Seventh (The Seventh Wave Trilogy Book 1)

by Lewis Hastings

“Alpha 55, can I come in, please?”

  “Alpha 55, go ahead.”

  “We have recovered a small bag of clothes from outside 48 East Street. Believe it to be the object seen being thrown from the Mondeo.”

  “Received.”

  A continuing list of abbreviated and acronym-laden comments made its way onto the event log.

  “MP from 51 speed six zero, road conditions are good, no opposing traffic, safe to continue, one vehicle ahead. Target vehicle is braking, now wrong side of the road, speed seven zero.”

  The latter part of the commentary aroused the CAD inspector who slid his microphone into place and prepared to abort the pursuit.

  Simms desperately wished for more power and a decent hands-free system.

  “Braking, braking, vehicle is turning left, left, left…into…”

  Nine Nine’s observer completed the sentence.

  “…MP, he’s into the Poets flats – left at Shelley, it’s a dead end, preparing to bail out. Can you get units to this location please?”

  The force, like many others up and down Britain had become used to this type of activity, drivers often only in their teens would try to escape in an area in which they had first-hand knowledge, better to elude the ‘Five-O’ with their cumbersome body armour and equipment, whilst they sprinted away into the night in their tracksuits and Nikes.

  But this vehicle was different.

  “Into the car park MP, he’s doing a 180 and we are back out onto King, turning left.”

  Simms had been in the pursuit for five minutes and was already mentally exhausted.

  His eyes saw only what they needed to, allowing him to stay in the chase, whilst his brain processed every piece of information before him, even hazards that didn’t eventuate flashed through his unconscious mind. His hands and feet were working in perfect synergy as he balanced risk with excitement.

  “Left onto Browning MP, speed five zero.”

  India Nine Nine’s observer announced that the junction was clear as they hovered at a thousand feet, their thirty million candlepower Night Sun searchlight illuminating the road and surrounding areas.

  Without warning, the Mondeo braked fiercely. A small set of white lights illuminated as the car then accelerated in reverse, its front tyres competing for traction.

  Despite the assistance of the vehicle’s anti-lock braking system Simms had no option but to run into the back of the bandit car. The impact was severe enough to deploy Simms’ airbag.

  Both vehicles came to a halt. Curtains at a nearby block of flats started to twitch as the local neighbourhood came to life, awakened by the activity outside their anonymous, mundane dwellings.

  Simms unbuckled his seat belt and attempted to waft away the clouds of black powder from the airbag detonation, all the while providing a brief but breathless sitrep.

  “51 RTA outside Barrett House. Stand by for an update. Can I have some backup to this location please?”

  The operator spun around in her chair. “Hear that boss? Local unit has crashed.”

  Every unit within five miles was descending upon his location. Eager for the chase and better still the arrest, officers were hammering their own patrol cars alongside streets, adding to the excitement, furthering the knowledge that something interesting was happening in south London. The problem was, it was happening all the time.

  The CAD inspector knew that his hardest job now was to maintain control – the last thing he wanted was a shooting on his shift, the second was one of his own getting hurt. For some, the political correctness had become so commonplace that the former was more concerning than the latter.

  Simms stopped. He recalled the last words of the operator, ‘be advised that occupants may be in possession of a firearm.’

  Something deeply intuitive made him stay in the vehicle which whilst battered and bruised was still just about driveable. Seatbelt off, he watched and waited as India Nine Nine hovered obediently overhead, a hawk watching its prey.

  The murky street was intensely illuminated by the Night Sun system, mocking the one remaining headlight on Simms’ vehicle.

  Instinctively, he placed the Focus into reverse and started to back away from the target car. His front air dam clattered onto the road, leaving similar damage on the Mondeo’s rear end. A fine mist emitted from Simms’ car, the result of a punctured high-pressure hose hidden somewhere deep in the engine bay.

  “MP from India Nine Nine the target vehicle has deliberately rammed 51. 51 appears OK; he’s in his vehicle. Occupants of the Mondeo are also remaining in theirs. Seems to be some form of stand-off. Another unit to each end of Browning please.”

