The Exit Club: Book 4: Conspirators

by Shaun Clarke

  As they could see little in the gloom, Geordie, when only halfway down, hurled a stun grenade. It bounced rattling off the stone floor, then exploded with a thunderous clap that ricocheted eerily around the basement. Getting a brief look at the cellar in the dazzling, fluctuating illumination of the flash-bang, TT saw no signs of movement and decided that it was safe to descend all the way.

  Reaching the corridor at the bottom, he tentatively tried the door of the first room but could not get it open. Assuming that all of the rooms were likewise locked, he took aim with his handgun and ‘drilled’ the lock with a couple of nine-millimetre bullets, causing more wood splinters and dust to fly away. When the lock was blown off, he dropped to one knee and gave cover with his 9-Milly as Geordie threw a flash-bang and rushed in with the others, aiming left and right, preparing to fire as the grenade exploded and illuminated the room with its brilliant, phosphorescent light.

  The room was empty.

  Without a word, still communicating with hand signals, TT led them quickly to the next room where they applied the same procedure. Finding that room empty as well, they tried the next one along, but that too was empty. They repeated this SOP all the way along the corridor, clearing one room after another, but finding all of them empty.

  However, when entering the final room, TT thought he saw something moving in the brilliant, fluctuating illumination from the flash-bang. Without hesitation, he fired a burst of twenty rounds from his submachine gun. This produced an incredibly noisy, metallic drumming sound and he caught a glimpse of something rolling away from him. When the bullets stopped hitting the rolling target, he saw that it was only a dustbin. There were no terrorists here.

  Frustrated again, TT led his team back up the cellar steps and into the reception area. Once there, they crossed a hallway filled with the smoke from stun grenades and burning curtains. It was also echoing with the noise of other members of the assault teams who had burst into the building from the front and rear and were now clearing the rooms on all floors with a combination of flash-bangs and CS gas grenades. The walls and carpets in the hallway and along the landings were singed black and shredded by grenade explosions and bullets.

  Separating from the other two men, TT and Geordie headed for the smoke-wreathed stairs, from where they could hear the hysterical voices of female hostages. When they reached the source of the bedlam, they found SAS troopers forming a line and passing the women down it with a speed that left little time for kindness. Some of the women were in shock and the eyes of all were streaming from the CS gas. They were guided down the stairs and through the library, then out onto the lawn, where some wept with joy.

  Though the embassy seemed crowded with troopers, some were still outside. Indeed, on the first-floor balcony, the plan to blast a way through the rear french windows had to be abandoned because of the risk of injuring or killing Alan Pearson, still struggling with Jock McGregor to break free from his harness and now in danger of being burned alive by the flames coiling out of the smashed third-floor window.

  As both men twisted in their harnesses, swinging in and out, getting scorched by the flames and choking in the smoke, vainly trying to release the jammed descendeur, Pearson bawled angrily at McGregor to do something. But McGregor, now also entangled, couldn’t do a damned thing and the two men continued to struggle in their harnesses at a dangerous height above the ground, hearing the sounds of battle raging from within, which just frustrated them even more.

  Meanwhile, far below them, on the first-floor balcony, Wilson and Penrose smashed through the windows with sledgehammers and threw in flash-bangs. Shucking off their harnesses, they clambered into the office of the Charge d’Affaires even as the brilliant flashing from the grenades was illuminating the gloomy room.

  At the front of the embassy, Blue Team, caught in the golden light of the early evening, in full view of the stunned reporters, press photographers and TV cameras in Hyde Park, clambered from the adjoining balcony and along the ornate ledge until they reached the heavily reinforced windows of the minister’s office. From the press enclosure, and even on TV, the distant, black-clad, hooded SAS men looked very sinister indeed.

  Glancing sideways as he made his way along the narrow ledge, Taff saw the police cordon in the street below and the press enclosure across the road, where the many TV cameras raised on gantries were focused on the embassy and, it seemed, on him. Startled, he looked away and continued his careful advance until he came up behind the first two men.

