House of War

What they found instead was an ambush. They had walked straight into a hornet’s nest of resistance as waiting soldiers of the Iraqi Republican Guards lit up the night with ferocious gunfire. Ben and a small team of his men found themselves pinned down between buildings as enemy rounds peppered walls and vehicles. The crew of one of the SAS Pinkies ran for cover as the Land Rover was riddled with bullets. Ben ordered it to be destroyed with a rocket, lest their radio fall into enemy hands. The heat from the blast seared them, but provided enough cover for them to break away from their precarious position and press forward. They fought until the barrels on their machine guns glowed red hot, and the ground was covered with spent shells.

The battle raged into the night and into the following day as the Republican Guards kept up their spirited defence. The SAS had come prepared for stiff resistance, though this exceeded their expectations. Ben was crouched just yards from an SAS sniper when a bullet struck the barrel of his .50-calibre rifle and shattered it into pieces. Despite being badly hurt by the shrapnel, the sniper grabbed another rifle and fought gamely on. Inch by inch, street by street, the troopers clawed their way towards the industrial plant as gunfire hammered their positions. It finally became clear that only a targeted air strike would break the defending forces’ grip on their stronghold. It was duly radioed in. Ben watched from behind cover as the stunning power of 2,500 pounds of high explosive payload from a Coalition Forces bomber tore the plant apart in a ground-shaking blast and effectively ended the battle.

It was an impressive fireworks display, but nothing in comparison to the awesome bombardment of Baghdad that Ben was to personally witness just weeks later, when his unit was deployed to the west of the city.

The fall of Baghdad, coming less than a month since Ben had arrived in Iraq, marked the end of the first phase of the war. It should all have been over then, but the real conflict was just about to begin – just as Ben had feared it would. With Saddam Hussein’s army in tatters it now became all about counterinsurgency as a diverse multitude of Islamic militant groups joined in to harass the invading troops to the best of their considerable ability, using all the guerrilla warfare and terror tactics the Mujahideen had honed to perfection fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, and then some. The SAS’s orders were simple: to continue seeking and neutralising threats to the Coalition Forces. Of which there were so many, it was virtually impossible to keep track of them all.

One such group, and one of the most formidable, was Jama’at al-Tawid wal-Jihad, or simply JTJ, who fast became a prime target for Special Forces. As the SAS soon discovered, JTJ were the perfect model for all terrorist organisations. The use of suicide bombings, often involving car bombs, the planting of roadside improvised explosive devices to catch unsuspecting army patrols, and the launching of guerrilla rocket and sniper attacks were some of their favourite tactics. But they delighted most in the taking of hostages, whom they would line up on their knees in the sand and coolly decapitate with long knives. Getting captured alive by these guys was not an option. Exactly as Ben had anticipated, this war had already begun to deteriorate into a hellish bloodbath.

But it was also exactly the kind of combat environment in which his regiment thrived, operating covertly, usually at night in SAS tradition, and often out of uniform. Bearded, swathed in local civilian garb and deeply tanned by the desert sun, they could pass more easily for ragged sand-hoboes than crack troops. Which was precisely the desired illusion. As the months went by, they operated in Ramadi and Fallujah, and remote parts of Al Anbar Province where, in one raid, Ben and his unit were directed to a farm thought to be a stronghold for radical insurgents. After another spirited firefight, fifteen dead bodies dragged from the wreck of the farmhouse were identified as known members of JTJ. However one of their most notorious fighters, a bloodthirsty terrorist by the name of Nazim al-Kassar, still eluded capture. The young warrior was already responsible for dozens, if not hundreds, of killings, he had recruited multiple suicide bombing volunteers and (or so it was thought) even personally strapped them into their explosive vests.

Ben didn’t know it yet, but he was destined to meet Nazim very soon. The day would be September 20, 2003.