  Overhead the AS355 realigned itself, better to illuminate the entire street. The commander could see a larger vehicle approaching at speed along Browning. The white BMW 5 series was an icon in the city. A star on its roof was all the aircrew needed to see.

  On board were three officers and a mobile arsenal – enough to deal with most immediate action scenarios. Conventionally the units would work in pairs but their counterpart was twenty miles away, supporting a cross border operation on a motorway heading south into the adjoining county of Kent.

  The driver concentrated on the rapidly unravelling scene before him. His passenger, or as he was referred to, the Navigator, dealt with the radio, and in the rear the third man, the observer, acted as a liaison between the unit and other specialist staff. All were armed with Glock 17 semi-automatic pistols; the navigator and observer were readying their Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine guns.

  Dressed in dark blue with matching body armour, carrying ballistic equipment including shields and helmets, the trio could strike swiftly and take control of most situations in a coordinated and highly trained approach.

  The Navigator made contact with his CAD operator.

  “MP from MP 413, on scene Browning – air priority please.”

  As his sentence finished, two of the Mondeo’s occupants exited their vehicle.

  The driver, a young male in his early twenties, but no more, looked startled, lost, and arguably more scared than he had ever been. He was holding a dark object in his right hand. Dressed in ill-fitting jeans and a cheap, fraudulent T-shirt, he looked like a boy thrust into a man’s world.

  His front seat passenger was entirely different. His frayed looks belied his relatively young age.

  Simms stared at him through the windscreen of his patrol car, his mind alive with electric stimuli, desperate to absorb every last detail. As hard as he tried to focus on the developing scene his eyes kept focusing on the heating element in the Ford’s windscreen, its zigzagging wires mapping out across the glass shield.

  Simms blinked and blinked once more.

  The passenger looked as angry as the recent wounds on his face, which bore the hallmarks of deep-seated burns, burns which openly wept as the male glared at his opponent through coal-black eyes.

  Sensing an opportunity to take control Simms opened the driver’s door and began to exit. As he stood, struggling against the weight of his stab-proof vest he heard a challenge.

  He was in the way; an unnecessary and deadly obstruction.

  “Armed Police! Get onto the floor now! Do as I say and you will not be harmed. Do it. Now!”

  The voice’s owner was confidently, quietly and efficiently weighing up the evidence before him, figuring out in milliseconds how to contend with at least two potentially armed criminals and an unarmed young officer with adrenaline still coursing through his veins.

  Frankly, he hoped the kid would hit the ground too. A ‘blue on blue’ was categorically all he needed to make a bad week worse.

  He raised the barrel of his matte-black phosphated-bodied MP5 from the low-ready position in a single arcing motion; staring at the driver tactically over the top of his weapon, his leather-clad right index finger moving decisively from the safe position to the firing position, easing pressure onto the trigger, ready.

  He knew his colleague had the passenger painted with his o
wn site. But there was still the rear passenger to contend with.

  The observer was ready to move in with his Glock and assist with any arrests.

  Tried and tested. They had done it all a thousand times.

  And then the moment changed, in half a heartbeat the situation erupted. The driver began to yell something, his voice was heavily accented. The observer had heard it before and he was convinced it was Russian, but why here, in London?

  The young male started to shout to Simms, his nearest opposition, but he was shouting for clemency not control.

  “The girl! The girl! I know where she is! Help me!”

  He brought his right hand up in line with his shoulder. To an onlooker, trained or otherwise, it appeared threatening. But Simms had heard the call for help.

  He rotated his upper body to look at his colleague and in a critical, intense and focused moment he sub-consciously saw the first round leave the weapon. On board India Nine Nine the observer saw it via his high-powered lens, a brief escape of smoke from the barrel was all the experienced crewman needed to see.

  What he had observed were the expanding propellant gases escaping, exerting rearward pressure on the weapon’s mechanism, allowing the round to leave the weapon and in turn facilitating the whole process, which repeated in the time it took to blink.

