Silent Weapon

by Andy McNab

  ‘Right, Sergeant.’

  ‘Let’s go, then. I have a people carrier parked out back. Is there much gear?’

  ‘Nothing we can’t all carry. We had to bring it in our regular overnight bags, so it’s portable—’

  And then more sirens whooped through the night air. Sean stared back at the square in dismay as another two vans pulled up and cops piled out of the back. These ones weren’t SCO19, just regular bruisers, and they lined up in front of Wolsey. The shouts and catcalls from the Killaz immediately went up by about two hundred per cent.

  ‘Oh, fucking hell!’ Sean shouted. ‘I said, if they don’t do anything stupid!’

  Dave suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs. As he strode over to the guy who looked like the most senior cop on site, his expression was furious. The guy wasn’t backing down. Sean caught phrases like ‘unacceptable presence at a crime scene’ and ‘need to safeguard civilian interests’. Hands were waving, fingers were jabbing in different directions. It looked like Dave was being told: You’re in charge down there, we’re in charge up here.

  Maybe the Home Secretary had reconsidered willy size, on appeal.

  The noise of the mob was getting louder, and there was something else in the warm night air – a tension that maybe no one not born on Littern Mills could have picked up. But Sean saw the next ten minutes laid out in front of him, clear as day.

  ‘Shit,’ he breathed. ‘They’re going to kick off. They’re going to do it. We need to get up to the OP, double quick.’

  Adams shook his head. ‘At this stage the OP can come to us. What’s really sensitive up there – as opposed to just expensive?’

  ‘Uh – the laptops? I suppose. Three of them. They’ve got all the int on them.’

  ‘Then tell Mitra to pack them up and bring them the fuck down here right now. We can abandon the rest.’

  Sean nodded and turned away to raise Mitra. He couldn’t tear his eyes off the rows of cops across the square.

  A ripple seemed to pass through the front line, and then they weren’t just standing there any more, they were advancing.

  The first bottles and stones started to fly through the air towards them.

  The balconies of Gladstone were clearing. Law-abiding residents would be retreating into their flats and locking their doors. Others would be hurrying downstairs to join in.

  The first Molotov cocktail blazed a trail through the air – a bottle half full of petrol with a flaming rag stuck down the neck. It smashed at the feet of a section of cops and they hurriedly pulled back, doing a dainty little dance around the liquid fire spreading over the concrete.

  ‘Stop it! Stop it, you stupid fucks!’

  Sean wasn’t sure who it was shouting – until Adams put a hand on his shoulder, and he realized it was him. He blinked back furious tears. Just a couple of years ago, in another life, he would have been joining in – and that was what made it so painful now. He knew what a waste of space he had been back then, and he knew what he’d had to go through to wake up to reality. He wouldn’t wish it on anyone else.

  A fireball suddenly blossomed at the base of Gladstone. Sean heard the screams as a knot of Killaz scattered in all directions, away from a luckless kid who was enveloped in ripples of flame.

  It was the easiest own goal to score if you were putting a Molotov cocktail together. All the petrol went up at once, bursting out of its bottle and spraying over whoever was holding it.

  The cries of shock turned to screams of agony and terror, and the flames soon covered the kid completely. He staggered to his knees, then dropped onto his face.

  Chapter 26

  Friday 4 August, 03:15 BST

  The Killaz fled to the edges of the square as cops ran forward with a fire blanket for the burning kid. They scooped up the body – alive or dead, it was impossible to tell – between them and hurried back across the square to the nearest ambulance.

  The fire spread along the metal grille over the front of Lakhani’s mini supermarket. Fire alarms split the air with their electronic screaming.

  That’s my home!

  Sean didn’t know if he’d said it out loud. He had never exactly loved the place – but a basic instinct to protect his territory took over.

  And it was fire. When it came to fire, the little boy inside him was never far from the surface. Sean had been in fights and car chases. He had been nicked, he had done time. He had come under fire and he had killed in the line of duty. But it was fire that gave him nightmares.

  ‘Fuckers!’