Chapter 8

The broad parameters of the SAS’s mission in Iraq gave them latitude to work together with United States Special Forces. Back then, however, international SF ops were yet to become fully integrated and it would be some time before the British and American elite units would be officially joined at the hip, sharing the same intelligence and serving the same common purpose. In those early days of the war there were still some tensions between them. As Ben was about to learn first-hand when, that September, his unit was deployed in a joint mission with elements of the US JSOC Joint Special Operations Command, comprising members of Delta Force, 75th US Army Rangers and DEVGRU, otherwise known as SEAL Team 6.

Operation Citation, as the mission was designated, called for the joint Special Forces unit to be divided into twelve-man teams and inserted deep into specific, pre-selected enemy positions in the north and west. By now the whole country had exploded into insane violence as the disparate factions and tribes started fighting not only the Coalition invaders but each other as well. The war had sparked off a lot of old grudges. Against this backdrop of absolute chaos the dedicated jihadist groups were flourishing and becoming ever more effective at disrupting military efforts to stabilise the country.

Of these, the group that had become known as JTJ was one of the most active, and its key players were now top targets. The main purpose of Operation Citation was to take as many of them as possible off the table. Dead, or preferably alive, because dead men couldn’t be persuaded to rat on their friends.

Ben was in command of Task Force Red, the codename of his twelve-man team consisting of four SAS men including himself, and the rest operatives from Delta. Task Force Red’s objective was to proceed to a remote village in the desert some twenty miles west of Tikrit, which US intelligence had reason to believe was being used as a meeting place for key JTJ personnel including Nazim al-Kassar and several of his top aides. Their orders were simple enough: scout the location, take up position, identify the threat and move in for execution.

It had been an unlucky mission right from the start. The most senior of the Americans was a Delta Master Sergeant called Tyler Roth, who made it obvious that he felt he should have been made Team Leader rather than this Brit guy, Hope. Roth took every opportunity to challenge Ben’s command, and Ben often felt that the Americans had their own agenda in the mission. All of which compounded the sense of mistrust and division that already existed between the SAS and US troopers. Ben could only rally his team together as best he could, in the hope that they’d focus when it was most needed. He also had to hope that the American intel was right, which it frequently wasn’t.

Before dawn on September 20 the heavily armed task force took up their positions around the remote village, little more than a cluster of ramshackle stone dwellings at the centre of a rocky basin. The place appeared completely desolate and abandoned, and at first it seemed to them as if they’d been sent on a wild goose chase. But then, in the blood-red hue of sunrise they spotted a line of four vehicles approaching from the west, and another three incoming in single file from the south-east, each convoy sending up a plume of dust.

As they watched and waited, the vehicles converged on the buildings and all parked up together in a great dust cloud. Through binoculars Ben counted twenty-seven men getting out of their vehicles and entering the largest of the buildings. They were clad in the familiar rag-tag garb of insurgents, most with heavy ammunition bandoliers draped around their bodies, some with chequered headscarves, all of them armed with the usual mixture of mostly Soviet weaponry. Among them, about Ben’s height, well built and handsome, wearing a combat jacket and cotton knit cap, was the notorious young jihadist who was rapidly rising up the ranks and of whom there was only one known photograph, Nazim al-Kassar. The man himself, in the flesh.

As Ben had worried, the American intelligence report was somewhat off the mark. Twenty-seven men was a much larger force than they’d anticipated. It would make capturing the leaders much more difficult, since they were sure to put up a fight. One of Ben’s SAS troopers, a Yorkshireman called Jon Taylor, was equipped with a launcher loaded with stun grenades. If Taylor could punt two or three of them in quick succession through the building’s window, there was a decent chance of incapacitating enough of its occupants to be able to storm the place and bring off a clean mass arrest. If not, the task force might have a hot morning’s work ahead of them.

The soldiers waited for all the men to enter the building, then for thirty minutes longer, for whatever strategic discussions they were engaged in to get well underway in a sense of security. Then the signal was given to move in and commence the assault.

And that was when it all went horribly bad. Taylor was twenty metres from the building and on the verge of launching his first grenade at the window when Ben saw an incoming RPG round streaking towards them from the edge of the rocky basin. Before he had time to yell a warning, the rocket-propelled warhead blew a crater right under Taylor’s feet, killing him instantly. Within instants, the air was thick with heavy machine-gun fire coming at them from all sides, and Ben knew the American intel had been even worse than previously thought. Task Force Red had been misled. A third contingent of militants had been en route to the meeting when they’d spotted the soldiers and opened fire from hidden positions all around the rim of the plateau.

