Hunter Killer

by Chris Ryan

  A vehicle shot past from the opposite direction. Jamal watched its tail lights disappear in his side mirror. He was relieved to see that there was nobody behind him. He focused on the road ahead. A minute later, another car zoomed past from the same direction. Jamal swore again – it had its headlamps on full beam, which dazzled him. He checked his side mirrors again. With reduced, blotchy vision he saw the red tail lights disappearing. He screwed his eyes shut momentarily to try and get his full vision back again.

  He opened them.

  He almost shouted out in shock.

  A vehicle had suddenly appeared no more than 30 metres behind him. Its headlamps were switched off, which was why he hadn’t seen it approach. It was closing in fast. Jamal couldn’t make out the outline, but he knew, beyond question, that it was the Discovery.

  Panic surged through him. He opened the throttle on his bike. The speedometer crept up past thirty.

  Forty.

  Fifty.

  The road had grown narrow. It twisted and turned. Jamal tried to hug the edge, praying that his skills on the bike were up to the task. He checked in the mirror. The Discovery was obscured by a bend in the road. But five seconds later the road straightened out. It was closer now.

  Twenty metres.

  Ten.

  Another vehicle sped by from the opposite direction. Its horn sounded angrily, but faded quickly. Jamal increased his speed even more. The speedo flickered past sixty. Seventy. It was too fast. He could feel himself losing control of the bike. There was a great roaring in his ears. One glance in the side mirror told him that the Discovery was on his tail.

  Now it was overtaking.

  He looked to his right. The man from the garage was behind the wheel. But in the back seat he could just make out another face that he recognised – the Phil Collins lookalike he had walked past in Perivale.

  His stomach churned. He didn’t know what to do. Speed up? Slow down? He was panicking. The Discovery eased passed him, and as it did, he saw the rear window sliding down. The vehicle was five metres ahead of him when the passenger leaned out slightly. He was carrying something: a black metal tube. A gun, maybe? Jamal found himself shouting in fear under his helmet. They were about to shoot him . . .

  It happened so suddenly. There was a blinding white flash, like electricity behind his eyes.

  He couldn’t see anything. He was totally blind.

  Time seemed to slow down.

  In a fraction of a second, he heard the Discovery’s engine pitch up a notch and he knew the vehicle was accelerating away. At the same time, he felt his tyres losing their grip on the road surface.

  He was screaming again. Still blind.

  A dreadful, high-pitched whine escaped the motorbike’s engine and he felt himself falling sideways to the right. But before his body hit the road, the vehicle came to an abrupt, jarring stop. He knew he must have crashed into the side of the road. The dreadful force of the impact jolted through him. At the same time, he felt the bones in his right arm and leg crush as they became sandwiched between the bike and the road.

  And then time sped up again. Agony coursed through him. He was still blind, but he had a picture of himself in his mind’s eye, the twisted skeleton of the bike wrapped around his own damaged frame.

  The pain was unspeakable. He tried to scream again, realised he didn’t have the strength to do it.

  There was liquid in his helmet, warm and thick. He recognised the taste of blood. He knew he had to get his helmet off, and he tried to do it. But his limbs weren’t working. He couldn’t move. He panicked even more, and inhaled a lungful of his own blood, as a hoarse choking sound came from the back of his throat.

  He couldn’t breathe.

  Seconds passed. The vision was clearing. Through the bloodied, misted visor, he saw the outline of two men standing over him. He tried to speak, but only gurgled before inhaling more blood.

  ‘Is he dead?’ said a voice. It sounded deep and slow, like a voice in a dream.

  ‘Not yet,’ came the reply.

  ‘Told you it wouldn’t fucking work. I’ll finish him off.’

  ‘No weapons.’

  ‘Won’t need them, mucker.’

  He was a hunted animal. Dread almost overcame his agony. He tried again to shout out for mercy, but again there was just a bubbling of blood and a burning in his lungs.

  One of the figures was bending over him. ‘You’ve planted your last bomb, sunshine,’ it said.

