Siege: A Thriller

by Simon Kernick

  “You’re going to need to be able to hold off the attacking forces at least until I can get through to the negotiator and tell him that unless the assault stops, we will blow up the building. Do you think that will be enough to make them pull back?”

  “If they lose the element of surprise and the authorities realize we’re still in control of the situation, they’ll have to stop the assault.”

  Wolf’s breathing had quickened, and he suddenly looked excited. “Which will leave them totally humiliated. We are doing good work here, Fox. The British government will fall over this.”

  “Let’s hope so,” said Fox, although right then he was far more interested in getting out of the building alive, which was no sure thing.

  As they hurried from the kitchen, Fox felt the adrenaline pumping through him. Zero hour was approaching—the time when he’d finally earn his money.

  The plan had always been to trigger an assault on the building. It was why they’d set a midnight deadline while timing the bombs inside the hotel to detonate an hour earlier. They’d never expected to last until midnight. Ideally, the assault would have come just before 23:00. That way they could repel the SAS forces, thus heaping public humiliation on the British government, and use the subsequent timed explosions (which could also be blamed on the government) as cover to escape from the building.

  Instead, they were going to have to put up with the assault coming nearly an hour earlier, which, Fox knew, would mean a nerve-jangling climax to the siege as they tried to keep the security forces at bay. But it was still manageable, as was the fact that they were operating two men short. The most important thing was that, unlike the SAS, they still possessed the element of surprise.

  The ballroom was quiet. The bodies of the two hostages who’d dared to resist their captors were still propped up against the wall in full view of the others as a warning. As far as Fox could see, it was proving effective, but then it needed to. The next hour was going to be extremely challenging.

  He motioned Bear over and, ignoring Cat’s glare, and Wolf’s comradely pat on the shoulder, led his old army buddy toward the ballroom door.

  It was time to prepare their reception.

  71

  Scope worked as quietly and methodically as he could under the circumstances, going through each of the cupboards one at a time, amazed that they had such an array of medicines on-site.

  He’d taken a huge risk coming back as he knew the terrorists were aware how much he needed the insulin. He’d been only feet away from them, hidden behind the bar in the ground floor restaurant, while they’d discussed the fact that they could take him out when he emerged from cover to find it. He’d even seen the face of one of them in the bar mirror as he’d temporarily removed his balaclava, and was surprised to see that it belonged to an ordinary-looking white man in his thirties.

  Right now, Scope was relying on the fact that the terrorists were too busy upstairs, and too short of numbers, to send someone down here. But if he was wrong then he was trapped, and almost certainly dead. Strangely, though, it wasn’t death he was scared of. He’d faced that on many occasions in his time as a soldier fighting other men’s wars. And in truth, since Mary Ann, probably the only truly important person in his life, had gone, life had ceased to be anything other than a simple mission for revenge.

  No, he didn’t fear death. What he feared was failure. He had to save Abby and her son. He cared about them now, had bonded with them, which was something he hadn’t done with anyone in a long time. The world was a hard, brutal place; it had destroyed his daughter, and it had come close to destroying him. But so far it hadn’t, and right then he was determined to keep it that way.

  He found the insulin pens in a box at the back of the middle cupboard.

  Feeling a sudden burst of elation, he ripped open the box and pulled out a handful of the pens, shoving them in his trouser pocket.

  Then, holding his knife by the blade, in case he ran into one of the terrorists, he exited the room at a run, praying he wasn’t too late.

  72

  “What the hell was that?” Bear had stopped in the middle of the lobby and turned his head.

  “What the hell was what?” demanded Fox.

  “I thought I heard a noise behind reception.”

  Fox briefly wondered if it was the man he and Cat had just had a firefight with. He stopped too, but couldn’t hear anything.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, although he tightened his grip on the gun. “Come on. We need to hurry.” He had no desire to help Cat avenge her brother, and if this guy, whoever he was, was in the back trying to find insulin, then that was fine too, because it kept him out of their hair. “Just keep down,” he hissed as they moved through the “Staff Only” doors and into the gloom of the main kitchen, before stopping at the windows looking out onto the courtyard, where the van they’d arrived in was still parked with the rear doors open. It was raining outside and the cobblestones were shiny and wet.

