by Chris Ryan
The kid didn’t drop it.
He clutched it.
His face was suddenly twisted in an expression of humiliation and anger. Barker had seen that expression before. The look of a bad guy who knew he’d been thwarted.
– Barker, stand down! That’s an order!
‘DROP THE FUCKING BAG!’
The kid still didn’t drop it. In fact, he seemed to be trying to open the zip.
Barker’s reaction was immediate and instinctive. He released a single round. The report echoed around the vaults of the abbey as the round slammed hard into the choirboy’s left shoulder.
Screaming. Everywhere. Confusion behind him. The congregation rushing into the aisle. Barker’s earpiece was a sudden burst of such confused shouting that he couldn’t make out a single word.
His target seemed to spin on his heels with the impact of the round. His white choir robe was suddenly splashed red. The rucksack flew into the air as the kid crumpled in a heap, down on to his chorister companions.
Barker lunged towards the rucksack, catching it a fraction of a second before it hit the ground. It was heavy. He held it to his chest as his own body thumped to the hard stone floor.
He could hear sirens outside, above all the shouting in the abbey. The fierce barking of his Regiment-mates as they closed in on the altar area, screaming at everyone to hit the ground.
He was breathing heavily. Sweating. He closed his ears to the anguished shrieks of the chorister he’d just hit, and who was now writhing in agony just a couple of metres away. He ripped open the zip of the rucksack and carefully, gingerly, looked inside.
There was an iPad. Its screen was shattered. There were bags of sweets: Haribos, Maltesers. There was a hymn book and a phone.
But there were no weapons. No explosives.
He looked up. He was surrounded by armed Regiment men, weapons drawn, faces fierce. But none so fierce as that of his boss, Wallace Conlin, whose jugular was pumping, and whose every expression and body movement told Barker he’d just made his last mistake as a Regiment man.
Danny Black was numb.
He stared from his covert position behind the treeline. Thirty metres away, the younger royals were at the cordon, shaking hands with the members of the public crowded round to see them. Smiling. Laughing. The older royals were exiting their vehicle, royal protection officers loitering nearby. A priest was standing in the door of the church. White robes. Prayer book in hand. A gentle smile as he surveyed the scene.
Danny hardly saw any of it.
He’d failed. He’d thrown the dice and lost. He should have listened to Spud. Told the authorities what he knew and enlisted their help in finding his daughter, rather than coming here and clutching at straws. The old nausea washed over him. He felt himself starting to shake. As if all his strength had been drained out of him.
The younger royals turned from the members of the public. Still joking with each other, they turned towards the church.
Danny collapsed to his knees. He put his head in his hands. Anger was suddenly burning through his veins. He thumped a clenched fist against the bark of a tree, and didn’t even wince when he felt his skin scraping away. There was a strange ringing sound on the edge of his hearing. It seemed to come from inside his skull. With his face clenched, he shook his head to get rid of it.
The sound didn’t go. It was high-pitched. Needling. Distant.
He suddenly took a sharp intake of breath. His eyes shot open. He looked up.
The sound was not inside his head. It was airborne.
He blinked. A memory crystallised in his mind: the half-burned weather report he’d found in Dhul Faqar’s fire.
Wind speeds.
Danny had been so sure that piece of paper had indicated a sniper attack. He’d been wrong. Because it wasn’t just bullets that were affected by wind.
He shifted into the firing position. One knee down. He raised his rifle and looked through the sight. All the while, he forced himself to focus on the distant whining sound. Trying to discern the direction it was coming from. He couldn’t.
There were footsteps, crashing through the trees behind him. He quickly glanced over his shoulder. Spud was there, running towards him, face sweating, eyes wild.
‘It’s a—’
‘. . . drone strike,’ Danny finished the sentence for him, getting his eyes back through the sights. ‘That’s what the wind report was for.’
He focussed in on the royals and their CP. Particularly on Tony. He showed no sign that he had noticed the sound. ‘It must be coming from our direction,’ Danny said quickly. ‘Tony can’t hear it.’
