by Damien Lewis
‘Sitrep,’ came Kilbride’s voice, demanding an update on the assault.
‘Two down,’ Boerke intoned into his walkie-talkie. ‘Going up to deal with third.’
‘One down,’ Smithy added, from his position at the rear of the bank. ‘Going down to deal with the genny.’
Boerke and McKierran reached the top of the stairs and a corridor opened out in front of them. Smoke was billowing out of a room halfway along it, and there was the acrid smell of burning rubber. Boerke signalled to the big Scot that he was going forward. As McKierran covered him the lean South African pushed ahead, a hunter silently probing the shadows. He reached the smoke-filled doorway, choking on the bitter smell of an electrical fire. He dragged his Arabic headscarf up over his face to try to filter out the fumes, and took up position on one side of the doorway.
Above it was a sign:
Imperial Bank of Beirut.
Security Control Room –
Authorised Personnel Only
Boerke grinned to himself behind the headscarf. Authorised Personnel Only. That was good.
He sensed McKierran join him at his left shoulder, and signalled that he was going in. Boerke stood back, levelled a boot at the wooden door and gave it a savage kick. The door panels splintered, it caved inwards and Boerke leaped through the opening. His weapon at the shoulder, he did a quick scan of the room: a crackling fire to his right, in among a series of metal boxes and wires, throwing out a cloud of black smoke; up above him, a jagged hole blasted through the roof, which had to be where Kilbride’s rockets had hit; to his front, a desk covered in chunks of plaster and a thick layer of dust, plus an upturned brass teapot and some shattered glasses; to the left of that a chair on its side – and a figure lying slumped in one corner, half lost in the shadows.
As Boerke’s torch beam probed the darkness around the fallen man, the wiry South African spotted the shape of a weapon rising from the floor and turning towards him. Instantly he pulled his trigger. The M16 barked, three bullets shattering the hand that gripped the gun. The guard let out an agonised cry, and his bloodied AK47 clattered to the floor. Three quick strides and Boerke was over by his side, kicking the weapon away from him.
Behind him McKierran did a quick scan of the room. The priority had to be to put out the fire before the whole of the bank went up in flames. He glanced across at Boerke, giving him a T-sign, with the tips of his fingers held against the palm of his hand, and disappeared into the corridor. McKierran headed back to the junction with the stairs, where he found what he was looking for. Once back in the security room, he emptied the fire extinguisher in several long bursts, its contents dousing the burning fuse board and the frazzled electric circuitry in foam. When the flames were extinguished, all that was left was a smoking mass of scorched wiring and blackened terminals.
Boerke grabbed his radio. It was time to report in to Kilbride. ‘Fourth man down. All areas secure. Come and join the party, man.’
CHAPTER SIX
TWENTY MINUTES LATER and Boerke had the four guards locked up in a secure room at the building’s rear. They had suffered blast wounds, shock and loss of hearing, and the guard from the security control room had a badly shot-up hand. But Boerke reckoned they would all live, which was saying something after the ferocity of the assault. Ward, the young SBS soldier, was proving to be an excellent medic. He’d got a saline drip into each of the guards, and he’d strapped up the fourth man’s smashed hand. For now at least there was little need to restrain them. None of them were capable of going anywhere, let alone trying to escape.
While Ward tended to the wounded guards, Boerke, Berger and McKierran went about strengthening their hold on the bank. A daisy chain of Claymore antipersonnel mines was established on Rue Riad al-Solh, to either side of the building. Three of the tripod-mounted mines were connected together with detonation wire – one angled towards the left of the street, one up the centre and one to the right. When triggered, each mine would fire out a charge of seven hundred steel ball-bearings in a sixty-degree arc, scything down anything in its path. Once the Claymore ambush was set, the men concealed it with war debris: chunks of wood and shattered masonry that lay scattered along the street. And then they began their first watch.
To the rear of the bank Johno and Nightly took up their guard positions, although no surprises were expected there as the back-access alleyway ended in a cul-de-sac. This left Kilbride, Smithy, Moynihan and Emile free to investigate the vault. At the inner end of the blasted lobby a staircase descended below ground. Under normal circumstances, customers would be taken down to the bank’s vault using the lift. But with the whole place bereft of all power the stairwell now offered the only access to the bowels of the building.
