roused from their slumber and herded at the double towards the boarding ramp.
The American soldier who had guided their coach in led Andy, Mike, Erich, Westley and his men towards a tent in the middle of the airfield. A flap was pulled to one side. The clinical blue glow of half-a-dozen halogen strip lights swinging from the tent support frame amidst drooping coils of electrical flex, spilled out through the opening into the pre-dawn gloom.
They entered the tent. Standing inside, looking harried, tired, and more than ready to grab some bunk time, was a Marine colonel; a short squat man with greying crew-cut hair and leathery skin pulled tight around a pair of narrowed eyes.
‘Colonel Ellory, sir. We picked these guys up on the border road. They’re Brits, sir.’
Ellory turned to look at them. His eyes ran quickly across Andy and the other two civilians, and then towards Westley, looking for rank insignia. ‘Okay son, where’s your CO?’
Westley saluted awkwardly. ‘We lost him, also our senior platoon NCO. I’m highest rank here, sir. Lance Corporal Westley.’
Colonel Ellory frowned as he worked to make sense of Westley’s Geordie accent. ‘You’re in charge, son?’
‘Yessir.’
He turned to the others, ‘And you are?’
‘I’m a civilian contractor, Andy Sutherland.’
‘Mike Kenrick, I’m a contractor too.’
‘Erich Feillebois, engineer with Ceneco Oil.’
Ellory nodded. ‘Okay guys. This is how it is. We’re trying to get as many of our boys home as quickly as possible. There’s a limited number of planes, a limited amount of fuel. Not everyone’s getting home. Priority goes to military personnel, and amongst them, priority goes to our boys. That’s the deal, I’m afraid. I know it sounds shitty, but . . . well, that’s how we’re doing it.’
‘Have you got any other British troops?’ asked Andy.
‘Yeah, there’s a few around. We’ve had some stragglers rolling in over the border road. A bunch of army vehicle retrieval engineers, quite a few independent security contractors, all goddamn nationalities. A mixed bunch out there. You’ll just have to take your chances with them. The Brits and the other internationals are in two separate groups down the other end of the strip.’
Colonel Ellory looked like he was pretty much done with the conversation and ready to turn his attention elsewhere.
Andy stepped in quickly. ‘How long are you planning on keeping this strip open?’
Ellory sighed. ‘I’d like to say, as long as it takes. But we’ll keep it going until I get orders to pull the plug and get out.’
‘How bad is it out there?’ asked Mike.
‘Out where? You mean the Middle East? Or home?’
Mike shrugged. ‘We’ve been out of the loop.’
Ellory ran a hand through his coarse grey crew-cut. ‘The Middle East is a goddamn write-off. We sent our boys into Saudi to try and save what they could. The crazy Muslim sons of bitches made for the refineries first. Pretty much destroyed most of them before we could get in there.’ Ellory looked at them. ‘And that’s pretty fucking smart if you ask me. There’s multiple redundancy in those pipelines and the wells. Not the case with their refineries. Those sons of bitches targeted exactly the right things. And it’s the same deal in Kuwait and the Emirates. You ask me, this wasn’t a fucking spontaneous outbreak of religious civil war. It was a goddamned organised operation. Some serious military-level planning went into this shit. They hit Venezuela, they hit the refineries in Baku. These motherfuckers knew exactly what they were doing.’
‘Who? Which motherfuckers?’ asked Mike.
‘Shit. You kidding me?’
‘Don’t tell me you think it was Al-Qaeda,’ Mike laughed, ‘because if you—’
‘Do I look like a dumbass?’ Ellory shook his head. ‘Of course I don’t think it’s Al-Qaeda. They couldn’t organise a piss in a bucket. Fuck . . . they’re just a bunch of phantoms anyway. No. I can make an educated guess as to who’s behind this shit though,’ said Ellory, placing his hands on the desk in front of him and arching a stiff and tired back. ‘Those sons of bitches in Iran.’
Andy nodded. It was a possibility. Perhaps they were the ones behind all of this. They had the wherewithal to pull off something on this kind of scale. And motive too.
‘Yeah, I could believe they’re behind this,’ said Mike. ‘I mean, we stalled their nuclear programme. But this . . . this has worked better than God knows how many nukes would have done.’
‘Exactly,’ said Ellory. ‘They know goddamn well they can hurt the world far more this way, by hitting the most