He’d left out how and where he’d picked up Vietnamese though. So I asked him.
‘Ah. This is classic Brit Army. I took a language skill in the Intelligence Corps and they encouraged me to learn Vietnamese for a year. And then they posted me to the Middle East.’
21
We walked out of the restaurant and into the sodium glow of a West End night. It was crowded on the pavements. I’d left my car on Great Windmill Street outside Sugar Reef, with a “Doctor on Call” pass in the window. It usually worked. I aimed my remote keys at the car and it bipped-bipped.
And that was when the Metropolitan Police armed response vehicle screeched to a halt and an Asian-looking policeman stepped out of the drivers’ seat, opened the rear door, retrieved his G36c, and smacked the bolt down and forward, charging the breech with a round.
‘Colonel Mahoney!’
‘Contact!’ I shouted and everything started to go downhill.
The Asian copper was bringing his carbine into the aim. Bang-Bang was off the starting blocks quicker than either of us. She drew her CZ85 in one fluid motion, flicked the safety down and shot at the fucker and the second round thwacked into his right shoulder and slapped him against his ARV.
There was an epidemic of screaming and chaos. Oh God. I drew my Walther and tried to bead it on the Asian guy but he had gone to earth. His partner was out of the car and looking between us and the dead ground, and pointing his own carbine at anything and everything. He looked pale and lost.
‘Kerim? What …?’
Bang-Bang let off two more rounds and one hit the white guy’s thigh and he screamed and dropped to the tarmac, loosing off two shots from his own G36. The glass smashed on my car as we scrambled for cover behind it. I looked at the Colonel. He gave me a wry smile.
‘Looks like I’m in your hands, you two. Go get ‘em.’
I popped the boot and edged around, and gingerly I grabbed the L86 and handed it to Bang-Bang, and got the PDW for myself. We regrouped and checked the weapons over. Above us, the bodywork took more hits and the rest of my car’s glass disappeared and showered over us. I handed the Colonel my Walther and slapped the action down on the PDW. I turned the sight on and hazarded a glance round the side of the car.
Both cops were behind their car and jerking around, trying to get a good angle on us. The white cop seemed to be shouting at the Asian cop and dragging himself along the ground. There was blood and glass all over the street.
We were in the middle of the West End and there must have been several hundred people screaming and trying to seek cover in everything- shop doorways, McDonalds, behind cars.
Suddenly the Asian cop yelled and stood up; he put his carbine into shoulder aim and loosed off a full mag on semi-auto right into the car. More plastic and glass smashed and we cringed. His mag ran out, he popped it and went to change it. He was doing well in light of the round in his shoulder. Distantly a part of my mind wondered whether he was hopped-up on drugs. And the guy was totalling my Beemer. I looked down. Part of the headlight unit was right next to me.
That was then I heard the battle cry of the Hur al-Ayn. As the cop’s magazine hit the ground, Bang-Bang stood up in full view and placed the L86’s bipod on my car’s bonnet. She aimed and pulled the trigger. A long burst of 5.56 with one in every five tracer zapped into the Asian cop, lifted him off the ground and firehosed him across the road, throwing bloody chunks of uniform cloth off him. She grinned at me and made a hand-chopping motion.
That was my cue to move and I went. I ran forward round the back of the car, clicked the PDW selector switch to full auto, and gave the Asian cop’s twitching head the good news with a burst of 9mm Para. There was a series of flashes and bangs and his brains flew out of his skull and halfway up the ARV car like a pile of scrambled eggs.
This was surreal. I’d actually just killed someone. Well, finished them off. My hands were shaking and I felt cold and sick. Damn.
When I was a kid my favourite film had been ‘An American Werewolf in London’, especially the end where the werewolf ran amok in Piccadilly and caused chaos. And now look. Here we were in Piccadilly and we’d recreated the end. We were the werewolves.
I stood there like a toy soldier.
