House of War

He went over to her and knelt next to the body. She was very still, with that special quality of inertia that only death can confer on a person. If there had been any blood, it would have been easy to see against the white cashmere top she was wearing. It looked as though a single strike to the neck had killed her. Ben looked around him for any kind of impact weapon, but there was nothing. A very strong man could have done it using his bare hands, but it would have taken a blow of tremendous force.

Her eyes were open and staring sightlessly straight at him, the vividness of their colour faded like the wings of a dead butterfly. Ben reached out and laid two fingers on the side of her throat. He had expected no pulse and found none. Her soft skin was still warm, also expected, because this had happened to her only minutes ago. While she’d been waiting for her coffee to brew.

Her death touched Ben deep, though he didn’t know why. It was as if he’d known her, somehow. As if part of his mind was trying to reconnect with an old scrambled memory lost somewhere in the murk of the dim and distant past. It was a strange feeling.

He lingered next to her body for a couple more seconds, then stood up and walked grimly to the living-room window. It was the archetypal Parisian floor-to-ceiling iron window with the ornate knobs and designer rust, flanked by gauzy white drapes. It overlooked the same side of the building as the kitchen. He looked out at the street below. The carpenters had finished fixing the plywood to the bookshop window. Cars, vans, bikes were passing by on the road, pedestrians strolling along the pavements, normal city life going on as usual.

And up here on the floor behind where Ben was standing, a young woman with a snapped neck.

He was about to turn away from the window when he saw a man emerge from the building and step towards the edge of the kerb. About Ben’s own height, though it was hard to tell from the downward angle. He was wearing a long dark coat. Quality wool, expensive. Black leather gloves that matched his shiny black shoes. He was well built with broad shoulders. Black hair, streaked with silver.

The man from the lift.

He stood at the kerbside with his back to the building and looked down the street as though he was waiting for a taxi to come by. Ben couldn’t see his face, but now he was seeing him again there was something oddly familiar about the guy – and not just from their fleeting brush a couple of minutes ago. Ben felt a weird tingle up his back, like a knife blade drawn along piano strings.

Just then, the man turned and craned his neck to look straight up at the window of Romy Juneau’s apartment. He was in his early forties, with the olive skin that hinted at Mediterranean ethnicity. He could have been taken for anything from Italian to North African to a Middle Easterner. His features were strong and square, not unhandsome, and his eyes were dark and clear and intelligent. They found Ben’s and stared right at him through the window.

And the tingle up Ben’s back turned icy cold. That was when it hit him. It couldn’t have hit him harder if the man down in the street below had pointed a gun and shot him. Because in that dizzy moment Ben realised what it was that his mind had been trying to reconnect just now. It wasn’t Romy Juneau who had triggered a distant memory from the past. And the strange feeling he was getting had started before he’d set foot in this apartment.

It was the man in the lift who had set it off.

The man now standing staring up at the window.

Ben now realised that he knew this man. And as the memories were suddenly unlocked and rushed into his mind, he was able to pinpoint exactly when and where he knew him from, and why they had met before, and what had happened on the last occasion they’d crossed paths.

None of the memories were good ones.

For just the briefest instant, Ben closed his eyes. He was suddenly transported back in time. He flashed on another face. A very different face, one with deep dark eyes that looked into his. And he thought, Samara.

As the instant ended Ben opened his eyes and was brought back to the present. The man in the black coat was still looking up at the apartment window, frowning as though similar thoughts were going through his mind, too. Then a silver Mercedes Benz saloon pulled sharply up at the kerbside next to him with a screech of tyres. Its tinted driver’s window slid down and another olive-skinned, swarthy-looking guy inside started gesticulating and beckoning. Ben couldn’t make out the words, but it was obvious the driver was urging the man in the black coat to get in the car.

The man hesitated for a second, as though he was thinking about turning back and returning inside the building. Ben wished he would. But then the man changed his mind and hurried around to the car’s passenger side, yanked open the door and flung himself into the seat, and the door slammed and the driver hit the gas and the Mercedes took off with another squeal of tyres, accelerating hard away down the street.