The high-pitched sound was getting louder.
‘It’s close,’ Spud stated.
Danny stood up.
‘Mate,’ Spud hissed, ‘you can’t put yourself out there. Those CP guys see you with a rifle, they’ll open up immediately. It’ll be a fucking firefight, ten against one.’
Spud was right. Danny raised his rifle, so he was covering the airspace above the crowd outside the church. Field of view was too narrow. He lowered the sight slightly to watch the airspace with his naked eye. ‘Keep eyes on Tony,’ Danny breathed. ‘Tell me when he notices the sound.’
‘Roger that.’
The whining noise sounded like it was very close. Grating. Threatening. Danny forced himself to take slow, deep breaths. To reduce his heart rate. He could feel the blood thumping in his head. When, if, the time came to take a shot, he needed to time it between those thumps, to give himself the best chance of landing his round.
‘How do you think it’s weaponised?’ Spud said.
‘Could be anything,’ Danny said without taking his eyes off the airspace. ‘IED. Big lump of C5. We’re about to find out.’
A pause. The whining noise was directly overhead.
‘I didn’t believe you,’ said Spud. ‘My bad.’
‘Just keep your eyes on Tony.’
Almost immediately, Spud responded. ‘He’s got it. He’s looking up.’
And even as Spud spoke, Danny saw it.
The drone looked black against the sky. Spider-like. It was about two metres in diameter, with four small rotor blades on the top, a circular, spinning blur. On the underside were two landing skids, which made it look like a miniature helicopter. Height above the ground, approximately fifty feet. It moved at maybe ten miles an hour in a zigzag formation. Danny’s response was almost robotic. He raised his rifle and directed his sight at the patch of airspace through which the drone was speeding. It was a sixty-metre shot. Tough, not only because of the distance, but also because of the erratic movement. It flashed across his field of view, too quickly for him to take the shot. But it was enough for him to identify a Go-Pro camera fitted to the base of the drone, and also a second item suspended between the landing skids: a curved bar of metal, chunky and dull-coloured, the convex side pointing towards the earth. Danny immediately recognised it for what it was. He had seen one very recently, in an IS compound in northern Iraq.
‘Claymore mine,’ he said tersely.
‘What about the detonation clackers?’
‘It must be modified. Remote detonation.’
‘If you hit it, the fucking thing’ll blow! It’ll take out everyone in the vicinity.’
Danny didn’t need telling. The shot had to be right. It had to hit the drone, not the Claymore, and he had to do it before the mine was detonated remotely. He panned his sights across the sky. The fast-moving drone crossed his field of view for a second time. His trigger finger twitched, but he didn’t take the shot. The drone had moved out of sight again.
‘It’s twenty metres from the crowd,’ Spud hissed urgently. ‘They’re in the kill zone already!’
Danny followed the drone. His heart rate was increasing. He could hear shouting from the direction of the crowd. ‘Get down . . . GET DOWN!’ No screaming yet – the public didn’t know what was happening, what danger they were in . . .
‘Tony’s raised his weapon. He’s
going to try to take the shot!’
To take out a drone like that, at distance, with a handgun? Good luck with that. It needed a harder-hitting round. It needed Danny’s rifle shot . . .
The drone came into view again. It was yawing somewhat in mid-air. The Claymore mine wobbled precariously. Danny caressed the trigger.
Heartbeat.
He knew he only had one go. The drone was practically above the crowd. It would detonate any second.
But the shot had to be right . . .
Heartbeat.
‘Take the shot!’ Spud hissed. ‘Take the fucking shot, Danny!’
Heartbeat.
Danny fired.
Heartbeat.
His suppressed weapon made nothing but a dull knocking sound as Danny expertly absorbed the recoil into his body. At exactly the same time, there was the much louder report of an unsuppressed handgun from the direction of the crowd. Danny knew instinctively that Tony had fired on the drone simultaneously with him. He was in no doubt, however, as to whose round had hit its mark.
His.