To my right Bang-Bang ran forward with a click-clack of high-heeled boots and skidded to a halt over the white cop, who was lying on the ground in shock. He was breathing in harsh gasps and blood was jetting from his leg. She kicked his carbine away, put the L86 into the aim on his head, and squeezed the trigger. It clicked dry on an empty mag.
‘Hah hah, you lucky fucker.’
She reached down to stroke his face.
‘I’m having your carbine, and your crappy Glock. You can explain that to your command any way you want.’
She looked at me and laughed as she pulled his Glock from its holster, unhooked the lanyard and kicked it down the street. I laughed back, but then that laugh died in my throat as a red Diplomatic Protection Group ARV screeched round the junction.
‘Enemy right!’
Bang-Bang scraped the cop’s G36 up from the pavement, aimed downrange, and started firing rounds into the ARV window. The windscreen exploded and the crew scattered left right and centre into the West End crowd. A stray round from them whacked into a shopfront next to us.
‘STOP STOP STOP!’
The Colonel was in the road and holding his MOD pass up in the air with his right hand and my Walther 88 in his left. Two laser sights wobbled onto his chest but he just stood there. You had to admire the balls on the man. Bang-Bang and I formed up on him, covering threats from front and back. I turned on the Aimpoint red dot on my weapon’s sight. I did not intend to die dumb tonight.
The crowd cowered. My ears were singing from the impact of the shots. It felt like I had cotton wool in them. Right by me a girl had fallen over and dropped her shawarma kebab all over herself. She was looking at me like I was going to kill her on the spot. Under our feet were spent cartridges and crunching glass. All down the length of Shaftesbury Avenue, car alarms wailed and honked.
The Colonel spoke.
‘Colonel Mahoney, KTS, stand down, this is my CP team!’
At this point my inner East London rudeboy came into effect.
‘Yeah! And we’re leaving in this ARV here!’
Oh no. I’d given the impetus to Bang-Bang. She jumped up and down and started singing.
‘What he said! And you can’t shoot us ‘cause we ain’t Brazilians!’
‘Shut UP, Holly!’ I hissed. We got moving.
My car was totalled. Shit, another invoice to KTS if I lived till dawn. The ARV’s engine was running and it looked good to go. We loaded the bags from my car into its boot and I gunned the engine and we got in the ARV and left the scene, up Shaftesbury Avenue and past about five ambulances and police cars heading in. The Colonel was in the back. He was chuckling.
‘Share the joke, boss.’
He caught my eye in the mirror.
‘If I’d had known my CP team was going to be half the cast of Four Lions … bloody hell. You did good just now, you two.’
I looked back.
‘Rubber dinghy rapids, bro.’
Bang-Bang was chewing gum and grinning as she discreetly racked the topslide of her pistol under the line of the car window. She was checking there was a round in the pipe.
‘I theeenk we just scared maaaany gringos, my friends. Maaaany gringos.’
The Colonel laughed even harder at this.
‘Riz - get us to the MOD main building, quicksmart.’
He reached forward and handed me back my pistol.
I floored the gas and after a few tries, found the buttons for the blues and twos, and we squealed right and down Charing Cross Road lit up like a flying saucer. It was a Vauxhall Astra. I knew Astras. The wind rushed in through the shattered windows. The radio in the car was going mental with callsigns and the dashboard data terminal was flashing a bizarre sequence of coloured squares. Bang-Bang started pressing them all for a la
ugh. I slapped her hand away from the screen. We had enough trouble for now.
The Colonel let out a sigh.
‘The first thing I want to know is what the hell just happened back there?’
22
I pulled the ARV into the Ministry of Defence entrance off Whitehall. The blue roof strobes lit the yard like a disco. Two MOD Police walked forward, bemused by the appearance of a police car with half the windows missing and spattered with blood and bullet holes. Bang-Bang and I exited the car left and right to cover them as they gripped their MP7s. The lead guy’s hand went up.
‘What’s your authority here?’
Bang-Bang spat a wad of gum onto the pavement.
‘My authority is My Milkshake Is Better than Yours. Now fuck off out the way and raise the barriers.’