Under aggressive attack, Ben’s unit found whatever cover they could and fired back. But then several of the insurgents inside the house came swarming out, shooting as they came. The task force were pinned between two enemy factions, with no longer any option but to fight their way out.

The battle was brief, intense and frenetic. In the midst of it Ben saw another of his SAS guys go down, hit in the thigh. Two of the Delta troopers were less lucky, one blown to pieces by another RPG round and the other fatally wounded in the throat by a rifle bullet fired from the house.

Then out of the corner of his eye Ben spotted Nazim al-Kassar and four of his men breaking from the entrance and running for the dusty black SUV in which they’d arrived. He fired on them, punching holes in the side of the vehicle. The SUV took off, wheels spinning in the dirt. Ben kept firing until his rifle was empty, shattering the windows and perforating the bodywork like Swiss cheese.

The SUV went into a wild skid and crashed into a low wall. Its driver burst through the windscreen in a spray of broken glass and blood, his face mangled to a pulp, his body sprawling lifelessly across the bonnet.

Ben drew his pistol and sprinted for the wrecked car, ignoring the bullets flying past him, intent only on stopping al-Kassar before he got away. He wrenched open the car door. Al-Kassar was in the back seat with blood on his face, clawing a pistol from his belt. Ben lunged inside the car, smacked the gun out of his hand and knocked him unconscious with three vicious strikes from his pistol butt. The elusive Nazim al-Kassar was now a prisoner.

Less than three minutes later, the fight was ended. The unseen attackers retreated from the edge of the plateau and into the surrounding hills, never to be seen again. The smoke cleared from the butcher’s yard of the village to reveal eleven dead insurgents on the ground, three more dead inside the building, and two critically injured. The rest had thrown down their guns and surrendered, evidently not quite so willing as all that to lay down their lives for Allah.

The task force had lost three men, Taylor and two of the Delta guys, as well as sustaining two further non-fatal casualties. Ben radioed in a CASEVAC chopper and the injured were airlifted from the scene along with the wounded prisoners. A grim death toll, to be sure. Ben was deeply upset about Taylor, and furious with the misleading US intel that had dropped them in the soup like that. But the task force had succeeded in its mission to snatch al-Kassar and several of his top aides. JTJ had just suffered a major defeat.

Or so Ben thought, as he returned to base that day with a truckload of prisoners in tow.

War and politics made for a terrible combination, yet the pair were inseparable bedfellows. As a commanding officer Ben was in possession of a secret British Ministry of Defence memo ordering the SAS under no circumstances to allow Iraqi prisoners to be handed over to the US Joint Special Operations Command, for fear that they might be whisked away by the CIA to some covert facility where they would be subjected to torture. The Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal was still fresh, and the suits in Whitehall wanted no part of any dirty dealings – at any rate, that was the official pretence.

So, on their return, Ben was careful to hand the prisoners over to a regular US Army unit. This caused a major dispute with the Delta guys, because Delta were in effect the military arm of the CIA, under the shady umbrella of its Special Activities Division. Hence, the D-boys had their own dark agenda and secret orders. And now Ben was the party pooper. Tyler Roth was so incensed by his decision that the two of them very nearly came to blows following an angry argument that night.

Two days later, the politics of the situation came back to haunt Ben with a vengeance. Unaware of just who they had in custody because of the shroud of secrecy surrounding Special Ops missions, the regular army grunts holding al-Kassar and the other top-level JTJ prisoners slipped up on security discipline. Ben was having breakfast with a group of other SAS guys when he heard the news that Nazim al-Kassar and six of his associates had managed to escape while being transferred between military camps. Al-Kassar would never be captured again, and many more people would die while he ran free.

People like Samara.