  Lance-Corporal Dave Roberts and Trooper Barry Samson, being the first at the window, saw the hostage Sim Harris staring at them from the other side of the glass. Roberts bawled through his respirator for Harris to stand back from the window and get down on the floor. Though clearly amazed to see the hooded, masked men on the balcony, Harris did as he was told, stepping away from the window and lowering himself to the floor as Roberts and Samson, covered by Taff and Corporal Jerry Manners, placed the frame charge over the window.

  While they were still putting their plastic strip charges in place, a terrorist armed with a Skorpion W263 Polish submachine gun appeared at the secondfloor window of the telex room immediately above them. The man flung the window open and hurled down a hand grenade. However, the grenade bounced harmlessly away– either it was a dud or the terrorist had forgotten to release the detonating pin.

  Before the terrorist could throw another or fire his submachine gun, a Delta Zero sniper, hiding across the road in Hyde Park, aimed along the telescopic sight of his tripod-mounted bolt-action rifle and hit him with a single, deadly round. Staggering backwards, the terrorist dropped his weapon, then disappeared from view.

  As the frame charge blew in the first-floor window, filling the air with showering shards of glass, Taff hurled in a stun grenade. The exploding flash-bang set the curtains on fire and filled the room with smoke.

  Almost immediately, Sim Harris reappeared, emerging ghostlike from the smoke, looking gaunt but alert. Carefully approaching the window, he leaned out to stare disbelievingly at the SAS men in their black CRW suits, body armour, respirator masks and balaclava helmets. However, before he could ask any questions, Taff and Corporal Manners, ignoring the crackling, scorching flames, grabbed him by the shoulders and roughly hauled him out through the smashed window. Once they had him on the balcony, they pressed him down onto his hands and knees and told him to remain there and keep his head until someone came for him. Harris nodded and lay there, but as Taff and the other three members of Blue Team scrambled through the smashed window, he sat up on his haunches and shouted excitedly at their departing backs, ‘Go on, lads! Get the bastards!’

  Blue Team, having clambered in through the smashed window, disappeared in the thickening smoke.

  By now, Red Team’s Lance -Corporal Wilson and Trooper Art Penrose had made their way along the smoke-wreathed landing of the first floor. There they heard shouts from the nearby office of the minister’s secretary. Rushing in, they found a uniformed policeman struggling violently with a bearded Iranian who was holding an RGD5 Russian-made hand grenade in one hand and a Skorpion submachine gun in the other. Though clearly in pain, the hostage policeman, PC Lock, was wrestling gamely with the bearded terrorist, trying to prevent him from throwing the grenade by holding his right wrist and falling with him over the furniture, making lots of noise. Lock had drawn his formerly hidden revolver with his free hand and was trying to put it to his opponent’s head, but either he just couldn’t manage it or he was reluctant to kill at close quarters.

  As the two men wrestled furiously, Lance-Corporal Wilson grabbed Lock with his free hand and jerked him away from the terrorist, whom he recognized from photographs as the leader, Salim. Wilson turned away from Lock as Salim, who had almost fallen over, was trying to regain his balance. Before he could do so, Wilson fired a burst of automatic fire at his head and chest. Trooper Penrose did the same. Hit by fifteen bullets, Salim was thrown backwards and crashed down through the furniture to lie face up in the debri
s on the floor, dying instantly.

  After checking that the terrorist leader was dead, Wilson and Penrose left the room and made their way across the first-floor landing towards the rear of the building, past burning curtains, through pockets of dense smoke, brushing against other hurrying, bawling SAS troopers, to try the door to the ambassador’s office. Finding it locked, Wilson was just about to blow it open with his MP5 when it was opened from inside and a youthful terrorist appeared in front of him, armed with a Browning High Power handgun. Before Wilson could open fire, Penrose, just behind him and to his right, fired a short, decisive burst from his MP5, causing the terrorist to scream in pain and stagger, shuddering violently, back into the room. Wilson threw a stun grenade in after him. The blast threw the terrorist even farther back and he stumbled blindly for another second or so in the dazzling flash. Penrose fired a second time, making the terrorist scream out again. Instead of falling, however, he gained the strength of the desperate and staggered deeper into the depths of the smoke-filled room, eventually disappearing.

