Locked and Loaded: A Riz Sabir Thriller Omnibus

by Charlie Flowers

  We made our way back along the road, back towards the Cosworth and its opened doors, as Calamity revved the engine in sharp barks and a flaming truck tyre arced overhead and hit the front of the Hotel Ibis. I called it in. ‘Tanker is neutralised, all callsigns fall back to Green One. I repeat, fall back to Green One. Out.’

  42

  The outside of Green Lane Mosque looked like the fall of Saigon as we pulled in. Our car was coughing in miasma of burnt clutch and Calamity grimaced. ‘I think we’ve blown a bearing.’

  Some demo crowd barriers had been erected then abandoned. There was a line of police standing near some Transit vans trying to deal with the crowds and some MDL protestors. We parked the vehicles in the best counter-ambush order we could think of. A Sky News TV crew was milling about trying to film things and generally getting in the way. We pushed their microphones out of our faces and went looking for our leaders.

  In the rear of the car park Bang-Bang was setting up a petrol-driven helicopter drone. It looked like something out of the Terminator films. Black and evil. She smiled at me. ‘Hello my love. Look at this for bloody ridiculous. Now the imams are insisting we take our shoes off. How am I supposed to fight when I haven’t done my nail varnish. Honestly.’

  Then she placed her internet glasses over her eyes and flipped a switch on the controller. The engines on the drone roared into life and blue exhaust jetted, and the blades tousled her hair as it shot skywards. Bang-Bang held out a small netbook and tapped little tags indicating our firing positions in the building and labelled areas of the mosque. ‘I’ll be carrying this netbook on me at all times in me haversack. If I get shot, take it off me. Sasha and Kiki also have a feed to the drone and they’re plotted up in the mosque office where they can run all their CCTV. No one’s going to sneak up on us today. OK here are our firing points. West tower covers the eastern approaches, that’s Sadie. Boiler house accommodation, we’ve put the Shrike and the RPG in there to cover the car park. Looking northwest up Little Green Lane we’ve put the PKM on the first floor. Oh by the way, I don’t know why, but our SAS friends left us two fire axes “just in case”.’ She nodded at two nasty-looking axes on the ground.

  There was a commotion outside the entrance. Fuzz came outside flicking the blood off her knuckles. She was wearing a tan, wide-brimmed floppy hat, which she tipped in our direction as she spoke. ‘That was a step too far.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘That imam called me a tattooed harlot.’

  Bang-Bang giggled. ‘I’m saying nothing.’

  ‘YOU can talk.’

  ‘Slutty and proud, Fuzz. By the way, can y’all look up and wave for the drone cam.’

  We looked up, and waved. Bang-Bang nodded. ‘OK, got that. We’re live.’

  More shouting emanated from the door over the heads of the refugees. Fuzz looked ready to kill. ‘Now he wants us to be wearing headscarves. I swear I’ll shoot the prick.’

  Sadie came over and cast her eye over the netbook schematic. ‘Hello ladies. Does our Imam not realise the seriousness of our predicament?’

  ‘Apparently not, Mrs Hayak. You or I?’

  ‘I.’

  She slung her Dragunov. ‘What did he say, Bang-Bang darling?’

  ‘Sillybollocks was trying to quote chapter and verse at me about women running about with guns. I replied with Hashiyat ad Dussuqi: Jihad becomes Fard Ayn on everyone, even women and children, upon a surprise attack by the enemy. I left the bit about husbands and creditors out though.’

  Sadie grinned and met the protesting Imam half-way in the car park. We gave a cheer as he walked into her throat-grip and she gave him the news with a slap that echoed round the car park like a pistol shot. He fell to the ground and that was it. The yelling was epic. We shrugged. Fuzz looked the other way. ‘Hey. He walked onto it.’

  The Brummie girls giggled. Behind us, the crowds grew. Everyone was scared of the EDL and the Infidels, and everyone wanted refuge in the mosque. A woman was trying to hand her toddler to us. She was pleading in some language none of us understood and a policewoman was trying to hold her back. We were minutes from complete chaos here. I raised my voice.

  ‘Chicas. I’m gonna walk the perimeter, get the fire teams in. If this is going to be the siege of Khe Sanh, let’s get it right.’

