Masters of War by Chris Ryan Read Free Book Online

and a grin that revealed the worst set of teeth in the Regiment. ‘We’re loading in five,’ he yelled back. ‘Ready to rumble?’
    ‘Roger that.’ Danny fitted his helmet and NV as Boydie went off to round up the others. The patrol leader always cracked the same joke before an op. Taliban commander with no arms and no legs? Ba’athist scumbag with no arms and no legs? Always a good start, in Boydie’s take on the world. Nobody in the Regiment would ever disagree with him, and certainly not tonight. The militants that Danny and his mates were heading in country to locate deserved everything they were about to get.
    Three days previously, a group of four UN peacekeepers – all British – had been kidnapped in Benghazi. For twenty-four ominous hours there had been no news, until a tape had arrived at the offices of Al-Jazeera TV in the time-honoured fashion. The grainy footage showed the peacekeepers first bound and beaten, then hooded and dead, hanging by the neck from a wooden ceiling beam. A balaclava’d figure, speaking in Sulaimitian Arabic, claimed responsibility for the atrocity on behalf of a rebel group still loyal to the memory of the ousted Gaddafi regime. To add insult to injury, he was wearing one of the peacekeepers’ camouflage jackets, complete with the bright blue armbands of the UN. It had taken about twenty minutes for the footage to go viral – which meant the families of the deceased got the good news via YouTube rather than the traditional knock on the door – and thirty minutes for two of the bodies to show up in a street two blocks from the British Embassy in Tripoli, not only dead but horrifically mutilated, a pro-Gaddafi slogan carved on the torsos with a razor or the point of a knife.
    Intelligence operations on the ground in Libya had gone into overdrive. Who were these militants? More to the point, where were they? There was no doubt in Danny’s mind that a fair few Libyan nationals had had their arms twisted – literally – to reveal what they knew, or suspected, about the location of the militants. The limb-twisting had come up trumps. Word had reached British intelligence officers of a tiny Ruwallah Bedouin village in the Libyan desert 150 klicks due south of Benghazi. Two independent sources had verified that the inhabitants had been evicted from their encampment there by a group of pro-Gaddafi militia. Evidence that these militia were the same individuals who had captured and killed the four UN personnel was sketchier, but, so far as Danny could tell, the powers didn’t give a shit about that. And he was right behind them: the only good militant was a dead one, and his patrol had direct orders to help the bastards on their way.
    Their objective was straightforward. Insert under cover of night into a wadi five klicks to the south-west of the target area. Tab along the wadi and set up an OP at a pre-determined location with a visual on the Bedouin village. Conduct surveillance on the village to confirm the absence of Bedouin and the presence of militia. Then laser-mark the location so that an RAF Tornado could bomb the living shit out of the place and send a message loud and clear that anyone who harmed British nationals could expect a swift and brutal reprisal. Job done.
    The rotors of the Sea Knight increased in speed. Boydie reappeared on deck with Tommo and Five Bellies, the other two members of their four-man patrol. Tommo was posher than tea at the Ritz, but his healthy disdain for the Ruperts meant the lads in the Regiment accepted him as one of their own. Five Bellies’ nickname had nothing to do with his girth – on the contrary, he was one of the fittest men Danny had ever met – but commemorated one particularly blood-soaked afternoon in Lashkar Gah when a group of heavily armed Taliban had cropped up out of nowhere and the advance to contact was faster than anyone wanted. He’d taken a shot with a .50-cal machine gun, and through sheer good luck it had ripped