by A P Bateman
16
Mohammed Betesh watched the car pull into the end of the street. It was a little too obvious for his liking but it would not be there long. He had received orders to wait from Zukovsky, to remain in position until the assault force arrived. He did not know who was going to be arriving, but he could see Rashid on his moped some way behind the car. He had not heard Rashid arrive, but imagined that the man had cut the engine and freewheeled into position. Rashid was proving to be an asset, a good thinker. Untested, Rashid was new to the operation but had proven himself a good fixer, someone who could get equipment and favours. He was also a good surveillance operator. He had come highly recommended from ISIS recruiters in London, some of the most extreme Islamic preachers and clerics in the country. Now Mohammed would discover if the man was also brave.
Mohammed’s phone rang and he looked at the display. No name was showing, but he recognised the number as Alesha’s. He waited just long enough to prevent the call going to voicemail, then accepted the call.
“Yes?”
“Mohammed, I am in position with Khalil. Rashid is behind us.”
“I am surprised Zukovsky is giving you another chance,” he said.
“There will be no failure this time!” She snapped. “Besides, I have braver men with me now. Rafan died like the cowardly dog he was.”
“Whore!”
“At times I’ve had to be. Just like your mother, I’d imagine. Only not with goats.”
“Bitch!” He shouted into the phone. “I’ll see you dead for that!”
“Eyes on the prize, Mohammed. I thought you were meant to be a professional.”
Mohammed breathed a deep, steadying breath. He squeezed the phone, gritting his teeth together. “What are our orders?” He smiled at the thought of slashing the Russian bitch’s throat before this operation was complete.
“You follow me, of course. I’m in charge, after all. Take out the security in the car and we storm the house. Two at the front, two at the rear. They won’t stand a chance.”
***
Forester sat in the rear of the Jaguar XJ saloon. His driver was ex-army, had spent his career driving senior staff at the MOD. He was the best in the business and had driven for Forester for eight years. He instructed at the MI5 driver training centre in Norfolk several times a year. At the weekends and holidays he raced his classic TVR in hill climbs. One of the more affordable motorsports. As he threaded his way silkily through the north London traffic, Forester marvelled at what rapid progress they made. He had once told Forester that it was not a matter of reading the road and vehicles in front, but as far ahead as you could see. Two thousand metres or more on open roads, ten cars ahead at least in the traffic. It gave you more than enough warning to see obstructions before the cars ahead of you, and he also had the traffic light changes timed from experience on the most driven routes around London.
Forester’s mobile vibrated and he took it out to see Detective Inspector Hodges’ ID and number flash up. “Hello, Inspector.”
“Forester, I have a lead on the drug used to incapacitate your agents. It was as I suspected, the supplier has given us the details of his two dealers. We followed the leads and there haven’t been many sales of the batch matching the toxicology reports on account of the Met busying themselves with nailing this, nipping it in the bud. Those two girls lying in comas are bad PR. Forget racial crimes, armed robbery and murder, young white women from middleclass families getting drugged, raped or spiked into a coma is something that can happen to everybody’s little girl. I’m on my way to his hottest tip. The dealer phoned first, ordered the man to stay put. I’ve got a uniform on him to stop him welching on our agreement. I’ve pulled a few strings on this, guaranteed him exemption from prosecution as long as he closes down this side of his business. If it goes to prosecution I’ll stand by that, it’s important to remain good to your word in this game.”
“I understand,” Forester said. “I want the person who bought those drugs. MI5 isn’t interested in anyone else.”
***
“Are you stupid?” Barbara shouted, smiling as Hoist visibly flinched. She threw down the picture of Alesha Mikailovitch in front of him. Casually tossing it down like a croupier dealing blackjack. “What’s her name?”
“I want my lawyer!” He shouted.
“There is not going to be a fucking lawyer you little prick!” She snapped. “Look at this room! Look at the floor! Look at the fucking drain! There will be two big ex-SAS types in here in a minute to beat your sorry little face in! Now who is the woman?”
“Veruschka,” he said solemnly. “My girlfriend.”
Barbara laughed. “Try again.”
“She is! We were having an affair.”
