by Tom Barber
TWENTY SIX
Back at the Heathrow Marriott, Number Six was confused. He was watching the news channel in his room, waiting for the first reports of an explosion at the airport, but nothing had happened.
Rising, he pulled back the curtain to see if there was smoke coming from the direction of the Terminal building.
But nothing.
The bitch better not have failed, he thought. She probably had. The girl was useless. He didn’t know where Dom had picked her up, but she was sickeningly mawkish and sentimental towards him. To his credit, Dom had used that infatuation and manipulated it to achieve what he wanted. She was soft and weak and it was likely the airport police had intercepted her or she’d found some other way to screw things up.
But that doesn’t change shit here, he thought.
Turning, he checked the clock on the desk by the bed.
9:15 pm.
Time to get to the roof.
He reached behind the far side of the bed and with a grunt from the effort, pulled up a long dark case, dumping it on the bed. It was about two feet in length, a worn military case that had probably been stacked under a tarpaulin in a desert somewhere for the past couple of years. He pulled a long black holdall from under the bed and started tucking the case into the bag. He didn’t want any other hotel guests to see what was printed on the side, in thick black letters.
He finished wrapping the bag around the case. Grabbing a thick coat, he pulled it on and zipped it up tight. It was cold outside, and the last thing he needed was any unnecessary shivering. He then picked up the strap for the bag and looped it over his shoulder. Turning, he moved to the door and double-checked that he had everything he needed. He could never come back here. He was travelling light, he had clothes on his back and money in his wallet to get a taxi and disappear.
Satisfied, he clicked off the light and departed.
Outside the room, he walked swiftly down the corridor. A couple coming the other way were blocking his path; the two of them saw the guy with the big bag wasn’t going to stop, so the two of them had to press their backs flat against the wall to let him pass.
Ignoring them, he stared with focus at the stairwell by the lifts.
The only thing on his mind right now was getting to the roof.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ Porter asked, behind the wheel of one of the squad cars.
He’d followed Rivers out of the Terminal to one of the ARU Fords as he’d run off, the American saying that they needed to get back to the Heathrow Marriott. Shapira had caught on fast and jumped in the back seat too, equally puzzled by the American’s behaviour and unwilling to be left out.
‘Number Six was at the hotel! I ran into him upstairs.’
Staring at him for a moment, Porter put his foot down and the car climbed past seventy as it roared past other traffic.
‘What? Where? Are you sure it was him?’
‘Positive. He’d shaved his head, so he looked different. But I saw his face, man. It’s him. He was on the top floor.’
He thought for a moment, remembered something else.
‘Oh shit.’
‘What?’
‘He was coming out from the stairwell when I bumped into him. He wasn't out of breath so he'd probably walked down, not up and we were on the top floor. So he must have been coming-’.
‘From the roof,’ finished Shapira.
Flooring the accelerator, Porter checked the rear-view mirror. He saw another black Ford weaving in and out of traffic, following close behind. He guessed some of the other lads were inside.
His suspicions were confirmed when the earpiece in his ear went off.
‘Port? It’s Fox. What the hell’s going on?’
Port pushed the pressel on his uniform with one hand while keeping the other on the wheel.
‘Rivers thinks he saw Number Six at the hotel earlier. Apparently the guy was walking down the stairwell, coming from the door to the roof.’
There was a pause.
‘He’s sure?’
Porter didn’t reply. He turned a hard right, and the car raced down a side road towards the entrance to the Heathrow Marriott, buses and slower moving cars flashing past the windows.
As soon as the car screeched to a halt outside the hotel, Rivers was already out and running through the entrance to the lobby.
It had been Dom’s idea. The two of them were old friends; they’d met in a club in New York City a few years back. When Dom had been putting this plan together at the beginning of March, the young man’s phone in Brooklyn had rung. Not much had been revealed, but he’d picked up on what Dom was asking of him and the reward that would come his way if he did it.
Without a moment’s hesitation the guy had packed his bags, jumped on a plane, and headed to London.
Back in New York, his life was going nowhere and he knew it. He’d had some luck with a couple of low-level drug deals, but he was a small fish in a very big pond. He knew there was only so far he could go before the big sharks came swimming. When he made it to London, Dom had put him up in the flat he was renting. He’d told him about the ideas for the attacks, why he’d had to flee New York so abruptly after what happened at the Four Seasons, why it was imperative he laid low until he made things right with his family. How his uncle, Henry, hated the United Kingdom. The young man didn’t know much about Dom’s uncle save that he was a powerful and dangerous man who operated in the drug trade. Dom had told him that if he helped him, Henry would be so impressed that he’d probably employ him. He’d be rich. Protected. Living in the sun, far away from the Brooklyn back alleys and dark streets selling rocks and angel dust to crack-heads and junkies.
Dom had outlined his initial plan. It was solid but there was a problem; the young man wasn’t prepared to go down the suicide bombing route. He wasn’t a fanatic and certainly didn’t intend to kill himself, not to mention that he also didn’t have a clue what he was doing with explosives.
Dom had agreed with him that suicide bombing was moronic and that they would leave that to those who were stupid enough to do it.
He’d come up with this plan instead.
Take out a commercial jet.
The younger man liked the idea; although the targeted jet would be full of fellow Americans, he didn’t give a shit. The only thing he had ever cared about was himself. Once he fired the launcher, he’d be out of the hotel in less than a minute. Stay low, out of sight. Give it a couple of days, then get out of the country. Dom had promised he’d be in touch. After that, hopefully, he could meet with Henry and talk about a role in his business.
