SOFT TARGET III Jerusalem (SOFT TARGET SERIES)

by Conrad Jones

  “I’m in charge sir,” Ryan Griffin answered.

  “Not any more you’re not Sonny Jim,” the Chief blustered. “This is not a terrorist incident, unless you know something that we don’t, then this is a firearms incident, and my armed response men will answer the call.”

  “Sir, with respect we think that the suspect shot Major Stanley Timms, and.....”

  “Exactly, my boy, you think that the suspect shot your senior officer, therefore it is not a terrorist attack, it’s a firearms incident and it’s our jurisdiction, now stand down immediately,” the officer was abrupt, arrogant and correct.

  “With respect sir, my lead officer John Tankersley warned me that this attack is linked to several others, and that the perpetrators are highly trained, highly skilled terrorists, sir.”

  “Respect, respect, John Tankersley doesn’t understand the meaning of the word respect, now for the last time stand down. Watch and pay attention sunshine, you might just learn something,” the Chief was not backing down. He had been involved in several altercations with Tank before, and had never come off the winner.

  This time he was one hundred percent correct, it was not a Task Force incident, at this point anyway. He could barely contain his excitement at finally ousting the mighty Terrorist Task Force and being placed directly in the spotlight of the local media too. The city boasted television studios for the country’s two biggest channels, Granada and BBC news, and their camera crews had set up camp next to the journalists from the radio stations.

  The Chief summoned the battle bus to set up their command position near the base of the huge tower. The response team had disembarked and made the final adjustments to their kit. They were kitted out in similar combat gear to the Task Force, except their equipment was not designed to withstand military firepower. They were essentially policemen, not soldiers. Their skills and reflexes had never been honed on the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia or even Northern Ireland.

  The Chief was handed a set of plans, which detailed the layout of the tower. There were just two ways up to the old restaurant, and two ways down, the lift and the stairs. The police helicopter was circling the disc shaped restaurant at the top of the tower. The pilot and navigator were reporting one gunman still on the scene.

  “There’s one armed suspect on the scene, I’m afraid the restaurant lights are off and the interior is very dark, but our body heat sensors are confirming what we can see, a single gunman,” said the spotter from the helicopter.

  “Is he causing an imminent threat to the public?” asked the Chief. He needed to know if the sniper was near the windows aiming to take another shot at someone.

  “Negative, he’s in the centre of the room, but the weapon is raised. We have a clear sight of the target. Do you want us to take the shot?”

  “Negative, if he’s not near the windows then stand down and retire to a safe observation point.” The Chief placed them on standby and the helicopter swerved away from the tower a safe distance away, where they could maintain observation on the target, without being shot at. The Chief gathered his team around him for a briefing.

  “We need to disable the lift, and send one team up the stairs, and another smaller unit will be airlifted onto the restaurant roof,” the Chief began. “They’ll abseil the short distance from the roof and enter the restaurant windows, simultaneously timed with an attack from the stairwell.”

  It seemed to be a win-win situation. There was one suspect isolated in a deserted tower hundreds of feet up in the air. If they disabled the lift then there was only one way out, which was down the stairs. He could already see the headlines in tomorrow’s newspapers. The Chief was pleased that he had chosen his best uniform to wear today; the smooth black drill and shiny silver buttons would look good on the front pages tomorrow. It might even speed up his promotion to Police Commissioner.

  “Any questions,” the Chief asked sternly, daring one of the lower ranks to question his plan of attack. His men remained silent and waited for the order to go.

  “What if it’s been rigged?” asked Ryan Griffin who had been ear wigging from the back of the group.

  The Chief flushed a crimson colour and didn’t even turn his head toward the Task Force man. He found it typical that one of Tank’s men would question his orders. Any insubordination in the uniformed ranks was stamped out immediately.

  “You have your orders, let’s move,” he said. The response team sprang into action.

  “What if the tower has been rigged Chief?” Ryan shouted as the policemen noisily grabbed their gear and followed their orders.