  The shout came out of the dark, followed by more of the same as the Killaz grew in confidence. Figures began to move forward again, silhouetted against the flames. Sean’s eyes narrowed. What were they doing? Their body language said something was up, but he could only imagine one thing, and that was impossible. Not even the Guyz, on their worst day, would think of—

  ‘This is for Adey!’

  Light sparked from a dozen cigarette lighters, and blossoms of flame flared in the mouths of a dozen Molotov cocktails. Then they flew towards the police.

  Kieran had planned this. Under the cover of the bombardment, a couple of masked lads ran forward with one of the square’s metal litter bins. They heaved it like a battering ram against Lakhani’s grille. Sean could hear the metallic smashes across the square. One, two, three – and then the grille toppled forward.

  More Molotov cocktails blazed as the lads hoisted the bin one more time and hurled it against Lakhani’s window. The glass was tougher than the grille had been. It took several blows to knock out a hole the size of a dustbin, but that was all they needed.

  The police decided that enough was enough. At a signal Sean didn’t pick up on, they suddenly closed ranks and charged.

  The Killaz only had a couple of petrol bombs left, but that was all that was needed. They shoved them through the hole, and flames spread across the floor of the supermarket, outlining boxes and shelves.

  And the Killaz weren’t the Guyz. Sean had known that, but now the sheer size of the difference finally sank in. In their own way, the Guyz had been looking out for the interests of Littern Mills. The Killaz didn’t even have that. For them it was the kicks, and that was all. And revenge. Adey – the kid who had got the Molotov cocktail wrong, and was now either dead or badly burned in police custody – had to be avenged. To the Killaz, everything was them against us, even if they were the ones who’d started it, and even if other people were only trying to help.

  ‘I will kill him. I will personally kill the little fuck …’

  Adams held him back. ‘You’re going nowhere. Not your fight. Let the boys in blue have their fun.’

  There was movement on the balconies of Gladstone again. Lights were coming on and people were moving out, more urgently than before. A fire alarm on the ground level would have gone off in every flat too. They were evacuating.

  The Killaz had disappeared into the dark at the edge of the square, with the police hard on their tails. Sean guessed they would now run a chase through the maze of the jungle, where Kieran’s lot had cornered Mitra earlier in the day. It was exactly what he would have done, back when he was on the wrong side of a good riot.

  ‘Come on.’ Adams hurried forward, beckoning Sean after him. ‘We should look out for Mitra. It’s just possible that an Asian man carrying three laptops from a burning building might need someone to vouch for him …’

  Something gave inside Lakhani’s. Light flashed and a fireball shot out of the shattered window, sending a lick of flame towards them. They both flinched, then Adams ran on. Sean stared into the heart of the inferno that now consumed the supermarket – until Adams yelled his name and the spell was broken.

  Fuck this. He wasn’t the kid afraid of fire any more. He was the trained soldier with a job to do.

  The first inhabitants had reached the bottom of the stairs. Sean and Adams had to push their way up against the flow. Sean clocked the faces – frightened, worried, weary … and resigned. Even something
like this, your home burning down, wasn’t that much of a surprise on Littern Mills.

  In the second-level stairwell they bumped into Mitra coming the other way, and they each grabbed a laptop.

  ‘Let’s get these somewhere they can do some good,’ Adams said.

  Back across the square, lines of cops had formed to herd the evacuees while they waited for the fire brigade to turn up. Adams had to get forceful with a couple of police officers and wave ID around to be let through to the cordoned-off area.

  All the other towers were awake by now, the balconies again lined with onlookers gawking at a burning tower that wasn’t theirs. The lads set down the laptops and watched the flames consume Sean’s childhood home. Mitra and Adams both saw how Sean was staring at the blaze, and had the sense not to try and say anything comforting.

  Adams studied the scene across the square. ‘Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I could almost believe they planned this. Evacuate all the inhabitants en masse and then send out your bio-mules. A few good coughs – infection left, right and centre.’