  Knowing that the terrorist was wounded, desperate and still armed, Penrose and Wilson felt compelled to go after him. Squinting to see through the condensation on their respirators, as well as through the smoke, they advanced carefully into the room. Unfortunately, when the smoke was swirling about them, Wilson felt himself choking and realized that the CS gas had penetrated his respirator. Coughing harshly, he staggered outside, ripped his respirator off, breathed in lungfuls of air – which was itself filled with the smoke from burning curtains – then placed his respirator back over his face and took deep, even breaths. As he was doing so, Penrose, now trapped in the dense smoke in the room and not able to see a thing, was bawling into his throat mike for someone to come in with a torch.

  Taff, on his way up from the ground floor, met TT on the stairs and both of them heard Penrose’s cry for help. Hurrying on up, they found Lance-Corporal Wilson about to go back into the smoke-filled room. However, Taff had a torch bolted to his MP5, so he switched it on, held the weapon as if about to fire from the hip, and advanced into the room with TT and Wilson beside him. When Taff moved his submachine gun left to right, up and down, the thin beam of light from the torch bolted to the weapon illuminated the smoke-filled darkness and, eventually, Trooper Penrose.

  Not wishing to speak, Penrose used a hand signal to indicate that he thought the wounded terrorist was hiding in the far left corner of the room. Nodding, Taff advanced on Penrose, waited until he had fallen in beside him, TT and Wilson, then advanced carefully through the dense smoke, aiming the barrel of the MP5 left and right, up and down, illuminating the darkness and, more dangerously, pinpointing his own position to the hidden enemy.

  No shots were fired at him and eventually, in that thin beam of light, he and the others saw a hand, then a face… and, finally, a Browning High Power handgun.

  Covered in blood, the sprawled on a large sofa overlooking the garden. Seeing them, he weakly took aim with his weapon, but his hand shook and wavered uncertainly from left to right, letting Taff and the other three SAS men fire their MP5s simultaneously, repeatedly stitching the terrorist, throwing him into convulsions, and making him writhe dementedly as pieces of torn upholstery, foam filling and feathers exploded from the sofa, eventually drifting back down like confetti on his bloody remains.

  wounded terrorist was near the bay window

  On the outside wall at the rear of the building, level with the third floor, just below the dangling Jock McGregor, Alan Pearson remained trapped in his abseil harness, kicking and twisting ever more frantically about twenty metres above the terrace. Even worse, flames from the fire in the general office were now roaring out of the window and starting to lick at his legs. To avoid being burnt badly or choked to death in the billowing smoke, he had been kicking himself away from the wall as if on a swing, but each time he swung back to the wall, he found himself again in the flames and smoke. Finally, in desperation, he ordered Jock McGregor to cut him loose.

  Aware that if he cut the nylon rope, Pearson could plunge a great distance to a brutal death, McGregor was reluctant to do it; however, with the fire in the thirdfloor room growing stronger and the flames licking out ever closer to Pearson, he realized that this was Pearson’s only option. With a great deal of effort, being himself trapped in mid-air and scorched by the flames, he withdrew his commando fighting knife from its sheath and hacked through the nylon cord snagged in the descendeur. As the last threads were shredded, he bellowed a warning to Pearson, who fell through the flames onto the balcony. Burnt and blistered, but free at last, he smashed the third-floor window with his small, belt-held sledgehammer, hurled in some stun grenades, then swung himself into the smoke-filled interior of the general office where, according to the briefing, most of the hostages were being held.

  The room was empty. It was also locked, barricaded and piled high with flammable material that had just been ignited by the flash-bangs. Nevertheless, when Jock McGregor had followed him into the room, Pearson, though badly burned and in pain, advanced blindly through the dense smoke and flames until he reached the locked door, which he recognized only after tracing it with his fingertips. Already in a foul temper because of his bad start, he blew the locks apart with a couple of shots from his 9-Milly. The locks exploded in spitting dust and wood splinters, but the doors, barricaded from the other side, remained firmly in place.

  Determined to try another route, Pearson retreated to the balcony and clambered across to an adjoining window ledge. From there he could see inside the room, where a terrorist was striking matches to set fire to papers piled up against the wall, obviously intending to burn valuable documents. Before the terrorist could look up and see him, Pearson smashed the window and hurled in a stun grenade. The loud, brilliant explosion temporarily blinded and shocked the terrorist, so although he had raised his pistol to fire at Pearson, instead he fled from the room.

