Osama

ONE

The White House Situation Room, Washington DC, USA. 1 May 2011, 1430 hours EST.

So this is what people look like, thinks Todd Greene, when they are about to witness a death.

The official photographer to the President of the United States takes his third picture in as many minutes. It is of a plain, narrow room with a long mahogany table, crammed full of laptops and polystyrene coffee cups. Thirteen men and two women are fixated by a screen on the wall at one end of the room. Some stand, their hands covering their worried mouths, their foreheads creased. Others sit: the President in the corner, his white shirt dotted with sweat stains, the Vice President to his right and his chief military adviser, General Herb Sagan, to his left. Unlike those of the President, the VP and most of the others in the room, Sagan’s clothes are immaculate. He wears a blue uniform, its lapel emblazoned with line upon line of medal flashes and decorations that Todd does not recognize. He thinks Sagan has the face of a man whose career will be defined by what happens in the next sixty minutes, 3000 miles away in a small town in Pakistan named Abbottabad.

The screen itself shows a dark image. It is the inside of a stealth-configured H-60 Black Hawk, specially designed to reduce radar splash, a dish-shaped cover over the rotors and with an infra-red suppression finish. This is top-secret stealth capability, Sagan has briefed everyone in the room. It will allow the aircraft to enter Pakistani airspace undetected. The juddering visual feed is from the helmet camera of a US Navy SEAL. For now, the sound is turned down low. There’s nothing to hear, other than the dull grind of the chopper circling in dark Afghan skies.

The VP speaks. ‘That guy on screen. What the hell does he have written on his armband?’

Sagan blinks at the politician he so clearly loathes. ‘His blood group, Mr Vice President, sir.’

The VP nods, embarrassed. ‘I see,’ he mutters.

Sagan interrupts. ‘Mr President, respectfully, DEVGRU are ready to enter Pakistani airspace. They need your authorization to continue…’

The President looks around the room. Nervous eyes look back at him.

His own eyes fall to documents on the table. Todd knows what they are: aerial maps of a compound in Abbottabad, taken from high altitude by a stealth drone. One of these grey, bat-winged spy planes is hovering over that faraway town right now, controlled from an operations base in the Nevada Desert. And next to the aerial maps is a photograph of a high-walled compound, taken three months ago by a plainclothes CIA operative. A hazy grey image of a man whose daily habit is to walk up and down outside the house within the compound walls. Despite everything – their surveillance from the air and from the ground, and their covert attempts to gather DNA samples from the occupants of the compound – it has been impossible to make a positive identification of the man. The agents involved simply refer to him as ‘the Pacer’.

But the Pacer’s strolling days are numbered.

‘You just need to give me the go order, sir…’ Sagan is polite, but tense. Perhaps even a little exasperated.

‘The back-up team?’ the President asks.

‘Three Chinooks,’ Sagan confirms. ‘Twenty-four men. They’re on-line by the Indus River, Mr President, ten minutes’ flight time from target Geronimo. That’s in addition to the attack team in the Black Hawks.’

‘We have surveillance on the compound? We’re sure of no unusual activity?’

‘Affirmative, Mr President.’

‘And our British cousins?’

‘Securing the Doctor and his family, Mr President. The Pakistanis won’t know what we’ve been doing in Abbottabad so long as we keep the Doctor out of the hands of the authorities. The British have instructions to maintain the cordon and stay out of the compound.’

He looks back up to the screen. Through the helmet-cam footage, Todd sees the face of one of the SEALs staring back, almost as though he is listening and waiting to hear the President speak. Half his face is in shadow. Moonlight, flooding in from one side of the Black Hawk, lights up the other half, revealing goggles propped up on the helmet and a boom mike beside his mouth.

The President gives a slow but distinct nod.

Sagan wastes no time. He lifts his lapel and addresses an unseen colleague via the microphone pinned to his uniform.

‘This is Sagan. I have a go order from the President. Start the clock on Operation Geronimo. Repeat, start the clock on Operation Geronimo. Confirmation code Charlie Alpha Niner.’

He turns back to his commander in chief.

‘We’ll know within the hour, Mr President,’ he says.

Abbottabad, Pakistan. 0030 hours.

‘I’m telling you, brudder: if he doesn’t stop squealing, I’m gonna frickin’ do him.’

Joe Mansfield looked over his shoulder. In the shadows five metres behind him, tied to a rickety wooden chair and with several layers of packing tape stuck over his mouth and eyes, was a thin, terrified Pakistani man. He was the owner of this small house. Nobody important. Just in the wrong place at the wrong time. His body was shaking and the sound escaping his taped mouth was high-pitched. He shifted in his chair and its legs made a scraping sound against the wooden floor. Standing between Joe and the prisoner was Joe’s best mate Ricky Singh. Ricky had murder in his eyes.

‘Take it easy, big guy,’ Joe said. ‘No rounds if we don’t have to.’

Ricky was a couple of inches shorter than Joe, but broader about the shoulders and torso. Second-generation Indian, with an accent that was more Leicester than Lahore, he was the only currently serving member of the Regiment who could blend into the background in Pakistan without darkening his skin. Useful back in the Stan, where they’d spent the past three months erasing insurgents from the badlands where the green army wouldn’t set foot; and it made him a shoo-in for a job like this. His hair was shoulder-length, and like Joe – like all SF personnel currently operating in this part of the world – he wore a full beard. Ricky called everyone in the Regiment ‘brudder’, like he had the biggest family in the world.

‘I’ve got my blade,’ he muttered. But he walked back to the OP. Their captive fell silent – maybe he realized his noises were making Ricky feel like doing something about them – while Joe continued to scan the area outside.

They were holed up on the first floor of a very basic building. The room – which they had reached by means of a rickety wooden staircase that emerged from a ground floor that housed nothing but an unflushed toilet and an old bicycle – was about six metres by four, and almost bare. There was one window, slung open. As soon as darkness had fallen, Joe and Ricky had fixed up a three-metre length of net curtain from the bottom of the window to the ceiling, at an angle of forty-five degrees. This would hide movement inside the room from anyone looking in. Joe had cut a rectangular hole, the size of a letterbox, in the centre of the netting, and erected a tripod behind it. He had three sets of optics to fit on the tripod: a pair of high-powered Canon binoculars, a Spyglass thermal-imaging device and a night sight.

