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His arms blurred, metal flashed silver in the lights, and suddenly Bright had let go of his weapon while red liquid spurted from his throat around the embedded blade. He dropped to his knees, both hands on his throat, and a strangled gurgle came out of his mouth. In the same move Clarkson had swept up his dropped weapon and leaped down from the carousel, hauling a shrieking woman to her feet.

  It all happened in the time it took for Bright to topple flat on his face and lie still while a pool of blood swept across the burnished metal of the carousel.

  The image burned into Sean’s brain, a never-ceasing, relooping slo-mo video. With a wordless cry he dropped to one knee and brought the MP5 up to his shoulder. Bright falling over. Wolston was standing with May’s weapon also trained on Clarkson – and on the weeping hostage.

  Bright falling …

  ‘Drop your guns, soldier boys!’ Clarkson snapped. ‘Drop them now! Put them down and step away!’

  Bright …

  Sean didn’t move. At that moment he was prepared to shoot through the woman and blow Clarkson away. His arms trembled with the clashing desires to squeeze the trigger and protect the woman.

  Wolston was also hesitating, but a hostage was a hostage. The weapon wavered, and then he let it drop. ‘Put it down, Harker,’ he said, his voice heavy.

  Sean felt tears of rage prick his eyes. He would not let them through. He shifted aim slightly, snuggled the butt more firmly into his shoulder, slowed his breathing so as not to make the weapon wobble. Clarkson’s face was above the hostage’s shoulder, and Sean had the MP5’s iron sights square on it. He was sure he could fire, give the woman the fright of her life as a single round zipped past her head at supersonic speed and sprayed Clarkson’s brains over the rest of the hall. If Wolston gave the word. By the time the woman clocked what was happening, it would be over.

  ‘Put it down, Stenders,’ Marshall said quietly. He and Penfold stood very still on either side of Hammond’s slowly moving, groaning body.

  ‘Fusilier Harker! Lower your weapon!’ Wolston snapped. He led by example, bending at the knees to lay his MP5 on the floor. Then he straightened and took a step away from it. His hands were back in the palms-out position to show – Look, no threat.

  Which just meant that Sean was now the sole focus of Clarkson’s attention. The gunman kept the MP5 on him, but he could only hold it by its pistol grip. His other arm was locked in a chokehold around the hostage’s neck.

  In theory, that gave them all a chance. Weapons like that were designed for two hands for a reason – the recoil made them unmanageable with just one. Held like that, any discharge could go anywhere – but at this short range, just between the two baggage carousels, it would probably go into Sean first.

  And Sean knew he was beat. His breath came in short spurts as he unpeeled his left hand from the stock. Each finger seemed to require a conscious act of will to move it. He brought the weapon away from his shoulder and began to lower it to the floor.

  It was only a tiny shift in Clarkson’s stance – maybe a fractional movement of the barrel as he tracked Sean properly, a tension in his body. But that was when Sean just knew.

  Shit, he’s going to fire.

  And even as he was bringing the weapon back up and raising his left hand, he remembered, I put it on ‘none’, didn’t I? And he knew that the half-second taken to flick it to ‘one’ would be a quarter of a second too long.

  Sean surrendered all voluntary control of his muscles. Pure instinct took over. The simple message to his brain was: Keep me alive.

  Close beside him was a vertical, knee-high steel wall. He didn’t even clock what it was there for, just that it was cover, and he flung himself behind it. The ground vanished beneath him and he tumbled down a slope. The wall was the lip of the feeder belt, the entry into the depths of the earth that disgorged unloaded suitcases onto the main belt.

  Behind him he heard the screams of the hostage, and the roar of the MP5, and the metallic clang of rounds hitting the steel. But he was already below the level of the carousel. He somersaulted into the depths of the airport in a clumsy tangle of limbs and weapon, and hit the bottom with a blow that knocked the breath out of him.

