Free Murder Team by Chris Ryan

than the Browning.
    Time check. 21.40. Five minutes till the Israeli ordnance hit. Danny located the keys for the Land Rover: they were hanging in the vehicle’s ignition. Then he ran up to the brow of the hill again, crouched down and took another look at the settlement. At a steady rate of about 30mph, he reckoned he’d reach it in three minutes.
    Time check. 21.41. The ordnance was four minutes from target. He crossed back over to the Land Rover, laid his Diemaco lengthwise between the driver’s seat and the passenger seat. A khaki hat was lying on the seat. Friedman’s? Danny put it on, then turned the engine over and switched on the headlamps. He knew he couldn’t approach the settlement covertly. His only option was to approach in such a way that the inhabitants didn’t feel threatened. That meant slowly, calmly and with his lights on.
    The words of an old RSM from his days in the Paras echoed in his head. Winning a battle is straightforward. Just make sure you have greater numbers, bigger weapons and better tactics than the enemy. The rest is easy.
    Danny was outnumbered. He had a rifle, a handgun and a single fragmentation grenade. So it was all going to come down to tactics. He’d better hope his were best.
    He knocked the vehicle into gear. At 21.42 hrs exactly, he crossed over the brow of the hill.
    Things were about to go noisy.
     

12
     
    The Land Rover trundled over the rough desert road. It stank of fuel and a dead man’s sweat. Danny kept his eyes firmly on the target. He fervently hoped that his information was correct and Spud really was somewhere down there. Otherwise, he was about to pick a bad fight with bad people, and for no good reason.
    His was not the only vehicle advancing on the settlement. While he still had the advantage of height, Danny carefully observed the convoy approaching from the opposite direction. The five sets of headlamps were a lot closer now. Maybe 500 metres from the other side of the settlement. They’d reach it at exactly the same time as Danny himself.
    Two minutes out. Danny was ten metres from the bottom of the slope. He could no longer see the convoy approaching from the other direction. There was 400 metres of flat, open ground between him and the settlement. He knew, without question, that whoever had Spud would have clocked him approaching by now. He just hoped that he was right and they were mistaking him for Gilad Friedman, their Israeli business partner, and thought that he was returning to the settlement for some unsuspicious reason. His fingers touched Friedman’s hat. In silhouette, maybe it would help Danny look like him.
    It was a big hope. Sweat trickled down his brow at the thought of what was to come.
    Ninety seconds out. Two hundred metres. Several figures had gathered outside the nearest building. They were moving around. Swarming. Hard to tell how many. Ten, perhaps? He could see they were armed. Their body language suggested they were arguing. Not a good combo.
    One minute. A hundred metres. Danny’s eyes picked out more details of the settlement. His trajectory would take him exactly between two of the fire pits that surrounded the settlement. They were about twenty metres apart and beyond them, set back perhaps another twenty metres, were what looked like four ramshackle sheds. Flat roofs – they appeared to be corrugated iron – and open frontages. Like nativity stables, gone very wrong. In the middle of these four buildings was a circular hut with a conical roof and a green door. Three armed personnel were guarding it. Armed guards meant something valuable was behind that door. Was it Spud? Danny couldn’t be sure, but he reckoned the probability was high.
    Beyond the circular hut, Danny couldn’t see, but he knew from his observations from the ridge line that the settlement extended no more than 150 metres from the two firepits.
    Thirty seconds. Fifty metres.
    The figures up ahead were clearer. He readjusted his estimate: approximately