Murder Team by Chris Ryan

metres to the ridge line.
    And it was from there that the noise was coming.
    Spud blinked. He saw a light emerging from behind the brow of the hill. The noise – regular and mechanical – increased. The light grew brighter. It back-lit the ridge line itself, throwing its outline into sharp relief. Spud could make out the shape of individual bushes and boulders along the ridge. And among them, directly to Spud’s twelve o’clock, was the silhouette of a man. He was facing toward Spud and the settlement. Even from this distance, Spud knew who it was.
    Danny.
    Spud found himself squinting. The light behind Danny was growing even brighter. So bright that it partially obscured Danny’s silhouette.
    And then they appeared. Two choppers, emerging over the ridge line, their rotors thundering and their lights shining. They hung a couple of feet above the ridge line for a moment. Spud thought he could make out the shape of Danny climbing aboard the leftmost chopper.
    It only took a couple of seconds for him to alight. Then both choppers surged forward, flying twenty metres apart, their engines screaming with the sudden burst of speed and their black, moonlit shadows rushing across the slope of the hill toward him.
     

16
     
    ‘You’re late!’ Danny roared across the noise of the Black Hawk’s engine.
    ‘Hereford lost their track on the sat phone as we were approaching,’ the loadie shouted.
    Both side doors were open. A Regiment gunner sat at a minigun, his eyes lined up with the sights, ready to fire. Wind rushed into the aircraft, blowing Danny’s hair back and forcing him to shout even louder – unlike the other six men in the chopper, he wasn’t wearing a headset. The chopper wobbled slightly as it rose into the air. Through one of the open doors, Danny caught a momentary glimpse of the settlement, and the desert beyond. With the advantage of a little extra height, he saw a trail of red lights – as he’d suspected, the strike had failed to take out Abu Bakr and his convoy. They were now leaving, at speed.
    He snapped his attention back to the job in hand. ‘There’s a Land Rover at the bottom of the hill!’ he shouted. ‘That’s where Spud is. Don’t fire on it. Slot everyone else.’
    The loadie nodded, then started issuing instructions into his headset.
    Almost immediately, there was a dramatic loss of height. Danny clutched on to a section of rough webbing on the side of the aircraft to stop himself tumbling. As the chopper lowered itself to the ground, it performed a ninety-degree turn, so the minigunner was now facing directly toward the settlement.
    It touched down. Danny looked through both side doors. He saw that they were positioned about ten metres in front of the Land Rover. The advancing militants were about twenty metres away on the other side of the chopper. The second Black Hawk was hanging in the air above them, about thirty metres high, hovering ominously.
    The militants didn’t stand a chance.
    The side gunners on both aircraft opened up at precisely the same time. Two sets of 7.62mm rounds thundered toward them, from different directions, at a rate of three thousand rounds a minute. It was carnage. Danny estimated that there were fifteen men. They were all dead in less than twenty seconds, their bodies reduced to a scattered pile of brutalised flesh. But the miniguns continued to fire, just in case . . .
    Danny watched it happen with grim satisfaction. Then he turned the opposite way and jumped out the other side of the chopper, which was facing toward the Land Rover. Head bowed against the downdraught, he ran toward the vehicle. And he felt a horrific twisting in his gut as he saw, from five metres, that the front seat was leaning forward. That the glass of the rear window had shattered.
    That there was no sign of Spud in the back.
    Behind him, he was aware of the second Black Hawk – the one that had been hanging in the air – speeding toward the settlement. But all his focus was