2016 - Takedown Read online

  TAKEDOWN

  By Stephen Leather

  ***

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  CHAPTER 1

  Caleb McGovan sat back in his seat as the aircraft began its roll-back and the EasyJet flight attendants went through the usual pre-flight rituals. He had heard airline safety drills so many times in his life that he could have recited the script word for word from memory, but it was less conspicuous to pretend to pay attention than to read a newspaper ostentatiously while it was going on. Around him there was the usual excited buzz of chatter from people setting off on vacation, one or two of whom were already well into the holiday spirit after a session at one of the airside bars in Departures. Apart from one particularly boisterous hen party, all in matching outfits including pink feather boas and ‘Horny Hens on Tour’ Tshirts, the other passengers were couples or families. McGovan might have been just another holidaymaker, except that he was travelling alone and did not have the air of a man with pleasure on his mind. One look at his closed and slightly forbidding expression was enough to stop the person in the next seat to him trying to strike up a conversation.

  As soon as the flight safety briefing was over, he closed his eyes and cat-napped throughout the rest of the four-hour flight to Turkey.

  Three other flights had just disgorged their passengers at Dalaman airport, and McGovan joined the seemingly endless queue of tourists snaking its slow way through Passport Control. The Turkish immigration official gave his passport no more than a cursory glance before waving him through. While the other passengers were spilling from the arrivals hall to hail taxis or were being picked up by their hotel and resort shuttle buses, McGovan walked straight past the taxi stands and out across the car park in front of the terminal. A 4x4 was parked at the far side and four men wearing Arab dress were waiting for him. They exchanged only a few words before they all climbed into the 4x4 and set off. McGovan was squashed into the back seat between two others as they drove east while the setting sun sank slowly over the Mediterranean behind them. It was a gruelling, all-night drive, heading away from the Turquoise Coast, then skirting the forbidding ranges of the Taurus Mountains, capped by the towering Mount Tahtali, which flanked the Mediterranean coast all the way to the Syrian border far to the east. There were other smaller airports much closer to the border but none with the anonymity that came from using a bustling tourist hub like Dalaman, where almost every passenger passing through it was a foreign holidaymaker.

  As dawn broke they were still three hours’ drive from the Syrian border. Apart from a few isolated tourist sites, almost the whole of south-east Turkey was a military zone, and as they drew closer to the border the driver of the 4x4 took a circuitous route, turning off the highway for the back roads, keeping well away from the Turkish army bases. They drove through dense forests, where the scent of black pine, cedar and juniper filled the air, and crossed an arid plateau where shepherds and their scrawny flocks paused to watch them pass in a cloud of dust. Steering well clear of the border posts, they eventually took a rock-strewn dirt road, a smugglers’ track leading up into the high mountains.

  Eventually they crested a rise and McGovan saw the track running on ahead towards a steel-mesh and barbed-wire fence. Death’s head warning signs in Turkish and Arabic hung from it at intervals, showing that the fence marked the Turko-Syrian border. The smugglers’ track ended at the fence, but an even fainter, narrower path continued on the other side, zigzagging away down the far side of the ridge. The 4x4 ground to a halt beside the fence. There was silence broken only by the metallic ticking of the engine as it began to cool. McGovan looked at his companions. Although he had been travelling with them for hours, he was still not sure whether they were acting as his guides or his guards. They stared back at him in silence. ‘What now?’ he said at last, in Arabic.

  ‘This is where you get out,’ one said. ‘Crawl under the wire and walk due south for a mile where, inshallah, another of our vehicles will be waiting in a wadi to collect you.’

  McGovan paused a moment, in case they had anything to add, but they remained silent. One of the men next to him opened the door, got out and made a gesture with his hand, as if wafting away an irritating fly. McGovan shrugged his shoulders and followed him. The man climbed back into the vehicle, the engine roared into life and the 4x4 slewed around, spraying sand over him as the wheels slipped and skidded, then sped back the way it had come.

  He watched it go, then took a careful look around. Satisfied that he was alone in the sweep of desert landscape, he drank some water from his flask and urinated against a rock, then moved towards the fence. From the fresh tyre tracks running parallel to the wire, Turkish Army vehicles patrolled this area frequently and he had no desire to be stopped and interrogated.

