by Chris Ryan
‘Fucking move!’ he yelled at Bald as he sprinted down the trail. ‘Let’s go!’
Bald sprang into action. The two Blades hurtled towards the main road, racing past the wooded area to their left, their legs scrambling for purchase on the rain-swept track. Two hundred and fifty metres from the telephone box, Porter heard the agonised screams of the wounded splitting the air. He quickened his stride, running for all he was worth, ignoring the savage pain between his temples and the burning in his leg muscles.
As he drew closer to the road he tasted the acrid tang of blood and burning metal in the air, and the pungent stench of charred human flesh filled his nostrils. He could see the gusts of smoke swirling across the road, blocking his view of the car park. He could hear the shattered glass from the Storey Arms as it showered the tarmac, making a noise like thousands of coins being spat out of a slot machine. A little further on the smoke had cleared and he spotted the pools of blood glistening on the tarmac on the other side of the road. He saw the twisted bodies of the dead sprawled on the ground, and the twisted metal carcass of the car, still churning black smoke into the air. Porter and Bald ran on.
They were two hundred metres from the phone box when the gunfire started.
FOURTEEN
0720 hours.
Ten seconds after the initial blast, the five masked gunmen burst out of the front of the Storey Arms and fanned out across the driveway. They moved quickly but calmly across the road, brandishing their AK-47 assault rifles. Shattered glass crunching under their boots, smoke swirling around their ankles as they headed towards the car park. Towards the screams, and the wounded soldiers.
They had sixty seconds.
Deeds led the way. The car park was carnage. He could feel the heat from the blast as he approached, the sweat sliding down his brow under his ski mask. The temperature at ground zero was a million degrees. It was like walking into a furnace, and Deeds found it hard to believe that anyone could have survived such a massive explosion. But as he crossed the road he noticed a few survivors amid the body parts and the charred corpses. Those closest to the Mondeo had been literally ripped apart. There was nothing left of them except chunks of blackened flesh and ruptured organs like diced meat on a chopping board. The instructors and their mates on the SP team had been further away from the blast. Some of the SAS operators had been cut down by the vicious hail of shrapnel that accompanied the bomb. Others were lying on the ground, disorientated and groggy, their hands and feet covered in blood.
Deeds turned his attention to an operator lying on his side. The guy was easily identifiable in his mixture of civvies and combat fatigues, and his thick beard and military Gore-Tex jacket. The guys on the SP team were the only soldiers carrying pistols. Which made them more of a threat, Deeds knew. The students had nothing but SLRs chambered with blank rounds. And the instructors were defenceless. But the SP team operators had pistols loaded with live ammo. They could shoot back. Deeds and the Serbs had taken that into account when planning the attack. After the bomb, go for the SP team first. Neutralise the biggest threat.
The operator lying in front of Deeds was in a bad way. His stomach had been torn open and his bowels were spilling out in front of him, like a bulging inner tube out of a slashed car tyre. The guy was desperately trying to shove his vitals back inside his stomach. Deeds coolly approached the wounded operator and thumbed the safety selector on the side of the AK-47 to ‘J’. The AK was an old Yugoslav army variant and the ‘J’ indicated the semi-automatic fire setting. The rifle felt good in his grip. Sturdy. Deeds had thirty rounds in the mag, plus two spare clips in his back pockets, giving him ninety rounds of 7.62x39mm brass. More than enough to get the job done and slot the remaining soldiers.
Deeds lowered the AK-47 so that the rear sight notch and front sighting post were trained directly at the operator’s head. The guy looked up at Deeds. Not pleading. Not begging for his life. He didn’t say anything. He just blinked in some sort of vague acceptance that he was into the last seconds of his life. Then Deeds depressed the trigger. The barrel lit up. The operator spasmed violently. Blood spat out of a hole in the back of his head in a furious red spray, like someone had just shaken a bottle of Dom Perignon then popped the cork. He was still falling away as Deeds turned his attention to the next target.
He caught sight of a heavily-bleeding soldier lying five or six metres away, slumped against the side of one of the Range Rovers. The guy was reaching down to his thigh holster and fumbling with his Sig. Deeds arced the AK-47 towards the guy. The operator raised his hands.
