Hunter Killer (17 page)

Galaid switched from English to Arabic and continued spewing a stream of obscenities at the front door. Danny breathed out very slowly, feeling his breath hot and wet under the paper mask.
Stay still. Stay calm. Trust that you’ve set the charge correctly. The blast won’t reach you in here . . .

After thirty seconds, his target fell silent. The feet changed direction again. Danny saw the bottom of a plastic supermarket bag swinging as Galaid finally walked out of the room.

Danny’s body grew even tenser. From the kitchen, he heard the sound of units being opened and slammed shut. Galaid barked another word, again in Arabic.

Silence.

What was he doing? Pouring himself a glass of
fucking
soya milk? Or was he moving into the bathroom? Danny pictured the bare wires of the device in the cistern. There was a chance that he’d detonate the whole thing simply by sitting down.

Or perhaps he was staring at the bathroom door, wondering why it was now open when he had left it closed.

He gripped his weapon a little harder. If it came down to it, and Galaid twigged that something was up, Danny would have to deal with this the old-fashioned way.

Hammerstone wouldn’t like it, but Hammerstone weren’t on the ground . . .

A noise. Liquid. Gushing. It took a couple of seconds for Danny to understand what he was hearing. It was the sound of Sarim Galaid pissing thunderously against the porcelain.

Danny silently cursed. From the sound of it he was taking a piss, not a shit as he’d expected. There was always a chance that the filthy fucker wouldn’t flush.

A burst in Danny’s ear. Spud. Pissed off. ‘Mucker, what the
hell’s
going down?’

Danny didn’t reply.

The gushing stopped.

Five seconds passed.

‘Mucker, you need to respond or I’m coming in.’

Ten.

What was happening?

Danny felt his breath trembling. He tried to picture the scene in the bathroom. Was Galaid still in there? Maybe Danny should just burst through and throw him against the toilet, let the impact do its work . . .

It would put him in the line of the blast, but Galaid would surely absorb the shrapnel . . .

He started to move.

The paper suit rustled again.

He emerged from under the bed, and for a moment saw a silhouette pass in front of the floral curtains.

Spud?

‘Stay away,’ Danny hissed. ‘It’s under control . . .’

No reply.

‘
Stay away!
’

And then, without warning, it happened.

The explosion was a short sharp crack. Loud, certainly, but there was no boom or echo. Danny felt the floorboards beneath him vibrate with the detonation. He heard a shower of shrapnel pelting the walls of the bathroom. A shock wave almost topped him and a lump of plaster fell from the ceiling a metre to his right.

Then silence.

Danny felt for his rucksack. If everything had gone according to plan, he didn’t want to trail bloody footprints back across the flat. He pushed himself to his feet, shouldered the rucksack and held his gun firmly with two hands. Just because the device had exploded, it didn’t mean Galaid was there when it happened. There was a thick cloud of dust in the second reception, and Danny could hear a high-pitched hissing sound. He could still see the door frame of the kitchen, but inside was dark and obscured. He edged forward. The hissing sound grew louder. In the kitchen, the floor was damp. The paper shoes of his SOCO suit crunched over shards of porcelain. The glass pane in the kitchen door had shattered outwards. The bathroom door was open. Danny lit his torch again and looked inside.

His makeshift Claymore had worked like a dream. Through the darkness and the smoke, Danny saw that the cistern itself was completely destroyed. The hissing noise came from the twisted inlet pipe that was spurting a tight jet of water up on to the ceiling. But the real devastation was on the floor.

Sarim Galaid had clearly been facing the cistern when it blew. Now he was on his back, feet at the toilet end, head at the door end. At least, what was left of him was.

The exploding cistern had ripped out the core of the bomber’s groin and abdomen. Where there was once a stomach, there was now just a bleeding cavity. A thick, jagged shard of ceramic jutted out of where the corpse’s bollocks once were, and although the heart had clearly already stopped, a thick slurry of blood, gastric juices and semi-digested food oozed from the catastrophic wound. Water from the spraying inlet pipe caused rivulets of pink to smear over the tiled floor.

Galaid’s face was unrecognisable. Shrapnel had peppered it, and proximity to the explosive charge had burned away the skin. The eye sockets were weeping blood. His hair had been burned away. He was nothing more than a smouldering, bleeding piece of meat.

Danny stared at him for a moment. For some reason he found himself thinking about Clara. About finishing with her because he knew that in the days that followed, death would be his constant companion. Looked like he’d been right.

He’d seen enough. He trod carefully back into the kitchen where he started to remove his SOCO suit, though for the moment he kept the gloves, mask and hairnet on. As he shoved the paper suit back into the bag, he heard a thumping noise from the front door – neighbours, probably, wanting to find out what had happened. He spoke into the radio. ‘Spud, is that you?’

‘Negative,’ Spud replied tersely. ‘I’m at the end of the street. You’ve got two coppers and a neighbour banging on the door. You need to get out of there, mucker.’

The thumping on the front door grew louder.

‘RV at the car,’ Danny said.

He trod over to the kitchen door, checking over his shoulder that he hadn’t left footprints. All clear. He clambered through the shattered pane of the kitchen door and jumped outside into the garden. Only then did he remove the remainder of his SOCO gear. He stuffed it in his rucksack, then ran down the overgrown garden.

There was a rickety, two-metre-high wooden fence at the end of the garden. Several panels damaged. Danny scaled it with ease and landed with a thump in a weed-strewn, litter-strewn alleyway. He looked both ways. Deserted. He ran north. Thirty-five metres to the end of the alleyway. Thunder cracked overhead. Heavy droplets of rain started to fall.