The rest of the room was a lot less hi-tech. The ceiling, bowed and cracked, looked as if it might collapse at any moment. There was a mattress in one corner, covered by a single, dirty sheet and the two sets of robes Joe and Ricky had been wearing over their gear. A ceramic hookah stood next to it. On the opposite wall, hanging at a slight angle, was a yellowed, grease-spotted piece of parchment with some Arabic script – something from the Koran, probably. Beneath it was a small cooking area with a tiny stove. The place stank in the heat – a musty smell of decay mixed with the spicy aroma of whatever the occupant had last eaten, its remnants still in a battered saucepan on the stove. The air buzzed with the sound of a single fly, as it had done all day. All in all, it was a dump. But a dump that had one advantage, even though its owner didn’t realize it. Outside the window was a single-tracked road. Beyond that, the five-metre-high walls of an enclosed compound.

And in the compound, if the Yanks were right, the slippery fucker who’d evaded capture ever since 9/11. In the endless briefings that had preceded this op, the CIA operatives had insisted on calling him ‘Geronimo’, or ‘the Pacer’, or even by one of his Arabic nicknames, if they were feeling cocksure and sarcastic: ‘the Director’, ‘the Lion’, ‘the Sheikh al-Mujahid’.

The rest of the world, of course, knew him by his real name.

Joe, Ricky and the rest of their eight-man unit had been in Abbottabad for twenty-one hours, but they’d been studying the imagery of the town and its surrounding areas for a week before that at their base in Bagram, over the border in Afghanistan. Twenty-four hours previously, a Chinook had lifted them over the mountains and in-country, along with a battered white utility van with Pakistani plates and a tape deck full of shite Arabic music. Their operational movements were covert even to the regular members of the Regiment. Joe, Ricky and the others were part of a specialist cell from the newly formed E Squadron – the highest-vetted and best trained the SAS had to offer, and even among E Squadron the expertise of these eight men in the field of covert surveillance had no equal.

The American SF flight crew that had put them on the ground in Pakistan at 0100 hours didn’t know what they were up to either. Fuck-ups aside, nobody would ever know they were here. No acknowledgements. No back-slaps. That suited them just fine. The Yanks needed men on the ground to pull this thing off, and they needed the best, even if they did intend to write them out of history at the end of the day. And of course, as far as Joe was concerned, there was more to it than that. There always was. If they were compromised and the op went to shit before it had even begun, it could be spun as a British clusterfuck, not an American one.

Ricky had driven the van cross-country to Abbottabad, every inch the Pakistani peasant, down to the stench of farm animals on his rough clothes. The rest of them had been secreted in the back, hidden behind a false panel that guys from the REME had welded on in case of a stop and search. But nobody stopped and nobody searched. By 0300 they had hit the north–south N35 Mankerai Road, just another vehicle entering the surprisingly busy little town.

There had been no need for them to speak when the van came to a halt, the engine cut out and Ricky tapped three times on the back of the cab to indicate that they’d reached their destination. They’d emerged silently into a dark, breeze-block garage alongside a shit-encrusted farm vehicle, before leaving in pairs at irregular intervals to get themselves into position.

The first two to leave, their weapons hidden under their robes, had been Raz and JJ. After Ricky, JJ was Joe’s closest Regiment mucker – a sarky, tough little Glaswegian whose house in the wilds of the countryside round Berwick-upon-Tweed had been the location of Joe’s holidays with his family for the past five years. JJ and Raz had drawn the short straw, but you wouldn’t have known it from their steely demeanours. By now they’d have spent almost twenty-four hours on the far edge of a field abutting the compound, dug into an irrigation ditch, covered with mud, shit and foliage. Watching and waiting, they were invisible even to any locals who might wander within a couple of metres of their stinking hideout. Stevie and Rhys had been next, hiding out in a disused outbuilding at the western end of the single-track road on which the compound stood. Joe and Ricky had followed, waking up their reluctant host with the suppressed butt of an M4 and a roll of packing tape. That left Diz and Jacko to go and babysit ‘the Doctor’ and his family.

In Joe’s opinion, the Doctor was the weak link in the chain. The photograph of him that Joe had studied was burned into his brain: a thin man with a goatee beard, a protruding Adam’s apple and round, steel-rimmed glasses. The Doctor was a long-time resident of Abbottabad who had been dishing out free vaccinations to the population over the past several months. The jabs were just a cover. Every time the Doctor administered a vaccination, he took a swab of the patient’s cheek. Routine, he’d told them – failing to mention that each of these hundreds of swabs eventually made their way to some lab in North America where the DNA on it was analysed. Nobody seriously expected Geronimo himself to take advantage of the medicine on offer; but if he had family members around him, there was a chance of some of their DNA making it onto one of the swabs and giving the CIA confirmation of their suspicions.

The confirmation had never turned up. Maybe this meant that the occupants of the compound were too cute for the CIA’s ruse. But there was a small possibility that the Doctor was not all he seemed to be, and that possibility had increased over the past hour. Jacko’s voice over the comms had been tense.

‘I’m with the missus. She expected him back at 1100 hours. He’s a no-show.’

‘You sure she doesn’t know where he is?’

‘Roger that.’ Of course Jacko was sure. He’d have used all his powers of persuasion to find out.

Their instructions were clear. If tonight’s operation was successful – and even if it wasn’t – they were to evacuate the Doctor and his family. But if there was any evidence of him trying to send word to the compound of what was going down, their orders were more straightforward: take the fucker out.

Evacuate or execute. Difficult to do either, if nobody knew where the hell he was.

Silence. Joe checked his watch. 0037. Ricky was standing three metres to his left. His M4 was slung across his front and Joe was almost certain he saw his mate’s left hand tremble.

No, that couldn’t be right.

