15.00 hrs.
There was a queue outside the security gates leading to the Western Wall, but not as long as usual. Ordinarily there would be swarms of tourists in this part of Jerusalem, waiting patiently to gain access to the ancient site. Not today. Even if the governments of the West hadn’t issued travel warnings, the mobilisation of troops in the area would have put people off. Not to mention the increased activity in Israeli airspace, and the military presence that was high, even for Jerusalem. There were some visitors to the city, with their cameras and baseball caps and rucksacks, but nothing like the usual number.
A young man who had just joined the queue to clear security before approaching the wall counted twenty people ahead of him, all men as the women were obliged to use an adjacent entrance. Eight of these men were dressed in traditional clothes: black suits, white shirts and wide-brimmed black hats. The remainder had their heads covered with skullcaps or ordinary hats. They were not tourists; they were here to pray at their holy site and they knew the regulations. The young man knew the regulations too. He had been coming here every day for the past two weeks, though before that he wouldn’t have been seen dead in such a place. His skin was perhaps slightly darker than the others’, but not so dark that he looked out of place in a traditional Hassidic suit. As the queue moved, he shuffled patiently along. And by the time he reached the security gate he had already recognised one of the guards from his regular visits. He nodded in greeting at the soldier, dressed in his olive uniform and with an M16 slung across his front. The guard nodded back and handed him a small tray.
The young man put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a bunch of keys and a handful of coins — a mixture of one-, two- and five-shekel pieces. He dumped these metallic objects in the tray, before passing through the airport-style metal detector. It made no sound. With another nod to the guard, he recouped his keys and his loose change, returned them to his pocket and continued on his way.
A flight of stone steps led down to the Western Wall plaza — a large, flagstoned square about seventy-five metres square, populated this morning by about a hundred people, twenty or thirty of whom were close to the wall, facing it and praying. The young man ignored all these people, as he always did, and headed straight for the far corner of the plaza, which adjoined the left-hand side of the wall. There he passed through a small archway to find himself in a room that gave access to Jerusalem’s ancient tunnels. There were more men in here, praying against the covered section of the Western Wall, which continued along to his right. Beyond them, a passageway led straight on. They paid him no attention as he continued in this direction.
The Western Wall tunnel, he knew, extended about 400 metres — well into the Muslim Quarter of the city. He wouldn’t go that far. He shuffled along, with the ancient stones of the wall to his right atmospherically lit by yellow lamps embedded in the floor, past the occasional visitor looking up at the wall and at the information plaques that explained its history. But he wasn’t interested in history. His mind was firmly on the future.
After about a hundred metres, he arrived at his destination. In the wall to the left there was a metal grille, about a metre square, its bars creating gaps roughly ten centimetres by fifteen. Beyond the grille it was dark, and the air around it was slightly colder. It was impossible to see how far back or down the space extended, but he knew it was enough for his purposes. The young man looked around to check nobody was watching. The immediate vicinity was deserted.
From the inside pocket of his jacket he pulled a resealable transparent plastic freezer bag with a thirty-centimetre length of fishing line attached to it. He removed the coins from his pocket and placed them in the bag, which he sealed and — checking once more that nobody was watching — pushed through one of the lowest row of holes in the grille. He kept hold of the fishing line as the bag dropped below floor level, before tying the other end securely round one of the vertical bars.
He knew that anyone looking very closely would see that there were eleven other bits of fishing line attached to the bottom of the grille. Further investigation would reveal that each line suspended a similar bag of coins. But as he stood up, he felt quite sure that nobody would notice this little cache. The coins were safe. They could wait there until they were needed.
Which wouldn’t be long, he thought to himself, as he shuffled out of the tunnel, back into the plaza and away from the Western Wall. Five minutes later he was walking around the Old Town, back towards East Jerusalem, his job complete.
For now.
The Regiment ops room back at the Israeli military base had been emptied, the entire squadron confined to quarters.
