by Chris Ryan
Another two rounds. Fresh screams from above. Tony or Caitlin had hit at least one more enemy target. That meant he could expect two more guys on the LZ, plus Ahmed.
He surged forward. Ten metres. Five. His ribs were agony. He ignored it. The sound of the chopper was much louder now. It couldn’t be more than thirty seconds out. He hit the metal staircase leading up to the LZ, before raising his head and his weapon up at an angle and wincing at a shock of pain from his broken ribs. He didn’t allow it to hinder him. Three-quarters of the way up the steps there was a bundled, bleeding body – one of the original three guards they’d taken out.
Danny, hyper-aware that his head was about to rise above the level of the LZ, was going to need him.
He hurried up to the corpse, then steeled himself. With shattered ribs, this was going to hurt. He bent over and ripped off its balaclava so that, at a distance, the enemy wouldn’t realise they were shooting one of their own. Then he took the strain and hauled the body up off the ground. His ribs cried out, but he shut off the pain, gritted his teeth and, holding the body by the scruff of the neck, took its full weight in his left hand.
It took massive effort and self-control to lift the corpse even higher so that just a few inches of its head rose above the edge of the LZ. Danny thought he could feel his own broken ribs moving inside him. Almost immediately three shots rang out from the far side of the LZ. Two of them flew over Danny’s head, but one slammed straight into the skull of the corpse, sending a chunk of brain and bone flying over the steps.
Danny let the corpse’s head drop out of sight below the edge of the LZ. The noise of the chopper was very loud now. It had to be on the point of touching down. Four more rounds flew over his head from Tony and Caitlin’s position.
Danny raised the corpse’s head again. No shots fell from the LZ. He took that as an opportunity to show himself.
He dropped the corpse, which clattered heavily on to the metal staircase. Weapon engaged once more, he thundered up the staircase, swinging round towards the LZ itself, his AK-47 directly following his line of fire. He took in the scene in a fraction of a second. A chopper had set itself down on the far side of the landing pad, twenty metres from Danny’s position, its nose facing him directly. The sun reflected brightly off the cockpit glass, dazzling him. But even with his suddenly compromised vision, he could tell that the side door was open, and there was no sign of Ahmed – Danny assumed he had already climbed inside. He could, however, see two more men, both dressed in black with their back to him. They were a metre out from the right-hand side of the chopper, and were obviously about to board.
Danny’s aim was true this time. They both collapsed as 7.62s slammed into them. Danny was already advancing as they crumpled to the ground. Distance to the chopper, fifteen metres. He still didn’t have eyes on Ahmed, and the chopper was rising. He directed his fire towards the cockpit, squinting to protect his eyes from the reflective glare. Danny could see very little inside the chopper as he released a two-second burst of rounds. The cockpit glass shattered and fell away. Danny could tell that he’d hit the pilot even before he saw him slumped over the controls, by the way the chopper, already a metre in the air, started to wobble precariously. It rotated ninety degrees clockwise as it collapsed back down to the LZ, its left-hand landing skids settling awkwardly on the body of one of the guys Danny had taken out, and presenting him with the open doors of the helicopter.
He advanced.
The downdraught from the rotors, still spinning, was a barrier he had to force himself through. Ten metres out he could see movement in the interior. He fired a warning shot just to the left of the area of movement, fully aware that if it was Ahmed, he had to be taken alive.
Seven metres out. The chopper shifted twenty degrees clockwise. Danny realised it was only a couple of metres from the edge of the LZ. With the rotors still spinning, there was a high chance of it toppling. He upped his pace and in two seconds was alongside the chopper. He breathed deeply, suddenly very aware of the sweat pouring down his grimy, bloody, broken face. Then, the butt of his AK-47 pressed deeply into his shoulder, his finger resting carefully on the trigger, he swung round and faced the entrance.
Ahmed was armed and ready. His back was pressed against the far side of the chopper, both arms were outstretched and he had a handgun pointing directly in Danny’s direction.
But he wasn’t fast enough.