‘We should have frickin’ heard by now,’ Ricky said.

Joe returned his attention to the optics. He felt sweat trickle down his back, and his mouth was dry. He scanned the five-metre-high wall that surrounded the compound at a distance of ten metres from the house. Running alongside the wall was a single-track road, stony and baked hard. There was only one entrance to the compound: a pair of heavy metal gates in that wall, twenty-five metres south-west of Joe’s position. From this location, he could see anyone approaching the compound’s entrance, from either east or west.

But so far there was nobody.

And no word from base that the operation had begun. Maybe it was a no-go. Wouldn’t be the first time they’d…

A crackling sound in his earpiece. He found himself holding his breath.

Nothing. For a few seconds, he thought it was just interference. Then, a voice.

‘Sierra Foxtrot Five, this is Zero. Operation Geronimo is go. Repeat, Operation Geronimo is go.’

Joe and Ricky exchanged a look, before Joe twice tapped the pressel on the comms unit strapped to his ops vest, wordlessly acknowledging this latest communication.

They knew what it meant.

The still night air was about to be broken.

War on terror?

Damn right.

1433 hours EST.

‘We’ve breached Pakistani airspace, Mr President. ETA twenty-seven minutes.’

The President looks across the table. For a moment, Todd thinks he’s looking at him, but then he realizes he’s turned his attention to the small, jowly man in an elegant brown suit who is sitting just behind Todd and to his left. He has blond hair that is neatly parted to one side, and horn-rimmed glasses. Whereas most of the other men in the room have either loosened or removed their ties, this man still wears a neatly tied dicky bow. Todd knows that his name is Mason Delaney, but doesn’t know his title, or even if he has one. He’s high up in the complicated hierarchy of the CIA, however, and he’s sitting behind the photographer because he doesn’t want his face to be recorded on any official photograph. During his time in this job, Todd has learned that there are certain men and woman who do not consider photographers to be their friends, even though the looks Delaney has given him before now are enough to make Todd believe the rumours that he prefers the company of young men.

For the first time since they all filed into this room, the President manages something like a smile.

‘Feeling confident, Mason?’ he asks.

‘I feel eighty-seven per cent confident, Mr President.’ Delaney’s voice is high-pitched and nasal. Almost girly. Todd notices Sagan’s face darken as he speaks. This military man clearly has very little time for such an effete individual, and when Delaney catches Sagan’s expression he widens his eyes provocatively. ‘What is your estimate of success, Herb?’

Sagan’s annoyance visibly increases. But this operation is Mason Delaney’s baby, and everybody in the room knows it. He takes a deep breath and appears to calm himself.

‘ETA twenty-six minutes, Mr President,’ he says. ‘Twenty-six minutes and counting.’

Abbottabad. 0053 hours.

Joe had eyes on the two metal security gates that formed the compound’s only entrance. Distance, twenty-five metres to the south-west, across the single-track road.

‘Anything?’ Ricky sounded as tense as Joe felt.

‘Fuck all,’ he murmured. Through the grainy-green view of his night sight, he had seen the occasional flashing eyes of a wild dog, or the bright light of a commercial flight drifting overhead. In his mind he pictured the bat-winged shape of the RQ170 stealth drone he knew was circling up there too, its camera trained directly on the 3500 square metres of the compound. An impressive piece of kit, sure, but not a substitute for men on the ground alert to the arrival of a lookout with an anxious expression, or the frown of a guard in a state of heightened awareness. Joe saw neither. He didn’t doubt that the compound was guarded, but the guards were well hidden behind its high walls. At the moment, the exterior was deserted.

Jesus, it was hot. Joe’s skin was soaked. There wasn’t even the hint of a breeze, but the sound of traffic from the centre of Abbottabad, just under a kilometre away, still drifted towards them. Like everyone else, Joe had always assumed that their target would be holed up in some remote village on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, or living in a cave with a heavily armed entourage. He’d even heard rumours that the guy was in Africa, living under the protection of some scumbag warlord. The fact that he was here, in pissing distance of the Pakistan Military Academy and right under the nose of the Pakistani government, had been as much of a surprise to him as he knew it would be to the world at large when it learned that the Americans had finally caught up with him.

If the Americans finally caught up with him. The rabbit wasn’t in the bag yet.

‘You think he’s in there?’ Ricky breathed in the darkness.

Joe kept the night sight to his eyes. It could only take a second for somebody to slip in and out of that place, and he didn’t intend to miss that if it happened. A bead of sweat dripped down into one eye. He blinked hard, but kept his position. ‘The Yanks must be pretty sure.’ He half smiled. ‘Be a laugh if they send in a squadron to find some farmer banging his wife, though…’

He was interrupted by more squeaking from the man bound to the chair. Joe felt himself start. When he looked over his shoulder, his mate was already storming over to their prisoner.

‘Ricky…’

Ricky was drawing his knife.

‘Fucking hell, mate! What’s the matter with you?’

No answer. Ricky picked up the roll of packing tape that was lying by the chair, and wrapped even more of it round the man’s head, so that now it covered his nose as well as his eyes and mouth. The noise stopped, but now the man clearly couldn’t breathe. His body started shaking more violently. Ricky gave it ten seconds, then carefully punctured the tape covering the nostrils with the point of his blade. Just enough for the guy to get some air in his lungs. The loose tape under his nostrils flapped in and out like a fish’s gills.

As Ricky walked back to the OP, he didn’t meet Joe’s eyes. Joe didn’t push it.

A minute passed in tense silence.

‘Hotter than a hooker’s noo-noo,’ Ricky muttered finally. ‘Flight crews need to be careful.’

He was right. High temperatures like this could thin the air and reduce the lifting capability of a chopper’s rotors. No point worrying about that, though. Let the Yanks do their job while Joe and Ricky did theirs: keep the cordon, and if anyone tried to come in or out, deal with them.

Movement.

Joe held up one hand to indicate that he’d seen something. Two figures had just wandered into Joe’s field of view. The sound of giggling reached his ears and through the open window he saw a young woman in Western clothes running ahead of a young man. She allowed herself to be caught and pressed up against the high wall of the compound. The giggling became muffled and the man’s hands started to wander.

