by Robin James
Arsenio had set the M72 to fire a ripple of all four rockets. His finger was on the switch. Perfectly calmly, the hint of a smile on his lips, he moved to one side of the launcher and flicked the switch.
The noise within the houseboat was deafening. Whoom, whoom, whoom, whoom went the rockets as, close on one another’s heels, they shot from their tubes on their perfectly aimed trajectories. Such was the recoil that Arsenio, even though he was prepared for it, was flung backwards into a bulkhead as the flat-bottomed boat was tipped to an angle of almost forty-five degrees and skidded sideways through the water. Both the Irishmen were thrown over, and in the prow the trussed Macks were crushed together between the curved edge of the bed and the side of the boat’s nose.
‘The whole world smiles with you,’ warbled Max Collie gaily, as the rockets smashed their way one after the other, precisely through the windows of their target – the peers’ guest room and bar.
‘Go, go, go,’ shouted Arsenio as he picked himself up. Oblivious of the fact that his head had cracked so heavily into the edge of a shelf in the wheelhouse that his temple was pouring blood, O’Leary slammed the throttle on full, and the Odyssey, still lurching violently from side to side in the wash caused by the M72’s recoil, shot forward towards Westminster Bridge. Shannon, meanwhile, hurried around to kill all the lights and the music.
For a split second, Stride thought he was hallucinating. Then, as four powerful explosions followed the four heavy ‘whump’ sounds which had drowned out the jazz, and a section of the House of Lords erupted with smoke and fire, he pressed his panic button.
There was little need for the alarm. Fernandez’s keen, highly experienced ears had recognized the first sounds for what they were and was hollering to the bridge to get the patrol boat out into the river even as the rockets smashed into the Lords.
The Dart, in its sleepy black hole of a boat shed, came alive in seven seconds. Within twenty, as the blacked-out Odyssey sped under Westminster Bridge, it was roaring out into the Thames, siren blaring, searchlights illuminating the water for one hundred and fifty yards in front of it as brightly as sunshine, and sending up a great wash of water against the walls of the Albert Embankment.
Arsenio’s master plan had been to take the houseboat around the right-hand bend in the river at Waterloo Bridge, then under Blackfriars Bridge, and to abandon it at Riverside Walk, where it met Bankside, just before Southwark Bridge – where he had a driver and a fast car waiting for them. He had worked this out precisely as taking, including reaching the car, six and a half minutes. He would be away before London even began to realize what had happened. But he had reckoned without the presence and lightning reaction of the SBS.
When Arsenio heard the siren, and looked back into the blinding searchlights, he assumed that an armed river police boat was bearing down on them. He did not panic. Knowing it was folly, without the right fire-power, to do battle with the river police – he and the IRA men were not even carrying guns, and the remains of their only four rockets were white-hot, smouldering metal in the wrecked peers’ guest room – he left the other two men to their own devices and hurried on to the deck to slither flat on his belly between the small bridge and the edge of the deck. His only chance of escape was to slip unseen into the water and swim for the south bank, staying as far beneath the surface as his lungs would allow. At a place where he had a chance of protection from eyes on the fast-overhauling launch – but where he risked, if he failed to drop like a stone, being hit by the propeller – he rolled over the edge close to the prow of the boat to hang for moments with his feet trailing in the wash. As he hyperventilated to enable himself to stay for the maximum time beneath the surface, he was staring directly through a porthole at the bed, from where his two trussed prisoners gazed out at him with wide and fearful eyes.
Steeling himself for possible mortal pain, Arsenio let go. He was lucky. As the chilly, mucky water closed over him he was bashed by the keel and spun around, but the propeller missed his head by inches. Cold already beginning to eat into him, and heavy clothing – he was wearing jeans, trainers and a thick roll-neck sweater – weighing him down, he struck out with a powerful breast-stroke to where he imagined the shore lay.
The slight inward curve of the prow of the boat had not been sufficient to disguise Arsenio’s taking leave of it from Zaki Fernandez’s sharp eyes. On the bridge of the patrol boat as it began to draw alongside the Odyssey, his gaze sweeping the surface of the water in the area where he had watched Arsenio disappear, the major ordered his armed frogmen to the rail.
