SOFT TARGET III Jerusalem (SOFT TARGET SERIES)

by Conrad Jones

  Tank frowned as he listened to the prognosis and nodded sternly. There was a uniformed officer talking to hospital security guards near the reception desk. Hospital security must have had a shooting incident in the building, prior to Tank arriving. His stomach wrenched.

  “What about Grace Farrington?” Tank asked.

  The agent was about to answer when one of his men burst into the reception area from a stairwell, his weapon was raised in a combat posture.

  “We’ve got an incident on the fifth floor, possible agent down, suspect must still be in the building,” the Task Force man shouted to Tank and his colleague as he scanned the reception area with his weapon. The reception area was half the size of a football pitch, surrounded by shops selling hospital stuff, flowers, magazines, fruit and the like. Dozens of people were milling around oblivious to the danger. Tank removed his Glock nine-millimetre and chambered a round.

  “Cover the exits. Who’s been hurt?” Tank shouted to the agent as he headed toward the stairwell.

  “We think that it’s Grace,” the man replied without emotion. He was concentrating on locating a suspect and neutralising them. Tank felt like he had been kicked in the guts. He barged through the swing doors and pointed his gun up the stairwell. There was an agent on every landing above him, up to the seventh floor.

  “Situation report,” Tank shouted to the nearest agent.

  “Casualty on the fifth floor Tank, five bullets in the chest,” the man on the first floor landing replied. Tank nearly vomited. No one survived five bullets in the chest, especially in Grace’s already weakened condition. Tank bounded up the steps, taking them three at a time without pausing, until he reached the fifth floor. The agents stationed on the landings remained silent as the big man sprinted passed them. They all knew what losing a fellow Task Force agent felt like, but losing a fellow officer who was so defenceless was mind numbing.

  He reached the doors and looked through the glass porthole. A doctor was washing blood from his hands at small porcelain sink, lots of blood. Tank pushed the ward doors open and held his breath as he entered, with his gun still in his hand. Two doctors were walking away from a gurney. A starched white cotton sheet had been draped over the victim; bloodstains were spreading across the material where it touched the wounds beneath it. Tank put his hand against the wall and vomited into a red mop bucket. He could feel his knees trembling as shock started to set in and sap his strength. The doctors reached him and guided him to a seat.

  “Sit down and take a deep breath. It really is a shock,” the doctor said.

  “I got here as quick as I could, when did she die?” Tank asked, feeling like he was going to vomit again.

  “She died immediately, there was massive trauma, and she was so weak anyway,” the doctor answered passing Tank a paper cup of water from the bloodstained basin. Tank shuddered at the sight of the blood-streaked porcelain.

  “Why would anyone want to shoot an old lady like that, she was riddled with cancer, it’s disgusting. I hope you catch the bastard.”

  “What do you mean, old lady?” Tank said regaining his composure somewhat.

  “Well, sixty two is not that old, I suppose. I bet she wouldn’t have thought so anyway,” the doctor rambled.

  Tank shook the doctor’s hand off his arm and walked over to the gurney. He pulled back the sheet and stared at the grey haired lady. Her black skin had already lost its pallor making her look a grey colour. Tank looked at the doctors in disbelief, then at the red mop bucket, and the yellow mop, then back at the doctors.

  “Where is Grace Farrington?” Tank said.

  “Who?” asked the doctor, confused.

  “Grace Farrington, the gunshot victim,” Tank explained.

  “Oh, you mean the coma victim, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Grace Farrington the coma victim,” Tank was becoming agitated. Two of his agents entered the ward and Tank held up his hand to stop them from interrupting.

  “She’s been taken up to the seventh floor to be prepped for a brain scan. I believe she demonstrated some muscle activity earlier, which is quite remarkable really. It’s been a bizarre day really,” the doctor was starting to waffle. Tank found himself staring at the mop bucket. There was a red bucket, with a yellow mop, any self respecting cleaning contractor wouldn’t make that mistake, especially not in a hospital.

  “It’s a cleaner,” Tank turned to his agents. “The shooter is disguised as a cleaner, and he’s fucked up, that’s not Grace Farrington, she’s on the seventh floor, so get your men up there.”

  The two agents turned and shouted their orders down the stairwell. The sound of combat boots thudding up the stairs faded as the Task Force men ascended.

  “Is there any other way off this ward?” Tank asked the doctors.

  “Through the anti-ward, there’s a stairwell and a service elevator.”

  Tank rushed through the small anterior ward, which was virtually empty, and he entered a narrow stairwell beyond. He carried the Glock next to his right cheek, barrel pointed toward the ceiling as he tiptoed to the handrail. He looked up the stairwell, then down, checking for any escaping assassins. It was empty and silent. The service elevator was to his left, and he saw that the lift was in motion. It stopped in the basement. Tank jumped the steps down to the next landing then took two steps and repeated the process again descending the staircase rapidly.

  “I need backup in the basement,” Tank said into an open coms channel. “We are looking for a dark skinned cleaner.” It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Cleaning companies the world over exploited the use of ethnic minorities for their underpaid workforce.

