They flew in from Chad on a twenty-year-old helicopter and landed on the outskirts of Maradah in southern Libya just before 10 p.m. The man who met them at the airfield provided them with a white Nissan Patrol with the Sirte Oil Company logo on its doors. They changed into blue Sirte overalls and Templar checked the maps with the man, who also showed them the four jerry cans of gasoline on the roof racks and the cooler box loaded with food and drink for four people. A blanket in the load space contained Beretta handguns, NVGs, silencers and M4 carbines, which Jéjé checked quickly and expertly under a headlamp on his forehead.
The load space also contained a box of grenades, spare magazines and bullets. The radio comms gear was in its own bag, and in a black case Templar found a Vintorez sniper rifle, a collapsible Russian firearm that worked particularly well with a suppressor. Templar double-checked the supplies and loaded his UAV control module into the Patrol. It looked like a slightly fatter version of a laptop bag, and did not give a hint of the destruction it could unleash.
The team of four drove through the night, arriving at a point five kilometres south of the target, just off the Al-Uqaylah–Maradah road that cut north–south through Libya like a surgical scar. The moon was waning, but bright enough to throw some light on the desert trail. Templar, Danny and Jéjé set off on foot; Shrek stayed with the Nissan and returned to the road.
After forty minutes of walking they arrived at a ridge that overlooked the al-Kaniyat camp, where they sat down to avoid presenting a silhouette to those on the other side. Templar brought out his rangefinder binoculars and assessed the compound, which consisted of three shipping containers, a CAT generator on skids and four relocatable buildings. A clearing in the centre of the camp was covered with a large camouflage net of the type that artillery units hid under in World War II, with a small dugout on the side containing a desk and chairs. Three beaten-up Japanese pick-ups were parked on the outer rim of the compound. Templar lifted the binos slightly to see what lay beyond the living and working area of the camp and sighted a white shipping container fifty metres from the southern edge with the word COSCO in black. He could see a five-hundred-litre plastic water barrel outside the container doors and a ladle on the top of it. This was the container where prisoners were kept, according to his briefing pack.
He panned the binos and counted two sentries on the perimeter of the camp: one to the right, guarding the road into the camp and one sitting in the cab of an old truck, facing the French team.
‘Sentry at our twelve o’clock,’ said Templar, looking through the binoculars.
Templar, putting down the binoculars, asked Danny for the Vintorez and he silently removed the pieces from the carry case and put them together to form the rifle, screwing the suppressor down, not too tightly.
‘I mark a hundred and eighty metres,’ Templar whispered.
He handed the rifle to Jéjé, who removed a night sight from his webbing and screwed it in place on the rifle. The former navy commando flipped down the bipod on the end of the Vintorez barrel, adjusted the scope for range and lay flat on the ground, spreading his legs for stability. Templar picked up the binos and put them to his face. He focused on the guard in the truck cab and as he watched there was a low whacking sound and the guard fell forward in the cab seat, his head bouncing on the dashboard.
‘Let’s make it fast,’ said Templar, and they pulled night-vision goggles down across their eyes, stood and walked down a ravine towards the camp. They waited at the truck cab, where Jéjé checked the dead sentry and came up with a ring of keys, handing them to Templar. Danny and Templar stealthed around the perimeter of the sleeping camp and finished off the sentry at the gate using a suppressed Beretta handgun.
‘From Templar, sentry two is down,’ said Templar over the radio.
Jéjé moved in from the truck cab, the M4 carbine to his shoulder, and stopped at the corner of a demountable which they believed was the barracks for the al-Kaniyat shooters. Jéjé looked in one of the windows, observed the interior with his night-vision goggles and pulled back.
‘Jéjé at the barracks,’ he whispered. ‘I count nine fighting-age males.’
‘Templar copy,’ said Templar as he jogged across the central square of the compound with Danny to a dingy old container with a dirty tarpaulin across its roof. Templar found the right key and unlocked the container door. Looking inside with his NVGs, he could see only diesel and firearms, and a box of grenades.
‘Templar at central container. It’s a weapons store. No kids.’
He turned back to the compound and now knew that the final demountable was the al-Kaniyat commander’s quarters, belonging to the man they called Parzan. He watched Jéjé move through the shadows to the quarters and open the front door very carefully.
