And it formed a new resolve in Ben’s mind. Jaden Wolf wasn’t the only marked man out there. Once that situation was dealt with, Saunders would be next. Nobody would threaten to hurt Grace and get away unpunished. Nobody.
He closed the farmhouse door behind him. Outside in the darkness of the yard, he gave Storm a parting hug. He slipped a Gauloise from a fresh pack, lit it with his Zippo, then clanged the lighter shut and got back in the car. The three-litre, straight-six, triple-turbo engine was still warm from the drive from Paris. It roared into life and Ben stamped on the gas and slewed hard around in the yard and took off again.
One lone wolf going after another. As the hunt began, Ben thought about the man he was being commanded to kill.
Chapter 6
Saunders had said that few people knew Jaden Wolf as well as Ben had. He’d been right. Because there weren’t many experiences in life that could form bonds between people like the shared adversity of extreme danger and war. That was the nature of Ben’s past history with the man who was now his target.
For those who’d never been there, it was easy to scoff at and dismiss as trite the notion of a ‘band of brothers’. But those who had been through the terror and the exhilaration, witnessed the raw brutality of mankind’s most destructive and pitiless endeavour, watched their comrades being maimed and killed and put themselves on the line right along with them, knew that that sense of kinship was the core experience of combat. The willingness to lay down your life to safeguard those of your brothers in arms was, ultimately, a form of love – one that forged some of the most intense and indelible bonds known to the human condition.
Ben was one of the minority of people who understood what that really meant. And so was Jaden Wolf.
Wolf was a few years younger than Ben, who had first met him as an intense, raw-boned twenty-three-year-old still fresh from his ascension from the Royal Marines to the hallowed ranks of UK Special Forces’ most elite unit, 22 SAS. Many young troopers from all throughout the British Army dreamed of wearing the coveted winged dagger badge with its Who Dares Wins motto; few of them dared to pit themselves against the bone-crushingly, soul-destroyingly arduous selection process, and fewer still, far fewer, ever made it through to achieving their goal.
For young Jaden Wolf, the journey to the regiment had been a particularly gruelling one, marked by failure, cruel disappointment and injury. On his first unlucky attempt to pass the notorious endurance phase of the twice-yearly selection course he’d slipped on ice, knocked himself unconscious, almost frozen to death in the mountains of the Brecon Beacons and had to be stretchered out with acute hypothermia, concussion and a badly dislocated shoulder, earning himself an automatic RTU by failing to finish. Though he’d been by no means the only candidate to have to return to his unit with his tail between his legs, he felt the humiliation deeply and spent the next year nursing his injured pride and training like a maniac before trying again.
Nobody ever said it was going to be easy. Wolf’s second attempt, the following winter, came perilously close to repeating the failure of his first when, during a forced march in full kit with a sixty-pound Bergen on his back and torrential rain making it all but impossible to see, he lost his footing in the rocks and tumbled a hundred feet down a gorge. In the fall, his rifle butt smacked him in the face, broke his nose and knocked out half his teeth. But this time the young Marine was not to be deterred, and would sooner die than fail again. By sheer force of will, he managed to drag himself out of the gorge and rejoin the march at double speed. He finished the endurance phase covered in blood and barely able to stand – one of just nineteen men out of over two hundred who’d shown enough grit to make it to the end.
Several months later, having battered his way through the rigours of Jungle Training, Escape and Evasion Training and the euphemistically termed ‘Tactical Questioning’ (military-speak for torture resistance), Wolf was able to stand proud as one of the fully-fledged new regimental members who received the exalted beige beret and winged dagger insignia. The fancy new titanium and gold denture he now sported in place of his missing teeth quickly earned him the nickname ‘Jaws’ among his SAS comrades. Along with the rest of the newcomers he was still on probation, his every move closely watched by the Directing Staff in case he slipped up or showed the slightest weakness. But it seemed that no amount of mental stress or physical hardship could wipe the gleaming golden smile off his face.
The several times Ben had got to work with him, Wolf had proven himself to be a tough and reliable trooper. He was unambitious for his own advancement and yet showed the capacity of a born leader of men, as efficient at fighting the enemy as he was thoughtful and selfless in regard to his peers. Ben had heard the whisperings among the top brass that Wolf might have the makings of a fine commanding officer.
Another quality Ben had liked in him, even though it was a decidedly non-military one, was the caring attitude he showed towards animals. On one occasion, when Ben’s unit entered a remote Iraqi village while hunting renegade Islamist insurgents, the SAS troops had found a tumbledown building that they initially suspected housed a cell of enemy fighters, only to discover that it was being used as stabling for a small herd of horses and mules, all of them badly undernourished and living in filth. He remembered Wolf’s disgust and anger at the appalling condition in which the poor beasts were being kept. After giving their keeper a severe dressing down, the young trooper had personally seen to it that the animals were cleaned up and given food and fresh bedding. When it came time for the unit to move on, Wolf was reluctant to leave the horses behind.
Wolf’s love of animals hadn’t always earned him the admiration of his superiors, however. Eighteen months after the horse incident, Wolf had returned from two weeks’ leave with a leg in plaster, the result of having thrown himself in front of a car to save a dog from being run over. Anyone who loved Man’s best friend that much had to get Ben’s approval – but the SAS top brass were not amused. A critical mission that had been months in the planning very nearly got screwed up as a result of Wolf’s having to be replaced at short notice, and he faced disciplinary action for turning up for duty half crippled. Only when Ben had intervened in the matter to plead his case had Wolf been spared from administrative punishment.
It wasn’t so long after that affair that Ben’s own military days drew to a close. After thirteen long and sometimes difficult years he finally quit the regiment to pursue his solo career, implementing his skills in service of innocent victims of the kidnap and ransom industry. Some time after, he’d heard through the grapevine that Wolf had quit, too, though nobody seemed to know where he’d gone afterwards.
Ben had always wondered where Wolf might have ended up. A lot of ex-SAS guys drifted into high-level security work, getting paid fat tax-free dollars for consulting on oilfield protection in the Persian Gulf or keeping VIPs safe from the bullets of assassins. Others went the less salubrious mercenary route, enabling the rulers of tin-pot nations to overthrow and butcher their neighbours, or sometimes to persecute and oppress their own citizens. A smaller minority became employed by secretive government agencies at home or abroad, doing work that was no less dark and dirty but highly lucrative. Some stayed in contact with their old army pals. But Jaden Wolf seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth.