Kaplani’s body relaxed. He laughed and gave Yurev a light punch on the shoulder. “Okay, okay. I had enough screwing to last a month anyway. Get them all out of here.”
***
Cherbourg, Frankfurt and Warsaw share a similar Central European time zone. Marcel Benoit kept his word, ensuring available weaponry and transport in each site Jules had flagged. Flawless passports for Guna Rana and his compatriots meant trouble-free passage across the borders. In every location, the cover companies provided by Brad Miles gave adequate launch protection to and from their targets.
Jack and two of Guna’s men had rehearsed the operation several times. The Cherbourg warehouse was accessible on three sides, but two entry points would be enough to execute the attack. The building sat back from a side street near to the cargo yards. The exterior walls boasted surveillance cameras, visible on each corner of the roof. The usual alarm procedure was an initial alert from a tracking centre to check for a false alarm, a frequent event. Positive response initiated a further call to the local police to get someone out to have a look. On the face of it very efficient, in practice much less so. The time planned took minutes only, not enough for a practical official response once the alarms triggered.
The area outside the warehouse was deserted as they approached, two from the front and one from the rear. Three cars parked against the side wall, suggesting their owners were inside with the heroin under close guard. They’d timed the hit for precisely one o’clock. Clad all in black, including face coverings and night vision goggles, the squad counted down the seconds. Simultaneous explosions ripped the locked doors apart at both ends of the building. Two stun grenades followed moments later as the ISP team stepped inside, firing their AK 47s in strafes away from the centre, ensuring no friendly crossfire casualties. The alarm system screeched in the fug of smoke. Seven of Kaplani’s people stood guard duty, two asleep and five playing cards near the middle of the goods racks. Jules’s orders were explicit. We go black. The men inside died within moments with no time to reach for weapons. Jack and the Gurkhas moved quickly along the boxes, fixing incendiary devices timed to detonate in thirty seconds.
They drove away from the warehouse, and the place erupted in a mangle of fireballs and thick smoke.
One down.
The drizzle laid a sheen across the road in front of the two-storey block in downtown Frankfurt. Late night taxis sped past the van parked twenty yards away. The rain meant no pedestrian traffic to concern Malky, Guna and the other Nepalese inside the vehicle with him. The ground floor showed no lights. From the upper windows, through a mix of plain and frosted panes, pale yellowing beams melded into the soft rain. They had no way of telling for certain which level housed the merchandise, but Malky assumed the lights would be for the guards upstairs, covering the drugs. His watch showed a few minutes before one o’clock as they eased from the van and split. Malky and Guna approached the front area, guns drawn. No doors barred the way, the entrance doubling as a loading stage. Apart from some broken piled wood crates and fuel drums, the bottom floor was clear. They waved for the other man to join them. The muffled noise of a televised football programme wafted down from above them. One main stairway led to the doorway at the top. Not ideal for a pincer attack, but easy enough if the door was unlocked. They listened and waited, and the noise from the television increased as the upper door swung open. Against the backlight the shape of a tall figure appeared and started down the stairway. Malky and the Gurkhas pressed into the shadow below the stair. The man turned left, starting to unbutton his flies. Piss break. With a swift soundless movement, Guna reached the guard, banged his knee into the back of the man’s leg causing him to buckle downwards. The kukri blade slashed effortlessly across his windpipe and the limp body collapsed in a heap. One less to worry about and their timing still on track. At exactly one o’clock, they readied themselves at the top of the stairs as the Irishman gingerly turned the door handle. A little squeak, but it opened with no resistance.
The stun grenades echoed in tandem as the trio hit. The startled thugs on guard barely shifted from their chairs as the lethal gunfire from the AK 47s ripped through them. Four dead in as many seconds. Malky’s squad moved efficiently along the crates stacked against the walls, fixing the explosives for maximum destruction. They made their way downstairs, placing a final device beside the fuel drums on the ground floor. With fifteen seconds remaining, the three shadows boarded the van and drove off.