By then, Ben was already racing from the apartment. He jumped over the body of Romy Juneau, sprinted through the hallway and hammered down the stairs and slid down the spiral banister rail to descend the last two floors more quickly. Reaching the entrance foyer he burst out of the inset door into the street.

But the silver Mercedes was already long gone, and the man in the black coat with it. All that remained in his wake was the memory of his name, who he was and the things he had done.

And the fact that he was supposed to have been dead years ago.

Chapter 5

Ben didn’t return upstairs to Romy Juneau’s apartment. There was nothing more he could do. He had left no trace of his visit; it was as though he’d never been there at all.

He was burning up inside with anger and confusion and frustration. But he kept his pace slow and measured as he walked up to the end of Rue Joséphine Beaugiron and went inside the bar-restaurant called Chez Bogart. The interior was all decked out with framed posters and stills from old movies. Whoever owned the joint was obviously a big Bogie fan. And doing good business, too. Most of the punters were the late breakfast crowd, noisily enjoying their brioche French toast and buttered baguettes sprinkled with grated chocolate and bowls of café au lait while defenceless women got battered to death just down the street.

It was still a little early in the day for hard drinking, even for him, but Ben was willing to make an exception. He ordered himself a double shot of Glenlivet at the bar, no ice, no water, and carried it over to a corner table beneath a giant blow-up still from Casablanca, the classic image of Bogart in white tux, loitering by the piano as Dooley Wilson sang ‘As Time Goes By’. He took a long drink of his scotch and thought about peculiar coincidences and the return of figures from the past whom you’d never thought you’d see again.

Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world.

Ben knocked the whisky down fast and soon felt the alcohol go to work to settle his nerves. Then he set down his empty glass and headed for the men’s room. It was empty, which was what he needed because he wanted no witnesses. And quiet, which was also good, because when anonymously reporting a murder it was generally preferable to leave no clues as to where you were calling from. He took out his phone, the prepaid burner this time. This was exactly the kind of purpose it served. He dialled 17, police emergency, got through quickly, and just as quickly gave the call handler the necessary details. Victim’s name and address, but not his own. He had no desire to spend the next two days being grilled by police detectives about what he was doing in her apartment around the time of her death.

Ben could easily have told them the name of the man he’d seen leaving the scene of the crime, but he held that information back too. There would have been no point. Whatever identity the guy had used to enter France would certainly be fake. Ben strongly doubted that his real name would even come up on the INTERPOL crime database, except in certain classified files to which regular cops would have no access. Any one of a variety of aliases Ben could have given them might have triggered a response. The kind that would have the whole street and surrounding area closed down by paramilitary forces armed to the teeth, searching door to door and stopping cars with K9 units on standby.

But that would have been just as pointless. They wouldn’t stand a chance of catching the guy. He was far too good for them. And if they somehow did succeed, it would probably be the last thing they ever did.

Ben cut off the police emergency call handler’s questions and left the restaurant through a tradesmen’s back exit that led into an alleyway. He lit a Gauloise and slowly walked back around the corner, crossed the street and made his way along Rue Joséphine Beaugiron as far as the antiquarian bookshop opposite Romy’s building, from where he could monitor events at a discreet distance. He finished his cigarette outside the shop and then wandered inside and spent a while browsing the shelves of dusty old books.

Fourteen minutes later he heard the police sirens screeching to the scene. By then he’d picked out a handsome old deluxe volume of the collected poetry of Charles Baudelaire. A present for his friend and colleague Tuesday Fletcher at Le Val, possibly the only ex-British Army sniper in the world with a taste for nineteenth-century French poetry. Ben ambled up to the front desk with the book in hand. The sirens were growing loud outside, filling the street. He said to the shop proprietor, ‘What’s happening now?’

‘God only knows,’ the guy grumbled. ‘This whole city is going to shit, if you ask me.’