The Puma had touched down three and a half hours ago, but that meant nothing to Luke. He was suffering from a kind of numbness. As he’d been escorted off the Puma by the flight crew, he’d been only half aware of the Foreign Office reps who had crowded round Alistair Stratton. Luke had barely registered the looks of incredulity that the Ruperts had given him when the flight crew explained how he’d laid into Stratton on the chopper, breaking his nose; and he’d been entirely submissive as he was escorted to a holding area on the edge of the Regiment’s operations base.
It was a small room with nothing but a wooden chair in it. Luke hadn’t bothered opening the door to check whether it was guarded. Of course it was fucking guarded. He’d collapsed into a corner and closed his eyes. He could just hear Stratton’s voice; just imagine what bullshit he was saying about what had occurred on the ground.
Time slowed down. Luke felt like he’d relived a thousand times the moment the RPG hit the Land Cruiser. But, sickening though the memory was, it was not nearly so sickening as the thought of Stratton’s rantings. In his head he replayed the desperate conversation on the Gazan rooftop. He remembered someone telling him once that psychopaths were often to be found in the corridors of power, but it was more than that. He’d been quoting the fucking Bible at Luke, at least that was what it had sounded like — the sort of shit you’d expect from some nutter with a sandwich board walking down Oxford Street predicting the end of the world.
To the end there shall be war.
The memory of Stratton’s words chilled him, but he couldn’t get the bastard out of his head.
The Book of Daniel. It tells us it is here that the End Times will start.
Was he really saying that? Was he really saying that the end of the world was coming and that he had something to do with it? Had he really tipped over the edge into genuine insanity?
But then Luke recalled the few moments he’d spent that morning looking at his ops officer’s laptop. The US naval fleet advancing across the Med; the coalition forces grouping in the plains of northern Israel; troop movement along the Iranian border; even Yemen was mobilising. When it came to orchestrating wars, Stratton had form. Just look at Iraq. And so far as Luke could tell, he was orchestrating this one like a fucking maestro, with Maya Bloom — ruthless and without pity — as his accomplice. If Stratton wanted the world to burn, all it needed was a spark. And if everything Luke had heard was right, that spark would be lit in Jerusalem.
Hanukkah. The first day of the celebrations. One hour before midday.
He thought back to the briefing they’d had at Hereford. The ops officer had mentioned Hanukkah. What had he said? Three days from now. Luke did the maths. The first day of Hanukkah was tomorrow. And at 11.00 hrs something big would be going down…
Nobody would believe him, of course. Not once Stratton had filled everyone’s ears with shit. Nobody would believe a simple Regiment sergeant over the former Prime Minister. Which narrowed his options. He had to get to Jerusalem. Catch up with Stratton. Catch up with Maya Bloom. Stop them, somehow…
17.00 hrs. The guards who burst into the holding area and took him to the ops room were less than gentle. There were just two people in there: B Squadron’s ops officer, O’Donoghue, and the OC, Dawson. They were standing in front of O’Donoghue’s laptop as Luke entered.
‘You — ’ the ops officer indicated the guards ‘- out. You — ’ he pointed at Luke ‘- here.’
The guards left quickly and Luke approached the computer. The three men were silent while a piece of black and white camera footage played on the screen. There was no sound. At the bottom right-hand corner was a time code, and the footage had clearly been taken by the camera of the Apache that had chaperoned the Puma towards Luke and Stratton’s position on the rooftop in Gaza City. Although the helicopter was moving quickly, its height gave the impression that the city was slipping away slowly underneath. After a minute or so, however, it started to descend. The rooftops became sharper and twenty seconds later the camera was focusing in from a distance on one in particular.
At first it was difficult to make out what was happening, but it took only a few more seconds to become clear. A man was face down on the roof. A second figure had his knee pressed into the man’s back, and a weapon pointing directly at his head.
O’Donoghue turned to Luke, his face a mixture of fury and astonishment. ‘What in the name of…?’ He was so angry he couldn’t even finish the question. ‘Jesus!’ he spat finally, shaking his head. ‘We’d better hope this never gets into the wrong hands. It would be the fucking money shot for Wikileaks.’