Two down.
The depot in Warsaw, a small metalwork factory in another life, had been converted over the last four years to a standalone, bricked-up compound built with the large breezeblock materials typical of the post-war construction in the once ravaged city. It sat incongruously between a couple of examples of the modern extravagance invested in government buildings with anonymous functions. Despite the lighting from its neighbours, the distance on either side provided access with a broad swathe of shadow.
Brad Miles took the lead for Jules and his Interpol colleagues. The warehouse centred off the main highway, stretching back almost forty metres, backing on to a canal. At this time of night, nothing moved on the roadway nor on the water. Jules and the South African, Johan Krull, readied at the rear of the building, targeting a large wooden-framed door, in former times the loading bay for canal barges. Inside the back doors sat an enclosed office, the rest of the area open plan with stacked pallets along the walls. Miles and his ex-Seal pal, Jeb Zucker waited at the front door, where both sets of entrances appeared heavy, probably bolt-locked from the inside. A couple of drunks on a late evening sortie walked by unsteadily on the opposite side of the road, too busy helping each other on their way to notice the blackened figures with the strange goggles only twenty metres across from them. The pair staggered out of sight around the corner and the time moved on to one o’clock.
The doors blew apart in concerted blasts and the stun grenades did their work. No guards appeared, until moments later the office door flew open and two men piled out, with guns in their hands. Others massed at their back, ready to follow. In the smoke and confusion, the mobsters could see nothing, The acrid after-smell of the grenades was recognisable to most of these men who’d experienced guerrilla warfare and the stinging scent of explosives. Sightless, they were easy pickings for the assault team with their night vision. We go black. The attack squad needed few bullets. The leading men fell and the rest tried to retreat into the office. Jeb Zucker lobbed in a grenade, the detonation devastating. The seven remaining opposition died instantly. The four assailants moved purposefully along the walls, placing their destructive packages on the large packing crates. Seconds after their exit, the building became a raging inferno.
Three down.
A busy night’s work had just begun.
***
Marcel Benoit’s string-pulling authority cleared air space to private landing areas in France, Germany, Poland and Denmark with a trio of modified Lynx helicopters pressed into taxi service for the three deadly fighting units during the night. The Lynx travels at speeds in excess of three hundred kilometres per hour. Jules had calculated the havoc created in hitting the main depots wouldn’t be communicated early enough to the smaller targets.
Minutes after the Cherbourg attack, Jack’s team winged toward Paris for their second sortie, followed by an assault a couple of hours later in Lyons. The squad under Malky took out Dusseldorf before flying on to hit Copenhagen. The final unit with Brad and Jules proceeded from Warsaw to Krakow, then the longest hop of the night, going on to complete their mission in Berlin.
***
Dawn broke westward across Europe. Jozef Kaplani and Yurev’s morning grew increasingly worse as the staggering impact of the night’s events unfolded.
“Bastards! Fucking Chinese bastards!” Yurev had seldom seen Kaplani’s rage as bad as this. “Bring the men here to Wieliczka, you said! They’ll try to hit us here, you said! Yurev, this is a fucking disaster! Nine fucking hits in one night. How could these Chines
e fucks manage to smack us like this? Are we such fucking morons to get taken out like flies? How much have we lost in the crates?”
“I don’t know yet,” came the lie.
Unfazed by his chief’s temper, Yurev continued calmly, “Nobody expected this quality of attack, and not so soon after what we did in England. Jozef, the Chinese couldn’t have done this alone.”
“Then who the hell did?”
“Right now I can’t tell you, but with blanket take-outs this slick, professionals for hire maybe.”
“The Chinese do their own work. They don’t bring in outside muscle.”
“Agreed. As I said, I’ve no idea. Give me time to find out, then I’ll advise you how we deal with it.”
“What do we do now? We’ve got the shipment from Turkey due to move by the end of the week.”
