Timebomb (Paul Richter)

by James Barrington

  Schneider looked them over and then issued his final orders. Each officer carried either a SiG 550 assault rifle or a Remington 870 multi-purpose pump-action shotgun, which would have been Richter’s own choice as a close-quarter combat weapon, plus a 9-millimetre SiG P220 semi-automatic pistol in a belt holster.

  The plain-clothes officer checked that his body armour remained invisible under his civilian jacket, nodded to Schneider and walked off down the corridor. The armed officers moved back into the small lobby, out of sight, leaving only Schneider and Richter visible in the corridor. As they were both wearing civilian clothes, the suspects shouldn’t be alerted if they noticed them.

  But just before the plain-clothes officer reached the door, they could hear the sound of a telephone ringing. It stopped in mid-ring and, seconds later, they heard shouts from inside the flat. It could mean only one thing.

  ‘Somebody’s tipped them off,’ Richter hissed urgently. ‘Stop him now. They’ll open fire as soon as he knocks on the door.’

  Schneider nodded grimly and stepped forward but, even as he did so, the other officer rapped sharply on the door of the apartment. The result was immediate. A three-round burst from an automatic weapon tore right through the thin wooden door and hit him full in the chest, smashing him back against the opposite wall, where he collapsed in a crumpled heap.

  Chapter Three

  Monday

  Onex commune, Canton of Geneva, Switzerland

  The five officers thundered along the corridor, Richter and Schneider a few paces behind them. The first one grabbed the door handle, twisted it and pushed, but the door wouldn’t budge. Half a dozen further holes were immediately punched through the wood at chest height, as an automatic weapon was fired from within the apartment, but the policeman was standing well to one side, so the bullets buried themselves harmlessly in the wall opposite.

  Richter and Schneider seized the recumbent plain-clothes man by each shoulder and started to drag him to safety down the corridor towards the lobby. One officer followed, walking backwards to cover them, his SiG 550 held ready.

  The locked door was never going to be a long-term obstacle. Even as they dragged the wounded officer into the lobby, one of Schneider’s men fired two rounds from his Remington 870 directly at the top and bottom of the door on the hinge side. Gaping holes appeared in the wood, and a sharp kick did the rest. The door toppled inwards, and the police swarmed inside.

  Shouts and a barrage of shots rang out – two from a shotgun, the others from automatic weapons or pistols – followed by cries of pain. Despite his instructions, Richter ran forwards, but then stopped at the door and peered round it cautiously.

  It was an open-plan apartment, as he already knew from the architectural plans they’d shown him at the police station, the main door opening straight into the living room. A coffee table had been overturned, and pieces of broken china lay on the carpet. But Richter wasn’t interested in crockery or furniture, only in the tactical situation. And what he now took in with a single glance was not encouraging.

  One police officer was lying just inside the door, bleeding profusely from two bullet wounds, one to the shoulder and the other in his thigh. The armour only covered so much of his body, and he’d been unlucky enough to get hit by two rounds that had missed the jacket. The officer lying next to him had been even more unlucky: his throat had been torn open by a bullet, and not even immediate medical attention would save his life.

  Beside a door that Richter knew led to the bedrooms, an unidentified man lay flat on his back, his chest splattered red by multiple wounds, and in the far corner one of the other occupants slumped against the wall, badly wounded.

  Near the centre of the room, the two remaining officers were standing, almost back-to-back, their weapons covering all three doors that led off the living room.

  As Richter took in this scene, the further door in the left wall opened for a brief second, just long enough for an unseen hand to lob a black object into the room and towards the standing officers.

  ‘Grenade!’ Richter yelled a warning, his voice echoed by the same word being shouted from somewhere inside the apartment. Having witnessed the effects of grenade explosions in confined spaces a couple of times before, Richter didn’t hesitate. He stood up from a crouch, turned and sprinted off down the corridor, but he’d barely made ten feet before the entire building was rocked by the explosion.

