by Andy McNab
‘I’ve got ID!’ Sean bellowed. ‘Wallet, left trouser pocket. I’m a British soldier. Fusilier Sean Harker, Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. The GSW is Corporal Joe Wolston. We were staking out—’
One of the men delved into the pocket and pulled out Sean’s wallet, where his ID nestled next to his driving licence. Then he abruptly rolled Sean over and held the card next to his face. ‘That’s Harker, ID confirmed.’
He folded the wallet and handed it back as Sean slowly picked himself up. The man’s face was invisible behind the gas mask, but he cocked his head the way Sean would if he was listening to his PRR. Then he looked directly at Sean. It was like being addressed by an Imperial Stormtrooper.
‘They’ve found Corporal Wolston. You patched him up?’
Sean nodded. PRR made its own signals – they would be able to use it down here.
And then he realized he had made a wrong assumption about these guys. Cops didn’t use PRR.
‘You’ll be, uh …’
The man looked at him, eyes so neutral behind the gas mask they were like blazing warnings.
So Sean didn’t say SAS. Not out loud.
Dave came pushing through down the steps, ID in his outstretched hand, which he waved in front of SAS guy’s mask. ‘I’ll take responsibility for Harker.’
SAS guy studied the ID, then just nodded and stepped back. Sean watched him go. The realization that Wolston was now in the best possible hands, that actually a proper ambulance would be turning up, was like a cold shower at the end of a long day.
‘So how did they get here so quick?’ he asked.
‘I’ve had them on standby since the operation began. I called them in the moment I heard shots.’
‘You didn’t say anything about them.’
‘You didn’t ask.’ Dave took in Sean’s half-naked appearance and pulled off the light jacket he was wearing. ‘Report, Fusilier,’ he said as he handed it over.
Sean clocked that the first-names thing was history now. It was strangely reassuring. As he pushed his arms into the borrowed jacket, he felt he was back where he belonged. He was broader across the shoulders than its owner, but he felt more comfortable with it on.
‘Down there.’ He waved a hand. ‘Four of them in a room. No, three. One of ’em was Zara. The fourth guy, Jaz, he came up and …’
Now that stage of things was over, it was hard to come back to the present. The priorities of making his report, and getting help for Wolston, and catching the conspirators – they were all banging together in his head. After midnight at the end of a long and tiring day, he barely had the resources to put them all in order.
‘From the beginning, soldier.’ Dave took him by the shoulders and stared into his eyes, the way Sean would with a mate who was completely out of it on booze, trying to get him to focus. ‘Step by step. What happened after the two of you went underground?’
The attention helped Sean to pin his thoughts together. He took a couple of breaths. ‘Best if I show you …’
He led Dave down the passage to the room, briefly describing what had gone down. In the alcove, a pair of SAS guys were bent over Wolston’s still form, giving first aid with kit of their own. When Sean reported that Ste had identified him by name, Dave broke off to tell one of the SAS to put an armed guard on the OP in flat 403, Gladstone Tower, now.
‘And I found all this,’ Sean finished as he turned to try and enter the room.
Dave put up an arm to block him, and an SAS guy appeared at his elbow.
‘We need to secure this area—’ the man said.
‘Or even better,’ Dave interrupted, ‘leave it completely alone. Why were they wearing surgical masks?’
From the doorway, his gaze darted quickly around the room, taking in everything Sean had already seen. The concrete walls were painted grey. Thick pipes ran across the ceiling. The lighting came from a bare fluorescent strip. It was all as Sean had left it, kitted out with everything needed to put Zara up for a few days. A camp bed, a chemical toilet, a laptop, a couple of DVD boxsets, bottles of water, the remains of food.
And some serious-looking medical stuff. White plastic machinery that Sean didn’t recognize, even from his own stay in hospital the previous summer. A waist-high cabinet on a metal trolley with a flatscreen monitor and various poles and pipes attached. Tubes, needles, clear plastic bags.
‘Did you touch anything?’ Dave asked.