The two of them stood in the shop doorway watching as a pair of marked cars and a gendarmerie van screeched to a halt across the street, a team of uniforms scrambled out looking highly purposeful and disappeared inside Romy Juneau’s building. Just regular police, responding to a regular incident. If only they’d known who they were really dealing with.

‘Dear me, I hope nobody got hurt,’ Ben said. The bookshop owner just grunted, threw up his hands in resignation at the terrible state of the world and returned to his desk. If only he knew, too.

The cops would soon call in the coroner and start asking questions up and down the street in search of potential witnesses to the incident. It was time for Ben to be moving on. He paid for his purchase, tucked the book under his arm and left the store at a relaxed pace, nice and easy, drawing no attention from anyone. The best way to disappear in a crowded city was to go underground. He headed for the nearest Métro station, joined the fast-moving crowd heading for the tunnels, and caught a packed train that took him on a winding, circuitous route back towards the safehouse.

His original plan had been to lock up the apartment, jump in his BMW Alpina and set off for Le Val. He’d have been enthusiastically greeted by Storm, his favourite of the pack of German shepherds that roamed and guarded the compound. To stretch his legs after the drive, he might have pulled on his running shoes and gone for a cross-country five-miler around the woodlands and fields, with the dog trotting happily along behind him. Later, dinnertime would have seen him sitting at the table in the big country kitchen with Jeff and Tuesday, the three of them digging into some delicious casserole provided by Marie-Claire, the local woman employed at Le Val to feed the troops and ruin everyone’s waistlines with her indecently tasty French rustic cooking. Then after dinner he’d have relaxed in the company of his friends by the fire, Storm curled up at his feet; maybe a game of chess with Jeff, a glass or three of ten-year-old Laphroaig, a haze of cigarette smoke drifting pleasantly overhead as he told them about his India trip.

But that cosy future would have to be put on hold for a while. He now had other business to finish before he could go home. Business he’d thought had already been done and dusted back in August 2016. Apparently not, it seemed. Which begged a lot of questions to which Ben now needed the answers.

The name of the man Ben had crossed on the stairs and seen leaving the apartment building was Nazim al-Kassar. He was, in the plainest terms, a terrorist. Or had been, many years earlier when he and Ben, then a newly promoted officer with 22 Special Air Service, had first crossed paths in Iraq. Ben found it hard to believe that Nazim could have changed tracks since that time. Men so single-mindedly committed to an ideology of warfare, terror and destruction didn’t just lose interest and switch career paths.

And Nazim had been one of the most committed of all. Meaning one of the worst, most viciously ruthless, and most lethally dangerous individuals out of all the long list of such men Ben had ever come across.

Ben was the only man who had ever been able to catch him. Nazim’s capture had come at a heavy cost in terms of lives lost, on both sides. For all that, he hadn’t remained a prisoner for long. Ben recalled clearly the events of the day when Nazim al-Kassar had got away from him, never for the two men to meet again.

Until this day, sixteen long years later.

Chapter 6

The story began with one Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian Muslim born in 1966. From an early age al-Zarqawi had been a committed jihadist, dedicated like his millions of fellows to the cause of spreading Islamic fundamentalism worldwide with the ultimate goal of creating a global Caliphate that would banish and eradicate all false religions, in particular Christianity and Judaism.

At the age of twenty-three, al-Zarqawi had travelled to Afghanistan in the hopes of joining up with the jihadist Mujahideen in their struggle against the Soviet troops who had, in their view, invaded their country. In fact, the Russians were there by invitation, having come to the aid of the pro-Soviet Afghan government in 1979 to help against the rise of rebel militants generously funded and armed by the CIA. America’s financial and military support of the Islamist rebels would ultimately prove disastrous to the West, but back then Communism was the bogeyman and the Carter administration, followed by that of Reagan, were each too blind to see the future nightmare they were sleepwalking into.

