[Spider Shepherd #13] - Dark Forces Read online

  Also by Stephen Leather

  Pay Off

  The Fireman

  Hungry Ghost

  The Chinaman

  The Vets

  The Long Shot

  The Birthday Girl

  The Double Tap

  The Solitary Man

  The Tunnel Rats

  The Bombmaker

  The Stretch

  Tango One

  The Eyewitness

  First Response

  Spider Shepherd thrillers

  Hard Landing

  Soft Target

  Cold Kill

  Hot Blood

  Dead Men

  Live Fire

  Rough Justice

  Fair Game

  False Friends

  True Colours

  White Lies

  Black Ops

  Jack Nightingale supernatural thrillers

  Nightfall

  Midnight

  Nightmare

  Nightshade

  Lastnight

  About the Author

  Stephen Leather is one of the UK’s most successful thriller writers. He was previously a journalist on newspapers including The Times and the South China Morning Post and his bestsellers have been translated into fifteen languages.

  Find out more at www.stephenleather.com.

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Stephen Leather, 2016

  The right of Stephen Leather to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 473 60408 7

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Sam

  Contents

  Also by Stephen Leather

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The man’s name …

  The man’s name was Mohammed al-Hussain, a common enough name in Syria. But the Mohammed al-Hussain lying prone on the roof of the two-storey building was no ordinary man. He was a sniper, one of the best in the world. He had 256 kills to his credit, each one meticulously recorded in the small cloth-bound notebook he kept in his back pocket. Each entry detailed the nature of the target, the location and the distance. Almost all of his kills were Syrian government soldiers.

  He was twenty-two years old, his skin the colour of weak coffee with plenty of milk. He had soft brown eyes that belonged more to a lovesick spaniel than the tried and tested assassin he was. His beard was long and bushy but his nails were neatly clipped and glistened as if they had been varnished. Around his head was a knotted black scarf with the white insignia of Islamic State, the caliphate that claimed authority over all Muslims around the world. His weapon was lying on a sandbag.

  When he had first started sniping, he had used a Russian-made Dragunov SVD rifle, accurate up to six hundred metres. It was a lightweight and reliable weapon, capable of semi-automatic fire and equipped with a ten-round magazine. Most of his kills back then had been at around two hundred metres. His commander had spotted his skill with the weapon and had recommended him for specialist training. He was pulled off the front line and spent four weeks in the desert at a remote training camp.

  There, he was introduced to the British L115A3 sniper rifle. It was the weapon of choice for snipers in the British SAS and the American Delta Force, and it hadn’t taken al-Hussain long to appreciate its advantages. It had been designed by Olympic target shooters and fired an 8.59mm round, the extra weight resulting in less deflection over long ranges. In fact, in the right hands the L115A3 could hit a human-sized target at 1,400 metres, and even at that distance the round would do more damage than a magnum bullet at close range.

  The L115A3 was fitted with a suppressor to cut down the flash and noise it made. No one killed by a bullet from his L115A3 ever heard it coming. It was the perfect rifle for carrying around – it weighed less than seven kilograms and had a folding stock so it could easily be slid into a backpack.

  It had an adjustable cheek-piece so that the marksman’s eye could be comfortably aligned with the Schmidt & Bender 25 × magnification scope. Al-Hussain put his eye to it now and made a slight adjustment to the focus. His target was a house just over a thousand metres away. It was home to the mother of a colonel in the Syrian Army, and today was her birthday. The colonel was a good son and, at just after eight o’clock, had arrived at the house to have breakfast with his mother. Fifteen minutes later, al-Hussain had taken up position on the roof. The colonel was a prime target and had been for the best part of a year.

  The L115A3 cost thirty-five thousand dollars in the United States but more than double that in the Middle East. The Islamic State was careful who it gave the weapons to, but al-Hussain was an obvious choice. His notepad confirmed the benefits of using the British rifle. His kills went from an average of close to two hundred metres with the Dragunov to more than eight hundred. His kill rate increased too. With the Dragunov he averaged three kills a day on active service. With the L115A3, more often than not he recorded at least five. The magazine held only five shells but that was enough. Firing more than two shots in succession was likely to lead to his location being pinpointed. One was best. One shot, one kill. Then wait at least a few minutes before firing again. But al-Hussain wasn’t planning on shooting more than once. There were two SUVs outside the mother’s house and the soldiers had formed a perimeter around the building but the only target the sniper was interested in was the colonel.

  ‘Are we good to go?’ asked the man to the sniper’s right. He was Asian, bearded, with a crooked hooked nose, and spoke with an English accent. He was one of thousands of foreign jihadists who had crossed the border into Syria to fight alongside Islamic State. The other man, the one to the sniper’s left, was an Iraqi, darker-skinned and wearing glasses.

  Al-Hussain spoke good English. His parents had sent him to one of the best schools in Damascus, the International School of Choueifat. The school had an indoor heated pool, a gymnasium, a grass football pitch, a 400-metre athletics track, basketball and tennis courts. Al-Hussain had been an able pupil and had made full use of the school’s sporting facilities.