  The sub-sonic 9mm Parabellum round had past Simms before he had chance to register its presence. It covered the forty metres in an instant, striking the driver in the chest. With a muzzle velocity of over a thousand feet per second, the round appeared to hit its target almost before it had been registered as a distinctive crack in the evening air.

  The operator squeezed the trigger again.

  The second round deployed, leaving a gaseous miasma in its wake, wafting into the marksman’s face, teasing his nostrils with its acrid chemical stench.

  The round struck the young male in the collarbone, shattering it. His fall from grace was as far removed from a Hollywood film set as it could be. He simply dropped to the ground, and in doing so released his grip on the phone he had been holding, which clattered onto the pavement.

  He was dead before he was able to have another conscious thought.

  He would never have the opportunity to purge his soul, to steer the hunters to their prey – the girl was so pretty, she shouldn’t have been left there like that. Alone.

  The officer implemented years of training; scanning over the top of his weapon, left and right, finger outside the trigger guard, watching the target intensely in case he returned fire. He knew his team needed to neutralise any further threats, to take control, but not at any cost.

  Simms could see the rear seat passenger clambering from the back and into the driver’s seat. He knew that they were going to try to escape. He shouted back to his colleagues, desperately trying to communicate what he was observing.

  He took the opportunity to seize the moment, leaving the relative safety of his car. He ran towards the deceased male, quite why, the subsequent enquiry would reveal, he wasn’t entirely sure.

  He had covered a few paces towards the Mondeo when he saw the passenger raise a pistol in his direction. He heard his colleagues challenge again. His conscious mind was spinning out of control. Fight or flight were his only options, like a batsman caught between the wickets at the nearby Oval he was marooned.

  The endless hum of the helicopter’s engine added to the disarray. It was the most surreal moment in his short life and shorter career.

  The passenger levelled the weapon across the Ford’s rooftop and squeezed the lightweight trigger. The first 9mm round missed Simms completely and embedded in a nearby wall, the second left the short barrel of the iconic Austrian weapon before the passenger had felt the trigger reset.

  The mechanism was silky-smooth, almost imperceptible as it fed another round from the fifteen remaining, allowing the whole process to repeat itself, hurling a third projectile on its way towards a terror-struck Simms.

  Simms’ body reacted to the second and third bullet as each hit him in the side of his chest; whilst his vest was not ballistic, it was able to suppress the raw energy of the round and most likely saved his life.

  What the vest failed to do was reduce the energy to a point where it wouldn’t cause a few of his ribs to implode; the intercostal cartilages giving way and allowing at least one of the ribs to puncture his lung.

  He tried to leap spectacularly over a low boundary wall but the effect of being shot at such close range forced him unceremoniously onto the pavement, his pale face skimming across the concrete, before he lay motionless, in intense pain, quietly praying for leniency.

  The passenger then turned towards the ARV crew and fired indiscriminately. At such close range it was chaos.

  Nine Nine took over the commentary attempting to broadcast a live TV feed back to the CAD room. The pixilated, distorted images were all Inspector John Daniel needed to see. It was his worst nightmare. How the hell he would explain this unravelling skirmish on the streets of London to an already over-stressed deputy commissioner was the least of his problems.

  One thing was for sure, despite his incredible experience and blemish-free career, his days as a CAD manager were most likely over. Hopefully, he would be offered a role that suited him and appeased his ever-loving wife. It was time to move on.

  He took his glasses off, laid them on the desk, rubbed his eyes, put them back on and re-engaged with the situation. His skill lay in his ability to organise disparate groups of people in tactical situations.

  “Nine Nine keep the feed coming please. Trojan sitrep ASAP.”

  He turned to one of his more experienced desk sergeants and shouted, “Has anyone spoken to Roberts? His crew started this mess. Get him on the bloody phone, sharpish!”

