Read Online Bad Soldier: Danny Black Thriller 4 by Chris Ryan - Free Book Online Page B

closer to the fire. The woman with the red headscarf was looking intently at Joe. There was an expression of pity in her eyes. ‘Family?’ she asked.
    ‘Dead,’ Joe said.
    ‘In Syria? Because of the bombs?’
    Joe looked at his feet. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘Not because of the bombs.’ He looked up again and stuck out his chin aggressively. ‘Daesh,’ he said.
    As he uttered the word, he cursed inwardly. Daesh was a nickname for the group that called themselves Islamic State. It was a nickname they hated, and Joe didn’t know where the sympathies of these migrants lay.
    He needn’t have worried. A couple of the migrants spat on the ground. Others muttered swear words. There was clearly no love for Daesh in this little group. Joe relaxed a little.
    ‘What happened?’ one of the women asked. Joe felt his expression hardening. He hadn’t told anybody what had befallen his mum and dad. It seemed too private, somehow. Not that he hadn’t relived that awful day a thousand times in his mind. Several times a day, he saw his father’s body, hanging from a tree with a black hood over his head. And he saw his mother, bloodied and beaten, being forced to do obscene things with the Daesh fighters. The memory made Joe’s stomach boil with nausea and impotent fury. He saw the face of a man who had stood nearby their apartment block. He had a scar running the entire width of his neck, as if his grin had slipped down his face. When his men were finished with Joe’s mother, it had been he who had shot her in the head. And it had been under his command that Joe had been taken away, and put to work . . .
    But that was not a story he was going to share here. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. He knew they wouldn’t push him any further. Everyone who ended up here had horrors in their past that they didn’t want to talk about.
    The migrants fell silent for a couple of minutes and rubbed their hands warm by the fire. The woman with the headscarf started coughing again. It sounded very bad, as though she had an infection on her chest. ‘Some of us were thinking of Finland,’ she said breathlessly when the cough had subsided. ‘If we can get there.’ She stared at Joe again across the fire. ‘You could come with us,’ she said. ‘It’s safer in groups. And look, you’re so thin, there’s nothing to you . . .’
    Joe shook his head. ‘No thanks,’ he said. ‘I . . . I prefer to stay alone. And anyway, there is somebody in the UK that I need to see.’
    ‘You have family there?’ Everyone round the fire seemed suddenly much more interested in him.
    ‘No,’ Joe told them quickly. ‘Not family. Just . . . just this guy.’
    The interest waned as quickly as it had risen. But Joe felt like he’d said too much. In any case, he had just felt a few drops of rain. He had been expecting this, having seen a weather report in a discarded newspaper that morning that said that a front of low pressure would be moving north-west from the Mediterranean. He put his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders and stepped away from the fire. He started walking along the road. As a car passed, its headlamps cast not only Joe’s shadow, but also a second one: somebody was following him. He stopped and turned. The woman with the red headscarf was a couple of metres behind him. She looked concerned.
    ‘Where are you going to stay tonight?’ she asked.
    ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Joe said.
    ‘You must be careful if you’re thinking of trying to cross. I wasn’t joking. People die trying to do it. And they’re searching the back of every lorry . . .’
    Joe smiled at her as the rain started to fall harder. ‘I have a plan,’ he said. ‘I think it will work.’ But he wasn’t sure if she heard him, because as he spoke she started coughing again. A terrible, hacking sound. The woman needed medical care, but that was obviously impossible. Joe fished around in his pocket. He pulled out a small pack of