Thunder (4 page)

Another crackle, “Blue Section ready.” Blue section were the rear sniper team, covering alleyways for ‘runners’.

“Orange Section also ready, ma’am,” the rest of her team, her own snipers, were assembled up and down the main road behind her.

She thumbed her transmit key. “Okay boys and girls, let’s get this done. On my mark. GO, GO, GO!”

She stepped smoothly to one side and two officers standing behind her swung around with their two-man battering ram and smashed the door inwards. The force of the blow was so severe, and the door so flimsy, that it clattered inwards, pulled clean off its upper hinges.

She ran in.

The house appeared to be the same layout as next door, exactly how the helpful neighbours had described it, so she rushed forwards into the narrow hallway with her two colleagues in close support. Her second team pounded up the facing staircase alongside her.

She could hear yelling from both up and downstairs.

In front of her, she could see Red Section flooding into the simple kitchen-come-dining room which traversed the width of the back of the house. The front-room doorway, alongside her, was closed.

“Ready?” she barked at her squad.

The two officers nodded and moved into position. One braced himself behind the second while she readied her weapon and directed it toward the door. Then the foremost officer jumped up and kicked the door inwards with both ‘Size Nines’.

As she burst into the room she was just conscious of the sound of smashing glass from upstairs, but she ignored it because in the middle of the room in front of her was a deeply tanned man...

He was standing, open mouthed, with a big bag of half-eaten crisps scattered roughly all over the carpet to one side of him. His jeans and stain-ridden boxer shorts were round his ankles. One hand was clutched around a battered porno magazine. His cock hung limply from the other. Thankfully, his upper torso was still adorned in a heavily creased and dirty orange tee-shirt which had a big smiley logo plastered over the front of it and the word ‘Peace’ printed in capitals beneath.

She grimaced in disgust.

“HANDS ON YOUR HEAD, AND ON YOUR KNEES! NOW!” she roared, brandishing downwards with her rifle.

The man fell to his knees, rapidly discarding both his girlfriends and his genitals. “I’m innocent!” he shouted in badly accented English. “This is a fit-up. I claim racial discrimination!”

“Read him his rights,” she said to her colleagues as they bundled in behind her. “And, remember, as much as we might want to, don’t lay a finger on Mister
Wanker
. Okay?”

Her two officers nodded and she moved swiftly back out into the hallway and round to the foot of the stairs. Looking upwards, another black-suited officer appeared on the landing. “One secure up here, ma’am,” he shouted. “The other jumped out of the back window.”

She rushed to the back of the house and out through the smashed kitchen door. Another man – short and overweight – wearing jeans and a light sports jacket – was rolling around on a small patch of weed-ridden, overgrown, grass. Red Section were standing around him, apparently using heavy swings of their boots to verify whether their suspect had injured himself during the fall.

“OFFICERS!” she shouted. “That’s not the kind of behaviour I expect from my team! Do none of you know how to properly restrain a suspect?”

The policemen all glanced over at her and, seizing this opportunity, the suspect rolled over and leapt to his feet, brandishing a hitherto hidden pistol in his hand. The dark metal object rose swiftly and she reacted instantly: racing forwards and viciously smashing the butt of her rifle into the side of the man’s head.

With a slightly sickening crunching sound, and a longer lasting residual twitching, the suspect collapsed sideways and prostrate himself obediently on the ground.

She casually kicked the now-latent weapon away from his hand.

“That’s how you do it,” she said impassively.

The officers nodded respectfully and several of them thought quietly to themselves, ‘Too right. Don’t go messing with Chief Superintendent Sharinda ‘Shaz’ Manjeethra.’

~~~~~

“They’ve caught three of them, Nick.” One of the nurses is buzzing around my bed. Checking drips and the various other mysterious objects dangling off my arms. “Got them yesterday evening. It’s been all over the news.” She looks up at me from the foot of the bed where she’s fussing with my sheets for no apparent reason – there’s no way it’s me that’s messing the sheets up, I’ve got so much plaster all over me I’d have to be bloody Arnold Schwarzenegger to lift any of my limbs – I think she just wants to see if the news makes me happy.

I nod gently and make a weak grunting sound.

My voice sounds so deep.