‘It’s not what it looks like,’ Luke muttered.
‘Really? So what were you doing there? Offering to clean the fucking wax out of his ears with an HK53? Christ, Luke, Stratton’s on the warpath.’
‘You can say that again.’
The ops officer ignored the comment. ‘He says you lost it on the ground. Says you opened up on a crowd of locals and that’s why I’ve got three dead men on my hands and God knows how many Palestinians. Have you got any fucking idea what a shit storm this is going to cause? Stratton says…’
‘I don’t give a toss what Stratton says.’ Luke’s outburst silenced the ops officer immediately. ‘He was going nuts out there.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘ Totally nuts. He was spouting scripture at me…’
‘I’m not fucking surprised, Luke. He was in the middle of a riot and you were sticking a weapon to his head. He probably was praying..’
‘How long have you known me, boss? Do you really think I lost it down there? Do you really think I put the lives of my unit at risk? Do you really think that?’
‘What I really want you to do, Luke, is explain why I’ve just been looking at footage that shows you…’
Suddenly the door burst open. A short, tanned man around sixty, with thick white hair, an expensive but crumpled suit and bags under his eyes, stormed in.
‘Who the fuck is he?’ O’Donoghue demanded of Julian Dawson.
‘I,’ the man said, ‘am the British ambassador to Tel Aviv. You ’ — he waved his right hand at the three men in general — ‘are in ten tons of shit.’ He looked from one to the other before his eyes settled on Luke. ‘Is this the man? I want him transferred to Tel Aviv. There’s a high-security unit there with an SIS presence. We need to make sure nobody can look back on our decisions and say we…’
‘He’s not going anywhere.’ The ops officer’s voice was firm.
A pause.
‘I hardly need to remind you,’ the ambassador said, dangerously quietly, ‘that I am the representative of Her Majesty’s…’
‘He’s under my command. He’s not going anywhere.’
‘Don’t be a bloody idiot…’
O’Donoghue had turned away from the ambassador in mid-sentence. He walked up to Luke and stared at him for a full thirty seconds. He looked like he was deciding on the best course of action.
At last he spoke. And if Luke had been encouraged by the way he’d stood up for him in front of the ambassador, now was the time to change his mind. O’Donoghue sounded fucking livid. ‘I don’t know what the hell you were thinking of, Luke,’ he said. ‘Frankly, there hasn’t been a fuck-up like this since Libya. I’m putting you in solitary.’
‘Boss, you’ve got to…’
‘Forget it, Luke. I haven’t got a choice. Wait here.’
The ops officer marched out of the room, leaving Luke alone with the OC and the ambassador. ‘This isn’t the end of it,’ the ambassador announced. ‘I won’t be steamrollered like this.’
Dawson ignored him. All his attention was on Luke and the look he gave him was bitter. The look of an officer who’d just lost men and was taking it hard. ‘Hope you didn’t have anything planned for the next ten years, Mercer,’ he muttered. ‘You’re doing time for this.’
Luke didn’t reply. There was no point, not with the footage from the Apache.
He eyed the door. His 53 had been taken off him while he was in the Puma, but his Sig was still strapped to his ankle. That at least was something.
At that moment O’Donoghue returned, along with four members of B Squadron that Luke recognised but didn’t know well. It only took one glance at them to realise word had spread that Luke had lost it — that everyone in that room thought they had a madman in their midst.
‘On your feet, Mercer,’ Dawson instructed, before turning to the four Regiment men. ‘Get him out of my sight.’
One of the guys — a short man who had shaved his head to hide his encroaching baldness — stepped forward. ‘I’ll need your weapon,’ he said.
Luke cursed inwardly. He looked towards Dawson. ‘Boss, I…’
‘ Do it,’ the OC told him, like a stern schoolmaster with an unruly kid.
A pause. ‘Right, boss,’ Luke said quietly.