  “Roger that, Tank. We’ve located Grace’s position and she’s secure.”

  Tank felt his nerves relax a little. Someone had tried to kill the Task Force’s senior officers, and that someone was going to pay. He slowed his pace as he reached the first floor landing. A seventeen stone man descending the stairs at speed was not stealthy, to say the least. As he reached the basement doors two agents entered the stairwell, shotguns at the ready. The three men positioned themselves. Tank pointed to the agents and indicated that they were to branch right; he was going to go left.

  They entered the basement area and moved swiftly, crouched low and they were sticking close to the walls. The basement was hot and steamy. It was separated into several service areas, an incinerator, a delivery bay and a laundry. Tank and his agents had entered the laundry section. There were four employees visible. They were all dark skinned, two afro Caribbean and two even darker, probably African. The employees looked frightened and concerned by the presence of men in combat gear, armed with shotguns. Tank pressed his index finger against his lips with one hand and pointed toward the exit with the other. He indicated that they had to remain silent and leave.

  The cleaners walked slowly toward the doors until they were a few yards away, and then they ran and clattered through the swinging doors tripping over each other as they rushed to escape. As the laundry workers reached the steps, two more Task Force agents entered the laundry. Tank gestured them to progress through the middle of the basement, parallel to the others. The rest of the laundry was deserted.

  At the far end of the laundry was the incinerator room. It was a huge area filled with immense piles of refuse waiting to be incinerated. There was an army of cleaning staff sorting the refuse into organised piles, sheets and linen, contaminated sharps such as syringes, food waste and gruesome body parts. At the far end of the cavernous room was the oven, its chimneystack towered above it and disappeared through the ceiling, before emerging again in the hospital car park above. There were contract staff members wandering about everywhere, brushing the floor and moving refuse. Tank and his agents stopped in their tracks when they realised how many of the cleaning staff were working in the basement. It would take an incredible stroke of good luck to identify a fugitive here. The employees were all foreign immigrants, dark skinned. They were all wearing black polo shirts, emblazo
ned with a gold embroidered logo on the chest. Big C cleaning company, everyone had dark canvas trousers on, and bright blue plastic overshoes, all except one man. It was a minor detail but an obvious one to a trained eye. It was always the attention to detail that gave terrorists away in the end. The suspect cleaner was about one hundred yards away. He didn’t have the plastic overshoes on, and out of over twenty other staff, he was the only one.

  The odd one out was walking away from Tank toward the delivery bay entrance. If he made it to the delivery bay, he could escape into the busy hospital car park, which was full of innocent members of the public. It was the best place for an armed confrontation. The majority of staff that were milling around had realised that there were armed police in the basement. Most of them stopped working and watched the police fascinated. Some of them moved swiftly toward the nearest exit, fearing that this was an immigration purge. Tank knew that there would be many illegal immigrants working in the basement, and they would be frightened that the police had launched a raid to find them.

  He focused entirely on the man that wasn’t wearing plastic overshoes, and he started to close the distance between them as quickly as he could without making it too obvious. The sight of Tank running with a gun raised sent a shockwave through the basement. Suddenly, like a flock of frightened birds, the army of cleaners bolted for the exits, mass hysteria fuelled by the lack of immigration papers and social security fraud kicked in. Self-preservation took control and scuffles broke out at the exits as the cleaners battled to escape.

  As the cleaners panicked, Abu looked behind him trying to figure out what had spooked them. He spotted Tank fifty yards away, directly behind him carrying a gun, and at least two other armed policemen to his left. Abu couldn’t believe that armed police had arrived on the scene so quickly, just another example of his cursed bad luck. He ran as fast as he could toward the delivery bay, and took his revolver from his waistband. That was a huge mistake. Tank dropped to one knee and took aim at the running man. He`d did not intend to shoot him, because he had no proof that he was definitely the assassin, until he saw the revolver. He gripped the gun with two hands and rested his elbow on his knee to steady the shot, and then he fired three times, aiming to stop him in his tracks, but not kill him. The nine millimetre slugs slammed into Abu`s legs. His left femur was smashed to pieces by the first bullet. The second shattered his right kneecap as it passed through the joint, blasting cartilage and bone fragments across the concrete floor. The third bullet hit him in the pelvis, and then unluckily, it ricocheted off the bone up through his abdomen into his heart, killing him instantly.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Nasik

  Nasik had lined up the crosshairs of his rifle, targeting the Terrorist Task Force’s commanding officer. The shot was aimed at his head when Nasik squeezed the trigger. Major Stanley Timms was half a mile away when the bullet was fired, which meant that there is nearly a two-second delay from the bullet leaving the rifle, and it hitting its target. As the bullet left the rifle, Timms had turned away from the window. When Nasik realised that the first shot had missed the kill zone, hitting the Major in the back, he fired a second shot. The target had been thrown across his desk behind some metal filing cabinets by the force of the impact. Nasik had emptied the entire magazine into the cabinets but the bullets had failed to penetrate the metal and compressed paper inside them. He was disappointed not to kill his mark with a headshot, but sure that the Kufur would not survive the injuries that he had received. Now he had no more than ten minutes to affect an escape, before the police setup a cordon around the city centre. It would not take them long to realise where the shots could have been fired from, and then narrow the possible sites down to the exact spot.