~~~~~

“So what are our options?” asked the tall, slim, Savile Row suited man from the head of the table. His question was met with silence, despite the presence of the dozen or so other men and women sitting in attendance along the table’s long, sheer-gloss polished, mahogany sides.

He waited patiently.

Eventually one of the attendants ventured, “There aren't many, I’m afraid, sir. With help from MI6, we think we have confirmed the identities of the four remaining Turkmen nationals involved in the cell. They are all ‘known suspects’ to both the Turkmen and Afghan intelligence agencies but they have escaped into Europe. They were well organised and left via different airports – one via the channel tunnel – shortly before the event itself. By the time we’d closed the ports down, it was already too late.”

“Cowards,” someone muttered to an approving audience of nods from around the table.

“The three we’ve arrested? The UK nationals?” The tall man asked.

“Locally recruited at some point. Probably whilst children in Turkmenistan and before they relocated to the UK. One was born and bred here but has a distant relative on his mother’s side. They probably just got caught up in the excitement of feeling part of something more interesting than another day in the Benefits Queue.”

“Hmmm,” responded the suit.

“They were responsible for local facilities, supplies, etcetera. It’s unlikely they were directly engaged in the attack itself. They were more of a ground support unit.”

“Will we be able to prosecute them for mass murder?”

“We’ll do our best, Mr. Prime Minister, but concrete evidence is proving tricky to secure. Furthermore, one of them is still recovering in hospital from the head wound he sustained during the arrest.”

“Well, I trust you will all do your very best. Nonetheless, together with the rest of the British public, I am furious about this. If there’s
anything else
that can be done to bring the bombers to justice then I want it done. As far as possible this should be by normal means and anything else must absolutely be at arm’s length. Even if that means that neither I, nor anyone else, will get any satisfaction from the knowledge that it’s happened. Do you
understand
what I’m saying?”

The men and women nodded wordlessly.

“For the time being, we’ll concentrate on the three we have in custody, sir.”

“Very good. Someone draft something banal to serve as a record of this meeting.” The Prime Minister rose from the table and left the heads of every major security agency to consider their options.

One of the group – a powerfully built, bull of a man – rose quietly from his chair at the far end of the table and made for the door. On his way out, he glanced across at the Heads of MI5 and the Counter Terrorism Unit who were sitting beside each other, about half way along the table. Both deliberately caught his eye. Sufficient acknowledgement for his purposes.

Striding powerfully down the corridor, toward the gloss black door of Number 10, he pulled his cellphone out of his jacket pocket and skimmed down his contacts list. Stepping outside into the misty-grey summer drizzle he could see the usual gaggle of press clustered under their colourful umbrellas on the opposite side of the street, so he turned immediately left and headed along the narrow footpath to Whitehall and then north toward Embankment. By now, the phone was pressed to his ear and he could hear ringing.

The ringing stopped.

“This is Sentinel. Are they ready?”

“At least one is,” came the reply.

“Well, time’s up. Activate them all. Let’s see whether your little experiment will work in practice.”

“Target?”

