House of War Read online

  In the next fraction of a second, the young Iraqi woman activates the plunger switch she was clutching inside the folds of her robe, wired via a detonator to the heavy bundle of C4 explosive in the hidden backpack strapped to her stomach. Almost before the blinding flash and the deafening explosion the shockwave erupts like an omnidirectional shotgun blast, only several magnitudes more powerful. The violence of the detonation is stunning. The two-ton Land Rover shielding Ben and the young soldier is rocked nearly off its wheels. They’re showered by the glass of its shattered windows. A circle twenty metres across is engulfed in smoke and billowing dust.

  Then it’s over, but the aftermath is only about to begin. The horror. The shock. The screams of the wounded and dying. Body parts of soldiers and civilians alike scattered in the dirt. Everything that isn’t on fire is spattered with blood. Ben is on his feet, heart racing, emotions numb. The boy he protected is unhurt. Many others haven’t been so lucky.

  Ben runs through the smoke. His senses are in a turmoil of confusion and he wants to throw up. The sounds of pain and horror are muffled and masked by the ringing in his ears. An Iraqi man is rolling on the ground nearby. He’s been eviscerated by the hail of shrapnel from the bomb. He will not survive. Ben rips off his battledress jacket and covers the man with it and tries to talk to him, but there’s nothing he can do. The material of the jacket is instantly soaked with blood. Ben steps back and looks around him. Soldiers are yelling wildly and sprinting in from the edges of the scene to help anyone they can. In minutes, medic choppers will be on their way and this place will become an emergency field hospital.

  Ben picks a path through the carnage towards the smoking crater and looks down at the torn, smouldering figure on the ground at the epicentre of the blast. Or two figures, because the woman’s body has been separated in half by the explosion. There is nothing left of her midsection. Her legs are mangled human wreckage in the dirt, peeled to the bone. The niqab has been torn away from her face, which has somehow remained untouched by the detonation. She stares up at Ben with dark, empty eyes. She would have felt nothing, experienced only a momentary white light as the explosion ripped her apart.

  He wonders who she was. What was her part in all of this? Who convinced her to sacrifice herself in this cruel war that nobody can even understand?

  Ben goes on looking down at the dead woman. Her sightless gaze seems to look straight back at him.

  And then her eyes suddenly snap open and she opens her mouth to speak.

  ‘Bennnnn …’

  He awoke with a start, uncertain of where he was for a few moments, until he realised that he was in Tyler Roth’s cliff house on Savana Island in the here and now, and not back in the hellhole of Iraq in 2003. His vivid dream had left him shaking and covered in sweat. He lay blinking in the darkness, breathing hard, and focused on listening to the reassuring, meditative sound of the ocean until the tension oozed from his clenched muscles and he was able to relax into the softness of the bed.

  Some things you never forget.

  Chapter 36

  Ben had been awake for less than thirty minutes before he heard Roth getting up and the patter of the shower. He emerged from the spare room soon afterwards to find the American bustling about in the kitchen, all energy and smiles as he put on a pot of coffee. Last night’s storm was just a memory and the morning sun was shining brightly over the dazzling blue ocean. Palm trees swayed lazily in the soft breeze and the sandy beach in the cove below the house was as white as snow. Another perfect day in Paradise.

  Roth had exchanged yesterday’s beach bum garb for khaki jeans and an old army shirt, neatly pressed. Ben noticed the packed kit bag on the floor. ‘Planning a trip somewhere?’

  ‘You asked me what happens next,’ Roth said. ‘I made my decision. Seeing as we both have unfinished business with Nazim al-Kassar, you ready to buddy up?’

  ‘As in what exactly?’

  ‘As in, I travel back with you to Paris. You said you needed my help, didn’t you?’

  ‘I thought you were a recluse who didn’t like to leave his island,’ Ben said.

  Roth shrugged. ‘Been thinking maybe I oughtta get out more. Reckon this is as good a chance as I’m gonna get. And it’s worth it, for a shot at that motherfucker. I already radioed Charlie and told him to get me on the first flight.’ He looked at his chunky watch. ‘Which gives us precisely twenty-seven minutes to get ready before the chopper arrives.’