  Moments later, he felt a boot on his neck, grinding down into his jugular. His broken body started to shake. His lungs burned worse than ever. His vision clouded again and went black.

  The boot on his jugular ground down harder, constricting whatever airflow had been going through his system.

  For a moment there was no pain. Just a strange, floating sensation, like he was bobbing under water.

  Ten seconds later he was dead.

  Eleven

  Spud had blood on his boot where he’d used his heel to finish off the bomber. He wiped it on the soft grass of the verge. Danny examined the corpse. The limbs were twisted, jutting out in different directions. Blood was seeping through the bottom of the helmet. There was a burning smell in the air, and Danny knew there was a risk of the bike’s fuel tank igniting. More crucially, a car could pass at any moment. They needed to be off the scene.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said. Spud nodded his agreement.

  The Discovery was 20 metres away. They jogged up to it. Danny took the wheel. Seconds later they were driving away, and a few seconds after that a saloon car thundered past in the opposite direction. They were leaving just in time.

  ‘Muppet,’ Spud said as they drove. ‘I tell you what, mucker, these lot are like shooting fish in a barrel.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Danny murmured. ‘That’s what worries me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Danny said quickly. And the conversation was rescued by his phone ringing over the Discovery’s hands-free system. Number withheld, naturally. Danny pressed a button on the steering wheel to answer. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Buckingham, old sport,’ came the voice over the loudspeaker.

  Neither of the SAS men answered.

  ‘I’m going to work on the assumption that you’ve recovered from your little temper tantrum,’ the MI6 man said. ‘Glad to see it hasn’t interfered with your work, in any case. That was a nice little hors d’oeuvre in west London, gentlemen. Very tasty.’ Danny and Spud exchanged a withering look at Buckingham’s covert language. ‘Much appreciated by everyone, but they don’t like to be kept waiting. Any progress on the fish course?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Danny said. ‘Battered.’

  A pause.

  ‘Right,’ said Buckingham. He sounded a little wrong-footed. ‘Sooner than we expected. But good. Good. You’ll need to check your letterbox. You’ll find details of your next course waiting. Lots of pressure from above after this business in Piccadilly. All hands on deck, and we’ve come up trumps.’ Another pause. ‘Don’t let her get away, lads. Lot riding on this. Sure you understand.’

  A click, and the line went dead.

  ‘Wanker,’ Spud said.

  ‘He said “her”,’ Danny noted.

  ‘Got a problem with that?’

  ‘Guess not.’

  Danny looked over his shoulder to the back seat. ‘We’ve got the laptop,’ he said. ‘Let’s find somewhere to get online.’

  The somewhere they found was a service station on the A40. As they pulled in, they saw an ambulance and two police cars, sirens raging, heading the other way. Spud headed into the service station to get food, while Danny hooked up their laptop to the flaky 3G connection on his work phone. Spud returned with a paper Burger King bag. They wolfed down their food, then logged on to the Gmail account. Sure enough, there was a draft message waiting for them. Danny clicked to open it. Twenty seconds later, a picture appeared of a young woman.

  She was good looking. Dark hair and skin, pretty face. As
usual, her details were clearly printed underneath the picture. Name: Tasmin Khan. Address: Flat 38, Manfred Tower, Alperton. ‘Fuck’s sake, we’re going to nail half of west London at this rate.’ Unusually, beneath the picture was a link. Danny clicked it, and the browser directed him to a Facebook page, or at least a copy of one. ‘GCHQ to the rescue,’ Danny muttered.

  The page displayed a conversation between the girl – she was using the pseudonym Nicki – and a young man whose profile picture clearly showed the recognisable features of Down’s syndrome. The two SAS men read the conversation – a crass and obvious honeypot trap, but one the target was too trusting and unsophisticated to see.

  ‘I’m almost looking forward to doing her,’ Spud said.

  ‘They’re going to keep on coming,’ Danny replied.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Her. The kid on the motorbike. Galaid. They’re just the foot soldiers, like that Victoria woman said. You can bet anything there are more waiting in the wings.’