Ben had smarted over the incident for a long time afterwards, wishing that he hadn’t followed his orders and instead let the Yanks do whatever the hell they wanted to Nazim and his henchmen. The incident had been one of the rotten experiences that drove a wedge between him and the military bureaucracy above him. Ultimately, it would be one of the reasons why he quit the regiment under something of a cloud, thoroughly disillusioned with the whole business and ready to move on.

But the memories were hard to let go of. Even after he’d left the military, he’d kept track of the exploits of JTJ. In 2006, the same year that Nazim’s mentor Abu al-Zarqawi had been killed in a US air strike, JTJ got itself a new leader and a new name. Along with much-expanded aspirations and confidence in its achievements it now became known as ISI, the Islamic State of Iraq.

Eight years after that, the name changed again. Henceforth the organisation would be called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. ISIL, for short. A name that became very well known indeed to folks in the West. And the rest was history: the bombings, the killings, the mass abductions, the media storms surrounding the filmed beheadings of hostages streamed across the internet.

All those years, Ben had always secretly wished that he might one day have the opportunity of running into his old friend Nazim al-Kassar again. Over time, he’d become resigned to the unlikelihood of that ever happening. Then the deal had been sealed in August 2016, when Ben had heard through the grapevine that Nazim al-Kassar was among a group of ISIL commanders blown to bits in a US air strike in Iraq.

To have seen him dead would have been preferable. But to hear him dead was good enough. Ben had been relieved that the world was now free of one more lunatic murdering scumbag.

And now here he was again. Walking about and looking very much alive after all.

Ben couldn’t believe it. Nazim al-Kassar, back from the dead and for some bizarre reason resurfacing in Paris, of all places. What could be the connection between him and a young woman like Romy Juneau?

That was a mystery Ben intended to solve. And if fate had chosen to cross his path with Nazim’s once again, it would be for the last time. Because only one of them was walking away from this alive.

Chapter 9

One thing was for damn well sure: the 2016 intelligence sources proclaiming Nazim al-Kassar’s demise were wrong. Badly wrong. It felt like history repeating itself once again. Ben needed to know how that could have happened, and why the hell a supposed dead man was walking around a European city leaving bodies in his wake.

Ben was deep in thought as he rode the subway train the long way back towards the safehouse. He could think of very few people with the right kinds of connections to help shed light on the questions in his mind. In fact, when he boiled the list right down, it came to just one man. Tyler Roth, the Delta Master Sergeant from Task Force Red.

Through the same grapevine that had fed him the inside track on ISIL activities, Ben happened to know that Roth had gone on to greater glories after Operation Citation. Promoted to captain, he’d served another twelve years with Delta. His long career had hit a peak in October 2013 when, as part of the Juniper Shield operations in North Africa, his undercover team had successfully captured Abu Anas al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda member on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list, in Tripoli. Then a couple of years later, in May 2015, Roth’s unit had carried out a raid on Deir Ezzar in eastern Syria, targeting the financial operations chief of ISIL. The target had been killed in the ensuing firefight, but Roth’s guys had captured his wife along with a cache of ISIL operational records and plans that had proved a goldmine for the intelligence spooks.

Or so Ben had heard, at any rate. Like the SAS, Delta worked so much in the shadows that nobody really knew anything about their activities, or couldn’t talk about them if they did.

One thing Ben was fairly certain of was that the Deir Ezzar job had been Roth’s last hurrah with US Special Ops. Shortly afterwards, having survived a decade and a half at the top of his profession without having taken so much as a scratch, he’d quit. Not to spend the rest of his life golfing in Florida, nor to retire to Italy to grow tomatoes like Ben’s old SAS comrade and mentor Boonzie McCulloch. Instead, Roth had opted for the path that many men of their level of training and expertise took, and slipped into the murky world of PMC. Which was short for Private Military Contractors.

In one word, Roth became a mercenary. Still employed, for the most part, by the same US government he’d served in his previous career, but working for much bigger pay cheques. The real money was in fighting wars so dirty and secret that nations like America and Britain wouldn’t even involve their blackest, most covert SF operators for fear of getting caught in the middle of an international flap.

