by Dc Alden
He twisted his head around, looking upwards through the shattered passenger window. He could see the flat roof of a building above a row of cheap grocery shops and liquor stores. Not the nicest area of town, remembered Khan. Then he saw something else, a figure in the driver’s wing mirror, getting larger.
The shooter was only a couple of yards away, carefully inspecting the van. Khan could see his head turning but the weapon was out of sight, no longer on the man’s shoulder. He seemed almost relaxed. Maybe he assumed the threat had been eliminated and was—
Suddenly the side door was wrenched open, light flooding into the rear compartment. Khan reacted immediately. He grabbed the door handle and threw himself out, landing hard on the ground. The shooter spun around, catching the barrel of his rifle on the door frame. Khan shot him twice in the chest and the man staggered, falling backwards inside the van.
Khan scrambled quickly to his feet, his pistol pointed towards the body. He noticed that the man hadn’t released his weapon, and was horrified when the shooter slowly raised himself into a sitting position, coughing and spluttering. Khan watched him in fascination; he was certain he’d hit him. The man looked up and their eyes met. In that instant, Khan saw the body armour under the combat jacket. Both men raised their weapons. Khan fired first, the round taking the gunman through the temple. He flopped backwards into the van, very dead.
Khan quickly scanned the area around him. With all the turmoil going on, he figured nobody had seen what had just happened by the van. One thing was for sure, this guy wasn’t working alone. Khan pulled the body out and let it drop to the ground. He climbed inside the van and knelt down beside Spencer. It was obvious he was dead. The floor was slick with blood and Khan noticed the single bullet wound to the chest, probably hit by a ricochet.
He spun around and peered over the driver’s seat. To his right he could see a sprawling housing estate that ran for half a mile along the Wandsworth Road towards Vauxhall Cross. As he watched, he saw flashes coming from several windows overlooking the main road and automatic gunfire rippled the air. The only people he could see were dead, scattered along the road. Nobody seemed to be taking any undue interest in him or the van, which was now obscured by a veil of smoke that swirled around on the light summer breeze.
Khan slid back out onto the road, crouching down next to the gunman’s body. He quickly searched the corpse. No ID card, no travel pass, no money, nothing. Khan studied his features. Dark curly hair, thin beard framing his jaw line, high cheekbones, slight build; possibly from one of the North African states. Arabian, then. He was dead, so no chance of a roadside interrogation. But dead men could still prove useful.
Khan holstered his pistol and stripped off the man’s body armour, strapping it tightly around his own torso. He picked up the AK-84, checking the magazine and making sure a round was chambered. He rifled the man’s pockets, finding two more magazines. He weighed the AK-84 in his hands, getting reacquainted with its feel. Satisfied, and feeling better able to protect himself, Khan turned his attention to his immediate dilemma.
He still had a major problem and that was how to get to back to the office at Millbank. Any further progress eastwards along Wandsworth Road could prove deadly. The gunmen in the tower blocks had the road covered, and from their high elevation could easily pick off anyone stupid enough to attempt passage. No, he’d have to wait until dark. He checked his watch. That was in three and a half, maybe four hours. He’d have to find a bolt hole somewhere, keep off the streets.
Scanning the buildings to his left, Khan searched for an escape route. There, an alleyway between two store fronts. It may be a dead end but, then again, it may be just the hiding place he was looking for. He checked the street again. There was sporadic gunfire, but thankfully it seemed to be coming from much further up the road. Behind him, the Wandsworth Road continued westwards which, apart from a few hastily abandoned vehicles, looked relatively unscathed. But it was east that Khan needed to go.
As if on cue, the wind shifted slightly, drawing a curtain of smoke across the street. Khan used it as cover, running to the side of the road and ducking between two parked cars. Keeping his head low, he checked the pavement in both directions, but it was empty. He turned his attention to the alleyway. It was maybe five or six yards away to his left, sandwiched between an internet café and a store front with steel shutters protecting its façade. Khan slowly scanned the area in all directions as smoke drifted silently overhead. He held his breath and dashed into the alleyway.
It was narrow, about thirty feet long, with a wooden gate at the far end topped with razor wire. Khan ran quickly along its length, his footsteps echoing loudly in the tight passage. He tried the handle; locked. He glanced up at the razor wire. It was rusted, thickly curled and vicious-looking. Khan didn’t fancy trying to climb over that, not in his light summer trousers and short-sleeved shirt. He tried the gate again, forcing it with his shoulder. It gave a little, but not much. He couldn’t risk shooting the lock out in case it attracted unwanted attention.
Two or three shots rang out close by and Khan spun around in alarm, raising his rifle. Smoke carried on the breeze, obscuring the end of the alleyway. Khan imagined figures behind it, armed, angry, searching him out. He was trapped like a rat in a pipe. He turned his attention back to the gate and carefully reached over the top, threading his hand between the coils of razor wire. He groped around and found a dead bolt on the other side, sliding it quickly backwards. He tried the handle again and, to his relief, the gate swung open. Khan went through quickly, closing it behind him and securing the bolt.
