SERGEANT MAJOR John Carr stood in the low light, fighting unfamiliar emotions and watching his blokes go through their final equipment checks.
Even at this hour, the air was brutally hot and humid, and it stank of open sewers, old garbage fires, and diesel fumes from the idling vehicles.
Foul in his nostrils as it was, he inhaled deeply: to Carr, it smelled like nothing on earth. He was going to miss it.
Tonight would see yet another operation against yet another high value target – this one a man codenamed ‘Joker’.
Joker: Sufyan bin Ahmed, a former colonel in Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard and now the leader of The Obedient Servants, a vicious Al Qaeda-in-Iraq cell responsible for multiple atrocities and deaths.
Another night, another nasty bastard.
The men of 22 SAS and Task Force Dagger had been at this for a long time now, year after year spent hunting and killing the murderous jihadists who had turned Iraq into a charnel house, slick with blood. Most of the action took place close enough to smell the other man’s breath, and sweat, and fear, in dark, dank rooms in backstreet houses and compounds, where the enemy holed up to make his stand.
With this tour drawing to its end, Carr’s Squadron had been lucky, with only a couple of soldiers wounded and none killed. They were facing a foe who prayed for his own, glorious death, and that presented a very particular challenge. But it was one which the men from Hereford were more than equipped to meet: their phenomenal skill at close-quarter battle, and their proficiency in the art of room combat, had changed the course of the campaign, and the flow of volunteers was drying up. The streets of the Iraqi capital might be teeming with those who loudly proclaimed their desire for martyrdom; few actually stepped up.
Squadron Quarter Master Sergeant Geordie Skelton wandered over, one giant fist wrapped around a hot brew, despite the thirty-five degree heat.
He and John Carr had passed Selection together, and had gone on to serve in every theatre to which the SAS had been committed during the nineteen years they had spent at the tip of the spear. Carr would have stepped through the gates of hell with Geordie by his side, and the feeling was mutual.
‘What’s on your mind, buddy?’ said Skelton, slurping tea.
‘Getting out,’ said Carr, quietly. Absent-mindedly, he rubbed his chin, rough with stubble, and felt the livid, crescent moon scar under his lower lip. A few yards away, a couple of young troopers cracked up at something a third had said. He envied them: they had years of service ahead of them. ‘Knowing I’ll never do this again,’ he said. ‘Knowing it’s all over.’
‘Fuck me,’ said Skelton, with a laugh. ‘That’s another day. Let’s get this one done first, eh?’
‘Yeah, you’re right,’ said Carr. ‘Feeling sorry for myself. Give us a swig of that brew.’
Skelton handed over the mug, and Carr took a big mouthful of the strong, sweet tea before handing it back.
‘Knowing my luck I’ll get clipped tonight,’ he said, with a rueful half-grin.
‘Howay, man,’ said Skelton. ‘What the fuck’s up with you? Twenty years of dickheads shooting at you, and you’ve never had a scratch, bar that fucking Action Man scar on your chin. And even that’s just made yous a fanny magnet. Your luck, you’d jump into a barrel of shite and come out clean.’
‘Aye,’ said Carr. ‘I’m only kidding. If either of us get clipped it’s all went south, that’s for sure.’
That was true: at their level of seniority, John Carr and Geordie Skelton would not even be entering the target building. Grizzled old men like them would hang around at the back with the Squadron HQ element, directing the whole thing, while the young guys did the business.
The building in question was a pale grey, two-storey villa to the south of Masafi Street, in the hard-core Sunni suburb of Dora, on the southern bank of the meandering Tigris. Two hours ago, Carr had delivered the briefing – the last he would ever give – and had watched the blokes poring over the aerial photographs of the area, until every man-jack of them knew the place intimately. Each of the multiple assault teams had gone over its individual tasks, step-by-step, ensuring that they knew exactly which rooms each of them would clear, who would go through which door, what their limit of exploitation would be…
Nothing was left to chance: that was the only way to make sure – or as sure as possible – that you walked back out of the room you’d breached.
As ever, the intelligence picture was imperfect. The informant – who had been promised a lot of US dollars, a new ID and six seats on a US Air Force Globemaster out of Baghdad for himself and his family – was confident that Joker would be at the premises this evening, preparing a giant improvised explosive device for an attack on civilians in the central Shia district of Sadr City. What he could not say for sure was how many of Joker’s lieutenants and underlings would be there.
Carr thought back to the conversation he’d had with the spook who had provided the intelligence for tonight’s target.
‘We want them alive,’ the spook had said, looking down his nose at the thickset Scot – a difficult thing to do, given that Carr was a good six inches taller than he. ‘Especially Joker.’
Carr had shrugged. ‘Is that so?’ he’d said, with a smile. ‘You cannae even tell me what we’re up against.’
‘It’s very important,’ the intelligence officer had said.
‘Really?’ Carr had said. ‘Well, you’ll get him in whatever state he comes out of that building.’
And he’d stared directly into the eyes of the spook, until the man had been forced to look away. ‘But we need…’ he’d said, almost plaintively.
‘What you need is to know what it’s like to step into a room where there’s an armed man trying to kill you. When you know that, then you’ll understand why that’s not an order I’ll be giving my men.’
Truth was, Carr didn’t have a whole lot of respect for the intelligence community: a first in Politics from Cambridge and a nice, soft pair of hands were not much use out here in the nightmarish killing zones of Baghdad, and this particular miscreant was even worse than most of them. Carr had taken an instant dislike to the superior little fucker – not that the answer would have been any different with a spook he did like.
‘One chance,’ he’d said, finally. ‘He’ll get one fucking chance, and that’s if he’s lying face down on the floor when my guys go in. If not, you get him in whatever state he comes out.’
Geordie Skelton threw away the dregs of his tea.
‘Look on the bright side,’ he said, to Carr. ‘The Squadron’ll run a damned sight better once I’m in charge.’
Carr chuckled: Skelton was due to replace him as Sergeant Major at the end of the tour.
‘I might come back and see how you’re getting on,’ he said. ‘If I fancy a laugh.’
He looked at his watch.
01:15 hrs.
Fifteen minutes until they rolled out of the gate of the FOB on the southern outskirts of Baghdad, which