I raised my Heckler to what I hoped looked like an authoritative level.
‘We’re KTS. Bringing Colonel Mahoney in from a contact, secure the gate and let us through, ta.’
They raised the barriers.
Colonel Mahoney brought out his MOD pass as we drove in and presented it to the senior cop.
‘Pay no mind to my young hooligans, Sergeant. Carry on. Oh, and raise the building threat level to severe.’
At dawn next morning I awoke, and stretched out the kinks. I’d slept on the office floor. I didn’t mind it. I’d learned to sleep on the ground during my al-Qaeda training. Colonel Mahoney’s people had found a place to hide us away in one of the Special Forces liaison offices in Zone N of the building. It wasn’t much but it was safe. I stood up and looked out of the window onto Victoria Embankment. Shaping up to be a nice day.
Bang-Bang was asleep curled in her little denim jacket in the office chair. She looked so small and young. Not like someone who’d shot a bunch of policemen last night. I mentally braced myself for the aggro I was going to get from the family over this, and why wasn’t I looking after her.
Right in front of her on the desk was the G36c she’d taken from the other copper. It was spattered with scabby congealed blood, and I could see from the transparent magazine that there were still a fair few rounds left in it.
And I’d killed someone for the first time last night. Again, back in my al-Qaeda training they’d talked for hours about this, saying it wasn’t our weapons but the hard heart that kills.
And in the end, when it came down to it, it hadn’t been that hard a kill. I’d fired, he’d died.
I went downstairs, stopping to hit a drinks machine for a freshleaf tea, checked with the front desk, went out of the main entrance and made my way to Embankment tube station. I picked up a few tabloids. Only Metro led with stories about the chaos from last night. It had kicked off too late to make the first editions of most of them.
The headline read “Terror In Picadilly”. There was a blurry photo of figures standing outside McDonalds and the ARV. Fortunately the picture quality was too poor to make any of us out. The gist of the story was that an armed policeman had gone mental and shot a member of the public and his partner, and that there were rumours that the SAS had been involved. SAS? I laughed inwardly as I walked back to the MOD building. Always a good standby of editors when no details were known. On a more serious note, the whole scenario was not good. There seemed to be rogue coppers everywhere, the UK threat level was slightly short of Defcon One, and we were at war with … who? Right now we seemed to be at war with everyone. God, I needed a cigarette.
Back in the lobby the Colonel was waiting for me. Typical army, he looked like he’d sprung from an Action Man box ready to go, shaved, shined and pressed.
‘I brought your lady friend a present from the mess wall.’
He handed me a small, folded t-shirt which looked vintage.
‘Hasn’t been worn since Vietnam.’
It was faded black, with a logo of a phoenix and the motto “Phung-Hoang 72”.
‘Oh, she’ll love this. Thanks chief.’
‘No problem. Token of gratitude from me. Now, can you go and find her? She appears to have wandered off somewhere. I’m sure she shouldn’t be too hard to spot, seeing as she’s wearing frou-frou knickers and a corset.’
Oh great.
As my car was currently totalled and inside a police cordon, I was going to need some new wheels. Fortunately the Colonel had seen to that. In the courtyard was a Transit van, part of what was known as the Intelligence Corps’ “White Fleet”. They were used on the mainland for training and also as backup on police surveillance operations.
At about 11am I finally found Bang-Bang. She was in the loading bay bantering with the MOD-Plod in there. I discreetly dragged her out onto the street by her elbow.
‘Where on earth have you been, we’ve been looking all over for you!’
I handed her the t-shirt.
‘Compliments of the Colonel.’
She admired it for a while, cooing over the vintage distressed look, I supposed. Holly lit a cigarette, handed me another, and didn’t speak for a long moment. She just took a deep drag on her cigarette and looked down the road. Finally she looked up at me and gave me a distant smile.
‘Cuz … cousin. Fia-aaan-cé. You normally only ever see me larking about and not acting seriously. Thing is, I love you and I really like the Colonel, he’s a good guy and I don’t want to see either of you killed. I did what I had to do.’
