Without Warning Read online

  Without Warning

  Book One: The Jake Hunt Series

  Jed Hart

  ™

  Feather Knight Books

  Australian Publishing Company

  ™

  Feather Knight Books

  First Published 2020 Copyright © Jed Hart 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publisher.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:

  This novel is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places, businesses, organisations and incidences are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover Design by BespokeBookCovers.com

  Typesetting and Formatting: Caroline Mullarkey

  Editing: Caroline Mullarkey

  FeatherKnightBooks.com

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  Prologue: Jake Hunt

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  SIX: Jake Hunt

  Seven: Roger Black

  Eight

  Nine: Jolo City, Sulu, Philippines

  Ten: Eighteen months before

  Eleven: Porton Down, Wiltshire, United Kingdom

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen: Jake Hunt

  Fifteen: Jake Hunt

  Sixteen: Nicole Roswell

  Seventeen

  Eighteen: Walter Bracks —eighteen months before—

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one: Jake Hunt

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four: Jake Hunt

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six Sipitang, Sabah, East Malaysia

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight Seria, Brunei Darussalam

  Twenty-nine: Jake Hunt

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two London, United Kingdom

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five: Bandar Seri Begawan

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine: Khalid

  Forty

  Forty-one: Jake Hunt

  Mohamed KHAN

  Forty-two

  Forty-three: Jake Hunt

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight: Jake Hunt

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two: Jake Hunt

  Fifty-three

  Fifty-four

  Epilogue: ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  Acknowledgements

  A massive thank you to my wife Sue for her unfailing support, even as I devoted more time to a worn out laptop than to her. Thanks to my amazing family, who make everything worthwhile. Also, thanks to my agent, Linda Turner, who agreed to be the first person to receive this manuscript, and who could scarcely contain her surprise when she decided I could actually write. To my friends at Feather Knight Books who have been unfailingly positive and reassuring; Johnny, who reads my work and encourages me, and Caroline, who is an incredible editor.

  Thanks to my readers: May these pages transport you to another time and place and entertain you there.

  Dedication

  For my colleagues and friends at Shell International, in the hope that you will forgive the liberties I have taken with this imagined Brunei.

  Acronyms/Abbreviations

  AOG

  Aircraft on Ground

  Alpha Sierra

  Abu Sayyaf terrorist group

  AS

  Abu Sayyaf terrorist group

  BHP

  Browning High Power – 9mm, 13 round magazine handgun

  C&C

  Command and Control; the pilot managing a combat assault

  CTC

  Counter-Terrorism Command

  DCI

  Detective Chief Inspector

  Pimlab

  Porton Improvement Laboratory

  FAP

  The Fuerza Aérea del Perú

  FNG

  Fucking New Guy

  Huey

  Bell UH-1H helicopter; two-bladed, single Lycoming turbine engine.

  Civil version - Bell 205

  KL

  Kuala Lumpur

  LCdr

  Lieutenant Commander – Royal Navy/Royal Australian Navy

  LAME

  Licensed Aircraft Maintenance Engineer

  NOTAM

  Notice to Airmen

  PH

  Percival Hamilton

  PPS

  Principal Private Secretary

  RANHFV

  Royal Australian Navy Helicopter Flight Vietnam

  SIS (MI6)

  Secret Intelligence Service (Military Intelligence Section 6)

  SOP

  Standard Operating Procedure

  S-61

  Sikorsky S-61 helicopter

  135thAHC

  US Army’s 135th Assault Helicopter Company

  Prologue: Jake Hunt

  I ncoming mortar fire, I hear the crump, crump, crump as rounds walk their way towards me. Metal fragments fizz past overhead. Christ, I think. Can’t move. I’m going to die here.

  The other blokes must be warned; we should be in the bunker. My body won’t respond, it just lies there in my hooch, still as a fucking corpse. They’ll bury me in pieces, I think. Like Roger Plover, the poor bastard. Someone is shouting, ‘Jake Hunt, get in the goddamn bunker.’

  My mouth opens to call back. Talk, goddamn it. I croak a response, and as it always does, the sound of my own voice wakes me. Sweating. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Slowly the tension drains away as reality seeps back in. I’m in Guilford, I think, in the UK. This is my own bedroom. Not a plywood hooch in Vietnam.

  Fumbling for the switch, I turn on the bedside light, because I know from experience it is better to wake fully after the dream. The digital bedside clock is reassuring. Four in the morning, sure, but January 1987. That’s good.

  Then I do what I know is necessary to exorcise the spectres for a month or two. Fully awake, I run through the dream again—slowly and truthfully—as if giving a factual briefing to my Commanding Officer. Facing up to it. Leaving nothing out, not dressing it up or ducking images. As accurately as I can, I describe one flight amongst many during the Tet offensive of 1969.

