30 kilometres southwest of Dubai, 12 December
He had crossed the border between Saudi Arabia and the UAE completely unnoticed. This was not surprising, because he was passing between the states some 50 kilometres south of the tiny coastal outpost of Silah. There were few more remote spots on earth.
He liked isolation. In fact, he thrived on it. He was a professional assassin who travelled under the name of Azrael, the English translation of the Arabic Azra’eil, the Angel of Death and he cared for no one.
Fifty kilometres inside the border, Azrael picked up a tarmac road. It was covered with sand and dust – a desolate strip laid down only a couple of years ago, a road that led from nowhere to a slightly more purposeful stretch of highway. This longer road went in one direction: towards Dubai, some 80 kilometres to the northwest. On the road, Azrael saw absolutely no one. Indeed, he saw no living thing. To left and right stretched the sand, endless expanses of amber without a single feature. He relished this intense solitude. He could not remember the last time he had felt so relaxed, so far from the cloying presence of other human beings.
Azrael also felt comfortable in his Land Cruiser. It was packed with the latest communications equipment and he was armed to the teeth. He had hand-picked and loaded everything himself at the base near Ar Riyad in Saudi Arabia. He had the usual guns: a couple of Barrett M107s, a 500 S&W magnum and, tucked into his waistband, the favourite of killers everywhere, a Glock 17. But the really interesting item in his armoury was not to be found on any website or arms catalogue in the world. Well, at least not yet.
Azrael’s paymasters, men he had never met and who referred to themselves collectively as the Four Horsemen, had supplied him with the prototype of a missile launch system that was so new and so secret it did not even have a name. Azrael referred to it as the Collector, because that is how he viewed the device – as a taker of lives, a gatherer of souls, an exterminator that collected on the debt the world owed him.
Ten years ago, Azrael, or Marcus Hewson as he was then known, had been a normal human being, a pretty regular guy, a good guy, in fact, a British soldier. He was married to a fine woman, a schoolteacher called Emily, and they had a four-year-old daughter, Charlotte. He had been a captain in the SAS, had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan before teaching other soldiers at the army base in Aldershot. But he had been consistently passed over for promotion and, for a career soldier, that was like being branded – there was nowhere else for him to go. He simply had to accept that his life would be one long, ongoing slog until retirement.
Then, on a winter afternoon while he was up to his elbows in cold mud on a training course with raw recruits, Emily and Charlotte were hacked to death in a shopping mall in Bracknell by an escaped mental patient from Broadmoor. The killer had then gone on to murder six other innocent bystanders before shooting his brains out with a sawn-off shotgun.
Marcus Hewson had never recovered. He found he was quickly repelled by the sympathy people offered him. He was enraged by the incompetence of the police and the authorities at Broadmoor. Within a day of the terrible events that had taken the lives of his wife and child, he had slipped into such a deep depression he was inconsolable. But being a genuine tough guy, a war hero no less, a man who had witnessed a great deal of death and torment, he did not want anyone to see his pain. And so he forced it inward where it festered and then calcified.
Perhaps he had always been a pure, analytical killer. It was just that once upon a time he had worked for the forces of democracy and good. The worse thing for Marcus Hewson was the fact that the man who had murdered his family, an insect named Norman Gardener, had killed himself. There was nothing left for Hewson to do about the murders. He could not exact revenge. The scumbag’s suicide had rendered him impotent.
It was this that had pushed Hewson over the edge. Within six weeks he had transformed himself into Azrael, an assassin for hire, a man who no longer considered himself part of the human race, a man who wanted to kill and kill and to never be caught. A man who wanted revenge but never to be known for his actions. And as is the way with these things, in the twilight world in which he began to exist and thrive, he discovered that like attracts like. He quickly found himself in the employ of the Four Horsemen, four beings who, for their own individual reasons, shared an almost identical worldview to his own.
Azrael stopped the Land Cruiser and lifted the high-powered binoculars to his eyes. Across the flat expanse of desert he could see, 30 kilometres to the northwest, the vague shape of his target: downtown Dubai. He then turned to a control panel in the middle of the console. A flat screen display about 20 centimetres across had been positioned where car stereos or sat navs were usually situated. He touched the screen and it lit up to show the PTP, the Personal Tracking System. This was a very distant cousin of an advanced radar receiver. The PTP used an uplink to a hacked Russian satellite network that was ordinarily employed by the Kremlin. It provided Azrael with an early warning system should anyone decide to stick their nose into his affairs.