The Islamists, with their own agenda, were only too happy to grab the guns and money and get stuck in, favouring hit-and-run guerrilla tactics against the Russians. The word ‘Mujahideen’ in Arabic meant simply ‘those who fight’, in the sense of jihad or holy war. And fight they did, hard and relentlessly. The cruel war of attrition had lasted more than nine bloody years, ending with the withdrawal of the battered, miserably defeated Soviet troops in early 1989. It had been Russia’s own Vietnam, and it crippled their economy so badly that it became a factor in the fall of the USSR.

Arriving on the scene that same year, the young al-Zarqawi was dismayed to find the war all wound up and his chances of dying gloriously in the name of jihad dashed, at least for the moment. Undeterred, he soon began looking for new avenues into which to channel his religious zeal. Among the various contacts he established was a certain Osama Bin Laden, the son of Mohammed Bin Laden, a Jeddah property development billionaire with close ties to the Saudi royal family. Bin Laden Junior had inherited some $30 million following his father’s death and left the business world behind to pursue his own interests, with a little under-the-table help from the CIA, who at that time still naively regarded him and his fellow jihadists as useful assets in the fight against Communism. While the war against the Soviets drew to a close and victory appeared imminent, Bin Laden had already started forming plans for the future. He had a vision to expand his operations on a grand scale, and to this end co-founded a new outfit called al-Qaeda, meaning ‘the Foundation’, a subtle reference to the worldwide Islamic Caliphate he wanted to create.

But this was still the early days, and Bin Laden was looking out for keen young talent to help him grow his operation. As plans developed, he later donated $200,000 to al-Zarqawi, with which to build a large jihadist training camp in Herat, Afghanistan. Many of al-Zarqawi’s fellow Jordanians came to join him there, and he happily set about building an army of fierce fighters ready and willing to die for Allah.

From the start, al-Zarqawi had been known for his extreme views – so extreme, in fact, that even Bin Laden considered him somewhat radical. He took a rock-hard line against other Muslims whom he considered too soft on nonbelievers and thereby heretical – such as all Shi’ites, who he felt ought to be wiped out en masse. He despised the Jews even more strongly, as he had been taught to do from childhood; but his most rabid loathing was reserved for the Western oppressors of the Muslim world, the UN and America.

In 1999 al-Zarqawi’s little army became officially known as Jama’at al-Tawid wal-Jihad, or JTJ for short. Its name meant, in Arabic, ‘The Organisation of Monotheism and Jihad’, which sounded deceptively academic compared to the brutal reality. Al-Zarqawi had founded his merry band of cutthroats with the main intention of leading it back to his homeland and toppling the Kingdom of Jordan, which he considered an example of heretical un-Islamic leadership. He was then still based in Afghanistan, which for the last three years had been largely controlled by its own Islamic Emirate, a.k.a. the Taliban. It was a safe haven for jihadist terror groups like the JTJ, which continued to thrive and attract new membership.

However, that all changed when al-Zarqawi’s former associate Osama Bin Laden orchestrated the September 11, 2001, attack on US soil that sparked the ‘War on Terror’ and a whole new era began. As thousands of American and British troops flooded into Afghanistan and started ferociously attacking Taliban enclaves and training camps, al-Zarqawi decided things were getting a little hot for him there and moved his operation instead to Iraq. There he met and befriended a loyal new disciple, one Nazim al-Kassar.

Nazim was thought to have been born in Ramadi, Iraq, in either December 1977 or January 1978 depending on whichever intelligence source would later prove correct. Little was known about his family background, or what kind of formative experiences and upbringing had prompted him to embrace radical ideology with such enthusiasm in his late teens and early twenties. In common with his like-minded peers he believed devoutly that one day, thanks to the heroic efforts of warriors in this holy struggle against the infidels, the kuffar, Islam would rule over every corner of the world.

