“These people will have cleared out by the time we get there; they'll know more of us are coming,” Michael said. “Don't bank on finding anybody left alive.”
Members of Hill's unit were already preparing their infantry vehicle. Others pulled on their body armour and equipment pouches, and they stacked spare cans of ammunition and supplies in the back of the fighting vehicle.
Corporal Hill pointed to the armoury. “Draw combat supplies from the armoury. Get yourselves a vest, rifle and ammunition. One more thing, when we hit the place, you take orders from me. I've had two hours of sleep, so don't give me any of that higher rank detective bullshit. I've got command authority, and if you won't do what I say, then stay the fuck out of my way.”
They went inside armoury B. High-powered lights in the ceiling lit the interior with red, and rows of metal racks and lockers held seemingly endless supplies of guns and munitions. They plucked what they needed from storage and loaded up, exiting just in time to see an old tank rumble past with a bulldozer attachment lowered.
“We haven't got room for you in the IFV; you'll have to follow us in your car. Buzz me on the radio if you get into trouble,” Hill said. He ran to climb into the back of the vehicle.
Richard looked to Michael. “Do you ever get that really bad feeling in your gut when something like this goes down?”
“All the time.”
They stopped at the end of the road, several hundred meters away from the address. Corporal Hill's section disembarked from the IFV. They stood by the sides of their vehicle, exchanging glances with each other.
“Smoke. Maybe we should have brought more tanks with us,” Richard said.
The pair of them got out of the car and jogged after the others. Michael pushed his way through their ranks and saw a police armoured personnel carrier on fire further down the road. Two shapes that looked like bodies lay motionless not far from it.
“Well don't just stand there, for Christ's sake. Spread out and move up,” Corporal Hill said.
The unit moved past the tank and down the road, splitting into their two fire teams. They hugged the buildings as they approached the wreckage, and Michael and Richard followed. He saw the bodies clearly now, each one soaked in a pool of its own blood. His shoe knocked shell casings.
Michael grimaced. The smell of burning flesh crept up his nose, and Richard gagged, pointing to the black, shrunken shape of the dead policeman manning the vehicle's machine gun. Parts of the vehicle had melted and dripped and trickled onto the pavement, where it dried again like splodges of concrete.
He glanced back the other way to see the tank commander still watching them with his machine gun and pulled back the bolt on his rifle. Shattered glass lay scattered across the pavement and road, chinking under footsteps.
Hill's section stacked up outside main entrance. He whispered something to the policeman on point, and they advanced inside. Two more corpses lay slumped against the corridor walls, battering ram and rifles by their sides, surrounded by a sea of brass casings. Gunfire had taken chunks out of the walls. They found the four ground floor flats empty. Corporal Hill checked up the stairs with a stick mirror, and then waved for the others to follow. Lumps of concrete from the walls crunched beneath their feet, and a single shell casing rolled off the side of the stairs and struck the floor with a jingle.
Hill advanced up the second flight of stairs. His rifle was pressed tight against his shoulder, and he peered down the sights through his visor. Richard inhaled a slow breath. Sweat streamed down his face.
Michael felt the muscles twitching in his arm. He tried to stay still, but that only seemed to make it worse. They were the last in line. A knock came from one of the rooms above, and the section stopped, went to one knee and raised their rifles.
“Jesus, this is going to have me a heart attack,” Richard whispered.
Michael nodded and said nothing. Hill crept further up. He craned his neck, then looked back at them. “It's okay, we're clear. Nothing here but bodies. Get up here detectives. We've done our job, now you do yours, and see if you can find anything worth taking with us.”
One by one they entered the upstairs flats. Michael followed. He stepped over four more dead policemen. All of them had been finished off with multiple shots through their visors to the face.
“Last flat on the left. Come and see this,” Hill said.
Michael continued on into the flat. He found the corporal in the lounge, pointing up at the ceiling. Glass and shell casings were everywhere, and the ceiling was scorched, blackened and charred from where it had burned. A single body had been dragged to the side, partly burned from feet to waist and filled with bullet holes.
“Is that petrol I smell?” Michael said.
Corporal Hill nodded.
Michael turned back to the door. “Nobody else but us three steps foot in here, got it?”
The policeman outside nodded.
Richard fingered his nose. “What happened to the ceiling? Looks like they tried to torch this place to destroy evidence, but-”
“But they didn't do a very good job it,” Hill finished. “Okay, let's have a quick lesson in munitions so you might realise what you unlucky sods are getting into here. That wrecked carrier out there was burning hot enough for the hull to melt. Do you know what that tells us? It tells us it got hit by an anti-tank rocket. The warhead went straight through the armour, hit the engine and lit the entire thing up, okay?”
Richard nodded.
“Anti-tank weapons produce a back blast,” Michael said. “At the angle required to hit the vehicle down there, the back blast hits the same spot on the ceiling; we used them a lot in the war. I'm surprised the shooter didn't cook themselves with it.”
“Pretty much,” Hill said. “I didn't know you fought in the war. Army of the Rhine? I was at Leipzig.”
Michael nodded. “Berlin.”
“Berlin, shit. What a mess.”