‘What is it?’ Ricky asked, his voice almost silent.

‘Couple of kids. We’re on for a live show if Romeo gets his way.’

Joe checked the time: 0059.

‘You OK, mucker?’ Joe asked quietly, not taking his eyes away from the optics.

‘Fine and frickin’ dand—’

He stopped mid-sentence and looked towards the window. So did Joe. They could suddenly hear the sound of a couple of choppers.

They were approaching fast. Joe could tell by the way the volume of the rotors increased quickly. He moved his eyes from the night sight and squinted through the net curtain and into the dark sky. At first there was nothing to see – the flight crews would be seeing their way with the aid of night-vision units, all lights on their aircraft extinguished. Twenty seconds later, however, the roar of their engines reached a peak, and Joe could see two great, black silhouettes, one of them hovering twenty metres above the compound, the second thirty metres above that, and maybe ten metres beyond it. In the corner of his vision, he saw the young Pakistani woman wriggle away from her suitor and look up. It crossed Joe’s mind that she could be in a lot of trouble if her indiscretions were made public.

Joe bent down at the night sight again and redirected it towards the nearer helicopter. Suddenly the black shadow was converted to green-tinted detail. Joe could instantly tell that he was looking at a modified chopper, one that few people would ever get the chance to see. The familiar shape of the Black Hawk was subtly different. The tail was smoother and more rounded. The nose was sleeker. Joe could tell at a glance that it had been engineered for stealth capability, which meant that the Pakistani authorities wouldn’t even suspect its presence here in their back yard.

The door on one side of the Black Hawk was open, and Joe counted six men at the aperture, not including the Minigun operator who had his weapon trained on the compound. He knew there would be another six preparing to drop down from the other side door. He could make out the head cams and goggles fitted to their helmets, the boom mikes to the side of their mouths, the assault rifles strapped to their bodies. Something fell from the chopper – long and snake-like. Joe had travelled in, and fast-roped out of, enough helicopters to realize something was wrong.

‘We got a problem,’ he said.

Instantly, Ricky was beside him, peering through the netting. ‘What’s happening?’ he demanded tersely.

‘Bird’s skittering…’

As he spoke, the chopper spun through ninety degrees, wobbling. The pilot was obviously struggling to control it in the heat-thinned air, and the fast-rope was spinning with the momentum of the helicopter. Now the Black Hawk was listing alarmingly. It spun back ninety degrees to its original angle, and although he couldn’t hear the voices of the SEALs inside over the screaming of the engines, he could see they were shouting at each other as they started to lose height. A couple of seconds later the chopper had lurched ten metres down. Its main body was now hidden from Joe behind the high wall of the compound, but he could just see the tail peeping up above the rim of the wall.

‘What’s happening?’ Ricky shouted.

Joe was about to answer when he heard the noise: an ominous, sharp, crunching sound as the Black Hawk’s modified tail caught the top of the wall and a shower of sparks, glowing brightly in his night-vision scope, needled his eyeballs.

‘Black Hawk down,’ he muttered.

‘That’s getting to be a frickin’ habit…’

Joe turned his sight to the second chopper. It too was descending and wobbling as it disappeared behind the compound’s wall. Hardly reassuring. The SEALs were supposed to fast-rope into the compound, leaving the choppers to fly away out of earshot so as not to attract unnecessary attention until they were needed to extract. Now they’d both set down inside the compound, and half of Abbottabad must have heard them.

The op was turning pear-shaped before it had even started.

Joe kept eyes on. Stuck in here, he felt about as much use as Anne Frank’s drum kit. ‘We’re going to get a fucking audience any minute,’ he muttered. As he spoke, though, he heard a solid clicking sound behind him. He looked round. ‘What you doing, big guy?’ he asked, his voice dangerously level.

For a moment Ricky didn’t answer. He was too busy checking the magazine in his suppressed Sig before replacing it high on his chest rig. ‘I’m going in,’ he said.

Joe straightened up. ‘We’re not going anywhere, mucker. We keep the cordon, no matter what happens.’

‘Fuck the cordon. They’ve crashed. They need help.’

‘There’s two choppers full of SEALs, Ricky. They can take care of themselves.’ As he spoke, he edged towards the door, ready to block Ricky’s exit.

‘Get out of the way, brudder.’ Ricky’s voice was level, but very quiet.

The air vibrated with the roar of the choppers on the ground nearby. The fly that had been buzzing around the stove landed on Ricky’s cheek. He didn’t seem to notice.

‘SOPs, mucker,’ Joe breathed. ‘The Yanks don’t want us in that compound.’

Joe was in front of the door now. Ricky stopped advancing.

Standoff.

Ricky scowled. ‘Fine,’ he said. He turned on his heel, walked back over to the observation post and laid his M4 back on the ground.

Joe joined him. He leaned down over the tripod and looked through the night sight again.

And that was when he saw him.

A man was running along the front wall of the compound. He was keeping close to it and was almost directly in front of the OP, about fifteen metres from their position, across the single-track road. The young couple, who were looking alarmed, were in front of him. He just skirted them, without appearing to acknowledge them, and continued along the wall, clearly uninterested in what they were up to. He was evidently intent on getting to the compound entrance, just twenty metres away.

Joe’s eyes were sharp, but it was difficult to make out his features exactly. He was dressed like a local, though – white dishdash, sandals – and he had round spectacles and a goatee.

‘Shit,’ Joe hissed.

‘What?’

But Joe was already speaking into his comms. ‘Jacko,’ he barked. ‘Is the Doctor home yet?’

‘Negative,’ Jacko replied tersely, his voice masked with distortion. ‘Why?’

‘I think we’ve found him,’ Joe replied. He was already moving towards the door.

‘You sure it’s him?’ Ricky demanded. ‘Where did he come from?’

