“Help,” was the last word I whispered, a sound lost in both of their raised voices, as I slipped into the dark embrace of blissful oblivion.
Waking up again was hard. Like the morning after a wild night, when you just lay there, willing yourself to go back to sleep, knowing the pain of an outrageous hangover was only minutes away. When the fog of sleep finally receded, I carried out a brief reconnoitre of the mess that was my body. My jeans were still on and buttoned, and to my great relief, I didn’t appear to have been raped. My blood-soaked jumper had been replaced by a large, buttoned-down man’s shirt, but as I tried to raise it to inspect the bullet wound beneath, I realised that my hands had been cable tied together in front of me. It was clear that one captor had replaced another, and for a moment, it seemed like my circumstances had improved, until I recalled Vasili’s words about being strapped to a bomb. After a little wiggling, I managed to push up my top to discover that my wound had been cleaned, dressed and wrapped tightly. The wound to my head hadn’t been bandaged, but it did feel as though it had been cleaned, and although battered and bruised, I didn’t feel as though I was in so much pain either, so I must have been given painkillers somewhere along the line.
More than half an hour passed by without interruption, so I felt brave enough to walk around. Trying the doors and windows gently on the off chance that they’d been left open, I wasn’t surprised to find myself trapped. The glass had been covered with something from the outside, leaving the room lit only by the overhead light. If it wasn’t for the clock high up on the wall, I wouldn’t have had a clue what time of day it was. After a search for an escape and weapons proved useless, I gently lowered myself to the floor. Eventually someone would come for me. My only hope was that Nan understood my cry for help and had alerted the SAS. But even then, that vein of hope was slim. If I had no idea where I was, I had no clue how anyone else would find me.
My prison was a strange mixture of government utilitarianism, from the bulk buy, scratchy blue carpets and mismatched metal filing cabinets, to the Victorian grand opulence with high ceilings and ornate crown mouldings. My best guess was that I was in one of London’s many turn-of-the-century properties that had been refitted for office use.
Hours passed alone. Without anything to sit on, I was starting to ache, and I figured that any painkillers I’d been given were probably starting to wear off. The sound of raised voices made me jump, and when a key turned in the lock, I scurried back into the corner, trying to make myself as small as possible. Four men, all wielding guns, stormed into the room, but it was the fifth man I was most afraid of. His cold, black, soulless eyes looked through me, as though I wasn’t even a person but an object, and a distasteful one at that. He gave me a cursory glance up and down, and apparently satisfied at what he saw, issued orders to two of them who advanced towards me menacingly.
“What do you want with me?” I cried.
They ignored me, gesturing with their guns that I should move out of the corner. Each time they crept forward, I kicked out at them with my feet, aiming towards a kneecap. It was a dangerous strategy. I could easily have found myself at the receiving end of a bullet. But I figured if they wanted me dead, they wouldn’t have gone to all the effort of patching me up.
When the fifth man grew impatient with my antics, he grabbed a gun from his companion and, swinging it around, jabbed me hard in the chest with the butt. It was enough to wind me. Throwing the strap of the gun over his shoulder, he reached down to seize me by the hair and yank me out off the floor. I swore to God that if I survived the ordeal, the first thing I was doing was cutting all my hair short as a “fuck you” to every man who thought they could use it like reins to control me.
“Stay still,” he ordered.
“Or what?” I asked defiantly. “What are you going to do, shoot me?”
He slapped me hard across my face, which still bore the pain of Vasili’s punishment. The men holding tight to my arms were the only things still holding me up. Reaching for my chin, his grip bruising, he turned me to face him. His face was unbearably close to mine as he spoke with little more than a whisper.
“No. I will pump you full of drugs then film as my men take it in turns to mock and abuse you over and over again. Then I’m going to do exactly what I want anyway, and you will die knowing that the last images of you anyone will ever see, will be of you on your hands and knees like a stray dog, begging for death.”