He bent down to loosen the disco gun in its ankle holster. And as he did so, he checked out each of the other men in the room. Only the four new arrivals were armed, but their rifles were slung casually across their fronts — clearly no one expected to be using them. Two guys were standing by the door; the other two were about five metres from Luke’s position. Closest to him were Dawson and O’Donoghue — who were behind a desk — and the ambassador, who stood just a couple of metres from Luke, surveying the situation with a bleak expression.
‘Get a move on, Mercer,’ Dawson said impatiently.
‘Yes, boss,’ he murmured. He removed the gun.
Luke knew he had to move hard and fast. The ambassador might have been a soft target, but the other men in the room were as highly trained as he was and just as strong. What they didn’t have, though, was the element of surprise.
He did it all in a single movement: pulling the gun from the holster, stepping towards the ambassador, hooking his left arm around the man’s neck and pressing the handgun against the side of his head. The ambassador breathed in sharply and Luke could feel his body suddenly shaking.
‘Get away from the door,’ Luke instructed.
No movement.
‘ Get away from the fucking door! ’
The two Regiment men on either side of the door looked towards Dawson, who nodded. They stepped aside.
‘Hands on heads and get to the back of the room, all of you,’ Luke ordered.
‘Do it,’ O’Donoghue said. And then, as the men moved: ‘Put the gun down, Luke. Your career’s already over. Don’t make it even worse.’
‘Where’s Stratton?’
‘You know I can’t tell you that…’
‘You think I’ve lost it? You think I’m mad? I’ll fucking show you when I nail this piece of shit. Where’s Stratton? ’
It was the ambassador who replied, his words tumbling over themselves. ‘Airlifted to Ben Gurion. He’s taking a UN flight back to London tonight.’
‘Put the fucking gun down, Luke,’ O’Donoghue warned.
But Luke was doing nothing of the sort. The ambassador was still trembling, and wheezing now on account of the firm neck lock he was in. Luke pictured the area outside the ops centre. It was open ground, at least 100 metres before he could get to any cover in the main part of the camp. As soon as he stepped out of that door, he’d be a sitting duck. Unless…
He looked over at O’Donoghue. ‘Where’s the key to that door?’
The ops officer remained stony-faced, so Luke tightened his arm lock on the ambassador, who started to whimper like a kid.
‘ Where’s the fucking key? ’
O’Donoghue moved slowly, clearly worried that his actions would be misinterpreted. He pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket, selected one and then held it up.
‘I want to know it’s the right one. Lock the door.’
O’Donoghue’s face hardened. He examined the keys again, selected a different one and moved over the door. He inserted it into the lock and twisted it back and forth. Luke heard the lock click shut and open again.
‘Leave it there and get back to where you were.’ O’Donoghue did as he was told. Luke forced the ambassador towards the exit. ‘I’m taking him outside. If I see the door open, I’ll kill him.’ He released the man, then grabbed the keys, opened the door and pushed him through it. Two seconds later he had locked his Regiment mates in the ops room.
It was twilight now. The floodlights were already lit, bathing the camp — which was as busy as ever — in their fluorescent glow. Luke immediately saw three choppers coming in to land. An open-topped truck with at least thirty IDF troops in the back was trundling past the Regiment buildings.
‘This is an outrage,’ the ambassador spat.
Luke didn’t reply. He just raised his Sig and brought it crashing down on the ambassador’s neck. The man fell, unconscious, to the ground.
And then Luke ran.
He didn’t have more than a minute, he estimated, before O’Donoghue and the others broke their way out of the ops office; and they’d be on the blower, raising the alarm right now. He ran into the crowded central area of the base and tried to get the geography of the whole place straight in his head. To get to the exit meant going through the main centre of operations, back past the F-16 hangar and then north. It was a couple of klicks, though, across open ground, and from memory there were two armed Israeli soldiers at the barrier. If he was going to stand a chance of getting out of the base before the whole place was locked down, he needed a vehicle. But first he needed something to keep all the soldiers crawling around the base occupied, otherwise O’Donoghue and Dawson would have every last fucker looking for him.