  Richter glanced behind him, to see that the corridor was empty, and he knew exactly what that meant. The four police officers in the apartment were almost certainly now all dead. He looked back towards the lobby, where Schneider was shaking his head, in an effort to recover from the effect of the blast. The remaining armed officer was still in the lobby, probably at least ten seconds away from the stricken apartment, and Richter didn’t think they had ten seconds. Now that the grenade had neutralized everyone in the living room, the remaining two terrorists would likely appear any moment, guns blazing as they tried to fight their way out of the building.

  Richter darted back to the apartment door and risked a quick glance inside before stepping into the chaos of the living room. Just as he’d feared, all six occupants – four police officers and two terrorists – looked as if they were dead, but that still left two bad guys unaccounted for.

  He grabbed a Remington shotgun from the floor and then hurried over to stand at one side of the room. His eyes kept flicking between the three doors, but two were set in the left-hand wall and the third in the wall opposite, which meant covering two threat axes simultaneously. But, having seen the grenade thrown, he knew for sure where at least one of the terrorists was hiding.

  The Remington possessed a full-length magazine, which Richter knew meant a maximum load of nine 12-bore shells – one in the breach and eight in the tube under the barrel – and the calculation was easy. Two shotgun rounds had been fired into the door of the flat to gain entry. Then he’d heard two blasts as the police officers went into the apartment, and three of them had been carrying shotguns. That meant that – even if all four of those shots had been fired from the weapon in his hands – he still had at least five rounds left. That should be enough to see this through.

  In the corridor outside he could now hear heavy footsteps, and guessed the last remaining police officer, or maybe Schneider himself, was running towards the door.

  Then the internal door to his right opened and someone peered out, a pistol clutched in his outstretched hand. Richter reacted instantly, dropping into a crouch as the man fired, then pumped two rounds from the 870 straight towards him. The first smashed into the wall, but the second took the terrorist full in the chest, catapulting him backwards. One down, one to go.

  He heard a door open on his blind side, and instantly the room filled with the staccato hammering of a Kalashnikov on full auto. Richter span round, dropped flat, and then rolled over onto his back as the assault rifle’s bullets ploughed a furrow into the wall behind him. He pulled the trigger of his own weapon, snapping off a barely aimed round, then pumped another shell into the chamber. He rolled further sideways, moving away from the stream of bullets, and fired again. The deep boom of the Remington was at that moment joined by a rattle of fire from the apartment door as the police officer opened up with his SiG 550. The last terrorist dropped backwards, the combined shots killing him instantly.

  As silence fell, Richter climbed cautiously to his feet, racking another shell into the chamber of the 870, just in case. He nodded silently to the police officer, and together they went over and kicked open each door in the apartment in turn, checking that nobody else was there. Only then did they turn their attention to the bodies littering the floor.

  ‘Dear God, what a fucking disaster,’ Schneider muttered, now standing at the door of the apartment, staring at the carnage in front of him.

  All four suspected terrorists were dead, the shotgun blasts having been instantly lethal at such short range, but as Richter looked around he noticed one of the wounded police offic
ers move slightly.

  ‘This one’s alive,’ he shouted, and crouched down beside the fallen man, who was lying closest to the main door of the apartment. He had been shot in the leg and shoulder, and the blast from the grenade had ripped open wounds all over him, but he was still just about breathing.

  While Schneider pulled out a radio and issued urgent instructions, Richter hurried into the bathroom to collect some towels that he could press against the worst of the man’s wounds. That wasn’t going to be much help, but it was all he could do. He glanced at his watch and noticed that, bizarrely, it was less than three minutes since the plain-clothes man had first knocked on the apartment door. It had felt more like ten.

  The other three officers were all clearly beyond medical help, though that fact would have to be confirmed by the doctor when he arrived. Two of the paramedics, summoned by Schneider, appeared at the door and stepped inside the apartment. Working with brisk efficiency, they strapped compresses on to the injured officer’s wounds, then lifted him onto a stretcher and carried him out. A couple of minutes later Richter heard the wailing siren of an ambulance as it headed away from the target building.

