(2013) Collateral Damage

by Colin Smith

  5. Rush-Hour

  There is little more capricious than a terrorist's bomb. But as a method of assassination it can be more certain than a bullet; even a trained man can go badly wrong with a gun. The British Zionist Edward Sieff survived a shot in the face from pointblank range because he possessed a particularly healthy buttress of teeth which brought the bullet to rest only a centimetre away from vital blood vessels. Yet, if a bomb is surer, it is also a sight less discriminating. The assassin who decides on a bomb must not care who else he kills as long as he gets his man.

  Hans Koller did not care. He had long ago decided that the struggle justified, if necessary, innocent casualties. He had reached this conclusion early on in his career as a terrorist and rarely thought of it again.

  The man he had been ordered to murder was a Jordanian of Palestinian extraction (his parents had fled to Jordan when Palestine became Israel in 1948) who lived in Cadogan Gardens, just off Sloane Street. The son of a wealthy merchant, he published and edited from London an Arabic magazine of political comment which enjoyed considerable prestige in the Middle East where the printed word is still respected. This magazine admirably reflected the publisher's own liberal education for it was critical of all extremists, whether landgrabbing Zionists, homicidal revolutionaries or oil-fired despots propagating their own visionary brands of Islam, PanArab Marxism and other New Orders.

  It was an editorial policy which had earned him much praise in the West and the undying hatred of many of his regular Arab readers. On the Palestinian question, for example, most of his enemies took the line that there could be no conditional support. One was either for or against them. And in his own country even fellow moderates secretly bitched because they envied him for his success with the kind of foreigners whose approbation they themselves so desperately sought. Some of these enemies were violent people as accustomed to turning to their guns as other men summon their lawyers. Yet he did not fear for his life. As he often told his friends, he had completely succumbed to the enormous assurance of the city in which he lived. He had come to the conclusion that an unspoken conspiracy existed to make London the most civilized, outwardly non-violent capital in the world. He constantly saw clues to this conspiracy in small things. Hyde Park Corner, for instance, the race-track of the city around which cars sped six abreast. Their drivers could steer across your bows with just the same amount of malice as their French or Italian counterparts, but it was all oddly muted. Acts of considerable motorized aggression were committed in a tight-lipped, unklaxoned silence. In Cairo or Beirut a man might sound his horn at the merest suggestion of another car. Here the silent traffic all seemed part of this odd covenant of restraint.

  The city's ostentatiously unarmed policemen, transformed into giants by their quaint Victorian headgear, were part of the same plot. He knew, of course, because as a newspaperman he made it his business to know, that things were not always as they seemed: that some of those same policemen, especially those guarding certain embassies and airline offices, carried the newly issued American revolver under their tunics. But the important thing was that the facade was still more or less intact: rude behaviour was not expected and therefore, compared with other capitals, was a rare occurrence. When it did happen people were outraged.

  The publisher was one of those foreigners who lived in a manner few Englishmen born in the reign of George VI could afford. It had become a habit, at about 6 p.m. every Wednesday evening, to drive his Jaguar to his club in Pall Mall for drinks with a friend and then on to dinner somewhere. Afterwards, if the mood was right, they might cruise around Shepherd Market and pick up a couple of the whores. Despite the sighting of the first Saudis and Iranians of the season, you could still find quite a lively young thing for less than one hundred pounds.

  Koller was placing his bomb under the driving-seat of the publisher's metallic blue XJ6. There had been no trouble getting a door-key for it because the name of the dealer who supplied it was still plastered across the back window. It had been a simple matter to go there posing as a friend of the publisher and explain that he had lost his keys and wanted another one.

  At moments like this Koller worked very calmly. The nervousness came before. Once he started, everything was all right. A fatalism came over him, something akin to that feeling of levitation sometimes experienced by people who have survived a bad car crash: a sensation of hovering above events watching his fate quite dispassionately.

