Random Targets

by James Raven

  They made good time despite the heavy traffic on all roads close to the motorway. Their driver took them down the same slip road that Temple had taken earlier in the evening.

  Hundreds of cars were still backed up along the carriageways where their occupants would be stranded for many hours to come. The crash scene was revealed in all its gory details beneath a collection of floodlights that had been placed around it. It reminded Temple of a scene from a Mad Max movie. There was a riot of high visibility jackets and pulsating blue lights. The area was teeming with police officers and forensic technicians in white suits.

  When they got out of the car the air felt cold and sharp in Temple’s lungs and he experienced a shiver of trepidation.

  Beresford used his mobile to let Vaughan know they’d arrived and the DS appeared within minutes. Vaughan looked exhausted and his face was smeared with grime, but he was clearly surprised to see Temple and the first thing he did was ask about Angel. Temple quickly filled him in. Vaughan was visibly relieved and gave a half smile.

  ‘Thank God she’s not more seriously injured,’ he said. ‘I’ve been worried.’ Then, after a pause, he added, ‘We’ve found something you should both see.’

  They followed Vaughan as he walked along the westbound carriageway away from the crash scene. The road was packed with emergency vehicles that were parked at all angles with their lights blazing. There were other cars and vans from the Collision Investigation Department and the Highways Agency. Several recovery trucks were stacked up waiting for clearance to haul away the wrecks.

  The frigid air was filled with the crackle of police radios and the stench of burning metal. From above came the constant stutter of helicopters.

  The muscles around Temple’s eyes tightened as he took it all in. It struck him yet again that the scale of the task facing them was a formidable one. This crime was going to be compared with the atrocities committed in America by crazy men with assault weapons who slaughter innocent people. It was bound to freak out motorists and maybe even deter some from using motorways in the short term.

  They were approaching a road bridge over the carriageways when Vaughan stopped and pointed towards the embankment.

  ‘We’re pretty sure the gunman was positioned behind those bushes in front of the bridge,’ he said. ‘From there he would have had a good view of the oncoming traffic.’

  A floodlight had been placed about half way up the embankment and Temple could see forensic officers searching the area.

  ‘There are fresh shoe prints in the grass,’ Vaughan said. ‘And some of the branches have been snapped off.’

  ‘You did well to home in on the spot so quickly,’ Beresford said. ‘With any luck the shooter will have left some trace evidence behind.’

  ‘But that’s not the best of it,’ Vaughan said. ‘Follow me.’

  He walked under the bridge and the other two followed. Then he stopped walking and Temple frowned.

  In front of them were two huge pre-cast concrete blocks that supported this side of the bridge. Between the vertical blocks the embankment beneath the bridge had been completely paved with grey slabs.

  Vaughan took a torch from his pocket and turned it on. He shone the light on the slabs and said, ‘So what do you make of that?’

  At first Temple didn’t see it. His eyes were slow to adjust to the light. But then he saw the words and numbers that had been spray-painted in bright red across the concrete slabs. As he read them a cold sensation gripped his chest.

  5.45 P.M. JAN 15

  THIS IS JUST THE START.

  MANY MORE WILL DIE.

  CHAPTER 7

  THERE ARE SOME anonymous threats that you don’t take seriously. Temple knew that. But this wasn’t one of them. The guy who had left the message on the paving slabs was the same guy who had carried out the senseless slaying of two motorists. And he wanted everyone to know it – hence the time and the date.

  How sick was that? How unbelievably insane? They were dealing with a crackpot with a gun. It was the worst kind of nightmare.

  ‘Whoever wrote it would have been shielded from the road by those blocks,’ Vaughan said.

  Temple knew that it was unlikely anyone had seen him. The traffic would have been blasting by at high speed and it would have been pitch dark beneath the bridge.

  ‘Is the paint still wet?’ Temple asked.

  Vaughan nodded. ‘It is in places where it’s been sprayed on thick. I reckon it was put there a few hours ago – just before the shootings.’

  Temple took a step back and looked up at the embankment. Scenes of Crime Officers were carrying out a meticulous search of the grass and the bushes. A couple were crawling around on their hands and knees.

  ‘When we came across the words we started searching this area in front of the bridge,’ Vaughan said. ‘That’s when someone spotted the shoe prints and the broken branches.’

  ‘Let’s have a look up there,’ Temple said.

  A crime scene van was parked under the bridge and from it they helped themselves to forensic suits and paper boot covers. Then they scrambled up the embankment. They were shown the broken branches and three shoe prints – two in the grass and one in a patch of bare earth at the top of the embankment where it joined the road. They couldn’t be certain they belonged to the shooter, but there was a pretty good chance.

  ‘We should be able to get a plaster cast of the one in the dirt,’ Vaughan said.

  Temple stood just outside the floodlight’s beam and looked back along the carriageway to the pile of tangled metal that was the crash scene. It was about fifty yards away. He figured the two drivers had been about thirty or forty yards further back along the road when they were shot.

  He held his arms aloft as though holding a rifle and pretended to pull an invisible trigger.

  ‘It’s the perfect position,’ he said. ‘He would have been shielded by the bushes and yet have a clear view of the oncoming traffic.’

