Overkill pr-1

by James Barrington

  Le Moulin au Pouchon , St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France

  Saadi Fouad had rehearsed his actions many times before, and knew precisely what he had to do. Almost immediately they had begun their occupation of the house they’d spent some time moulding plastic explosive charges, studded with pounds of ball-bearings, nails and screws as a kind of rudimentary shrapnel, around the ground-floor doors and windows, to be triggered by simple tripwires. Those, they were confident, would eliminate the first wave of any assault, leaving them plenty of time and firepower to engage the remainder of the attacking force.

  As soon as the floodlights switched on, Fouad ran swiftly up the staircase and crouched in front of the locked door of the small back bedroom, looking down the stairs and into the blackness of the hall over the barrel of his Kalashnikov assault rifle.

  Abbas had briefed Fouad and the others very thoroughly. He didn’t expect that the house would ever be assaulted, simply because of the security surrounding Podstava and El Sikkiyn, and he had always believed that if the French authorities ever tried to gain entrance to the house they would simply be dealing with a small group of gendarmes, effective enough at controlling traffic and handling normal French criminals, but hopelessly unprepared for the level of training, weaponry and dedication that his men possessed.

  As the M79 fin-stabilized high-explosive grenade smashed into the stone wall immediately beside the door frame and virtually vaporized the front door of Le Moulin au Pouchon with a roar that shook the house to its foundations and showered him with debris, Fouad suddenly realized that in this matter Abbas had miscalculated, and very badly. Moments later he heard the flat crack as the plastic explosive around the doorframe detonated, the explosion precipitated by a section of the ruined door which had snagged on a tripwire, and flattened himself on the floor as the air filled with flying steel.

  ‘Arwens, now,’ Dekker called, and immediately two almost simultaneous explosions ripped through the night, tearing the rear door of Le Moulin off its hinges. As the door toppled outwards and crashed to the ground, the first troopers rushed inside the property, weapons at the ready, alert for the Arab terrorists they expected to find.

  But the danger wasn’t in front of them, it was behind. The home-made booby-trap placed by Abbas and his colleagues exploded less than a second after the first five men had dashed into the kitchen. Small but lethal steel missiles flew everywhere, bouncing off walls and ceiling, ripping into flesh, and all five men fell.

  ‘Stop,’ Dekker yelled, as his remaining troopers rushed forward. ‘Second team – regroup outside. Cover the exits. Nobody goes in.’ As his men scrambled into what cover they could find and sighted their weapons at the windows and the opening where the door had been, Dekker spoke again into his microphone. ‘Ross, Dekker. The rear door was booby-trapped. I’ve five men down, injuries unknown. I’m going in alone.’

  Seconds after the front door booby-trap detonated, Saadi Fouad heard another explosion at the back of the house, and realized that a second group of attackers must have smashed their way in through the rear door. Two stun grenades bounced into the hall and Fouad barely had time to close his eyes and cover his ears before they detonated. Then dark shapes poured through the oblong hole where the front door had been, diving left and right into the shadows. Fouad scrambled to his knees and squeezed the trigger of his assault rifle. He poured a lethal stream of 7.62mm shells down the stairs at a rate of six hundred rounds a minute.

  The problem he had was that he was by himself, and when the Kalashnikov fell silent as the thirtieth and last round was fired, he took over three seconds to unclip the empty magazine and snap on a full one. But by that time two of the dark shapes were halfway up the stairs, and less than one tenth of a second after that he was dead.

  Dekker eased his way over the threshold of the kitchen door with exaggerated care, feeling with his feet and left hand for any tripwire or other actuating device. In his right hand he held his Hockler, and he was looking everywhere for any sign of the opposition. The faded carpet covering most of the kitchen floor was dark with blood, but he didn’t look at that.

  The door through to what Dekker guessed was the hallway was closed. He approached it cautiously, turned the handle and eased it open a crack, and peered out. By the dim light of the moon which was shining through the hole where the front door of the house had been, he realized he was looking straight down the muzzles of two Hocklers.