I let him see the hate and defiance in my eyes as his men forced the vest of explosives over my chest and shoulders, tying it behind me and doing something with the wires. His smug grin was that of a man who knew he had absolute power over my position, and it made my blood boil.
With one final act of insolence, I spat in his face. His smile turned to rage, and quick as a flash, his handgun was pressed firmly to my forehead. Maintaining his stare as he wiped away my saliva, I practically dared him to do it. The hit that I was expecting never came, the explosive vest probably the only thing to save me from more pain. But mentally, it felt like a victory, even if only a minor one. When you’ve been worn down enough, when you’ve taken as much abuse as you believe you can handle, sometimes a tiny act of rebellion is enough to remind you that you’re still alive. And where there’s life, there’s fight. He uttered more harshly spoken words that I didn’t understand before he left, his men following behind him. The turning of the key in the lock echoed ominously in the silence.
Alone once more, I retreated to my corner, and on shaky legs slumped to the floor. My bindings had been cut when they forced the vest onto me, but it didn’t matter. The thing was wired from behind, and my hands were shaking too badly to do anything of use, even if I knew how. As time passed, the pain grew worse, and it was hard to ignore with little else to focus on. Slipping my hand underneath the vest, I touched the edges of the bandages, only then realising as I pulled my hand away, my fingers wet with fresh blood, that time was running out, in more ways than one.
Tom
Only once we were airborne did we learn that the chopper couldn’t get anywhere near the target for either an aerial assault or so we could repel in. The height and close proximity of the buildings around put pay to that. It was probably one of the reasons the terrorists chose it. At the eleventh hour, permission came through from the owner of a private helipad across the Holborn Viaduct. Lacking any other options, the first chopper touched down, with the second following barely a minute later. From there we booted it as fast as we could to Aldersgate Street. When we arrived, the place stood out a mile. In a city where most buildings were lit up like Christmas trees, regardless of the hour, the address we’d traced Sarah to was conspicuous in its near darkness.
“Boys, we need intel, and we need it fast. My team will take the front elevation of the building. Harper’s team take the back. Police are setting up a half-mile perimeter roadblock around this place, and they’re quietly evacuating buildings. Use them to gather intel if you need to. That gives us half an hour tops before this thing’s all over the fucking news and the terrorists are tipped off, if they haven’t been already. Use the mics to communicate, secure comms channel 2 only. No chatter. I want heat signatures from every angle of that place. We have ten minutes to figure out exactly how many bad guys we’re looking at. Harper and I will coordinate the entry plan, and we go in fifteen minutes after that. Right now, we have the element of surprise. They have no idea they’ve been made, and they aren’t expecting us. I know this is going to be messy, and we’d all like a fuck load more prep time, but we just don’t have it. This operation is not getting fucked because they’re seeing pictures of us hanging off the building in a special news bulletin. Understand?” Hunter said, addressing both teams. I was reluctantly impressed at his leadership skills. If he hadn’t fucked up the last op and lost sight of Vasili Agheenco, I might have even thrown out a compliment.
“We’re coming up with an entry plan together, are we?” I asked as the guys ran off.
“Look, it’s no secret
that I don’t like you. You’re an arrogant prick who’s never given me or my team a fair crack of the whip. But I was wrong to talk shit about Sarah the other day. She’s a nice kid, and I feel shitty for fucking up and letting the Russian go. You have more experience with forced-entry operations than I do, so let’s get past our bullshit and get this done so we can go back to hating each other.”
“Deal,” I agreed, and with a grudging nod of respect, went to prep for the most important mission of my life.
A little over twenty minute later, we had a plan. It wasn’t the best plan in the world, drafted on the fly and with hardly any intel, but we had little choice. In a world where the media could smell a fart even before it left your arse cheeks, there was no such thing as discretion, even when discretion was the better part of valour. If we didn’t go now, at least one news station would report on the police cordon, and Sarah was as good as dead.