  Everything had changed when he had turned seventeen. Teenagers who had painted revolutionary slogans on a school wall had been arrested and tortured in the southern city of Deraa and thousands of people took to the streets to protest. The Syrian Army reacted by shooting the unarmed protesters, and by the summer of 2011 the protests had spread across the country. Al-Hussain had seen, first hand, the brutality of the government response. He saw his fellow students take up arms to defend themselves and at first he resisted, believing that peaceful protests would succeed eventually. He was wrong. The protests escalated and the country descended into civil war. What had been touted as an Arab Spring became a violent struggle as rebel brigades laid siege to gover
nment-controlled cities and towns, determined to end the reign of President Assad.

  By the summer of 2013 more than a hundred thousand people had been killed and fighting had reached the capital, Damascus. In August of that year the Syrian government had killed hundreds of people on the outskirts of Damascus when they launched rockets filled with the nerve gas Sarin.

  Al-Hussain’s parents decided they had had enough. They closed their house in Mezze and fled to Lebanon with their two daughters, begging Mohammed to go with them. He refused, telling them he had to stay and fight for his country. As his family fled, al-Hussain began killing with a vengeance. He knew that the struggle was no longer just about removing President Assad. It was a full-blown war in which there could be only one victor.

  Syria had been run by the president’s Shia Alawite sect, but the country’s Sunni majority had been the underdogs for a long time and wanted nothing less than complete control. Russia and Iran wanted President Assad to continue running the country, as did Lebanon. Together they poured billions of dollars into supporting the regime, while the US, the UK and France, along with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the rest of the Arab states, supported the Sunni-dominated opposition.

  After the nerve gas attack, al-Hussain’s unit switched their allegiance to Islamic State, which had been formed from the rump of al-Qaeda’s operations in Iraq. Led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Islamic State had attracted thousands of foreign jihadists, lured by its promise to create an Islamic emirate from large chunks of Syria and Iraq. Islamic State grew quickly, funded in part by captured oilfields, taking first the provincial Syrian city of Raqqa and the Sunni city of Fallujah, in the western Iraqi province of Anbar.

  As Islamic State grew, Mohammed al-Hussain was given ever more strategic targets. He was known as the sniper who never missed, and his notebook was filled with the names of high-ranking Syrian officers and politicians.

  ‘He’s coming out,’ said the Brit, but al-Hussain had already seen the front door open. The soldiers outside started moving, scanning the area for potential threats. Al-Hussain put his eye to the scope and began to control his breathing. Slow and even. There was ten feet between the door and the colonel’s SUV. A couple of seconds. More than enough time for an expert sniper like al-Hussain.

  A figure appeared at the doorway and al-Hussain held his breath. His finger tightened on the trigger. It was important to squeeze, not pull. He saw a headscarf. The mother. He started breathing again, but slowly and tidally. She had her head against the colonel’s chest. He was hugging her. The door opened wider. She stepped back. He saw the green of the colonel’s uniform. He held his breath. Tightened his finger.

  The phone in the breast pocket of his jacket buzzed. Al-Hussain leapt to his feet, clasped the rifle to his chest and headed across the roof. The two spotters looked up at him, their mouths open. ‘Run!’ he shouted, but they stayed where they were. He didn’t shout again. He concentrated on running at full speed to the stairwell. He reached the top and hurtled down the stone stairs. Just as he reached the ground floor a 45-kilogram Hellfire missile hit the roof at just under a thousand miles an hour.

  Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd stared at the screen. All he could see was whirling brown dust where once there had been a two-storey building. ‘Did we get them all?’ he asked.

  Two airmen were sitting in front of him in high-backed beige leather chairs. They had control panels and joysticks in front of them and between them was a panel with two white telephones.

  ‘Maybe,’ said the man in the left-hand seat. He was Steve Morris, the flying officer in command, in his early forties with greying hair. Sitting next to him was Pilot Officer Denis Donoghue, in his thirties with ginger hair, cut short. ‘What do you think, Denis?’

  ‘The sniper was moving just before it hit. If he was quick enough he might have made it out. We got your two guys, guaranteed. Don’t think they knew what hit them.’

  ‘What about IR?’ asked Shepherd.

  Donoghue reached out and clicked a switch. The image on the main screen changed to a greenish hue. They could just about make out the ruins of the building. ‘Not much help, I’m afraid,’ said Donoghue. ‘There isn’t a lot left when you get a direct hit from a Hellfire.’

  ‘Can we scan the surrounding area?’

  Morris turned his joystick to the right. ‘No problem,’ he said. The drone banked to the right and so did the picture on the main screen in the middle of the display. The two screens to the left of it showed satellite images and maps, and above them was a tracker screen that indicated the location of the Predator. Below that was the head-up display that showed a radar ground image. But they were all staring at the main screen. Donoghue pulled the camera back, giving them a wider view of the area, still using the infrared camera.