  He opened the driver's door and then, crouched on his haunches, laid the executive case on the seat and opened it. The lid of the case would have obscured the view of any passer-by on the pavement who happened to glance in the car, and Koller's body shielded it from observation from the road. Carefully, he removed the clothes-peg and set the hands of the clock. He checked that the battery connections were secure, and that the detonator was correctly attached to the grey slabs of plastic explosive. For good measure he had put in some extra slabs that were unconnected to the main charge, but was fairly certain that it would be enough to set them off too. He didn't trust bombs. He much preferred bullets, but his instructions in this case had been quite specific.

  Even so he had brought with him a big FN Browning 13-shot service automatic that did not improve the cut of his Harris tweed jacket. Ideally, he would have liked the gun he had in Paris, one of the new snub-nosed .44 magnums, the sort some American police were beginning to carry as a backup gun and guaranteed to stop a Mercedes if you got close enough. He was always fearful that the butt of the huge Browning, which he kept in a shoulder-holster, was poking out from beneath his jacket and constantly tugged at his left lapel to make sure it was well hidden.

  He closed and re-locked the car door, then crossed the wide street and walked down it a little way until he came to some black-painted iron railings above the basement entrance to a large, white-painted Georgian town house.

  It was the very worst time for a bomb. The evening rush-hour was approaching its peak and the overspill from the main arteries of the city was beginning to clog the side-streets. Several taxis passed the booby-trapped car. Then a couple of teenagers from an international school, mostly attended by the sons and daughters of diplomats, cycled slowly by. Koller, his mind frozen on his target, watched their progress with all the detachment of a tennis umpire. First they were in court, then they were line ball, then they were out. The fading spring sun cast long shadows.

  The terrorist was standing about three hundred paces from the car. He wondered whether that was far enough away. He thought it was, but you could never really be sure with these things. He looked at his watch. Three minutes to go. His man was slightly behind schedule; he should have been coming out of the front door by now. He looked around. There was a gate in the railings with some steps leading down to what was obviously a basement flat. It had a window in its front door, but this was covered with a white muslin curtain. He went through the gate and sat on the top step, so that he was slightly lower than the level of the road. He was beginning to wish he had not included those extra slabs of explosive. He just didn't know how powerful the bomb would be. It was the wrong bomb, of course, he knew that. It was a very crude bomb indeed. He should have had one of the mercury-fused types which you place under the driving-seat to detonate as soon as the car starts moving and the wobbly chemical connects the circuit.

  For some reason they didn't have that equipment in London just as they only had pistols that looked as though you were carrying half a house-brick under your jacket. If the publisher had not got into his car by the time it exploded he was banking that the noise would bring him immediately to his front door and that he would get him then. Koller calculated that the distance from where he was sitting to the entrance of the publisher's apartment block was about three hundred metres, perhaps slightly less. The accurate range of the Browning was no more than seventy metres maximum. He would have to close in quickly, preferably to a range of about ten metres. He couldn't miss him from there. Whether he could kill him was another matte
r. It never ceased to amaze him how much lead human bone and tissue could take.

  Two minutes to go. The publisher had been delayed by a telephone call. One of his contributors wanted to extend his deadline. He had a block; the piece was a pig to write; the situation was so fluid it was like trying to write on water. His deadline had already been extended once, but the publisher was a patient man. 'Don't worry, my friend,' he said, 'the 24th will do. Perhaps the situation will have solidified by then. But no later. OK?'

  He put the receiver down, checked his trouser pockets for his car keys, and walked down a short hallway hung with Roberts prints of idyllic Levantine harbours and Grecian ruins. He was on the first floor and therefore in the habit of taking the stairs down as a token gesture towards keeping fit, like his occasional games of squash. Why, he wondered, did journalists need so much attention? They were like children. First of all they gave you nothing but excuses as to why they had not done the thing they had promised to do. Then, when they had done it, despite the fact that it was late and twice the length you had asked for, they pestered you on the phone every day until you told them it was a work of genius. Strangely, although they were usually quite poor, they rarely quibbled about money. They seemed to be entirely held together by their enormous egos.