‘Just the stuff I took for Wolston.’
Dave drummed his fingers on the door jamb. ‘Right.’ He turned to SAS guy. ‘I’m calling in experts to assess the scene and the civilian authorities to take over the management, but until they get here, post a guard by the exit doors either end of this passage. No one to come down without authorization. And we will all withdraw now. Provisionally I’m declaring this a biohazard zone.’
Sean recoiled. ‘Biohazard?’
‘They were wearing those masks for a reason. And what was in that cooler box? You use coolers to keep biological material fresh – usually food, but it would work for any other kind too. We need to know what they were doing – and where the hell they’ve now gone. And what they’ve taken with them. But I think it’s fair to say we’re blown, so we can stop hiding. I’m now in a position to fling resources at the estate: we’ll start with the locations you got off the local boy. No more detectors – I’m having those doors properly kicked in by professionals, and I’m having Zara and Emma’s flats secured. Meanwhile, Fusilier Harker, get back to the OP. You and Fusilier Mitra are to dismantle everything and await evacuation. I’ll call transport in to escort you back to base.’
‘We could just stay in the OP and leave in the morning,’ Sean said. He had been running on adrenalin for God knows how long. Now it was draining away, and his body was realizing it had been on its feet for most of the last eighteen hours. He felt exhausted.
‘You can kip on the way back to Tidworth – apart from anything else, the SAS will want your armed guard back. You’ve done your part and I want you out of the way—’
They both heard the sound at the same time. Police sirens, up above. Multiple ones. Powerful engines roaring into silence and doors slamming.
‘Oh, great.’ Dave set off up the steps, Sean following close behind. They emerged into the warm night air.
Sean didn’t know how the SAS had got into the basement of Wolsey, but he was prepared to bet that no one in any of the towers had even noticed.
The police did it differently. They put on a show. Vans were pulled up at the base of the tower block, grilles down over the windscreens and splashing pulses of blue light around the square. A couple of smaller saloon cars with more blue lights pulled up behind them.
And their arrival had been noted. Lights were coming on in the flats, and the balconies were soon lined with onlookers. So, a sudden police incursion into Littern Mills, Sean thought with a sinking heart: this was not going to end well.
‘You didn’t have them on standby?’ he shouted over the noise as more black-clad figures burst out of the vans. After seeing the SAS in all their battle kit, he thought, the Met’s finest looked like kid brothers trying to be as hard as their elder sibs. But the Heckler & Kochs all looked pretty similar, and just as effective.
Dave shook his head. He stood still with his arm out, ID dangling open in his hand, waiting for someone to notice him. ‘It’s the Summit. There’ll be an SCO19 unit on every street corner. Someone must have reported the gunshots. Shit!’
He drew a breath as a pair of cops sidled up, weapons to their shoulders. One of them squinted suspiciously at his ID. Sean didn’t move, apart from holding his hands out at his side to show that he was no threat.
‘Identify yourself!’ the SCO19 guy snapped.
‘Security Service.’
The man came closer and peered at the ID. Then his face seemed to turn inside out with disgust, like he was sucking on a lemon. ‘Oh, fucking hell. What are you guys doing here? We weren’t told there was an operation in progress.’<
br />
‘No doubt.’ Dave sounded tired. ‘Who am I speaking to?’
‘Sergeant Toby Wilson, Specialist Firearms Command …’
‘Well, Sergeant Wilson, I was going to send for you people anyway, so as you’re here, you can make yourselves useful. This is a Security Service operation.’ He waved the ID again. ‘Please confirm that you recognize my authority to assume command.’
Wilson wasn’t going to give in so easily. He turned away pointedly as he spoke urgent words into the radio on his shoulder.
When he turned back, he looked like he’d added a few cups of vinegar to the lemon. ‘I’m ordered to follow your instructions.’
