Crisis Four Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Crisis Four

  October 1995

  Monday 16 October 1995

  April 1998

  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

  June 1998

  June 1998

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781407039053

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  CRISIS FOUR

  A CORGI BOOK : 9780552152366

  Originally published in Great Britain by Bantam Press,

  a division of Transworld Publishers

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Bantam Press edition published 1999

  Corgi edition published 2000

  13 15 17 19 20 18 16 14

  Copyright © Andy McNab 1999

  The right of Andy McNab to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Condition of Sale

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  About the Author

  In 1984 he was ‘badged’ as a member of 22 SAS Regiment.

  Over the course of the next nine years he was at the centre of covert operations on five continents.

  During the first Gulf War he commanded Bravo Two Zero, a patrol that, in the words of his commanding officer, ‘will remain in regimental history for ever’.

  Awarded both the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) and Military Medal (MM) during his military career.

  McNab was the British Army’s most highly decorated serving soldier when he finally left the SAS in February 1993.

  He is now the author of ten bestselling thrillers.

  BRAVO TWO ZERO

  In January 1991, eight members of the SAS regiment, under the command of Sergeant Andy McNab, embarked upon a top secret mission in Iraq to infiltrate them deep behind enemy lines. Their call sign: ‘Bravo Two Zero’. Within days, their location was compromised. In the fire-fight that followed four men were captured. Three died. Only one escaped. For the survivors the worst was to come when they were tortured with a savagery for which not even their intensive SAS training had prepared them.

  ‘One of the most extraordinary examples of human courage and survival in modern warfare’

  The Times

  ‘The best account of the SAS in action’

  Sunday Times

  IMMEDIATE ACTION

  The no–holds–barred account of an extraordinary life, from the day McNab as a baby was found in a carrier bag on the steps of Guy’s Hospital to the day he went to fight in the Gulf War. As a delinquent youth he kicked against society. As a young soldier he waged war against the IRA in the streets and fields of South Armagh.

  ‘A richly detailed picture of life in the SAS’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘The real thing . . . The strength of Immediate Action lies in its detail’

  The Times

  Nick Stone, ex–SAS trooper, now gun–for–hire working on deniable ops for the British government, is the perfect man for the dirtiest of jobs, doing whatever it takes by whatever means necessary . . .

  REMOTE CONTROL

  Dateline: Washington DC, USA

  Stone is drawn into the bloody killing of an ex–SAS officer and his family and soon finds himself on the run with the one survivor who can identify the killer – a nine-year-old girl.

  ‘Proceeds with a testosterone surge’

  Daily Telegraph

  CRISIS FOUR

  Dateline: North Carolina, USA

  In the backwoods of the American South, Stone has to keep alive the beautiful young woman who holds the key to unlock a chilling conspiracy that will threaten world peace.

  ‘When it comes to thrills, he’s Forsyth class’

  Mail on Sunday

  FIREWALL

  Dateline: Finland

  The kidnapping of a Russian Mafia warlord takes Stone into the heart of the global espionage world and into conflict with some of the most dangerous killers around.

  ‘Other thriller writers do their research, but McNab has actually been there’

  Sunday Times

  LAST LIGHT

  Dateline: Panama

  Stone finds himself at the centre of a lethal conspiracy involving ruthless Columbian mercenaries, the US government and Chinese big business. It’s an uncomfortable place to be . . .

  ‘A heart thumping read’

  Mail on Sunday

  LIBERATION DAY

  Dateline: Cannes, France

  Behind its glamorous exterior, the city’s seething underworld is the battleground for a very dirty drugs war and Stone must reach deep within himself to fight it on their terms.

  ‘McNab’s great asset is that the heart of his fiction is non–fiction’

  Sunday Times

  DARK WINTER

  Dateline: Malaysia

  A straightforward action on behalf of the War on Terror turns into a race to escape his past for Stone if he is to save himself and those closest to him.

  ‘Addictive . . . Packed with wild action and revealing tradecraft’

  Daily Telegraph

  DEEP BLACK

  Dateline: Bosnia

  All too late Stone realizes that he is being used as bait to lure into the open a man whom th
e darker forces of the West will stop at nothing to destroy.

