by Paul Finch
Pouring sweat, he squirmed over the ridge, slithering down another twelve yards or so – at which point, very suddenly, the pipe seemed to change shape, become oval, turn narrower. Had earth movements outside partly crushed it? With probing fingers, Heck felt lines of jagged teeth where the interior surface had buckled.
He halted again, fighting down panic.
Somewhere behind, the voices sounded louder. He imagined them gazing into the pipe, perhaps preparing to unleash volleys of gunfire after him. Twisting onto his side, he tried to push himself through. The concave metal immediately gouged his chest, crooked steel ripping through his shirt and into the skin underneath. Briefly, he was stuck there. There wasn’t room to bring his elbows back to his sides. His arms were fully extended in front, so he couldn’t use those to gain leverage. Even the most strenuous efforts to wriggle through had no effect – but those voices were now ringing down the pipe. They knew he was here; they’d hear him gasping, choking. Metallic clicks echoed as fresh magazines were snapped into place.
That was enough.
The pressure on his chest might be adequate to prevent him filling his lungs with enough air to scream, but it was inadequate to hold him indefinitely, to prevent him driving forward one last time, forcing himself past the obstruction, and then hauling himself bodily on. When the pipe suddenly levelled out, and he found his hands and head emerging into air and space, he almost shouted with relief. He was able to plant his palms against the rim at the end of the pipe, and push hard, sliding his torso out next, then his waist and finally his legs.
Heck lay stunned and filthied on a damp, gritty floor, bleeding from a dozen minor wounds. Another deep rumble somewhere close by roused him.
Sobbing for breath, he dug in his pocket to retrieve the phone. When he hoisted the meagre light, he saw that he was in a secondary tunnel. In this case the tracks were still in place, minus the electrified inner-rail. Some twenty yards to his right stood a set of buffers and behind those, a wall of solid black bricks. To his left, there was a train.
Heck gazed at it in disbelief.
It didn’t look like a modern train: it was the same shape, but maroon in colour. One of its rear windows was broken, the other intact, though centimetres-thick with grime. In fact, the whole thing was so covered in dirt and cobwebs that he could barely distinguish the ornate, gold-painted London Transport motif.
More worryingly, it blocked the tunnel. There wasn’t enough room to get around it on either side, and certainly not underneath it. Another faint rumble suggested a passing train. Meanwhile, a muffled staccato coughing denoted gunfire.
Heck swung around.
Unmistakably gunfire, followed by a metallic grating and crashing, and then the banging of feet on a metal stair. Set above the pipe he’d just clambered through was an identical steel door to that on the higher level. This too was chained and padlocked.
‘You’ve got to be kidding …’ he said.
A second later, a fusillade of shots ripped through it, lasers of torchlight blasting after them. With a squeal of ancient hinges, this second door was kicked open and two of the Nice Guys stood there. If Heck had been around, he’d have seen that one was tall, powerfully built and black; the other white, his formerly handsome features now flat as an anvil, his pulverised nose thick with clotted gore.
But Heck wasn’t around.
He’d re-pocketed his phone and was already at the back of the train, perched on its rear running board and yanking at its handle. To his amazement, it worked first time. The door opened and thick wafts of dust blew out. He burrowed through them, coughing, and then ran down a dim central aisle, breaking veil after veil of cobweb.
When he reached the first sliding door between carriages, it was closed. He tried to draw it back. Initially there was no give; its runners were gummed up. He threw himself against it, bracing his foot on an upright. With agonising slowness, it squealed open a few inches and he was able to slide through.
He sped on, finding further dividing doors open. Torchlight now speared after him, refracting through cracked, grimy glass, bouncing from age-tarnished metalwork – and a storm of gunfire ensued. Dozens of slugs winged through the train’s interior, shattering glass, caroming from safety bars, punching into upholstery. Heck dived into a forward roll, glancing over his shoulder. They were no more than two carriages behind. He could see their humped outlines advancing behind the double strobe-like glare. More projectiles whistled over his head, explosive impacts on all sides.
Another sliding door stood five yards ahead. This too was open.