  But he was only still for a moment. His brain was still following its last order, and as he realized, Shit, I’m exposed, he was already rolling over to one side, off the belt and onto a hard concrete floor. He was in a low space that was wider than the hall above. Everything was concrete – pillars and floor and ceiling, all bare. This was not a public area. It smelled of diesel and damp, and it was empty. A luggage trolley stood next to the belt, half unloaded but now abandoned. Any civvies around here would have already cleared off.

  Sean scrambled to his knees and brought the weapon to bear on the gap in the ceiling above him. A flick of the thumb set the MP5’s selector to ‘lots’. Any black-clad head showed itself in that gap of light above him, he would blow it apart. His finger on the trigger tingled with anticipation.

  There was still shouting and screaming up there, and most of the words he could hear were Clarkson and May bellowing orders. No head showed.

  Instead there was a clank and a rattle, and an HG85 hand grenade – fuse three to four seconds, lethal range of ten metres, and able to take out a man in Kevlar body armour – was bouncing down the belt towards him.

  Chapter 9

  Wednesday 2 August, 07:15 BST

  Shit shit shit shit shit …

  Sean didn’t remember moving. Somehow he was behind one of the concrete pillars, pressed hard against it, making himself as thin and vertical as he could.

  The explosion was a crack, a snapping sound that spat 1800 fragments of hot metal out in all directions at speeds that would slice through a human body like a knife through butter.

  But they couldn’t get through the concrete. They clattered against the pillar, and Sean was safe in its shadow.

  It was one, very small bright side.

  Shit shit shit …

  He drew several deep breaths to calm his pounding heart, and considered his options. Tried to think strategically.

  This was him. On his own, cut off from his unit.

  The logical thing now would be to try to escape and make his way to the authorities. He could tell them what he knew, give them int that might help them retake the hall – but fuck that: he had just seen one of his best mates killed.

  OK. He blinked away the rage and anger that he wanted to feel whenever he thought of Bright, lying there with a knife in his throat. That would come later. For now he had to be cool. Serve his revenge cold.

  Everyone upstairs must think he was dead. The lads and the gunmen. They weren’t chucking any more grenades down. At least, not yet.

  So he had an advantage.

  He looked around, and he didn’t have to search far. There were two carousels up top, which meant there were two feeder belts down here. His leap behind the pillar had put him nearer the second one. It was a twin of the first, a conveyor belt rising up at a forty-five-degree angle and disappearing into the ceiling.

  It was a vulnerability.

  Give the gunmen a couple more seconds and they would work it out for themselves, and take precautions. Which meant that Sean had less than a couple of seconds to get there first. He instinctively shook his head to clear the sweat from his eyes, even though he wasn’t wearing a helmet, and leaped onto the belt.

  He advanced up at a crouch, weapon held before him, ready to open fire on anything that moved. He was prepared for what he intended to do. He had killed someone once before, in instinctive self-defence. This time he would mean it. The objective was to eliminate the threat of the gunmen before the bastards knew what had hit them, and the most effective way of doing that was to put a couple of rounds into each of them. As his instructor had drummed into him the very first day he picked up a rifle, shooting to wound is a convenient Hollywood fiction that doesn’t exist in real life. If you open fire with live ammunition, you expect to kill. His only regret was that he couldn’t d
o this Battlefield style, savouring the expression of the bad guy who suddenly realizes what’s coming and can’t do anything to escape it.

  He crouched just below the steel lip and reluctantly dialled the selector back to ‘one’. This would have to be precise – with innocent warm bodies present, he couldn’t just spray rounds about like they were on special offer. He let his ears do the recce for him. He was just a couple of paces from where Clarkson had been – which meant that Bright’s body was also lying nearby, just out of sight. Sean coldly pushed the image from his mind. Meanwhile, judging by what he could hear, Clarkson was no longer on the carousel – in other words, no longer just a few steps away from where Sean was now. It sounded like he was down on the floor among the passengers, maybe four metres to Sean’s right.

  ‘Right!’ Clarkson was shouting. ‘All you soldier boys, line up over there. Move! I’ll count to five, and then your man here loses his head. Shift! One, two—’

  ‘And the rest of you, shut the fuck up!’

  That was May, conveniently giving Sean his location. He was moving – pacing slowly down the space between the carousels, over on the other side.