The canteen was twenty-five metres to his right, a low prefab building with wide double doors that were currently shut. There was nobody immediately outside — it was too early to scran up yet — and Luke sprinted over to it and tried the door. It was unlocked, so he disappeared inside.
The dining area of the canteen was about twenty metres by twenty, with rows of long tables and benches. Although Luke could smell cooking, the dining area was empty. At the far end was a serving hatch about four metres wide, and to its right was a closed door. Luke headed towards the door, which turned out to be locked and couldn’t be opened from this side without a key. But the serving hatch had a metal roller blind in front of it and this had been left partly open. He climbed through the hatch into the kitchen before pulling the blind down behind him and checking the door. From the inside, it opened fine.
The kitchen was about half the size of the dining area. Along the far wall there was a bank of catering ovens with huge stainless steel pots of food bubbling away; on either side of the room there were long metal worktops with hot-water urns, racks of knives and large toasters; and in the middle of the room there was a large food preparation island. In the far left-hand corner was an open door. There was nobody else in the kitchen, but Luke could hear voices from outside.
He grabbed a seven-inch boning knife — sharp and flexible — from the worktop and headed for the door. There were two men standing out the back, five metres from the door, dressed in food-stained white overalls, each of them smoking a cigarette as they chatted quietly. They didn’t see Luke approach until he was pulling the door shut. One of them shouted out, but by then the Yale-type door lock had fastened shut. Luke rammed the tip of the boning knife into the lock, then yanked the handle down at a ninety-degree angle. The tempered-steel blade snapped, leaving the tip in the lock. Nobody would be opening that door in a hurry.
He ran back to the ovens and extinguished the hobs before looking around. He knew what he wanted to achieve. All he needed was the tools to do it. A gas pipe entered in the middle of the back wall at a height of about 1.5 metres and ran down the wall to the rear of the ovens. Good. Looking back to the central island, he saw a heavy cleaver. He grabbed it, then scanned the kitchen for a final piece of equipment.
He saw a copy of the Jerusalem Post sitting on a metal trolley. He picked it up before taking the meat cleaver and slamming it into the gas pipe.
The pipe dented, but didn’t break. Luke whacked it again and the dent grew bigger. It was the third strike that split it, and a sudden rush of gas hissed loudly into the kitchen.
Back at the central island he helped himself to another long chef’s knife before moving over to one of the large toasters along the side worktop. He loosened a couple of pages from the newspaper, stuffed them into the toaster and pushed down the lever.
Thirty seconds before they caught fire, he reckoned. Thirty seconds to get the fuck out of there.
Luke hurried towards the door that led into the dining area. He quickly let himself out, shut the door behind him and disabled it with the knife. And then he ran.
In the end it took just over thirty seconds for the gas to ignite. Luke was about ten metres from the canteen when a massive explosion erupted behind him. He felt the heat against his back as the twilight glowed suddenly orange while he walked calmly away. Over to his left, seventy-five metres away, he could see men congregating outside the Regiment buildings. But all around him panic was breaking out. Men running and shouting. Nobody knew it was an exploding gas main — no doubt they’d all assume it was a Palestinian missile got lucky. Immediately Luke found himself among a chaotic crowd of soldiers, some of them sprinting towards the source of the explosion, some sprinting away. But all of them camouflaging him just the way he wanted.
Twenty metres ahead he clocked a WMIK. The driver had stopped and climbed out of the vehicle. As Luke approached he saw him running in the direction of the canteen, leaving the driver’s door open and — he realised ten seconds later once he was alongside — the engine running. He looked over his shoulder. Great clouds of smoke were billowing up from the canteen, three military vehicles had screeched up in front of it and everyone’s attention was on the burning building.
Which meant nobody gave Luke a second glance as he slipped into the driver’s seat of the WMIK, turned the vehicle round 180 degrees and drove away.
If he floored the WMIK, he could be at the exit barrier in three minutes. But to speed through the built-up area would just draw attention to himself. It took all his self-restraint to accelerate slowly, his Sig on the dashboard where he could reach it easily and his hand resting gently on the gear stick in case he suddenly needed to shift. In the passenger seat was a Bergen. It looked like it was full of gear, but Luke had no time to check it.
