The soldier coughed weakly. Mina almost laughed with relief. It was the first sign of life she had seen. ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked in Pashto. It didn’t matter that the patient wouldn’t understand her. Mina just wanted her to hear a friendly human voice.

  The patient exhaled. It was a painful, rasping noise. It didn’t sound good. Anxious, Mina put the cup of water to her patient’s lips again. This time, she seemed to drink. Just a tiny sip. And when she had swallowed it, she spoke.

  Mina had no English. The word her patient weakly uttered had no meaning to her. It sounded like: ‘Tony . . .’

  ‘Are you okay? Can you sit up?’

  She didn’t sit up. She spoke again. ‘Danny . . .’

  ‘You need to rest. We will be safe here. We will look after you.’

  ‘The Red Unit . . .’

  ‘Hush now. Rest.’

  The patient started to shake her head. ‘They’re coming . . .’ she whispered, every word clearly an effort. ‘They’re coming . . .’

  CHAPTER 23

  Time check: 01.58 hours. According to the map, Danny and his team were approaching the point where the GPS trackers on Tony, Dexter and Cole’s radios precisely indicated that they had stopped for half an hour on the night of the hit. In other words: the cache location. The two-vehicle convoy stopped. There was a lull in the sandstorm, though it was still swirling enough to compromise their vision. They wrapped shemaghs round their heads for protection, and tried to survey the terrain through a night sight.

  They had followed the line of the mountain slope. They could just make it out, rising into darkness on their right. If their intel was correct, they were approximately 750 metres from the cache. But that didn’t tell the full story.

  This area was more fertile than the terrain they had crossed to get here. More fertile than any terrain Danny had yet seen in Helmand. The mountainside was covered in the pointed outline of tree silhouettes. He supposed that in wintertime water drained down gullies and ravines from the peak, irrigating the slope and the ground at its foot. Close up, the slope was a series of verdant peaks and gullies. Scanning the area, Danny realised he had no line of sight towards the cache’s location: it was blocked by a hill, about fifty metres high, covered with conifers, low dry gorse and large flat boulders. This terrain repeated itself all the way up the mountainside and as far as Danny could scan to the west. A vast forest of tree, rock and scree sprouting up from the desert floor, with the sandstorm swirling all around it.

  A good place to hide something. And a good place for an ambush.

  The ground at the foot of the mountainside was far from level, but a rough path led through it from the south. It was dotted with copses and areas of vigorous bush growth. Tony and the others had cached their bullion quickly. They’d have taken the most direct route. To return there, Danny reckoned, it would be most efficient for Tony to take the same path. He would want to recognise his route. He’d approach covertly, but most likely from that direction.

  The unit needed to approach the cache and set up OPs and firing points. They had to do it quickly. Tony could arrive at any moment, but they also needed to be prepared for the possibility that he was already there. They would need to approach very cautiously and be ready to take him out if they saw him. First, though, they needed to ditch their vehicles. Brooker identified a dip in the terrain thirty metres to their south-east. The guys removed all their gear and drove the vehicles into the dip. They covered them with loose branches and gorse, then used more branches to dust away any imprint the tyre marks had made on the dusty ground – though this was barely necessary on account of the swirling sand. They supplied Danny with a boom mike and earpiece and performed a quick comms check. When Danny was linked into their personal radio network, they shouldered their gear and their weapons. Then they moved at a north-westerly bearing up the slope.

  As they climbed, they emerged above the sandstorm and encountered an eerie silence beneath the shadow of the conifers when they hit the treeline. They moved with the aid of NV goggles. Patrol formation: Brooker in the lead, Danny second, the guys snaking out behind him. Danny stepped carefully. The ground was littered with rocks, loose branches and scree. Careless footing could lead to a twisted ankle or worse. But the bulk of Danny’s attention was focused on the surroundings and searching for movement. Tony probably didn’t know they were on to him, but if he was in the vicinity and they stumbled across him . . .

  Put it this way. Two Regiment guys were dead already by his hand. It wouldn’t bother Tony to add to the tally.