  He unloaded the Remington and rested it against the wall in one corner of the room, then looked around carefully, checking for the laptop computer that had been the trigger for this entire operation.

  The dining table was lying on its side, probably blown over by the blast from the grenade, and Richter walked over to check there. The laptop, an expensive model with a built-in webcam at the top of the screen, was lying on the floor behind it, but one glance was enough to tell him that they weren’t likely to get much information out of it. The screen had been almost completely ripped off and the base itself had taken at least three bullets. Even worse, Richter could see what looked like fragments of the hard disk’s platters scattered over the carpet beside it. But forensic science could occasionally work miracles, so it was at least worth trying to recover something.

  ‘I’ve found the laptop,’ he called out to Schneider, ‘but it’s very badly damaged. You’ll need to bag all the bits and see if your specialists can get anything out of it.’

  The senior Swiss officer walked over and studied the wrecked machine. ‘This fucking mess just gets worse and worse,’ he said. ‘I’ve got three officers dead and another who probably won’t last the day four very dead terrorists and the computer that might have given us information about whatever they were up to is a writeoff.’

  ‘Your plain-clothes guy?’ Richter asked.

  ‘That’s about the only good news. It looks like he’s uninjured, just badly winded. Thanks, by the way. If you hadn’t gone in when you did, the last two of these bastards might have got out of the apartment with their Kalashnikovs, and then it would have been an even bigger bloodbath out on the street.’

  ‘And you and I might both have been on our way to the mortuary in a couple of body-bags,’ Richter added.

  ‘Exactly.’

  Behind Schneider, other medical personnel had been stopped at the door by a newly arrived police officer, and only a single doctor had been allowed into the apartment to confirm that all the blood-soaked bodies sprawled on the floor were dead. At that moment he crouched beside one of the downed cops, feeling vainly for a pulse.

  Twenty minutes later, Richter sat in a police van heading back towards the station, preparing to write his report on what had happened.

  Back at the apartment, the Swiss forensic team, having carefully photographed the scene before the removal of the bodies, were now beginning a painstaking examination of the entire premises, looking for any clues that might indicate what the four terrorists had been planning. As a priority, Schneider had ordered the smashed laptop to be boxed, and that was already on its way to a specialist laboratory.

  Reculver, Kent

  Just over three hours after Jasper’s nose had led Walter Keane to the patch of blood-stained grass at Sheerness, another man walking his dog encountered more tangible evidence that a crime had been committed.

  He spotted a dark shape lying awkwardly among the grey boulders that formed the estuary side of the footpath running between the car park and Reculver Towers, the remains of a medieval church that still dominated the hamlet. After peering at the object uncertainly for a few seconds, he came to a decision. He looped the animal’s lead over one of the vertical stanchions of the fence running alongside the footpath and climbed nimbly over the rocks leading down to the water’s edge. What he’d seen looked to him increasingly like a bale of some dark material, as he clambered over boulders made slippery with seaweed exposed by the retreating tide. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d plucked something of value from the sea but, as he got within just a few feet of it, a breaking wave disturbed the mysterious object and he unexpectedly found himself staring into a pair of lifeless gaping eyes and an open, toothless mouth.

  He jumped back involuntarily, slipped and lost his footing, landing painfully on his back amongst the boulders.

  ‘Fuck,’ he muttered, gritting his teeth in pain as he clambered to his feet again. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

  He scrambled awkwardly back over the rocks to the footpath and, in the absence of anything else upon which to vent his spleen, he kicked out clumsily at his dog, which dodged to one side with the ease born of long practice.

  Unlike Walter Keane, this dog-walker had no particular wish to assist the police with their enquiries, having himself seen the inside of the local station’s interview room on more than one occasion, but he did walk across to the pub opposite the car park, where he dialled ‘999’ and left a brief anonymous message before returning home.