At the top of the stairway Kilbride encountered the first security gateway. As soon as the bank’s alarm had been triggered, metal bars had started to descend from the ceiling. The steel barrier had dropped to within just two feet of the floor, and had then stopped dead as the bank’s electricity died. Kilbride stared at it in amazement, realising just how close the assault had come to a total fuck-up. They had managed to fry the bank’s circuitry with just seconds to spare before those steel gates closed completely.
Kilbride ducked down and thrust his M16 under the obstacle, rolling through the narrow gap after it. Smithy, Moynihan and Emile followed, until all four men were standing on the far side of the partially lowered metal gate. At the bottom of the flight of stairs was a second security barrier, and they had to repeat their rolling manoeuvre to get past this one as well. Kilbride shone his torch into the gloom on the far side. A main corridor stretched ahead, leading to the vault. A small service passageway branched off to the left-hand side.
Smithy jerked his head in that direction. ‘Leads to the back-up genny room, boss.’
Kilbride glanced towards the side passage, then turned back to the main corridor. Some twenty yards beyond where he was standing he could see a massive shape blocking their way. It glinted dully in his torch’s beam, a faint bluish tinge betraying the fact that it was made of solid steel. It was time for Moynihan to go to work with his bag of tricks and blow the door to the vault.
‘Smithy, we’re going to need some light,’ Kilbride announced. ‘Take Emile and get the lanterns from the truck. Put a couple on the stairs to light the way and bring the rest down here.’
‘Boss,’ Smithy replied.
He and Emile disappeared up the stairwell, and Kilbride turned to face Moynihan. He nodded in the direction of the vault. ‘Shall we?’
Moynihan raised one eyebrow. ‘Sure. It should be age before beauty, shouldn’t it, boss?’
Kilbride shrugged and moved towards the massive steel structure. As he got closer, details became clearer. The passageway was some six feet wide by eight tall, and the door to the vault filled most of it, apart from the solid steel door frame. The smooth brushed-metal surface of the door itself was interrupted by a series of large rivets that ran around the edge. Set in the centre-left of the door was a steel wheel of the type used to seal off bulkheads on a submarine.
Kilbride played his torch beam on the walls to either side of the door. To the left lay a black panel, inside which was a dial for keying in the combination of the lock. If the right sequence of numbers was entered the metal wheel would free itself, allowing the internal steel locking bars to be rolled back, at which point the giant door could be swung open.
Kilbride took hold of the cold steel spokes of the wheel and tried to spin it anticlockwise. It didn’t shift one inch. He put his weight against it and tried again, this time in the opposite direction, just in case it had a reverse thread. Again, it didn’t budge.
Kilbride turned to the Irishman. ‘Paddy?’
Moynihan ran his hand over the cold steel surface of the door. ‘Sure, there’s an old saying: “A golden key will open any door.” And when you don’t have a golden key, Paddy Moynihan says a little bit of plastic explosives will work wonders.’
‘You reckon?�
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‘Sure, she’s a big fecker all right. Must weigh all of four tons. But there’s two weaknesses to any door: the lock and the hinges. Now, the hinges on this one are pretty massive and they’re no help … But the lock … If we can hit the door with a shaped cutting charge and blow a hole in her, we should be able to reach in, fiddle with the lock and retract the pins manually. End of story.’
Kilbride slapped the Irishman on the shoulder. ‘Get to work, Moynihan.’
Moynihan dumped his bag on the floor and rooted around, pulling out a shaped charge of PE4. The plastic explosive was rolled into pencil-thin lengths, several of which had been wound together to make up a long sausage-shaped charge. Using gaffer tape Moynihan started stringing the PE4 in a ring around the lock. Smithy arrived with the lamps and brought one closer to light Moynihan’s work. Finally, the Irishman affixed a length of detonation wire to a firing cap which he inserted into the charge.