‘Are you going to kill me?’ the man croaked.
‘Yes, chief.’
Deeds gave him a three-round burst to the chest before he could retrieve his pistol. The operator slumped backwards like a marionette with all the strings cut. His right leg twitched. Deeds paced over to him and put another round between his eyes for good measure. His leg stopped twitching.
Across the car park the other four gunmen were putting down the other survivors with sharp bursts, slotting the wounded where they lay. The air was quickly filled with the incessant crack of rifle reports and the chink of spent jackets as they spat out of ejectors and tumbled to the asphalt, and the groans of the dying. Some of the wounded students tried to drag themselves away from the car park in a desperate attempt to escape the killing frenzy. The gunmen dropped them in quick succession. They were merciless.
Deeds saw one instructor staggering towards a Volkswagen Golf that had stopped fifty or so metres to the north of the car park. It was easy to spot the instructors. They were older than the students, and they weren’t wearing the mini-belt kits issued to soldiers taking Selection. Some of the instructors even wore their SAS berets. This guy’s leg was in rag order. He shouted at the terrified woman behind the wheel, screaming for help. Deeds lined up the instructor’s back and let rip. The first two rounds thumped into his spine. The third punched into the nape of his neck and the fourth took out a chunk of his scalp. The guy dropped a couple of metres from the Golf, blood and brain matter spattering the bonnet. His beret fell to the ground beside him. From behind the wheel, Deeds heard the woman screaming as she hit the deck.
Thirty seconds to go. From across the road Deeds heard a loud rumble as Stankovic sparked up the getaway vehicle. Four seconds later, the white Transit van rolled out of the parking area to the side of the Storey Arms and turned left out of the driveway. A sign painted on the side of the van read ‘Newport Plumbing and Heating Solutions Ltd’. The Transit veered onto the main road and then jerked to a halt seventy metres away from Deeds and the four Serbs. Engine racing, ready to bounce south as soon as the gunmen finished executing the remaining soldiers.
Three seconds after that, the two Regiment men raced into view at the telephone box.
FIFTEEN
0721 hours.
Porter saw the gunmen as he bolted forward. There were five of them, spread out in a wide arc across the car park, forty metres downstream from the red phone box. They wore black ski masks but Porter recognised two of them from their Gore-Tex jackets and trousers. The ramblers who’d raced down the side of the Fan. Tank was the nearest of the gunmen. He was putting down rounds on the Volkswagen to the right of the phone box, fifty metres from Bald and Porter. Goatee stood three metres further back, pissing bullets at the wounded students.
The other three gunmen were dressed in matching black fatigues. They were all clutching AK-47s and unloading their clips into anything that moved.
A third gunmen stood near to Tank and Goatee, a bulky guy wearing a pair of scuffed white Nike trainers. The guy was moving swiftly over to Bob McCanliss. Porter saw the chief instructor crawling along the tarmac. The lower half of his left leg had been blown clean off and there was a trail of glistening blood behind him. Nike rolled McCanliss over onto his front and drew the AK level with his face. McCanliss screamed something at the gunman. Nike fired twice, blowing McCanliss’s brains out.
The gunman spun away from McCanliss as he
spied Bald and Porter rushing towards the road. In a blur of motion Nike brought his weapon to bear and pulled the trigger. Porter turned and shouted at Bald.
‘Get down! GET FUCKING DOWN!’
There was a waist-high stone wall next to the phone box. Porter threw himself forward, diving for cover behind the wall just as the AK-47 muzzle flashed. Bald dived behind a separate section of the wall as the first rounds hit and ricocheted off the stone, spitting dust and stone fragments into the air. The gunman let off another sharp three-round burst. Bald cursed under his breath as the bullets slapped into the wall no more than six inches above his head.
‘Where did the rest of these bastards come from?’ he spat.