  Brooker had a GPS unit on his wrist. Every fifty paces or so he would stop, consult it and adjust their bearing. The going became steep. Danny had to use his hands to clamber over several sections of the terrain. Not easy with the wound in his left shoulder sending stinging pains through his torso every time he tensed those muscles. He forced himself to focus on his objective, not on his injury. It was the only way.

  After half an hour of climbing he was sweating heavily. He was aware that his body was not functioning at a hundred per cent. Five metres up ahead, Brooker raised one hand to indicate a halt. Danny moved up to join him. They had emerged from a wooded area and were now looking out over a deep gully, almost a ravine, rocky and unforgiving, that led from about fifty metres lower than their current altitude in a straight line up the mountainside to a false peak – about 150 metres. There was a slight kink in the ravine about twenty metres to their one o’clock.

  ‘I think that’s it,’ Brooker said quietly.

  Danny scanned the area carefully. No sign of Tony. No sign that the cache area had been recently disturbed. ‘We’re in time,’ he said, relieved. ‘It doesn’t look like he’s been here.’

  ‘You think it’s booby trapped?’ Brooker said.

  Danny shook his head. ‘Tony and the guys had some C-4 that we picked up at one of our target’s compounds, but I don’t think he’d risk priming the cache with that. An animal could set it off, anything. His bullion would be worthless.’

  ‘I’ll get Kit to scout it out anyway. He’s our explosives guy. Assuming it’s clean, we’ll dig in our own IED.’

  ‘We could always do a Tony,’ Riley said. ‘Dig out the cache, replace it somewhere else, come back in a few years and reclaim our treasure.’ And when no one replied he raised his hands defensively. ‘Joke, fellas. Joke!’

  Danny was almost certain it was.

  The guys took up firing positions on the edge of the treeline. Murray faced south, down the gulley. Riley faced north, uphill. Brooker faced back the way they’d come. Danny covered Kit, who advanced carefully towards the gulley, his weapon across his chest, Brooker’s GPS on his wrist. A faint breeze blew occasionally through the hot night air, rustling the trees. Apart from that, dead silence. Kit reached the gulley. He climbed down into it and Danny momentarily lost sight of him. When he emerged at the other side, he was on all fours. Danny held his breath as Kit examined the ground. The location was marked, Danny now saw, by a distinctive boulder. It was flat and weathered on the side closest to the gulley, but with two sharp spikes protruding on the far side, like a victory sign. If Danny was looking for a place he would remember in the days, weeks or even years to come, he’d have chosen that boulder. He was quietly certain that Tony and the others had done the same.

  Silence. Then Kit’s voice over the radio. ‘It’s clean. You can tell something’s been dug in here. They must have been in a hurry. It’ll take me about ten minutes to get a pressure plate in and a couple of blocks of C-4. I’ll dig in now.’

  ‘Roger that,’ Danny said. ‘Can you work things so that it doesn’t destroy the gold?’

  ‘I’ll pack it so the blast goes upward.’

  Danny remained immobile, weapon primed, watching Kit remove a small camera from his ops vest and take a photograph of the cache area. He then unpacked an entrenching tool and got to work. Occasionally he heard a sound of scraping from where his unit mate was digging in the explosive.

  Danny used the time to survey the area for suitable firing positions. If the IED didn’t do its job on Tony, one of them would have to open up. There was a thick bush of thorny gorse about thirty metres west of the cache. It looked unpleasant and inhospitable – the kind of location most people would avoid, which made it perfect for a shooter. Several metres to his right, the treeline was very thick. A second guy could take up position there and be completely hidden. Thirty metres down the gulley was another copse where two guys could be positioned and have line of sight on the cache. Danny turned his attention up the gulley. There was a further inhospitable thicket at a distance of thirty-five metres, from which one guy could keep line of sight on the northern side of the boulder marking the cache. He was convinced that they could install themselves in positions where nobody would see them, especially in their camo gear.

  Kit lay the entrenching tool to one side and removed some other items from his bag. He spent five minutes fitting them into the hole he’d made, and then covered it up again. When this was done, he gingerly moved around the cache, heading away from the gulley. When he returned he had a conifer branch, which he used to brush away footprints and loose dirt. He double-checked the cache against the picture on his camera. ‘Okay,’ he said over comms. ‘We’re done here.’