  The vehicles would have been like ducks in a shooting gallery. From a range of eighty or ninety yards the shooter would have had no trouble finding his targets.

  ‘He probably used a night vision scope,’ Vaughan said. ‘It’s the only way he could have been so deadly accurate. Otherwise he would have had to fire at the windscreens and hope for the best.’

  ‘Maybe he fired more than two shots,’ Vaughan said. ‘We won’t know for certain until we’ve examined all the wrecks and that’s going to take time.’

  Temple clambered up to the top of the embankment and stepped on to the road bridge. It had been sealed off at both ends by police cars. A fingertip search was underway along the nearside pavement. Vaughan told him the road was called Allington Lane. It was in the north part of Southampton, close to the airport. On either side of the bridge the road was lined with thick clumps of trees. It was poorly lit and he couldn’t see any houses in either direction.

  ‘There’s a small estate about a quarter of a mile along the road to the left,’ he said. ‘To the right you have to travel a lot further before you come to any buildings. And I’m told there are no traffic cameras along this stretch.’

  ‘It’s quite narrow,’ Temple said. ‘So I don’t reckon our shooter would have parked his car up here. It would have caused a problem for passing traffic and stuck out like a sore thumb.’

  ‘Maybe he gets around on a motorbike,’ Beresford said. ‘Or even a push bike, which he could have hidden in those bushes.’

  They could only speculate at this stage because they really had no idea how the gunman had got there or what mode of transport he’d used. For all they knew he could have walked for miles with his rifle concealed in a bag of some kind.

  A police helicopter swept across the sky above them, so low Temple felt he could almost touch it. For a few moments its engine drowned out the constant moan of sirens.

  Temple made the point that things needed to be controlled and organized. As with any serious motorway crash, each group had its own objectives and responsibi
lities, but this time everyone had to feed information into the murder investigation as soon as they had it. They decided to go back down on to the motorway and convene a meeting of all the team leaders, including the traffic officers, fire chiefs, Highways Agency staff and scene-of-crime technicians. They were half way down the embankment when one of the forensic guys called them over. He was holding up a clear plastic bag.

  ‘We’re definitely at the right spot,’ he said. ‘This is a shell casing from a high-calibre bullet.’

  ‘Can you be more specific?’ Temple asked.

  The forensic guy nodded. ‘It’s a .338 Lapua Magnum. They were specially developed for top notch sniper rifles – the kind that can kill at a range of hundreds of yards.’

  Temple felt his blood pressure plummet. He was familiar with those particular shells. They had a fierce reputation and were among the deadliest ever manufactured. In fact they were a favourite with the military and had been used for years by British troops in Afghanistan.

  CHAPTER 8

  WHAT KIND OF nut opens fire on motorists with military grade ammo? And what possible motive could he have?

  These questions and more were bunching up and Temple knew that once the facts were made public everyone would be demanding answers. Speculation would be rife. Half-assed theories would be put forward. The government would pray that it wasn’t the start of a major terrorist campaign. And that couldn’t be ruled out, of course. Terrorists try to instil fear in the public. And this would be a low-risk way to do just that. A pull of the trigger and, hey presto – death and destruction on a vast scale.

  For some reason Temple knew that there were 2,000 miles of motorways in the UK; essential arteries that drove the economy by transporting people and freight between towns and cities. These would make perfect targets for religious fanatics. On the other hand he knew it was just as likely that this was the work of a lone psychopath; someone who was doing it for fun or to fulfil some warped fantasy; someone who’d watched too many violent video games. Or someone with a mental illness who saw it as a chance to draw attention to himself.

  Temple did not allude to this stuff when he got the various team leaders together on the hard shoulder of the westbound carriageway. He asked them to be mindful of the murder investigation. He said that anything that might be relevant to the inquiry should be passed to DS Vaughan or one of the other detectives.

  It was no secret by this time that two motorists had been shot. The news had spread like wildfire. The two had been named as Ross Priest, a carpet salesman from Bournemouth, and Veronica Chester, a music teacher who lived in the New Forest. There was a press embargo on the identities until the relatives had been informed.

  Only a few people knew about the warning that had been sprayed in paint under the bridge. Temple had instructed the forensic technicians not to draw attention to it. And he’d told his officers to put a tent over it.

  After the meeting Beresford made a call to update the Chief Constable who would in turn pass on the information to the Anti-Terrorism Command in London. Temple wasn’t sure what those guys would make of the painted message. After all, it wasn’t the kind of thing terrorists usually did. Their modus operandi was to make threats via the internet.

  Temple then had a separate meeting with his detectives. They’d spoken to dozens of the drivers who hadn’t been injured, but none of them had seen anything in the moments before the vehicles started to crash into each other.

  DS Vaughan confirmed that a bullet fragment had been taken out of the head-rest of the car which Mr Priest had been driving. It had been taken away by forensics and an attempt would be made to match it with the shell casing found near the bridge.

  ‘I want a couple of you to go to the hospital and talk to the walking wounded,’ Temple said. ‘One of you should stay here with Dave to gather the evidence. The rest of you team up with uniform and start checking out nearby houses. Someone may have seen our shooter.’