  In my mind, I look across the cockpit at Johnno Willis, flying in the right-hand seat. It’s reassuring he’s there because I trust him. If you are in the left-hand seat of a Huey gunship with the minigun sight up, you don’t have time to watch your co-pilot.

  With Vinh Long fifteen minutes behind us, I turn back and look for targets, finger on the trigger, ready to fire. Johnno has us down in the weeds at ninety knots following the riverbanks and popping up over the trees at the bends so we can catch the bad guys’ unawares. The flight took a lot of light calibre fire on the first two insertions. Now there are two hundred troops on the ground, but also a burning helicopter in the landing zone and four of our own medevac’d out. Johnno makes another hop over the trees then runs in low over a rice paddy, skids just above the levee bank then climbs, cuts hard left ninety degrees and sets me up beautifully along the bank.

  In front of us, three guys in North Vietnamese Army green carrying AK-47s jog alongside the river. They are moving away from the troops on the ground but are still aligned with the approach to t
he landing zone. They’ll be well placed to shoot straight up into the underbellies and main rotors of the aircraft next time the flight comes in. They are main force Viet Cong, the guys that give us the most trouble, not the local black clad peasants who set booby traps at night.

  The AK-47s they carry are Russian assault rifles. They were the invention of Mikhail Kalashnikov, who as a child wanted to be a poet. Better he had been, but instead he designed weapons, and very good ones. This was just about the perfect submachine gun for guerrilla warfare. It would take a bashing, suffer dropping in the mud and still fire with total reliability.

  The last guy paused, turned, and loosed a burst at us, but it was wild shooting. Unbalanced and on the run like that, there was little chance of hitting us. A mistake. He should have kept going.

  My aim is near him, left and low, then I walk the tight, angry hailstorm of minigun fire along the reed beds and across his abdomen as he turns. He is thrown back onto the mud like he’s been hit by a Sheridan tank. The other two disappear into the nipa palm at high speed. I take my eyes off the gunsight for a few seconds as we rocket overhead.

  This guy is damn nearly sliced in half. His midsection is pinned like a mounted butterfly, clothing and skin driven into the mud on the bank. He can’t drag himself any farther. But he tries, and that’s what I see each time I have the dream, the exact way he moves. His upper torso twists in a slalom motion, weaving back and forth as he tries to claw his way to safety. We know he’s dead, but the message takes much longer to get through to him.

  Then mortar rounds fall, I wake, and the show ends.

  It was no pleasure having that dream again, but I don’t want to make too much of it. We all saw bad stuff, much worse than that. But your subconscious has its favourites, and that scene was top of the pops for mine. I’ll be watching that episode until the day I die.

  One

  T errorists are trained not born, and before Amir Bakil learned to be a terrorist, he worked as a waiter. The instruction for his new job took a month, though it seemed to him much longer. Now, waiting on tables was another life. The calm before the storm, he thought. That earlier time was like a dream of paradise, and he wanted to go back. But it was impossible.

  Amir was a short, wiry Filipino in his mid-thirties, with the nervous mannerisms of a man lacking confidence. He spoke softly and did not look people in the eye; always standing back to let others go first. When in the company of others, he listened rather than spoke.

  Although he thought carefully about events around him, he did not try to convince others of his opinions. Why would they be interested? But he believed absolutely in three things: his family, the relentless struggle to lift and keep them out of poverty, and his faith. The change of occupation had not been his idea.

  A premonition of the trouble he faced came as he worked in London in April of 1986. Israeli security guards working for El Al airlines found one and a half kilograms of Semtex explosives in the bag of Anne-Marie Murphy—a five month pregnant Irishwoman. Along with 364 other passengers, she attempted to board a flight to Tel Aviv. Not that Amir knew anything about the plot beforehand. He was just a Muslim in London who would share the blame.

  Asked after her arrest about the explosives and the triggering device that was with them, Anne-Marie said she didn’t know they were there.

  “Nezar gave it to me,” she said, referring to the bag.

  “Who is Nezar?”

  “Nezar Hindawi is my fiancé,” she said, proud of the fact at first. Then, realising her situation, she said irrelevantly, “He is Jordanian.” Her thoughts were scrambled, doubts overtaking the happy certainty of her future. “He gave me this bag—" She paused as if seeking an explanation from those that questioned her. “But we are to be married.”

  No, thought Amir when he read the transcript. You will not marry Nezar.

  As a family man, he considered Hindawi despicable. Although he cared little for the Israelis, the notion of so many passengers dying troubled him.

  Does any cause justify killing civilians on such a scale? he wondered.

  Men at the Hounslow Central Mosque where he worshipped, discussed the matter.

  A guy who worked as a bouncer spoke confidently to the group surrounding Amir, “Between the two sides in World War II, fifty-five million civilians were killed. Both sides bombed residential areas routinely. There are your Christians for you. It went on for years.”

  “What are you saying?” another man asked.