  Fuzz nodded as Sadie went to find her sniper’s nest. ‘OK Rizbhai. Right you lot, let’s do a last check.’ They racked the bolts on their weapons. Fuzz checked those with the precious body armour. Calamity and Mishy picked up a fire axe each. Fuzz tapped my arm. ‘I’m gonna take that mosque minibus there and back it up against the western entrance doors. Seal it off. I’ll be in touch.’

  I suddenly noticed she was carrying a short samurai sword laced onto her waistband. She registered my look and nodded at it. ‘If I have to use this, we really are in the shit. See ya in a bit.’

  As I ran up the staircase into the first floor I rang Duckie again. Something was nagging at me. The phone rang, and rang, and… I could hear more crowd noise, chanting. ‘Duckie! Can you… yes it’s me. Have you seen ANY Sikhs Versus Shariah on the march?’

  ‘Sikhs Versus Shariah? No. They’re not here. None of them. I can see local Sikhs turned out against the march, but… no.’

  ‘Where’s Tommy?’

  ‘He got in a fight and got dragged away. It’s all Infidels now.’

  ‘OK Duck. We’re pulling you out. Get here to Green Lane Mosque ASAP.’

  I looked out of a window, over the road to Morrisons. Nothing yet. I made my way back downstairs. The Brummie Blackeyes were giggling again as they loaded their AKs. The mosque deputy was looking at them helplessly. ‘OK girls, what have you done with the imam?’

  Kiki pointed. ‘We put him in the store cupboard.’

  The deputy shrugged apologetically and we shook hands. He spoke. ‘Salaam aleykum. I’m Nadir. Are we going to be OK?’

  I didn’t know what to say. I ended up with ‘I’m Riz. Just follow me, Nadir.’

  I methodically checked each fire position in the cavernous building. Years ago it had been the local municipal baths. I’d been here once, in my long-distant jihadi days, but it had changed since then. The mosque deputy clucked after me, apologising for his boss. I gripped his shoulder as we went through the library on the first floor. ‘Look. Nadir. Akhi. It’s OK. But I want you to do something for me. Do you have floorplans of the building?’

  He nodded nervously.

  ‘Good. I want you to photocopy them, at least five copies, and bring them to all of us. Can you do that?’

  He nodded again and got to it. My radio bleeped. ‘Rizbhai. Bus is against the main doors. But we’d better batten down the hatches. I can’t see anything but I can hear shouting… chanting. They’re coming.’

  ‘Have that Fuzz. Get into position and good luck luv.’

  43

  The second-to-last fire position was covered by Sadie, in the tower facing west down Little Green Lane. She was sitting crosslegged and the livid bruise on her right eye was showing up nicely. The slit window was open giving a clear field of fire down the road back into town. Directly below us was the minibus, jammed up against the western doors. Sadie was reciting something under her breath as she laid loaded magazines, one after the other, before her on the carpet.

  ‘And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this

  Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it

  Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this

  Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards

  The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:

  They call it easing the Spring.’

  She looked at me and smiled. ‘You know that bit in Four Lions where the emir tells them his cousin died defending a masjid in Bosnia?’

  Sadie was carefully loading rounds into the last magazine, turning and rolling them in. Each round had a different tip denoting tracer, armour-piercing… ‘Well my uncle, God grant his soul peace, actuall
y did die in a shootout outside a mosque. In Bosnia. And now look. Here we are defending a mosque. In Britain.’

  She finished loading the mag, slapped it into the magazine well, shouldered the rifle and checked her scope sight picture. I placed my hand on her shoulder. ‘I know. It’s a bad situation all round.’

  She smiled at me again and tapped the open copy of the Quran on the windowsill before her. ‘Surah l 'Imran 3:54. And they planned, but Allah is the best of planners.’

  ‘Ameen.’

  ‘But Riz, would you look at this shit?’ She gestured to a burst-open British Army ration pack behind her. ‘I could be up here for days and is any of this halal?’

  I inspected the packages. ‘Some of it is. Pot luck.’

  ‘Oh brilliant.’ She placed the rifle on a seat cushion on the window sill and tracked left and right. I started to pick at the rations, trying to guess which were and which weren’t halal.

  ‘Sadie. In all the excitement, I forgot to ask. If you survive this, what are you calling the kid?’ I nodded at her swollen belly.