  The drone was an MQ-9, better known as the Predator B. Hunter-killer, built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems at a cost of close to 17 million dolalars. It had a 950-shaft-horsepower turboprop engine, a twenty-metre wingspan, a maximum speed of 300 m.p.h. and a range of a little more than a thousand miles. It could fly loaded for fourteen hours up to a height of fifteen thousand metres, carrying four Hellfire air-to-surface missiles and two Paveway laser-guided bombs.

  One of the Hellfires had taken out the building, specifically an AGM-114P Hellfire II, specially designed to be fired from a high-altitude drone. The Hellfire air-to-surface missile was developed for tank-hunting and the nickname came from its initial designation of Helicopter Launched, Fire and Forget Missile. But the armed forces of the West soon realised that, when fired from a high-flying drone, the Hellfire could be a potent assassination tool for taking out high-value targets. It was the Israelis who had first used it against an individual when their air force killed Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin in 2004. But the Americans and British had taken the technique to a whole new level, using it to great effect in Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq and Syria. Among the terrorists killed by Hellfire missiles launched from drones were Al-Shabaab leader Ahmed Abdi Godane, and British-born Islamic State terrorist Mohammed Emwazi, also known as Jihadi John.

  The Hellfire missile was efficient and, at less than a hundred thousand dollars a shot, cost-effective. It was just over five feet long, had a range of eight thousand metres and carried a nine-kilogram shaped charge that was more than capable of taking out a tank. It was, however, less effective against a stone building. While there was no doubt that the men on the roof would have died instantly, the sniper might well have survived, if he had made it outside.

  Shepherd twisted in his seat. Alex Shaw, the mission coordinator, was sitting at his desk in front of six flat-screen monitors. He was in his early thirties with a receding hairline and wire-framed spectacles. ‘What do you think, Alex? Did we get him?’

  ‘I’d love to say yes, Spider, but there’s no doubt he was moving.’ He shrugged. ‘He could have got downstairs and out before the missile hit but he’d have to have been moving fast.’

  Shepherd wrinkled his nose. The primary target had been a British jihadist, Ruhul Khan and it had been Khan they had spent four hours following until he had reached the roof. It was only when the sniper had unpacked his rifle that Shepherd realised what the men were up to. While the death of the British jihadist meant the operation had been a success, it was frustrating not to know if they’d succeeded in taking out the sniper.

  Shaw stood up and stretched, then walked over to stand by Shepherd. Donoghue had switched the camera back to regular HD. There were several pick-up trucks racing away from the ruins of the building, and a dozen or so men running towards it. None of the men on the ground looked like the sniper. It was possible he’d made it to a truck, but unlikely. And if he had made it, there was no way of identifying him from the air.

  ‘We’ll hang around and wait for the smoke to clear,’ said Shaw. ‘They might pull out the bodies. Muslims like to bury their dead within twenty-four hours.’ He took out a packet of cigarettes. ‘Time for a quick smoke.’

  ‘Just give me a m
inute or two, will you, Alex?’ asked Shepherd. ‘Let’s see if we can work out what the sniper was aiming at.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Shaw, dropping back into his seat.

  ‘Start at about three hundred metres and work out,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘Are you on it, Steve?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Heading two-five-zero,’ said Morris, slowly moving his joystick. ‘What are we looking for?’

  ‘Anything a sniper might be interested in,’ said Shepherd. ‘Military installation. Army patrol. Government building.’

  ‘It’s mainly residential,’ said Donoghue, peering at the main screen.

  Shepherd stared at the screen. Donoghue was right. The area was almost all middle-class homes, many with well-tended gardens. Finding out who the occupants were would be next to impossible, and there were dozens of houses within the sniper’s range. There was movement at the top of the screen. Five vehicles, travelling fast. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  Donoghue changed the camera and zoomed in on the convoy. Two army jeeps in front of a black SUV with tinted windows, followed by an army truck with a heavy machine-gun mounted on the top followed by a troop-carrier. ‘That’s someone important, right enough,’ said Donoghue.

  Shepherd nodded. ‘How far from where the sniper was?’

  ‘A mile or so.’ Donoghue wrinkled his nose. ‘That’s a bit far, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not for a good one,’ said Shepherd. ‘And he looked as if he knew what he was doing.’ He pointed at the screen. ‘They’re probably running because of the explosion. Whoever that guy is, he’ll probably never know how close he came to taking a bullet.’

  ‘Or that HM Government saved his bacon,’ said Shaw. He grinned. ‘Well, not bacon, obviously.’

  ‘Can we get back to the house, see if the smoke’s cleared?’ said Shepherd. He stood and went over to Shaw’s station. ‘Can you get me close-ups of the sniper and his gun?’

  ‘No problem. It’ll take a few minutes. I’m not sure how good the images will be.’

  ‘We’ve got technical guys who can clean them up,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘Denis, could you handle that for our guest?’ said Shaw, then to Shepherd: ‘Thumb drive okay?’