  ‘Dekker,’ he said with relief, and pushed the door wide. ‘Where’s the opposition?’

  One of the troopers shrugged. ‘There was one upstairs, but he’s dead. Apart from him, the place seems deserted.’

  ‘OK. I’ve got five men down in there,’ Dekker said, gesturing back into the kitchen. ‘Second team, this is Dekker. Target appears cleared. Enter with caution and render first aid. Establish a perimeter watch – there may be opposition players in the grounds.’ He turned back to the troopers. ‘Where’s Beatty?’

  ‘Upstairs, with the boss.’

  St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France

  Hassan Abbas and his two companions had barely reached the security of the derelict outhouse when the M79 grenade took out the front door of the old mill. The sounds of the plastic explosive and the stun grenades detonating were almost as loud, and then the staccato beat of the Kalashnikov carried clearly up the hill. Seconds later the weapon fell silent, and Abbas knew that they would not be seeing Saadi Fouad again, at least not alive.

  Jaafar Badri moved a length of wood carefully to one side, making sure he made no noise, to clear a space for Abbas to sit on the floor. Then he and Ibrahim took up station in positions looking down the slope towards the mill, weapons at the ready.

  Abbas opened up the Samsonite bag, pulled out the laptop computer and switched it on. It seemed to take an age to load the start-up programs, but he barely noticed because he had other things to do.

  He opened the bag again and removed the mobile phone, which he switched on. Then he connected a data cable between it and the laptop and put the computer and phone on the bag, clear of the floor. He pulled the Glock out of his shoulder holster, removed the magazine and swiftly ejected each round on to the stone floor in front of him. Abbas reloaded the magazine, rammed it home into the pistol and worked the slide to chamber the first round, pulled out the magazine again and added a single round from his pocket to replace the one he’d just chambered.

  The last thing he needed was a weapon jam, and past experience had taught him that a freshly loaded magazine was always more reliable than one in which the bullets had been sitting for days or weeks. He had two spare magazines attached to the webbing of his shoulder holster, and he swiftly unloaded and reloaded both of them as well. He left the pistol on the ground within easy reach of his right hand, then looked down at the laptop screen where the Windows ME desktop had just appeared.

  Abbas smiled, placed his forefinger on the touchpad, slid the cursor across the screen to the Internet Explorer icon and double-clicked the left-hand mouse button. The program loaded almost instantly and the ‘Connect to’ dialog box appeared on the screen as the Dial-Up Networking utility accessed the mobile phone and began dialling Wanadoo. Abbas knew that within two or three minutes at the most he could begin the detonation sequence.

  Le Moulin au Pouchon , St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France

  ‘So where the fuck are they?’ Dekker demanded.

  ‘You’re sure there would have been more than one terrorist?’ Ross asked.

  ‘Absolutely.’ Richter was positive. ‘There are four beds in this house, four prayer mats down in the living room, but only one dead Arab up here on the landing. An Arab’s prayer mat is like his comfort blanket – he never goes anywhere without it. Somewhere there are three more of these bastards, and we’ve got to find them.’

  The rear bedroom door had yielded to a round from an Arwen but, apart from the glowing screen of the desktop computer, had revealed nothing of interest.
No doubt Baker, when he got his hands on the machine, would have a lot more to say.

  Richter’s phone began vibrating again and he snatched it out of his pocket. ‘Richter.’

  ‘He’s back,’ Baker said shortly. ‘He’s calling from a mobile phone, and he’s gone straight into the Weapon Control module.’

  ‘You have to stop him,’ Richter said urgently, ‘because we can’t find him. Change one digit on each of the firing codes. He might think he’s mis-typed it when the system refuses to accept it, but even if he suspects that you’re doing it, it will still take him time to get you off the system.’

  ‘Right,’ Baker replied, and rang off.

  ‘He’s on the system again,’ Richter said. ‘He’s here somewhere, and we have to find him now.’