Joe wasn’t sure. Maybe if he hadn’t been keeping Ricky on the straight and fucking narrow, he’d have seen the man arrive, got a better look. But whether it was the Doctor or not, if he was approaching the main entrance of the compound with the aim of reinforcing its occupants or helping them in any way, he had to be stopped.

They were at the top of the rickety set of wooden stairs, the stench of the ground-floor toilet wafting up towards them and no trace of their previous argument in their voices. They needed to get to ground level, because to fire from their OP would immediately give away its location. Seconds later they were hurtling towards the front door. Opening it, Joe stepped out into the darkness beyond, his M4 fully engaged. Ricky was with him.

Joe took in the situation at a glance. The Doctor – if it was the Doctor – was fifteen metres away, at Joe’s two o’clock. The courting couple had separated. The boy was edging away eastwards along the perimeter wall. Distance, twenty metres, eleven o’clock. He’d left the girl crouching on the ground, yelling her head off at the sight of two men with weapons. They were both in the wrong place at the wrong time: Joe and Ricky couldn’t let Romeo go off and alert anyone to their presence. Same went for Juliet.

‘Take them out,’ he instructed Ricky, and turned his attention back to the new arrival.

The guy was seventeen metres away now. Eighteen.

A single head shot would put him down, but Joe made the split-second decision to aim for the body. If this was the Doctor, they needed to identify him, and it was hard to identify a body with only half a head.

He fired. The suppressed M4 made a dull knocking noise and the man went down.

To his left he heard the discharge of Ricky’s weapon as he fired on Romeo.

Joe kept his own target in his sight, checking for movement. After five seconds, though, the girl was still screaming. He looked to the left. Ricky had his weapon pointed at Juliet, who was still crouched on the ground ten metres away, to their twelve o’clock. The red dot of his laser marker danced on her throat.

But Ricky didn’t fire. His hand was shaking again.

‘Fuck’s sake!’ Joe hissed. He turned his own weapon in the girl’s direction. The red dot from his gun joined Ricky’s.

One round. A flash of blood and the girl fell backwards.

There was no time for Joe to lay into Ricky for his moment of indecision. An explosion from inside the compound ripped through the air. Both men pressed themselves against the exterior wall of the house. Joe engaged his comms. ‘Zero,’ he shouted, ‘this is Sierra Foxtrot Five. What the hell’s going on in there?’

A crackle of interference, then a voice. ‘Entry team breaching the internal walls to reach target Geronimo. Hold the cordon. Repeat, hold the cordon.’

‘Roger that.’

Joe immediately consulted his mental map of the compound. It was triangular in shape. The main building, situated opposite the triangle’s apex, was connected to the main entrance gates by a pair of high interior walls that formed a thirty-metre-long, open-topped passageway. The Black Hawk had crashed in the western segment of the compound, where, intelligence reports suggested, the occupants burned their rubbish. The explosion must have been the SEALs breaking their way through the walls of the roofless corridor that led from the entrance gates – the same gates Joe’s target had been trying to reach. The man had fallen into a ditch along the bottom of the compound wall eighteen metres from Joe’s position and to his two o’clock. Joe needed to get over there, identify him and finish him off if necessary.

‘Cover me,’ he said.

Ricky nodded, dropped to one knee and pressed the butt of his M4 into his shoulder, ready to provide covering fire should Joe need it.

Joe ran. The distance between the house and the enemy wall was ten metres, but he had to run double that on the diagonal in a south-westerly direction to reach the man. He’d gone down barely a couple of metres from the security gates. He was clutching with one hand the wound Joe had inflicted on the side of his right leg. It was pissing blood through his fingers, and the man was shaking violently. Joe flicked on the Maglite attached to the body of his M4. It lit up the alarmed, sweating face of the wounded man, whose dishdash was soaked with blood.

Joe saw immediately that he was not the Doctor. He was about twenty years too young.

He was also feeling for a weapon with his spare hand.

He didn’t get very far.

The barrel of Joe’s cylindrical silencer was no more than six inches from the target’s head when he fired. The round made as much noise entering the man’s skull as it did leaving the weapon. Blood spattered over the pale rendered wall of the compound as the shooter slumped back into the ditch, his face no longer a face. But Joe’s attention was already elsewhere. There was a second explosion from inside the compound – louder than the first, or maybe Joe was just nearer. He turned to look at the main gates. He was standing just two metres from them. They were metal, about five metres high – the same height as the wall – and each a couple of metres wide. A thick roll of barbed wire covered the top. They hummed and vibrated on account of the mechanism inside.

And they were opening.

A figure emerged – just a shadow in the darkness.

SEAL or enemy? Impossible to tell, but if it was the second, they couldn’t be allowed to breach the cordon and fetch reinforcements.

Joe held his fire for a briefest of moments. The figure hurried out into the moonlight. It was a man. Tall. Thin. He wore a dirty white smock and his bearded face was full of wild, sweaty panic. He was clearly not an American, and he was clearly trying to escape. Which meant he was dead.

Joe fired once more. The suppressed round, hardly audible above the sound of the raid, entered the man’s right eye, blasting a chunk from that side of his head. He dropped immediately. As his body fell against it, the gate boomed like an oil drum and creaked open a few more inches.

Joe sensed movement over his shoulder. He turned quickly. A figure was approaching, halfway between his position and the observation house. He was only a fraction of a second short of dropping him when he realized it was Ricky. Joe cursed. What the fuck was wrong with him? Couldn’t he follow the simplest SOP – stay where he was and cover his mate?

Ricky had his personal weapon engaged and was alternating the direction of its aim – first one way along the track, then the other – with every step he took.

Joe no longer heard the roar of the choppers in the compound. He just saw Ricky, and now that he was only five metres away, he could see the sweat on his brow.

Ricky said nothing. He strode past Joe, stepped over the dead body and disappeared into the darkness beyond the partially open gate. Three seconds later the corpse slid into the compound as Ricky dragged him back inside. What the hell was he doing?

Joe felt the acrid taste of bile rising in the back of his throat. Ricky was about to fuck things up good and proper. He cursed under his breath and scanned the area. There was no sign of any movement along the road. Inside the compound, the air was filled with the roar of the choppers.