‘First of all, send men up to flats 614 and 508 in Wolsey Tower to secure the premises and detain anyone found there for questioning. As of five minutes ago, 614 was empty and 508, we believe, contained a single teenage female, unarmed, but take no chances with either. And you, Fusilier’ – Dave looked at Sean – ‘get going. Send the armed guard back down. They won’t try anything now the cat’s out of the bag.’
Sean found Ravi Mitra almost wetting himself with impatience. Dave had ordered him to help Sean take down the OP, and not to waste time with queries unless there was a new development.
Sean peeled off Dave’s jacket and pulled on a fresh shirt of his own while Mitra demanded details. Apart from the fact that Wolston was down, but still alive, Sean could only tell his mate what little he had seen. It all took time to tell, because they had to concentrate on the main job of putting the equipment away. The telescopes, the computers, the wires, the detectors – everything had its place in foam compartments inside the containers it had arrived in. It was pushing oh two hundred and Sean’s brain had lost the ability to do two things, like think and talk, at the same time.
He glossed over the details of the fight because you didn’t grass on a mate. Especially not a mate who was now fighting for his life. But at the back of his mind he still had a clear image of Wolston freezing, even as he brandished the knife that would tip the balance. One day he would come back to that.
Mitra, still shaken about Wolston, eyed Sean warily at the mention of biohazard. ‘And you’re safe?’
‘Dave must have thought so. I didn’t get a cut or anything. And stop looking at me like that. As long as we don’t have unprotected sex, you’ll be fine.’
‘My mate the plague zone,’ Mitra muttered.
Sean gave a tired grin and made to close the last of the laptops. Then he remembered there were still pictures on his phone that should be uploaded – the ones he had taken in the room below Wolsey. Which meant digging out the USB cable to join the two items together. Once they were connected, he called up the phone’s picture gallery and dragged the icon over to the mission folder on the screen. The empty box began to populate itself with thumbnails.
‘Hold on!’ Mitra put out a hand to stop him, and squinted at the images. Then he clicked on one to enlarge it. It was the white plastic gizmo. ‘You ever given blood, Stenders?’
‘Nope.’
‘I have. My parents do it like it’s a competition. We’ve got drawers full of golden hearts back home. It drives them both mad that they have to wait six months to donate again every time they come back from visiting Nana-ji. But this thing that looks like R2D2’s little brother – it’s what hospitals use. It sucks it out and bags it up for you.’ He looked sideways at Sean. ‘And that’s what they were doing to Zara.’
‘Right …’ Ideas started to gather in Sean’s head. And then …
‘Oh shit!’
He stared down at his hands as if expecting them to start sprouting some weird fungus. He gaped at Mitra, who was looking back at him, torn between amusement and alarm.
‘Yeah?’
‘Got to report this,’ Sean gasped. ‘Dave will want to know.’ He scrabbled for the pressel on his belt, remembered the mike was no longer on his collar, and pulled it out of his pocket to speak into it. ‘That’s Harker with something to report.’
‘Roger. Go on.’
‘At the briefing you said if it wasn’t for the airport diversion, you might think that Zara was just a drugs mule. Well, she is a mule, but it’s not drugs she’s smuggling. I think it’s germs. Diseases.’
Images swam in front of his eyes. The bandage on Zara’s arm, and the cooler box being lugged by Ste. You could transport blood under refrigeration … couldn’t you? But for how long?
He could see Mitra’s eyes go wide as the realization sank in.
‘They put something into her blood in Lagos and now they’re taking it out again. Here. In London.’
Dave must have got it by now, but Sean couldn’t stop talking. All he was getting was silence. Fucking hell – didn’t the man realize?
‘So you were right,’ he pressed on. ‘It is a biohazard zone, and that’s why they had masks …’
‘A bio-mule scenario,’ Dave said calmly at the other end. ‘Yes, that is now the most likely hypothesis we’re working to. I guessed the moment I saw the blood-transfusion machinery.’