  ‘Which means more bombs,’ Spud observed.

  ‘Yeah. Unless . . .’

  ‘Unless what?’

  ‘These kids are just puppets,’ said Danny. ‘We want the guy pulling the strings.’

  ‘Abu Ra’id?’

  ‘Abu Ra’id.’

  ‘Hammerstone don’t have a handle on him.’

  ‘Hammerstone aren’t asking the right people. For Christ’s sake, they’re going after his wife. I’d bet my left bollock she doesn’t know where he is.’

  ‘You think we should speak to the girl?’ Spud tapped the screen to indicate Tasmin Khan.

  Danny nodded.

  ‘Hammerstone won’t like it. She won’t talk without a bit of persuasion. It’ll leave marks. We’re supposed to make these hits look accidental, remember?’

  Danny clicked on the inbox. He wasn’t surprised to see that the draft message had already been deleted. He shut down the laptop, then gave Spud a bleak smile.

  ‘We’re clever lads,’ he said. ‘I’m sure we’ll come up with something.’

  03.45hrs

  Manfred Tower, Alperton, was a shit hole: a squat council block with rain stains down the concrete and a background stench of piss in the foyer, which looked on to a dark stairwell. It was pissing down again outside, but even colder inside. A single strip light flickered with a noisy electric sound. There was nobody about, not at this time in the morning. They’d recced the exterior of the building and seen that only three flats had their lights on. One of them was on the third floor. Flat 38? They were about to find out.

  Danny led the way up the concrete staircase, his rucksack slung over his back. Behind him was Spud, carrying a Domino’s box full of hot pizza that they’d bought just round the corner, the cardboard damp from the rain and steaming slightly. ‘Vegetarian,’ Danny had reminded him before he made the order. ‘Or at least, no pork.’ Spud had scribbled the address of their target on top of the box.

  ‘What if she doesn’t open up?’ Spud said.

  ‘Then we’ll try it another way. But if she’s there, I think she will.’ There were a hundred ways to force an entry into a flat. Danny and Spud were adept at all of them. But the best way, by far, was to get the occupier to open up of their own free will. Danny’s calculation was that if their target was at home and in hiding, she’d be feeling pretty hungry about now.

  The front door of flat 38 was one of two along a stark corridor, each door set about 15 metres apart. There was a light on a push-button timer, but Danny left it for now and headed along the corridor in the darkness, leaving Spud at the top of the stairs with the pizza. He walked past flat 37, and as he passed the door to flat 38, he saw that there was a spyhole at head height, just below the scratched painted number. He cleared it by about two metres, then picked out the latex gloves, face mask and hairnet that he’d stowed carefully inside his rucksack. He put them on, stood with his back against the wall and gave Spud a thumbs-up sign. Spud hit the push button with his elbow to avoid prints. The corridor lit up. Still carrying the pizza, he walked up to the door and knocked twice.

  Silence.

  Spud and Danny looked at each other. Spud knocked again.

  A voice on the other side of the door. Female.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Pizza,’ Spud said. He affected a bored expression, looking round the corridor like a kid daydreaming in class.

  ‘I didn’t order no pizza.’

  Spud read the address off the top of the pizza box. ‘Flat 38?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Margherita, extra olives.’

  ‘I didn’t order no bloody pizza, go away.’

  ‘No need to get mouthy, love. Someone’s paid for this. You got anyone else in there? Boyfriend or something?’

  ‘No! Go away!’

  ‘Right.’ A pause. ‘Well, look love, you might as well have it.’

  Another silence. Danny found himself holding his breath, ready to pounce the moment the door opened.

  But the door didn’t move.

  It would have been natural for Spud to glance at Danny, but he was too careful for that. She might be looking through the spyhole. Instead, he knocked again.

  ‘So do you want this bloomin’ pizza or what?’

  ‘No, you can have it.’

  ‘You joking, love? I’ve got Margherita coming out my ears.’

  ‘Go away!’