  “I’m saying that killing a planeload of passengers is fair retribution. It is also the language they understand. The infidels are happy to bomb us in our countries, bomb our cities and towns, devastate our homes. Kill our families. They are used to bombing civilians, you see, it’s what they do. Why should anyone be shocked or surprised if jihadis kill infidels in retaliation? Who are they killing? Airline passengers with money to travel the world. Jews and wealthy Kafirs. It is the only thing these people understand.”

  Amir was unconvinced. Although he said nothing, he posed himself two questions.

  If one man committed murder, did that make another murder, right? If an earlier generation committed genocide, did that make the haphazard killing of civilians acceptable now? No, he thought.

  In his own mind, he did not condone the use of a pregnant woman to carry explosives. To use any person in such a way seemed cowardly to him and using a woman with an unborn child seemed particularly so. Was a greater good somehow served by making an airliner crash? It was difficult to see how.

  Hindawi is a committed fighter? Let him carry his own explosives, Amir thought, and better still, why not sit down and negotiate rather than murdering innocents?

  What would I do, he wondered, if I found myself caught up in such a scheme? Would I go to the police? Go home to Jolo in the Philippines? Become a fighter for an Islamic cause? He did not know. At least he did not know then, but by December of 1986 his questions were answered, and he wished they were not.

  Six forty-five, he looked up from his watch and studied the Cobham house. It was a mansion. His family in the Philippines would view this place with amazement and happily live in just one of its rooms. Sweat trickled from his armpits, and his belly was in nervous turmoil. The adrenalin that pumped in his system made his legs weak, and body tremble. Today he would strike a blow for Allah, not a mighty blow, but it would be part of a great historic movement. Failure was not an option, but mentally he could not cast himself in the role required. Today he needed to act as if he were a different man. Better to die in the attempt than fail because the lives of everyone he loved were in the balance.

  The lessons he had received in Jolo, preparing him for this day came back to him. One line stood out above all others and repeated itself in his mind: “I bring men who desire death as ardently as you desire life.”

  Khalid, the original Khalid—because there were many named after him—made that statement in a threatening letter to a Persian monarch twelve years after the prophet died. A mighty fighter for Allah was Khalid, but Amir did not think of himself as such a man. Not the Sword of God or a lion amongst men. That text did not make him feel better. In his heart of hearts, he did not desire death, he wanted to live. Perhaps his time in the UK waiting on tables sapped what courage he once possessed. Each year he travelled from Jolo to work halfway around the world, and he thought that marked him as different from his peers. Today that fact didn’t help. He felt weak, sick and afraid.

  Thoughts of his family held him to his purpose. For them, he needed to find the courage to do what was necessary, even though it scared him to his core. My family must not suffer, they are everything in life that I value.

  His two companions were poor company. He stared at them, trying to gauge their mood. The driver Hazique Sayid and his companion Mahesh bin Osman were both Malaysians.

  With the heater turned off in the van, it was getting colder, and the two shifted about trying to stay warm. One of them smelled bad, which one he couldn’t tell. Perhaps
the stink came from both of them. They were believers, but petty criminals and unreliable accomplices. Now they were cold, nervous and grumbling intermittently. Were they thinking about backing out and abandoning their enterprise? They must not.

  ‘Everything is going as it should,’ Amir said. ‘Another fifteen minutes and it will be time. Remember what you must do and make no deviation from our plan. Khalid and all the leaders of Abu Sayyaf are monitoring what we are doing today, Allahu akbar.’

  The threat was clear. The leadership of Abu Sayyaf did not take kindly to failure; Hazique and Mahesh understood that.

  Amir’s mind turned, as it often did, to the man who forced him to do this. Khalid ibn Abi Fayed invaded his thoughts and dreams more often now than ever before. Like a slow acting poison, Khalid destroyed the peace in every corner and recess of his mind and replaced it with fear.

  Could such a terrible human be an instrument of divine intervention? Shouldn’t he have redeeming qualities if he worked in Allah’s service? Some spark of divinity or goodness? But there was nothing. The devil incarnate, he thought. That is Khalid, and I serve him out of fear.

  But he counselled himself: The cause is just. The return of the Caliphate is a righteous goal. For more than a thousand years after the death of Muhammad, may his name be blessed. Caliphs ruled the faithful, and Islamic scholars led the world in science, philosophy, law, mathematics and astronomy. Why should it not be so again? Civilisations come and go. Islam is rising, and Christianity is falling. Why not a new Caliphate and why not an independent Islamic state in the southern Philippines?

  A dream, he thought with a sigh, and I am not a scholar or a politician. These things are above me, like Khalid himself. He fights for an independent Islamic state and a global Caliphate. Who am I to judge such lofty objectives?

  In his heart, Amir believed they were both worthy goals, but he did not want to fight for them. Did he commit some mortal sin by wanting to live in peace with his neighbours? They were people of many religions, creeds and philosophies, but he liked them. Should he hate them instead? Would that be better?