He was already in position. He’d opened the door to the roof, closing it behind him and was now standing facing west. He was glad he’d worn the coat seeing how frosty the night was. He lowered the case to the ground and unzipped the bag, pushing the cloth back. Kneeling, he undid two clips and eased the lid open. It was an RPG, or Rocket-Propelled Grenade; the weapon was a Russian model, designed to take out tanks or low flying aircraft. Assembly of the weapon was simple. It was only two parts, the launcher and the rocket.
He pulled the launcher from the black inner casing and lifted it to his shoulder. The weight felt good; it had a pistol grip for firing which he curled his fingers around, looking down the sight. The weapon was sleek, in good condition and he’d used it before.
He knew it would be accurate.
Carefully, he reached into the case and slid out the second part. The warhead. An armour-penetrating grenade propelled by a rocket. He tipped his shoulder and slid the missile into the front of the weapon. It locked into place with a click. Dom had managed to get hold of some high-quality equipment for the group. C4, RPGs, Semtex plastic explosive, but unfortunately there was one disadvantage with the weapon resting on his shoulder; it wasn’t a heat-seeker.
He’d have to hit first time, but then again, that wouldn’t be a problem. In practice runs against selected targets out on the empty moors in the Welsh countryside the young man had proved extre
mely accurate with the launcher. Dom reassured him it was equally effective against aircraft, despite being designed to take out a slow-moving tank. He’d informed him about the success of the weapon in Somalia in the early Nineties. Apparently, rebels had used this weapon to take out two Black Hawk helicopters, which left the young man sufficiently impressed.
When he fired, the plane was going down.
A noise jerked him back to the present. The jet was coming into view from the sky ahead. It was three hundred yards away, descending from the dark ahead and to his left. The 9:20pm from New York, right on time.
Full capacity, over two hundred and fifty souls on board.
He shifted his hips, letting the launcher slide snugly into place against his shoulder. Then he slowly rose to stand upright. He took long, deliberate breaths, trying to slow his heart rate.
Putting his eye to the sight, he lined up the plane. He’d have to aim ahead of its flight path, but the jet was moving smoothly and calculating its course was easy.
The rocket would get there in three seconds.
His finger fell back to rest on the trigger in the pistol-grip.
This is it.
Nice and slow.
Taking a breath, he started squeezing the trigger gently.
Suddenly there was a noise behind him and the entrance to the roof burst open.
He turned, with the weapon still against his shoulder and saw the guy he’d bumped into on the corridor earlier. He now had a pistol in his hand, the woman he’d been with and some other cop beside him also carrying firearms. Shit. He saw all three of them momentarily freeze as they realised what he’d been about to do.
Then their weapons all came up, sighted on the terrorist’s head.
Number Six stood motionless, not intimidated, aiming the rocket launcher at them from ten feet away.
‘Drop it, asshole!’ the American guy shouted.
‘Put your guns down! If I fire, you all die!’ Number Six screamed back.
None of them moved. It was a stand-off, except one of them had a rocket launcher.
The young guy sensed the plane was approaching the runway behind him in the airfield.
He could hear it, getting closer and closer.
And in that moment, he realised he was done. There was no way out. He would never allow himself to get taken to prison, so he had to make a choice.
Three of them, or nearly three hundred of them.
He decided.
He suddenly turned in one swift motion.
And the fearsome weapon swivelled towards the plane.
TWENTY SEVEN
After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, police around the world had developed various methods and tactics when confronting a suicidal terrorist. The UK had called theirs Operation Kratos. Members of the British government and police had visited Israel, Sri Lanka and Russia to consult with their security forces. Unlike the West, those nations had been accustomed to suicide bombings for many years and as a consequence had devised systems of attack that were beginning to be universally used around the world.
There were common themes. They’d found in most life or death situations any explosives a terrorist had control of were extremely sensitive to motion; hence, the conventional tactic of shooting the chest was likely to cause a detonation via twitching or jerked reactions.
Another key discovery had been that suicide bombers, if discovered prematurely by police, were more than likely to continue their attack regardless. Which meant stealth and covert tactics had to be in place to avoid them realising they’d been identified until it was too late for a terrorist to react.
For Rivers, Shapira and Porter, the second finding wasn’t relevant here. Clearly, the guy knew all about their presence.
But the first was.
The key to prevent any twitch or movement on a trigger or switch was to shoot the target through the brain stem, thus instantly severing any motor neurone activity.
And that’s exactly what Shapira did.
As the terrorist turned towards the plane with the rocket launcher, she was the first to react. The Mossad agent fired her pistol twice, a lightning fast double-tap. Both shots took the guy in the lower portion of his neck, severing the stem. Blood and bone sprayed in the air, and he dropped like a stone.
But there was a problem.
They’d waited a millisecond too late.
Number Six’s finger was already moving on the trigger to launch the weapon, fourteen pounds of grip pressure.
That was all it needed.
Smashing back the door to the roof, Deakins and Fox rushed into sight behind them as the terrorist went down; together, the five of them watched in horror as a cloud of light-blue smoke erupted from the rear of the weapon.
There was a loud whoosh as the rocket roared out of the tube and off into the air.
Headed straight towards the airplane.
The rocket chewed through the air towards its target, moving at frightening speed. The five people on the roof stood helplessly as it roared towards the Boeing 757.
It was going to be a direct hit.
The plane was about eighty feet off the runway; even if by some freak miracle the pilot saw the rocket, he’d have no time to do anything about it. He was flying a commercial airliner, not a helicopter.
It missed by a whisker. Literally, a hair.
The warhead thundered under the belly of the plane and zoomed off into the middle of the airfield, away from its intended target and any other planes in the vicinity. It ploughed on for another hundred and fifty yards, then self-detonated like a firework as the fuse inside reacted, exploding in the sky.
Back on the roof, everyone stood still for a moment, still stunned by the speed of what had just happened.
Then they all sagged with relief.
Taking a huge breath, Porter shook his head.
He was getting sick of this.