The heat signatures put the target count at fourteen. Fourteen terrorists against two, four-man special forces teams. The unknown was the bioweapon. If a rogue shot hit the bioweapon or the explosives they intended to set off with it, we were all dead. Worry about what we couldn’t control was pointless. We just had to count on the element of surprise and hope that in the seconds it took us to hit our targets, none of them reached a trigger for the bomb. Three minutes before go ahead, MI5 bought us a Hail Mary. They’d hacked the feed to the internal security cameras, and Hunter had a stream of intel straight to his comms unit.
“Suspect biohazard package is on the fifth floor. Second door to the left after the elevators. There are two marks in the same room and another five in the room adjacent. Sarah is alive. The cameras show Sarah on the floor in a room across the corridor from the bio package. She’s not moving, but I’d say she’s alive,” Hunter reported.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing, inhaling and exhaling as I calmed the beating of my heart and focused on tuning out everything but the mission ahead. We’d had less than ten minutes to learn the layout of our entry floors, but mine was burned into my brain. I was ready, detached emotionally from everything I was about to do. There would be no hesitation. No pause. No mercy. She was my entire world, and they took her from me. Now I would take the entire world from them.
One minute.
Every step, every movement, every action I was about to take was choreographed in my mind, like a dance that would end only in death. For all the pain and suffering they’d brought on innocents, a quick demise seemed too easy. A mercy they’d denied nearly all of their victims. But Sarah didn’t believe in an eye for an eye. Her idea of justice and mine were so very different. Even now I doubted she’d be wishing pain and death on her captors. Unfortunately for the fuckers who thought they could hurt and maim and kill without consequence, I wasn’t so forgiving.
Ten seconds.
“They’re on the move. They have Sarah and they’re dragging her to the biohazard room. She appears to be strapped to an explosives vest, and she looks a little banged up, but she’s alive. Pick your target carefully. Do not let them get to a trigger for the explosives, and do not hit that vest. Counting down now.
Three.
Two.
One.
Go. Go. Go.”
Hunters voice in our ear gave the go ahead, and we were gone. Creeping up the marble steps to the front lobby, I took cover behind one of the Georgian pillars until the guard who had been pacing the ground floor lobby made a path towards me. I waited until he was almost upon me before slipping around the pillar to approach him from behind. Using one hand to cover his mouth and stifle any noise, I brought the other up sharply, slicing open his throat. He was dead before his body hit the floor.
“Ground floor, first floor, and stairwell clear. Proceed to the second floor,” Eli said. Acting like a spotter from the building across the road, he was keeping an eye on the movement of heat signatures and feeding the information back to us. Two floors up and things didn’t go quite as smoothly. B team had taken out another man, but he’d cried out as he’d gone down. Spooked from the noise, my guy had turned around before I had the drop on him, pulling a knife. We fought, bouncing off walls and wrestling for control of the weapon. Seconds later, I dislocated his shoulder, loosening his hold enough for me to drive the serrated blade straight through his heart. His body slumped forward, then fell to the ground.
“Stairwell and all remaining floors clear. All targets assembled on the fifth floor,” Eli told us. As we made it to the right floor, Crash knelt on the ground, taking up his position by the main door. Will and I continued up as stealthily as we could, until we hit the roof. Finding a suitable anchor, we secured our guide ropes, then hooked on our carabiner clips and edged over the roofline.
“Tango. Alpha. One. Ready,” I said into my throat mic.
“Tango. Alpha. Two. Ready,” Will said next. The rest of the guys called in to confirm their positions.
“Phase one, go,” Hunter ordered, and we repelled seamlessly down the front elevation of the building until we reached the windows that would be our point of entry. We weren’t worried about being seen. Every window had been covered in some way. But as I reached mine, my heart stopped. The window cover had slipped, leaving gap big enough for me to see through, and there she was. My beautiful girl. The centre of my fucking universe. She looked lost and alone. So very fucking alone. I willed her to see me. To know that I was coming for her. That I was with her.
Like she heard me, her gaze locked with mine until her eyelids fluttered closed and her expression morphed into one of absolute agony. I took a second or two to scrutinise the men who’d been roughhousing her. Whether Vasili had done that damage to her face or these bastards, didn’t matter. They were dead the minute they looked at her.