  ‘Get back to the treeline,’ Danny said. ‘I’ve identified firing positions.’

  The guys congregated around Danny, who pointed out the positions. ‘Kit, Murray, get behind that treeline.’ He pointed to the copse thirty metres down the gulley. ‘That’s position one. Murray, you have the comms gear?’

  ‘Roger that.’

  ‘Try to make contact with Hereford. Tell them we’re in position and we’re waiting for Tony to put in an appearance. Brooker, you and me are going to take those gorse bushes.’ Danny pointed them out. ‘You take cover the northern side of the marker boulder, I’ll cover the cache side. Riley, you take this treeline. Will you all recognise Tony Wiseman?’

  The unit nodded. Tony was known.

  ‘Hopefully, if he turns up, the IED will take him out. If not . . .’ Danny looked at each of the guys in turn. Their reluctance to shoot another Regiment guy was plain in their faces. ‘If not, I’ll take the shot. Understood?’

  Understood.

  The unit separated. Danny jogged towards the gulley, negotiated its loose, rocky sides and emerged on the other side about five metres south of the booby-trapped cache. He edged carefully around it, then ran to the gorse bush. It was about four metres by four, a couple of metres high. Danny entered it from the far side, cursing silently as the thorns tore the skin on his face and snagged his clothes. It took a couple of minutes to position himself correctly. He lay on his front, his weapon engaged, the cross hairs of his sights precisely pointing towards the cache.

  There was no sign of the others. They were all installed in their respective OPs. Danny spoke into his comms. ‘Do we have contact with Hereford?’

  ‘Negative,’ Murray replied. ‘We’re in a comms dip. I’ll keep trying.’

  ‘Do it quietly,’ Danny said, and he turned his attention back to the cache.

  Had they made the right call? Would Tony be along to retrieve his money? Or would he make the smarter decision and lie low?

  No. Danny was certain. Tony’s greed, and his unshakable faith in his own skills, would lead him here.

  All they had to do was wait.

  The Taliban convoy moved fast. They were used to these conditions. The sandstorm was a minor irritation to them, and they could travel without fear of interruption. In the occasional lull of the storm, Tony saw the mountain range looming on their right. They were getting close.

  ‘Who’s your weakest guy?’ Tony said. He was confident that Al-Zafawi was the only other person in the vehicle who understood English.

  Al-Zafawi stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  Something passed between the two men. Al-Zafawi’s flinty eyes narrowed. He looked back, as if towards the car behind them.

  ‘Is he the same sort of size and build as me?’ Tony said.

  ‘Smaller.’

  ‘Then choose someone my size. Just so long as you know he’ll have his seventy-two virgins before the rest of you.’ He looked out of the window again. ‘Or whatever the fuck it is you believe,’ he muttered.

  ‘What do we tell him?’ Al-Zafawi asked.

  Tony gave it a moment’s thought. He needed to control the amount of information Al-Zafawi possessed. Too much, and the Taliban leader might start to think Tony was surplus to requirements. But he couldn’t hold back everything.

  ‘The SAS will try to ambush us,’ he said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because it’s what I would do. They know about the bullion. They know where it is. They’re going to expect me to rock up and claim it. That’s when they’ll hit.’

  Al-Zafawi’s eyes lit up. ‘Then all we have to do is find their positions and attack.’

  ‘Forget it. You won’t see them. They’re the SAS.’

  ‘You underestimate us. My men are very—’

  ‘You won’t see them, buster. I might be able to spot a couple of them, but . . .’

  ‘Why you and not us?’

  ‘Because you haven’t spent months sweating your bollocks off in the jungles of Brunei training for this shit. You think all you need to be an SF unit is the expensive gear? That’s the least important thing. It’s the training.’ He shook his head. ‘Never mind. Trust me when I say you won’t see them. We have to make sure they show themselves. Then we hit.’