  She was squinting through the telescopic sight. I knew she was taking the time to calculate distances to landmarks using the scope’s built-in rangefinding reticle. She looked from her scope to her handwritten dope charts, and back. ‘Well. After that last-minute fizzer at the roundabout, I reckon I’ll be calling him Zidane.’

  ‘Ha. Good one. So it’s a boy then?’

  ‘Yep. Mashallah, it’s a boy.’

  ‘Welcome to the war, Zidane.’

  The last fire position was covered by Calamity’s Shrike machinegun and the RPG-7, waiting on the carpet for Armageddon. It faced east, over the abandoned car park and the deserted pub. Well, mostly abandoned. Unbelievably, the Sky News crew were doing a piece to camera.

  I looked though my binoculars. I tracked left and right. Nothing yet. I handed out the last photocopy. Calamity lit a cigarette and looked at the printout, then back to the outside world.

  I went to the offices, picking my way round the nervous knots of refugees, and looked in on Sasha’s team. They’d started up all the building’s security cameras and her laptop had a feed from the drone hovering several hundred feet above us. She toggled through the channels and Kiki and Lana checked their radios. Nothing on the Airwave, nothing on the Bowman. Lana was puzzling over the Bowman’s rather old-school display.

  ‘Hold it.’ Sasha put her hand up. ‘Camera Five. What was that?’ She zoomed in to the pub up the road. I craned my neck to look and squinted. Did I see something moving? Some white blur. I didn’t know.

  Sasha took one last look. She stood up and shook her head. ‘I think we’re OK just for-’

  Suddenly there was an explosion outside and I could hear the yammering of the Shrike. They were here. I ran into the womens’ area and looked over the huddled refugees. Calamity was firing the Shrike, pak-pak-pak it spat. She stopped firing and turned back to give a thumbs-up to me. ‘Targets down!’

  I checked chamber on my weapon and ran in the other direction, calling Bang-Bang on the radio.

  She answered. ‘Hello babe. Drone cam sees multiple hostiles heading towards us from every road. That was a grenade you heard, the Shrike team got them outside the pub though. But the main lot are nearly here. We’re about to get hit. You’ll have them in sight in two minutes, see you at Sadie’s.’

  Sasha hashed in my walkie-talkie earpiece. ‘OK you lot, they’re here. Watch the approaches and watch the exits. Mark ‘em.’

  I ran back to Sadie’s position. Bang-Bang was there and had had her internet glasses over her eyes. We looked out of the window. I had my binos. We looked. Nothing. Sadie was marking ranges on a card. This wasn’t right and I said as much. ‘This ain’t right. Doll. Think like a terrorist. You two - look at this building.’

  They thought. Bang-Bang looked down, readied her AKS-74U, looked up, and spoke. ‘OK. Brick building on a convergence of two roads, perfect interlocking fields of fire. Good heavy structure. Small windows. This building practically defends itself.’

  And she blanched. ‘Shit. You’re right. I wouldn’t hit it. From the outside-’

  I raced downstairs. Stairs. Kitchen. Office. And grabbed the mosque second-in-command and I already knew what was coming. I pushed him against a wall and a Hajj tours calendar fell to the carpet. ‘The strangers! Point me out the strangers!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘People who don’t normally pray here you dipstick!’

  ‘Oh. Well we have some new men from Eastern Europe. And some nice Asian men who I haven’t seen before… they were very polite.’

  We looked at each other. He looked like he was about to cough something up and finally spoke. ‘…Oh my God.’

  I hit my radio pressel. ‘Holly, Fuzz, main level they’re already in here! Sikhs V Shariah and some white guys and... ’

  Below us, inside the mosque, the shooting started.

  44

  I hit my radio pressel again as I ran. ‘Mishy, Holly, Maryam, Fuzz, downstairs, follow on me!’

  ‘They’re here?’

  ‘They are. They are.’

  The second-in-command coughed vomit through his hand and his pale moon face gazed at mine, shamefacedly. I racked the action on my AK and a cartridge flew. Shit.

  Bang-Bang walked up behind me and gripped my shoulder and gave me an enquiring look. Ahead of us was an entrance to the main male prayer hall. Mishy and the crew ran up behind us and dropped into a loose line. Maryam checked the PKM’s belt feed. Pixie had joined us and mouthed ‘what?’ at me. I shook my head. Not thirty feet away and the hall was shuddering under the impact of bullets. Dust and splinters flew into the corridor.

