by Andy McNab
Tom was lying in their path. He had to move, and now. One round would be all it took to put an end to his chances of sorting out this nightmare.
He wrenched himself onto his hands and knees and tried to crawl. His legs wouldn’t function. He dug his elbows into the rubble and hauled himself forward. The cover of the nearest carriage seemed to be a lifetime away. But he managed to slide beneath it as a dozen sets of boots pounded past him.
Cutting charges were set on the carriage doors at intervals along the train. Sixty seconds later they, too, detonated. The succession of pressure waves rippled along the tunnels to England and France. They didn’t have anywhere else to go. As Tom struggled to recover, he knew that no one on either side would be in any doubt now that there was more than a fire going on down here.
He watched the insurgents swarm onto the train. The operation was as slick as anything the Blue team could have achieved. The charges guaranteed entry; they also subdued the occupants.
Tom thought only of Delphine. If one of the smouldering doors was hers, she’d be OK. Toilets and luggage racks separated the access points from the passenger seating. She’d be scared, but alive.
Laszlo’s men burst into the carriages, brandishing their suppressed weapons. Panic spread like wildfire.
‘Shut up!’ Laszlo’s voice cut through the bedlam in the forward section. ‘Everyone! Hands on your heads, then heads down. Do it now!’
A man in his thirties, alone in a corner seat, suddenly leaped to his feet and started running down the aisle, away from the guns. The first shots went wide, but well-aimed rounds from Laszlo and Sambor cut him down.
Sambor moved quickly after him and finished him with a single shot to the head. Laszlo paused alongside him as the other passengers tried to process what had just happened. He knew it would be hard for them: no gunfire; no pre-game warm-up; just instant death. It wasn’t the way they’d seen it in the movies.
‘Could he be the one?’
Sambor kicked over the body so that they could have a closer look at his face.
Laszlo looked down. ‘No. No dust residue on him from the detonation. Just another nonentity with no self-control.’
He showed no reaction to the howls around him, but he was pleased. They were getting the message. Fear really did bring compliance.
‘So, you think our hero is still out there?’
‘Perhaps.’
The only thing that mattered to Laszlo was the mission. Once a clear set of objectives had been decided upon, he knew he must never deviate from them, no matter what was thrown at him. Fighting and killing were easy; his mind had processed the why, the when and the how. Laszlo was an intellectual; a professor of the art of conflict. His heart provided the fire; his body was the finely honed instrument with which he forged his vision.
He scanned the carriage. Some of the passengers had obeyed his orders: they kept their heads low. Others, trembling with fright, were still too stunned to react. Speed and aggression were the key. They needed to be gripped instantly. He nodded to his men, and out came the Mace cans. Ten seconds later, the offenders were doubled up, coughing and retching, tears and green mucus decorating their faces.
He was glad they’d dropped the runner. These people needed to know what would happen if they didn’t do exactly what they were told.
The next phase could now begin: herding the passengers towards the front half of the train. They had about four hundred people to control, and they needed to confine them.
50
DELPHINE HAD DONE exactly as Tom had instructed when the explosions started. She’d crouched behind her bags and stayed where she was as the pressure wave rocked the carriage. Her ears felt as if they were bursting.
The pinstriped businessman had been less prudent. Panicked, he had dived out of his seat, run towards the nearest detonation site and leaped into the darkness. Hyperventilating with fear, not knowing which way to run, he hadn’t seen the heavily armed men emerge from the smoke. He hadn’t had time to take a single step before he’d felt something pushed into the side of his head, just below the earlobe.
His killers stepped back from the side of the train and fired a burst at one of the windows. The suppressed weapons continued to make no sound, so the blizzard of incoming safety glass was the first sign of further attack. Safe behind her makeshift barricade, Delphine remained untouched, although the faces of two or three others were cut. But she wasn’t unharmed. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she curled up like a small child and wept. It wasn’t long before she realized she was weeping for Tom.