Thirty seconds. A hundred metres. More soldiers were running towards the canteen. Another fifty metres along, he passed the hangar containing the F-16. On the night they’d arrived, it had been surrounded by mechanics. There was nobody in the hangar tonight. The aircraft was ready to fly.
Rain started to spot the windscreen. Luke turned on the wipers and the glass became immediately smeared with dust. It took a few seconds to clear, by which time he was driving past an equipment warehouse.
Suddenly he remembered the satellite marker strapped to his left arm. It was still attached from the op and it meant the ops centre could track him to within a couple of metres. He struggled to remove it from his arm while steering with one hand, then wound down the window, ready to ditch it. But just then he saw something better. A logistics truck was approaching, its driver clearly unaware of the chaos ahead and its open-topped back piled with full bin bags. As it trundled past the WMIK, Luke chucked the marker up on to the top of the bags and watched in the rear-view mirror as the truck headed in the opposite direction. If the marker had remained still, anyone tracking would have realised he’d just dumped it; if it was moving, maybe he’d buy himself a bit of extra time.
He continued to drive steadily towards the exit of the base.
A minute passed. Five hundred metres of ground. He’d cleared the main part of the camp so he accelerated up to 70 kph, but kept looking in the rear-view mirror expecting to see vehicles speeding towards him; or maybe a chopper would land effortlessly on the road in front of him. Neither event happened, but his mouth was still dry when, a couple of minutes later, he saw the main entrance 300 metres ahead: a high wire fence with barbed wire rolled across the top, a sentry point with two guards and a lowered barrier.
Luke slowed down, reached for his Sig and rested it on his lap. Regiment SOP would be to nail the two sentries before they had a chance to raise the alarm…
He drove towards the barrier.
It was sixty metres away.
Fifty.
Lights in the rear-view mirror. Headlamps. Three sets. They were moving quickly.
Luke accelerated. It was his only option: pick up enough speed and the barrier couldn’t stop him.
The rain was falling more heavily. The figures of the two guards were indistinct, but he could see them standing by the barrier, assault rifles slung across their fronts. It didn’t look like they’d clocked him yet. If he burst through, it would shag the front of the WMIK and they’d certainly fire on him. Assault rifles could take out his tyres, shatter the rear window — but at least he’d be out of the camp.
He accelerated some more.
Thirty metres to go.
Twenty.
The headlamps behind him were getting closer.
Suddenly, and to Luke’s astonishment, the barrier rose. Had word not reached the sentries? Were the headlamps behind just regular army vehicles? He wasn’t going to stop and find out. Seconds later he was speeding through the barrier. He caught sight of one of the guards, who looked surprised that the Land Rover had zoomed through at such a rate. But the day was drawing to a close, and it was raining hard. By the time Luke looked in the mirror again, the barrier had closed behind him and the sentry was taking shelter.
He kept his foot down and his eyes firmly on the road ahead. He’d been lucky, and experience told him that such luck seldom lasted. He tried to get his head straight. Stratton was at Ben Gurion — if he hadn’t already flown. The security there was fucking ridiculous. On his own, Luke would never get close to him.
He had only one choice. To get to Jerusalem. Because if he didn’t pull something out of the bag by eleven o’clock tomorrow, Stratton and Maya Bloom’s plans would come to fruition.
Which meant that right now his only friend was speed.
The air at Ben Gurion was thick with rain. It poured on to the chassis of a UN cargo TriStar as it refuelled, and on to the military presence — heavy, even for Ben Gurion — that surrounded it. An armoured Jeep was cutting through the darkness across the airfield from a nearby helicopter pad. The vehicle stopped just a couple of metres from the steps that had been placed at the rear of the TriStar. Two armed personnel climbed out of the front of the Jeep, and one of them opened the rear door to allow a thin man to exit.
