They drove on in silence. As they passed the Land Rovers, they felt the eyes of the Palestinian gunmen. Once they’d cleared them, Stratton let out a huge breath.
‘Don’t start relaxing,’ Luke said, looking over his shoulder. He saw that the DShK on top of the technical had rotated like an anti-aircraft gunner and still had them in their sights. But Fozzie accelerated, and within two minutes the welcoming committee had faded into the distance.
The Gaza Strip was a tiny territory. It was about twelve klicks from the crossing to the centre of Gaza City, where they were headed. Difficult to say how long it would take, because it depended what they met up ahead. Anything between twenty minutes and an hour, Luke estimated. The road was about ten metres wide and had clearly once been in good condition. Now, though, the tarmac was crumbling and the way ahead was littered with potholes, forcing Fozzie to keep his speed down to about 30mph and to swerve now and then to avoid the dips in the road. The terrain on either side was flat and bland: fields of patchy grass and bare earth, the shell of an occasional building long since deserted. The whole place was like a fucking ghost town.
‘Where is everyone?’ Russ asked after they’d been driving for another minute or so. It was a good question. The road was strangely deserted for a main thoroughfare — the shortest route from the border to Gaza City, the outskirts of which were only a couple of miles away. Luke looked out of his window. On the side of the road, about ten metres from the edge, he saw the rotten carcass of an animal. A horse? Difficult to say. Its ribs were exposed, its skin was dried and shrivelled and its insides had at some point been plundered by a hungry scavenger.
A hundred metres further on they passed a little group of what were once buildings. They’d been destroyed by artillery fire, long enough ago for the rubble to be covered with hardy weeds. And as that ruined scene retreated, the view up ahead began to change as the bleak nothingness of their surroundings morphed into a rising sea of concrete buildings in the distance.
‘Gaza City,’ Russ said.
Nobody replied.
Fozzie had started to slow down. Fifty metres ahead there was a crossroad, and as they drew near it became clear why the road from the Karni crossing had been deserted. There were six military Jeeps here, and twice as many armed soldiers. Luke knew a roadblock when he saw one. Sometimes, in zones like this, they were unofficial, having been erected by enterprising locals attempting to make a buck. That didn’t appear to be the case here. One of the Jeeps had a green flag flying from its bonnet, with white Arabic writing; the vehicles themselves had green lettering on their sides; and two of the soldiers were standing by a radio set up on the bonnet of the other Jeep.
‘Hamas,’ Fozzie murmured when they were thirty metres distant. ‘Looks like they’ve been waiting for us.’
‘Is that good or bad?’ Finn asked.
‘I guess we’re going to find out.’
‘Stop the vehicle,’ said Luke. Fozzie hit the brakes fifteen metres between them and the roadblock. Luke activated his sat phone. ‘Zero, this is Tango 17.’
‘Tango 17, this is Zero. Send.’
‘We’ve got ourselves a roadblock. Looks official. Can you sort it?’
‘Wilco, Tango 17.’
The comms went dead.
Silence in the Land Cruiser as it sat motionless in the middle of the road. The soldiers up ahead looked at it warily. When a few of them exchanged words, they did so without taking their eyes off the Regiment’s vehicle. And while no one had their weapons pointing directly at them, the soldiers all had both hands on their assault rifles and looked like they knew what they were doing.
A minute passed.
Two minutes.
Suddenly Stratton, seemingly unable to restrain himself, snapped. ‘Just talk to them,’ he instructed. ‘It’s obvious they’ve been waiting for us. Just roll down the bloody window and talk to them.’
‘Nobody’s rolling down the windows,’ Luke said calmly. ‘They’re there for a reason.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Stratton snorted. ‘Nobody’s going to attack me…’
He cut himself off short as each of the four SAS men turned to look at him with cool expressions on their faces.
‘Nobody’s rolling down the windows,’ Luke repeated, and silence fell once more inside the 4 x 4.
They had to wait another three minutes for anything to happen. One of the radio operators up ahead started talking into his handset; moments later they saw him bark some kind of instruction to the others. A couple of them jumped up behind the wheels of two of the Jeeps and reversed them out of the way. The remainder continued to stare at the Land Cruiser. They made no indication that the Regiment unit was permitted to cross, but Fozzie didn’t wait for that. He moved the vehicle forward and through the roadblock. Luke could sense Stratton fuming. The guy clearly didn’t like being told what to do. Fine. As long as Luke was in charge of the safety of the men in this vehicle, Stratton could like it or fucking lump it.
Luke had seen his share of battlegrounds. He’d walked the deserted streets of Musa Qala and dodged sniper fire in Sangin. He’d been involved in pitched battles in Basra and seen the brutal effects of many wars in central and eastern Africa. Gaza City, he knew, wasn’t a war zone like Afghanistan. It wasn’t Darfur or Somalia. Every conflict, however, was different in its own way. Despite everything, Gaza still functioned as a state. But it was a state on the edge. Its people were poor. Many desperate. Even more were angry. As the Land Cruiser approached the capital, Luke felt he could taste the tension in the air.
The outskirts of Gaza City were a mishmash of tall apartment blocks, single-storey warehouses, the occasional mosque. Almost everything appeared to be built from concrete, or rendered in bland grey or yellow plaster that was cracking and falling away. Suddenly there were more vehicles too. Not many of them looked roadworthy, at least by British standards, and there were fewer than might have been expected for a city the size of Gaza. Even if the inhabitants could afford a car, petrol was hard to come by. There were rather more pedestrians — thin, ragged and with weather-beaten faces — than there were drivers.
The black Land Cruiser, with its tinted glass and shining chrome, attracted attention and Luke didn’t like that. A CAT team would normally take one of two options. They would either follow the principal in an unmarked vehicle — an old baker’s van or a utility truck, something that would merge into the background — if they didn’t want to be seen. If the situation required a more overt, threatening presence, the unmarked van would be replaced with a Jeep mounted with a. 50-cal or a Gimpy — something to make people think twice about engaging them. But Hamas’s insistence that only a single vehicle could cross had chucked the SOPs out of the window. The Land Cruiser was an unsatisfactory halfway house and Luke felt that every Palestinian citizen they passed — most of them dressed in shabby Western-style clothing, though a few wore more traditional robes and headdresses — was staring at them with ill will.
Fozzie followed Russ’s directions and they continued to head north-west through this run-down suburb. They were now no more than four klicks from the Karni crossing and already they could see the effects of years of Israeli bombardment of the territory. More than half the buildings they passed bore scars of some sort — perhaps just a boarded-up window or a spray of bullet marks across the facade. Plenty, though, were reduced to a shell, or even to a pile of rubble and steel. One thing was clear: these crumbling structures on the outskirts were not administrative buildings or military targets; they were apartment blocks and people’s houses. As the Land Cruiser passed one of these demolished buildings, Luke saw a small makeshift tent, constructed from bleached canvas and metal poles bound together with string. The front side of the tent, about a metre wide and two metres high, was open to the road and it had been erected to house not people, but a large photograph of a man. Garlands of flowers were strewn around the photograph, but they were withered and dried out. It was plainly a shrine of some sort, there to commemorate a life lost when the building that had stood there was destroyed.