‘Jéjé at the commander’s quarters,’ he said, having pulled back. ‘Confirm one male, sleeping. No kids.’
‘Copy that,’ said Templar.
He brought them together and they moved back to their first vantage point, from where they’d made the sniper shots. Templar could have released the prisoners first, but his experience in Africa told him that when captive humans were released—kids in particular—they could do unpredictable things and jeopardise the operation. He would deal with the al-Kaniyat militia first, and release the prisoners when they had clear air.
He took off the backpack he’d been carrying and brought out a laptop-sized plastic device, connecting a burner phone to it with a USB cord. The box was a spinner that could pretend to be a cellular base tower for any phone in the vicinity and was also a French military command-and-control system. He switched it on and watched the small screen on the box light up. Then he input the cell phone number he’d been given by the DR in Paris. With the number in the box, he plugged earphones into the device and keyed the encrypted radio system.
He checked his watch: it was 4.23 a.m. ‘Black Crow on station. Confirm “go” for the package.’
Templar waited as a voice he knew well confirmed Templar’s identity and authority.
‘Copy that, Black Crow,’ said the voice. ‘Blue Nest standing by for trigger.’
Templar nodded to the man beside him. ‘Danny, time for a wake-up call.’
Danny moved down to the compound, picked up two empty steel drums by their handles and flung them into the clearing in the centre of the camp, where they bounced over one another, shattering the stillness of the night. Through his NVGs, Templar could see Danny pick up another steel drum and fling it after the first two, where it made even more noise as it banged and bounced its way across the compound.
Lights came up and a demountable door opened as Danny scrambled up the bank, back to the team’s vantage point. Two soldiers appeared on their barracks’ front porch, squinting into the dark and jabbering in confusion as they aimed their rifles into the night. A third and fourth soldier pushed through the first two, looking for the threat.
Someone yelled a command, and the floodlights around the clearing lit up, the CAT generator roaring into life as the electrical load kicked in.
The team removed their NVGs and Templar waited for Parzan, who emerged onto his front porch, bare-chested. The al-Kaniyat commander immediately started yelling at his troops, who spilled out onto the dirt, trying to find the source of the disruption.
It suited Templar—the longer they left their lights on, the harder it would be to see the French team in the darkness. Carefully, looking up into the clear sky, Parzan stepped off the porch, at which point Templar hit the green button on his burner phone. They watched Parzan freeze and look down at his pants pocket. Slowly, as if drawing a scorpion from his underwear, the feared militia commander reached for his phone.
‘Come on, answer it,’ mumbled Templar. ‘You know you want to.’
Finally, Parzan extended a reluctant finger to the screen and hit the receive button.
A mile above them was a circling French MQ-9 Reaper drone aircraft that carried a two-hundred-and-fifty-kilogram guided bomb—the GBU-12. The bomb had a receiver in its nose, which was now locked on to the IMSI in Parzan’s phone.
Templar waited silently as Parzan listened. Neither of them spoke. It was French protocol to confirm a second mode of identity beyond the primary identification of the target’s IMSI. Many terror commanders did not handle their own phones or laptops.
Finally, Templar said in English, ‘Is that you, Parzan? I’ve been trying to reach you.’
‘Who is this?’ demanded Parzan, his face panicked, his eyes searching the darkness of the camp’s perimeter for clues. ‘Who is this?’
‘What time is it there?’ asked Templar. ‘It should be almost eight-thirty, right?’
‘Who is this?’ shouted Parzan, his voice ringing out over the noise of the generator.
The voice analyser in Templar’s control box verified a match: the voice belonged to Parzan al-Sharif, one-time schoolteacher and now Libyan militia commander subject to a long list of allegations of human rights abuses.
Templar keyed the radio: ‘Voice identification confirmed. Clear to shoot.’
Templar signalled his team to take cover and they ducked into the crest of the dune they were occupying. Five seconds later, there was a faint whooshing sound, followed by a huge explosion which shook the ground and the air. As Templar and the team let the shock wave pass over their dune, chunks of earth and pieces of clothing began falling on them. Beyond them in the desert, they heard the tinkling sound of glass raining on dirt.
