by Conrad Jones
There was a narrow metal receiver well running beneath the shutter door, the full length of the opening. The brass rings combined with the metal well that they were inserted into, would concentrate the force of the blast upward. Flash removed a small electric drill from his utility belt and fitted it with a metal drilling bit, the diameter of a one pence piece. He drilled a hole through the clasp and out the other side, only stopping when he felt the bit had completely penetrated the warehouse and was drilling fresh air. Then he took a fibre optic flexible camera and inserted it through the hole. Twisting the fibre, he could see the interior of the warehouse. He signalled to Tank that there was one bandit visible in a seated position to the right hand side of the storage unit. The fibre optic was removed and then quickly replaced with a long thin latex sleeve, which resembled a kid’s party balloon.
Flash poured half a litre of the liquid explosive Tovex into the balloon, from a storage flask, which was in the pouch. The balloon, full of demolition grade liquid explosive, now breached the metal roller shutter, and more importantly was positioned beneath the metal padlock, inside the warehouse unit. Combined with the four preset brass compressed charges that he had already set, the roller shutter would be blown upward into its housing at about ninety miles an hour, taking anyone inside completely by surprise. Flash stepped away from the door and jumped down from the raised delivery platform onto the service road with a splash. He summoned Tank and the others to follow suit, as it was a much safer position, and it offered a brilliant line of sight to open fire at any bandits that were revealed inside the unit.
Tank checked that the unit was ready to go, and then he signalled that he was going to remain on the delivery platform, to the left hand side of unit number thirteen. Standard Special Forces protocol when attacking a possible suicide bomber is to shoot the bandit in the head as many times as possible until they stop moving, in order to prevent them detonating an explosive device with a remote switch. The more angles they could shoot from the better.
“When you’re ready Flash, we’re moving on your mark,” Tank whispered into the coms.
“Roger that, on my mark, three, two, one,” Flash counted down and detonated the charges.
Chapter Forty-Four
New York
Sabah had been born in Mogadishu, Somalia in the mid sixties sometime. He was orphaned at a very young age like millions of other children from that country. Somalia has been torn apart by civil war for decades. Muslim extremists have fought a string of corrupt governments fuelled constantly by famine and poverty. The United Nations sent troops in to try to stop the genocide in the late eighties and early nineties, resulting in the ambush and massacre of twenty-four Pakistani peacekeepers. America became heavily involved resulting in the incidents immortalised in the movie ‘Blackhawk Down’, but to no avail. The war still rages today, and the tribal and religious divides run deeper than ever. Islamic extremism in Somalia is like a cancer, which has been spreading and taking a stronger grip every day for over thirty years. Sabah was one of its victims.
Sabah couldn’t remember ever not holding a machine gun when he walked outside on the streets of Mogadishu. He’d been recruited into the local militia at a very early age, joining his four older brothers in the back of a converted Toyota pickup truck. The truck is what is known as a technical; a civilian vehicle converted to carry a fifty-millimetre belt fed, heavy machinegun, powerful enough to punch holes through brick walls. They patrolled their residential block, looking for enemy militia or government soldiers that had dared to wander into their territory. Life was cheap, and death was a daily occurrence.
His four older brothers were all dead, three of them were victims of sectarian killings, and the fourth brother became one of Africa’s millions of aids victims that die every year. Sabah became a well-respected member of his militia, dedicated and focused, fearless and brutal. During the infamous conflict with American forces in the early nineties, he rose through the ranks quickly. The higher up the militia ranks that he climbed, the more religion became the driving force, as opposed the tribal issues, which fuelled him as boy. He was chosen to travel to a religious terrorist training camp in the mid nineties, to study explosives and the manufacture of improvised explosive devices. It was during this training that he met and studied under the nefarious Yasser Ahmed and his cohorts.
Yasser spotted that Sabah was a fast learner, and had a much higher IQ than the average student. He soon picked up explosive methodology, and started to display an interest in the helicopters and light aircraft that supplied the base with food and munitions. Yasser encouraged him to learn, and arranged for the pilots to teach Sabah. Six months later, he had his first solo flight, and using a forged pilot’s licence he became the regular airborne camp deliveryman. That was fourteen years ago, since which he`d become a very accomplished pilot.
It was as an accomplished pilot and dedicated follower of Islamic Jihad that he had been given the honour of striking back at his Western tormentors. It was a plan that would rival the attack on the twin towers in its magnitude, and would echo across the Western world for decades.
Sabah was sat at the controls of an Antonov-124, which is a Russian built, record-breaking cargo plane, used by several Eastern European air forces. On May 1987, a world record flight was made by an Antonov-124, which flew for twenty-five hours and thirty minutes without refuelling, covering twenty one thousand, and one hundred and fifty one miles. This incredible aircraft can fly over four thousand miles fully laden, carrying a payload of one hundred and twenty two tons. The plan was incredibly simple. On board was a crate wrapped in a dozen layers of aluminium. The crate was the size of a small saloon car, weighing about three tons. The inside of the crate was lined with a ton of strontium-90, which had been salted with cobalt, all of which was packed around a core of military grade high explosives.