  Clarkson had reached three and was beginning on four when Sean moved. He had the butt in his shoulder, hands on pistol grip and stock, and he rose smoothly to his feet, aiming at where Clarkson’s voice was coming from.

  Shit.

  The lads were kneeling in a semicircle around the lead gunman like worshippers before an altar, though their god required his followers to clasp their hands behind their heads. But each carousel had a large display screen on a pillar next to it, giving details of flight arrivals, and the pillar was in the way. Not badly – Sean could plainly see Clarkson – but enough to obscure a clean shot, and certainly enough to provide ricochets into the hostages if Sean took a punt anyway. Until he moved, Clarkson was off limits.

  But plan B was good. May was exactly where Sean had expected him to be, standing by the other carousel while Hammond sat up, rubbing the back of his drooping head. May froze at the sight of Sean emerging, for exactly as long as it took Sean to aim and put two single shots into him. They tore through his body and threw red streamers onto the steel of the carousel behind. He crumpled where he fell. Hostages screamed and the nearest ones scrambled hurriedly away.

  The lads didn’t need telling. The pillar also stopped Clarkson firing immediately back at Sean, and the lads moved while, for half a second, he was torn between options. For the second time Clarkson disappeared beneath a crowd of Fusiliers.

  Hammond climbed unsteadily to his feet, and immediately Sean had him at gunpoint with his own weapon. The gunman’s hands shot into the air. His eyes were wide, his pupils dark with fright behind his balaclava. Now Sean was out on the main belt, he could see Bright’s still body. He wanted to go over to him, see if there was the slightest thing he could do – but he had to push that idea away, because keeping tabs on Hammond was more important.

  Then Sean heard someone shout ‘Shit!’ – just before a cloud of black, choking smoke burst out from the knot of lads over Clarkson. In half a second it had enveloped them and was billowing out into the rest of the hall, with the background roaring hiss of a smoke grenade, and chokes and shouts from the lads. Sean remembered the ugly little cylinders hanging from Clarkson’s webbing.

  There was nothing Sean could do to help them – he couldn’t open fire on an unseen target without causing a lot of collateral damage in the form of his mates. But he could keep Hammond at bay. In fact, he began to ask himself if he shouldn’t just do the world a favour and take Hammond down anyway – was that what the SAS would do?

  He saw Hammond’s eyes go even wider – maybe the guy was thinking along the same lines.

  Except that a second smoke bomb suddenly flew out of the expanding cloud and landed at Hammond’s feet. In a moment the gunman had disappeared like the assistant in a cheap magic act, and then the cloud had filled the space between the carousels.

  ‘Clarkson’s got away!’ Sean heard Wolston bellow from the depths of the fog. The hostages screamed and shouted twice as loud. ‘Harker, if you see him …’

  The smoke stank and clogged up Sean’s nose, and he could see fuck all. Shapes of bodies blundered about in the haze, and he had to squeeze his eyes to slits as what felt like a swarm of bees settled onto them and started to sting. A man clad in the flapping outline of Okwute’s robes stumbled towards him.

  Something metal fell on the tiled floor with a clank, and Sean recognized the sound even before he saw what it was. A brushed-metal sphere the size of a piece of fruit.

  He drew a breath to shout a warning, and fought every instinct of self-preservation to make himself reach down for it. But before he could move, Okwute had scooped it up and flung it as far away as he could with a strong, flowing overarm throw, across the hall and away from the hostages.

  ‘Grenade! Everyone get flat!’ Sean shouted, and suited actions to words as he dropped to the tiles.

  Okwute landed with a thump next to him. They stared into each other’s streaming eyes from a distance of a few inches. A few seconds later Sean heard the crack of the explosion. The screams shot up the scale, but his ears told him that it was just good old panic and fear, not the sound of anyone who had just been hit by red-hot shrapnel.

  The smoke was clearing. Shapes were becoming more distinct. Sean quickly clambered to his feet.