‘Black Crow for Blue Nest,’ said Templar into the comms. ‘Package has arrived.’
‘Blue Nest out,’ came the voice. ‘Have a great morning.’
‘Get Shrek to pick us up,’ said Templar to Jéjé, shutting down the comms box. He stood carefully, assessing the camp. ‘I’ll see you at the car.’
There were pieces of bodies lying around the camp and a crater three metres deep where Parzan had stood a minute earlier. It was dark as Templar entered the terrorist camp, the floodlights having been blown out along with every window. Dust settled slowly, like a shroud of death, covering the camp with the distinctive smell of post-combustion bomb chemicals. Templar had become acquainted with that smell in Chad and Sudan, but he’d never been comfortable with it. It wasn’t the smell of victory, as it was represented in the movies: it was the tell-tale odour of death, dismemberment and civil dislocation. To release such power was not something to be done lightly.
He walked through the camp, around the smoking crater, and out the other side, to the container being used as a prison. It was peaceful out in the scrub, the waning moon casting an aura of calm. The sound of yelling children became louder as Templar approached the white container. One voice called out above the rest—a boy brave enough to be defiant, and yet still sounding scared and defeated. The human spirit was a hell of a thing, he thought as he ladled a fresh tub of water from the plastic drum and placed it in front of the door. He found the right key from the guard’s key ring and released the padlock.
A hundred metres away the team’s Nissan Patrol descended the approach road into the camp, its headlights killed. Shrek’s voice hissed in Templar’s radio earpiece. ‘Your ride’s here, monsieur.’
Templar threw the padlock into the desert and unclamped the vertical locking bars on the container. The kids’ voices died down; they were obviously worried about who was outside. In a calm and natural movement, Templar let the door swing open with a creak and turned for the Patrol.
■
The lieutenant in the remote drone cockpit went through his post-operation checks, confirming the aircraft’s status with his female flight officer. The quarter-tonne GBU-12 had been released on target but they still had a Reaper to fly back to Diori Hamani International Airport in Niger, the site of France’s main military presence for operations in Sahel.
As he set the navigation system for the drone’s flight home, the nameless man from the government who had stood behind them during the operation walked to the flight screens in front of two pilot chairs inside the command centre.
‘Erase the flight data,’ said the tall, fit man. ‘And delete the ordnance logs for the bomb.’
The lieutenant was about to argue, but when he looked up he saw a person whose gaze was both charming and terrifying.
‘Well,’ said the lieutenant, stealing a quick glance at the flight officer, ‘I can scrub the flight records, but we just dropped hardware worth two hundred thousand euros and—’
‘Do you want me to show you how to do it?’ asked the man, a small smile on his face.
‘I can do it, but …’
The lieutenant knew from the previous four hours that this man not only knew how to fly but he had an intimate knowledge of the digital systems that enabled the remote drone cockpits. Now the lieutenant was unsure who he was more scared of: this man from Paris and his demands, or his commanding officer, who would eventually want to know why a two-hundred-and-fifty-kilogram guided bomb had been eradicated from the system, and therefore from his annual audit.
He looked sideways at his flight officer, who shrugged as if to say, What can we do? The lieutenant reached for the computer mouse, clicked deep into the command-and-control system and deleted the barcoded serial number for the GBU-12, along with the telemetry for its recent deployment—data that showed where it was released, at what time and by whom.
The government man pointed to another screen and the lieutenant entered that system and deleted the flight data of the Reaper drone.
‘Nice,’ said the man, when the system confirmed the deletion. ‘And, of course, best you both forget this operation.’
‘What operation?’ replied the lieutenant.
‘Good answer,’ responded Alec de Payns. Turning, he pushed through the security door of the drone’s Block 50 Ground Control Station. His eyes reacted to the dramatic African dawn as he left the semi-dark of the cockpit, and he paused on the tarmac in front of what looked like a forty-foot container with wheels attached at the corners. Then he lit a cigarette and turned east, reaching for his sunglasses as the sunrise hit his face. For a second he felt very still, and in that moment he recalled the Company’s motto: Nox Generat Lumen—the night brings the light.