SOFT TARGET III Jerusalem (SOFT TARGET SERIES)

by Conrad Jones

  “There are no more contact readings in the area, it appears as if the container was then either carried off, or put onto wheels and dragged.”

  Tank nodded in agreement, because it made perfect sense. The device could be anywhere by now, London, Manchester or any other big city.

  “So there you are, you’ve got less than a mile square to search then, it’s not brilliant, but it`s the best we can do for now,” Graham Libby folded his arms looking a little deflated. Tank looked completely baffled.

  “What do you mean a square mile, I don’t follow you Graham,” Tank unfolded his arms and leaned over the negatives again looking for a solution to a conundrum that he didn’t understand.

  “Well if you’d let me finish what I was saying then you would understand perfectly,” the scientist said patronisingly coking his head to the side as he spoke.

  “Tank’s face flushed red and he could feel the anger rising. He didn’t like being messed about, especially by his own team, he couldn’t tolerate office politics, and he’d rather someone tell him that they were pissed off, than pretend that they’re okay. If the problem was out in the open then he could deal with it, and then move on to the next issue. Graham Libby realised from the look in Tank’s eyes that he had overstepped the mark. He coughed nervously then continued in a hurried fashion.

  “I was trying to explain that the whole area was sealed off, and the area was being monitored and scanned by police helicopters, packed with body heat sensors.”

  Tank was starting to get the picture, and it wasn’t a pretty one either. Graham Libby continued, regaining his enthusiasm.

  “The amount of radiation this container is giving off would have registered like a small supernova on their screens; if it had left that area then it would have been reported. We would definitely not have missed a reading like that. I’m absolutely convinced that the container never left the city centre, Tank,” the scientist rubbed his hands together as if he’d just discovered the cure for the common cold.

  “If there is a radiological dispersal device in the city centre then you have a problem,” Graham Libby shook his head, worried by the thought.

  “Now if you can give me five more minutes of your time, I’d like to show you this,” the scientist continued. He picked up a test tube, which contained a thick viscous material. He turned off the desk lamp again. The substance glowed blue in the dark.

  “What is it?” Tank asked.

  “Vomit, it was recovered from the lower balcony of the shopping precinct, close to the entrance of the delivery basement. Whoever secreted this is very ill indeed, so I’d assume that they carried your radioactive materials for an extended period of time, without any protective clothing.”

  “What would be his prognosis?”

  “He’s terminal, there is no treatment for this level of exposure. If he isn’t already dead, then he soon will be. I don’t think that he left that area because his heat profile would have been spotted. There is some good news however, the DNA matches the hand print found on the mirror at the tower’s fire exit, plus he’ll be glowing like a Christmas tree on your heat sensors.”

  “So it looks like we’re heading for that basement.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Yasser

  Yasser was still watching the approaching Bedouin caravan in the distance. The dust cloud they created was shimmering in the early morning heat. He heard the door of the felt roofed guard shack creaking open. The door hinges were full of desert sand, which made them screech and groan. The same guard as usual walked toward his cage carrying a canvas water flask, the personnel never changed. Always the same Egyptian soldier brought him water. Yasser stood up and walked to the cage door. He greeted the guard in Arabic. The guard ignored him as usual, slid open the meal hatch and passed the water bottle through. Yasser swapped it for the empty container that he`d used through the night. The guard nodded, and then he took the empty flask from Yasser and closed the hatch again. The guard turned away from the cage and rubbed his sleepy eyes. When he opened them, again he was facing the hangar in the distance. He straightened up surprised by the sight of the Bedouin caravan approaching the airfield. He hadn’t noticed them earlier when he left the shack. The guard started shouting his colleagues as he rushed back into the felt roofed building in a panic.

  Yasser heard muffled voices, expressing alarm, and the dull thud of army boots being pulled on in a hurry. The door squealed open again and Yasser’s five captors emerged from their shack, carrying ancient Enfield 303 rifles. He was surprised to see the Second World War rifles. They had wooden stocks and a small magazine that held just three bullets. Whoever supplied this outpost with its ancient British weapons didn’t expect them to be needed. Yasser was dismayed. The rifles fired one bullet at a time, and the next bullet had to be chambered into the breach manually. A one armed man couldn’t fire more than one bullet. Even if Yasser managed to steal a rifle it was no use to him, he needed an automatic weapon.

  One of the Saddam Hussein lookalikes was watching the approaching caravan through a huge pair of field glasses, and again they were British standard army issue from the last century. The helicopter pilot ran to his aircraft and opened the cockpit door. He reached inside and removed a nine-millimetre Tokagypt automatic pistol. It was by far the most efficient weapon that his captors had. It was the weapon that Yasser would need if he was going to kill his guards quickly. The guards started bickering between themselves in Arabic, apart from the helicopter pilot and his mate, who were struggling to keep up with the conversation. Yasser could hear that the general crux of the argument was whether to accommodate the Bedouin if they requested water and supplies. One of the guards was adamant that they should, and one was adamant that no one should be allowed to approach the airfield. The third soldier didn’t really care and he leaned against the wall smoking a cigarette, enjoying the morning sunshine.