By the time he became a keen young disciple of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Nazim al-Kassar was already utterly devoted to the cause and ready to do whatever it took to show his allegiance both to his mentor and his faith. When al-Zarqawi travelled to Syria to oversee the training of Islamist fighters there, Nazim accompanied him and took a leading role in the expansion of their army, proving a strong leader of men as well as a highly proficient warrior himself, as skilled with the AK-47 rifle as he was with pistol and knife. He underwent training in strategy, counterintelligence and explosives, and learned to speak English perfectly. He was also deployed to different countries to assist in missions and assassinations at his master’s behest, one of which was the murder of an American diplomat in Jordan. Before his twenty-fifth birthday, Nazim already had infidel blood on his hands, and he was ready for more.

It wouldn’t be long in coming.

In 2003, two years after invading Afghanistan in reprisal for the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, the Americans along with their coalition of Western allies launched the second major wave of their so-called War on Terror. This time, the target was Iraq. The objective: to complete the job left unfinished in the First Gulf War and bring down the regime of Saddam Hussein, believed to be plotting further terror attacks on the West.

It was at this point in history that Nazim’s path was set to cross for the first time with that of his deadly enemy, Ben Hope.

Chapter 7

In Ben’s opinion, back then and still to this day, the US-led invasion of Iraq had been one of the most hideous strategic blunders in military history. The Americans and their allies had apparently learned nothing from the humiliating lessons of Vietnam, or the tribal revolts against the British occupation of Iraq in the 1920s that led to high casualties on both sides. One does not go blithely marching into these countries, gung-ho and flags-a-waving, without inviting a bloody disaster.

The Iraq war would ultimately drag on for nearly as long as the Soviets had doggedly clung onto Afghanistan, and prove every bit as badly counterproductive in the long run. Ben had predicted that outcome back in 2003, and he’d been around to watch it unfold all around him when his SAS unit was deployed into the heart of the conflict that spring. But whatever his personal misgivings about the wisdom of the whole endeavour, it was his job to do what he had to do.

On the night of March 17, Ben was among the men of SAS D Squadron who strapped themselves into the folding seats of several Chinook CH-47 troop transporters ready for takeoff from Al Jafr airbase in southern Jordan. Their destination: the township of Qu’aim over the border in Iraq, which according to intelligence reports was a strategic site from which Saddam’s army were planning to launch missiles laden with chemical weapons into Israel.

This was Operation Row, a highly classified Special Forces mission taking place an entire twenty-four hours before the British government had actually voted whether or not to join the invasion. The SAS force consisted of sixty men, who had just spent the last three months on secret bases in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, training and preparing for the big push everyone knew was inevitable.

Even though Parliament hadn’t officially sanctioned their mission, most of the men had already written their ‘death letters’, to be read by family and loved ones in the event that they did not return alive. Ben was one of the few with no family or loved ones to write to, but he hadn’t been immune to the mixed feelings of fear, anxiety and excitement as the Chinooks took off into the night. The deafening roar of the turbo-prop engines filled their ears and the powerful upward surge pressed them into their seats. They exchanged glances and nervous grins in the darkness. The journey into war had begun.

D Squadron’s LZ was 120 kilometres over the Iraqi border. The passage into enemy airspace had been smoothed in advance by American Little Bird helicopters, but the very real possibility of surface-to-air missile attack had never left the minds of everyone aboard. After an uneventful flight the Chinooks touched down in the barren wastes of the Iraqi Western Desert. Shivering with cold, the SAS troops disembarked and unloaded their weapons along with their transport, the open-top ‘Pink Panther’ Land Rovers bristling with machine guns and rocket launchers that would carry them overland to Al Qu’aim.

The Chinooks departed the LZ and thundered away into the night as the soldiers, dug into defensive positions, waited tensely for any sign of enemy attack. None came. They spent March 18 hunkered down behind their weapons, waiting for another sixty troopers of B Squadron to join them at the LZ before the combined SAS force boarded their Pinkies and set off across the rough, rocky desert terrain.

By the time the SAS were approaching Al Qu’aim, the British Parliament had finally voted in favour of joining the invasion. Operation Row was now a legitimate mission. That night, the troopers reached the outskirts of the township and began probing the perimeter of an industrial plant that intelligence reports had tagged as a likely site for chemical weapons storage.