I looked back into the building.
‘Have you jarked something in there?’
Another distant smile.
‘I’ve done it for KTS and my lot. And you two. Now we wait and watch to see what comes in. You trust me, right?’
‘For better or worse, Holly, with my life. OK. I won’t ask.’
She leant on my shoulder, half-hugged me and then put her arm out for a cab.
‘See you at yours.’
23
That night we had a party round mine to celebrate still being alive. The theme was Sixties Spies. The girls didn’t disappoint, they all arrived in vintage gear and big hair. The weapons were brought in and left in the hall as we were still on red alert. On the telly my copy of The Ipcress File was in full swing, most of which was totally lost on the gang. Kids these days…
‘Hah!’
Bang-Bang stepped back from her netbook with a triumphant expression.
‘What ya done now?’ said Princess.
‘It works. I’ve dropped FlameLite into IMVU and it’s working.’
‘IMVU? That’s where I go! That’s where we all go!’ Calamity exclaimed.
Duckie was now interested.
‘So hopefully it won’t spiral out of control and take over the world, no?’
‘Nah. There are failsafes. It does appear to be using my avatar to talk to people though … that’s interesting …’
She put her glasses back on and started tapping away. I didn’t like it when techy people said “that’s interesting”. It usually meant Skynet had become self-aware or something.
‘I tweaked it using Lua. It’s the same programming language used in Angry Birds. I made my own version, like a FlameLite, if you will. Believe it or not, I got the tools in World of Warcraft. My version also works in social media and online worlds.’
I started ferrying the food in.
‘Clear the decks.’
I nodded at her screen.
‘Don’t tell me. That was what you left in the MOD building?’
‘I did, cuz, and it went to work. Found some stuff before the day was out. Here, have a look.’
I looked at some gobbledegook on her screen.
‘Flame Lite tracks pretty much anything. It can sniff the network traffic, take screenshots, record audio conversations, log keystrokes, turn on every Bluetooth in the room. And you can tell it what to look for. Or not. Sometimes it just decides to go looking itself. Today it went off on one and decided it was going to install itself as the building’s anti-spyware program. Look at this …’
She tapped a chart.
‘This is what it found. Two Chine
se attack programs - no surprise there - and a copy of Duqu, which it caught and quarantined. Duqu is a similar program. Not as advanced, but still pretty good. It was in the main servers, sucking up data -’
She clicked on some screengrabs.
‘- and then sending back what it had been looking for. Anything with “MOD” and “KTS” together. And anything with “Colonel Mahoney”.’
I felt like someone was walking on my grave.
‘It probably got his schedule and emails, and it reported back to this IP address here …’
An IP address came up. She ran it through a Whois.
‘This turned out to be a server in Islamabad. I hacked into it by bruteforcing the root password, and took an image of the network. It was reporting to this IP address …’
Now an IP and a map came up. Hounslow. The Whois listing had a business address. Goldenboy Global.
‘Their server bounced it to ... here …’
Lines grew on the map display and a new IP resolved.
‘Someone in the Houses of Parliament. The Palace of Westminster, to be exact. Just down the road.’
‘You reckon this might be Chacha?’
She nodded from behind those daft glasses.
‘I can send FlameLite after it if you want.’
‘NO! No. I’m not having it running rampant in Whitehall. Things are bad enough as it is. But- good one, Holly.’
Fuzz clapped her hands. She was dressed as a BOAC stewardess. Her own joke. ‘C’mon, guys! Too much working and not enough partying!’
We took the hint and laid the table. I deferred to Len Deighton. ‘Listen up!’
I read from his guide to the perfect party.
‘ Host and hostess should be in the kitchen : no one wants them fussing around about ash on the sofa covers . Dinner should always be a little late because this has everyone hungry and in the right mood to appreciate the cooking ... ’
My audience cheered and I got a roll mop thrown at me for my pains.
‘Shut up and eat. We’re watching Goldfinger next.’
Locked and Loaded: A Riz Sabir Thriller Omnibus Page 9