by Chris Ryan
‘Listen to me! Listen . . . Ahmed . . .’ It was Buckingham talking, and he had a quaver of total panic in his voice.
‘You will call me Caliph,’ Ahmed said.
Hesitation. Then . . . ‘Please, Caliph . . . You don’t need to kill me. The other three are special forces. Imagine the publicity you’ll get, putting them in front of the camera. But you haven’t got the other two. You’ve only got him. Let me go and you can use me to draw the other two out.’
Silence.
‘For God’s sake, man, I’m more use to you alive than dead . . .’
His words degenerated into a kind of nervous gasping.
There was silence in the room. Danny had the impression that Ahmed was letting Buckingham dig himself a deeper hole. Buckingham clearly didn’t realise this, because after a few seconds he continued on the same tack.
‘Think of it,’ he whispered. ‘One of them’s a girl. A white girl. You can give her to your men.’ Danny glanced in disgust towards Buckingham, who gave him a sidelong look, licked his lips nervously, and then continued with a quiet intensity in his voice. ‘I bet they haven’t had a woman for weeks. They’ll thank you for it.’
Silence.
Ahmed crouched down so that his head was on a level with Danny’s and Buckingham’s. He looked from one to the other. Danny could just about discern that he had a grim smile on his face.
‘You are so weak,’ he whispered.
He stood up again, and this time he spoke more clearly. ‘For your information, we have secured the other two. Who knows, I might let my men do what they want to the woman, but that is not your concern. I understand you killed one of my most promising young executioners, Danny Black.’
Danny shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, trying to keep his voice level. ‘It was the Chinese guy.’
Ahmed almost smiled. ‘The Chinese,’ he said. ‘They’ll do almost anything for oil. They have weaponised plague, smallpox and other weapons you’ve never even heard of. They don’t even want payment for their troubles. Just think how it will benefit them when the caliphate has spread and the West no longer has access to our natural resources.’
He held something up in front of Danny’s face: a small vial of clear liquid. Danny didn’t need to ask what it was.
‘In London,’ Ahmed whispered, ‘we are beheading your soldiers in the street. In France, we are executing them in their offices. After today, thanks to this, your people will look back on those times as the good old days.’
Danny kept quiet. Any attempt to antagonise this lunatic would be counter-productive. To his left, though, he could hear Buckingham shivering with terror.
‘But I see no reason,’ Ahmed said, ‘to dispense with the old ways just yet.’ He pocketed the vial of liquid, before walking back behind the camera. He raised one hand and clicked his fingers. The three men with torches moved forward, coming to a halt a metre behind the tripod and shining their beams at Danny and Buckingham so that they were quite brightly lit up. There was a shuffling sound behind the camera. Danny, squinting again in the light, could tell that Ahmed was wrapping a shamagh around his head.
When he returned to the front of the camera, he was carrying something that made Danny’s skin turn clammy. It was a knife. The blade itself was a foot long, and Danny could see that it had jagged, serrated teeth. Someone switched on the camera. A little red light glowed.
Ahmed paced in front of the camera, his long shadow moving erratically in the unstable torchlight. Buckingham was retching again. Great, heaving sounds from the pit of his stomach. ‘Ordinarily,’ Ahmed said, ‘we would sedate you. It makes things easier. But a British special forces soldier and a British intelligence office demand special treatment. You are not our usual quarry of aid workers and do-gooders. The only question is, who first?’
He looked from one to the other. Then he stepped towards Danny.
With his free hand, Ahmed grabbed a clump of Danny’s hair, then rested the blade on the back of his neck. Danny could feel the individual teeth pricking his skin. The serrations were clearly razor-sharp, because although there was barely any pressure, he felt spots of blood oozing over his skin.
‘You’ve learned,’ Ahmed said, ‘that people fear me. You have learned that they fear to speak the name of the Caliph. I am going to show you – and everyone who watches this tape – why.’
Danny closed his eyes. His body was starting to tremble, and he focused on stopping it. He wasn’t going to give this bastard the satisfaction of letting the camera see just how scared he was, now, in the seconds before his death.