  Ben had come to Savana Island in the hope of gaining information. Instead he was returning with a co-partner. It was more than he’d bargained for. But it just might work out well. Nobody could doubt Roth’s skills, that was for sure.

  He said, ‘Chopper?’

  Roth grinned. ‘Quickest way out of here, amigo. When I move, I move fast. Hit the shower and grab some coffee. That’s Jamaican Blue Mountain. Finest in the world.’

  The world’s finest coffee was drained to the last drop by the time the thump of rotors sounded over the island, and Ben looked out of the window to see the bug-like light Sikorsky helicopter coming in to land. Roth pulled on a black nylon flight jacket and a baseball cap and grabbed his kit bag, and the two men went out to meet the chopper. Sixty seconds later, Savana Island was receding into the distance as they buzzed towards St Thomas.

  Another ninety minutes after that, they were in the departure lounge waiting to get on the KLM flight back to Europe, via Newark. Ben had been able to exchange his return ticket and all was going smoothly, except for the fact that he’d tried four times to get through to Thierry Chevrolet, to no avail.

  ‘Who’s that, your technician guy?’ Roth asked, only mildly curious.

  ‘I wouldn’t call him that exactly.’

  ‘What would you call him?’

  ‘Thierry’s a crook who hangs out with lowlife sleazebags,’ Ben said. ‘But he’s a talented crook. And normally reliable. Plus, he owes me. I don’t understand why he isn’t picking up.’

  ‘Never trust the French,’ Roth said with great authority, and went back to reading the magazine he’d bought from a newsstand.

  Then they were off again, climbing over the glittering blue waters until the islands were just green splodges far below. Ben leaned back in his seat and wondered why Thierry wasn’t answering his calls. He hoped everything was all right; it frustrated him that he’d have to wait until they touched down in New Jersey before he could try again. He brooded over it a while longer, then gave up worrying about things he couldn’t control. Roth was a quiet travelling companion, apparently lost in his own thoughts and not much interested in conversation. That suited Ben fine, though he noticed the way that Roth was gripping the arms of his seat as though willing the plane to go faster, a tense look in his eyes. A man in a serious hurry, Ben thought.

  When they reached Newark with a few hours to kill before the next leg, Ben called Thierry’s number again and got the same result. What was going on with the guy? Roth seemed vague about Ben’s concerns, as though he had more pressing matters on his mind, and announced that he was going for a walk. He was gone a long time. Ben was used to travelling alone, and he was good at waiting, but Thierry’s lack of response was gnawing at him.

  Finally, at 18.20 Eastern Time, they were back in the air. Ben had a window seat and watched as New Jersey, framed in the porthole window, grew smaller and hazier beneath them. They were in the clouds before they reached the Atlantic coast. Roth’s stroll around the airport had obviously helped him work out his tensions. His newfound relaxation marked a sharp contrast with his earlier state, and he was content to doze off with a little smile on his face. Ben soon lost interest in both Roth and the view from the window, and thought only about Nazim al-Kassar.

  Just over eight hours after takeoff from Newark Liberty, the plane hit the runway at Charles de Gaulle. Two-thirty a.m. Eastern Time was half past seven in the morning, Central European Time, making it a short night. Ben and Roth disembarked, went through security separately and met up again outside. By the tim
e Roth appeared, Ben had already tried Thierry again twice. Still no reply. His worry was growing.

  ‘Hot wheels, man,’ Roth commented of the Alpina as Ben led him across the car park. ‘I had an SRT Challenger that was faster than a goddamned Hydra rocket. Never could hit two hundred miles an hour, though. I’ll bet this baby’s good for it.’

  ‘I drive like a girl,’ Ben said. ‘It keeps the insurance premiums down.’

  ‘I’ll bet. So what’s our first port of call in the City of Light?’

  Ben had already decided on that. He took off towards Paris, driving like a girl, and carved his way through the morning traffic to the safehouse.