  ‘Actually, that would be a very inefficient way of engineering contagion,’ said a bored voice, just as Sean was starting to think, Fucking hell, they could …

  The three soldiers turned round to see the biohazard man, Mirzoyan, with a couple of other white-suit fetishists, on a break.

  ‘The open air is too well ventilated,’ Mirzoyan went on. ‘To spread infection effectively, the space needs to be enclosed. If I was hatching this plot, I would infect my volunteers and then just send them to a gig, to a club, to a movie, to a game … that would do it.’

  ‘Wouldn’t the bleeding from the eyes and the coughs and the vomiting blood be a giveaway?’ Sean asked.

  The biohazard man smiled a small superior smile. ‘Bleeding only affects a few victims. Most Lassa fever symptoms are internal – headaches, nausea, weakness – so they wouldn’t show and they could be suppressed with drugs.’

  ‘Well, that’s you told,’ Adams commented.

  Sean opened his mouth, closed it again. Something Mirzoyan had said rang a bell, but Mitra broke his train of thought.

  ‘Lassa fever?’

  ‘Dave thinks that’s what the girls were smuggling. In their blood. But we’re still in the incubation period. They’ve got three weeks to become infectious.’

  ‘Shit.’ Mitra was quiet for a few seconds. ‘This incubation thing … We know about the timescale – how?’

  ‘Because Kath Buckingham and Rachel Cooke were only at the hospital for a week before they came home with us.’ Sean was still trying to pin down the thing that was bothering him.

  ‘And they are …’

  ‘The false identities being used by Girl X and Zara at the hospital,’ Sean said impatiently. Mitra looked doubtful. ‘Got a problem?’

  ‘If those were the identities being used at the hospital – I’ll take Dave’s word for that.’ Mitra delved into his pocket for his phone and flipped up the images directory. His eyebrow went up as he nodded and showed the screen to Sean and Adams. ‘Only, neither of those is the identity in Zara’s false passport.’

  The picture showed the main page of a passport. The photo was of Zara, but the name was yet another fake one. Beth Robinson.

  While Sean and Adams took it in, Mitra thought for a minute, then flipped through the images more slowly. It was almost like he didn’t want to produce visual evidence.

  But he came to the one he wanted, dragged thumb and forefinger across it to enlarge, and showed it to Sean. It was another page from Zara’s fake passport, and it had the entry stamp from Nigerian Immigration on it.

  ‘And she entered Nigeria three weeks ago. Is that long enough for you?’

  Minimum incubation period of around twenty-one days … That was what Dave had said. Zara had already had those twenty-one days.

  Sean felt his guts go into freefall. This wasn’t over. In fact, it was only just starting.

  Adams had also joined the dots. ‘Mitra, get over to Dave and push that passport pic into his face until he understands,’ he ordered. ‘We don’t have three weeks’ grace – this is happening now.’

  ‘Me? And what are you going to do?’

  ‘This has gone far enough. Dave plans to saturate this place with personnel to track down the girls, but we don’t have time. From what you’ve told me, there’s only one reliable informant, and the little cocksucker is currently leading a riot. So, Harker, you’re with me. We’re going to track him down and get answers.’

  Chapter 27

  Friday 4 August, 03:45 BST

  Sean and Adams ran into the night, following the sound of fighting: the shouts and smashes, and the crackle of police radios.

  Sure enough, it led them into the overgrown paths of the jungle. Depending on whether you really wanted a rumble or just to let off steam, it was here that you lured your enemy. Then you engaged them on your own terms. You planted ambushes, or turned and fought, or just disappeared into the dark.

  The passages between the overgrown flowerbeds were pools of dark. Streetlights made it far enough down to show your head and shoulders, but your chest vanished into the darkness and you had no way of knowing where your feet were or what they might be about to step on.

  Adams suddenly bent over double, swearing loudly as he tripped over a litter bin. Sean heard it rolling away over the concrete.

  ‘Walk down the middle,’ he said. ‘Keep away from the edges.’

  Orange light glimmered ahead and they came out into the open space of the playground. Sean’s ears had already told him what they would find.