The explosives were set to explode when the pilot detonated them by a remote switch positioned in his cockpit. The blast would compress the radioactive mixture to a critical state. The aluminium jacket was then designed to disintegrate into a cloud of metal confetti, showering a huge area with radioactive particles. Strontium-90 has a half-life of about twenty-eight years, rendering anywhere it contaminates radioactive for decades. Sabah simply had to take-off from the west coast of Africa, and then fly the airplane as close to the financial district of New York as he could; then detonate the device in the air above the city, spreading the contaminated material as far as was physically possible. All he had to do was deceive the American radar operators, and air traffic control as he approached American airspace, but that was all part of the plan.
Chapter Forty-Five
The St. John’s
Flash detonated the five charges simultaneously, shattering the padlock inside the warehouse and propelling the huge metal roller shutter upward. It slammed into its housing with a deafening rattle. Nasik was rudely woken from his troubled slumber, confused and disorientated. He lifted head to see what was happening. He was surrounded by armed men in black protective suits.
“Don’t move a muscle or I’ll blow your head off,” Tank shouted at Nasik, shock tactics to frighten and confuse the enemy.
“Put your hands behind your head right now asshole,” Chen closed in on the bandit, Nasik.
Nasik looked drunkenly from one man to the next. He tried to follow their instructions by lifting his hands, but they were heavy and difficult to control. He notice a deep throbbing pain in his right hand, which was now the size of a spade, purple and bloated so that it looked like a lobster’s claw. He stared at it as he lifted it up in front of his face. Nasik didn’t remember hurting it; in fact, he didn’t remember much about anything. He lifted his left hand, which felt even heavier, and the men in black started to shout louder, very loud indeed, their voices echoed off the warehouse walls intensifying the noise.
“Drop the weapon!”
“Drop the gun now!”
All he could hear was shouting and balling. He looked at
his left hand and in it was the Colt revolver. Nasik wasn’t sure why he had a gun but he did, and he needed to drop it. He shook the gun trying to free it, but his fingers had swollen and they were stuck between the trigger guard and the handle. He was still confused when the Task Force opened fire. His head was physically torn to pieces in seconds, splattering blood and brain matter across the grey breezeblocks.
“This is pilgrim one, we have one bandit neutralised, I repeat one bandit down,” Tank spoke into the coms. “Chen get your men to check him for booby traps.”
“Roger that.”
Chen signalled and two of his men approached the headless corpse.” They scanned beneath his legs and behind his back for wires or pressure pads. The body was clean, and they searched his pockets. There was a wallet, which according to the photograph inside it had belonged to a middle aged white European, and a bunch of labelled keys.
“He’s clean, there’s nothing on him.”
“What about the keys?” Tank asked. Chen tossed them to Tank. They were all different cuts, different applications, and they were all clearly labelled.
“Who do you know that labels their keys?” Tank asked.
“My father,” Chen replied. Tank shook his head in despair.
“The warehouse area is clear,” the Task Force men had scoured the storage area and found nothing.
“All the readings from the floor space are clear,” the tech guy called in after checking the concrete floor with the Geiger counter for radiation.
“Ignition key, van door key,” Tank was reading the labels. “Lift one key, basement key, shutter key, and lift two key.”
“Okay, the van is how he arrived,” Chen speculated. “The van door key was needed to remove the device from the back of the van.”
“Which would put the lift one key possibly at the tower,” Tank was turning the keys through his fingers as they spoke.
“The basement key gave him access to the delivery area, and the shutter got him in here.”
“Which leaves the lift two, key,” Tank said holding it in the air, looking around the warehouse.
“There’s a goods lift set in the rear wall,” Flash pointed out.
“Scan that door,” Tank said into the coms. “Pilgrim one where does the goods lift from unit thirteen service?”
“According to the plans, it services just one unit on the second floor,” the fat controller replied.
“Is the elevator car there?” Tank asked. The tech guy was scanning the metal doors for radiation traces. The Geiger counter clicked loudly as he waved it across the door handle. There was a six-inch sight glass fitted into the door just above the handle, which allowed the operator to see if the goods lift was there or not.
“Negative, but the handle is reading that someone has been in contact with beta emitting material,” the tech guy answered.
“Pilgrim one here, get an extraction team down here to remove the bandit, you’ll need to get it to Graham Libby immediately for analysis,” Tank said. “We’re going to use the stairwell to reach the second floor.”
“Roger that, look I would advise that if the lift is in working order, and it hasn’t been rigged, that you bring the device down to the subbasement,” the fat controller said with his usual amount of tact. “Obviously if it was to explode it would be better that it’s below ground, not that I think it will explode, but you know what I mean don’t you?”