  Temple looked at his watch. 11:15 p.m. So much had happened in such a short period of time – Five people dead; his girlfriend in hospital with serious injuries and one of the country’s busiest motorways still closed off.

  But what swam through his mind – and caused his heart to pound like a jack hammer – was the crude threat scribbled in red paint under the bridge: This is just the start. Many more will die.

  CHAPTER 9

  THREE MILES AWAY from the crash scene the man who left the message under the bridge sat in front of his TV watching the rolling news on Sky.

  The central heating in his tiny flat was on full blast, but he was still wearing his polo sweater and khaki coat. He hadn’t bothered to change after getting home. He was too cold and in too much of a hurry to see what they were saying about the carnage on the M27.

  The details were only just beginning to emerge: five people dead, two of them shot as they drove along the motorway in the rush hour. At least fifteen people injured. The motorway was still closed along a 15-mile stretch and would probably remain closed until well into tomorrow.

  A senior police officer was interviewed. He said they believed that just one gunman was responsible and that he fired shots from the embankment or from a nearby bridge. Probably using a high-powered rifle. A massive search was underway and extra police had been drafted in from neighbouring forces.

  As he listened he couldn’t resist a self-satisfied grin. It had, after all, been a resounding success and it had imbued him with a sense of power and fulfilment. He’d managed to kill five people with two shots. And it could not have been easier. Now the cops were running around like headless chickens wondering what the hell was going on.

  He felt elated. There’s something deliciously impersonal about murdering total strangers at random. It heightened the thrill of the kill because there was no emotional attachment. No inner voice telling him that maybe this person didn’t deserve to die.

  When he targeted the two cars he couldn’t even discern the faces of the drivers beyond the windscreens. Despite ten times magnification through a night-vision scope their heads and shoulders were still little more than blobs in the dark. But it was enough. After adjusting his aim to take account of the speed of the cars he’d let them have it.

  Faceless people he didn’t know and couldn’t even see properly. The perfect victims.

  He decided he’d had enough of the news and switched off the TV using the remote. By morning there would be a lot more of it. The victims would be named and people would be queuing up to condemn what had happened. He wondered if the cops would reveal what they’d found under the bridge. Maybe not since it might cause some panic.

  He got up from his chair and threw off his jacket. He was hot now and could feel sweat trickling down his back. He went to the fridge and helped himself to a beer. German-made and cold as ice. Just how he liked it.

  Then he picked up his custom-made canvas rucksack and put it on the table that stood between the kitchenette and living area.

  It was time to clean the rifle. He felt duty-bound to take care of it, especially after the outstanding way it had performed that evening. He unzipped the bag and took it out.

  He had always been in awe of this particular weapon. The Arctic Warfare Super Magnum – better known as the L115A3 long-range sniper rifle. It was considered so deadly that the British army had dubbed it ‘The Silent Assassin’. It had a range of over a mile and had been used to kill scores of insurgents in Afghanistan.

  The man ran his fingers over the folding walnut stock, then across the stainless steel barrel and finally over the state-of-the-art telescopic sight. In his humble opinion it was a work of art and he was proud of the fact that it was British made. In fact the manufacturers, Accuracy International, were based along the coast in Portsmouth – just a few miles from where he decided to launch his first attack. How gloriously ironic was that?

  He kept the cleaning equipment in a kitchen drawer. He took it out and got to work. Fifteen minutes later the rifle was in pristine condition. Clear
of prints and greasy smudges and looking as though it was brand new.

  He loaded two more shells into the detachable magazine and put the rifle back in the bag.

  It would stay there until tomorrow.

  CHAPTER 10

  IT TOOK ALL night to clear the traffic that had built up behind the crash scene. For the hundreds of people trapped in their vehicles it was a ghastly ordeal.

  They had to wait for some of the wrecks to be moved so that a single lane could be opened up. But that didn’t happen until the SOC officers gave the go-ahead. They had to be sure that the area had been properly processed and that all potential evidence had been removed and catalogued. Then the road surface had to be cleared of debris and ash.

  Temple stayed at the scene until 3 a.m., by which time his eyes burned and his muscles ached. He was tired and hungry and worried about Angel.

  Before getting a lift home he sent out a message to his team that there’d be a full briefing in the office at 8 a.m. and he wanted everyone there.

  His small house on the outskirts of the city was cold and lifeless. It was a typical bachelor pad which lacked character and felt sterile. Angel had been planning to improve things. When she moved in she was going to make the place warm and homely with new curtains, bright cushions and more pictures. He was looking forward to it.

  The first thing he did was blast a ready meal in the microwave. Then he picked at it as he read through his notes. At one point he closed his eyes while he thought about what questions to raise at the briefing.

  The next thing he knew he was coming awake with a start. He checked his watch and saw that he’d slept for two hours. He showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes. White shirt, blue suit, red tie. Smarter than usual because he knew he’d be expected to front a press conference at some point during the day. Then he called a taxi, as his own car was still at the station. It arrived just as dawn was breaking. It looked like it was going to be another gloomy day. Dark clouds were gathered like gargoyles above the city.