As the insurgents stormed the carriage, Delphine wriggled further down in her seat, dragging her bags on top of her. But she was spotted at once. A man mountain with wild hair and a glistening beard seized her arm, dragged her out from behind her protective barricade, and herded her towards the rest of the panic-stricken crowd of survivors.
She saw Grace, tears streaming down her face, clutching her children and trying to quieten their terrified cries. Delphine worked her way towards them through the heaving mob. ‘It’ll be all right,’ she whispered, squeezing her arm. ‘It’s OK, children. Just stay quiet and keep still. The bad men will go soon.’
51
WHILE THEIR MEN secured the passengers and herded them through the train, Laszlo and Sambor stormed the driver’s compartment. Laszlo issued his commands in a brisk monotone. ‘Get on the floor. Put your hands behind your backs. And now stay absolutely still or we will kill you.’ He knew that people generally couldn’t control their fear: they needed his control because they had lost all sense of their own.
The driver proved not to be as stupid as Laszlo had assumed. He slid out of his driving seat like oil and lay flat on the floor, face down. He didn’t move a muscle. Sambor zip-tied his wrists and ankles while Laszlo picked up his radio mic. He knew that Folkestone control centre would be standing by, desperate to know what was happening in the tunnel.
To begin with, he just heard breathing.
When he spoke, it was slowly and deliberately, in perfect, slightly accented English. ‘My name is Laszlo Antonov. And I have complete control of this train and all its passengers. What happens to them next depends on the nature of your response. Now, put me in contact with whoever is in command of incident control.’
It was pointless dealing with anyone else. He knew how the system worked.
‘Sorry . . .’ The voice at the other end of the line was barely more than a squeak. ‘You said Laszlo Anton—’
‘Listen to me, young man. I want to talk to whoever will be liaising with COBRA. They know who I am. They know I am on this train. Just do what I say, and do it now. If you don’t know what COBRA is, go and find someone who does.’
He listened in silence to the panic-stricken rambling of the Eurostar employee.
COBRA?
He knew nothing about the police arriving to seal off the tunnel.
He knew nothing about the SAS taking over their holding area.
But why would he? Everything had happened in less than an hour.
The idiot knew nothing, apart from the fact that the fire alarms had been triggered and the French were dealing with it. And that they were holding all movement on the UK side. The tunnel’s entire CCTV system was down, and now the Eurostar crew were reporting explosions – explosions on the train. He’d thought he was dealing with a small fire, not a hijack and hostage emergency . . .
Out of his depth and thrust suddenly into a situation that was well beyond his pay grade, he began to stumble through a response, in a strange, robotic tone that suggested he was reading from a handbook or a What to do when the shit hits the fan instruction sheet. ‘I . . . er . . . I need to establish the . . . er . . . circumstances . . . of this incident . . . before I can make a judgement on the . . . correct response . . .’
Laszlo remained the personification of cool. He’d been expecting something like this. Most organizations carried out paper exercises to deal with a crisis. But,
as the 7/7 bombings had demonstrated, when it came to the real thing, people reacted very differently. For Laszlo, this was a good thing. It provided an opportunity to take command of the situation, and to demonstrate that whatever threats he made, he would carry them out. ‘Then you, young man, have just killed the first hostage.’
He looked back along the carriage and pointed to a harassed blonde doing her best to comfort her two young children. The pretty French girl he’d seen at St Pancras reached out to protect the woman, but Sambor swept her aside. He grabbed the blonde’s arm and dragged her away. As he began to shove her up the aisle, the kids burst into tears.
‘Please,’ the woman begged. ‘My children . . .’
Laszlo inclined his head. ‘Sure, why not? Bring them too.’ There was no warmth in his smile.
Sambor gathered up the three of them. Laszlo held out the open radio mic with one hand, and rested the barrel of his sub-machine-gun across his forearm, pointing at the two children.
He turned his ice-cold stare back to the mother. ‘Choose,’ he said. His eyes darted between them. ‘Which one?’
