Soft Target 02 - Tank

by Conrad Jones

  “He’s fucking toast,” Glinka laughed as he stared at the burning car.

  “Shut up you moron,” Clarky hissed to the young skinhead. He reached into a car and took an abandoned baseball cap from the back seat and pulled it onto his shaved head. The Brigade men clicked onto what he was doing and followed suit. Some grabbed abandoned jackets and raincoats to make them look more normal. Baseball caps covered their bald heads and discarded gloves hid Swastika tattoos. They headed up the tunnel away from the fire taking as much looted clothing as they could muster.

  Chen and the Task Force team arrived at the bus minutes behind the skinheads. They surveyed the carnage and they watched in horror as they saw that the driver of the burning car was still twitching in the inferno. Despite the raging flames that engulfed him his will to survive wouldn’t allow him to surrender to the flames. The truth was that he was beyond saving. Chen nodded toward the car and passed his fingers across his throat. The Task Force man closest to him understood the order, and fired four bullets into the burning man. He stopped struggling and slumped in his seat, his pain all gone.

  “Grab that hose,” Chen ordered and three Task Force men sprang into action.

  “Jam it into the railings and point it at the bus, you two do the same with the hose on the opposite side of the road.” Two more men jumped over the railings onto the roof of an abandoned car and then leaped from roof to roof across the tunnel until they reached the other side. The brass hose nozzles were jammed into the metal bars and then the water was switched on. Two powerful jets of water arced across the tunnel into the burning bus. Steam billowed upward toward the tunnels curved ceiling. The hissing noise was deafening and it echoed down the tunnel.

  Chen gave thumbs up sign and the Task Force men headed up the tunnel away from the bus. Two men were on one walkway; Chen and the others were on the opposite side of the road. They made good time as they moved up the tunnel and passed the first members of the escaping public in a few minutes. Chen pointed to his eyes and then to the stragglers. The Task Force men studied them looking for anything that would identify them as 18th Brigade members.

  Neil Clark and the brigade men had reached the back of the traffic jam. Cars were trapped in the tunnel by the vehicles behind them, but the last car in the line was drivable, as there was nothing behind it.

  “We’re splitting up here,” Clarky said heading for the vehicle. He opened the passenger door and climbed across the centre console into the driver’s seat. Glinka opened the rear door and attempted to climb in. He froze when Clarky shoved the cold metal barrel of his 9mm Berretta in his face.

  “I said we are splitting up knobhead, now shut the door before I put a big hole in your thick head,” Clarky needed to get away from the Brigade men without blowing his cover.

  “Hey that’s my car,” said a black man, who was standing on the walkway trying to see what was going on in the tunnel. Clarky climbed out of the seat and approached the man smiling.

  “Listen I was moving it out of the way so that we can all move....” Clarky didn’t finish the sentence; instead he head butted the man on the bridge of the nose. The black man collapsed to his knees, and Clarky searched his jacket pockets and found the man’s car keys. With the car keys in his hand he turned back toward the car. Glinka was stood in front of the open driver’s door with a .38mm Colt in one hand and his claw hammer in the other.

  “I’ll take them. I am a fucking moron am I?” Glinka snarled. He had never liked Clarky. There was something sneaky about him, something not quite right.

  Clarky tossed the keys at him gently aiming toward the hand that held the Colt. Glinka instinctively tried to catch the car keys and only succeeded in dropping his gun. His face had a stunned expression as he watched the weapon clatter along the road. Clarky reached for his own gun and Glinka launched at him with the hammer. The steel claw glanced off his forehead cleaving a flap of skin from the bone. Blood flowed from the gash into his left eye. Clarky dipped his knees slightly and twisted his hips simultaneously making his body like a coiled spring. He thrust his right fist upward beneath Glinka’s chin, straightening his knees and hips to maximise the impact. The vicious uppercut caught Glinka with his mouth open, which any boxer will tell you is ‘Goodnight Vienna’. Glinka staggered backward against the car and spat three broken teeth mixed with blood and saliva onto the tarmac. He managed to compose himself and launched forward again, bringing the hammer down in a flashing arc. Clarky stepped sideways to avoid the blow and kicked Glinka in the stomach. The young skinhead bent double with the force of the kick and he gasped for breath. Clarky stamped the edge of his boot against the side of Glinka’s knee dislocating the joint and ripping the tendons. Glinka fell against the car screaming in agony. The other Brigade men watched in awe as Clarky destroyed Glinka, who had a fearsome reputation as a fighter. They weren’t sure what they should do, run or join in. While they watched the action deciding what to do, Chen and the Task Force men had caught up with them, and had them covered from the elevated walkways on both sides of the road.

  “Drop your weapons and lie down on the floor with your hands above your heads. Do it now,” Chen shouted. The Terrorist Task Force who looked like Robocop and bristled with weapons surrounded the Brigade men. The skinheads put up their hands, dropped their weapons and lay on the ground, all except for Clarky.