Heck barrelled at it on all fours, inserting himself through before heaving it closed. Panting, he undid his buckle and pulled loose his leather belt, threading one end of it through the door’s handgrip and the other around a nearby pole, and then fastening them both together. But even as he did this, a blizzard of lead erupted through, wood and metal fragments flying. Heck was hurled backwards, his face slashed by glass. The belt was instantly shredded, the pole smashed from its mooring.
He clambered onto a row of seats. Deflected slugs had taken out the window behind them. Beyond that stood a brick wall scaled with mould, but to the left of it a narrow slice of blackness was visible; a safety niche for maintenance men. Heck stepped through the empty frame, and slid into the gap, falling full length and landing on a pile of rotted rubber hosing. Behind him, thunder and lightning raged on in the train, casting sufficient luminescence to expose an open door at the back of the recess. He scrambled through it, and was hit across the body by a horizontal bar, which felt like a handrail. He groped left; the handrail sloped downward. Another stair.
He descended, feet clanking metal, and twenty treads down stepped onto a level surface, some kind of slimy grating through which he was assailed by rank odours far fouler than the normal oil and dust of the Underground.
When he yanked out his phone again, its visibly dwindling glow revealed a straight passage running off into dimness. Its floor was a metal grille, a gantry of sorts, though ancient, corroded and slippery with moss. It followed an egg-shaped passage comprised entirely of dripping brickwork. Heck ventured forward, wondering where the hell he was – under his feet he could hear rushing water. Then his weakened battery gave out altogether. Cursing, he continued in pitch blackness, feeling his way along the handrail, though a few yards later the reverberations of the gantry became louder, sounding hollow.
Heck had a sudden sense of vertigo, of open space – as though the aged brick structures overarching him had fallen away. He halted. Had the gantry become a bridge? It suddenly felt rickety. There were metallic creaks from both above and below. His footing wobbled, and the water now sounded as though it was pouring in cataracts on every side. The first glint of electric light from behind set him stumbling forward again, but at the same time allowed him to see more. He’d covered thirty yards or so before stopping to gaze in amazement at the cathedral-like dimensions of the vault he’d blundered into.
It soared to at least sixty feet overhead. There were high vents on all sides, spouts of water pouring down from multiple levels where pipes jutted out. The floor, maybe ninety feet below, boiled and foamed, before the surging torrent roared away down a massive, circular shaft into what seemed like the very depths of the earth.
Dizzied, Heck had to lean on the handrail. Not too far away, engraved in the brickwork, though so crusted with filth that they were initially difficult to read, were three words:
Hackney Brook Interceptory
It was a water-junction. Most likely built by Bazalgette or one of his Victorian engineers, to divert the flow of the Hackney Brook, yet another of London’s many underground rivers whose true course had been lost.
Not that this knowledge really helped.
The whole vault was now flooded with torchlight.
The Nice Guys emerged onto the gantry, but they too slowed to a halt, astonished at what they were seeing – so much so that they didn’t at first spot Heck.
He lu
rched on, the gantry groaning and shuddering. It appeared to be suspended by chains, though there weren’t a great many of these, and ended at the far side of the junction, maybe forty yards ahead, on a ledge where a single timber door stood. The two Nice Guys only seemed to realise Heck was present when he was two or three yards short of this door. They opened fire as he threw himself headlong at it, exploding through the ancient, worm-eaten woodwork. Slugs travelled through with him, careening in the narrow space on the other side.
For several seconds, he lay dazed on a heap of bricks and broken slabs, amid more choking dust. However, the clatter of feet on the gantry dragged him to his feet and set him scrabbling around. He located a wooden ladder ascending the wall to his left. Glancing up, he saw nothing, yet sensed he was in a shaft of some sort. Even though the ladder was flimsy, he started climbing. The first three rungs snapped, but he drove himself on. Twenty feet up, he passed through an old trapdoor and struggled knee-first onto a narrow platform. Natural light now shimmered down on him. Its source was high up, maybe a hundred feet, at the very top of the shaft. It was a single circular blot, cross-thatched. A grid perhaps? A manhole on a street?