He lowered his weapon, breath held. The whining of the drone had suddenly become even more high-pitched. The rotors were failing. The drone itself was rocking from side to side. Struggling to keep height. Forty metres. Thirty. Danny’s eyes were fixed on the distant curved shape of the Claymore mine as it swung like a pendulum, one second pointing at the crowd – who were now all crouching on the ground as the royal CP team started bundling their charges towards the safety of the church – the next second pointing clear of them, before swinging back to the crowd.
And then away from them again.
The motor cut out. The whining stopped. The drone dropped like a stone, the Claymore pointing momentarily towards safety. But it still had the momentum of its last swing. As it hurtled to the ground, it started skewing back towards the crowd.
The drone was twenty feet in the air when the Claymore detonated.
There was a massive crack that reverberated across the Sandringham grounds, as the hundreds of tiny shrapnel beads inside the Claymore sprayed down towards the earth at sickening velocity. The force of the blast knocked the drone up and sideways a couple of metres, while the shrapnel itself made a sound not unlike machine gun fire as it blistered into the metal and glass of the two black vehicles parked in front of the church.
There was a moment of silence, then the drone hit the earth with a distinct crash.
The royals were still being bundled into the church. The public were on the ground. More security guys were running towards them from the direction of the west gates. Danny couldn’t tell at first if any of the crowd had been hit by the Claymore shrapnel. His question was answered in seconds. There was sudden screaming – three people, maybe four. Danny had heard the screams of the wounded enough times to know that he was listening to them now.
‘Those CP dorks are only interested in the fucking royals,’ Spud said, his voice slightly wild and highly strung. ‘We should get to the wounded.’
Danny turned. ‘No. We need to find the fuckers who were controlling that drone.’
A shadow fell across Spud’s face. ‘They could be anywhere,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Those drones have a range of, what? Two miles? We can’t—’
‘I said we need to find the—’
He was cut short by the sound of gunfire. It came from the west. A single shot that echoed across the misty morning. There was another surge of screams from the crowd. Danny barely heard them. He started sprinting through the trees towards the perimeter of the grounds. He gave no thought to silence or subtlety now. He crashed through the mist and the undergrowth, vaguely aware of Spud following just behind, his only objective to find the source of that gunshot. Perhaps someone had caught up with whoever had been controlling the drone. That thought was all he had now. His only lead to Mujahid, and to his family.
They hit the perimeter fence in less than a minute, about twenty-five metres from the west gate. They could hear shouting and chaos from the direction of the church. The gate itself, however, was unmanned.
‘We can’t use the gate,’ Spud said immediately. ‘There’ll be cameras. People will know we’ve been on site.’
Danny sniffed. He raised his rifle, looked through the sight and in a matter of seconds had located the position of the security camera overlooking the entrance. A simple shot. He released a single suppressed round and immediately saw the camera shatter and fall limply to one side. ‘Move,’ he told Spud.
They ran along the perimeter fence. When they hit the gate, Danny briefly glanced left. He could see the church fifty metres away. The crowd back on their feet. Chaos. Shouting. A good moment to slip away. They ran through the gates and across the road. There was a visitor centre here. It was closed, naturally, the environs deserted. Danny and Spud thundered past the little collection of buildings to find a car park beyond them. Maybe fifty cars, obviously belonging to the Sandringham visitors. And surrounding the car park, shrouded in heavy mist, was thick forest.
Danny sprinted north to the far end of the car park. This was the direction from which the gunshot had come. He burst into the trees again, Spud close behind. Visibility through the trees and the mist, ten metres max. He forged twenty metres beyond the treeline.
A dead body was slumped against the foot of a gnarled old tree. The man was clearly freshly shot, straight in the face. His features were unrecognisable, and the blood was flowing freely. He was still clutching something: a hand-held screen in a tough, rugged case, which was covered in spatters of gore. The corpse’s hands told Danny that he was dark-skinned.
Danny’s stomach turned to ice. Was this Mujahid? Had he been killed before he could give Danny the information he needed?
‘Is that him?’ Spud asked.