  Still perched on the window ledge, Pearson aimed his MP5 submachine gun and fired from the hip. The gun jammed. Cursing, he drew his 9-Milly, clambered off the ledge and into the room, then went after the terrorist, whom he had recognized as Shakir Sultan Said. Losing the terrorist temporarily in the smoke, he then saw him bolting into what he knew was the telex room, where most of the male hostages were held, located off to the right across the landing, which was covered in smoke.

  Unseen by Pearson, another terrorist, Feisal, the group’s second-in-command, had just run into the room with two other terrorists, Ali and Makki, when Said, fleeing from Jock McGregor, who had been following Pearson, also reached it. Seeing the unharmed male hostages huddling fearfully together in the corner of the room, Feisal brutally raked them with a burst of automatic fire from his Skorpion submachine gun, killing some and wounding others. Inspired by this gross act, Ali emptied his Astra revolver into them as well.

  Checking for wounds as he huddled with the other frightened hostages, some of whom were now drenched with blood, the embassy doorman, Abbas Fallahi, discovered that he had been saved from death because a fifty-pence coin in the pocket of his jacket had diverted the bullet. Even as he was whispering his thanks for his miraculous salvation, a smoke canister fired by Zero Delta from the other side of Princes Gate smashed through the window of the telex room, hitting him and knocking him to the ground.

  The room filled up with smoke.

  Having helped in the slaughter, the terrorist named Ali dropped his pistol in panic and wriggled his way in among the surviving, coughing, blood-soaked hostages. As he was doing this, his friend Feisal was throwing his submachine gun through the smashed window and emptying his pockets of ammunition. Said, being the last to enter, could think of nothing to do but stand in the smoke-filled room with his finger crooked inside the pin of a grenade.

  Hearing the gunshots and the screams of the victims, Pearson raced to the telex room with McGregor close behind him. Even as the two men were coming to the rescue, some of the surviving hostages were wriggling out of the blood
-soaked group on the floor, grabbing the discarded weapons and ammunition of the terrorists and throwing them out of the window, into the street below. With his MP5 held in his left hand and his 9-Milly in his right, Pearson reached the telex room, kicked the door open and immediately turned around, crouching, handgun raised in the classic CQB stance. When he saw the terrorist to his left, grenade in hand, he quickly fired a single round aimed at the head. Having entered Said’s skull just below the left ear, the bullet exited through his right temple, killing him instantly.

  Still in a foul temper and in agony from his burnt legs, Pearson checked the group on the floor and found one dead terrorist, one dead hostage, and two badly wounded men. Demanding to know if any of the survivors were terrorists, he received no response, so he grabbed the first Caucasian-looking person he could find and jerked him roughly to his feet. Before Reg Morris, the embassy’s caretaker and chauffeur, could identify himself, Pearson threw him roughly across the room, towards the doorway. From there he was manhandled, just as roughly, by other SAS troopers, down the stairs, still wreathed in smoke, through the smoke-filled library, and out onto the rear lawn where, like all the others, terrorist and hostage alike, he was given an ‘undiplomatic reception’, which meant being laid face down on the ground and trussed up like a chicken.

  Still in the telex room, Pearson was again attempting to separate the terrorists from the hostages. Taff and TT burst in as an Iranian on the floor, being bawled at by Pearson, pointed tentatively at two men sitting with their backs to the room and their hands on the wall. Before Pearson could stop them, Taff and TT fired sustained bursts at the two men, hitting one in the head, the other in the neck and pelvis, punching both of them forward, face first, into the wall, where they slid, shuddering, down to the floor, smearing the wall with their blood.

  After commanding the huddled survivors to remain where they were and not speak unless spoken to, Taff began the task of checking for terrorists by separating the wounded and the dead from those still untouched. Among the hostages attacked by the terrorists, Dr. Ali Afrouz, the embassy Charge d’Affaires, had been hit by two bullets, one of which had passed through his right thigh; Ahmed Dagdar, the embassy’s medical advisor, had been savagely wounded by six bullets; and another member of staff, Ali Samad-Zadeh, had been killed outright.