James had sent detailed US satellite photos to the Israeli Air Force team controlling the drone. Blowing the well to pieces with a missile would be easy, but no repair team would visit a well that was obviously beyond repair. The trick was to cause minor damage, and to do so in such a way that it didn't raise suspicion of sabotage.

At fifty metres the well's control room came into view. It was a regular prefab site cabin, mounted on a metre-high steel platform in case of flooding. There was a light on inside and a man in the cabin seemed to glance around, as if he'd heard something.

The drone shot up slightly and hovered over the shed's fibregla.s.s roof. The image on the big screen split and Tovah pointed to the right-hand side to explain.

'That's a high-resolution camera, underneath the body of the drone,' Tovah explained.

The right of the screen showed a metal arm sliding out of the drone. There was a slight rocking of the image as the arm dropped a coin-sized listening device on to the cabin roof. Then the drone skimmed a couple of metres along the rooftop, dropping another, as Tovah translated more commentary.

'They're testing the audio. Apparently they're getting a good signal from both devices.'

Ryan looked at James and spoke in a whisper. 'Will we get that audio while we're in the field?'

'That's the plan,' James said.

As the arm retreated inside the body of the drone, its remote pilot steered gently towards an electrical supply box at the side of the hut. It fed from a chunky mains cable and there was a backup diesel generator to compensate for erratic local electricity.

The drone pilot flew as close to the box as he dared and lowered a metal probe, the size and width of a man's lower arm. It was an electromagnetic pulse generator (EMP), capable of creating a super-intense magnetic field that would fry any electrical equipment within a ten-metre radius.

The sabotage would be obvious if the generator got left behind, but the drone's own sensitive electronics were also susceptible to being fried. So the EMP had been jerry-rigged with seventy metres of strong fishing line, which reeled out as the pilot took off.

After stabilising at seventy metres, the pilot activated the pulse. The image on screen flickered for several seconds. Everyone looked anxiously towards Tovah as the two remote pilots babbled frantically in Hebrew.

'What's happened?' James yelled anxiously. 'Did it just crash?'

'The pulse wasn't supposed to damage the drone, but it looks like it did,' Tovah explained. 'They're getting no signal from the drone. They're trying a backup frequency ...'

Suddenly the image on the left side of the screen came back, showing the view from a healthy drone, hovering several hundred metres off the ground with the oil derrick visible below.

Tovah continued to translate the stream of Hebrew. 'They seem to think the drone defaulted to an automatic self-protection routine when the pulse interrupted their signal. All systems normal, but they're not sure if the cable linked to the EMP snapped.'

The right side of the screen came back to life, showing a length of cable getting wound around a motorised fishing reel. A half minute went by before the silver EMP probe came into view and the pilots started yelling triumphantly.

'They've got it,' Tovah translated unnecessarily, as the probe disappeared back into the drone's belly. 'Now they're going to do surveillance.'

The drone backed up and dropped down to around a hundred metres. From this range it was clear that several lights around the derrick had blown out. When the co-pilot zoomed his night vision on the hut, it showed smoke pouring out the door, while the man who'd been inside was around the back using a fire extinguisher to fight a small blaze in the supply box. A couple of guys in hard hats were running across from the main pumping station, desperate to find out what had gone wrong.

'They're elevating to fifteen hundred metres and switching the drone to autopilot for the ride home,' Tovah said, as she smiled at James.

'G.o.dspeed, Mr Drone,' James said, as he strolled to a wall behind the TV and switched the gym lights on. 'We've got two planes booked for tomorrow,' he yelled. 'Folks going to Turkey for mission mayhem need to be on the tarmac at 0600 ready to load planes and equipment. Take-off is scheduled for 0700. The RAF plane taking the rest of you back to the UK is due at eleven. Chef and the training instructors will need help packing up, so the four remaining Currents need to eat breakfast and have bags packed and a.s.ses down by the pool by 0900.'

'Once James is out of here I'm in charge,' Capstick added. 'And I haven't handed out a punishment lap in almost a month, so you'd better not muck me around.'

34. BLACK.

It had always been an off-the-books black mission, but up to this point James had been comforted by familiar surroundings: the hostel, old friends, CHERUB agents, training instructors. Now it felt real, strapped into an unmarked thirty-five-year-old Antonov freighter, complete with red-faced Slav pilot and patched-up bullet holes.

They were making a second pa.s.s at a dirt landing strip, five kilometres from the southern Turkish town of Viransehir. The first run had been abandoned after the front landing gear failed to drop, and seeing the co-pilot opening a floor plate and winding it down with a manual crank didn't inspire confidence.