  Nasik dismantled his rifle and put it back into the toolbox. He stuffed his pistol into his overalls and wheeled his box toward the fire exit, which led into one of the world’s longest stairwells. Nasik analysed the scene. The old restaurant looked like any other building site, apart from the businessman sat on the floor tied to a roof support in the middle of the room. That definitely looked out of place. Nasik stared at the man, thought things over for a moment, and then made a plan.

  Nine minutes later, he stood at the same spot near the fire exit and surveyed the scene again. It was almost identical to the first time, apart from the man tied to a roof support, who was now dressed in painter’s overalls. Nasik had stripped him and swapped clothes. The project manager was now secured, standing with his back to the upright scaffold pole. He was sporting Nasik’s baseball cap and sunglasses. Nasik forced a three-foot length of wood up the right hand sleeve of the overalls, through the material at the shoulder, and then taped it to the pole. The effect was to leave the businessman with his arm fixed in a pointing position. Then he used the same gaffer tape to attach a six-inch piece of copper pipe to the extended right hand of the project manager. From a distance away, it would look like he was pointing a gun. Nasik smiled at his creativity, turned off the lights, switched on the gas, which fuelled the old ovens, and headed toward the exit. The lift doors were still wedged open. Nasik dragged a five-foot propane gas cylinder, which was attached to a blowlamp that the plumbers used. He turned the gas tap to open, and then tossed it down the seemingly bottomless lift shaft. It was still falling when he reached the fire exit.

  The shirt and tie he’d put on were a little too big but they would pass for now. The suit trousers were warm and wet. The smell of stale urine pervaded from them, but it was unavoidable that he would have to live with. He opened the fire exit door and headed down the almost endless spiral staircase. The staircase was over a thousand steps high, and was built inside the cylindrical exterior walls, so it descended in a wide circular sweep, with no landings. The lift shaft ran up the centre of the tower, encased by the stairwell. There were no intermediate floors for the lift to stop on, just street level and the tower. There were no windows fitted into the stairwell, which meant that Nasik soon lost all concept of how far down the huge tower he had travelled, or what police activity was happening outside. He felt, rather than heard, the oscillation of a helicopter engine approaching. There was no doubt that it would be carrying at least two police sharp shooters on board. The option of reaching the bottom of the staircase and then leaving through the street entrance was completely ruled out. He kept on down the wide curving stairwell until he almost became dizzy. If only the mission had gone to plan, there would have been no one else in the tower and he could have taken the lift back down to the street and disappeared into the crowds.

  Just when he was beginning to think the stairs would never end, he reached a green exit sign fixed to the curved wall of the tower. It signposted a fire exit which led from above the base of the tower, into the second floor of the shopping mall. It was a lifeline. He pushed the metal door release bars and the door opened immediately, but only a few inches. A thick steel security chain was threaded between the locking bars, stopping access to the shopping centre. A fire alarm began to sound inside the tower, it was deafening in the confined space of the stairwell, as the acoustics of stone steps inside a massive concrete tube amplified the sound. Nasik looked through a rectangular piece of fire glass. Beyond it was a smoked glass panel, which led directly onto a wide marble concourse, which was lined, by shops on either side.

  There were two stainless steel escalators carrying the hundreds of shoppers from one floor to the next. He felt inside the suit jacket, removed a pair of reading spectacles, and put them on. Then he kicked the fire doors unnoticed by the shoppers, but they refused to yield, held in place by the thick metal chain. He was trapped in the stairwell.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Armed Response Unit

  Ryan Griffin was organising his squad of fifteen Task Force agents at the base of the St. John’s tower. In the absence of a senior officer, he was in charge of the unit. The Terrorist Task Force was a small elite unit, whose remit was international, but focused completely on counter terrorism. They relied on the back
up and support of conventional law enforcement agencies and military Special Forces, to provide the numbers required to affect large areas, such as a city centre. Local uniformed divisions were erecting steel barriers around the pedestrianized sectors of the shopping centre, and evacuating the precincts and office blocks. They had also mobilised an Armed Response Unit, which was comprised of uniformed police officers that had received specialised weapons and tactics training. As Ryan was prepping his Task Force team, the Chief of the uniformed police approached.

  “Where’s your commanding officer?” the uniformed officer demanded, without any introductions. Ryan noticed a battle bus had arrived on the scene and the policemen moved the metal cordon to allow it to pass, and then replaced it to contain the growing number of onlookers that were gathering along the barrier. Liverpool has two hugely popular radio stations, Radio City and Radio Merseyside based within a minutes walking distance of the massive tower, and they had both already dispatched roving news reporters to the scene. The media throng buzzed as they reported that the bus had all the insignia of the Merseyside Armed Response Unit emblazoned on it. It indicated without shadow of a doubt, that there had been a firearms incident in the city centre.