Distance to target, two metres. It was barely necessary to adjust for the rifle’s skew. Danny fired first, discharging a round accurately into Ahmed’s left shoulder. He juddered hard against the back wall of the chopper, a flash of blood spraying across the interior. As he fell, Danny turned his body and his weapon towards the cockpit: there were two flight crew, both dead.
He jumped into the chopper, just as it shifted another few degrees clockwise. There was a frantic juddering as the skids below shifted off the corpse that was propping them up. Danny hurled himself towards Ahmed, who had dropped his handgun and was now gripping his wounded shoulder. He’d never seen such hate in a man’s face before. But that was okay. It was mutual. He grabbed Ahmed’s weapon from the floor of the chopper. Then, with his free hand, he punched Ahmed’s wound as hard as he could, knowing that the pain would put him out of action completely for a few precious seconds. Ahmed gasped, and Danny took his chance to hurl himself towards the shattered cockpit. He hauled the slumped pilot off the cyclic. The chopper shifted again – a full thirty-five degrees this time, so now it was facing directly out to sea. Danny twisted the throttle closed. Instantly he heard the loud beating sound of the rotors above diminish.
He turned back to Ahmed, a dark frown creasing his face and a familiar sense of hot anger rising in his chest.
He surged forward, grabbed his captive from the floor of the chopper and threw him out on to the LZ. As Ahmed landed with a heavy thud, Danny saw that Tony and Caitlin were at the edge of the landing pad, down on their knees in the firing position, protecting their location in case they hadn’t eliminated all the enemy on the rig.
Good thing too. It meant Danny could focus all his attention on the man who called himself the Caliph.
Ahmed was on his back, still clutching his wounded shoulder, his face a mixture of fire and pain. Danny collapsed down on to him, pressing one knee so heavily against his sternum that he started to cough and choke noisily.
‘You are going to tell me,’ he breathed, ‘the name of the person or people who are about to release the bioweapon in London. You might reckon at the moment that you won’t. But trust me, you will.’
Ahmed spat in his face.
‘Here’s what you’re thinking,’ Danny continued relentlessly. ‘You’re thinking I’m going to threaten to kill you. You’re thinking I’m just like you, and that the worst I can do is put a bullet in your skull or cut your fucking head off. But you want to know the truth? That Caliph bullshit means nothing to me, and I’m a hundred times worse than you can possibly imagine.’
Ahmed’s eyes narrowed. ‘I’m not afraid of dying,’ he spat.
Danny gave him a grim smile. ‘Oh, I know that,’ he said. ‘I know you’re looking forward to your seventy-two fucking virgins. That’s why I’m not going to kill you. Not even when you ask me to do it, which you will. When I’ve finished with you, you’ll be begging me to put you out of your misery, like the dog that you are. But I won’t. Not until until I know every single thing about the attack.’
Ahmed’s lip curled into a nauseatingly arrogant expression, almost as if he was daring Danny to follow through on his words.
‘You’re beginning to believe your own PR, Ahmed. You might be the Caliph to everyone else, but to me you’re just some cunt I’m going to hurt.’
Ahmed hissed at him.
‘Ready for this, you piece of shit?’ Danny said.
The London crowds were swarming like ants. Bailey watched them through the viewfinder of his TV camera. The Cutty Sark was a dot in the distance. Bright sunlight reflected off the snakin
g Thames, turning the water silver. The green spaces of Shooter’s Hill were crowded. The chopper hovered above them.
Bailey took his eye away from the viewfinder. He looked down at himself. He had changed into his hazmat suit, but the mask was by his side, ready to be worn when the time came.
He checked his watch. 07:40. The time was arriving. Just another twenty minutes.
Bailey examined the rest of his equipment. A rubber tube led from the industrial sprayer into one of the heavy vats of liquid. He didn’t know how long it would take to expel the contents of the first canister. Five minutes? Maybe ten? He didn’t even know if they would have the opportunity to engage the second canister, but it wouldn’t really matter. One would be enough to deal with the ants below.
He realised his hand was shaking. Anxiety? Excitement? A bit of both. Hardly a surprise, he thought to himself, when you know you’re about to buy yourself a ticket to Paradise.