  The two men crouched low and Fox scanned the area, squinting in the darkness. When he was satisfied that the courtyard was empty he reached down and carefully retrieved the button detonator he’d left underneath the counter earlier, and held it in the palm of his hand, button up. “In a few minutes the military will come through there,” he said, pointing toward the archway they’d driven through earlier, where the body of the security guard still lay. “They’ll head over to the wall here and rendezvous underneath the mezzanine floor windows. What they don’t know is there’s a bomb hidden in one of the wheelie bins just outside the delivery entrance. You can’t see it now, but it’s about twenty feet to the left of us. It’s a simple low-tech command wire device so any radio jamming gear they’ve got won’t be able to stop it from detonating. Your job’s to man this position. You don’t move, you don’t turn away, you don’t lose concentration. Do any of those things and we’re all dead.”

  “Jesus, you don’t have to tell me that, Fox. How long have we worked together?”

  “I know. But we’re up against the best in the world here. We can’t afford to make even the smallest mistake.”

  “Sure. I know.”

  “When you see movement through the arch, and you’ve confirmed it’s enemy forces, you get down, count to twenty, so they’ve got time to come into the courtyard in numbers, then press the button. And make sure you’re behind the kitchen units, because it’s going to be a big bang.”

  “Won’t they have recced this place already? I mean, like you say, these guys are the best in the world. What if they’ve already located and disabled the bomb?”

  “They haven’t.”

  “You’re very confident.”

  “First off, the bomb’s hidden underneath a load of rubbish in an area where the bins are meant to be. Second, Dragon cut a hole in the back of the bin and ran the wires through there and under the delivery room door, so they’d be impossible to spot without moving the bin.”

  “They could have moved the bin.”

  Fox smiled. “We’d have heard them. Dragon also taped a grenade between the bin and the one next to it, on the underside where you can’t see it. If anyone moved anything, it would have come free and blown.” He gave the detonator to Bear, telling him to handle it carefully, then pulled a pair of noise-suppressing headphones from his backpack. “You might want to wear these when you set off the bomb. I’m going to be upstairs in one of the function rooms. As soon as I hear it go off, I’ll open up with the AK and chuck out a couple of grenades. If you get the chance, unload a few rounds yourself, but then make your way back to the mezzanine floor using the emergency staircase. We’ll rendezvous there.”

  “What if they keep coming? They’re not going to want to give up just like that.”

  “They’ll be sitting ducks out there so they’re going to want to get back and regroup. Also, as soon as Wolf hears all the commotion, he’s going to get on to the negotiator and threaten to kill all the hostages unless they pull back.” He patted Bear on th
e shoulder. “They’ll pull back. Remember, they’ve had hardly any time to prepare for this and we’re forcing their hand. They’ll be making mistakes too.”

  Bear shook his head slowly. “I never thought I’d end up killing fellow British soldiers.”

  “They’re unavoidable casualties,” said Fox, who had no desire to get into a debate about the morality of what they were doing. It was way too late for that. “You want to make the government fall, you want to make the people angry, this is the way you do it. Plus, you’ve got the best motivation of all: if you don’t kill them, you can bet your life that they’ll kill you.”

  Bear nodded slowly as he thought this through, then grinned. “Reminds me of the old days,” he whispered, peering out into the gloom. “Waiting for the enemy to appear.”

  “And we got out of that OK, didn’t we? We’ll get out of this too. Then we can all retire.” Fox got to his feet, keeping low. “Rendezvous back in the mezzanine foyer. I’ll be waiting for you there. Good luck.”

  Keeping to the shadows, he slipped back through the kitchen and headed upstairs.