He had to make a decision. Ricky was alone in there. If one thing had been drilled into him from the very first minute of his very first selection weekend, it was this: never try to do anything by yourself. Either he was with his mate, or he was against him. Put like that, the decision was made for him.

Joe stepped over the threshold and pulled the gates shut. They closed with a rattling clang, then he became aware of the sounds of battle: the choppers turning and burning and the occasional burst of precise, targeted gunfire.

His first thought was for Ricky. Joe could make out his silent silhouette five metres ahead, weapon in the firing position as he hugged the left-hand wall. They were standing in the shadows, but he could just make out Ricky’s eyes as his mate looked at him over his shoulder.

They were in a corridor open to the sky, some three metres wide and lined by two five-metre-tall walls. Twenty metres ahead, Joe could see where the SEALs had blasted through these walls: there was a cloud of smoke and dust, illuminated by a beam from the right that he assumed emanated from the downed Black Hawk. Silhouetted figures passed from right to left, obscured by the dust. He counted six men. Seven. He saw the outline of a sniffer dog, then another two human forms. Nobody was heading towards them. They were moving swiftly into position from the LZ to the compound’s accommodation area.

The thunder of the Black Hawks’ rotors took on a different quality – a slightly higher pitch. The undamaged chopper was rising. Then it appeared above the right-hand wall, huge and threatening, and continued to rise until it was about fifteen metres in the air. Looking up, Joe could see that the Yanks had decided, now that everything had gone noisy, to use the helicopter as a weapons platform. He could see a door-gunner aiming a Minigun down into the compound, plus three other soldiers with their assault rifles pointing downwards. The guys in the Black Hawk showed no sign of being able to see him or Ricky. If he could just persuade his mate to get back to the entrance…

The dust was settling up ahead. Peering in the darkness, Joe could make out two piles of rubble, each a good couple of metres high, by the blast site. There were no longer any SEALs moving towards the house. He could hear evidence of their activity, though. There were screams: not the constant, bloodcurdling screams of a massacre, but the occasional shouts of women and children, obviously very frightened. And, punctuating the screams, the dull knock of suppressed weapons. Joe counted them. One. Two. Three. The clinical sound of individuals being deliberately picked off. There were more people screaming than being shot, which meant the SEALs were being selective. They knew who they were after. But even though the Yanks might not be greasing everyone, Joe knew exactly what he would do in their shoes if he unexpectedly came across two men as heavily armed as him and Ricky.

‘We’re surplus to fucking requirements, mucker,’ Joe whispered. ‘Let’s get the hell out…’

Ricky’s only response was to go on another five metres. He was halfway towards the rubble now, and still advancing. Joe ran after him.

A shout from the other side of the wall. An American voice, clearly a SEAL commander, instructing two of his men: ‘Guard the main entrance. No one enters, no one leaves.’

Joe froze.

He looked back towards the gate. Fifteen metres. To get there, re-open the gates and extract? Fifteen seconds. Too long. But the piles of rubble were only five metres away. The light shining from the choppers through the gap in the wall meant the vision of anyone passing through there would be compromised.

He could sense Ricky making the same calculations.

They sprinted towards the rubble. A rectangular block of concrete – about two metres long by a metre high and with a crack running its entire height – was resting at forty-five degrees against what remained of the left-hand wall, with other chunks of debris littered around it. Joe wormed his way into the gap, fully aware that Ricky, with his back against a metre-high boulder of concrete alongside the wall on the right, was less well hidden.

They’d found cover just in time.

Two SEALs ran from the courtyard into the corridor, heading for the security gates. Joe didn’t move. His mouth was filled with the dry taste of dust, and the sharp edge of the concrete was digging into his right arm. Through a foot-wide crack in the otherwise undamaged part of the wall, he could see into the central courtyard. It was about twenty metres by twenty. The main house – two storeys with a two-metre-high privacy wall around the first-floor balcony – showed no signs of occupation. The lights were off, the windows shut.

Joe counted six SEALs in the courtyard, the nearest of them about twelve metres away, kneeling down in the firing position, their weapons trained on the house. They all had thick beards like his, and were wearing JPCs in the latest Crye Precision multicam. This was the same get-up Joe and Ricky would have been wearing if they hadn’t been in civvies, with the exception of the small Velcro patch on the Americans’ body armour bearing the stars and stripes insignia.

Lying on the ground, no more than four metres from Joe’s position, was a dead body, clearly an enemy combatant. He was wearing underpants and a vest, and had taken a round to the chest – the vest was dark and saturated. The corpse’s head was twisted so that it was looking almost directly at Joe.

A flash of phosphorescent light filled one of the windows, followed by a sharp crack.

Another scream, almost lost under the thunder of the choppers.

The retort of a rifle. It sounded like it came from the first floor of the house.

And, stuck in that cramped, uncomfortable space, barely daring to breathe and cursing his friend for getting them into this situation, Joe Mansfield couldn’t help wondering if that was the gunshot the world had been waiting for.

The White House Situation Room. 1510 hours EST.

‘What the hell’s happening?’

The National Security Adviser is the first to ask the question Todd sees on everyone’s face. The room has been silent for ten minutes, its occupants’ eyes fixed on the screen.

Only there’s nothing to see. Just darkness. The occasional shadow. Every minute or so, the picture crackles – a reminder that these images are being transmitted halfway around the world. It’s quiet as well as dark. The occasional shout, a barked instruction, the sharp rapping of a firearm. There’s no way the watchers can know whether this is American fire or enemy fire.

Todd senses movement behind him. He looks over his shoulder and sees Mason Delaney pull a silk handkerchief from his top pocket. He dabs a bead of perspiration from the area of his forehead just under his parting, before neatly replacing the handkerchief. When he sees that Todd has been watching him, he gives the photographer a little smile. ‘We should sell this footage on a DVD in Wal-Mart, Mr President,’ he announces in his piping voice. ‘Pay off the deficit.’ Delaney smiles. Nobody else does.