There was a brief lull in the gunfire. Porter peered out from the side of the wall and looked towards the Storey Arms. The front door was hanging open. So that’s where the gunmen were hiding, he realised. His mind hadn’t been playing tricks on him. They’d been holed up inside the building all along. Down the road from the Storey Arms he spied the white Transit van, eighty metres from their position and parallel to the far end of the car park. The two gunmen nearest to the Transit were already racing over to the van. Another ten or fifteen seconds, Porter realised, and the shooters would be gone.
They had to act now. Porter snapped back behind cover as Nike unleashed another three-round burst at the wall. He heard the bullets glancing off the stone pile. Then he heard Nike shouting at the other gunmen, alerting them to the two Blades across the road. Nike turned away from the car park and raced towards Tank and Goatee. The two other gunmen were emptying their clips into the wounded soldiers. A few of the students were still alive. Some were screaming in pain. Others were trying to drag themselves away from the shooting. Porter looked back to Bald.
‘We’ve got to get the drop on this lot,’ he said urgently.
Bald nodded. ‘You just read my mind, mate.’
The Jock had already retrieved his Sig Sauer P226 from its holster. Now Bald thumbed the decocker on the right-hand side of the receiver and manually cocked the hammer. There was no safety mechanism on the Sig, just a decocker that varied how much pressure you needed to apply to the trigger to discharge a round. With the decocker off and the hammer cocked, Bald would only need to give the trigger the slightest squeeze in order to loose off a round. Porter watched him ready his weapon and wished to God that he had his own tool to hand. We’re going up against five heavily-armed gunmen, and I don’t even have a fucking pea-shooter.
Beyond the wall, the two ramblers brought up their weapons and loosed off a pair of three-round bursts. The first three bullets struck the wall. The second grouping whizzed over Porter’s head and hit the telephone box, shattering the glass panels and ricocheting off the phone unit in a mad flurry of sparks. Bald waited for another lull in the fire. Then he rolled out of cover to the right of the wall, his weapon drawn in a firm two-handed grip with his support hand resting under the left side of the slider and his left thumb pointing forward to help him line up his target. In the same instant Porter glanced around his section of the wall, giving him a line of sight to the ramblers. He saw Nike on a knee in the middle of the road. The guy had hurried over to the two ramblers. Three gunmen were now focused on Bald and Porter while the other two guys were on mopping-up duty. Nike was slapping a fresh mag into his AK-47. Porter watched him and worked the angles. From the stone wall to the gunmen was a distance of maybe forty-five metres. The Sig had a maximum effective range of fifty metres. Bald was operating right on the threshold.
Nike had almost finished reloading his AK-47. He had the clip fully inserted. He tugged on the charging handle, chambering the first round. Then he shot to his feet, raised the assault rifle so that it was level with his shoulder and peered down the sighting post.
Just in time to see Bald pull the trigger.
The Sig fired twice. Bald’s aim was surgical, the result of thousands of hours he’d spent on the ranges. The first round of 9x19mm Parabellum hit Nike square in the groin. The guy jerked back, howling in agony. Blood splashed across his trousers. The second round thumped into his neck, sending Nike into a tailspin. He dropped like his body was weighed down with lead. His weapon tumbled from his grip, clattering to the ground next to his slack frame, the blood pooling around him and mixing with the hard rain.
One down, Porter thought. Four left to kill.
Tank saw what was happening and swung his AK-47 towards the wall. Bald and Porter ducked behind cover as Tank depressed the trigger. Rounds hammered against the stone pile in a relentless staccato rhythm. Porter counted the shots. One, two, three.
Four, five, six.
There was a break in the rifle reports. From the other side of the road Porter heard voices shouting. He peered over the wall. Saw the Transit eighty metres away. The other two gunmen finished emptying their clips into a couple of wounded students crawling across the car park. They heard the getaway driver shouting at them and then turned and bolted towards the Transit. One of the gunmen made for the back doors while the other guy laid out a line of traffic spikes widthways across the road, five or six metres behind the Transit. If any cop cars tried chasing after the gunmen, the spikes would slash open their tyres and put the brakes on their pursuit.