  The Bedouin caravan took a diagonal path across the airfield heading directly for the guardhouse. Yasser could hear their pots and pans clanking as the camels swayed and plodded across the desert runway. The females of the tribe walked behind or alongside their husband’s camel, herding the family goats and sheep as they went. Their incessant chattering mingled with the other sounds from the approaching tribe. The wind blew and the sound of the animals bleating, drifted to Yasser on the breeze, goat bells tinkled, camels bayed and children laughed. The cacophony of desert life made Yasser feel very sad, longing for a life that was lost many years ago, when Iraq belonged to Iraqis, and Christian soldiers fought each other, not Islam.

  The camels stopped one hundred yards from the five guards and their hut. The women and children peeled away from the adult males, and herded sixty or so sheep and goats to a separate area. Without any instruction, the women broke camp, pots rattled and a small fire was being prepared ready to cook a Bedouin breakfast on. Yasser watched the well-rehearsed process with delight. The Bedouin tribes always travelled at night, using the stars to navigate across the endless sand dunes, maps were of no benefit in the desert. When the sun rose and the adult men stopped their camels, then the women and children set up camp, watered the animals, fed the tribe and then slept. It was obvious that the Bedouin were bedding down adjacent to the airbase, whether the Egyptian soldiers liked it or not. The tribe was eighty men strong. The Bedouin never count the number of women and children in the caravan. Only adult men capable of working and fighting are counted. The more adult males the tribe has, the greater its kudos with other tribes.

  Three of the camel riders broke away from the tribe and plodded casually toward the guardhouse, flanked by half a dozen tribesmen on foot. The Bedouin were all armed with Soviet built Kalashnikov assault rifles. They were old clumsy weapons, but extremely reliable and easy to maintain, which is essential when you live in a world where sand pervades every tiny crack and orifice.

  “As-Salaama Alaykum,” greetings peace be with you, the first Bedouin tribesman shouted as he approached. His face was covered from
the dust and the sun with his head wrap. He touched his head, his mouth and his chest as he greeted them.

  “Wa Alaykum As-Salaam,” the Eygptian soldiers replied in unison.

  The helicopter pilot and his mate just nodded a silent greeting. The Bedouin men eyed them suspiciously, as they had not offered the traditional Arabic greeting in response to theirs. The Bedouin spoke the same Arabic language as other people from the Middle East, but their accent can be very different. Accents can vary dramatically from one tribe to the next. Yasser tried to follow what was being said between the two parties but they were too far away from him, and the Bedouin spoke quickly in an unfamiliar dialect. He heard a request for water being made and then some discussion following it between the Eygptian soldiers. They were bickering again.

  One of the guards seemed to take control of the situation and he pointed to an area that Yasser could not see, because it was obscured by the felt roof guardhouse. He could only assume that there was a water storage tank somewhere, and an outside tap. The guard was indicating that they could use that supply. If the Bedouin caravan used the water at the other side of the guardhouse, it would keep them away from Yasser. More to the point, they wouldn’t even see him from where they were.

  It appeared that a compromise had been reached and the three camel riders moved their animals out of Yasser’s line of sight, behind the guardhouse. The helicopter pilot relaxed and placed his black automatic weapon into his waistband. He slapped his mate between the shoulder blades and they went back into the shack out of the burning sunshine. As they entered the guardhouse, Yasser heard the polyphonic ringtone of a mobile phone. The helicopter pilot answered and spoke quickly in a language Yasser still couldn’t identify with, Greek maybe, Albanian possibly, Macedonian probably, he couldn’t be sure. The pilot came back out of the shack and swaggered toward Yasser`s cage, still talking into his cell phone. He was grinning at Yasser, not a nice grin, a sick malicious grin, a sadistic grin. Yasser stared back at the pilot and realised that his time here had run out. Orders were coming through to move him to another hellhole of a prison. Another team of Christians would torture him to the point of death, trying to extract as much information from him as they could before he died.

  It was obvious from the look on the pilot’s face that he enjoyed his job. Being stuck in a sweltering shack in the middle of the desert somewhere was not the part of the job, which he enjoyed. He had been waiting for the order to take Yasser to his final destination since the moment that they arrived. Yasser had made the mistake of building his hopes up. It’s what desperate men do, but now his heart sank and his glimmer of hope started to fade away.

  The pilot ended his call and approached the cage, still grinning. Yasser’s facial expression never changed, he just stared into the pilots eyes. The pilot returned the stare but his eyes flickered. There was something beyond Yasser’s eyes that frightened him. They were deep and milky, like a shark. The pilot sneered, coughed up phlegm from the back of his throat and spat it at Yasser. The green globule landed on Yasser’s leg but he ignored it, and continued to stare at the pilot with his ice-cold eyes. The pilot let off a tirade of abuse that Yasser didn’t understand. He picked up a stone and threw it between the bars, hitting Yasser above the left eye. A small trickle of blood ran from a little nick on his forehead, but he still didn’t overt his gaze.