  Clarky picked up the car keys and bolted for the abandoned vehicle. He slammed the door and put the keys into the ignition, and started the engine. The Task Force men opened fire at the tyres and they were shredded in seconds before the car had even moved. Chen fired six well aimed shots into the engine block and a plume of steam rose from the vehicle. The engine stopped and Clarky raised his hands in surrender. He placed his bleeding forehead on the steering wheel exhausted. Uniformed policemen arrived with sirens blaring and blue lights flashing.

  “Cuff them and take them to the Task Force office,” Chen ordered.

  Chapter 34

  Tank/Faz/Dano

  Tank and Grace Farrington reached the motor room, and found the door barricaded.

  “Blow it open,” Faz ordered. A Task Force member approached the door and placed a disc shaped charge to the frame next to the hinges. The charges were shaped, which forces the explosion in a desired direction to maximise the destructive effect. He flicked a red button to activate the timer, which could be set to five second delays.

  “Fire in the hole,” the squad man shouted, and the team took cover to protect themselves from flying debris. As the dust cleared the door appeared to have remained intact despite the hinges being blown off. Tank took three big strides and smashed his huge shoulder against the weakened door. The wood splintered and cracked down the middle but only moved a few feet. He stepped back and launched his shoulder against the door a second time. This time the door disintegrated and the metal lockers behind it clattered across the motor room allowing them access. Tank kneeled and pointed his 9mm Glock into the dark building, and signalled the team to enter. The Terrorist Task Force entered the motor room hugging the walls and searching every potential hiding place, and then quickly declared the area clear.

  “There is one casualty in the control room,” an agent informed Tank, “he’s got a nasty bang on the head, but he’ll live. It looks like they’ve killed the power in the tunnel.”

  “Can you get it back on?” Tank asked.

  “It’s already done Tank. It was an isolation switch, which was turned off. We should hear the motors kicking in any minute now.” Sure enough a loud mechanical whirring noise began as the exhaust fans started to turn.

  “Major have you picked up anything from the drones?” Tank asked over the coms channel. The unmanned helicopters were fitted with heat seeking equipment, which could locate, and track human body heat. Military drones were also armed with air cannons capable of firing fifteen hundred .75mm shells a minute. They have been used extensively in the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Unmanned drones a
re the cutting edge of military technology because they are fast, silent and have a range of devastating weaponry.

  “They are showing several suspects entering a building site close to your position, but the CCTV pictures can’t distinguish Brigade men from the construction workers,” the Major answered, “uniform police units are moving into the area now, but there are over four hundred workmen on that site.”

  The City of Liverpool was granted the status of City of Culture Capital for 2008. The title had sparked a tidal wave of building work as the city was regenerated and refurbished in anticipation of the tourists it would attract. The historic skyline now looked like a scene from H.G.Wells’ War of the Worlds, as huge metal arms crisscrossed the city. Colossal cranes worked day and night building museums, art galleries and shopping malls. A two mile square area of the city centre was bulldozed and was undergoing rebuilding work twenty four hours a day. The Brigade men had split up and with the aid of the safety gear they had dressed in, were almost impossible to distinguish from genuine construction tradesmen.

  “We need to get onto that construction site and look for them up close and personal,” Tank said, “we will split into four teams, one hundred yards apart, and stay in contact at all times. Major we need air support and back up from uniform units. Tell them to identify suspects but not to approach, repeat do not approach.” Tanks request went over the open coms channel so that every uniformed officer in the city centre could hear it. The secret listening post at the old Newborough School programmed two unmanned drones to cover the area. They were deployed to hover unseen like huge black wasps above the unfinished buildings. Uniformed police monitored exit and entrance gates to the building sites, but the perimeters were so extensive it would be impossible to stop a determined fugitive from escaping.

  Tank and Faz entered the construction site and headed toward a four storey concrete structure. It wasn’t possible to identify exactly what it was destined to be, but there didn’t appear to be any work taking place on it. Tank scanned the open floors of the structure and noticed a lone builder on the second floor. He spotted Tank and the other Task Force members entering the site and scurried off behind an unfinished staircase.

  “I have a suspect on the second floor of the structure I am labelling now,” Tank spoke into the coms channel. Tank had used lasers and the labelling system many times as a member of an international Special Forces unit, who were tasked with finding the whereabouts of the nefarious terrorist leader Yasser Ahmed, in the mountains of northern Turkey.

  Labelling a site or a target was done using a laser, and was perfected in the mountains of Afghanistan called the Tora Bora during the search for Osama bin Laden. Ground forces would aim a laser gun at a distant group of Taliban, or a suspect cave and then request air support. Minutes later quadruple vapour trails could be seen scoring the Afghan sky as American B-52 bombers approached at ten thousand feet. Suddenly huge dust plumes and boiling orange flames would erupt from the target identified by the laser, leaving nothing alive. Over a six month period Tora Bora was the most concentrated cluster bomb attack ever launched, but the elusive mastermind of 9/11 slipped the net.

  Faz broke left and took up a position of cover on the ground floor of the structure, at the bottom of the staircase. Tank ran to the right and waited at the bottom of a scaffold, which was attached to the open side of the building. He lifted a canvas sheet, which covered the metal framework, and waited for the information from the drones.