He had heard nothing of Roth in years. As far as he knew, though, the American was still in the PMC game – if he hadn’t met a bullet in some squalid little conflict nobody was supposed to know about.

Ben picked up some Lavazza coffee beans on the way home, and when he reached the safehouse he threw a handful in the grinder, brewed himself a cup of dark roast, lit a cigarette and got on the phone. His first call was to Jeff Dekker at Le Val, to say something had come up and he’d be delayed getting back. Jeff didn’t ask what, and Ben didn’t need to explain. Jeff was like that. But Ben knew that if he’d asked, his friend would have been ready to drop everything and join him without hesitation.

Jeff was like that, too.

Ben’s second phone call was to a guy he knew in London, with whom he hadn’t spoken in a long, long while. The guy’s name was Ken Keegan, and he was the director of a small but strangely lucrative firm called Simpson Associates Ltd, based in Canary Wharf. Needless to say, no real individual by the name of Simpson was, or had ever been, involved in the business. The company acted like a talent agency, fielding top-dollar PMC assignments and farming them out to the operatives best suited for the job, in return for a hefty commission. Keegan was a wealthy man, and worked eighteen hours a day. For years after Ben left the SAS the guy had constantly been pestering him with offers of lucrative contract work in Sudan or Sierra Leone or whichever high-risk hotspot happened to be attracting soldiers of fortune like sharks to blood that week. Ben had turned them all down, and eventually the phone had stopped ringing.

Keegan answered his direct line in less than two seconds, all eager and raring to go. Ben said, ‘I like to see a man who’s happy in his work.’

‘Fuck me. If it ain’t the one and only Ben Hope.’ Keegan spoke in the piping, breathless voice of the seriously fat. Which he was. Probably the largest man Ben had ever seen, on the one occasion when they’d eaten out together at a pub in London and he’d watched in morbid fascination as the guy consumed a steak and kidney pie the size of a wagon wheel. That was at least ten years ago. Keegan was probably twice as big now.

‘Still not dropped dead of a coronary, then,’ Ben said.

‘Take more than that to stop me, mate. So what brings you sniffing around my door? Let me guess, had enough of the soft life and feel like doing some real work for a change?’

‘I need something from you,’ Ben said.

‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

‘Relax. Just a number, that’s all I’m after.’

Keegan sounded suspicious. ‘Okay, but whose?’

‘You still in touch with Roth?’

Keegan was quiet for a few moments. Ben could hear him thinking. He was waiting for more, but Ben felt no need to offer specifics. Especially not the mention of the name Nazim al-Kassar. Keegan would just think he was nuts.

Keegan said, ‘You’re not the only one who’d like to talk to that fucker.’

‘Why? What did he do?’

‘Fucking went and retired on me, that’s what he did. Just when I had all kinds of plum jobs lined up for the ungrateful sod.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Ben said. ‘I might have had something for him myself.’

‘Anything in it for me?’

‘I guess we’ll never know now, will we?’

Keegan gave a high-pitched wheeze that sounded tubercular. ‘Bastard. Anyway, I thought you were well out of all that, years ago. What’s the sudden interest?’

‘So do you have a number for him, or not?’

‘Come on, mate. Quid pro quo. This ain’t bleeding directory enquiries, is it?’

‘How about as a special favour to an old friend?’

‘How about in return for you taking on a job for me? I’ve got more work coming in than I got guys to delegate it out to. Matter of fact I have one here on my desk that’d suit you down to the ground. Ethiopia. In and out, eight days tops, big money.’

‘Let me think about it,’ Ben lied.

‘Yeah, well, don’t think too long. Client’s breaking my balls something terrible. I need this yesterday.’ Keegan broke into another whistling, hacking cough, like a cat with a hairball in its throat. He went silent for a long moment, and Ben thought maybe he’d slumped dead at his desk. Then Keegan said hoarsely, ‘Okay, I’ll see what I can come up with. Roth’s a right awkward bugger to contact, even at the best of times. Gone all reclusive and paranoid in his old age. Easier to have a conversation with the fuckin’ Duke of Edinburgh.’