‘Either I’m a Chinaman or that’ll never bloody work,’ Smithy grunted. ‘You should use four of ’em – one charge’ll never do it.’
Moynihan kept his eyes glued to his work. ‘Sure, Smithy, has no woman ever told you – it isn’t size alone that counts, it’s what you do with it.’
‘You’ll eat your bloody words when it fails to blow. There’s fifty million in gold riding on this, Paddy …’
The Irishman ignored Smithy and talked to himself softly as he prepared to blow the charge. ‘Sure, we’ll roll out a length of wire this way, and maybe to the bend in the corridor and then down the service passageway – get us back away from the feckin’ blast. For it’s better to arrive ten minutes late in this world than ten minutes early in the next …’
Moynihan rolled out the detonation wire all the way back to the generator room, and got Smithy, Emile and Kilbride in there with him. Having half closed the door he glanced at the others and raised one eyebrow.
‘You feckers ready?’
Kilbride and Emile nodded.
Smithy scowled. ‘Ready for fuck all—’
The last words were lost in an almighty explosion as Moynihan hit the detonator switch. For a split second the air was punched out of their lungs as the blast wave rolled through the confined space, ripping along the corridor and the walls. It tore up the stairs and through the lobby of the bank, whipping up a storm of splintered wood and debris and spitting out the remaining glass in the bank’s shattered windows. The noise of the blast echoed out across the Green Line, losing itself in the rumble of battle that rolled on and on across the city.
At the front of the bank Boerke, Berger and McKierran raised their heads from the dirt and exchanged glances.
‘Holy shit,’ Bill Berger muttered. ‘That Irishman sure ain’t messin’ around. Anyone left alive down there, you reckon?’
Boerke gave an evil grin. ‘Who cares, man, as long as the door is blown.’
‘You’re a canny bastard, Bushman,’ Jock McKierran growled. ‘More gold for us, is that yer meaning?’
The three men laughed. They had every confidence in Moynihan’s explosive abilities. But if the vault had been blasted open each of them was now itching to get sight of the gold. Boerke righted a battered armchair that had been blown over by the blast. It was one of the few pieces of furniture that had survived their assault on the bank. He climbed into it and pulled out the Rubik’s Cube from the smock pocket of his medical tunic. Keeping one eye on the street up ahead, he started to manipulate the plastic puzzle.
McKierran glanced at Bill Berger, then nodded at Boerke in his green armchair. ‘Aye, well, there’s nothing like making yerself comfortable … Are we taking it in turns, laddie?’
Boerke carried on playing with the Rubik’s Cube as if he hadn’t heard him.
As the smoke in the basement cleared, Moynihan was the first to pop his head around the corner of the corridor. At the far end he could just make out the form of the giant door, still looking very much intact. The steel was scorched and blackened by the blast, but that was about all … He groaned to himself, and went to give the lock a closer inspection.
While he did so he heard Smithy behind his back, muttering, ‘Thick Paddy bastard … I said it’d never bloody work.’
Moynihan felt a sudden flash of anger towards the Sergeant, but he forced himself not to react. He needed to concentrate all his energy on opening the massive steel door. He felt certain that the problem was less the amount of explosive he’d used and more his ability to channel the blast in the right direction. He had to focus one hundred per cent of its destructive impact onto the steel surface of the door, and he had an idea how he might just do that.
Moynihan dropped his bag and began scrabbling around again. ‘Sure, in case you feckin’ English bastards was wondering that was just the dress rehearsal.’
He pulled out a handful of PE4, a couple of metal funnels, some wooden batons and a roll of black gaffer tape. As he set to work, Kilbride and Smithy glanced at each other in amazement.
‘Couple of old gardening funnels like I keep in me garage to fill up me lawnmower,’ Smithy remarked, incredulously. ‘Okay, you mad Irish bastard, what’re you up to now?’
Moynihan ignored Smithy’s question and continued working on his new explosive device. As he did so, Kilbride did a quick walkabout of the bank, giving the men an update on the Irishman’s activities. He paused in the bank’s lobby, at the unit’s long-range radio set. Every four hours Kilbride had been sending a one-word sitrep to their Cyprus base, signalling that all was fine with the mission. If he missed a transmission, then that would raise the alarm. Kilbride checked his watch: it was twenty minutes before another sitrep was due. As he turned away from the radio he heard the faint staccato bleeping of an incoming message.