“Charge 1 set,” Will whispered.
“Charge 2 set,” one of the guys from Hunter’s team replied. That was our cue to move. Pushing ourselves off the building, we moved into position on either side of the window, slid down our gas masks, and turned our heads away from the glass.
“Three, two, one,” Hunter counted down. On zero the charge detonated and the window exploded. A fraction of a second behind it, the casement opposite on the other side of the building blew. Unpinning our gas canisters, we launched them into the debris. Smoke engulfed the room, and shouting gave way to coughing as the fuckers struggled for air.
“Go!” Hunter yelled into the earpiece.
I kicked off from the wall and swung left until my boots hit the glass strewn windowsill. Unhooking my carabiner, I pulled myself inside and raised my weapon as I swept the room. The crunch of glass under Will’s weight told me that he was right behind me. Disorientated and desperate, the terrorists panic fired in our direction, but their aim was high. Dropping to my knees, I took a deep breath and picked off my targets one by one. Bullets ripped through flesh and bone as the first couple fell to the floor.
Thrown into disarray, they screamed instructions at one another, desperately trying to claw back control from the chaos. It was too late. No one was spared. They scrambled for any sort of cover they could, but there was none. Not from us. I was ruthless. Relentless. Meticulous. Not a bullet was wasted as I carved a path of bodies through the carnage. Two shots each was all they had. One to kill and one to be sure. As soon as the bullets left the chamber, I was on to my next target, cutting through them quickly without compunction or remorse.
A cacophony of cries echoed through the smoke as Hunter worked his way towards us, but with every fallen terrorist, the noise abated, until there was only silence. I surveyed the sea of bodies for the only light in this shit storm. The realisation that she was gone was a painful one. Turning to look at Will, I gave him the hand signal to communicate my intention and moved forward, keeping low and focused.
“Boys, stay sharp. I’ve got two more heat signal between you both, and it looks like one is dragging the other,” Eli informed us. The inhale and exhale of my breath through the mask was the only sound to punc
ture the quiet. Sweeping from left to right, I moved as quickly as I could through the hallway until I found what I was looking for. A few metres in, stood a terrorist. The last of them left alive. The last to realise the hopelessness of their situation. There would be no trial. No public platform upon which they could announce to the world their justification for the death of innocents. No opportunity to divide people in lies and hate. Not a single one of them was leaving the building alive, and now the last man standing knew it.
This was a different breed from the ones I’d killed. There was no anxiety or fear in this man’s eyes. Only hate, and the promise that, if he was going to hell, he was bringing some company along for the road trip. He was slumped low to the floor, unable to hold the weight of his load with one arm. When I saw that he was using my girl as a human shield, my blood ran cold. I convinced myself that she was just unconscious, because I couldn’t function any other way.
He shouted loudly at me, and I didn’t need to translate to realise that he was telling me to stay back. The low calibre handgun pointed at Sarah’s back conveyed the message loud and clear. It didn’t matter whether his bullet would trigger the explosives in the vest. It would hit Sarah, and that’s all that counted.
I raised my hands in surrender and ever so slowly lowered my gun to the floor, all the time taking small strides in his direction. It was something we were all well practiced at. The trick was to do it in such a way that the target was looking at your hands for the gun and the expression of your face so that he could read your intentions, all the while missing how close you were moving towards his position. My hands were empty and held high, but I was so close I could almost touch him. Maintaining eye contact, I didn’t spare Sarah a single glance. One look would have told him everything he needed to know, and there was no way I was voluntarily handing over the knowledge of just how important she was to me. I could pinpoint the moment he made me, realisation washing over his face as he screamed and pushed the gun deeper into Sarah’s back. Her poor broken body jerked in reaction. I stilled, not wanting to risk setting him off when Hunter appeared in my peripheral vision. He signalled to his team to stay back, and I knew then what he was going to do. Knew that I’d have seconds to steal away one life as he was risking his.
City Under Siege Page 27