Droplets of rain on Heck’s upturned face indicated that it was. From here, the ladder leading up was made of steel and fixed rigidly to the wall. But he knew he couldn’t just climb to safety. The voices of the Nice Guys sounded from the gantry – they’d be halfway across at least, and would sight him in seconds. In a narrow space like this, he’d be a sitting target.
Weary, he glanced around for anything he could use.
Only one other item occupied the platform with him. This too was ancient – corroded, dust-covered. Of no use whatever.
It was a wheelbarrow, filled with hardened concrete.
And yet behind it, in the wall of the shaft, there was a timber hoarding – some kind of shutter through which materials had once been lowered.
Lowered.
To Bazalgette’s engineering teams.
Working below.
Heck grabbed the barrow’s handles, wheeled it around and drove it forward, smashing it like a battering ram through the decayed hoarding. Beyond that, it dropped like a stone, and hit the gantry about ten yards in front of the first gunman.
The structure of the bridge collapsed.
It was that simple.
With a massive, explosive impact, the barrow clove through, and then chains were whipping down, broken struts and sections of grille-work spinning into oblivion.
The first of the gunmen – the big black guy – fell too.
Seemingly for seconds, silent but flailing as he plummeted ninety feet into the frothing torrent of the Hackney Brook, just at the point where it plunged downward through that circular maw into London’s ultimate bowels.
The second Nice Guy, the Aussie, was more fortunate.
He was a good twenty yards behind, and able to retreat, though he had to do this at speed, for with screams of agonised steel, more chains and girders gave way; more sections of grille went twisting into the abyss. Only when he reached the far side did he feel secure enough to perch there and take pot-shots at the distant aperture – pointlessly of course, as Heck, now unreachable, had ducked back inside the shaft, where he skulked in dimness, shuddering and sweating with relief.
Only after several minutes, as Heck tiredly clawed his way up the ladder, did full awareness of his aches and pains creep back. This in itself would be a difficult journey – he glanced up – and he still had eighty-odd feet to go.
Chapter 19
When Gemma Piper and Frank Tasker arrived at Homerton University Hospital, there were ARVs on the car park, along with several news vehicles. The story had leaked quickly that the lunchtime shooting in Stoke Newington was connected to the mass-shooting in Oxford, which in turn was connected to the mass-shooting near Brancaster Prison; sure proof – one recent TV bulletin had estimated – that a new war had erupted between powerful factions of the British underworld. Local divisional officers and hospital security were doing their best to contain the press pack, who had gathered behind a line of incident tape but were lobbying loudly for updates.
Gemma and Tasker were met at the hospital’s front door by a senior nurse, who advised them that Detective Constable Quinnell was undergoing emergency surgery, though the signs were so far good. They were shown through to intensive care, which now, at Tasker’s phoned-ahead request, was under the guard of SCO19, all visibly armed and standing in prominent positions. In the first IC waiting area, they found Quinnell’s wife, Holly, and ten-year-old daughter, Sally, sitting together tearfully. Ben Kane sat alongside them, talking quietly. He spotted Gemma and indicated with a nod that she’d want the next waiting room along. They moved down to that one, and stopped short at the sight of Mark Heckenburg in an indescribably filthy state, his shirt and trousers reduced to oily, bloodied rags, his hair a mass of dust and cobwebs, the eyes wild in his grimy, sweat-smeared face. For all that, Heck seemed to have it together; he was in the process of briefing three divisional uniforms, an inspector and two sergeants.
‘According to a statement DC Quinnell made before they took him into theatre, the redhead’s a Yank,’ Heck said. ‘Course, we don’t know that for sure. I didn’t hear it myself … he told one of the nurses. The physical description’s vague too, and probably won’t do us much good even if we circulate it – there can’t be any shortage of young Americans in the UK with longish hair and goatees. But it’s all we’ve got. Also, check with CAD for a partial index on the nicked Alfa Romeo he escaped in. The other one’s defo an Aussie. He may come back out through Shacklewell Street Tube, but knowing these bastards, he’ll realise we’ve got it covered. Most likely he’ll have found another way. An all-points is vital, I reckon. Just remember, he’s on the run – so he’ll be in a state. Plus I caved his face in … shouldn’t be too difficult spotting him. But he’s on his feet, and he’s armed with an automatic … I think one of those Israeli assault rifles, a Tavor. He may have a sidearm too. Remember, both these guys are as high risk as they come.’