Disoriented by his spinning around as he went under, Arsenio had been swimming in the wrong direction. When he came up for air he was almost beneath the SBS boat – and staring up at them as the frogmen went over the side after him. He had not the slightest chance, and he was far too intelligent to take one. Instead of diving beneath the Thames once again, he meekly raised his hands and surrendered. He even managed a shake of his head and a rueful grin.
Unhappily for O’Leary – and for Cynthia Mack – the Irishman was foolish enough to disregard Fernandez’s loudhailer command to heave to. O’Leary began weaving the houseboat to and fro across the Thames, and a trigger-happy SBS sergeant manning a prow-mounted Browning M1919 machine-gun stitched the bridge with bullets, shredding him. Both of the boats were bouncing around in the water. The Odyssey, with O’Leary’s bloody corpse hanging over the wheel, was out of control and heading straight for the Victoria Tower Gardens at Millbank. The Dart lurched by its side. A final burst of bullets from its machine-gun pierced the prow of the houseboat. The trussed and gagged Mrs Mack died instantly, her heart and lungs ripped apart.
The Odyssey’s nose crumpled into the river bank, badly injuring Rodney Mack. The only people to have come out of the affair unscathed were Arsenio Cruz Conde and Shannon, both of whom would in due course receive triple life sentences.
To Arsenio’s regret, the peers’ guest room and bar had not been empty during the attack on the House of Lords. Two cleaning ladies had been working there at the time. It had taken a great deal of surgical skill and ingenuity to fit their appropriate pieces back together again for burial.
All that had been twenty-two months ago. El Asesino had been detained by these English whoresons for far too long. Apart from anything else, he was a man with an enormous sex drive, and the variety of sex readily available in Parkhurst was utterly repugnant to him. As he stroked the soundbox of his almost-finished guitar he mused that, if all went well, this would be his last hour inside HMP Parkhurst. Tonight, with luck, he would be in the arms of a woman and, hombre, was he going to show her what a South American macho was made of! But, he realized, he was going to miss his guitar.
In that moment he decided that even if it complicated his escape he was going to take his cherished creation with him.
2
Leonard Dobbs’s uneasiness increased as the morning wore on. Yet he couldn’t put his finger on anything. His murderers, extortionists, rapists, con men, thieves and terrorists had metamorphosed into a bunch of model prisoners. It was utterly unreal. In his office, just before lunchtime, he studied the bank of security screens which shared one wall with a colour picture of Her Majesty the Queen, a framed map of the Isle of Wight and a sprinkling of anodyne seascapes.
Men were beginning to file back to their cells from workrooms, the gymnasium, library and exercise yard, to wash for lunch. They moved in orderly fashion, chatting quietly. And yet . . .
The Governor watched as Arsenio Cruz Conde walked beneath the security camera on his way out of the carpentry room. Here was an enigma indeed: one of the world’s most wanted terrorists before his capture, so dangerous that he was known as the Assassin, a man for whom three countries had put in requests for extradition – no chance of it being granted, of course, for a bomber of the House of Lords – but whose behaviour ever since setting foot in Parkhurst had been exemplary. Cruz Conde was that cliché, the model prisoner. So much so that he was allowed to take hi
s guitar – as beautiful a piece of craftsmanship as Dobbs had ever set eyes on – to his cell with him to work on between carpentry sessions. Most carpentry tools were, since they could be used as dangerous weapons, forbidden beyond the woodwork room. But Arsenio had his sandpaper and his varnishes and his glue and some small vices in his cell, and his guitar took shape there almost as much as it was progressing in the workroom.
Something inside Dobbs’s head was niggling at him to sweep the entire prison, to turn over every cell and workroom, to search for weapons. To discover why everyone was acting as perfectly as Cruz Conde always did – for surely there had to be a reason. On the other hand that operation had been carried out only two weeks before and to do it so quickly again would seem awfully fussy, if not downright provocative.