  Ryan Griffin shook his head in disgust. The policemen could be walking into a death trap, but there was nothing he could do but watch and hope that he was wrong. From what Tank had told him about this foe, they were experts. They would not make a situation like this one as simple as it seemed. The sniper had hit his mark, and then decided to hang around waiting for the police to shoot him; it just didn’t make sense. His attention was distracted by the sound of a twin-engine troop carrier. The black Wessex helicopter approached the huge disc at the top of the tower and four armed policemen abseiled onto the roof. The tower was so high that they were barely visible from the ground. A squad of around a dozen men entered the stairwell from the street, while four more approached the elevator doors and waited. Ryan`s cell phone vibrated in his webbing.

  “Ryan, it’s Tank,” said his boss, “what’s the situation there?”

  “It’s pretty desperate Tank, we’re stood down,” Griffin answered.

  “Stood down by whom exactly? What’s going on?”

  “Chief of Police himself, Tank. He’s sending his muppets into the tower. They could be walking into god knows what in there.”

  “He’s a fucking idiot. That tower will be rigged, there’s absolutely no doubt about it,” Tank raised his voice but there was not much that he could do about it right now.

  “He’s put four men on the roof, a squad climbing the stairs and four men are about to disable the lift,” Ryan relayed the scene to Tank, because it was obvious to a soldier that there could be half a dozen booby traps in the towering structure.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Yasser

  Yasser was woken by a change in the engine noise. He was curled up in a protective foetal position against the bulkhead of the helicopter. The constant pain in his shoulder made him feel very vulnerable. He felt the engine noise intensify and then felt the undercarriage touching solid ground. It was the fifth time that the aircraft had landed since he had been thrown into it. The last time it landed the side doors had been opened, and Yasser felt the blast of downdraft through the hessian hood. He couldn’t see a thing but he heard the other prisoner being dragged out of the cargo hold before the door was slammed closed again.

  Yasser was feeling stronger mentally than he had done in months. The daily routine of relentless pain and torture had all but broken him. He hadn’t had anything to eat or drink for twenty-four hours but he wouldn’t swap that for his stinking cell and another session with his tormentors. The engine noise dissipated steadily and slowly wound down to a complete stop. They had kept the engine running since he had boarded it, even when it had landed. He listened intently trying to identify anything that would help him, any voice or accent, but all he could hear was muffled tones.

  The doors slid open and a blast of heat engulfed Yasser. It was an intensely dry heat that Yasser identified with the desert climates of the Middle East. The aircraft shook and he felt movement as people climbed aboard. The sound of footsteps approaching made Yasser curl up and tense his body, anticipating an assault. Rough hands grabbed at his feet and dragged him toward the fresh air and scorching sunshine. The world became brighter even through the hessian hood. He felt himself being tipped over the edge of the hold, feet first, where more hands supported his weight and then dragged him away from the helicopter. Yasser let them carry him along without wasting any of his meagre energy reserves on walking. It did
n’t hurt to let them think that he was completely incapacitated either. He heard the clink of a key turning in a metal lock, and then the screeching of metal hinges protesting at being opened. Yasser was dumped unceremoniously onto a sandy floor.

  He gritted his teeth and grunted as his infected stump scraped on the floor. He was slightly confused because the heat was still incredibly strong and he could feel the sun on his skin. The hessian hood was roughly removed from his head, and he had to squeeze his eyes closed while they adjusted to the intense sunlight. There were three soldiers stood over him. They could have been first, second and third place in a Saddam Hussein lookalike competition. They had short wavy black hair, gelled back from their faces and thick black moustaches. They were wearing olive green military shirts with epaulets fixed to the shoulders. There was no insignia attached to the uniforms. Their dark green combat pants were tucked into high-laced army issue boots. Yasser decided they were Egyptian, probably from the Sinai Desert region, because their facial features were soft and rounded. Egyptians from Cairo, and the Nile delta area, have sharp hooked noses and high cheekbones, different to these men.