  ‘One of the UK’s top thriller writers’

  Daily Express

  AGGRESSOR

  Dateline: Georgia, former Soviet Union

  A longstanding debt of friendship to an SAS comrade takes Stone on a journey where he will have to risk everything to repay what he owes, even his life . . .

  ‘A terrific novelist’

  Mail on Sunday

  RECOIL

  Dateline: The Congo, Africa

  What starts out as a personal quest for a missing woman quickly becomes a headlong rush from his own past for Stone.

  ‘Stunning . . . A first class action thriller’

  The Sun

  CROSSFIRE

  Dateline: Kabul

  Nick Stone enters the modern day wild west that is Afghanistan in search of a kidnapped reporter.

  ‘Authentic to the core . . . McNab at his electrifying best’

  Daily Express

  In memory of Edward C.S. Hooper

  30 October 1979–15 April 1999

  OCTOBER 1995

  Monday 16 October 1995

  The Syrians don’t fuck around if they think you’re invading their air space. Within minutes of crossing the border, your aircraft will be greeted by a three-ship intercept, flying so close you can wave at the pilots. They won’t wave back; they’ve come to get a visual ID on you, and if they don’t like what they see they’ll hose you down with their air-to-air missiles.

  The same rule doesn’t apply, of course, when friendly commercial aircraft blip onto their radar screens, and that was why our team of four had opted for this particular method of infiltration. If Damascus had had the slightest clue about what was about to happen aboard our British Airways flight from Delhi to London, their fighters would have been scrambled the moment the Boeing 747 left Saudi Arabian territory.

  I was twisting and turning, trying to get comfortable, feeling jealous of all the people sitting upstairs behind the driver, probably on their fifth gin and tonic since take off, watching their second movie and tucking into their third helping of boeuf en croute.

  Reg 1 was in front of me. Six feet two, and built like a brick shit-house, he was probably having an even worse time in the cramped conditions. His curly black hair, going a bit grey at the sides, was all over the place. Like me, before I left in ’93, he had been selected to do work for the intelligence and security services, including the sort of job for the US that Congress would never sanction. I had done similar jobs myself while in the Regiment, but this was the first I’d been on since becoming a K. Given who we were going in against, none of us was giving odds on whether we’d get to do another.

  I glanced across at Sarah, to my right in the semi-darkness. Her eyes were closed, but even in the dim light I could see she wasn’t looking her happiest. Maybe she just didn’t like flying without complimentary champagne and slippers.

  It had been a while since I’d last seen her, and the only thing about her that had changed was her hair. It was still very straight, almost South-East Asian, though dark brown, not black. It had always been short, but she’d prepared for this operation by having it cut into a bob with a fringe. She had strong, well-defined features, with large brown eyes above high cheekbones, a nose that was slightly too large, and a mouth that nearly always looked too serious. Sarah would not be troubled in her old age by laughter lines. When it was genuine, her smile was warm and friendly, but more often it appeared to be only going through the motions. And yet, just when you were thinking this, she’d find the oddest thing amusing and her nose would twitch, and her whole face would crease into a radiant, almost childlike, grin. At times like that she looked even more beautiful than usual – maybe too beautiful. That was sometimes a danger in our line of work, as men could never resist a second glance, but at thirty-five years of age she had learned to use her looks to her advantage within the service. It made her even more of a bitch than most people thought she was.

  It was no good, I couldn’t get comfortable. We’d been on the aircraft for nearly fifteen hours and my body was starting to ache. I turned and tried the left side. I couldn’t see Reg 2, but I knew he was to my left in the gloom somewhere. He was easy to distinguish from Reg 1, being the best part of a foot shorter and with hair that looked like a fistful of dark-blond wire wool. The only thing I knew about them apart from their zap numbers was that, like me, they had both been circumcised within the last three weeks and that, like mine, their underwear came from Tel Aviv. And that was all I wanted to know about them, or about Regs 3 to 6 who were already in-country, waiting for us – even though one of them, Glen, was an old friend.

  I found myself facing Sarah again. She was rubbing her eyes with her fists, like a sleepy child. I tried to doze off; thirty minutes later I was still kidding myself I was asleep when I got a kick on the back of my legs. It was Sarah.

  I sat up in my sleeping bag and peered into the semi-darkness. Three loadies (load masters) were moving around with orienteering torches attached to their heads, glowing a dim red so as not to destroy our night vision. Each of them had an umbilical cord trailing from his face mask, and their hands moved instinctively to make sure it didn’t get snagged or detached from the aircraft’s oxygen supply.