  When they got there, Ben’s darkest fears were half realised. Worst case scenario, he’d imagined that either the Corsicans or Nazim’s people had somehow managed to trace the address and Thierry and his friend Pierrot would be lying dead in pools of blood. But that wasn’t the sight waiting to greet them.

  Instead, the safehouse was empty. The two men were gone. No Thierry. No Pierrot. And no laptop containing the video clip, either, because it had been removed from the table where it had been sitting before. Nothing else was missing or disturbed. The hidden guns were still where Ben had left them. He took one for himself and tossed another to Roth.

  ‘I’m feeling at home already,’ Roth said, loading up his pistol. ‘I take it these things aren’t available to civilians here, right?’

  ‘Only if they’re criminals,’ Ben said. ‘Welcome to Europe, land of the free.’

  If Thierry and his friend’s disappearance was a puzzle, the missing computer was even more so. If Nazim had taken them, he’d have had good reason for taking the laptop with the incriminating file loaded on it, too. But he’d also have left men posted in anticipation of Ben’s return, which meant that Ben and Roth would have walked into an ambush just now. And if the Corsicans had taken them, common or garden thugs of that variety would have had no reason to take just the laptop without ransacking the whole apartment into the bargain.

  The biggest problem with either theory was that Ben’s safehouse was virtually impossible to find, let alone break into. Its only entrance was inaccessible from the street and protected by a thick steel door strong enough to resist rifle bullets. There were no signs of forced entry.

  To Roth, the explanation to the conundrum was a simple one. ‘You said yourself, the guy’s a crook who runs with lowlife sleazebags. It’s obvious he’s just skipped out on you, buddy. He grabbed the dough and ran, and took your shiny new laptop with him to sell for a few extra bucks. Don’t sweat it. You still have the Juneau woman’s phone, with the original file on it. And we have to move on. You want to hear the plan?’

  ‘You only just got here,’ Ben said. ‘And you have a plan?’

  ‘I told you, when I move I move fast,’ Roth replied.

  Ben looked at him. ‘From St Thomas to Newark, you wanted to move fast. You could have been strapped inside a US Air Force Lockheed Blackbird going at Mach 3, and it wouldn’t have got there soon enough for you. But for the second leg of the journey, you were a guy with time on his hands. Not a care in the world. Whatever you’ve been hiding from me happened somewhere in-between. To be precise, it happened at the airport, during your little stroll. I sense that you’re not quite as out of touch as you pretend to be. Who’d you talk to?’

  For an instant Roth seemed as though he was about to deny it; then he broke into a rueful grin. ‘Busted. You’re an observant sonofabitch, aren’t you?’

  ‘And you’re a sonofabitch with secrets. I like to be able to trust the people I work with.’

  Roth reached into his jacket and pulled out a small iPhone. ‘What the hell. Had to come out sooner or later, so I guess now’s confession time. I broke my own rule. One of my contacts came through. But one rule I’ll never break is to compromise my sources, so don’t ask me to name the guy, okay?’

  ‘Don’t waste time, Tyler. Tell me what he said.’

  ‘Actually you were only half right. I talked to him twice, the first time before you got up this morning, the second time at Newark like you guessed. My guy has a source inside the GIGN and tells me they have a lead on one of the dead shooters from the Montparnasse attack.’

  Ben knew all about the GIGN, the elite counterterror division of France’s National Gendarmerie. He’d taught advanced close-quarter combat classes to some of them at Le Val, and was on first-name terms with one or two of their commanders. But they didn’t exactly keep him abreast of all their latest black ops missions. He said, ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘The asshole in question is the one they found bled out in his car near the scene of the attack,’ Roth said. ‘You wouldn’t know anything about that, of course, but his name was Sarfaraz Baqri and he was on their terror watchlist, along with a bunch of known associates that they’ve been waiting for the right moment to spring a surprise raid on. The shooting makes it the right time.’

  Roth brought up an image on his phone and held it up for Ben to see. It showed a scowling African man in his late twenties, with a scrappy growth of beard.