“An affair?” Barbara scoffed. “Was she married?”
“No.”
“Well I know you’re not,” she sneered. “So how was it an affair?”
“We were together.”
She tossed a sheet on the table. There was another photograph and a paragraph written underneath. “Her name is Alesha Mikailovitch. She is wanted by Interpol for the murder of a rather unsavoury Russian drug baron. She’s a known prostitute. A crack whore who slept with men to further her pimp’s reach and business.”
“That’s not true!”
“Oh wake up and smell the blackmail will you?” Barbara stared at him. “So what did they want?” Hoist looked at her blankly. “Spit it out! Delay any longer and those ex-SAS boys are going to turn your spleen into something that resembles green baby shit.”
“Just minor things.”
“Or so it started.”
“I didn’t mean it to go so far.”
“They never do. So how did it go? Let me guess; you meet by chance. A bar? No, it has to have a hook. Internet dating? Bit of a stretch, but I guess they targeted you first and looked for an angle. Hacked your home computer. You’ll have one of course. Mainly for porn and online gaming would be my bet. So it was through the internet, right?” Hoist nodded. Barbara slid a pen and sheet of paper across the table. “Name of the site, user ID, account number, security questions. Everything we need to get into and own your account.”
Hoist wrote down all she needed. He looked up as Caroline entered the room, took the sheet without a word and closed the door behind her.
“She said her name was Veruschka,” he said lamely. “They trapped me. Made films of me. I just wanted to impress her,”
“Can’t imagine you’d be able to do that,” she sneered. “So you had a few dates, slept together a few times. Impressed her with your tales of a 007 lifestyle, even though you lived where you lived. Most probably told her it was a cover,” she smiled as she saw his eyes flicker. “Then when does the butterfly sting like a bee? When does your lover drop her bombshell?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“They wanted what?”
“Information.”
“Be more explicit. Those ex-SAS boys are straining at the leash.”
“Information from personnel. They wanted names and addresses, cover aliases, covert operation names, details of assets both at home and abroad, operations and details on mosque surveillance throughout Britain.”
“And you supplied them,” Barbara commented flatly. “That was a lot of information. It would take a good undercover agent months to get hold of that little lot. So you were caught with what was downloaded three days ago. This was a personnel file detailing a small percentage of undercover agents and handlers. How much more was downloaded?”
Hoist frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Well, from their shopping wish list, how much did you get for them?”
Hoist looked at her, he seemed confused by her question, unsure what she had meant. He thought he had detailed their requirements. He shrugged. “All of it.”
17
Mohammed could see the driver of the blue Vauxhall Insignia saloon smoking, his window wound down half way, the smoke clearly wafting outside. The man was off guard, h
is instincts nulled by the belief he was perfectly safe in this quiet neighbourhood. Mohammed could see Alesha getting out of the car up ahead. That was the signal to move and he got out of the van, keeping the AK47 held down alongside his leg. He crossed the road most of the way, estimated the blind spot in the wing mirror of the undercover police vehicle and walked casually at a brisk pace. His fingers wrapped around the hilt of the Arabian dagger and he drew it clear of the curved metal scabbard. He could smell the cigarette smoke as he drew closer. He looked up and saw Alesha and Khalil nearing the driveway, Rashid crossing the road. He saw the police officer in the car sit up and take notice. Mohammed quickened his pace, reached the open window and slashed the knife across the man’s neck, opening up the windpipe and severing the carotid artery on his right side. A spurt of blood hit the windscreen and splattered a pattern on the glass as the driver writhed in his seat, both hands clasped around his throat. Mohammed had his arm back outside the car before it could get bloody. He sheathed the blade with the blood still on it. It was a Yemeni tradition to never clean off the blood of your enemies. With both hands on the AK47 he joined in with Alesha and Rashid and ran up the driveway to the front door. Khalil brought up the rear. He had a Glock 17 pistol in one hand and a bag in the other.