  The ARV navigator fired three rounds. The first struck the rear hatchback window frame and ricocheted at a sixty-degree angle into the night sky. The second struck the Glock, causing its plastic components to shatter in the passenger’s hand, breaking a finger and tearing skin from another.

  The third round sliced through the target’s neck, avoiding the left external carotid artery but damaging the sternocleidomastoid muscle.

  Bleeding profusely, the passenger ducked into the Mondeo as the third member of the team gunned its throttle and accelerated along Browning Street.

  Nine Nine’s pilot instinctively followed, leaving the ARV crew to regroup. A local unit moved forward upon their instructions and tended to Simms, who was still down but not out.

  The observer keyed the microphone, “MP, we are back on board and will continue the pursuit. All area cars are to maintain cordon and control only. Do not approach this vehicle.”

  “MP received,” the operator repeated the instructions from the ARV crew as his colleague organised an ambulance to the scene. Satisfied this was done, he shouted across to Daniel.

  “Boss, Deputy is on the blower, wants an update, shall I put him through?”

  “Oh, please do Derek, please do.”

  The Trojan team were racing along Browning hoping to pick up the damaged and highly sought-after Mondeo. With air support, it was just a matter of time before they located it.

  “India Nine Nine, we have a temporary loss. Vehicle is somewhere in the vicinity. Stand by.”

  Unbeknown to both crews, the new driver on board the Mondeo had turned right into Colworth Grove, a dead-end street about half a mile from them. With his lights off and bringing the car to an abrupt halt using the handbrake, he had become all but invisible.

  Nine Nine swept along the road and banked, turning sharply to repeat a run across the top of the local residential area, half of which was coming to terms with a fatal police shooting on its doorstep.

  The ARV slowed, its driver, used to playing cat and mouse, had decided that it must be somewhere nearby. The area car at the larger junction of Browning and Walworth Road had not observed anything other than a taxi, and even that had been stopped and searched.

  Now all they
had to do was triangulate the area, close it down, and wait.

  The crew on board the AS355 saw another vehicle travelling along Walworth and turning slowly onto Browning. It had a triangle on its roof. A dog patrol had arrived.

  Both units exchanged quick-fire information on their back-to-back radios as they wound their windows down, listening to India Nine Nine as she gained height and created a larger search area, infrared camera ready for any foot chase.

  Cade had been joined by O’Shea.

  “You OK?”

  “Yes, fine. You left me, but there was no way I was negotiating those bloody stairs at that speed. I sat tight and prayed that our man George wouldn’t flip the old girl over!”

  Cade looked at her, deliberately, but not so intently that she found it disturbing.

  “You and I make a great team kid,” he said in a Bogart-esque voice, “Of all the buses in all the world…”

  They stood quietly now, outside the bright red transport symbol, for the first time in what seemed like hours. Unusually, the air was still, the traffic was light, and all that could be heard were Nine Nine’s rotor blades as it maintained a search pattern over Camberwell; the sentinel quietly watching over its most coveted possessions.

  “Jack.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is she?”

  Cade paused, trying to play down his inbuilt fear before replying through pursed lips, “I have absolutely no idea Carrie, none at all. We have let her down.”

  O’Shea wasn’t sure whether to offer a hand of friendship, to stroke Cade’s arm, embrace him or just leave him to his thoughts. After a few well-chosen words, she chose the latter.

  “Jack, I need to help here. I’m experienced beyond your wildest dreams and I need to use that knowledge. Frankly, if I don’t, I’ll go bloody mad. At least let me offer some thoughts on where I think this might head, you never know I might…”

  Cade held his hand up, as if to quieten her.

  “Go ahead,” said Cade as he saw Roberts’ details on his phone, “I’ve got a few minutes of battery time left so make it snappy, mate.”

  “Jack, one dead in the Mondeo, one of our local lads is down but OK, the passenger and an accomplice have escaped but we’ve got enough staff to sink a battleship. They are somewhere near Browning Road. We’ve got every man and his dog searching now. Are you OK? Where are you?”