  “The drone is showing a single target located on the second floor, and he is positive for metallic substances,” said the recon agent from the listening post.

  The drone had scanned the suspect for the presence of any substance, which could be a weapon. The presence of metal indicated a gun, but it could just as easily be a drill or a spirit level. Faz used a thumbs-up sign to indicate that she was clear to proceed. Tank responded with an ok signal and started to climb up the scaffold with his gun holstered. Grace started up the stairs.

  Neil Danelley, Dano, waited silently in the dark stairwell. He was holding his breath so that he could hear everything, even the lightest footstep. His hand was sweating around the handle of his 9mm Luger, and then he swapped the gun to his other hand and wiped the sweaty palm on his jeans. He studied the gun in his hand and smiled. The Luger was a German made pistol used extensively by Nazi officers in World War II. They were standard issue for all ranks above Sergeant. Dano had bought it from a collector in Glasgow, and paid three times the firearms value. The vendor had shown Dano papers, which belonged to its original owner, who was stationed at the Auschwitz death camp in 1943. The fact that the gun was used to kill Jews thrilled Dano and his fascist friends; he recounted the gun’s history to anyone who would listen. He hadn’t always been a racist, but the changing Britain he had grown up in made him into the worst kind of bigot.

  His auntie was a primary school teacher for twenty years, and she always dreamed of teaching underprivileged children in Africa. The opportunity to teach in the Sudan arose and she jumped at the chance. She settled in well at first although she never really became accustomed to the blazing heat. She decided to apply some of her most successful teaching methods to the curriculum of her new school. She first donated a teddy bear to her class of forty students, with the idea of each pupil taking it home for the night, and then writing a diary of what the teddy bear had done in class the next day. The project had worked well as it incorporates the whole class and improves both reading and writing skills. The first task was to name the bear. The children in the class chose the name Mohammed for the bear, which didn’t seem to be a problem to the unsuspecting teacher, as she had twelve pupils with the same name in the class. The pupils had gone home very excited and told their parents about the new teacher and their new project. Extremist Islamic hardliners in the community became offended and complained to the police. Using the name of the great prophet of Islam was taken as an illegal insult against Islam itself, and the teacher was arrested. The incident was to cause one of the biggest political incidents ever experienced between the West and the Islamic community of North Africa. The naive schoolmistress was imprisoned in appalling conditions while radical fundamentalists took to the streets of Sudan demanding that she be beheaded for the affront to the great prophet.

  The incident made Dano question his faith and more importantly the rational of other religions. It did not seem at all fair that someone wanted to cut off his aunt’s head over a teddy bear. As his education progressed, and he grew older, immigration in Britain became daily news. Large sections of the country’s biggest cities became ghetto’s and no go areas for the indigenous white population. The borders of Europe were dismantled in 2005 and a tidal wave of Eastern European migrants swamped Britain’s welfare state. The education system couldn’t cope with the influx of foreign children, and the health service imploded beneath the strain of pregnant immigrants that came here specifically to give birth. The final straw was when he was sent home from school for wearing a crucifix, which his grandmother had given to him shortly before she died. The government and large blue chip companies banned the wearing of the crucifix because it caused offence to minority religions. Dano couldn’t believe what was happening to his country when the government banned schools from performing children’s Christmas nativity plays. The indigenous Christian population of the United Kingdom felt as if it were under siege. Centuries old traditions like Christmas and the wearing of the symbol of Christ, the crucifix, were becoming outlawed in their own country, to appease immigrant opinion. Yet Islamic extremist teachers were allowed to preach sermons of Jihad and hate openly on the streets of Britain, protected by the British police. Political correctness and the rise of radical Islam created more racists in the late 1990’s, and early 21st century, than any other influence. Dano quickly became involved in far right politics and was swept into the 18th Brigade along with thousands of like-minded angry young men.

  Dano leaned against the dusty wall behind him and listened i
ntently. He heard a scuffle on the stairs below him and he jumped, someone was close by. The scaffold frame attached to the outside of the building to his right creaked beneath Tank’s heavy weight, and Dano knew that he was being hunted by several foe. His Luger was loaded with eleven rounds, and that was all he had. He hadn’t expected to be in a gunfight with Special Forces. He wasn’t ready to die just yet either, and he realised that if he fired one bullet he was fair game to every armed officer in the country. Another scuff on the stairs made him hurry his decision making process. He had to lose the weapon or risk being shot.

  “Don’t shoot,” Dano shouted down the stairwell, “I am throwing my gun down the stairs.” He loved his Luger but he could always buy another with same sick history attached to it. He tossed the gun onto the concrete stairs and it clattered into the darkness out of site.

  “Step away from the stairs and raise your hands where I can see them,” Faz shouted as she climbed the steps slowly. She picked up the weapon. The command echoed across the unfinished building. Grace rounded the first landing pointing her Glock 9mm into the second floor space. There was no sign of the suspect. Tank reached the same floor and signalled to her that he couldn’t see the target either with an exaggerated shake of his head. She rounded the corner and pressed her back against the wall staring into the gloom trying to make sense of the shadows, but she couldn’t see who had thrown their gun away.