  When he reached the wire, he lay flat in the dust and wormed under the lowest strand at the point where the smugglers’ track intersected with the fence. The compacted earth, scored by the marks left by the elbows and feet of countless others as they had wriggled under the fence, showed that he was far from the first to cross the border there. He picked himself up on the far side, brushed down his clothes and took another careful look around him. Then he set off, moving away from the fence and heading due south.

  The sun was high in the sky and the heat was pitiless. The mountains and the desert were shimmering in the heat-haze, but there was no other movement, apart from a pair of vultures circling on the thermals high above. The sun-bleached animal bones he saw at intervals as he picked his way among the rocks, suggested that they never had to wait too long in this unforgiving landscape for their next meal.

  He walked fo
r perhaps twenty minutes, picking his way along a narrow dry riverbed cutting through the steep scree slope that marked the Syrian side of the border. Further down he could see the riverbed broaden as it disappeared into the mouth of a wadi and, as he drew nearer, the glint of sunlight reflecting from the white metal roof of a Toyota Landcruiser showed him that his escort for the next stage of his journey was waiting for him.

  As he approached, four more men, who had been sheltering from the sun in the shade beneath an overhang of rock, stepped into the open and stared at him impassively. Once more all were dressed in black Arab robes. Two wore keffiyehs but the others wore hoods with crude holes cut for their mouths and eyes. There were few words of greeting. One merely grunted and pointed to the back seat of the Landcruiser, where McGovan again found himself wedged between two burly, silent Arabs as the Toyota bounced and buffeted its way down the rough, rock-strewn bed of the wadi. The men on either side of him smelt as if neither they nor their robes had seen soap and water for many weeks, but his years serving in the British Army had inured McGovan to far worse.

  They drove for more than an hour, coming to a halt at a checkpoint flying the Islamic State flag. ‘The Black Standard’ was claimed to date back to the time of Muhammad in the seventh century. It was inscribed with the Shahada – ‘There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah’ – above the seal of Muhammad, both etched in white Arabic script against the black background of the flag.

  The ISIS men manning the checkpoint were armed to the teeth with what McGovan’s well-trained eye immediately recognised as brand-new American M-16 assault rifles and M-203 grenade launchers. All were no doubt part of the endless shipments of US military equipment that had been poured into Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom and its aftermath. McGovan’s weather-beaten face creased into a sour smile as he savoured the irony of the title. America’s desire to lash out at someone, anyone, in the wake of 9/11 and its professed intention to replace Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship with an American-style democracy had, directly or indirectly, caused the deaths of an estimated half a million Iraqi citizens, most of them civilians. Now the country was dissolving into civil war, inflicting yet more misery on its long-suffering population.

  Despite the unprecedented levels of manpower, equipment and resources devoted to the Iraqi Army since the American conquest, the Iraqi troops that the Americans had trained in their thousands had evaporated, like water in the desert, on almost every occasion when the going had got even slightly tough. In addition, 90 per cent of their American-supplied military equipment – just like 90 per cent of the billions of dollars the US had poured into the country as military aid or bribes to buy the loyalty of Sunni tribesmen – had also disappeared. Some had gone into the pockets of corrupt American contractors and military personnel, while the rest had been funnelled through Iraqi middlemen to reappear in the hands of hostile Iraqi forces, and the jihadists who were now turning the weapons against the Americans and their Iraqi stooges. Bought or stolen from the American-trained Iraqi troops, or carried by deserters joining ISIS from the Iraqi Army, some of those weapons had now been brought across the border into Syria.

  The guards manning the second ISIS checkpoint exchanged greetings with the Arab occupants of the Toyota but directed baleful, suspicious looks at McGovan. ‘The faranji must be hooded and bound before you can go further,’ one said in Arabic, glaring at him. ‘It is forbidden for all unbelievers to see the route or the houses we use.’

  One of McGovan’s escorts reached under his seat and pulled out a black cloth hood, which was placed over McGovan’s head and tied with a cord around his neck. His wrists were secured behind him. The cloth sack was even more foul-smelling than his escorts’ body odour and the thick cloth made the heat beneath it even more intense, but McGovan ignored the stench and the sweat trickling down his face, focusing only on what he would need to say to the ISIS commander whom he would soon be meeting. Before he had set out to travel to Syria, he had been left in no doubt that if he did not convince the commander of his bona fides, the journey he was now making would be the last he ever took.