  Barely a minute later he was inside the Meadow Room on the mezzanine floor, a mid-sized function room with a long boardroom table and chairs and an electronic whiteboard taking up one wall. He stood in the corner of the room, the AK-47 in his hands, and looked around the edge of the curtain, into the courtyard below.

  This was it. The culmination of months of training and planning. He slowed his breathing, knowing how important it was to remain calm as he prepared for the coming onslaught. One more hour and he’d either be a very rich man or a dead one.

  He looked at his watch. 22:01.

  73

  22:01

  Tina was driving around the maze of rain-soaked residential streets where the van she was looking for was supposed to be parked, as she had been for more than twenty minutes now, when her phone rang.

  “They sent me a video from Howard’s phone,” Arley announced breathlessly. “My children were alive ten minutes ago.”

  “That’s brilliant news.” Tina had thought they would be, but she still felt a rush of relief. “Were there details in the video that could be of any use to us?”

  “Only that it was shot inside a house.”

  “And a location?”

  “I’ve just emailed it to you. It’s not exact, but it’s down to a twenty-or thirty-yard area around Pride Street, within the same wider location as the van.”

  “I drove down Pride Street two minutes ago and I didn’t see a van, but I’ll have another look now. But listen, Arley, I’m not risking my neck here. I’m unarmed. I’ll see if I can find the house, but that’s it.”

  “If you can find proof that the kids are there, that’s all I need. Then the security forces can deal with it. But I need to know for sure. Please. We’re so close.” The desperation was clear in her voice.

  “Has the SAS made the decision to go into the hotel yet?” asked Tina, knowing that if they had, she was going to have to make this thing public.

  “Not yet, but it’s going to come soon.”

  “OK. Leave things with me, and make sure you get the ANPR people to get in touch with you if that van starts moving. I’ll call you the moment I have something.”

  Tina ended the call and shook her head. She shouldn’t be doing this. Yet she couldn’t help feeling an excitement she hadn’t experienced in many months. In fact, not since the last time she’d found herself acting totally illegally by teaming up with a wanted killer in order to bring an even worse one to justice. Tina had always attracted trouble. It was in her nature. But she also prided herself on always doing what she thought was the right thing.

  Except this time she wasn’t at all sure she was doing the right thing. There were too many other lives at stake. Not just her own.

  She pulled over. Her laptop was open on the seat next to her and she picked it up and checked the Hotmail account, opening the attachment from Arley’s email of three minutes earlier.

  It showed a small-scale street map of the area she was in with an irregular red circle over a section of Pride Street that was about two hundred yards west of her current location. Pride Street backed onto a railway track, and as Tina looked at the map more closely, she could see that there was a track running behind the houses with another house at the end of it, next to the railway line—one she hadn’t seen earlier on the bigger map. The house was just inside the red circle, and it struck Tina that it was isolated enough for the kidnappers to have got the children out of the back of the van without attracting attention.

  There was no time to check whether or not it had been rented recently, so she pulled back out again and accelerated toward the railway line.

  She almost missed the narrow turning with the dead end sign that, according to the map, led down to the house she was interested in. Slowing up, she caught a glimpse of a high-wire fence about thirty yards distant just as a train passed on the other side of it with a steady rumble.

  Straight away she knew that it was too risky to drive down there, in case someone was watching. Instead she continued farther down the street, still checking the parked cars just in case she was wrong and the children were being kept somewhere else, but after thirty yards and no sign of any red van, she found a spot and parked.

  Taking a deep breath, she grabbed the can of pepper spray she’d bought in France from the glove compartment, as well as an eight-inch piece of lead piping—both totally illegal for a civilian to be in possession of, but nothing in comparison to the crimes she’d already committed that night. She slipped the pepper spray into her coat pocket and the lead piping into the back of her jeans, and then got out and hurried along the street, keeping her head down against the rain and the cold.

  The drive down to the house was little more than a muddy track, with overgrown brambles and scrub on either side. There were tire tracks in the mud but it was difficult to tell whether they were recent or not.