  Outside, Emma had rounded the corner from Toby's flat in Cadogan Square and was about to pass the publisher's Jaguar. She had decided to take the tube from Sloane Square rather than attempt the impossible and try to find a free taxi at that time of the evening. Her mind was still battling with the problem of how she would tell Dove she was leaving him. It was not helped in its task by the first faint drumbeats of a hangover.

  Thirty seconds to go.

  Koller stamped out a cigarette, pulled the Browning from beneath his jacket, slid back the cocking mechanism, sat with the weapon held loosely in his two hands between his knees.

  He watched the blonde-haired girl approach the car. She walked slowly as if her mind was somewhere else. He could see she was a good-looking young woman, wearing the same sort of boots with narrow, rolled jeans on top as the cabinet minister's daughter. It would be a waste if she was killed. Hurry you fool, he thought, walk faster. Schnell! Schnell! But Emma continued to walk like a somnambulist, looking neither to left nor right, her Londoner's feet instinctively missing the dog turds on the pavement.

  The publisher emerged just as Emma was level with his car. At the same time the bomb went off with two distinct reports. First there was the crumph of the plastic explosive followed, perhaps a second later, by the dull whumf of the petrol tank going up. The publisher was blown back inside the house while the front door swung so far back against its hinges that it hit the hallway wall, bounced forward again and slammed shut.

  Across the street Koller's vision was rapidly becoming obscured by the smoke from the blazing Jaguar. Seconds before the bomb went off he had been up, pistol in hand, ready for the sprint down the road. But the blast had made him drop down again. By the time he was running toward the burning car the front door was shut tight and smoke was billowing across the road. There was a tinkling sound, almost like running water, as the last glass fell out of two dozen shattered window-panes.

  Koller was quite beside himself with rage. There was no doubt that the whole operation had been a fiasco. And it wasn't his fault. They hadn't given him the right equipment. They had fucked it up. Not him.

  For half a minute he completely lost his head. His eyes smarting from smoke, he ran around the rear of the Jaguar and started shooting at the obstinately closed front door. He fired seven shots in rapid succession. The door was big and old and made mostly of oak with cross-sections two-and-a-half inches thick. Because he was standing below it most of his shots went high. Three hit the cross-sections, which were sufficiently thick to slow the passage of the nine-millimetre round so that by the time they were through the woodwork they were badly misshapen and virtually spent. The other four rounds went through the panels between the cross-sections with no trouble at all.

  The Palestinian publisher, who had fallen in the entrance hallway with his back to the wall, was beginning to pull himself up when the bullets began to buzz around him like angry insects. It took him a couple of seconds to realise what was happening.

  He ran across the hall and took a great leap up the carpeted stairway that led back to his apartment. As he did so one of the German terrorist's last shots caught him high in his right arm. For a moment he was thrown against the wall, but terror worked his limbs and he staggered up the four steps necessary to put him beyond the bullets like a man on fire.

  ***

  Alfred Gold, taxi driver, was motoring along Cadogan Gardens on his way back towards the rank at Sloane Square, when he came upon an amazing sight. A big car, it was too far gone to tell what type, was ablaze at the side of the road. Standing as near to its rear bumper as the flames would allow was a fair-haired man in a sports jacket, his knees slightly bent, his shoulders hunched forward, and holding a pistol in both hands which he appeared to be firing at someone's front door. Beyond the gunman, through the smoke, he could see somebody lying prone on the pavement.

  The taxi driver would not have considered himself in his wildest dreams to be the stuff that heroes are made of. Afterwards, he told the reporters that he just didn't think about it. He drove his taxi straight at Koller.