  Bang-Bang ran forward and threw the doors open and dropped and fired her carbine into the vortex on full auto.

  The hall fired back in a blaze of bullets and debris.

  The main male prayer hall was a flaming deafening hell. The crowds were screaming and scrabbling to escape, piling up against each other. The screams of the children rose like a chorus. Tracer zipped and ricocheted. I jumped up and ran forward, loosing off a blind wild burst. I caught a split-second glimpse of a man in a long dark coat aiming a PPSH. His face registered from the screen shots. Davey. A white burst of submachine gun fire drove us back into cover. ‘Jesus Christ, what are they doing?’

  We dived behind the doors as the wood splintered outwards and Pixie dropped to the floor, smashed by multiple rounds. Bang-Bang waved at me and chopped the right hand signals and then pulled at Pixie’s bloodied prone body.

  ‘Holly. Pass me your makeup mirror!’

  She rummaged and threw it across the doorway at me. ‘Sikhs and white guys. They’re shooting into the crowds.’ There was a colossal bang that shook the walls. ‘Grenades.’

  ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘We go up and over, and’ I chopped my hand, ‘flank ‘em from the other exit. C’mon. Hurry!’ I tripped over the mosque office guy’s body. He was grimacing into space with a jagged bullet hole in his head.

  Bang-Bang slapped a new mag into her AK then checked her photocopy. ‘OK. Through the mens’ section. Follow me.’

  We ran left, forward into the office section, through the opened door. And slipped on blood.

  The stink of arterial blood hit my nostrils and I slipped and slid again. Bang-Bang grabbed my hand as we stepped over the corpses sprawled around the office and pulled me along. ‘Where are they? Get on the radio.’

  Ahead were the second, splintered set of doors to the mens’ mosque area. ‘Three…two…’

  We hit the doors. A storm of fire smacked and whooshed around us. We quickly made for cover and returned fire. To my left Fuzz turned, rattled off three quick shots round a pillar and ducked back. Maryam had dragged Pixie’s body with us into the office in a slick of blood. She was dead. A dead deadweight. I took her mags. From now it was a race to reload, and whoever won the race won the firefight. Whoever lost died.

  A man in a long coat jumped up from behind a barric
ade of corpses he’d shot and made a break for the exit. He was carrying a screaming child as a hostage. Fuzz shot him in the back and he fell spastically onto the kid in a puff of dust and blood. ‘He’s still moving.’ She shot him again. He died. Fuzz adjusted her floppy hat and chopped her arm down towards the enemy. ‘Heads up, that’s Davey! Shoot!’

  Everyone opened up on full auto around me.

  Davey had a sick grin on his face as he walked through the hall and machine-gunned the crowd and they were battered away from him like fuck knew what. He looked like he was hopped-up on speed or something as our fire tracked around him.

  And then his gun jammed. The grin died on his face. He looked down at the submachine gun and tried to rack the bolt back.

  Bang-Bang stood. ‘It’s jammed! It’s jammed, go!’

  She ran round the pillar and loosed a burst which took Davey in the jaw. It blew half his face off and he was slammed to the ground. He writhed and lay still. And a grenade rolled towards us from his dead fingers. It detonated with a shattering bang.

  I checked my limbs were working. The dust was choking and I could hear a high-pitched ringing sound. Maryam was under a smashed table, her legs kicking. Bang-Bang scrabbled across the carpet, grabbed her mag harness with me and we pulled her back to our barricade of corpses and wrecked furniture. Maryam flailed and smacked at the bolt of her AK. ‘What. Where. Fuckers.’

  I gripped her face and checked her eyes for concussion. ‘Maryam! MARYAM! C’mon, get back in the fight.’

  She blinked. ‘Yeah. Hooah.’ She shook her head and jumped up, rifle in the shoulder and let fly. ‘YOU-’ BRRRRAPPP ‘DOZY BRUMMIE SKREWDRIVER-LISTENING NAZI’ BRRRAAPPP ‘SLAGS!’

  Rounds whacked and whined around us. She changed magazines. ‘DID I MISS YOU OUT?’

  I pulled her back down as tracer zipped one foot above our heads. The windows behind us disintegrated into the street. Above us Bang-Bang jumped up, rattled off a mag, ejected it and slapped a new one in and gave the other side of the mosque the good news with short, controlled bursts. Flames and searing-hot cartridges spattered.