  ‘Tell you what,’ Spud called. ‘I’ll leave it here. By the door. All right?’

  No answer.

  Spud bent down and laid the pizza box on the ground right in front of the door. Still without acknowledging Danny’s presence, he turned and headed back down the corridor. The light clicked off before he’d walked even four metres, but he kept going in the darkness until he reached the end of the corridor.

  Danny stayed very still. He could just make out Spud’s silhouette in front of the door leading to the stairwell. He could smell the pizza. He could hear traffic in the distance, and the pumping of his own heartbeat.

  Thirty seconds passed.

  Forty-five.

  Movement on the other side of the door. A kind of scratching sound. He pictured their target up against the door, looking through the spyhole.

  He readied himself.

  A click. The door opened.

  Some situations required a scalpel. Others a hammer. This was a hammer situation. He had only the fraction of a second between the target opening her door and putting her head out into the corridor, to strike. He swung himself round, his right heel digging into the pizza box, and thrust his latexed hands as hard as he could against the door. It thumped against the body on the other side. Danny lunged into the room, where the light was dim but still brighter than what he was used to. He grabbed the woman’s hair with his left hand, then slammed the right over her mouth. Just in time. She tried to scream, but all that came out was a muffled yelp.

  In an instant, Spud was there, carrying not only Danny’s rucksack but also the crushed pizza box. He shut the door behind him, laid the stuff on the ground, then dug around in the rucksack for the second SOCO kit. Moments later he was gloved, masked and hatted, just like Danny, who still had his hand firmly over the girl’s mouth.

  Spud pulled his handgun and stepped up to her. ‘See this?’ he whispered, and he tapped the suppressor that he’d fitted to the barrel of the Glock. ‘Most people think it makes the gun silent, like on the telly.’ He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t. Not really.’ He pressed the barrel into the soft flesh of the girl’s neck. ‘But if I shoot you like this,’ Spud added, ‘that’s really going to make a difference. You’d be amazed how much sound the human body absorbs close up. Very messy, but very quiet. They’ll only know you’re dead when they start smelling you by the stairs in about three days’ time. Understood?’

  The girl nodded vigorously.

  ‘Good. So when my mate here moves his hand off your mouth, you’re not going to make a sound, right?’

  More nodding.
/>   Slowly, Danny released his hand, ready to snap it back if the girl screamed. But she didn’t.

  ‘Lie on the floor,’ he said. ‘Hands on the back of your head. You’ll be dead if you move a fucking muscle.’

  Trembling, the girl did as she was told, and Danny looked round the room.

  It was a bedsit, with a kitchenette area in one corner, a single bed against the far wall. A laptop on the small kitchen table, with a webcam clipped to it. A single window looked out onto a light well. They’d clearly arrived just in time. Tasmin Khan, or whatever the hell she wanted to call herself, had been getting ready to leave. Permanently. A chest of drawers had all three drawers open, and looked like it was vomiting clothes. Two rucksacks lay on the bed, each of them crammed full. Tasmin Khan wasn’t just leaving. She was leaving in a panic, and a hurry.

  ‘Kill the lights,’ Danny said.

  Spud did so. The room fell dark, the only light being a faint greyness from the direction of the light well. Danny stepped over to it, satisfied that he was sufficiently camouflaged by the darkness. If anybody was watching from the windows on the other side of the light well – and at this time of night he doubted it – they might be able to see figures moving about, but they wouldn’t be able to identify the intruders. It was a sash window, and Danny was able to raise the lower pane to create an opening about a metre square. Outside, the rain was heavy. Good thing too. More camouflage. He returned to where the girl was lying on the floor, knelt down and spoke quietly, very close to her ear.

  ‘Nice gaff, this,’ he whispered. ‘Did you bring your mate with the funny eyes back here? Give him a good time before you blew the poor bastard up?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Save it, Tasmin. Or should I call you Nicki? I heard a rumour you like big strong men. At least that’s what you told your boy on Facebook. Well, here’s the good news: you’ve got two of them in the room with you.’