Richard put his rifle aside on the table and knelt down beside the corpse. “Well, either way, this place was a total bloodbath, and it means we're dealing with an organised group. Stark's unit must have taken them by surprise, maybe while they were trying to clean the place out. Explains the petrol. Burn the whole building down and there's no evidence.”
“They didn't do a very good job of torching this place. Half a corpse cooked to a medium rare state is a pretty piss poor attempt. Something must have put the fire out,” Hill said.
Michael moved into the bedroom. There was no bed, only five sleeping bags and left over supplies spilling out of two duffel bags. He opened the bags further, and then tipped everything out onto one of the sleeping bags. Pre-packaged needles, surgical equipment and an assortment of medical products spilled outwards.
He held up one of the needle packets for the others to see. “These aren't for shooting up. Is there anything in the fridge?”
“No,” Richard said. “Wait, there's something down the side. Somebody dropped it. Look here.”
Richard entered the bedroom, and Hill followed. He raised his hand, holding the plastic packet of fluid between two fingers as he dangled it in the air. “Reminds me of the orange juice drinks my dad used to put in my packed lunch for school.”
“I wouldn't drink it,” Hill said.
“It's got a label on the side, but it's all numbers and serials. God knows what this stuff is,” Richard said.
“Presumably you inject it,” Michael said. “Bag it. There must be some place in this country that can analyse it. You've got something stuck on your boot, Corporal.”
Hill bent down and scraped off a chunk of white goo with a gloved finger. He held it up to the light. “Great, it's an eyeball, or some kind of artificial one, at least. Look like some kind of rubber. There's wires inside it.”
“It looks like a toy,” Richard said.
“Bag that too. We need to identify that body if we can. I'm starting to get sick of being one step behind all these people. “
“From the looks of
things, maybe being one step behind them is the best for your health,” Corporal Hill said. He looked out at the wrecked personnel carrier.
Michael checked his watch; nearly time for the next shift to arrive. He rubbed his eyes and groaned. The corridors were empty, and a discarded nutrition bar wrapper drifted along the floor, carried forward by the wind. One of the lights buzzed with the sound of a wasp trapped in a tin can.
The cold draft met his flesh. He knocked on the major's door.
“Come in.”
Harris had a pistol disassembled on his desk. He wiped the barrel with a filthy rag, as Michael took a seat. “We need a laboratory. To be more specific, we need one that can test the chemical packet and eyeball we found. I don't know who the body belongs to, and I doubt we'll find out for a while, if at all.”
The major began to reassemble the weapon. “We don't have a laboratory that can analyse what you brought back. This country is in the dumps, and if there's a lab that can do that kind of work, we'd have to contract it out and get Assurer to fit the bill. I don't think they'd bite. The body can be identified if we've ever picked the man up before, but somebody is going to have to go to the central station and check each individual record,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Could be a while.”
Michael slumped a little deeper into the chair. He chewed off the end of his thumbnail. “Then it's a dead end, sir. Eratech will have been cleaning up since the hit, and now they'll be a torching everything faster, if, and it's a big if, there's actually anything left to go on. Maybe it's time to start thinking about canning this case for something we can actually solve. Let's be honest, we never really had much of a chance on this one from the beginning.
“It's not the first murder case we've messed up, and it won't be the last. We're still learning.”
A moment of silence passed. Harris inserted a magazine into the weapon, racked the slide back and chambered a round. He pivoted away and pointed the gun at the floor, peering through the sights.
“I'm not junking the case. There's enough evidence to finger Eratech, but not to put any proper heat on them. We can still work this. Think about the money. We're all going to the wall here. Nail a high profile case like this and Assurer will be tossing a lot more than a standard bounty your way.”
“Respectfully, sir, a bounty requires that I be alive to spend it. These guys waxed an entire section of heavily armed policemen. We don't even know if these other companies had a hand in this. Maybe he pissed them all off at once. I think you're prejudging the situation, and furthermore, sir, I believe you have a personal stake in this that you are not telling us about.
“I've seen multiple cases junked with a lot more evidence than this so we could be redeployed elsewhere to plug holes in a sinking ship.”
Silence. Michael swallowed the lump in his throat. The major stared at him, eyes narrowing as a frown formed on his face. His lips curled downwards.
“I'd watch your step, Detective; I extend a lot of leeway to people under my command, but don't mistake it for having free rein in what you say. When we the last time you took a holiday?”
“Nobody takes a holiday down here. Take a holiday and you starve to death.”
“Sometimes they do, if their employer deems it okay. I think you should take a holiday, Detective. Washington is a good place to go. I'm going to send a couple of faxes and get something sorted out. If it's cleared up top, somebody will book you a flight to Washington, and you'll take a break, and you'll also take what you recovered from the flat. That's all for now. Until then, don't get yourself killed.”
Michael exited the office in a hot sweat. He made it to the end of the corridor before stopping against the wall. He shut his eyes, felt the beads of moisture turn to ice and shivered.
“You look wasted,” Samantha said.
He glanced up at her. “Didn't see you there.”