The blade didn’t move. Ten seconds passed. He wasn’t sure, but he thought that maybe Ahmed was laughing softly. Unwillingly, he opened his eyes. Nothing had changed. The torches were still shining towards them. The light of the camera was still on. Buckingham was still whimpering to his side. But as he stared straight ahead, Ahmed released his hair and lifted the blade. Danny felt a strange surge of relief.
Ahmed was walking towards Buckingham. Danny watched grimly as he stood on Buckingham’s far side, grabbed his hair and laid the knife on his neck.
‘The girl,’ Buckingham whispered desperately in a strangled voice. ‘Let me . . . let me get the girl for you . . .’
‘Do you remember our excursion in Riyadh, Mr Buckingham?’ Ahmed said. ‘Do you remember how the crowd pushed you to the front so that the last person the prisoner saw would be an infidel, so that she would burn in the hellfire?’
Ahmed forced Buckingham’s head to the side, so that he was looking directly at Danny. ‘Look at the infidel, Mr Buckingham,’ he said.
Then he started speaking in Arabic, a dull, monotone chanting that Danny couldn’t understand. But it seemed to echo meaningfully around the room.
‘I can be of use to you . . .’ Buckingham tried to say over the chanting. He was crying. His voice was broken. ‘I know things . . . secrets . . . please . . . Caliph . . .’
Ahmed continued chanting above Buckingham’s panicked sobs.
Twenty seconds later, he stopped.
There was a pregnant silence, as if everybody in the room was holding his breath.
‘For pity’s sake, Black!’ Buckingham suddenly screamed. ‘DO SOMETHING!’
But there was nothing Danny could do. He could tell that the Caliph had already made his decision.
He didn’t want to watch, but somehow he had to.
It wasn’t the first swipe that was the worst. That went with the grain of the hooked blade and sliced easily into the back of Buckingham’s neck. Buckingham took a sharp intake of breath, and Danny sensed that the blade was so sharp he hadn’t even felt the first cut yet.
The second swipe was a different matter. Ahmed pulled the hooks of the blade towards him. Danny could hear the resistance exerted by the tendons in the back of Buckingham’s neck. Ahmed had to yank hard to pull the blade through the sinew. By the shaky torchlight, Danny could just make out lumps of internal flesh hanging from the exposed teeth.
Buckingham’s scream was inhuman: a loud, high-pitched, gurgling wail. Danny heard blood dripping from his neck and spattering on to the floor. As Ahmed made the third slice, the wailing suddenly cut out, and was replaced by the sound of Buckingham’s body going into spasm. Danny could only assume that the blade had cut into the spinal cord. Seconds later, the body slumped still.
It took another minute for the job to be done. Danny turned his head away, but couldn’t avoid listening to the wet, coarse slapping sound as Ahmed hacked his way through the remainder of the neck. Only when he heard a heavy thudding sound did he know it was over.
There was a hushed, church-like silence in the room. Danny glanced to his left. Buckingham – what remained of him – was still kneeling, and the torchlight illuminated the brutal wound. His internal organs looked like they were trying to escape from his neck, and fresh blood was sopping from its remnants.
Ahmed bent down and retrieved the head from the floor, then held it up for the benefit of the cameras. St
rings of flesh trailed down from the neck as he continued his Arabic chanting for another thirty seconds. Then he dropped the head again and turned to Danny, while one of his men switched off the camera.
‘Please don’t imagine, Danny Black, that anyone is coming to help you,’ Ahmed said. ‘I have enough people in the Qatari government to stop any rescue mission or armed response. We could stay here for days, and nobody would come. I will make you beg for your life before I kill you. A scared soldier makes better TV than a quiet one. I’ll leave you with your friend. We’ll see how calm you are when your time comes.’
TWENTY-NINE
07.30 GMT.
Dawn had already broken over the Thames as Bailey’s white Transit van pulled up at the vehicle entrance to the London Heliport.