  The terrorist had heard the taxi approach even as he was squeezing off his last two shots at the door. He turned, saw the black Daimler diesel was about to ram him, snapped off one shot at the windscreen, stepped onto the pavement and ran to his right, inside the taxi's turning circle.

  As soon as he saw the gun pointing at him Gold instinctively braked, bringing the cab to rest with its front wheels just over the kerb. The shot shattered the windscreen, went over the taxi driver's left shoulder, and out of his vehicle through the back window. Blinded, Gold punched a hole in his frosted windscreen while Koller, who was by now recovering his cool, ran around the side of the taxi pumping two more shots into it as he went. One demolished the meter; the second drilled through the passenger door and went out through the floorboards by the accelerator, missing Gold's right foot by a couple of inches. The cabbie slammed his vehicle into first, went right up on to the pavement, and then executed a tight, three-hundred-and-sixtydegree turn.

  Later, it was construed by the press that Gold, undeterred by the three shots which had already penetrated his taxi, was off in hot pursuit of the gunman. In fact, the very opposite was true. The turn was a desperate piece of evasion by a man in a car who knew he was being shot at, but because his forward vision was limited to a six-inch hole in his windscreen, had no idea where the shots were coming from. By this time Koller had already rounded the corner into Sloane Street and was weaving through the two hundred yards of late shoppers and liberated office workers separating him from Sloane Square underground station.

  He had slipped the heavy pistol back into the shoulderholster, and fastened the top button of his jacket. Most people were looking towards the sound of the explosion they had just heard. The observant were beginning to point out the rising smoke that originated from somewhere behind the Peter Jones department store. Nobody paid any attention to a youngishlooking man running in the opposite direction, except an elderly flower-seller at the underground, who noticed that his face was smudged. It reminded her of something; later she remembered it was the way the firemen looked during the blitz.

  Koller had decided from the start that the tube was to be his getaway. He already had a ticket for Victoria station, one stop along the line from Sloane Square. He waited a little under two minutes for a train, elbowing his way well into the crowd, his left hand pulling his lapel over his gun. A middle-aged woman, shopping-bags in both hands, objected to his shoving and tutted. 'Some people,' she said.

  He turned his back to her.

  A man in a dark blue uniform came rushing on to the platform and the terrorist watched, knowing that he had only three shots left and no escape
; perhaps he could take a hostage and force his way to the exit. The woman with the shopping-bags might do. But as the man got closer he saw that his hair was lank and long and that he was holding the flat cap of a private security company in his right hand. When his train pulled out it was still a little under five minutes since the bomb had gone off and the first police sirens were sounding in the streets above.

  In Cadogan Gardens any further part Alfred Gold might have taken in the proceedings came to an abrupt end when, coming out of his full turn, he collided and dented the driving-side wing of a maroon Citroen crawling by the burning Jaguar. At almost the same time Gold's radio link came to life. He picked up the mike, gave his call sign and asked his control to tell the emergency services to come to Cadogan Gardens where a man had been shooting at him, a car was burning, and somebody appeared to be badly injured. When he had said it once he had to say it again because taxi dispatchers are amused to receiving this type of message. This time he mentioned the injured person first. He could now see through his left window that it was a young woman. While he was saying all this the driver of the Citroen, a sixty-ish, florid-faced man wearing an RAF tie, came to the driver's window. 'Do you mind telling me what you think you're doing?' he snapped. Gold ignored him and repeated his message. Slowly, the red-faced man began to comprehend that something very untoward indeed had happened in which the traditional role of the outraged injured party would not be at all appropriate.

  When the cabbie had finished speaking they went together to examine Emma, who was lying very white and still on the pavement. Her hair and clothing were slightly singed. The plastic and foam components in the bombed car, particularly the seat stuffing, continued to give off choking black smoke.

  'We'd better get her out of here in case the tank hasn't gone,' said the red-faced man. He was scared, but determined not to let the side down. He wasn't to know the tank had already exploded. Nor was Gold.