  One of them raised his hand and Yasser flinched away in fear. The soldier raised his hand again slowly; in it was a canvas water bottle, which he put to Yasser’s lips. Yasser drank greedily from the canteen, he hadn’t realised how thirsty he was until water was offered. The soldier pulled the water away when Yasser had quenched his thirst, and he poured some gently over the terrorist`s head to cool him down. Yasser nodded his appreciation.

  “Shukraan,” Yasser whispered under his breath. He had used Egyptian Arabic to thank the guard.

  The soldier nodded imperceptibly to his colleagues, turned away and locked the gate behind him without speaking. Yasser looked at his surroundings for the first time. He was outdoors locked inside what could only be described as a cage. He had seen similar cells on news film of Guantanamo`s camp x-ray, but the climate was not tropical like Cuba, he was definitely in the middle of a desert. There were low dark mountains far away in the distance. The foreground was blurred as a heat haze rose from the parched earth.

  The helicopter that he had arrived on was standing on a square of compacted sand, next to a single storey building that had a flat felt roof. On the opposite side of the building was a metal hut made from corrugated sheets, and beyond that was a short runway. There was a hanger situated at the far end of the runway, and three bright yellow passenger aircraft were stood idle next to it. The planes had a dusty unused appearance to them. A warm breeze blew in from the desert and sand and dust was blown from the airplane wings and fuselage. Yasser deduced that they had not flown for a long time. He sat up and put his back against the metal bars staring at the mountains in the distance. Despite the agonising ache in his infected shoulder, he felt more alive than he had done for as long as he could remember.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Abdul Ahmed

  Abdul Ahmed was a rich hotel owner. He had owned his first hotel at the age of twenty-two in the Eygptian holiday resort Sharm el Sheikh. Situated at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula on the shores of the Red Sea, the resort had guaranteed sunshine three hundred and sixty five days a year, combined with the most breathtaking reefs in the world. The coastline of the Red Sea grew so much in popularity that construction work could be seen along its entire length, as far north as Israel. As the resort expanded Abdul`s empire grew with it. Although capitalism had made him a rich man, he was a fanatical supporter of Islamic Jihad.

  As a small boy, he had witnessed the Israelis invasion of Sinai, which they occupied for many years before eventually handing it back to Egypt in 1982. The Jewish state of Israel, armed with Western military technology destroyed the Egyptian air force in less than a few hours, before they could even launch an airplane in retaliation. Abdul was hell bent on the annihilation of Israel and the liberation of Muslim Palestine and the West Bank. He was focused and extremely clever. He knew that his talents lay in business and finance; he was not a warrior or a military genius. Abdul had immense political influence within the Middle East, which he used to aid the Islamic cause. He was also a multi-billionaire and he used his financial muscle to supply and support many terrorist militias in his own country and abroad.

  Abdul had searched the world over for the whereabouts of his hero, Yasser Ahmed, but it seemed that he had disappeared off the face of the earth. Until one day, he received a telephone call from one of his hotel managers.

  Two months prior Abdul had been on the fifteenth hole of the Conrad Hotel golf course, near Sharm, when his caddy handed him his cell phone. The call was from his hotel in a resort called Taba, which is situated at the north tip of the Red Sea. The resort is the only place in the world where you can see four countries from your sun bed. Sitting on the Egyptian beach if you look to the north, you can clearly see the Israelis port of Eilat, and the Jordanian sea port of Aqaba, which are separated only by the River Jordan and a few miles of sand. Ten kilometres south of there, on the eastern shores of the Red sea, is Saudi Arabia.

  The hotel manger had been alerted by an eagle-eyed receptionist. The receptionist had noticed that a guest’s passport had raised a diplomatic red flag when it had been scanned into their system. It seemed that the guest had once worked for Her Majesty’s Secret Service, MI5 to be precise. Abdul had the manger investigate further, and it seemed the man had checked in alone. He was booked in for a two-week vacation, all-inclusive, and had been blind drunk since he arrived. The opportunity had been too good to miss. Hundreds and thousands of tourists use the Egyptian resort of Taba as a base to travel into nearby Israel to visit the Dead Sea and the Holy city of Jerusalem. Millions more take the ferry crossing to Jordan, and travel to the lost city of Petra, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Border crossings are painfully slow and obstructive. It wasn’t difficult to engineer a scenario where the ex-MI5 agent seemingly left Egypt on a tourist trip and never returned. No one even noticed that he’d gone.