He found himself in a small backyard. High walls surrounded him on three sides and the ground was covered with rubbish and discarded building materials. There was a door to his left that led into the rear of the steel-shuttered store, secured with nothing more than a hasp with a thin piece of wood jammed into it. Khan removed the wood and stepped inside. He stood quite still, listening. There were no other sounds apart from muffled noises coming from the street outside.
In the dim light, Khan noticed that the walls had been recently plastered and decorated. There were two small rooms to his left and ahead of him a large empty space with a few bags of plaster and some building debris piled in the middle of the room. There was no glass frontage or door entrance, just a wide aluminium shutter separating the newly-renovated store from the street outside. Light pierced the shutters, illuminating a billion dust particles drifting lazily on the air.
Khan breathed a little easier. It was just an empty retail shell, obviously still in the process of being renovated, but it would give him the temporary shelter he needed until darkness fell. He made his way out into the rear yard. There were several heavy bags of concrete lying amongst the debris and Khan dragged a few over to the gate and piled them against the footplate.
He returned to the store, securing the back door with a piece of discarded wire and a plastic chair wedged under the handle. It wasn’t perfect security but it would alert him if somebody tried to gain entry. He found a spot at the front of the building and lost himself in the deep shadows. Although it offered him short-term sanctuary from the anarchy outside, Khan knew he was effectively trapped, but he needed to lay low for a while. If he stayed here, hidden away in this empty store, the trouble outside might just pass him by. Later, he would make his move.
Of course, the darkness held its own dangers; any friendlies out there would have little or no time to react before they realised that the dark-skinned man with the flak vest and assault rifle was actually a British intelligence operative rather than a terrorist, but it was a chance he’d have to take. So what the hell was going on out there? Khan shivered involuntarily. Was this happening elsewhere around the city? And what about the rest of the country? There would be a lot of terrified people out there tonight and the emergency services would be completely overwhelmed.
Fleetingly, he thought about Salma, the bright, attractive legal secretary he’d met a few weeks ago on a rare da
y off. Things had been going well, and they’d enjoyed a few dates together. She lived near Brick Lane in an outrageously priced one-bedroom apartment, where Khan had spent the odd night sleeping on the couch. Salma was not one to rush things and Khan respected her for that. Besides, he didn’t want to blow his chances.
He wondered where she was right now. If she was still at work she’d be able to see the fires from her office in the city. Khan tried to remember what floor she worked on. The forty-second, that was it, although he got the impression that the height bothered her. Or maybe she was already at home, watching it all on the news. He hoped so.
Khan had told her he was a civil servant working for a dreary government department in Whitehall, a well-paid but uninteresting position, prompting no further curiosity on her part. How would she react if she saw him now, holed up in an empty shop with an automatic rifle across his lap? For the first time since he got out of bed that morning, Khan managed a thin smile.
She’d probably have a fit.
At that precise moment, Salma Nawaz was fighting for her own life. She pushed and clawed to no avail against the unyielding mass of shouting and screaming bodies that had her pinned against the floor-to-ceiling window on the forty-second floor of the Hanson building. As she twisted her neck and looked out across the city, the chaos on the streets below only heightened her terror.
At six pm, Salma had been working in the datacentre, one floor down from her desk at Lewison, Butler and Partners, the prestigious city law firm where she worked. She’d been sitting in front of the large display screen, dragging and dropping electronic documents around the company’s file structure, when she heard a deep boom and the floor shook beneath her two inch black heels. Then, all the lights in the room went out and the display in front of her died. A wave of panic gripped her and she’d stumbled out into the corridor, where the emergency lights had flicked on. She made her way up the fire escape stairs, emerging onto the forty-second floor, where the first thing she noticed was that all the desks were empty and every computer screen was lifeless. The power must be out up here too, she realised.
She heard loud voices, then shouting. Salma thought she recognised some of the voices, but they sounded different, shriller and high-pitched. There was a commotion coming from the other side of the large, open-plan office. She walked quickly between the desks, seeing most of her colleagues crowded against the east-facing windows. What on earth were they looking at?
Salma didn’t like to get too close to the windows. Heights scared her, although she didn’t mention that in her interview and had struggled to keep it a secret since she’d been at Lewison-Butler. Sometimes, whenever something of interest was happening outside, people would loiter near the windows to watch, particularly if it was a lightning storm or a light show over at the Dome. Salma always stayed on the periphery, away from the windows. She imagined that the slightest pressure against them would make the glass crack and break. Irrational, of course, because during her building induction she’d been told the windows could withstand squillions of pounds of pressure and the glass was coated with super-strength epoxy something-or-other, but none of that was any consolation to Salma. The only statistic she remembered was that here, on the forty-second floor, she was standing five hundred and forty-six feet above the streets of London. And that thought alone made her feel sick.