There’s movement. The head-cam footage on the screen judders as the soldier whose view is being transmitted to the White House runs along a short, dark corridor, two other SEALs in front of him. The corridor ends in a flight of stairs, which they start to mount. They are halfway up when Sagan stands. He has one hand to his ear and an expression of concentration – or is it alarm? Todd wonders – as he listens to his information feed.

Suddenly all eyes are no longer on the screen, but on Sagan.

Sagan’s eyes widen. A smile spreads across his face. ‘Geronimo EKIA… enemy killed in action…’ He turns to look at his commander in chief. ‘We got him, Mr President. We got the son of a bitch.’

A few seconds of silence. The President closes his eyes. His face visibly relaxes as he kicks back in his chair and punches his palm in a gesture of triumph. It’s as if the whole room has exhaled after minutes of holding its collective breath.

A quiet buzz of excited conversation. The President shakes hands with his deputy, before inclining his head appreciatively at Mason Delaney at the other end of the table. When Todd looks back at Delaney, he is put in mind of a cat preening himself. The CIA man’s lips glisten with barely suppressed delight and he straightens the bow tie that doesn’t need straightening.

The President then turns to congratulate his chief military adviser. But Sagan doesn’t appear interested in congratulations. As he sits down at the table again, he urgently directs the President’s attention to the footage with a sharp jab of his forefinger.

There is a hallway at the top of the stairs. A number of people are there, kneeling, their backs against a dirty wall and with an armed SEAL standing over them. It’s impossible to say how many, because they only appear on the screen for a fraction of a second. Five? Maybe six? They are all women and children, their hands secured behind their backs with cable ties and their mouths covered with packing tape. Their lives are being spared, but not their dignity.

The head cam turns away as its wearer jogs along another corridor, stopping after five metres at an open door to his right.

‘This could be ugly, Mr President…’ murmurs Sagan. But he doesn’t suggest that anybody looks away.

The head cam looks into the room. For ten seconds the soldier wearing it is as still as the politicians observing him, as they all stare at the scene it reveals.

It is a bedroom – shabby, untidy. There are two beds – a small double, and what looks like a single camp bed to one side. On the opposite wall there is a window with frayed blue curtains, and along the right-hand side of the room a wardrobe that is little more than a rail holding a collection of white robes. The floor is covered with a patterned rug. The whole place has an air of neglect, as though it is an unloved room in the cheapest and most neglected of temporary accommodation.

But nobody is really looking at the wardrobe or the curtains or the rug. They are looking at the body lying on the double bed.

The face is instantly recognizable, despite the devastating gun wound the man’s head has sustained. The gaunt cheeks, the beard flecked with grey and, now, red. His left eye is closed. His right eye is no longer there. It’s just a bleeding, gaping abscess, around which a flash of skull is visible. The untidy sheets of the bed itself are saturated with blood in the area around the head. There is spatter elsewhere, and a streak of scarlet on the garish rug.

The women in the Situation Room, and some of the men, avert their eyes. At the same time, the head cam turns to the right. The corner of the room becomes visible. There are two Navy SEALs. They have boom mikes at the edge of their mouths, goggles perched on the top of their helmets and head cams attached to the fronts. They hold their weapons with the light confidence of professionals. But the figure at which they are aiming them is not a threat. It’s a little girl. She is wearing a nightgown and is crouched in the corner, her head in her hands, weeping.

‘Surely they’re not going to—?’ says a female voice in the Situation Room.

But Sagan interrupts her. ‘His daughter,’ he states, having been briefed by his information feed.

Several of the people sitting round the table recoil as one of the SEALs steps towards the girl. He doesn’t hurt her, but neither is he gentle. He pulls the kid to her feet and for the first time the occupants of the room see her face. The image might be blurred and scratchy, but the look of terror it conveys is almost as distressing as the grisly vision of the girl’s dead father.

‘Get the kid out of here,’ instructs the second SEAL. His companion drags the girl towards the door. As she passes her father, though, she wriggles free and runs to him, ignoring the bloodied rug she’s treading on, and flinging herself at his corpse. She manages to hold on to his thin leg for a fraction of a second before the soldiers pull her away. The head cam steps back and the body disappears from view, to be replaced by the landing once again. The SEALs bind the girl’s wrists behind her back and throw her in the direction of the other women and children. She wails as she stumbles to the ground, and shouts something in Arabic. But her distress doesn’t seem to affect the soldiers. ‘Get him bagged up,’ one of them instructs.

‘I don’t think we need to see any more,’ interrupts the President. Sagan nods and presses a switch in front of him. The images disappear from the screen. Silence falls in the room.

Todd raises his camera.

Snap.

Abbottabad, 0130 hours local time.

Joe’s heart hammered in his ribcage as he kept watch on the courtyard from the darkness of the pile of rubble. How the hell had they got themselves into this situation? What was going on with Ricky? How was Joe going to get them both out unseen?

Five minutes passed.

There were still six SEALs in the courtyard, kneeling in the firing position, clearly waiting to bring down anybody attempting to flee the building. They didn’t flinch when the front door of the house opened and a line of people emerged. They were women and children. Joe counted seven, all of them cuffed and blindfolded. Two SEALs followed, and they directed the captives to the right-hand side of the house before making them lie on the ground face down.

More movement at the doorway. Another two SEALs emerged. They were carrying a body bag, one man at either end. Joe had seen enough body bags in his time for it to be an unremarkable sight. Somehow, though, he couldn’t keep his eyes off this one. He knew he was watching the SEALs extract the corpse of the most wanted man in the world.

The two SEALs were about five metres out of the house when he saw yet more movement at the doorway. Another two appeared, carrying a second body bag. Both pairs of soldiers were moving with grim purpose across the courtyard. They stepped over the underwear-clad corpse four metres from Joe’s position, each body bag scraping over the dead man’s bloodied vest as the SEALs carried them past the pile of rubble – less than a metre from Joe’s position – through the demolished walls of the open-topped corridor and into the rubbish-burning area that doubled as an LZ.