Lauren had never had a problem flying, but she grasped Bruce's hand and grimaced as the deafening jet touched down, blasting great trails of grey dust over surrounding fields.

'I'll never complain about Ryanair again,' Kyle joked, as rusted landing wheels squealed to a halt.

After a flight that was windowless, unpressurised and unheated, James, Ryan, Lauren, Tovah, Kyle and Bruce threw off grotty blankets and undid safety harnesses as a rear cargo ramp lowered to the dirt. First sight was a pair of Turkish customs officers jumping out of a Toyota pick-up, while an airport maintenance truck ploughed through the jet dust.

'They hate Israelis,' Tovah told James.

'I don't speak Turkish,' James said, as he unzipped a doc.u.ment pouch and pulled a dozen-sheet cargo manifest.

'Me neither,' Tovah said.

The two officers strolled up the cargo ramp, stubbly beards and guns on hips. False pa.s.sports were inspected and stamped. James pa.s.sed a pre-agreed seven thousand euros with the manifest and earned a broad smile.

'Automobile parts,' the officer said in broken English, smiling at his colleague as he stamped and initialled each page of the manifest.

'Get your gear out of here fast,' the officer said. 'Use the side gate.'

Five microlight planes, along with weapons, micro-drones, body armour and everything else needed for the commando-style raid, had been packed into cardboard crates marked with Audi and Citroen logos, before getting vacuum sealed in thick plastic.

The team worked up a sweat, wheeling the crates down the ramp and lifting them in the back of the truck. James rode with the cargo, while the others crammed into a ratty Mercedes taxi, getting a dust shower as the unmarked plane throttled up to leave.

The drivers deliberately steered clear of Viransehir's centre, speeding past streets of tiny homes and cutting through recently harvested fields. Their destination was an isolated, modern farm building, tall enough to house a giant cotton harvester and equipment used to pack raw cotton into truck-sized bales.

'You won't be disturbed here while you prepare,' the truck driver told James. 'The rest of your equipment arrived last night. I've also brought food and cooking equipment, as instructed.'

After getting everything inside, a scrum over the only toilet and a light lunch of yoghurt, bread and local soft cheese, the team began to unpack and make final preparations. Tovah checked all five microlights for transit damage. The package that had been waiting for them contained new grey inflatable wings, replacing brightly coloured ones designed to maximise safety during flight training.

While the olive-skinned and dark-haired Ryan and Tovah fitted and test-inflated the new grey wings, James and Lauren had to make themselves look more like Syrians. The pair had an uncomfortable if amusing experience dying their blond hair, with no hot water and a pressure hose designed to clean agricultural equipment. Then they stripped down to underwear and Kyle gave them a once-over with a spray tan, designed to darken subtly rather than turn them sunbed orange. The final step was disposable contacts, designed to make blue eyes brown.

Ryan didn't have much growth, but James, Kyle and Bruce hadn't shaved and the trio posed for selfies with four-week beards and James' dye job.

The next stage was to try on their kit. Combat boots, tight-fitting stab-proof undershorts and vests, then lightweight bullet-stopping body armour. They didn't want to appear too militarised, so the men got waterproof jackets, plaid shirts, cargo pants with lots of zip-up pockets for storing equipment. There were also combat helmets, only to be worn at the dangerous end of the mission.

Since they were entering Islamic State territory, Lauren and Tovah would have to wear double veils, full sleeves and gloves for their road journey.

'Why did I just dye my hair?' Lauren asked, as she peered out through the tiny slit in her veil. 'You can't even b.l.o.o.d.y see it. And I can barely see where I'm going.'

'You need to practise walking around in it,' Tovah said seriously. 'You'll stand out if you keep tripping over.'

James couldn't resist a wolf whistle as Lauren walked up and down the concrete floor. 'Man, you so s.e.xy, sistah!'

Lauren snapped her head around. 'Shut up or I'll break your legs, a.s.shole.'

'Not very ladylike,' James teased.

Lauren stripped back down to socks and undies as Bruce found the weapons crate. Since UK- or NATO-issue weapons were off limits, James had sourced East European and Russian weaponry, while Tovah had ordered up a selection from Israeli intelligence's a.r.s.enal.

'There's like thirty guns here,' Bruce noted. 'This is my kind of shopping. Oh man, there's Galils in here! I love these babies.'