Against her better judgement, Salma made her way towards the windows. There were maybe sixty or seventy people gathered there, nearly everyone in the office, looking out over East London. Everyone seemed to be shouting and pointing. What on earth was going on? She saw several others break away from the crowd and bolt for the staircase. The first pangs of real fear began to gnaw at Salma then, but curiosity was the stronger emotion. She climbed onto a desk and stood up, looking out over the heads of the crowd. The scream rose in her throat and she stifled it with a fist.
Above the urban sprawl to the east, a giant airliner circled the sky, two of its engines ablaze and trailing black smoke. Salma watched in horrified fascination as the aircraft turned slowly towards them. She suddenly recalled the attacks on the World Trade Centre, many years ago. She hadn’t even been born then, but the footage she’d seen had always chilled her, the images of those plunging to their deaths, the crowds below watching, unable to help. She’d imagined herself there, trapped on a shattered window ledge a thousand feet above the ground, a curtain of smoke and flames behind her, those around her screaming, crying. Jumping.
More people broke away from the crowd and bolted for the lobby, but Salma found herself rooted to the spot, transfixed, as the crippled aircraft lumbered around the sky. She jumped off the desk and made her way to the window, drawn to the macabre spectacle. It was an Atlantic Airlines Airbus, a double-decked, five-hundred seater. She could see it quite clearly now. It wasn’t heading directly for them, she could see that also, but it was going to be close. The pilot seemed to be fighting for control as the wings dipped and swayed and the aircraft yawed from side to side. She could see that the tail fin was also damaged, the upper half shattered and blackened, trailing ribbons of twisted aluminium. The aircraft loomed closer.
One of the senior partners suddenly cannoned into her, sprinting for the lobby. She scrambled to her feet and swivelled back to the window. The aircraft was almost upon them. One moment it seemed far away, but then the office darkened as the huge airliner filled the sky in front of the building. It thundered past the windows, slightly below her, the wing tip barely fifty feet from the glass. In its wake, the whole building shook to its foundations. Pictures sprang off the walls and everything rattled violently as terrified employees clung to anything they could to steady themselves.
Salma just stood there swaying, her hands clamped over her ears as the winged monster screamed past the building. She followed its path as it headed towards the centre of London, knowing it was going to crash. She lost sight of it as it banked to avoid another high building, the turn abnormally steep. Moments later, a towering fireball mushroomed into the air over the West End. Salma was paralysed with horror. She’d just witnessed the final, terrible moments of hundreds of people. Nausea churned her stomach and made her head spin. She staggered away from the window.
She had to get out, get away from the horror that threatened to overwhelm her. She had to get home. She was about to run to the stairs when another sound stopped her in her tracks. It was like rumbling thunder, growing louder with each passing second. Suddenly, the fire escape doors burst open and scores of people spilled out into the office, shouting and screaming, tumbling over desks and sprawling onto the carpeted floor. Then smoke started belching into the room, thick black smoke, travelling quickly across the ceiling, filling the air above them.
Salma ran down the corridor towards the kitchen. The crowd surged after her, seeking a way out, charging like a herd of panicked wildebeest. She found herself lifted off her feet and hurled forwards. Her head cracked sharply against something hard and her vision swam. She scrambled upright and fought to stay on her feet as the bodies closed in around her. Her vision blurred momentarily, but her face pressed against a smooth surface, cool and comforting under her skin. Like glass…
Salma’s eyes regained focus as she realised she was pinned against the kitchen window. She twisted her neck painfully to see what was going on. Down the packed corridor she saw a group of men desperately trying to block the gaps beneath the fire doors, their hands clamped over their mouths as the smoke continued to pour into the office. Then the realisation hit her: they couldn’t get out. The fire was below, leaping up the stairwells, the building shafts, burning, melting...
She felt herself crushed against the window as the crowd sought refuge away from the choking curtain of smoke. She screamed with all the power in her lungs, pushing backwards with her bottom, but the pressure was too much and her voice was lost in the crowd. She was pinned against the glass, her arms above her head.
And that’s when she heard it. Above the shouting and screaming, Salma he
ard an audible crack. She twisted her face upwards and her blood froze. There. A small fissure had appeared at the top of the huge glass pane and, as she watched, the jagged finger reached downwards another few centimetres. It was the plane, she thought. The near miss had rattled everything, weakened it somehow, and now everybody was herded into this tiny kitchen and the pressure against the glass was making it crack.
Salma tried to turn her body, but she was pinned fast by the writhing mass against her. Her chest hurt and it was getting difficult to breathe. Then she felt it; the crack had worked its way down to her fingertips. At the top of the window frame, she could see a fine dust sprinkling down from around the surrounding concrete. The crack up there was wider, deeper, working its way past her fingers and across her cheek. With every ounce of strength she possessed, Salma tried to wriggle her way out, but the wall of bodies pressing against her had her trapped.
She watched with mounting horror as the fracture widened near the top and more concrete and plaster rained down. The man next to her suddenly became aware of the danger and shouted in alarm. Others around her joined in the sudden chorus of desperation and tried to push their way forward, shoving and punching their colleagues in front of them. They managed to make some progress and Salma felt the pressure on her body ease slightly. But it wasn’t over.