Alesha held a compact MP5 9mm machine pistol. She aimed at the lock on the door and fired a short burst. The wood splintered, but the bullets flattened on the steel door behind and ricocheted back through the wood showering them with splinters and fragments of copper and lead. They both flinched, Mohammed screamed as a large piece of bullet fragment tore into his shoulder. Blood seeped from the wound and made a pattern like a pressed flower head on his coat. He grimaced, snatched the bag off of Khalil and delved inside. He took out three Russian grenades and two shaped charges of plastic explosive and laid them on the ground. He passed the bag back to Khalil. “Get around the back, now!” He turned to Alesha. “Go with him!”
Alesha glared at him, but relented and followed Khalil. Mohammed stood back and fired a sustained burst at one of the downstairs windows. The AK47 thundered, firing thirty bullets in a few seconds, so close to the window the muzzle flash danced against the glass and scorched the frame.
***
“We’re being hit!” A Special Branch officer came bursting into the hallway, shouting into the booth. “Get down! Get down!” He had his Smith & Wesson Sigma pistol in his right hand and he was trying to dial on his mobile.
Caroline gathered her file together. Swift, who had been going softly-softly with Hoist after he had been shaken up by Barbara appeared at the door, startled by the noise. Hoist was on his feet and standing behind him, peering over the man’s shoulder. Swift turned and ushered him back into the room. He shut the door behind him, the lock engaged electronically.
“We’re under attack,” Caroline said. There was a dull thud and she knew from experience that it was a grenade detonating against the door. It shook the house. She looked at Swift. “Give me that file, I need to shred it. Send the recordings onwards to HQ by pressing the condense and send buttons, then press delete to erase the recordings from the hard drive. Do it now!”
Swift bounded into the booth where Barbara was crouching, stunned and panicked. The two fumbled with the box. They had never done a shut-down protocol for real. Caroline ran into the office and heard another thud, this time from the rear. The other Special Branch officer was running upstairs two or three treads at a time. He looked at Caroline, his face ashen. Caroline started pushing the file documents and photographs through the shredder.
“I’ve hit the panic button and called through to the switchboard!” Alice shouted through the doorway. “Here, give me that and see what you can do elsewhere!” She grabbed the documents and pushed them through two or three sheets at a time.
“Any weapons?” Caroline shouted.
“Kitchen utensils, rolling pin, knives, nothing else!”
Gunshots were clearly audible and the thudding of bullets impacting on the toughened glass and metal. Caroline ran out to the hallway and into the lounge. The remaining Special Branch officer was peering around the edge of the shattered window, but it had still held firm. “Get back!” she shouted. “Get upstairs and get a window open! Get some rounds down on to them! The high ground has the advantage!”
The Special Branch officer looked at her for a moment, then decided it wasn’t a bad idea and bounded up the stairs after his colleague, who by the sounds of it had done exactly that. The short, sharp reports of a 9mm pistol filled the house. The gunshots outside sounded louder with a window open, near deafening. The door thudded again, then juddered as an almighty explosion almost knocked her off her feet. She knew it was something far larger than a grenade. The doorway was askew and was shifting as someone behind it started to kick at it. Caroline ran past Swift and Barbara who were both on their mobile phones having apparently completed the security protocol to delete the hard drive of the CCTV unit. She looked around the kitchen and put a pan on the electric hob and switched it on full. She wrenched open the cupboards and took out a full one kilo bag of castor sugar, ripped it open and tipped it into the saucepan. The rear door shuddered like the front door had only moments before and the noise of the explosion was felt in her chest as the shockwave resonated through the house. Glasses and crockery dropped out of the top kitchen cupboards and shattered on the tiled floor.