Alistair Stratton looked a far cry from the smart, statesmanlike politician the world knew. His skin was smeared with dirt, blood and sweat; his nose was clearly broken; his clothes, in places, were torn. But although this usually unruffled figure looked like he’d been plucked from a war zone, it was not this that was most noticeable about it him. The Middle East peace envoy looked like peace was the last thing on his mind.
Soaked by the rain, he swiftly entered the body of the TriStar. He stood in its cavernous body, surrounded by crates of equipment and even a number of vehicles marked with white UN lettering, the scrapes and shouts of equipment being loaded echoing all around him. A second man approached, wearing camouflage gear and a UN armband. When he spoke, however, his clipped tones identified him as a British soldier, and an officer at that.
‘We should be off the ground in half an hour, sir.’
‘Why so long?’ Stratton’s voice was hoarse.
‘We’ve just received a communication from B Squadron SAS.’
The former PM looked at him sharply. ‘What?’
‘One of their men has gone AWOL. Nothing for you to worry about, sir, but a Regiment unit is on its way by helicopter.’
The politician’s bleak face grew bleaker. ‘I want men stationed at every entrance to this aircraft. Is that understood?’
The officer looked mildly surprised.
‘We’re quite secure, sir…’
He cut himself short. Stratton’s face had turned dangerous. ‘Is that understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’ The officer turned to march off and attend to Stratton’s instruction, but not before asking, ‘Do you… do you need some medical attention, sir?’
Stratton didn’t reply. As the officer disappeared, he stood alone in the belly of the TriStar, staring into the middle distance for almost a minute with the air of a man whose thoughts were far away. The loadie approached and spoke with a scrupulously polite Midwestern American accent. ‘I need to ask you to take a seat, please, sir.’
A pause.
‘Mr Stratton, sir?’
Stratton blinked, then nodded. Thirty seconds later he was clicking himself into a window seat up at the front of the plane. He gazed out at the tarmac, where, through the heavy rain, he could see a fuel lorry pulling away from the aircraft.
He continued to stare out on to Israeli soil.
Hallowed ground.
He didn’t need to ask who the SAS man was, but he was insignificant. There was no way he could prevent what was going to happen. No way he could stop the great events that were about to unfold…
Stratton was still staring from the window, lost in thought, when the aircraft’s engines started up; still staring as it taxied to the runway, accelerated and took to the skies. The TriStar juddered with turbulence through the rain and the cloud cover. When it finally broke through, he saw the waxing moon hanging bright in the sky and, a couple of minutes later, a different kind of light. There was a gap in the clouds, revealing the sprawling shape of a city below. In its centre, easily visible even from this height, was the Temple Mount.
Jerusalem. Stratton felt a thrill as he gazed down on the sacred place. His pale lips moved faintly. Silently.
A sudden lurch as the aircraft banked to the left and, as quickly as the Holy City had come into view, it disappeared.
It was another fifteen minutes before the cloud cover dispersed again and Stratton caught a glimpse of the ground below. Here it was less populated, with much smaller towns dotted around. But the terrain was flat and, after staring for a minute, something caught Stratton’s eye. Two aircraft, at a much lower altitude than the TriStar, were circling above a built-up region, maybe a couple of square kilometres, with two runways very clearly marked out in yellow lights. Stratton knew what he was looking at: a coalition military base. The aircraft were no doubt bringing in troops, equipment or supplies.
It was all coming together.
‘Everything all right, sir?’
A figure had appeared in the aisle by his seat. A soldier, in digital camouflage and wearing a distinctive beret with the emblem of a winged dagger.
‘I understand one of your men has gone missing,’ he said. He lightly touched his painful, broken nose. ‘He lost his mind, you know? Quite lost it. Post-traumatic stress disorder, I suppose. Terrible thing. I’m rather afraid for his own safety.’
‘He won’t get far, sir,’ the Regiment man replied stiffly. ‘I promise you that.’
‘Good. I’m glad to hear it. For his own sake.’
And without another word, Stratton turned to look out of the window again, to gaze at the sight of his armies gathering on the plains below.