  I unzipped the bag and, even through my all-weather sniper suit, immediately felt the freezing cold in the unpressurized 747 cargo hold. None of the passengers or cabin crew would have known there were people down here, tucked away in the belly of the aircraft. Nor would our names have appeared anywhere on a manifest.

  I folded the bag in half, leaving inside the two ‘aircrew bags’ I’d filled during the flight – plastic bags with a one-way valve which you insert yourself into and piss away to your heart’s content. I wondered how Sarah had been getting on. It was bad enough for me because my cock was still extremely sore, but it must be hard being female aircrew on a long flight with a device designed only for males – or the female commander of a deniable op. I put a Post-It on my mental bulletin board, reminding myself to ask her how she got round the problem. That was if we survived, of course, and were still on speaking terms.

  I could never remember which was starboard or port; all I knew was that, as you looked at the aircraft from the front, we were in the small hold at the rear and the door was on the left-hand side. I clutched my oxygen tube as a loadie crossed over it, and adjusted my mask as his leg caught it, pulling it slightly from my face. The inside was wet, clammy and cold now the seal had been broken.

  I picked up my Car 15, a version of the M16 Armalite 5.56mm with a telescopic butt and a shorter barrel, cocked it and applied the safety. The Car had a length of green paracord tied to it like a sling; I strapped it over my left shoulder so the barrel faced down and it ran along the rear of my body. The rig (parachute) would go over that.

  I pushed my hand under the sniper suit to get hold of the Beretta 9mm that was on a leg holster against my right thigh. I cocked that, too, and pulled back the topslide a few millimetres to check chamber. Turning the weapon so it caught one of the loadies’ red glows, I saw the glint of a correctly fed round, ready to go.

  This was my first ‘false flag’ job posing as a member of Israeli special forces, and as I adjusted my leg straps I wished I’d had a little more time to recover from the circumcision. It hadn’t healed as quickly as we’d been told. I looked around me as we got our kit on, hoping the others were in as much pain.

  We were about to carry out a ‘lift’ to find out what the West’s new bogeyman, Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi multimillionaire turned terrorist, was getting up to in Syria. Satellite photography had shown earthmoving and other heavy equipment from Bin Laden’s construction company near the source of the river Jordan. Downstream lay Israel, and if its main source of water was about to be dammed, diverted or otherwise tampered with, the West needed to know. They feared a repeat of the 1967 war, and with Bin Laden around it was never going to be a good day out. He hadn’t been dubbed Americ
a’s ‘public enemy number one’ by Clinton for nothing.

  Our task was to lift Osama’s right-hand man – known to us only as the ‘Source’ for op sec (operational security) reasons – from on site. His private jet had been spotted at a nearby airfield. The US needed to know what was happening in Syria, and, more to the point, maybe learn how to lay their hands on Osama. As the briefing guy had said, ‘Bin Laden represents a completely new phenomenon: non-state-supported terrorism backed by an extremely rich and religiously motivated leader with an intense hatred of the West, mainly America, as well as Israel and the secular Arab world. He must be stopped.’

  Once ready and checked by the loadies, it was just a question of holding on to the airframe and waiting. There was nothing to do for the next few minutes but daydream or get scared. Each of us was in his or her own little world now. Before any operation some people are frightened, some are excited. Now and again I could see reflections from the red torches in people’s eyes; they were staring at their boots or at some other fixed point, maybe thinking about their wives, or girlfriends, or kids, or what they were going to do after this, or maybe even wondering what the fuck they were doing here in the first place.

  Me, I didn’t know what to think really. I’d never been able to get sparked up about the thought of dying and not seeing anyone else again. Not even my wife, when I was married. I always felt I was a gambler with nothing to lose. Most people who gamble do so with the things that are important to them; I gambled knowing that if I lost I wouldn’t break the bank.

  I watched the glowing redheads pack our kit away into the large aluminium Lacon boxes. Once we’d been thrown out and the door had closed again, they’d stow all other evidence that we had been there in the boxes and just sit it out until they were taken care of in London.

  Two of the loadies started a sweep with their torch lights to make sure there was nothing loose which could be sucked out as soon as the door opened. Nothing must compromise this job.