She stared at him uncomprehendingly. It was a moment before she realized his meaning. Then her legs buckled beneath her and she sank to the floor. ‘Please, I beg you.’ She clasped her hands together, pleading. ‘They’re only . . . babies . . . Please, please . . . take me instead . . .’
Laszlo held the microphone by her face and looked down at her in silence.
She sobbed and implored as the seconds ticked by.
‘Very well.’ He swung his barrel towards her.
She turned to her children and her hair caught in the muzzle, as if trying to reach out and stop what was about to happen. ‘I love you both so very—’
Laszlo pulled the trigger. The bullet struck her in the top of the head. Her body slumped, leaving a few strands of hair wrapped around the weapon’s foresight. As he swung the sub-machine-gun away they fluttered gently to the floor.
The carriage was completely silent. The little boy’s eyes widened in disbelief. Then his sister gave a heartrending cry. She sank to her knees alongside their mother, trying to cradle her in her arms.
The boy remained as still as a statue, struck dumb with shock, staring at the muzzle of the gun that had killed his mother.
Laszlo brought the microphone back to his mouth. ‘If I do not hear from someone authorized by COBRA within fifteen minutes, her children will be the next to die.’
In his earpiece, he could just hear sobbing.
Laszlo had always found weakness revolting. His reaction to it was visceral. ‘Get a grip on yourself,’ he barked. ‘This woman at my feet showed great love, great strength and great dignity in death. But you? You disgust me. Now, do what I say.’
52
THERE WAS A faint movement in the darkness beneath the train. Tom ran his fingers, as grey as the dust around them, across his forehead and down his cheek. He gave himself a moment to take stock. His head was pounding; he was covered with cuts and bruises; his nose and mouth were filled with grit; but he had no serious wounds or injuries. Not that it mattered much: he still had to crack on, no matter what condition he was in.
He slid out and hauled himself upright. Hugging the tunnel wall, he moved forward in a crouch to avoid the lozenges of light cast from the carriage windows. The contrast between the glow of the emergency lamps and the darkness of the tunnel allowed him to stand in the strips of shadow and see inside the train without being seen himself.
A line of passengers stood facing him, hands on heads and faces pressed against the glass. The ones that hadn’t been herded to the side were clustered on the seats, heads down. People were crying, begging, praying, comforting children; some just stared, accepting that their life would now come to an end.
Through the gaps between these visions of human despair and remorse, the muttered promises that if they ever got out of this they would change for the better, Tom spotted several of Laszlo’s sidekicks. He eased himself closer, disabled the flash function on his phone camera and held it up, zooming in on each face in turn.
He kept going, hoping against hope that he’d spot Delphine. He eventually caught sight of her being comforted by a group of other hostages.
Relieved and elated, he risked inching his way into the pool of light spilling from an empty window close by, and stood stock still, willing her to glance in his direction.
As he watched, Delphine’s look of desolation was suddenly replaced by a beaming smile. Tom put a finger to his lips. She gave a faint, almost imperceptible nod, then signalled to the right with her eyes. Laszlo and Sambor were issuing a string of orders to their men further up the carriage.
Laszlo froze, antennae on full alert. He cast a suspicious glare along the carriage, but Delphine had already repositioned herself, her nose against the window and her eyes staring out into the darkness.
Tom edged further along the train and photographed the brothers. The lighting wasn’t strong enough to obtain good imagery of anything inside, but that didn’t matter. The team would need up-to-date shots of the X-rays and the computer geeks could sort out the pixels later. The quicker he got Delphine out of the train, the quicker Gavin would have the pictures and the quicker Tom could add some int to what the Slime had already gathered.
Sambor and Laszlo began to walk towards the driver’s compartment. Tom tracked their progress by monitoring their shifting weight as it depressed the train’s shock absorbers between the carriages, and kept in step with them. But when they reached the front of the train, he couldn’t see through its small side windows or the sharply angled windscreen.