  The Landcruiser drove on for another twenty minutes, and McGovan felt the vehicle making frequent changes of direction, presumably in an attempt to disorient him. Eventually it pulled up and the engine was switched off. He heard more challenges and greetings in guttural Arabic, then the car doors were opened. He was hustled out and taken inside a building, where the hood was removed and his wrists untied. He stood blinking for a couple of minutes, getting a sense of his surroundings. He was inside a low, mud-walled building, a goatherder’s hut from the smell, which was now evidently doubling as an ISIS safe-house. A few ISIS fighters, yet more anonymous bearded figures in long black robes, with black hoods or keffiyehs, kept watch over the surrounding desert from the narrow windows, while others leaned against the wall, directing malevolent stares at him. The look in their eyes told him that if their commander was not satisfied with any of the answers McGovan gave in response to his questions he would not leave the building alive.

  After a few minutes’ silence, broken only by the buzzing of the flies that swarmed around him, a door at the rear of the building opened and the ISIS commander swept into the room, flanked by two massive bodyguards. The commander, who looked to be in his late forties or early fifties, was dressed like his men, in flowing black robes, but he was bare-headed and the fringes of his greying beard were dyed with henna – McGovan knew that was usually the mark of a hajji of South Asian origins. However, whatever his origins might have been, he spoke to McGovan in flawless Arabic, first making the traditional greeting, ‘As salam aleykum.’

  ‘Wa aleykum as salam,’ McGovan said. His accent was nowhere near as good, but it was passable.

  ‘We already know your name and much about you,’ the commander said. ‘I am known as Saif al-Islam.’

  ‘The Sword of Islam,’ McGovan said, nodding. ‘A good name for a warrior.’

  ‘Indeed so, and one whose blade will not be sheathed until, inshallah, the Caliphate has been established and history will turn again, overthrowing the empire of the United States and the world Jewish government.’

  McGovan said nothing in reply, and after a few moments, Saif al-Islam gestured towards a low table at the side of the room. The two men sat cross-legged on the floor, facing each other across the table. They sat in silence at first, scrutinising each other, while the commander’s men brought them cups of bitter cardamom-scented coffee and fresh dates.

  ‘So, Englishman,’ Saif al-Islam said at last, ‘you claim to have come to join our jihad.’

  McGovan nodded. ‘I can help you in your fight, I’m sure of that.’

  ‘We have many foreign fighters here,’ said Saif al-Islam, ‘many from England, but also from around the world.’

  McGovan nodded again. ‘It’s good that so many Muslims are prepared to help their brothers where help is needed,’ he said.

  ‘You realise that we do not pay our foreign fighters? We can give you food and arms but we are not interested in mercenaries.’

  ‘I am not doing this for money, Saif al-Islam. In fact I don’t want to take part in the fighting here. I’ve come to seek your help to stage a high-profile attack inside the UK.’

  ‘You do us too much honour,’ the ISIS commander said, with what might have been a mocking smile. ‘We are only simple fighters. We are used to waging a guerrilla war in the desert, but we have no experience –’ again the mirthless smile ‘– or, at least, very little, of waging war on the streets of Western cities. Tell me, what or who would be the target of such a high-profile attack?’

  McGovan shot a glance towards the circle of ISIS men standing around the walls, all well within earshot of their conversation. He took a piece of paper and a pen from his pocket, wrote a few words on it and slid it across the table.

  Saif al-Islam regarded him with amusement. ‘You do not trust my men, Englishman? Yet I would trust any of them with my life.’
>
  McGovan inclined his head. ‘But you know them, Saif al-Islam, whereas I do not. And I am a cautious man. The fewer people who know of my plans, the less chance there is of them being compromised.’

  As if to reinforce his words, as soon as Saif al-Islam had glanced at the note, McGovan took it back and burned it with his cigarette lighter. The commander’s expression did not change. ‘Before we can talk further about this,’ he said, ‘I need to know more about you. As the Prophet has ordered us, we fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Why would you, a faranji, a Westerner, and a Christian,’ his lip curled, ‘wish to join our jihad against your own people?’

  ‘I no longer consider myself a Christian,’ said McGovan. ‘I fought for the British in Iraq and in Afghanistan.’ He saw the ISIS fighters stir and the hatred on their faces. One spat on the ground and began to stride towards him, fists clenched, but was stopped in his tracks as Saif al-Islam held up a warning hand.