Bruce pulled the Israeli-made, ultra-compact a.s.sault rifle out of its foam packaging, aligned the sight and played around with it for a few seconds to familiarise himself. He then added two pistols, a silenced large-calibre and a tiny .22 that fitted in his shirt pocket. Bruce then clipped on grenades, smoke bombs, an extendable baton, a Taser, several knives and a half-metre-long machete.

'Let's go kill bad guys!' Bruce shouted, as he expertly twirled the machete from hand to hand.

James laughed, but Tovah looked furious and faced Bruce off. 'I was in the Israeli Defence Force,' she said angrily. 'Saw a lot of s.h.i.t, and it was always boys who liked guns too much who'd end up getting killed. More importantly, some of 'em almost got me killed.'

Bruce was startled as Tovah wordlessly stripped his a.r.s.enal down and reminded everyone that it was best if they each used the same kind of rifle and handgun, to minimise the amount of ammunition and spares they'd need to carry.

The atmosphere stayed tense as everyone packed up with spare underwear, rations, first-aid gear, and distributed the various electronic items they'd need for the rescue operation. When everything was packed, the final stage was depersonalisation.

Jewellery, mobile phones, wallets and anything else that would enable their ident.i.ties to be ascertained had to be abandoned. After that, James broke the seal on cheap Casio watches, Chinese in-ear radio equipment and bulky phones with combined cellular and satellite coverage.

'Ten-day battery life, military-rugged, fully encrypted, for emergency use only,' James explained. 'Once you leave this room, you're anonymous. You don't call your girlfriend, check your e-mail or Facebook. And since this is a black mission, there's n.o.body to call but each other. As far as the British and Israeli governments are concerned, they don't know we're here and this mission does not exist. There's will be no SAS rescue team. No Apache helicopters dropping by to pluck us out of danger. If we die, we're just six unidentifiable bodies in a desert. And if we live ...'

James dramatically pulled a rack of pills from his pocket. 'This is old-skool spy stuff,' he announced. 'Cyanide pill. Pop one in your mouth, bite it between your back teeth and you'll be dead inside two minutes. It's not pleasant, but neither is being captured, tortured and beheaded by Islamic State.'

Tovah shook her head firmly. Ryan looked anxiously at Kyle and Lauren. Bruce picked up the packet, but put it down without breaking off a pill.

'You're sure?' James asked.

Bruce cracked a big smile. 'Not dying, not getting caught,' he said firmly. 'Don't need suicide pills. We're all gonna be fine.'

35. BORDER.

James picked up a final electronic chatter report just after 1400 hours. There were plenty of phone calls, e-mails and texts from workers at the damaged well, indicating that someone was coming to repair the damaged pump controllers within a day or two.

The bad news was that no signal had been received from the two listening devices placed on top of the well control room and the a.s.sumption was that they'd been damaged by the unexpectedly powerful EMP generator, or heat from the fire.

The team's ride south was a thirty-seat pa.s.senger coach, whose owner/driver used it for an irregular bus service into Syria. It arrived empty and they spent a quarter hour loading packs, microlight planes and partially dismantled dirt bikes into the luggage hold.

They set off with an exhaust plume some way behind the latest emission standards. Rather than head straight for the border, the coach stopped on the edge of town, collecting four bearded men. A second stop brought a single Arab pa.s.senger, dressed in amber-tint sungla.s.ses.

The first stretch south was through smallholdings and recently harvested cotton fields. As they got closer to the border with Syria, shelters made from sc.r.a.p wood and plastic sheeting began to appear in fields along the roadside. These were occupied by some of the two million refugees who'd fled Syria during the civil war. The closer they got, the more refugees they found, along with wafts from their refuse heaps coming through the air conditioning.

The last stop in Turkey was at a properly organised refugee camp, with lines of identical white shelters marked with the Red Crescent logo. An Arab TV crew boarded the coach, followed by five smartly attired men. They filled most of the remaining seats as a group of porters rammed the cargo area with pallets of food and medical supplies, leaving the driver with a fight to lock down the luggage doors.

The border crossing was heavily manned on the Turkish side. Two dozen troops backed up the customs officers, with tanks parked on either side of the road in case of trouble. The queues of vehicles trying to enter from Syria stretched to the point where the road disappeared into haze, and the land on the Syrian side was a ma.s.s of human tragedies. People who'd been refused crossing and had nowhere else to go.