  A trooper appeared at the foot of the stairs and called up. ‘Boss, the kitchen, please, immediate.’ Ross and Dekker ran down the stairs, Richter close behind. In the kitchen, five troopers lay flat on the floor, two obviously dead and three receiving treatment from their comrades. The faded carpet had been pulled back against the wall, and someone had opened the trapdoor.

  ‘Their bolt hole,’ Dekker breathed. ‘Where does it go?’

  ‘I’ve been down it, just to the bottom of the ladder,’ the trooper said, ‘and there’s a passage that runs underneath the house, but they must have gone up the hill, because the downward passage has a metal grille fitted across it. It’s real old, and real solid.’

  Dekker looked at Ross. ‘We don’t go down it,’ he said flatly. ‘If they booby-trapped the doors, there’s no way there isn’t some sort of a nasty surprise waiting for us down there.’

  ‘There’s no point in going down there,’ Richter said. ‘They just used this to get out of the house. It has to lead to a building or just out into the fields somewhere.’

  ‘Right,’ Ross said. ‘Back upstairs, and see if we can pick them up with the night-vision glasses.’

  St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France

  Badri and Ibrahim had barely moved since they’d reached the derelict outhouse. They stood, silent as shadows behind the ruined walls, looking down the gentle incline towards the old mill, which now stood ominously silent in the faint moonlight. Behind them, crouched on the floor, Hassan Abbas was hunched over the laptop, still working on the detonation sequence. The first code he’d input had been rejected, which he had put down to a typing error, but when the second authorization code that he’d taken extreme care to get right was also rejected, he’d realized the system was being tampered with.

  The only way that could happen was if the other user on the system wasn’t actually General Modin, but someone who’d used his logon details to gain access, and who was altering the master list of authorization codes. And that, Abbas realized quickly, was something he could easily deal with. He exited from the Weapon Control module and checked the logged-on users. He found only one – Modin – which was itself unusual. Normally other users would have logged on, checked something or carried out some kind of maintenance task, and then logged off. But for the last several hours, only that single user had been on the system, and Abbas knew he had to be a doppelgänger.

  That in turn meant that General Modin had been compromised and that some authority, presumably the same authority that had ordered its execution squad to attack the house, knew about Podstava. But what they didn’t and couldn’t know about was El Sikkiyn, although they were about to find out.

  Hassan Abbas had a degree in computer science from Cornell University in the States, and was by any standards an expert. He had exactly the same authority on the Krutaya mainframe as the system designer, and could do anything he wished. He thought for a few seconds, then initiated a full system maintenance shutdown routine. This required the forced disconnection of all users apart from the initiator of the routine, and he watched in satisfaction as ‘General Modin’ suddenly vanished from the list of logged-on users. As a precaution, Abbas deleted Modin from the list of authorized users. Then he copied the list of modified firing authorization codes into the laptop’s word processor program before turning his attention once again to the Weapons Control module.

  Le Moulin au Pouchon , St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France

  ‘There’s definitely something there,’ Dekker muttered, his eyes glued to the night-vision glasses in the darkened bedroom. ‘About a hundred metres up the hill. It looks like a derelict building, but I can see at least one person in it, maybe two. I’m only seeing their faces.’

  ‘That has to be them,’ Richter said. ‘Take them out.’

  The bedroom had only one fairly narrow window with a view up the hill, and it was immediately obvious that two men wouldn’t be able to shoot out of it at the same time. ‘Take the first shot as soon as you can,’ Ross instructed the sniper. ‘With any luck the second target may show himself straight afterwards, taking a look down here.’

  The trooper nodded, opened the window and rested his Accuracy International PM sniper rifle as comfortably as he could on the sill and stared up the hill through the Davin Optical Starlight scope.

  Richter’s mobile rang again, with the news that he had hoped not to hear. ‘It’s Baker. Sorry, but he ejected me from the system a couple of minutes ago, and I can’t get back in – he seems to have deleted Modin as a user. It’s all up to you now.’

  ‘Thanks a bunch,’ Richter said, and snapped the phone off. ‘That was my computer man in London,’ he told Ross. ‘Dernowi has kicked him off the system, so we’ve got minutes at the most to sort this out.’