Using his iPhone display to light his way, he lowered himself to the concrete track bed, wriggled between the wheels and beneath the greasy tangle of wires and cables of the undercarriage.
53
HAVING PARKED THE two recently orphaned children outside the cabin, Laszlo turned his back on them and sank into the driver’s seat almost directly above where Tom lay. He reached for the radio mic.
‘Time’s up. Who is there to talk to me?’
Laszlo was well aware of the sequence of events that would have followed his discovery on the train. He knew, even if Eurostar didn’t, that the chief constable of whichever constabulary covered the location of the incident would be first to take command. But how had he been flagged? He was more intrigued than angry. The man helping the pretty French girl to the toilet? Very possibly. He hadn’t seen him since . . .
‘This is Chief Constable Michael Alderson of Kent Constabulary. Who am I speaking to?’
Alderson had decided to keep his tone uncompromising but courteous. He’d come by all he knew about Laszlo from the five minutes he’d spent reading the file sent to his BlackBerry while juggling a flurry of calls to and from his commanders.
He’d had to secure the area, co-ordinate the emergency services and keep a grip on proceedings from the back of a speeding, London-bound BMW. But now he was static on the hard shoulder of the A2 – he’d asked the driver to pull in as soon as he’d got a full signal.
Alderson stuck a digit into his free ear to cut out the traffic noise and the clicking of the four-ways. The driver sat motionless, not even moving his head to check the fast-approaching traffic in the wing mirror.
Laszlo smiled to himself. ‘You know very well who I am. Laszlo Antonov.’ He paused, giving the policeman time for his name, and what it meant, to sink in. Maybe this Alderson would take the trouble to look more closely at the briefing notes he no doubt had in front of him.
‘I want to begin by congratulating you, Chief Constable. You’ve just saved some lives. One moment, please . . .’
He covered the microphone with his hand and turned to Sambor, then wrinkled his nose in disgust. The children were now huddled on the floor behind him. The sight of their mother’s murderer was enough to start them both shaking and whimpering all over again. And the brown patch spreading across the boy’s new holiday trousers was painfully obvious.
&
nbsp; ‘He’s shat himself . . .’
Sambor gave a crooked smile. ‘You seem to have that effect on people, my brother.’
‘It’s one of the secrets of my success.’ Laszlo’s smile faded. ‘Get them out of here.’
‘You want me to get rid of them?’
‘Clean him up or kill them, I don’t care which. Their lives are ruined now anyway.’
Sambor hustled the children out, and Laszlo turned back to the radio mic. ‘Chief Constable Alderson, my apologies. How kind of you to take my call.’
‘Mr Antonov, what is it you want?’
‘To live a nice quiet life in Hampstead. As indeed I was – until the SAS came knocking on my door.’ Laszlo leaned back in the chair, resting his feet on the head of the terrified train driver, who still lay face down on the floor with his hands and feet zip-tied. ‘However, as you know, I’ve taken up a new, but purely temporary, residence near Folkestone.
‘It’s a little cramped for my taste, and there are far too many noisy neighbours but, as you may know, there are fewer of them than there were a little while ago.’ He paused again, to let the message sink in. ‘And there will be fewer still a few minutes from now, if our discussions do not prove fruitful.
‘First, do not even think about putting power back online. It does not serve me at all, only you. The back-up system will suffice for now. Second, I should imagine the gentlemen from Hereford will be attempting to pay me a call – in about . . . let’s see . . .’ He checked his watch. ‘Say three hours from now – that is, if you hand over control. Which you have to, of course, because the situation is already well beyond your very limited control. No doubt the home secretary will be ordering you to do so very soon, once COBRA is in session and the gravity of the situation is clear to all.
‘So I’d obviously like us to have completed arrangements for the release of these poor people, in exchange for a safe passage for myself and my associates. Do you think you might be able to manage that, Chief Constable?’