  The pilot tired of his unresponsive prisoner and turned back toward the guardhouse. He was disturbed by the aura of menace that he’d sensed from Yasser. The slightly built, one-armed Iraqi man had an air of evil all around him. Yasser heard the guardhouse door slam closed, only then did he wipe the blood from his face and the phlegm from his leg.

  “Do not turn round Caliph. I bring good news from an old friend of yours. Today Allah will release you from your captivity, be patient, when the sun goes down we will strike.”

  The voice was behind him. Yasser heard someone scurrying off behind him into the shadows of the guardhouse. He didn’t turn around. He didn’t want to really, because he was holding his breath, excited that help had arrived. The Bedouin had herded their animals around the water supply beyond Yasser’s range of vision. They were bleating noisily and the constant chatter of the women and children drifted across the felt roof to him. It was a comforting sound, a normal sound from his past and it reassured him that all would be well.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Nasik

  Nasik could hear the sound of diesel engines coming and going on the other side of the metal roller shutter. The shopping precinct must have been given the all clear to reopen. Deliveries had been arriving for at least half an hour or so. At least that is what his befuddled brain was telling him. In fact, he had been asleep for nearly eight hours. After sending the radioactive toolbox up in the goods lift, he had sat down to rest and lost consciousness almost immediately. He was cold, very cold.

  The storage unit that he’d woken up in was built from bare breezeblocks. The floor was concrete. Decades of usage had left the surface marked from the rubber wheels of a thousand forklift trucks that had trundled from the loading bay to the goods lift and back. He shivered from the cold. Nasik rubbed his hands together for warmth and then recoiled from the pain in his right hand. He didn’t remember hurting himself, but his hand felt like he had burnt it, or scalded it. The light in the storage unit was hurting his eyes, so he squeezed them shut to rest them. They felt like he had grit beneath his eyelids. Nasik rubbed his eyes with his hands and the pain in his right hand shot through him again. He cried out in pain this time. He looked at the offending hand, turning it slowly and trying to open and close his fingers at the same time. His hand had swelled to twice its normal size and had turned an angry purple colour, like a deep-seated bruise. The index finger looked like it was about to burst, he could no longer distinguish where the knuckles should be. As he rotated the hand and studied it, tears ran down his cheeks. Nasik ran his left hand through his tussled hair and huge clumps came away between his fingers. He stared from the swollen hand, to the hand full of hair and then back to the swollen one again.

  He knew now that they had been betrayed. His mission was to shoot a senior member of the British counter terrorist services, leave the explosive device in the lift, and then escape in the van that he’d arrived in. The rendezvous point was already arranged. Once they had all completed their separate missions they were supposed to meet up on the car park of a pub called the Bay Leaf, in Treaddur Bay, on the outskirts of Holyhead. From there they were to return to the Syrian tanker, which had brought them and then rest on the voyage back to the Middle East where the never-ending battle for Palestine beckoned them.

  He leaned on one elbow and wretched. He vomited thick yellow bile, flecked with blood; an acidic taste clung to the back of his throat. Nasik wiped saliva and yellow drool from his chin with the back of his hand, and tufts of his hair stuck to his face. There was something in the box that had made him sick, something powerful enough to burn his skin and make his hair fall out. He felt so tired and his eyes were becoming more painful and gritty. Nasik wasn’t sure what time it was but he needed to get back to the van, and then drive one hundred and five miles to the rendezvous point. The Syrian tanker had a sickbay and a medic. He just had to get there, take some medicine and then he’d be fine. Nasik closed his gritty eyes again; he thought that if he just slept for a short time he could regain some of his energy and then drive to Holyhead. He placed his painfully swollen hand gently on his chest, out of harm’s way and drifted off into a troubled slumber that was plagued with nightmares.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Tank stood on the roof of Canning Place. He looked east toward the St. John’s tower. The huge concrete structure was the colour of sand except for the disc shaped section at the top, once a restaurant, more recently the home of Radio City, now a blackened shell. A shiver ran down his spine as he thought about the hapless policemen that had breached the skyscraper’s windows, only to be blown back through them by the gas explosion. Tan
k had no doubt in his mind that the Kevlar body armour worn by Britain’s security services would have protected them from most of the blast. They would have been alive until they hit the pavement hundreds of feet below.

  He turned as he heard a helicopter approaching. A huge twin rotor Chinook was flying across the River Mersey toward the helicopter pad at the top of the police headquarters. Tank watched a wooden sailing galleon unfurling white canvas sails on three masts that were as tall as pine trees. The canvas billowed and flapped as the wind filled it, sailors rushed about on the decks tying off rigging and harnessing the wind. The river looked a deep blue colour today, and the wakes left by various different sailing vessels were pure white in comparison. It was a scene of calm and serenity. It was a scene of complete contrast to the turmoil John Tankersley was feeling right now. Grace had apparently shown signs of life and he wanted to be with her. Major Stanley Timms was fighting for his life on an operating table. Attempts had been made to behead the Terrorist Task Force by taking out its key personnel, and somewhere in the city, there was a radioactive dispersal device. It seemed like hoisting the main brace and sailing off into the blue ocean was a far more attractive option at this moment in time.