  ‘This here little bundle of sweetness and light is Hasan Jafari, emigrated to Europe from the dear old Republic of Sudan eight years ago, currently resident here in Paris, suspected of various involvements with al-Qaeda, Daesh and terror cells in France, never caught, but the good guys reckon they’ve got sufficient probable cause to greenlight the snatch. It’s happening today. You never know what juicy titbits of information might come our way, after they squeeze the fucker like a tomato. It could help lead us to al-Kassar.’

  ‘Today when?’ Ben asked.

  ‘There was some logistical delay, or it would already have happened by now,’ Roth said. ‘It was originally planned for dawn this morning. When I talked to my guy the second time, I found out they’d rescheduled the raid for tonight.’

  ‘Hence the reason you went from acting so jumpy to suddenly as cool as a cucumber.’

  ‘I was anxious to find out how the raid had gone and whether they’d got him. Now it turns out we have some clock to burn before they make their move.’

  ‘I take it we’re not officially invited to this party?’ Ben said.

  ‘No, but we’re gonna be ringside when it happens. Should be fun to watch. So I suggest we hole up here in your cosy little apartment, grab some food and sleep, and prepare for the evening’s entertainment.’

  Ben couldn’t believe Roth had managed to find all this out with two phone calls. ‘Not bad contacts for a reclusive army veteran.’

  Roth chuckled. ‘Just keeping a toe in the water, bro.’

  Chapter 37

  The scheduled time was shortly after midnight, and the location was an address in the commune of Villejuif, a few kilometres south of the city. After a long, frustrating day of waiting, Ben and Roth rolled up to the scene with plenty of time to spare and found a parking space sixty metres down the street where they could observe the action.

  The directions provided by Roth’s mysterious contact had led them to a quiet suburban street where apartment buildings were interspersed with older red-brick houses and gardens, some in a better state of maintenance than others. Like every other modern urban setting, most walls and shutters were plastered with graffiti, and the pavements were littered. The flicker of TVs showed behind curtained windows and the soft boom-boom of music sounded from somewhere.

  ‘Villejuif,’ Roth muttered, shaking his head. ‘Jew Town. Might have been true once, but now the Muslims are driving them all out. Over fifty thousand Jewish people have fled France to the States or Israel in just a few years under threat of persecution. It’s the new Nazism, the one nobody wants to admit it’s even happening. You know the Islamics had their own SS divisions in World War Two, to carry out genocide against the Jews in Croatia, right? Himmler loved ’em.’

  Ben was in no mood for another of Roth’s history lectures and said nothing, watching the street. He still couldn’t believe that Thierry Chevrolet would have skipped out on hi
m like that. What was the world coming to, if you couldn’t trust an honest crook any more?

  A couple of cars passed by. The only pedestrian in sight was a beleaguered-looking old guy being dragged along by a pair of yappy terriers, who shuffled past the parked Alpina without noticing the two men inside and disappeared around the corner. Then the street was deserted, but Ben’s instinct told him that the GIGN assault team was somewhere close by, biding their time until the last moment.

  The target of that evening’s raid was a small one-storey end-of-terrace house next door to a pharmacy. The property looked like a student rental, belonging to an absentee landlord who cared little about its upkeep. A low stucco wall bounded a neglected garden of foot-high weeds and dying trees. An ancient Puch moped was tethered up on a rusty chain inside the gate. A dim light shone through the dimpled glass of the front door, and another through the crack in a curtained window.

  Ben looked at his watch. Three minutes to midnight. The occupants of the house, however many there might be inside, had no more idea of what was coming than their neighbours up and down the street. When it did, the raid would be swift and efficient, stunning in its suddenness.

  ‘Any time now,’ Roth said.

  Midnight came and went. Ben had spent much of his life in that still, contained state of mind that comes before an action. He was calmly experiencing it now, even though he and Roth would be no more than observers. He knew that the GIGN unit members would be going through the same mental preparation at this moment.

  And then it began.

  At ten minutes past midnight, a large black Renault Sherpa light assault vehicle came roaring down the street and pulled to a sharp halt outside the house. ‘Here we go,’ Roth muttered.