  The Killaz were ranked along the far side, pelting a row of riot cops with stones, bottles and fragments of torn-up playground equipment. Sean and Adams lurked behind the police. They edged round the playground to get a gander at the rioters without attracting a baton charge of their own from the cops.

  ‘So, which one’s Kieran?’ Adams asked.

  Sean squinted, trying to see. There were several skinny types dressed in the Kieran uniform of sleeveless jacket, cap pulled down over the eyes, scarf over the face.

  ‘That one …?’ he said, trying to be sure. ‘Skinny fucker …’

  ‘Focus, Harker. Try to narrow it down.’

  ‘Third from the left …?’

  The kid in question hurled a bottle and the action made his hat fall off. He quickly scooped it up and jammed it back on, but it gave Sean long enough to see it wasn’t their man. The kid had a crewcut.

  ‘Nope, not him …’

  ‘Fucksake, Harker, we’ve got a job to do.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s any of them …’ Out of the blue inspiration struck, and Sean pulled out his phone.

  ‘Oh, right!’ Adams exclaimed. ‘He’ll interrupt his busy social schedule to talk to you?’

  ‘If he answers, and we don’t see someone pick up, then he won’t be any of them, will he?’ Sean said as he called up the phone log and tapped Kieran’s number. It rang twice, three times …

  ‘Yo, Sean, mate, how’s it hanging?’

  Sean and Adams scanned the rows of rioters. None of them were on the phone. Adams rolled his eyes in disgust but kept quiet. He leaned in close to catch what Kieran was saying, jamming a finger into his other ear to block out the noise all around him. Sean could have put it on speaker, but people at the other end can always tell and no one likes the feeling of being listened in on.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ Sean said. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Not so fast, mate!’ Kieran’s chuckle was knowing and suspicious. ‘You never know who might be listening in.’

  ‘OK, you know I’m local. Just give me somewhere the pigs won’t know. I really need to talk.’

  ‘So, talk. It’s what we’re doing.’

  Sean drew a breath. How to put all this into words Kieran would understand? ‘OK. The room. The room under Wolsey that the cops busted, right? That started all this.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It was hot, but i
t’s empty now. I heard some cops saying they think there’s somewhere on the estate the goods have been taken to. Mate, we really need to find it before they do.’

  ‘You mean, another room stacked up with hot goods?’

  ‘Well, yeah.’

  ‘Sean, mate, you are full of it. There weren’t no goods, were there? Hot goods don’t get special attention from armed response and the Teletubbies.’

  ‘Teletubbies?’ Sean said, baffled.

  ‘The wankers in white suits!’ Kieran snapped. ‘What are they? Forensic experts? What have you got in there, mate? A dead body?’

  Sean opened his mouth to say something, but Kieran got there first.

  ‘Here’s how it looks to me. You come to us talking about outside interests bringing their crap onto Littern Mills. Well, tell you straight, mate, I’m thinking that’s what you’ve been doing.’

  ‘It’s not like that—’

  ‘So tell me how it’s like, and be quick because I’m seriously losing interest.’

  The best way of lying, Sean had learned a long time ago, is to tell the truth and let the other guy hear what their preconceptions make it come out as.

  ‘Listen, you know how the Guyz went tits up? Getting involved in bombing? Well, it’s the same thing again. Terrorists. Only I want to stop it happening.’

  Sean saw Adams scowl at the glancing blow with the truth, but he didn’t think he had a choice.

  A pause, then Kieran was back, no longer sounding bored. ‘Terrorists? On our manor?’

  ‘Yup—’

  ‘Well, fuck that. Once we’ve seen the pigs off we’ll be turning our attention in that direction.’

  ‘But if you—’

  ‘Sean.’ Kieran sounded clipped and cold. ‘I still respect you as one of the Guyz, but that could change. And no offence, mate, but you don’t live on the estate any more, do you? You grew up here, you should understand. You’re turning into a foreigner. We deal with our own problems. We don’t get the pigs involved.’

  Sean tried one more time. ‘Look, if you—’

  ‘OK, I’ve tried doing this the nice way. Here’s the nasty way. Fuck off.’