  The agent in question, Mark Garden had been sacked from the service for incompetence a month earlier. In a very short space of time, he had lost his job, his marriage and his home. Despite government warnings, he`d decided to travel abroad for a break, before his employment history could be erased. He had been at the hotel for a week, most of it a complete blur. The hotel employees were friendly and accommodating, especially toward their British guests. In recent years, there had been a massive increase in the number of Russian tourists heading to the Red Sea for their holidays. The Egyptian staff described them as the most ignorant, rude and aggressive people that they had to cater for.

  Garden assumed that the reason he was being treated so well was because the Russians were such a bunch of arseholes. The waiters kept coming to his table and he drank whatever they put in front of him. One night after being plied with free brandy all evening, he returned to his room to find all his clothes packed, and his belongings had disappeared. He remembered a blow to the back of the head and a chloroform smell, then nothing until he woke up.

  That was over two months ago. He awoke strapped in a chair with a blinding headache and a raging thirst. At first, he had thought it was just another hangover, until his eyes started to focus. The room he was in looked like the sheriff’s office from a spaghetti western, bare walls, a small barred section and a desk. He was sat in front of the cluttered desk facing a wall with posters stuck to it, he’d called for help but no one came. He couldn’t see behind him. As his vision cleared, he noticed the posters were prints from a book or manual. The original drawings had been hand drawn in coloured crayons, and then copied to make a book. His blood had run cold when he realised the drawings were illustrations of torture techniques. He recognised them from his time at the agency. They were pages from the al-Qaeda torture manual, even more terrifying because they were hand drawn with such attention to detail. They included most of the power tools your local DIY warehouse stock, being used to inflict terrible injuries to the pencilled characters. Sho
rtly afterward, the torturers arrived, and his nightmares really began.

  Abdul didn’t know where his men had kept the British agent, he didn’t need to know what horrors they had inflicted on him, and he didn’t really care. The information that they had extracted from him however had been priceless. Abdul had obtained the names and descriptions of Britain’s senior counter-terrorism agents, along with website addresses and encrypted passwords to access their files. Armed with this information Abdul financed the team of assassins to strike at the heart of the Western crusaders, on their own soil. The information they extracted had slowly become less valuable as time went on, until the agent started to divulge the whereabouts of facilities that were used by the West for extraordinary rendition. That was the icing on the cake. From that information, Abdul had a list of possible sites where Yasser Ahmed may have been held and tortured. He paid thousands of dollars in bribes to have the facilities monitored by radar. Every time an aircraft took off or landed, they were tracked by satellite and radar. Eventually Abdul would find the inspirational terrorist leader, Yasser Ahmed.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Nasik/St. John’s Tower

  Tank and Chen bypassed the city centre roadblocks and took the dock road back to their headquarters at Canning Place. Armed police encircled the building, and police vehicles were leaving the fleet car park in an uninterrupted convoy. They were stopped briefly at the gate by two uniformed policemen and then waved into the car park. They took the lift to the top floor, which was the home of the Terrorist Task Force. The elevator stopped but the door refused to open without a security access code being punched into the control panel. The top floor was on lock down following the attack on Major Timms. The high wide windows, which normally offered panoramic views of the Albert Docks and its flotilla of beautiful tall wooden sailing ships, were now covered by automated metal shuttering. The Task Force office was virtually deserted. They had units deployed in Holyhead searching the Syrian tanker, at the Royal hospital protecting Grace Farrington and Major Timms, and a small unit on standby at the base of the St. John’s tower. Tank felt like he needed to be everywhere at the same time, but without Timms at the helm he had to coordinate operations.