There was a sharp rap on his office door. He responded with his customary ‘please’, turning away from the TV screens as his head warder came in.
‘Were you observing anything in particular, sir?’ asked the overweight but thoroughly capable Officer Briggs.
‘Browsing, if you like, John. Just browsing,’ Dobbs told him as he went to his desk and sat down. He was sorely tempted to take a cigarette from the inlaid wooden box on his desk and light up. It was seven weeks since he had given up and the craving only seemed to get worse. With great control he put the idea from his mind – he had, after all, promised his wife and daughters that this time he was giving up for good. ‘What’s up?’ he asked.
Briggs nodded at the screens. Prisoners were going into their cells, whose doors would not now be locked on them since they were about to go down for lunch. ‘Something, if I’m not mistaken, sir. Just what do you see on those screens?’
Dobbs’s deep-brown eyes, slightly troubled, flickered from his officer to the screens and back again. ‘I see . . . serenity.’
‘Too bloody much serenity by far. Am I right?’
‘You too then?’
Resting his closed, hefty fists on the Governor’s desk, Briggs told him, ‘I’ve been in the prison service as long as you, sir. With respect, I believe I share your nose for it. Trouble’s brewing. Something damned serious if you ask me. I had an idea you might be smelling it as well.’
‘I do, John. I do. Very much so. I thought it was perhaps my imagination. But you’ve confirmed it isn’t. Your recommendation?’
‘That they have lunch. And afterwards we lock them in their cells, we question everybody closely, we search everywhere with a fine-tooth comb, and we don’t let them out until we get to the bottom of this bloody unnatural peace.’
The Governor produced a weak grin. ‘Yes. Do that, John, will you. I begin to feel better already.’ He straightened some papers on his desk and then sat back in his chair, deep in thought.
In the cell which he shared with the mass murderer Ulrich Warren, as the taciturn Warren was washing his hands, El Asesino, his back to the open, barred door, was stooping over his guitar, which was propped on its base on the single chair. Very carefully, he was prising off the hourglass-shaped back with the edge of a laminated playing card. The soundbox was so skilfully fashioned that its back fitted into the lipped sides with the precision of a bullet into the chamber of a gun, needing no glue to hold it temporarily in place. Even in this vital moment of his overall escape plan, Arsenio displayed his ironic sense of humour; for, as his tool to loosen the back, he had deliberately chosen the card of death – the Ace of Spades.
Very few people were capable of having a gun smuggled into a high-security prison, for the feat required the cooperation of expert outside help and was to all intents and purposes impossible without the subornation of a warder. It was probably unheard of for anyone to ever have got in two – and even less likely that he could have kept them hidden during a thorough search of the prison. The Venezuelan had achieved such a miracle.
Inside Arsenio’s beloved guitar, taped to the removable back, was a Colt 1911 A1 automatic pistol and a tiny .20-calibre Russian PSM, whose bullets were powerful enough to penetrate body armour. Their clips were fully loaded, and there was a spare clip for each gun. The Colt he slipped to Warren, who tucked it away inside a makeshift shoulder holster fashioned from a strip of bandage, beneath his loose, brown-denim prison shirt. Then Arsenio pulled a thick elastic band over his shoe and up under his trouser leg to above his calf and jammed the PSM inside it. Two convicted assassins were fully prepared for a lively lunchtime in Parkhurst Prison.
Although the scene appeared relaxed enough, there was an air of tense expectancy in the lunch hall as the inmates queued for their meal and took their trays to their tables – which fact bothered Officer Briggs even more than the week of protracted calm. He thought that he could sense trouble in the air, but there was little he could do simply on a hunch. Besides, after this lunch everyone was going to be locked up until he had sorted out whatever it was that was going on. He warned the three supervising warders to stay very much on their toes.
As he placed his tin tray on the table before him and took his seat, Arsenio had a crystal-clear picture in his mind of how the next twenty minutes were going to proceed. He was perfectly calm and relaxed, utterly confident of success. He waited until everyone was seated and eating, then he called out loudly for a warder, an offended tone in his voice.