He grabbed the headphones and started transcribing the Morse code onto a scrap of paper. ‘Kilo One, Base. Heavy fighting in Golf Sector. Mission aborted. Return to base. Repeat, return to base. Acknowledge.’
Kilbride chuckled to himself. ‘Kilo One’ was the code name for his own unit and ‘Golf Sector’ was that for the Green Line. As if they didn’t know already that they were in the middle of a bloody great big firefight. And what sort of bullshit reason was that to call off the mission, anyway? Kilbride sensed the hand of Major Thistlethwaite at work. He began tapping out a response to the message on the radio’s Morse pad.
‘Base, Kilo One. Radio malfunction. Repeat, radio malfunction. Do not copy your message. Await further update. Kilo One, out.’
Kilbride didn’t believe that they would swallow it back on Cyprus, especially Sergeant Major Jones and some of the other old hands. But it was about the best he could manage in the circumstances. Once he’d finished sending the message Kilbride unscrewed the cover on the radio’s battery compartment, removed the battery and bent a couple of the lug pins out of shape. He reassembled it and the radio stubbornly refused to power up. Now they really did have a radio malfunction. If they needed it at any stage, he could always bend the lug pins back into shape again.
Down below in the basement, Moynihan had filled each of the two metal funnels with a half-circle of plastic explosive. He inserted a detonator, attached the wire and gaffer-taped the whole lot up. Then he gaffer-taped a couple of one-inch wooden blocks onto the open end of each funnel. He attached a wooden baton to the neck of the funnel, and with a second baton taped to the first Moynihan had fashioned a wooden handle that was just the right length to jam against the wall.
He glanced at Smithy. ‘Make your fat self useful and grab hold of that.’ He indicated the free end of the wooden handle. ‘When I have the feckin’ charge in position I want you to jam that baton in tight against here.’ Moynihan patted one of the vertical concrete stanchions of the corridor. ‘Got it?’
Smithy grunted.
Moynihan manoeuvred the open end of the first funnel over the lower half of the lock. When he had it exactly in position Smithy jammed the baton in place, and the first of the funnel charges was held tightly against the door. They did a
repeat performance with the second, jamming it in tight over the upper half of the lock.
Moynihan stepped back to admire his handiwork. ‘Simple lesson of explosive physics,’ he remarked. ‘When the PE4 blows it takes the path of least resistance – the inch gap at the funnel’s mouth – so placing the lock at the epicentre of the explosion. End of feckin’ story.’ He turned to Smithy. ‘Sure, even you should be able to understand that …’
Smithy shook his head in disgust. ‘Couple of gardening funnels … You’re round the bloody bend, Paddy. It’ll never bloody work …’
Moynihan ran the detonation cord back to the generator room, and the two men retreated inside. Five minutes later Kilbride rejoined them. He’d made the Irishman promise not to blow the funnel charges without him.
The noise of the second explosion had barely died away before Moynihan popped his head around the corner of the corridor to check. The two metal funnels had been blasted backwards like a pair of missiles, flattening themselves against the back wall of the basement. They lay there among the splintered remains of the wooden batons. But as far the steel door of the vault was concerned, it remained almost unchanged.
Moynihan uttered a string of curses. ‘We could be here all feckin’ night trying to feckin’ blast our way through that feckin’ thing …’
Smithy glared at the Irishman. ‘We don’t have all night, you thick Paddy bastard. I said it’d never bloody work—’
Moynihan rounded on him. ‘So what does a feckin’ gobshite Sassenach like you know about it? You have any better suggestions? Keep feckin’ quiet if you don’t.’
The two men eyeballed each other. ‘Well, why don’t we just bloody do like we do on training and blast a hole through the bloody wall?’ Smithy demanded. ‘It’s only bloody concrete. Got to be a lot bloody easier than going through six inches of bloody steel.’