The first gunman popped the back doors and climbed inside the van. The second gunman finished setting up the spikes and joined him. They started shouting at Tank and Goatee, frantically beckoning them over. The ramblers took the hint. They turned and started making a run for it. Porter reckoned they were forty metres from the Transit, maybe forty-five. With the ramblers’ backs turned Bald now sprang out from behind cover and drew his Sig level with the nearest target. Goatee. He aimed for the torso, the largest centre of mass. At forty metres a hit wasn’t a sure thing. Bald fired twice. The first shot missed, sparking off the tarmac like a matchstick striking against the side of a box. The second round smashed into Goatee’s left leg just above the knee joint, punching through his flesh and shattering his femur. A mist of blood and shattered bone spat out of the wound. Goatee howled in pain and crumpled to the ground.
Tank stopped. Dropped to a knee beside his mucker and put down a quick burst at Bald and Porter. His aim was off. The rounds landed short, slapping into the wet turf and throwing up fists of dirt. Goatee was writhing in agony on the ground beside Tank, squealing like a stuck pig as he tried to staunch the flow of blood from the trauma wound to his leg. There wasn’t a great deal of blood, which meant the bullet hadn’t severed the femoral artery. Bald fired again. Once. Missed.
The getaway driver panicked. He gunned the engine and the tyres screeched as the Transit began pulling away from the Storey Arms. Tank glanced over his shoulder and saw what was happening. He let off another frantic burst at the wall then spun away and raced after the van. But the Transit was too far ahead and picking up speed. In a matter of seconds the van was sledding south on the A470, hurtling into the distance, leaving Tank and Goatee behind in a trail of exhaust fumes. Tank hesitated, his head darting urgently left and right as he searched for another escape route. Then he hurried over to the four-tonners. They were parked up in a line at the far end of the car park. The windows were shattered and the paintwork covered in dust and smoke, but otherwise the four army trucks had survived the bombing.
‘Move it!’ Bald shouted. ‘NOW!’
He leapt over the wall. Porter followed hard on his heels. The two Blades surged across the road. Ahead of them Goatee had struggled to his feet. He was limping towards the four-tonners. Hobbling after Tank. His trouser leg glistening with blood. Porter dropped down beside Nike’s limp body and grabbed the AK-47. The weapon felt good, and heavy. Porter knew the AK-47 was fully loaded. He’d seen Nike seat a fresh mag in the rifle right before Bald sent him over to the dark side. There were thirty rounds of 7.62x39mm brass in an AK-47 mag. Throw in the nine rounds Bald had in the Sig, and they had enough firepower to take down the two gunmen. They had the two ramblers trapped in the car park, with nowhere left to run.
>
Now we’re in fucking business.
A huge cloud of smoke was still pouring across the car park. The air was thick with the stench of cordite and burnt plastic, fusing with the hot stink of blood. Porter could hardly breathe. His eyes watered. His throat burned. Everywhere he looked he could see body parts and splashes of blood. Some of the dead students were on fire. Others had been ripped apart by the sheer force of the explosion. Arms had been torn from their sockets. Faces sucked inwards. Bowels slashed open by pieces of shrapnel. In the corner of his eye Porter noticed Kinsella sprawled like a rag doll on the tarmac. His torso had been severed at the waist. His intestines were slopping out of the ruptured stump where his legs had once been.
Up ahead Goatee glanced over his shoulder. Saw Bald and Porter tearing towards him, and hesitated. He glanced back at the trucks. Like he was measuring the distances. Weighing up whether his best bet was to make a run for it, or stand and fight. Goatee chose the second option.
Bad call.
Goatee trained his AK-47 at the onrushing Blades and let rip. Flames spat out of the rifle snout. Hot lead spattered the ground inches from Bald and Porter. They scrambled for cover behind the Range Rovers parked fifteen metres further back, closer to the main road. They ducked behind the front and rear wheels as a volley of bullets hammered against the bodywork. Like a thousand hammers banging against a lead pipe. Then the shooting stopped. Porter looked up. Spied Goatee kneeling by the front of the army truck, gritting his teeth through the pain as he shunted a new clip into the AK-47. Porter shrank back from view as he put down a furious burst of gunfire at the Range Rover. There was a deafening clatter as bullets punched through the vehicle, shattering the glass and pinballing through the chassis.