The warder had no reason to be wary of the Venezuelan, for Arsenio was one of the most popular prisoners – clearly there was something very amiss with his food.
‘Look at that,’ Arsenio complained indignantly, as the warder reached his side. ‘Will you look at that, man. A fucking great black beetle in my cabbage. Christ.’
At that moment Dobbs happened to be staring at the screen in his office which covered the lunch hall. Though there was no sound, he realized, as the warder stooped to stare at Arsenio’s food, that the prisoner was registering a complaint. At the same moment he observed something else as well – and it made his spine creep. So far as he could make out, every one of the prisoners had stopped eating and all were paying close attention to what was happening, although amid what should have been a general hum of chatter none of them except those closest to the terrorist should even have noticed. He hurriedly reached for his in-house phone.
There was a beetle all right. A broken-legged but still living creature which Arsenio had produced from his pocket to stow among his cabbage. The warder picked up a spoon and poked the insect as Arsenio, apparently scratching his leg, slipped the PSM from its elastic band and swept it upwards to jam it painfully just below the man’s right ear.
It was the signal for action, the moment they had all been waiting for. El Asesino had not only bribed a warder in order to get his guns into the prison, but had also offered a sum of money to most of the inmates – to be delivered to their families – in exchange for their participation in a riot as cover for his and Warren’s escape. The money was hardly a fortune – £500 when they accepted, and the same amount when Arsenio was free – but it was enough, as he had expected, to encourage these long-term prisoners into the sort of activity which a great many of them would relish.
The other two warders were drawing their guns. As Arsenio shouted to them to drop their weapons or he would shoot their colleague, Warren dragged the Colt from under his shirt and unnecessarily put a bullet in one of them. The man sank to the floor, blood spouting from his femoral artery.
As the Governor stared at the dining-room monitor in horror, although not entirely in disbelief, the scene before his eyes transformed from the unnatural tranquillity of the previous week or so to one of utter mayhem. Every man was on his feet, tables were being overturned, plates and knives and forks were flying, chairs were being smashed. Warren held the second warder with an arm wrenched behind his back and the muzzle of the Colt rammed into the man’s neck, and had forced him to the locked and barred door, where he was threatening the guard behind it with death to his colleague if the door was not opened.
Dobbs watched his screen for several frozen moments. Then he punched his Grade One Emerge
ncy button and, with barely a thought for his safety, rushed out of his office. By the time he reached a viewpoint on a catwalk, men were spewing out of the opened dining-room and through the main hall towards the doors to the exercise yard, several of them now with warders’ guns in their hands and firing indiscriminately into the air. Detached from them, coming up the stairs towards Dobbs, was Arsenio, his eyes calm and with even a hint of amusement in them, the crook of his arm around Briggs’s neck, his PSM in the back of the man’s head as he forced him forward.
‘This is total madness,’ the Governor called out, realizing as he shouted them the futility of his words. ‘You’ll never get away with it.’
Arsenio stopped a short way from him. ‘Get back into your office and call the guards off the walls,’ he told him.
‘I can’t do that.’
The Venezuelan was not a man to waste words. He put a bullet through Briggs’s forearm. As the man screamed in pain, Arsenio said flatly, ‘Next time it’s his cock, all right? Unman the guard posts, Mr Dobbs.’
‘The police, the army, they’re already on their way. You haven’t a chance. Nobody will even get out of here, never mind off the island.’
‘So call off the guards. Or maybe you want to see this one a eunuch and the rest mangled – or dead?’
Dobbs sighed heavily. Illusions, when they died – and they frequently did in this business – died hard. He had been utterly convinced that in Cruz Conde he had a reformed character on his hands, a man who one day in the distant future, paroled, might make a decent contribution to society.
‘I’ll call off the guards,’ he said.
In his cell, Arsenio allowed Briggs to clumsily bandage his left hand, which was streaming blood, then he tied both of the warder’s hands behind his back with a strip of linen previously torn from a bed sheet for that purpose. He had used another strip to fashion a makeshift strap for his guitar. Slinging the guitar over his back, he ordered Briggs to walk in front of his pistol. They started off down into the madness raging below them.