  Okwute leaped up onto the carousel, his face set and determined. He laid a gentle hand on Bright’s head and murmured, ‘Inna lillaahi wa inna ilayhi Raaji’oon.’ He glanced up at Sean. ‘To Allah we belong and to Him is our return. Our prayer for the dead.’

  Sean was barely listening. The adrenalin that had fuelled him ever since he climbed up the ramp was still there, and it wanted a new outlet. Like, point his gun at the ceiling and set it to fully automatic, and just scream and empty the mag.

  But he was holding a weapon and he should do something useful with it. Wolston had his weapon back and held it at the ready, legs slightly bent as he circled about, aiming at anything that looked like it might be Clarkson or Hammond. Sean brought his own weapon up and looked around.

  ‘Where the fuck are they?’ Wolston shouted. ‘Anyone, report! Do you see them?’

  Sean whipped his head around, staring into every corner of the terminal. Dismay settled onto him like a dead weight in his heart.

  They couldn’t have fucking got away!

  But they had. Bright lay dead at Sean’s feet, and his killers were nowhere to be seen.

  Chapter 10

  Wednesday 2 August, 09:30 BST

  ‘Right.’ Wolston’s face was haggard, his voice dead as he put away his phone. He had lost a man on his watch, and that hurt. ‘We will be met back at camp by the adjutant and representatives of the Security Service, and debriefed on arrival.’

  For once, no one was in the mood to make jokes about being ‘debriefed’. The occupants of the minibus were subdued as it climbed up towards the QE2 bridge and started the slow crawl round the M25 before finally making a break for the M3 and down to Wiltshire. Down in the south-west the sky was bright blue: it was promising to be a great day back home. The black clouds here, and the road spray kicked up by the traffic around them, suited everyone’s mood better.

  It wasn’t the first time they had lost a mate – apart from Wolston and Burnell, they had all been serving together at the time of the Tidworth bombing, which took the life of Fusilier Toni Clark and several others – but it was not something you ever got used to.

  Out of habit, Sean had expected the police to be harder work when they finally showed up. He knew cops get touchy about people other than them discharging firearms, even if they are on the same side. And maybe the couple of PCs and sergeants he had spoken to had been gearing up to give him a hard time – but the inspector in charge had known how the world worked. Wolston had checked in with the adjutant immediately the siege was lifted, and been ordered to say nothing. So the inspector had realized that t
wo incompatible forces were clashing, army orders to keep shtum versus the Met’s obvious desire to get answers, and this would all be sorted out by people above his paygrade. The lads had been allowed to go, after undertaking to be available for interview at a later, unspecified date. It would all be on CCTV, anyway.

  And now they were on the final part of the journey home. For the debriefing. And how would that go? Sean wondered. Praise, or bollocking?

  ‘You all did well.’ Lieutenant Colonel Levene looked Sean in the eye. ‘Bloody well. There will be inquests, of course – there have to be in the event of any death – both on Fusilier Bright and on the dead gunman – and you may be called as a witness, but the army will back your actions to the hilt, and we’ll do everything we can to keep your name out of the media.’

  It answered Sean’s question very clearly. Praise, apparently.

  There were four of them in the colonel’s office. Levene, a guy from the Green Slime (aka Military Intelligence), a civilian from Special Branch, and Sean. The colonel was working through the section one by one. Sean sat on a chair across from Levene’s desk, and tried not to feel embarrassed appearing before a senior officer like this – unwashed, unshaved, in civvies, while Special Branch wore a jacket and tie, and the other two officers were both in cleanly pressed No. 8 Temperate Combat Dress.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  He had been braced for it to go either way. The army was big on its members showing initiative. It also crapped from a great height on anyone who showed initiative in the wrong way or at the wrong time. And if it resulted in casualties, then the crap could get piled on top of you – the sky was the limit.

  Despite the congratulations, Levene still looked just as morose as the lads. Sean felt a stab of annoyance. What was his problem? He hadn’t lost anyone …

  But then he realized that Levene had lost someone. And not for the first time. He had also been around for the Tidworth bombing, and now he had lost another man. The death of a Fusilier rattled all the way up the chain of command. Everyone took it personally.