Danny knew that the most painful places to shoot a man are not always the most obvious. And of the most painful, only a few were appropriate if you wanted your victim alive and conscious. The stomach would hurt very badly, but at point blank range it will probably kill, and certainly render your target unconscious within minutes. You wanted somewhere with a mass of bone, cartilage and nerve endings. The hip would be good if it weren’t so close to major arteries. The elbow would be a prime candidate if there wasn’t a risk of the victim struggling.
Much better was the knee. There was a reason the IRA and the Mafia used kneecapping as a method of punishment. It was as much pain as a person could tolerate without passing out or bleeding out.
Danny stood above Ahmed, the heel of one foot pinning him down by his belly, the barrel of his gun an inch away from his right knee.
He fired.
Ahmed’s whole limb slammed flat against the LZ. His trouser leg suddenly took on a dark, wet stain, but the bleed wasn’t too bad. Ahmed’s scream, however, was: a hoarse, high-pitched howl that seemed to echo across the platform. Danny moved his heel from his victim’s belly, then slammed it hard down on the wounded kneecap. The scream became so intense and raw that it was barely audible. Danny ground his heel into the wound, then he kneeled down again. ‘Names,’ he said.
Ahmed scrunched his eyes closed. He whispered something. Danny listened hard. It almost sounded as if he was chanting something. Some kind of prayer. Danny could barely make out the words. ‘I will drive him into the Hellfire . . . it allows nothing to endure . . . it blackens the skins of men . . .’
Fine.
He stood up and released a second round into the good knee, then slammed his heel down on that one.
It was as if Ahmed had screamed himself out. His body was shaking and he was gasping for breath.
‘Names,’ Danny said.
Ahmed gritted his teeth and shook his head.
Danny felt a moment of anxiety. He hadn’t expected Ahmed to withstand this level of pain. Most people would have cracked by now.
‘What’s happening?’ Tony shouted from the edge of the LZ. ‘What have you got?’
Rather than tell Tony he had nothing, Danny rolled the shaking, muttering Ahmed over on to his front. He raised his victim’s right leg, then laid his rifle directly underneath the knee joint so that his foot and the lower part of his leg were pointing up at a slight angle. Then he stood and slammed his foot down on the lower leg. There was a cracking sound as the damaged knee pivoted back, and Ahmed howled silently. His arms flailed despite the shoulder wound, and Danny managed to discern a single word.
‘Stop!’
Quickly, he knelt down by the side of Ahmed’s head. ‘There’s only one way to make it stop,’ he said. ‘You know what you’ve got to do. Give me names.’
‘I . . . I . . . don’t know them . . .’
‘Well that’s a big fucking shame for you, sunshine, because I’m not going to stop until you give me something concrete.’
He stood up again.
‘Wait. Wait . . .’
‘I’m done with waiting, pal . . .’
He shifted the blood-soaked AK-47 so that it was under the left knee and prepared to repeat his last procedure.
Ahmed was chanting again in Arabic, but Danny could hear the note of desperation in his frail voice. He pressed his heel against the lower part of the left leg.
Ahmed inhaled noisily.
‘Bay . . .’
‘I can’t hear you?’ Danny shouted. He put pressure on Ahmed’s lower leg.’
‘Bay . . .’
‘That means nothing.’
More pressure.
‘Bailey!’ Ahmed screamed, although the volume of the scream from his ravaged throat was little more than a whisper. ‘His name is James Bailey!’
THIRTY-ONE
Danny didn’t hesitate. He looked over his shoulder at Tony. ‘Get over here!’ he shouted.
Tony ran towards them.
‘Don’t let the fucker move,’ Danny told him.
‘What did he give you?’
‘Enough,’ Danny said. ‘Maybe.’
While Tony kept guard over the prisoner, Danny sprinted to the chopper. Its rotors were still now, its interior deadly silent. He climbed in and clambered over the bleeding bodies of the two flight crew. He scanned the flight deck controls – collective, throttle, cyclic – until he found the VHF radio. He turned it on and tuned the radio to transmit at 121.5 MHz – the international civil aviation distress frequency. He grabbed the mouthpiece of the radio and immediately started transmitting. ‘This is Bravo Nine Zero. Hellfire suspect is James Bailey. Repeat, this it Bravo Nine Zero. Hellfire suspect is James Bailey.’