‘Bio-mule …’ Sean rolled the word around in his mouth. It felt odd. It wasn’t a term he had heard before but he immediately knew what it meant. He tried to picture how it might work. If a bio-mule wasn’t obviously ill, then airport security wouldn’t pick them up. Once they were in the country, they somehow had to get the bugs out of that blood and into people. How?
It wouldn’t be something like malaria, which needed a specific insect to bite you and then someone else. It had to be simpler than that. How simple? He imagined Zara coughing her way down somewhere like Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon, spraying out … whatever the fuck it was in all directions. She might drop dead by the time she got to Tottenham Court Road, but how many hundreds – make that thousands – of shoppers would have breathed her germs in the meantime? And then gone home and repeated the process themselves, coughing on the train or the Tube … before someone finally clocked what was happening?
But then, why were they taking blood out of Zara?
Mitra must have been thinking along similar lines. He looked dazed. ‘So that’s why Zara didn’t bother with anti-malarials,’ he said. ‘What’s the point when you know you’ve deliberately got infected with something way worse?’
Sean stared at him. ‘Kind of missing the fucking point, Kama Sutra? I was in that room! I could have it …’ His mind spun. Should he grab a shower? Douse himself with TCP, burn all his clothes? ‘I was in that fucking room that is now a biohazard zone!’
‘Hey, hey, hey!’ Mitra waved his hands in a calm-down motion. ‘If you were in danger, if you were infectious, Dave would have said something – and he’d have had you out of here by now. Not wandering around Littern Mills. You’re not thinking, Stenders.’
Sean let the logic sink in, and his racing heart slowed down. ‘Yeah. Whatever …’
Even so. First thing in the morning he was going to get on to Mum and tell her to get out of town. Find a hotel somewhere else. Andover, maybe, where he could keep an eye on her. But get out.
‘Harker.’ Dave was abruptly back on the air.
Mitra and Sean shot each other wary looks.
‘Harker, roger?’ Sean said.
‘Get yourself down to the square. A situation is developing with your little friends from the estate and I need to know their intentions.’
Chapter 24
Friday 4 August, 02:00 BST
Jeers and insults floated up in the warm night air as Sean stepped out onto the balcony. The Killaz were making their presence felt. He craned his neck down at the square, but could only see the tops of a few heads. They must have been gathered in the overhang in front of the Gladstone shops, where they would just be outlines to the cops across the way in front of Wolsey.
He groaned. How the fuck had this come as a surprise to anyone? A hot night when no one would be going back to their airless flat. Bored kids out for entertainment. And cops whose idea of winning hearts and minds was to come down hard and expe
ct the people they were sitting on to be grateful for the protection.
The police had set up their own forward operating base at the bottom of Wolsey. They had arranged their vans in a semicircle round the entrance to the sublevels. It gave them a secure area behind and hid what was going on from prying eyes. Meanwhile a line of cops had moved out from the semicircle, standing shoulder to shoulder with their backs to the vans.
Every now and then someone from below would run out into the light and make graphic wanking gestures or moon his arse before retreating into the shadows again. That and the shouts of ‘Pig!’ were all pretty much what Sean had expected the moment the first set of cops gatecrashed the party.
So what the fuck am I supposed to do about it? But Dave obviously expected something.
He took the stairs two at a time, but as he got to ground level, he made himself slow down. He didn’t want to burst into the midst of the Killaz looking like he gave any kind of shit. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and swaggered out.
The first thing Sean did was clock their faces. He could see them all – excellent. It was the best scenario for the time being. Caps and hoodies, yes, but they didn’t have scarves pulled up. When faces got hidden, that was when you knew a riot was about to happen. At the moment this was just a break in the usual dull routine, a chance to let off steam.
How this turned out depended on the attitudes of both sides. If either of them was spoiling for a fight, then a fight would happen, no doubt about it. The cops weren’t there to bust heads, just to secure a crime scene, so they should have a high tolerance level for any crap the Killaz put out – but many of them might also be pissed off to find that an MI5 operation had been going on under their noses, and want to take their frustration out on someone. And the Killaz were definitely pissed off by the uninvited police presence.