Caroline took a heavy cook’s knife off the magnetic rack and held it firmly in her right hand as she made her way more cautiously into the hall. She looked up the stairs and shouted. “One of you get down here, we’re about to be breached! I need a weapon on the front door, it’s almost down!” She could hear the door being pounded behind her in the kitchen. She looked at both Swift and Barbara, they were frozen. This was not in their remit. They were psychologists, negotiators. “Get Hoist out of there and get upstairs!” They did not need telling twice. Swift worked the keypad and Caroline could hear them shouting at him as she went into the kitchen. The door was almost in and the kitchen window was opaque, a web of shattered glass, impossible to see through, but still holding firm. It was bowed where it had been punched or more likely beaten with the butt of a weapon. There were no more explosions but the door was shifting inwards. A four-inch gap was held only by millimetres of the tips of the steel bolts. The barrel of a pistol eased inside. Caroline could tell that the person behind was forcing their shoulder and all of their weight against the door, gradually heaving it open. She quietly edged across the kitchen, backed up to the door, took a deep breath to steady her nerves, then hacked down with the heavy cook’s knife across the person’s hand. The pistol clattered to the ground and there was a gut-wrenching scream as the hand retracted and most of a thumb dropped onto the floor along with a surprising amount of blood. The screaming carried on as Caroline picked up the weapon, jammed it out through the gap and fired five rapid shots. There was a moment’s pause and the door took a heavy rapid and sustained burst of fire from some sort of small automatic weapon. Twenty rounds or more clattering and singing as they ricocheted off the metal and through the air. She looked at the bubbling froth of dark brown boiling sugar and backed up to take it off the stove. It was filling the air with a bitter, acrid smoke that started to sting her eyes and burn her nostrils. The door gave way with a final push and dropped askew in the doorway. Caroline saw a man getting back to his feet having fallen on top of both doors, cradling his bloodied hand. A woman stood behind him. She recognised her as Alesha Mikailovitch. She was strikingly beautiful, but her eyes were fierce and cruel. She was changing over the magazine of the smoking MP5 machine pistol, panting and grinning with pleasure, arousal. Caroline remembered the sound she had made firing the bullets into the poor Special Branch officer’s body. A haunting display of pleasure amid violence and death. Caroline made eye contact with her, momentarily before she flicked out the pan and splashed them both with the molten caramel. Almost four times the temperature of boiling water, sticky and slow to cool. It melted their
skin and clothing and their screams were beyond a level of which Caroline had ever heard before. Or ever wanted to hear again. Animalistic, other-worldly. Alesha flailed backwards and out of view down the side of the house, the man fell onto his back and rolled onto his front. He was kicking wildly and still wailing. Caroline still had half the liquid in the pan and ran to the front door, which had given way but had fallen at such an angle as to create a difficult barrier for the intruders to breach. She caught sight of Alesha screaming past her accomplices, her hands cupping her face as she ran onto the driveway. Both men turned and looked at her, giving Caroline a chance to splash the rest of the liquid at them. The lead figure took the brunt across his chest and face and he jumped high into the air dropping his AK47 and spinning a kind of uncontrolled, unintentional pirouette. He cupped his face, and Caroline realised at that moment that both he and Alesha’s hands were scolded also and stuck to the ruined skin. He screamed and reeled backwards fleeing after her. The second man looked up. He had escaped the dousing and had a pistol in his hand. He seemed to notice the pistol in Caroline’s right hand and turned and ran. Caroline raised the weapon and sighted on the centre of the man’s back. She cursed, lowering the pistol as she watched him run into the street and disappear from sight. She backed into the house, then spun around remembering the attacker with the injured hand. She dropped the pan on the floor, held the pistol with both hands and sighted it in front of her. She edged into the kitchen and carefully peered out of the doorway. The man had gone. Alesha’s machine pistol lay abandoned on the ground, a thick, sticky black treacle covering it. She turned around and walked to the stairs. There was an eerie quiet in the house. She could hear sirens approaching, still a long way off. She climbed the stairs steadily, the weapon held out in front of her. Barbara was cowering in the bedroom doorway. She stood up as Caroline approached. Swift peered out of the bathroom, Hoist was behind him crouched on the tiled floor. Caroline eased her way into the second bedroom. Its window overlooked the garden behind the kitchen. A Special Branch officer lay slumped on the floor, his weapon on the floor beside him, a pattern of crimson holes patterned across his chest. Caroline turned to the landing. She saw the open window overlooking the driveway. She saw the second officer slumped across a bookshelf. He was staring at her, but his eyes held no life. He still held the pistol, blood had run down his arm, over the frame of the weapon where it dripped off the tip of the barrel and pooled on the floor. Alice stood next to him, her fingers resting on his neck checking his pulse. She looked up at Caroline, tears in her eyes.