Jumping from the vehicle, Azrael strode around to the back door, opened it and stared down at two steel boxes taking up the space inside. The Collector was the most advanced missile launcher in the world. It had been developed in a private lab on Trista da Cunha, approximately 2500 kilometres west of South Africa in the Atlantic Ocean. There, a team of researchers had spent three years and almost 200 million euros of the Four Horsemen’s money designing a range of new weapons that would not be rivalled by legal weapons builders for at least a decade.
The Collector was the pride and joy of the designers on Trista da Cunha. Conventional rocket launchers came in two flavours. The simplest were solo-operated bazooka-style devices, with a range of up to 1000 metres. Such weapons could seriously damage a tank. The other type was a Multiple Launch Rocket System, or MLRS. These babies were transported on trucks. They had a vastly greater range than the sort of device a single soldier might operate and one of them could destroy a building from 15 kilometres away. But no one had yet developed a launcher with the power of a truck-based launch pad and the versatility of a bazooka. No one, that is, until a group of eggheads working on a speck of land in the South Atlantic had been funded to the tune of 200 mill.
The Collector had a range of 40 kilometres and fitted into two steel boxes. Azrael pulled the first box along the back of the Land Cruiser, levering it to the desert floor. He then tugged at the second box and settled it beside the first. Opening both lids, he lifted out a dozen steel-carbon alloy tubes. Next he removed three concertinaed lattices made from a titanium silicon composite 20 times stronger than steel and weighing just 6 per cent of its metal equivalent. Lastly, Azrael extracted a collection of aluminium boxes, each containing electronic components.
He had spent a week on Trista da Cunha learning everything there was to know about the Collector and he had achieved a personal-best construction time of 6 minutes 13 seconds, from opening the box lids to having the launcher ready to go. Today the construction took a fraction longer thanks to the intense heat and the sand and dust getting in the way.
Six minutes 24 seconds after prising open the first box, he surveyed his handiwork. The Collector stood just 2 metres high. The superlightweight structure of the platform com- bined with its remarkable strength meant that it could hold two 3-metre-long launch tubes, each encasing a Scourge missile. The Scourge was almost as large as a Patriot 3 used by armies around the world and requiring a truck-sized launch platform. It could deliver a relatively small warhead but one with an explosive power equivalent to 450 kilograms of TNT – a destructive force comparable to a cruise missile. Travelling at a fraction over 1000 kilometres per hour, the Scourge would reach its designated target from Azrael’s location in approximately 128 seconds, a little over 2 minutes.
Azrael had just pulled himself into the driver’s seat of the Land Cruiser to complete the set-up procedure and had switched on the car battery to power the telemetry and guidance initiators, when he heard a burst of noise coming from the PTP. He glanced over and saw the screen light up with red lettering. ‘ALERT. ALERT. SATELLITE TRACKING HAS LOCKED ONTO APPROACHING UNIDENTIFIED GROUND VEHICLE. ALERT. ALERT.’
Azrael felt his pulse quicken as he leaned over and tapped at the screen.
‘MILITARY VEHICLE,’ the machine announced. ‘FOUR-POINT-TWO KILOMETRES SOUTH-SOUTHWEST, HEADING 21' 44'' 03'''.’
‘Excellent,’ he said under his breath. ‘Coming straight this way. Something to make this all a little more interesting.’
‘IDENTIFY VEHICLE,’ he tapped into the PTP. The machine sent an instruction to the uplink. The ‘borrowed’ Russian satellite analysed the approaching vehicle, photographed it and found its thermal signature. It then sent this information to the PTP. The data was displayed on the screen. Azrael read it. ‘A troop carrier,’ he said to himself. ‘Driver, co-driver, six troops in back. ETA 2 minutes 6 seconds.’
He leapt from the car, ran around the front and slid into a narrow space behind the control panel of the Collector. His fingers flitted expertly over an arrangement of keys as he kept his eyes fixed on a digital display showing operational parameters. A whirring sound came from deep within the latticework platform as a series of electric motors turned the structure. Numbers flowed down the digital display and Azrael made some final adjustments to the angle of the launchers.
He glanced at his watch. It was one minute to nine. Turning back to the screen, he tapped two more keys then lifted his binoculars to view the horizon and the distant towers of Dubai. From this distance they looked like a clutch of stalagmites projecting upwards from the floor of a cave. A haze of pollution hung over the city and just above the desert floor, super-heated sand shimmering.
Azrael checked his watch again and moved his index finger a few centimetres upward, letting it hover over a red button slightly to the left of the centre of the console.
He felt the plastic against his skin and relished the extra- ordinary sensation of possessing power over life and death. He wanted the moment to last forever. But then if it did, he thought, no one would die and that would never do. He pushed down, hearing a click as the device engaged.