He reached the end of the alleyway and found himself in the road where, several hours previously, he’d collected pizza flyers from the parked cars. He caught sight of Spud, standing on the opposite side of the street, his expression darker than the sky. Danny nodded. From the direction they needed to go came the sound of sirens. Instinctively, Danny and Spud walked the opposite way. After thirty seconds, Danny crossed the road and fell in beside his mate.

‘Been busy?’ Spud asked from between gritted teeth.

‘Spotted an opportunity,’ Danny said. ‘Grabbed it.’

‘Feel like telling me what happened?’

Danny sniffed. ‘Put it this way,’ he said. ‘If that Abu Ra’id cunt wants to blow up London again, he’ll need to find another bomber.’

Her name wasn’t really Nicki, of course. The lustrous curly hair was false and she would never normally wear so much lipstick or eyeliner that it made her look like a Western whore. And it went without saying that she did not find her gullible victim remotely attractive. Quite the opposite. He made her flesh creep with his strange features and lecherous glances. But as Abu Ra’id had said: in war, sacrifices have to be made. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, and across the Muslim world, the British and American monsters had targeted the weak and the helpless. So why shouldn’t
they
use the weak and helpless in their retaliations?

She looked up ahead. Police officers at the corner of Lower Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus. Four of them, in high-visibility jackets. After Paddington, the sight of an Arabic woman, a Down’s syndrome man and a suitcase would surely arouse suspicion.

‘Let’s cross here,’ she suggested.

He looked a bit confused, but of course he agreed.

Hand in hand, they crossed the road and stepped into Norris Street, a quieter back street just south of Piccadilly Circus.

‘I like the arcade machines,’ she said once they were away from the busy main streets. ‘Shall we go and play them?’ And then, when he looked suddenly worried: ‘My treat!’

He grinned at her. They turned a corner. Another main road was up ahead and she saw two more police officers, a man and a woman, walking towards them. Her pulse raced. She had hoped she wouldn’t have to do this, but now there was no choice. She stopped, pinned him against the wall and pressed her lips to his. She felt his tongue, wet and warm, twitching in her mouth. An unpleasant bulge in his trousers.

The police officers passed. She pulled away and saw his foolishly grinning face.

‘That was nice,’ she said.

Two minutes later, still hand in hand, they entered the Trocadero. It was very crowded, even at this hour. They walked past outlets selling brightly coloured sweeties, royal-family plates and tacky models of red London buses. They stood close to each other on the escalator as it carried them down into the basement. Here, the air was filled with the pinging and beeping and roaring of the arcades. Kids stood shooting light guns at imaginary foes. Others sat in arcade cars, speeding round imaginary racetracks. She pointed at an empty car and tugged at his sleeve. ‘Let’s go on that,’ she said.

Dragging the suitcase behind him, he followed her to the car.

‘You go first,’ she said.

Obediently, he propped the suitcase up next to the car and climbed inside. She fed a pound coin into the machine and watched his pitifully malcoordinated attempt at playing the game, which was over in 45 seconds.

Dude, you caused a pile-up
, said the machine in a robotic voice.

‘You’re really good,’ she cooed, and she inserted another pound coin. She was aware of a couple of kids loitering nearby, coiled up with suppressed laughter at his strange looks and ineptitude on the arcade.

‘Thank you,’ he said. And then, after a moment’s thought, he blurted out the word: ‘Darling.’

She cringed, and smiled.

When his second go was over, she whispered in his ear, allowing her lips to brush lightly against him. ‘I need to get some more change.’ That look of panic again. She whispered in his ear: ‘We’ll spend a bit more time here, then go back to your place.’

And, of course, he nodded.

‘Will you look after my overnight bag?’ she asked.

He nodded again. Disgusted, she wondered if he might actually start drooling.

‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ she said. ‘Darling.’

She walked towards the escalator. Only when she was at the top did she look back down. The lairy kids had surrounded his car. They were pointing at him and laughing, no doubt as much at his strange looks as at his hopelessness on the arcade. More fool them. She turned her back on them and hurried out of the Trocadero, past the buses and tea towels and sweets, and out into the street. The sky was very dark. Thunder was in the air. She crossed the road and pulled a mobile phone from her coat. She walked briskly as she pressed speed dial number one.

There was no point listening for the ringtone, because she knew there wouldn’t be one. There would just be the explosion, and she braced herself for that.

She was at least thirty metres from the Trocadero’s entrance when it came, but it nearly knocked her from her feet nonetheless. The ground seemed to shake, and the boom seemed to reverberate against the high walls of Shaftesbury Avenue. She fell against another pedestrian – a woman in a blue raincoat, whose expression changed in an instant from annoyance to terror.

As the boom subsided, there was a moment of almost-silence. As though London was holding its breath.

And then a thunderclap cracked overhead. Like an echo of the explosion. Huge droplets of rain spattered on to the pavement. She hurried south, a faceless figure in the faceless crowds, as the desperate screams from the direction of the Trocadero reached her ears.

Nine

‘You should have told me what you were doing, mucker. That’s all I’m saying.’

Spud wasn’t the type to lose his rag, but he was close to it now. For some reason, Danny didn’t care. He was tense. Maybe an argument would do him good.

‘I was thinking on my feet. That’s all
I’m
saying.’

Spud glared at him from the passenger seat and Danny suddenly felt bad about himself. His mate was right. It was one of the first things they’d learned – never do something by yourself, if you don’t have to.

Chastened, he said: ‘Okay. Point taken.’ And to cover the uncomfortable pause that followed: ‘Fucking traffic. What the hell’s going on?’ They were nose to tail down Fulham Palace Road. It was pissing down and the other drivers were getting lairy. Danny switched on the car radio, wondering if it was too early for there to be any news of his morning’s work.

There was news all right. Just not what they expected. They listened in horror as fragments of information filtered through the breathless reports of harried journalists.
Massive explosion . . . scenes of devastation in the West End . . . scores feared dead . . .