“We re-direct to here, Jozef, for the meantime. If we can be hit this easily, the next lot could disappear just as fast. Besides, we lost a shitload of men this morning, some of our best people.”
“What? Bring it in here to Wieliczka? Then what?”
“Then we figure out quietly and clearly how to keep our channels supplied. Safely. The downstream outlets and dealers are still in place. We’ll have to be a bit more clever about moving the supplies to them. We’ve done this before with other stuff in Bosnia, right?”
Kaplani looked at his second-in-command and wondered, not for the first time, how this man stayed so cool. But he saw the merit in the proposal.
“Okay. Go ahead and tell me the numbers as soon as you’ve a handle on what we lost.”
“About three weeks supply, I’d guess,” said Yurev, knowing what he’d been told during the night. “Maybe we’ll bring in extra bodies to the compound. It would be crazy for anybody to try to get at us here, but after this shit, I suppose anything’s possible.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. Something doesn’t fit in my mind. We only removed a few of their main dealers. The fuck shops were easy targets. To be honest, I half expected they’d hit back at ours, and that’s where we tightened security. Not one of our brothels had any trouble. If this was only a Chinese thing, it doesn’t add up.”
“What else could it be?”
“The one time I’ve seen anything this good was in Bosnia. Stories went round about specialist mercenaries, on nobody’s side in particular. A lot of senior people on both sides were taken down in assassinations. Some say it was the Yanks, some say the SAS, others say the Israelis, no-one really knows. This has all the signs of that shit.”
“Why would any of them be interested in us?”
“Not sure. Remember those assholes in Krakow, sniffing about our business? We never found out where they were from or who sent them. My gut tells me the connection’s there. I think I’ll go talk to our favourite police chief in Warsaw, and see if he can throw any light on it. Meantime boss, you look like shit warmed over. Get some sleep. Nothing fresh’ll happen today after this storm.”
Yurev left him and Kaplani felt a wave of fatigue. He walked across to his bottle cabinet and poured a full glass of vodka. It disappeared in two large gulps. Now for some rest.
CHAPTER 18
“Of course it’s tied in with the blast at the Peking Garden,” Manning said to DCI Granger. “The same family’s involved in the brothels. Let’s give Townsend and his pals a ring. Ask them to come in again. I’m sure they’ll welcome another chance to savour our hospitality.” Granger didn’t like the way Manning operated, but damn, the man did get results. He returned to his office to make the call, to be told Mister Townsend was out of town on business, returning to London in a couple of days, and yes, they’d pass on the message the Head of Serious Crimes Division needed another word.
The DCI leafed through the small pile of red-marked papers in the middle of his desk, the daily ‘urgent attention’ reports. On top, two murders of suspected prominent drug dealers, one in London, one in Liverpool, each found with the bodies savagely mutilated and dumped in streets near their local working districts. Later in the day another two killings surfaced with the same hallmarks. Granger added them as links to the brothel strikes.
What kind of bloody turf war is this?
***
The Air France plane touched down mid-afternoon at Heathrow, and by early evening the ISP office had its full complement of executives back in place. Brad Miles came with them, but the other members of the three hit squads arrived on separate flights and billeted in a couple of four-star hotels in West Kensington to await the next moves in the campaign.
Brad and Jules had a brief conference call with Marcel Benoit at Interpol’s headquarters in Lyons. Daily communication system security sweeps were standard practice. Nonetheless, they talked in coded terms.
“All of last night’s snow’s been cleared,” said Benoit. “Local authorities none the wiser as to what happened. Travel plans next for the tourist season?”
“We expect a movement from a large concentrated weather pattern near Turkey toward the South of Poland. Once the forecasters show that’s done, maybe time to go local house hunting,” Jules replied.
“We’ll have the report to you as soon as we see some movement. Enjoy your day.”