Danny stepped up to the corpse. He put his hand underneath the sticky, dripping chin, lifted the head and, with his free hand, wiped more blood away from the neck.
There was no scar.
‘No,’ Danny said, letting the chin drop heavily to the corpse’s chest again. ‘Not him.’
‘Drone that size,’ Spud said, ‘needs two operators. One to watch the camera footage and navigate, the other to operate the controls.’
Danny stood up straight and looked around. His sharp eyes immediately picked something out. There was a tree sucker, six paces to the north, with several sharp thorns sprouting from the side. Hanging from one of these thorns was a thread of red fibre. Someone had brushed against it as they passed.
‘Someone must have been on to them,’ Danny said. ‘If they killed this guy, they’ll be trying to kill Mujahid too . . .’
Danny couldn’t let that happen.
They started running through the forest again. The trees grew thicker all around, but there was a clear animal trail through them. The path of least resistance, which anyone running in this direction would have followed. Thirty metres from the corpse, Danny noticed that a tree branch crossing the trail had half snapped – the lesion was fresh – so it was pointing in the direction he was running. Confirmation that he was heading the right way.
More confirmation came thirty seconds later, in the form of another gunshot.
It was loud and close. And it was immediately followed by the sound of a scream, which faded away into a pained whimper. The sounds stopped Danny in his tracks. He stared, breathing heavily, through the thick trees. The mist was thick. Like smoke. Barely five metres’ visibility now. But there was no doubt about it. The pained sound was coming from straight ahead. Danny’s best estimate was that whoever it came from was twenty metres from their position.
He prepped his weapon. Safety off. Butt into the shoulder. Spud did the same. ‘If it’s Mujahid, we need him alive,’ Danny reminded his mate under his breath.
‘Shame,’ Spud replied.
They advanced, stepping more carefully now, keeping footfall to a minimum. He didn’t know what he was about to stumble across, but he knew he had to be prepared to fight. So, once more, his weap
on was an extension of his body. If Danny turned, the weapon would turn. And whoever got in his way would be the half inch of a trigger squeeze from death.
Figures emerged hazily from the mist. Just silhouettes. No faces. Distance: fifteen metres.
There were two people. One was on the ground, leaning against the tree as the previous corpse had been. The other was standing a couple of metres in front of him. One arm stretched out straight, at right angles to Danny’s trajectory. A handgun in his fist. Danny could tell, at a glance, that the person holding the gun was not a pro. The arm was locked and shaking, and Danny could tell from his stance that the recoil would knock him backwards. That didn’t make him any less dangerous, though, so Danny trained his own weapon directly on the figure, while he tried to work out what the hell was going on here. If the corpse they’d already encountered was anything to go by, the guy on the floor – who had just started moaning again – was dark-skinned and probably connected with the drone. Mujahid? Maybe. But who was the guy with the gun? Security services? Police? No way. He was holding that thing like he was scared of it . . .
Distance: ten metres.
‘Drop your weapon!’ Danny shouted. He kept his own rifle firmly trained on its target.
The gunman didn’t move. He just kept the weapon pointing straight ahead of him.
Danny stepped forward. ‘I said, drop the weapon.’ As he spoke, the gunman’s face, almost in profile, became a little clearer. Those features made him hesitate. They confused him. The gunman had dark skin. Was this Mujahid? It couldn’t be. He was too young. Fifteen? Sixteen at a push. He wore very ordinary clothes – jeans, trainers, an old red hooded top. His dark hair fell in a centre parting. He had on a pair of glasses with thick rims. Sideways on, Danny could just make out that those glasses were being held together by Sellotape. He looked like a nerdy kid.
Danny moved his gaze to the kid’s target on the ground. He instantly felt himself burning up with hatred. This guy had obviously taken a round to the left shoulder and was clutching it with his right hand, but blood was seeping through his fingers. His body shook badly. He was wearing black clothes – a warm waterproof jacket, sturdy boots. Lying to the side of him was a drone control unit with a long silver antenna.