The Turks had less appet.i.te to stop people from leaving. The four-hundred-kilometre land border had eighty legal crossing points and many hundreds of illegal ones, making it almost impossible to police. James watched a pregnant woman scream at an entry guard as the coach got filtered into a single lane, with high wire mesh on either side. Signs in Turkish, Arabic and English told people to stay in their vehicles, while further along the awkward face of Syria's former dictator had been shot out of a Welcome to Syria billboard.

The bus got waved through the Turkish gate. The bearded men on the Syrian side had Kalashnikov a.s.sault rifles and tatty camouflage jackets from which Syrian Army insignia had been picked off. The two cars up ahead made no attempt to hide the Turkish lira notes they handed across with their pa.s.sports.

Expecting the guards to board and inspect, Ryan pulled his green, fake, Turkish pa.s.sport from his pocket and felt sweat bead on the back of his neck. But the guard gave the driver a friendly smile, then tipped his head respectfully at someone. The journalist? Or perhaps the well-dressed men who'd boarded with the medical supplies?

'Apparently we're in the right company,' Ryan whispered to Tovah, in Arabic.

The coach's hydraulic door hissed shut. The exhaust threw out another plume and they were inside Islamic State-controlled Syria, heading south on a highway built with oil money. Beyond the traffic queuing to get into Turkey, the countryside was deserted. Advertis.e.m.e.nts had all been ripped up or blacked out. This was Islamic State territory now, but buildings showed scars from months of fighting and burned-out cars left black trails where they'd been pushed off to the side of the road.

Speeding fines clearly weren't on the Islamic State priority list. The coach's plastic trim rattled and squealed as they topped a hundred kilometres per hour. Cars skimmed past, going much faster than that.

A shambolic roadblock caused brief delay, but fifty euros and some banter from the driver did the trick. Shortly after, they left the highway, taking another modern road. A scary interlude came with a tunnel cut through a rock formation. There was no speed enforcement and no electricity to power the lights inside. The coach had to swerve as it rounded a bend and encountered two cars that had crashed head on and been abandoned in the dark.

Over the s.p.a.ce of two hours, pa.s.sengers came and went, the food and medical supplies got unloaded outside of a large hospital and the sun was failing as James pulled out a little GPS unit which calculated that they were now less than five kilometres from the sabotaged well at Tall Tamar.

The driver pulled into a village that had seen some heavy fighting. Modern concrete houses were sprayed with bullet holes and every metal roof had collapsed.

'This was a Kurdish area,' their driver explained. 'Anyone who wasn't killed would have fled north, and the battle damage means n.o.body has resettled the area.'

'So we'll be safe?'

'Stay out of sight, keep a man on watch. But you'll be safer here than anywhere else nearby. And most importantly, you have this.'

He gestured out of the window as the coach turned off-road, in front of a strip mall. The layout was like hundreds James had seen when he'd been at uni in America. A medium-sized supermarket, a gas station, a run of smaller shops and a pair of fast-food restaurants at the far edge of a two-hundred-car lot.

Unlike the ones James had seen before, the gas station had exploded, leaving a burned-out canopy and a crater with the exposed remains of underground fuel tanks. The supermarket had lost all its gla.s.s and been looted bare. There was a hole where a tank had driven in one side and out the other. The smaller shops had fared even worse, with three completely collapsed. The remaining cars were either burned out, or crushed so thoroughly that a tank crew appeared to have decided to have a little fun driving over them.

'It's perfect,' Tovah told the driver, seeing more than enough uncratered tarmac for the microlights to take off, while the sh.e.l.l of the supermarket made a decent overnight shelter.

Bruce, Kyle, Lauren and Ryan started diving into the cargo bay and dragging out the gear.

'Outstanding,' James agreed, as he shook the driver's hand and gave him five thousand euros. 'The other five will be paid through to your bank in Turkey when we get back.'

'What if you all get killed?' he asked, half joking.

'You'll get paid,' Tovah said. 'My people will see to that.'

As the coach headed off, everyone dragged the equipment inside the corner of the supermarket, to the annoyance of birds roosting in the framework beneath the twisted metal roof. Then James gave out orders.

'Tovah, Lauren, erect a canopy in case it rains. Then start a.s.sembling the bikes and planes. Bruce, Kyle, I want you to secure the area. Take guns. Find the motion alarms and spread them around. Also, when you're on the prowl keep your eyes out for a working tap. We've brought drinking water, but it would be nice if we can wash and flush a toilet. Ryan, how's your head for heights?'

'It's OK.'

'Great,' James nodded. 'There's a satellite dish I need rigged up so I can download chatter reports. There's also a UHF aerial, so I can have a go at picking up a signal from the listening devices on the control centre roof.'