  Al-Zafawi looked confused. ‘But how—’

  ‘I think the SAS want to kill me. So we’re going to let them do just that.’ He smiled. ‘Except it won’t really be me.’

  The light of understanding dawned in Al-Zafawi’s eyes.

  ‘When we stop,’ Tony said, ‘I’m going to ask you in front of the others who’s your best guy. You point him out. I’m going to give him my weapon. I’m also going to give him my camo gear, because my pattern is slightly different to yours and the team will definitely clock that. You tell him it’s what British soldiers do – a sign of respect because he’s doing the most dangerous job. Plus, he gets a better firearm. You think he’ll buy it?’

  Al-Zafawi thought for a moment. ‘He will do what I say.’

  ‘We tell him we need someone to scout the path to the bullion from the south. Just him, no one else is up to the job. Meanwhile, we’re going to approach the location from above which means we’ll have the advantage of height. We’ll put a shemagh round your guy’s head. When he approaches the cache, the team will make a false positive ID by his clothes and weapon. Once he’s down, they’ll emerge from their covert firing points. That’s when we hit them.’ Tony smiled again. ‘You like the idea, buster? I can tell from the look on your face.’

  ‘The two who attacked me in the cave. They will be there?’

  ‘Not the chick,’ Tony said. Al-Zafawi looked confused. ‘The girl. Not the girl. But the guy . . .’ Tony nodded.

  ‘He is mine,’ Al-Zafawi said.

  ‘’Fraid not, Buster. Your guys can have the rest of them. But there’s only one person in this unit who’s going to nail Danny Black, and you’re fucking looking at him.’

  He stared out of the window again. There was a brief lull in the sandstorm and by the light of the moon he could see the outline of conifer trees on the ridge line of the mountain range. That more verdant terrain told him they were surely close. The sandstorm whipped up again and the view was lost. ‘Stop the convoy,’ he said. ‘We need to look at the map.’

  ‘There is a place further on where we can shelter,’ Al-Zafawi said.

  It took five minutes to get there: a deserted stone barn on the roadside. It had no roof, but the walls were enough to protect them from the sand. It was large enough to fit the entire convoy. Once in, one of the men had spread out a dog-eared map on the bonnet of Tony and Al-Zafawi’s vehicle. They were examining it by the light of a torch as the storm howled above them, depositing grains of sand into the folds of the paper. The map was clearly old. Tony didn’t trust its accuracy. But it was all they had. He located the village of Gareshk and traced the road north towards the mountains that he, Dexter and Cole had followed with the bullion. Some rudimentary contour lines indicated a ravine leading up the mountain face. By Tony’s estimation it was in roughly the correct place. He took a pen from his camo jacket and circled the area. He could sense Al-Zafawi examining it closely, but the area was intentionally too general for the Taliban leader to work out the exact location of the cache. Tony drew an arrow towards the gulley from the south, then two arrows from the north-east over the mountain ridge.

  ‘Our guy goes in this way,’ he said quietly, pointing at the single arrow. He indicated the double arrows. ‘Do you know a route that will take us up to the high ground?’

  ‘My men know the area well. They will get us into position.’

  Tony nodded. ‘Gather them together. Let’s get our guy sorted.’

  Al-Zafawi barked an instruction. The unit lined up. If Tony marshalled them well, from the high ground and with the element of surprise, they’d have a chance. He’d lose a few of them, of course, but that hardly mattered.

  Al-Zafawi walked up and down the line like a tin-pot general, instructing his troops in Pashto. He stopped by one of the younger-looking men. He probably wasn’t more than seventeen. His beard was wispy and only half grown. But he had a kind of arrogance to him. Tony could tell he would believe that Al-Zafawi thought he was his best guy.

  As Al-Zafawi spoke, the young man stepped forward. He was preening. He gave Al-Zafawi his AK-47, and Tony handed him his own M4 with the little white kill dots Tip-Exed on to the side. The young man clutched it, holding it up slightly with a greedy look in his eyes. Al-Zafawi continued to speak in Pashto, while Tony removed his camo jacket and handed it over. The young man took off his jacket – awkwardly, because he didn’t want to let go of the M4 – and swapped.