He had arrived at the Battersea area from St Albans a full hour ago, where he’d pulled up in a side street off Battersea Park and waited. He hadn’t wanted to be late, but neither did he want to show up at the helipad too early. It would be suspicious if he and his accomplice took to the skies before sunrise, but now was the perfect time to make his way to the entrance of the heliport.
There was a security checkpoint at the vehicular entrance. Bailey approached it slowly. A uniformed security guard walked up to his window. Bailey wound it down and handed him his press accreditation pass. The guard studied it carefully. ‘Lovely morning for it,’ he said.
Bailey smiled. ‘Better than last year, anyway. Pissed it down all day. Pilot had to land the helicopter halfway through the race. Poor visibility.’
‘You won’t have that trouble today, mate,’ said the guard, handing back the press accreditation. ‘You’ll get a close-up of Mo Farah’s lunchbox in weather like this.’ The guard chortled at his joke. Bailey smiled politely. ‘Straight ahead and to the right, Mr Bailey. My colleagues will direct you on to the helipad.’
The barrier opened. Bailey drove slowly forward. To his right was a long hangar, with several cars and vans parked outside. Bailey drove the length of it – a distance of maybe thirty metres. The helipad itself came into view. There were three landing pads: two of them set back from the riverbank, one on a T-shaped pier that reached out into the Thames. There was a helicopter on each of the pads, two white Agustas and a yellow and black Twin Squirrel light utility chopper out on the pier. Bailey found his eyes zoning in on the Twin Squirrel. There was a figure standing right by it. Bailey could just make out the features of his colleague, McIntyre.
Up ahead were two guys in yellow hi-vis jackets. They both carried a handheld beacon but neither of them waved Bailey on, so he braked and waited for one of them to approach.
‘BBC?’ the ground steward asked. Shaved head, thick neck, broad Cockney accent and a smell of tobacco.
Bailey nodded and handed his press card over again, but the ground steward waved it away. ‘Your pilot’s here already, guv. He says you got some camera equipment to load up?’
Bailey nodded.
‘Okay, you can take the vehicle directly up to the heli. We’ve got ten minutes before we need to clear the pad of non-aerial vehicles. You have the all-clear from air-traffic control.’
Bailey wound up his window and slowly drove towards the Twin Squirrel. McIntyre stood calmly by the aircraft, but Bailey found himself examining the chopper carefully at a distance. His heart rate rose slightly when he saw a thin length of metal tucked along the side of the chopper’s landing skids. He couldn’t make out the individual spraying nozzles at this distance, but he knew they were there, and that a second aerial spraying attachment would be attached to the opposite side of the chopper. Nobody would notice these understated attachments if they weren’t looking for them. Once they were airborne, and the blades of this industrial spraying system had hinged outwards at ninety degrees, the helicopter would look a lot more suspicious. But by then, it would be too late.
When he was ten metres out, Bailey did a full turn and reversed up to the helicopter. He killed the engine and climbed out onto the tarmac.
There was a chill in the air. The river, just metres away, seemed very still, and clearly reflected the dark purples of the early morning sky. As Bailey walked up to McIntyre, he was aware of the glowing yellow lights of the modern apartment blocks on the opposite side of the river, and of a flock of birds flying in a V formation over the water. Two commercial airliners were visible, following the flight path down into Heathrow. That, along with the ground steward’s comment about the all-clear from air-traffic control, gave him confidence: there was no sign of any nervousness in the coordination of UK airspace. Which meant they weren’t suspected.
Neither man spoke. They just nodded silently at each other.
Bailey opened the back of the Transit van. Daniel dealt with the side doors of the Twin Squirrel. Together, they hauled the flight cases of camera equipment from the back of the van and into the helicopter. Bailey clocked the motor and tubes of the industrial spraying system’s machinery at the back of the chopper. They piled the flight cases in front of it, so it was hidden from anyone who happened to peer inside. And once that was done, they turned their attention to the two canisters that they had so carefully loaded up the previous morning, still strapped to the sides of the Transit.
‘Don’t let them tip this time,’ Bailey said.
Protected by the Transit van from the view of the ground stewards, they manoeuvred the first canister out of the vehicle, across the three metres of tarmac that separated it from the chopper, and with difficulty hauled it up into the body of the chopper.