  Keeping to the side of the track, Tina followed it as it turned at a narrow angle in front of the barbed-wire fence before ending at the entrance to a small run-down cottage that was almost entirely obscured by high vegetation and an unsteady-looking brick wall. Parked in the narrow carport in front of the cottage, beyond two ancient wrought-iron gates, was the red van they were looking for.

  Tina stopped. There were lights on in the ground floor of the cottage and all the curtains, upstairs and downstairs, were drawn. This was the place, she knew it.

  She should have got straight back on the phone to Arley and told her that she’d done as much as she could. But she didn’t. Instead she switched her phone to vibrate and climbed over the gates, tiptoeing across the gravel until she was level with the driver’s window of the van. She peered inside. The front was empty, while the rear was hidden by a makeshift curtain, and she couldn’t see or hear anything. Satisfied it was empty, she approached the cottage along the edge of the driveway, keeping close to the undergrowth before stopping outside the first of the ground floor windows. She put her ear to the glass and heard the sound of a TV.

  Slowly, carefully, Tina made her way around to the back of the cottage. A back door led into an unlit utility room with washing machine and sink, and beyond that Tina could see a narrow hallway with a staircase and the glow of lights at one end. Nothing moved inside, but there was definitely someone in there.

  Putting on her gloves, Tina tried the back door and wasn’t surprised to find it locked. It didn’t matter. The lock looked as ancient as everything else about the cottage. She’d been trained in covert entry years before when she was in the Serious and Organized Crime Agency, and she’d brought a set of picks with her tonight.

  Even so, she paused. The man who’d kidnapped Arley’s children was armed and extremely dangerous. He’d already killed her husband, and Tina knew he wouldn’t hesitate to do the same to her. Far better just to call the police, or better still Arley herself.

  Except she hadn’t found the kids. Not yet.


  Tina felt her whole body tense. She was going in. It was just the way she was. All her instincts told her to hold back, but in the end it made no difference. She wanted to find those kids and make them safe. If anything happened to them because she hadn’t done all she could . . . well, she found it hard enough to live with herself anyway.

  Reaching into her jacket pocket, she pulled out the picks and set to work, and in thirty seconds she had the door unlocked. It would have been twenty, but she was out of practice.

  Slowly, she turned the handle and crept inside.

  74

  Liam Roy Shetland, code-named Bull, had been buzzing all day. He’d finally killed a man. Put a gun against his head and pulled the trigger.

  It was one of the most amazing things he’d ever experienced. Better even than sex, and similar too, in a weird way. There’d been this incredible rush as the bloke died—like having a really big orgasm. He’d been reliving every detail in his head ever since—the way the blood had splattered on the floor; the funny little grunt the bloke had made. Which was just as well really, because otherwise the day would have been shit boring, hanging around on his own in a house that reeked of mold, babysitting a couple of brats, and without even a PlayStation or the Net to keep him occupied. Just a tiny little telly with nothing but Freeview.

  But the time was fast approaching when he would achieve the kind of notoriety he’d been dreaming of all his life, and he could feel the anticipation building. This was his chance to prove wrong all the bastards who’d ever doubted him. His mum. His teachers. The Paki at the Job Center who always used to look down his nose at him. All of them.

  The handler should be calling him any time now, telling him he could leave. There wasn’t a lot of time left if he was going to get to the rendezvous in time. His instructions were simple. He was to drive the van as close as he could to the Stanhope Hotel, and park it in as public a place as possible. There was a bomb in the back, set to go off at eleven P.M., and he needed to be well away from it when it blew. Fox had given him a rucksack containing a smaller bomb, and his job was to take this and continue toward the Stanhope on foot. When he got to the outer cordon where the crowds and TV cameras were gathered, he’d been told to get rid of the bag somewhere among them, without making it look too obvious, and then get the hell out, because the rucksack bomb was timed to go off at 11:15.