  Forty minutes later, two constables were standing over the body, one of them speaking urgently into his personal radio.

  About an hour later still, the Reculver Towers car park was choked with police vehicles, and the whole area around the corpse had been marked out by crime-scene tape as the SOCOs began their work, with one eye warily on the tide, which was about to turn.

  Detective Inspector Paul Mason stood by the head of the corpse, looking down at it. The pathologist – a lean and cadaverous elderly man with an unhealthy grey complexion that suggested he himself wasn’t long for this world, and who was known as ‘The Ghoul’ – had already been and gone. He’d confirmed that the victim was dead, a fact blindingly obvious to everyone present, and that, although there was a severe contusion to the back of the corpse’s head, the most likely cause of his demise was the knife-slash across his throat that had cut almost as deep as his vertebrae. Nor, the pathologist added, had he died where he’d been found. He’d been killed elsewhere and his body dumped in the sea. These conclusions, again, had come as no surprise. Now the police work could start in earnest, beginning with trying to identify the body and, just as important, finding out where it had come from.

  There were no documents on the corpse that would assist with identification, and though there were numerous bits of paper stuffed in various pockets of the voluminous overcoat, none was in any way helpful. There was also around fifteen pounds, mainly in low-denomination coins, in one inside pocket, but it was clear from even a cursory examination that this man had been a tramp or derelict. That would ultimately have no bearing on the thoroughness of their search for his killer, but it would obviously make it more difficult to find out who he was, since there was little likelihood of a wife or lover somewhere waiting for him to come home.

  ‘Not much of a life,’ Mason muttered to DS Clark, his usual partner in such cases.

  Not even much of a death,’ Dick Clark grunted, staring at the corpse’s face with grim attention. It was doubtful if even the dead man’s mother would have recognized this sad detritus of a wasted life. The heavily bloated face had a greenish tinge, and its features looked strangely distorted, partly caused by some of the soft tissues having been nibbled off by various forms of marine life.

  ‘It’s going to be a bitch finding out who he was.’

  Clark nodded. ‘I’
ll get one of the artists to try and knock up an image of his face before the crabs and whatever got at it. We can ask the local papers to print it and pass it on to the neighbouring forces.’

  ‘Send some copies to the Sally Army as well. He might have been a regular customer at some of their soup kitchens. But if nobody local recognizes him, I don’t know where we’ll go from there.’

  ‘About the only useful thing The Ghoul was able to tell us was that the corpse hadn’t been in the water long. I’ve got a couple of constables studying the tide tables and an OS map of the neighbouring coast to try to work out approximately where Mr X might have been shoved in.’

  ‘It’s more likely they’ll end up with a list of places where he couldn’t have been killed, but that’d be a start, certainly.’ Mason turned his gaze away from the corpse and looked west towards the mouth of the Thames Estuary, shielding his eyes against the driving rain. ‘This wasn’t a local crime, I’m sure of that. The answer lies somewhere up that way.’

  ‘Then there’s the problem of motive,’ Clark said. ‘Kids might have fun beating up a tramp, but they very rarely end up committing a murder, unless by accident. But there’s clearly nothing accidental about this death. Whoever dragged a knife or razor across this man’s throat knew exactly what they were doing. So what could this derelict have done that made his death a necessity?’

  ‘If we ever find that out,’ Paul Mason replied gloomily, ‘we’ll be a lot closer to finding his killers.’

  Onex commune, Canton of Geneva, Switzerland

  The only person in the briefing room, as Richter and Schneider walked in, was the same plain-clothes man, who stood up painfully to greet his superior officer. As Schneider had explained, he was just badly winded, but Richter knew from personal experience what the impact of a bullet from a Kalashnikov felt like at close range. Though the body-armour vest had saved the man’s life, he was going to be aching for days or weeks still to come.