The movement of the body bags was like a signal. US troops spilled out of the house. Two men were carrying crates – Joe assumed that these contained materials they were confiscating from the compound – and they were preceded by a tracker dog whose silhouette Joe had already seen. Joe recognized it immediately as a Malinois, a variety of Belgian shepherd – intelligent and highly aggressive – that the Regiment’s own dog handlers used as both sniffer and attack dogs. It was wearing a harness that suggested the troops had been intending to winch it down to the ground from the chopper, and had a small IR camera, the size and shape of a Smarties tube, fixed to its side. It scampered ahead of them, clearly unfazed by the noise and stopping only when it came to the dead body near Joe, which it sniffed, paying particular attention to the area around the bullet wound.

The dog looked up. With a sensation like cold ice sliding down his spine, Joe realized the animal was looking in his direction. It tilted its head and scampered over the body. Two seconds later it was inches from Joe’s hiding place, its wet nose worming its way into the crack in the wall. He could smell the rank stench of its breath.

The dog sniffed.

A low growl escaped its throat.

Joe’s hand moved slowly to the holster on his chest rig, his fingertips feeling for the Sig.

A harsh voice. American. ‘Cairo! Cairo!’

Joe saw a hand grab the dog’s collar and pull it away. Its handler came into view. The SEAL looked young, most likely no more than twenty. He had a lean face and pronounced cheekbones, but there was a small scar on his upper lip, which looked slightly out of shape – a harelip that had been fixed surgically, Joe reckoned. The soldier pulled Cairo out of Joe’s field of view, which meant he could see the whole courtyard again.

The six SEALs were standing but kept their weapons trained on the house while another eight soldiers started to extract, as did the two who were guarding the main security gate. Thirty seconds later the final six hurried from the courtyard. Joe could hear the undamaged Black Hawk returning to the ground, ready to lift them out.

Joe was drenched in sweat, and not just because of the heat. He remained absolutely still for thirty seconds after the last SEAL had passed by him. Only then did he creep out of his OP. Ricky was still hidden, fully obscured by the darkness, his back up against the concrete slab behind which he had secreted himself. Joe edged towards the opposite side of the corridor, and peered round the damaged wall. He squinted as the choppers’ lights blinded him, but he was able to make out the second of the two body bags being loaded into the unharmed Black Hawk. Three SEALs were running from the compromised chopper to the intact one; ten seconds later the LZ was deserted and the frequency of the helicopter’s engines became a little higher as it prepared to take off.

Joe’s stomach knotted. They were abandoning the second chopper. He knew what that meant. To leave a military asset on enemy territory was a no-no at the best of times. And when the asset in question was a stealth chopper, and the enemy was Al-Qaeda…

‘It’s going to blow, brudder.’

Ricky was standing half a metre behind him.

Joe grabbed his arm. ‘Fucking run…’

The two men were ten metres from the main gates through which they’d entered the compound when the undamaged chopper rose above the walls again; and they were only two metres away from the gates, alongside the body of the man Joe had killed outside the compound and which Ricky had dragged inside, when the explosions came: a succession of short, sharp detonations, followed by a single, much larger one that made the walls shake and threw Joe to the ground. He jumped up immediately to see Ricky already throwing himself at the gates, knocking up the latch with his M4 just as a shower of dust and shrapnel started to rain down all around them. They hurled themselves out of the compound as a twisted chunk of what was once a helicopter slammed into the meat of the fresh corpse; then both men covered their heads and ran across the narrow dirt road, out of range of the debris that was still showering down.

‘What the hell?’ Joe almost screamed.

But Ricky was looking back towards the compound. A bright orange glow was emanating from inside the walls where the downed chopper was burning. The second Black Hawk was already thirty metres in the air, and swerving in their direction. It thundered overhead and headed north-west, into the distance.

Ricky was refusing to catch Joe’s eye. ‘Let’s get back,’ he said tersely.

Without a word, they ran thirty metres back east along the road to their original OP, where the owner of the house was still tied up on the first floor, trying to breathe slowly as his body shook with fear. It didn’t take more than a minute for them to gather their things – the tripod and the optics – and don their robes once more. Ricky was heading for the door again; Joe had stopped stock still.

The two friends stared at each other.

‘What?’ Ricky demanded.

Joe didn’t answer. He strode over to their captive and ripped the tape from his nose, though he left him blindfolded, silenced and bound. Only then did he follow Ricky to the doorway.

‘You’re out of control, mucker.’

Five seconds of silence.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Ricky retorted, his chin jutting aggressively. ‘You gonna go squealing to the frickin’ ruperts?’ But his friend knew how insulting that suggestion was: Joe sneered at him.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Joe said. He pushed past Ricky and started running down the stairs. By the time they hit the street again, the Black Hawk had long disappeared into the night sky, but now there was the sound of alarmed citizens shouting from an easterly direction – from the centre of Abbottabad. Joe was confident he and Ricky looked enough like locals, especially in the darkness, not to attract any attention, especially when there was so much else for the townsfolk to ogle back at the compound. But that was no reason to lower his guard: he kept one hand firmly on the handle of his Sig as they made their way back into the town, keeping in the shadows, to RV with the rest of the unit.

And Joe’s mind was turning over. What had Ricky been trying to prove? It happened sometimes that a guy lost his nerve and tried to make up for it by putting himself in danger. But Ricky didn’t seem the type.

Something else was troubling Joe too. Something he had seen. Why had the SEALs removed two bodies from the compound? Target Geronimo was one thing – he understood that they couldn’t just leave his corpse where it lay – but what reason could they have to remove another stiff?? It occurred to him that maybe they had nailed a kid and needed to remove the body to avoid a PR disaster, but in his heart he knew that the body in the bag had been too large for a child. Maybe it was a significant AQ commander? But who? Who else was sufficiently important that the Americans would want him removed along with the Pacer?

Joe tried to clear his head. No doubt he’d find out in time, but for now he had other things to worry about. There was still work to do and this was dangerous territory. Osama bin Laden might be dead, but the blood was still pumping through Joe’s veins. He had to remain focused if he wanted it to stay that way.