The message came through clear and direct. After the havoc wreaked in the past twenty-four hours, Jules logically expected the subsequent cargo of heroin from Istanbul to be routed to the current safest place for Kaplani, his own backyard. Benoit’s people would monitor, but not intercept any shipment from Istanbul in the next few days with Jules, Brad, Jack and the team handling the next stage. So far so good.
***
Reports of a series of seemingly unrelated assaults on locations across Europe hit the wires at daybreak. The control centre at Met headquarters collated the messages from its counterparts in France, Germany, Denmark and Poland. Unlike those in England, it rapidly became clear none of the places attacked were brothels, but warehouses listed under a range of business names with no immediate tie-in to indicate any commercial link among them. Alan Rennie and his senior officers scanned the incoming material from the continent. The Assistant Commissioner placed another direct line call to Marcel Benoit.
“Morning, Marcel. You’re on speaker with Bob Granger, Paul Manning and some of my security-cleared people,” he began.
The Interpol boss greeted his fellow law enforcers, “And a good day to you. I guess you’re hearing the same as we are on the warehouse incidents. We’re still trying to assess the who and the why on this lot,” he lied.
“It seems too much of a coincidence after the strife here this week, Marcel. Are these locations run by Kaplani and if so, why only warehouses? Do you think our Chinese friends have the wherewithal to do this, because we’ve nothing on our side to suggest they’re equipped to move like this, and as fast as this?”
Benoit had no intention of giving London anything to encourage investigation so soon outside of England.
“We’re no wiser than you with what we have right at this minute. We’ve nothing to tie them in with your friends in England.”
Paul Manning intervened. “From the initial information we’ve had this morning, and from my field experience, I must say this looks professionally organised. So far, no witness sightings, no evidence other than the carnage left behind, no trail, and no leads. No survivors with injuries either, only murders and arson. Doesn’t it strike you as strange, Marcel?”
“I agree with you. We’re running business checks on the warehouses as fast as we can, trying to find a common denominator. It may well be associated with your cases, but equally I might be looking at a different gang war of some kind. Until I have something concrete, I’m having to run with that for the time being. If anything comes through, you guys’ll be the first to know.”
Rennie broke in again, “Okay, Marcel, thanks. We’ll be in touch. Goodbye.”
The line cut and Manning cursed quietly, “That’s a load of bullshit, Alan. How can this not be related?”
&
nbsp; “Why wouldn’t he share with us if he had something?” asked Bob Granger. “What purpose could that possibly serve?”
“Damned if I know, but I’ve been in this game too long to buy what he’s saying.”
“For the moment our only option is to ride with him,” said Rennie. “I don’t want us falling out with Interpol when we need all the help we can get in our own bailiwick.”
The Head of Serious Crimes held his tongue. The Assistant Commissioner outranked him by some way. He nodded in acquiescence and reached for his coffee cup. A ton of work still waited on their own inquiries, but being quiet on the issue didn’t mean letting it slide. Whatever the rat he was smelling, sooner or later it would surface again.
***
Percy Gamley’s idea of excitement seldom reached beyond the radio commentary of a drawn five-day county cricket match. Being a senior accountancy partner in the City dictated a daily routine of breakfast, train travel to and from the office, dinner at home and bed, interrupted only by his three-week trip in the summer to his sister’s boarding house in Cornwall. Now here he sat in the Bromley police station in south London, the centre of more attention than he’d ever had in his life. He basked in a rather pleasant frisson.
“Can we recap, Mister Gamley, to make sure I’m not missing something?” The interviewing officer, some twenty years his junior, was politeness itself. Why do the policemen all look so young nowadays? “From when you left your house. At six ten, you said?”
“Yes. Six ten. It takes me a full fifteen minutes to walk to the station. Any later and you’ve nothing but crowded trains, with no chance of a decent seat.” The young man nodded, peering at his notebook. He looked at Percy, prompting him to continue.
VENGEANCE WEARS BLACK (Jack Calder Crime Series #2) Page 7