“Roger that control, and thanks for the advice,” Tank said sarcastically.
Tank pointed to the stairwell and the Task Force men started up the first flight in combat formation. Chen took the lead to the first landing, and then took up a covering position as the man at the rear overtook him and started up the second flight. The second flight brought them level to the ground floor of the mall, but there were no entrances or exits connecting them. The stairs were covered in once white vinyl, now cracked and peeling up at the edges, countless black blobs of chewing gum spotted them. The formation turned the second landing and headed up to the first floor level. Again, there was nothing of note, just the tattered white staircase covered in discarded gum. It was obvious that the shopping centre management never used the stairwell to access the warehouse below.
As the Task Force approached the second floor, they were faced with two sets of double fire doors, one directly facing the stairs, and the other branched from the small square landing to the right. Tank reached the small landing and studied the doors. They were made from compressed chipboard, and covered in green fire retardant paint. There were eight-inch rectangular windows fixed in each door, positioned in the centre of each set, where they met in the middle. Tank looked through the doors to the right. There was a long corridor with several doorways leading off it, probably a backup area containing office space and staff facilities. The double doors in front of him had hand written notices pinned to them. One said ‘If the customer isn’t smiling, then give them one of yours’, and another ordered, ‘No chewing gum on the shop floor’, which would explain the state of the staircase.
“This is the entrance to the retail unit,” Tank nodded toward the double doors. He pushed them but they were locked in the middle with a mortise lock, but they moved enough to indicate that they wouldn’t be much of an obstacle.
“It’s locked,” Chen said. Tank shook his head slowly.
“I can see that,” Tank answered looking through the glass window for tripwires or booby traps that could have been rigged on the doors from the inside.
“Check the bunch of keys,” Chen said.
“Negative that,” Tank said taking two steps back, and then launching his massive shoulder into the centre of the doors, just below the glass windows. The mortise lock shattered beneath the weight and the wooden frame split down the centre. The Task Force poured into the empty shop unit like a well-oiled machine.
“Shop floor is clear,” they started to sound off, a well-practiced military procedure.
“Men’s changing rooms are clear.”
“Ladies changing rooms are clear.”
“Scan that lift,” Chen ordered his tech guy. He approached the lift doors cautiously, checking the floor for tripwires, and began to run the Geiger counter over the metal. The clicking noise oscillated loudly and the pitch changed as he moved the monitor away. He seemed unsure and he looked through the sight glass in the lift door.
“What’s the score?” Tank asked, waiting for his verdict.
“There is a large plastic tough box in the lift, and we have beta rays registering on the Geiger,” the tech guy sounded like he wasn’t sure about something.
“There sounds like there should be a, ‘but’, at the end of that sentence,” Tank said. “What’s the problem?”
“Well, if you look at that box,” he said moving aside for Tank to look through the sight glass. Tank looked and then moved so that Chen could see it too. “If that box contained enough strontium-90 to make an effective dirty bomb, then this Geiger counter would be doing summersaults, but it isn’t.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that that tool box isn’t full of strontium-90.”
“Check it out Chen, and then send the lift back down to the basement,” Tank said. “Pilgrim one here, did you hear that control?”
“Roger that,” the fat controller said. “The bomb squad are on standby and ready to come down there. Doctor Graff, the Israeli, is there too. He wants to see the device.”
“Now why would he want to do that?” Tank asked.
“My thoughts exactly,” replied the fat controller.
Chapter Forty-Six
Yasser
Yasser was sat in the Bedouin chief’s gazebo eating a watery lamb stew. It had been so long since he’d eaten a proper meal that it tasted like the most wonderful food on the planet. The Bedouin women and children were preparing the caravan ready to depart, and continue on their eternal journey across the deserts. They were herding the sheep and goats into manageable flocks, ready for depart
ure. The elder tribesmen were seated in a wide circle enjoying their meals and chattering in a dialect that was difficult for Yasser to follow. Megdah and Melad were sitting on either side of him, eating in silence. Megdah was pushing pieces of lamb round his plate aimlessly, having completely lost his appetite. His pallor was pale, as if he was about to vomit. He couldn’t get the visions of Yasser and the helicopter engineer out of his mind.
Melad on the other hand had been fascinated by it all, even helping a couple of times when Yasser’s single arm grew tired of sawing. At one point, he’d changed the blade on the hacksaw, which had snapped on a particularly thick piece of thighbone, while Yasser had a rest and spoke kindly to the screaming man. Yasser had spoken none stop as he cut the man up, explaining that you couldn’t be cruel to people for no reason at all. A man had to have a sense of justice, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; Yasser had a cause, a belief from which he would never deviate. He was fighting to revenge all the injustice that had been caused by the capitalist heathen invaders from the West; were as the helicopter engineer had stamped on Yasser for no reason at all, and so he had to be taught humility by having his limbs sawn off, one at time. In Yasser’s mind, it was a just punishment.