He knew that GCHQ would be monitoring the distress frequency. All he could do now was continue to broadcast the information, and hope that they could do something with it.
07.50 GMT
‘We’ve got something!’
The strained, stressed voice of one of Bixby’s men rang out across the ops room in the basement of the MI6 building. Bixby manoeuvred his wheelchair across the room, past the Chief, who seemed to have lost all semblance of control, and past a couple of Porton Down reps there to advise them should the unthinkable happen, to where his guy was sitting in front of a laptop, his right hand pressed hard against his earpiece.
‘What is it?’ Bixby demanded.
‘GCHQ have picked up a radio communication from between the Qatari and Iranian coast. They’re patching it through.’
‘Everyone quiet!’ Bixby shouted. ‘Let me hear.’
The hubbub in the room immediately died. Bixby’s guy tapped a few buttons on his laptop. A hissing sound from speakers set around the ops centre filled the room.
It was nothing: just feedback and white noise.
‘Wait out,’ Bixby’s guy said. ‘There’s someth—’
A male voice, very faint, almost drowned out by the radio crackle: ‘Bravo Nine . . . suspect . . . repeat . . . Nine Zero . . .’
The loudspeaker reverted to white noise.
Bixby felt a dead, dread weight in his limbs. ‘Patch it through to Hereford,’ he said quietly.
More tapping at the laptop, while the white noise filled the air.
Then, suddenly: ‘This is Bravo Nine Zero . . . Hellfire suspect . . .’
White noise.
Bixby cursed. He felt the eyes of everyone in the ops room boring into him. He glanced up at a screen on the wall. It showed aerial footage – a crowd of thousands congregating at the marathon’s starting area.
For a full minute there was nothing.
‘I think we’ve lost it,’ Bixby’s guy said weakly.
If Bixby could have shaken his head, he would have done. ‘Keep the channel open,’ he said.
And as soon as he had finished speaking, the loudspeaker burst into life again. The voice was suddenly very loud. Very clear. Bixby recognised it. Danny Black.
‘This is Bravo Nine Zero. Hellfire suspect is James Bailey. Repeat, this is Bravo Nine Zero. Hellfire suspect is James
Bailey.’
‘FIND OUT WHO HE IS!’ Bixby shouted. ‘NOW!’
07.55 GMT
The Regiment’s Agusta Westland flew low over north-west London. Aside from the flight crew there were five men in the chopper: a four-man unit plucked from the standby squadron, plus Spud. They’d seemed surprised when Spud had presented himself to them – it was no secret that he had been out of the game for a while – but respectful. Spud was the senior guy, and the younger Regiment soldiers had automatically deferred to him.
He sat a little bit apart from them, his body armour pressing painfully against his scarred abdomen, his Kevlar helmet and earpiece strangely uncomfortable as he hadn’t worn them for so long. Even the assault rifle slung across his chest felt weird. They were each plugged into the helicopter’s comms system, but neither the pilot nor Hereford had spoken for twenty minutes. There was nothing to say. They were on high alert, but they didn’t know what for. They simply needed to be ready to respond when the time came.
Spud looked through the window. In the distance, shimmering in the early morning sunlight, he could make out the London Eye and Big Ben. In his mind, he pictured the massive crowds that would soon be snaking through London. He thought of Frances. He didn’t know what he’d be able to do in the event of an attack. But he’d rather be here, in the thick of things, than sitting behind a desk at a safe distance while his mates were putting their arses on the line . . .
07.56 GMT
A voice rang out across the MI6 ops room. ‘We have a James Bailey, a freelance cameraman, working for the BBC.’
‘What do we know about him?’ Bixby demanded. ‘Is he a person of interest?’
‘Negative, sir. British Caucasian, no criminal record, not previously known to any of the security agencies.’
‘Shit!’ Bixby hissed. A single name, barely heard over a crackly radio line from thousands of miles away, was hardly proof of terrorist intent. ‘Where is he now?’