“Yeah,” she said, coming closer. “Things were getting pretty bad on the streets earlier. No casualties, as if we haven't suffered enough today already, but a lot of gunfire. I don't think its simple gang stuff; they're too well organised for that. Terrorism? Who would bother with that these days? At least it's burnt itself out for the evening.”
“For now,” Michael said, nodding. “They'll have to monitor it. If the people doing this can sustain it long enough, then we'll know for sure that they have proper backing and aren't out just to off a few policemen. Best hope they can't.”
The buzzing light died, and part of the corridor faded into shadow.
“Shift changes in the minute. You got plans for the night?” Samantha said.
“Nah.”
Samantha looked away for a moment, eyeing the darkness. She scratched her head and turned back again. “Can we get a drink together? There's a bar not far from here. It's pretty safe.”
Chapter 8.
It was dark inside the bar, lit only by a few dim bulbs and the street lights outside. Michael watched the queue of people at the bus stop. A lone smoker stood outside the doors, dressed in a trench coat and puffing away on his cigarette as the world went by. The floor and chairs were wood and dark with varnish, sending an echo through the place every time somebody moved.
A waitress placed their drinks on the table, then moved on to the next batch of customers. Samantha had red wine, he a glass of water.
“You know it's okay to have a little alcohol now and then, right? You're not on duty,” Samantha said.
Michael sipped his drink. “My health isn't that great. I got a dose of gas in the war when the filter on my respirator wore out. I try to avoid alcohol.”
“Sorry, I'll stop there. Forget I mentioned it.”
“It doesn't matter. You live locally?”
“Lower Kingston. My younger sister and our parents live in Basingstoke. It's not so bad where I am; safe, generally. There's a small police outpost nearby, and there's always a patrol vehicle parked outside. They use it a lot to check in and use the phones.”
Somebody outside sounded their car horn, and another driver retorted in kind. Heads turned towards the shouting. Samantha sighed and rolled her eyes. Half the crowd outside the bar crammed onto a red double-decker bus.
“I've only been with Assurer for a year. Before that, I drifted between administrative and office roles. It's been a decent enough place to work, safer than all the others, at least until these bombs started going off. Now I feel sick every time I get in my car, and a mirror on a stick doesn't make me feel much better, know what I mean?”
“Yeah. They've set up a task force to investigate. Beyond a certain point, it becomes more hassle than it's worth trying to rig a car to explode, and these people will know by now that cars being checked. It's the other places you want to be checking now, not that it'll make you feel much better.”
Samantha downed half her glass in one sip. She smiled. “Well, at least you're honest. You ever hear some of the suits from Assurer speak? It's all numbers and money, never people. They'll leave it all for the people on the front line to sort out and sweat the details another time.”
Michael glanced out the window. He found himself staring at those walking past, watching how they were dressed, how they moved in their own little worlds. “That's always the way.”
The traffic stopped. A motorcade of black vehicles occupied the road with tinted windows, spitting exhaust fumes as they sat idle. The smoker tossed his cigarette and shoved his hands into his coat pockets. He removed a radio, spoke a single word into it, and then pressed one of the buttons.
A rocket shot from an alley across the street. It struck the lead vehicle in the engine block and blew chunks of the frame across the street. Fire erupted as people fell to the ground. There was a woman clutching at her bloody face, screaming and shaking, but nobody paid her any notice.
Michael knocked the table on its side and dragged Samantha down behind it. The smoker pulled at the belt on his trench coat, letting it slide open to reveal the machine gun he kept hidden underneath. He raked one of the
vehicles with automatic fire, as other gunmen emerged across the street from a shop. They opened up on the other vehicles.
Stray rounds shattered the windows, and one of the waitresses went down with a bloody hole in her stomach. Michael pulled Samantha closer as the glass rained down on them. He peeked over the table and watched a limousine window roll down. A rifle barrel jutted out before flashing with fire.
The gunman went down against the remains of the bar door. Somebody hit the limousine with a 40mm grenade, and then two more. Flames escaped from inside, as another gunman climbed on top of an abandoned car, machine gun spitting belt links as he sprayed bullets indiscriminately.
Bystanders began to flee, managing a few steps from their hiding places before they were caught in the crossfire. Bullets tore them up, splattering blood, brains and skull fragments over the pavement. Part of the table blew apart in a shower of splinters, and Samantha shrieked.
A pushchair rolled along the pavement. The mass of corpses outside the bar stopped it dead in its tracks. Two manicured hands clung onto the handles, severed their bloody wrists, and the baby inside screamed. Gradually the gunfire faded. His eyes darted between the pram and the shooter on stop of the car. Then the dead gunman in the doorway got up again.
He let out a groan of pain and put one hand to his chest. Michael ducked as the man cast a glance inside the bar and staggered off down the street. The other gunmen followed after him.
Michael started to rise, but Samantha grabbed him by the arm. “Michael don't. Michael, you idiot, you're going to get yourself killed,” she said.
He shook off her grip and stepped over the dead waitress. A few pedestrians were still alive, clutching at gunshot wounds, and a stream of blood ran down the cracks of the pavement like a burst water main. Five gunmen sprinted down the road to the right, weaving in and out of abandoned and destroyed cars. Michael ran after them.
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