  Even as he spoke, the sniper squeezed the rifle’s trigger and immediately brought the weapon back on target. ‘One down,’ he said, never taking his eye from the sights.

  St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France

  Karim Ibrahim suddenly jerked backwards in a spray of blood and, in a slow motion that was almost graceful, span to the ground, his Kalashnikov clattering on to the stone floor beside him as the echo of the shot rang around the valley. Badri sprang across to his fallen comrade and looked down in disbelief. Ibrahim was dead, had been dead before he even hit the ground, a massive bullet wound in his face.

  ‘A sniper,’ Badri snapped, disgust in his voice, and rushed back across the outhouse to the ruined window. Keeping low and behind the wall, he pushed the muzzle of his Kalashnikov through the window and emptied the magazine down the hill towards the old house.

  ‘Stop,’ Abbas shouted, ‘stop firing. Now they know where we are. You cannot hit them, and I need you alive to keep me alive. Reload, and stay down and out of sight.’

  Almost reluctantly, Badri crouched low and fitted a new magazine to his Kalashnikov. ‘Should we move on?’ he asked.

  Abbas shook his head. ‘No. They would hunt us down like animals in the dark. To have killed Ibrahim like that, with a single shot, means they have image-intensifier sights and sniper rifles. They probably also have automatic weapons and grenades. We have two Kalashnikovs and three pistols. We have no choice but to make our last stand here.’ Badri nodded, but said nothing. ‘They cannot reach us directly from the house,’ Abbas said. ‘The undergrowth is too thick. Now they know where we are, they will try to work their way around and come upon us from behind.’ Abbas gestured urgently to the dark hillside at the rear of the outhouse. ‘Move over there and watch for them.’

  Abbas had displayed an immediate tactical grasp of the situation, and of the intentions of Ross and Dekker. They’d both studied the terrain leading up to the outhouse through their night-vision glasses and had decided that it was effectively impassable without making their presence quite obvious, which would inevitably invite a stream of bullets from the surviving bodyguard. An approach from the rear was the only viable option.

  Dekker and four troopers, followed by Richter, slid silently out of the front door of Le Moulin au Pouchon and ran up the road for about two hundred metres, then moved through the scrubby hedge and started up the hill.

  Hassan Abbas l
eant back from the laptop computer, his fingers leaving the keyboard for the first time in what seemed hours, and for a few seconds he just sat there, deep in thought.

  When El Sikkiyn had been conceived, the al-Qaeda leadership had insisted on the simultaneous detonation of all two hundred and three weapons placed on American soil. Abbas and Sadoun Khamil had both argued that it would be better only to detonate the majority of the weapons, leaving the others still in place and hidden, to be used as a lethal bargaining counter for the future.

  But al-Qaeda believed that the only way that America could be induced to fire its entire nuclear arsenal at Russia, which was the prime objective of the plan, would be to ensure that America suffered an overwhelming nuclear attack, clearly originating from Russia. The American and Russian governments might be able to avoid a full-scale nuclear exchange if only a few weapons were exploded. They could, perhaps, negotiate some kind of reparation or settlement, particularly if the Russians could demonstrate that the attack had actually not been their doing. And that was not what al-Qaeda wanted. El Sikkiyn was designed to ensure the total destruction of both America and Russia, hence the single, massive strike.

  The problem that Hassan Abbas was facing, as the executor of El Sikkiyn, was time. Ever since he had switched on the laptop, he had been trying to complete the detonation routine. But that required the inputting of two twelve-digit codes – twenty-four digits – for each weapon. It was a safeguard the Russians had built into the system, and there had been no way Abbas could reasonably argue against it.

  The other problem was that before any weapon could be detonated, the user had to select ‘Individual’, ‘Group’ or ‘Total’ to determine whether just one or a number of weapons were to be fired. Abbas had selected ‘total’, but he’d only enabled thirty-two of the two hundred and three weapons, and he knew that there was no possible way he could complete the authorization sequence for all of the devices before the unknown attackers would have worked their way around to the outhouse and killed him.