They turned back to get the second canister. Bailey’s muscles burned as they left the chopper to retrieve it.
The ground steward suddenly appeared. He looked into the almost-empty Transit van, his handheld beacon illuminating the contents: a solitary canister, with Chinese lettering.
Bailey felt his muscles tensing up. He exchanged a sidelong glance with McIntyre, whose expression had suddenly turned dangerous.
The ground steward looked back at them. He was wearing a frown.
‘Fucking Chinks,’ he said in his broad Cockney. ‘They get everywhere, don’t they?’
Bailey smiled.
‘What is it, Hoisin sauce?’ He laughed loudly at his joke. ‘Nah, seriously, camera stock?’ He said it casually, as though showing off his knowledge, and clearly not realising how out of date it was.
Bailey nodded carefully.
‘Here, I’ll lend you a hand,’ said the ground steward. ‘I need to ask you to get the vehicle off the pad.’
‘You’re okay, mate,’ Bailey said quietly. ‘We’re on top of it.’
The ground steward shrugged. ‘Suit yourself, mate,’ he said, and he strode off across the helipad while Bailey and McIntyre loaded up the second canister.
By the time they were done, Bailey was sweating. He closed up the back of the Transit and drove it over to the hangar area. He jogged back to the Twin Squirrel. McIntyre had quickly pulled a hazmat suit over his clothes and was already at the controls with the rotors spinning. Bailey opened the side door, jumped in and closed the door behind him.
The helicopter rose from the helipad almost immediately. Bailey saw that McIntyre had his headset on and was talking into the boom mike, though he couldn’t hear what he was saying. As they rose over the river, and the London skyline came into view – its buildings glistening in the early morning sun – he started to unpack one of his boxes. He withdrew his own white hazmat suit, then two rebreathing masks. He would hand McIntyre’s his when the time came.
He turned his attention to the aerial spraying machinery at the back of the chopper. It didn’t look like much, and when they had first told him what he was to do, he hadn’t believed it would have the desired effect. But then he had researched the subject. It was amazing what information you could find, if you just knew where to look. He had read about an American bioweapons simulation, where a harmless substance was sprayed into the atmosphere from a ship out at sea. The substance had reached far inland, in quantities tha
t would have been devastating if it had been a lethal agent. The more he had read, the more he had become convinced that they were right: spraying a bioweapon from a chopper at a height of 150 feet above the crowds would have precisely the effect they required.
McIntyre looked back and shouted at him over the noise of the aircraft. ‘They want some shots of The Mall!’ he shouted. ‘Then over the Cutty Sark towards Shooter’s Hill to see everyone arriving for the race.’
Bailey nodded. He started to unpack his TV cameras, ready to begin filming the tens of thousands of people who even now were swarming towards the start line. As he put his equipment together, he ran through the morning’s schedule in his head. Wheelchair race, 08.55 start. Paralympic race, 09.00 start. Main race, 10.00 start. But by 08.00, he knew, the crowds would already be enormous, and their TV producer would not yet have requested that they travel further along the race route. That would be the best time to attack.
‘Remember to stay at five hundred feet until I give you the word. Then drop down to a hundred and fifty feet and swoop over the crowd.’
The helicopter banked. Bailey fitted his TV camera to its secure tripod, then opened the side door. Through the viewfinder, he focused in on Buckingham Palace and The Mall. The broad street had been shut off to traffic, but was already lined with spectators and guarded by a police presence that was, Bailey thought, larger than he expected. The union flag was flying over the palace itself.
Bailey allowed himself a grim smile as he wondered how long it would be before that flag was flying at half-mast.
Danny’s muscles burned with pain. The stress position – forced on to his knees and with his arms stretched behind him and cable-tied to the post – had been agonising after thirty minutes. But now, after two or three hours had passed, it was torment. The cable ties that bound his hands together behind his back were digging harshly into his wrists – he could feel wet blood where they were digging into his flesh – and the skin on the back of his neck that had been punctured by Ahmed’s knife was angry and sore.