The uniforms nodded and moved away, the inspector talking into his radio. Heck turned and found Gemma and Tasker still staring at him.
‘You been checked out?’ Gemma eventually said.
‘I’m fine.’
‘That’s not what I asked you.’
‘Yes I have, ma’am. A few bumps and scrapes.’
‘And how the fuck did that happen?’ Tasker wondered. ‘Gary Quinnell was shot twice, and you emerge with scrapes?’
‘Funnily enough, the plan was for neither of us to get shot, sir,’ Heck replied. ‘But here’s how it went down …’ He explained as best he could, from the initial ambush all the way through to his eventual emergence from a pavement manhole – courtesy of council workers – several streets away.
They listened, pale-faced.
‘And I only got out of there after climbing a hundred feet,’ Heck added. He focused on Gemma. ‘Not bad for a bloke on a suicide kick, eh?’
‘We’re just glad you’re alright,’ she said.
‘Yeah, it’s written all over your faces.’
‘Don’t push it, sergeant!’ Tasker warned him. ‘Just because you’ve had a tough day, that doesn’t give you licence for lip!’
‘The main thing is you’re obviously on the Nice Guys’ hit-list,’ Gemma said.
‘I don’t see why, ma’am. I honestly, genuinely don’t.’
‘Is that a joke?’ Tasker asked.
‘Seriously, sir. I met them once before, and kicked their arses. But by the looks of it, that was no more than a local cell. And even then I didn’t break their head honcho. I’m hardly their nemesis, am I?’
Gemma shrugged. ‘Whether you’re a sensible target or not, Mike Silver clearly feels he has a score to settle.’
Heck rubbed his brow. ‘For which reason I owe him. I’m guessing this means you’re bringing me back in?’
‘On the contrary,’ Tasker said. ‘We’re sending you
out.’
Heck frowned. ‘What’s that?’
‘There’s an SCU officer lying in there at death’s door, sergeant … purely because he spent the morning saddled up with you.’ Tasker shrugged. ‘Even if you’re prepared to risk your own life, you surely don’t want to endanger more of your colleagues?’
Heck’s gaze flirted between them. ‘What’re you suggesting?’
‘We’re not suggesting anything,’ Tasker said.
‘We’re putting you in protective custody,’ Gemma added.
Heck gazed at her. ‘Ma’am? Ma’am … you cannot be serious?’
‘Keep your voice down,’ she countered.
‘It’s already been decided,’ Tasker said. ‘It’s difficult enough hunting these bastards, without them hunting us at the same time.’
Heck could scarcely believe what he’d just heard. Protective custody meant being taken out of action altogether, not just excluded from Operation Thunderclap.
‘Look …’ he stammered, trying his level best to sound reasonable. ‘Okay, I see it. The Nice Guys hate me. They want me dead at any cost. But surely that gives us an advantage? You can use me as bait.’
‘Even by your standards that’s a bloody ludicrous idea,’ Tasker said dismissively, spying one of his SOCAR detectives waiting for him in the corridor. ‘I’m glad you’re okay, Heckenburg …’ He strode out. ‘But this discussion’s over.’
Heck gazed at Gemma beseechingly. She returned the gaze blankly.
‘Where?’ he finally asked.
‘Somewhere outside London.’
‘That won’t make any difference. They’ve already hit targets in Hampshire, Kent, Norfolk, Oxfordshire. How’s leaving London going to help?’
‘Only an elite few will know about it.’
‘And who’s picked this elite few … Frank Tasker? That makes me feel safe! Sorry, ma’am … you want me in protective custody, you’ve got to find me first.’