“Not on this line....” The bull hung up and continued striding toward his tiny nondescript offices further along the Thames.

~~~~~

Mum is crying again.

I reach up gently, lifting the various tubes which trail from my arm, to place my left hand on the side of her downturned face – it’s about the only movement I can make – and she lifts her face toward me. Mascara is making dirty rivulets down her cheeks. Her charcoal grey eyes are red-rimmed. I hate seeing her like this, but I must probably look the same.

I am crying too.

“It was a lovely service,” she is saying. “The whole village came out and the vicar made a wonderful sermon about the gift of life. About how much joy the two of them brought to those who met them. About how much joy they brought to you...,” and she’s consumed with another wracking sob.

I nod and grunt, I hope encouragingly.

“They buried them together in a simple plot in the graveyard. Very unusual nowadays, for graves to be set aside within the main church grounds,” that’s more like mum – rambling around, getting off subject – but this isn’t some pleasant chat, is it? Not when your mum is having to tell you about your family’s last journey together. Not when she has to tell you because you’re still utterly immobile and couldn’t be there yourself. “The vicar said he’d made arrangements for you.” She stops again for a moment. “You know... For when it’s your time... To be together again...”

It’s too much for her. Her shoulders are lurching under my hand but I need to hear this now. In one go. I need her to get it over with. I grunt again and she seems to steel herself.

“The coffins were both so tiny,” she says quietly. “We did as you asked, and gave the things to the undertaker.” I’d written down the objects I wanted buried alongside the scant human remains recovered from the scene. Precious objects that I knew they’d want to be with for eternity. My beloved Iuli would never be without the necklace I had presented on the first day we had shared and then nervously whispered our love to each other. My daughter would have her most treasured possession, her little teddy. She could never sleep unless she had it clutched tightly in her tiny arms... She used to suckle on his nose...

God, this hurts.

Sleep well, Elizabeth. Cuddle up with Teddy. This cruel world can’t touch you any more.

No nightmares, my little Princess.

~~~~~

Cordova, Spain

“Forty-two, Forty-three...”

Shoulder length brown hair, mottled with blonder naturally sun-bleached highlights rose up above the lounge table top. Then disappeared again.

“Forty-four...”

Jack Vittalle, born Dominic Millerstone, glanced to his left as he pushed himself upwards on powerful arms and broad shoulders and his deep forest-green eyes spied the full can of beer sitting, unopened, on the edge of the coffee table.

“Forty-five...”

He’d let himself have it at one hundred, he decided.

The beer was not alone on the table top. There was very little free space at all. Besides the half-empty takeaway boxes, well-thumbed magazines and a few discarded cans, the majority of the surface was occupied by a stripped down nine-millimetre Browning L9A1 pistol laid out neatly on its heavily used cleaning mat. Beyond this clutter, his plain looking but heavily encrypted cellphone sat precariously overhanging the far edge. The phone started ringing and the vibrations sent it clattering onto the bare wooden parquet floor.

“Shit!” Vittalle mumbled, scrambling round the table on all fours, still in his prone press-up position, like some enormous six foot two inch, muscle-bound toddler. He grabbed at the phone as it continued to propel itself gently across the floorboards and pressed the answer button. “Tin,” he said simply.

“Go,” said the voice and Vittalle’s already exercised heartbeat went up by about another sixty beats per minute.

“Orders?” He asked.

“In your drop box.”

The line went dead.

~~~~~

London

“So, for the record. Please explain, Chief Superintendent, why you felt it necessary to strike the suspect with the butt of your weapon?”

She knew it was procedure. A standard, internal, independent enquiry to ensure police powers were not being abused but this was becoming yet another disabuse of such protections, for the benefit of the very people she was supposed to be prosecuting.

The small, fat, bald Investigating Inspector looked across at her expectantly and in the silence she could hear the tape machine whirring on the desktop. He nodded toward the device impatiently.

“The other option was to shoot him dead,” she said coldly. “I know...,” she smiled across at the ugly pig. “I picked the wrong one.”

His face turned angry. “Chief Superintendent,” he began, with a hint of exasperation in his voice, “just the facts please, not your opinions!”

Sharinda ‘Shaz’ Manjeethra sighed to herself. “My officers were in the process of apprehending the suspect, who was lying in the back garden of the suspect’s rented property, having thrown himself out of one of the upstairs windows. He was lying face downwards when I first saw him.”

“How were your officers ‘apprehending’ him, exactly?”

She stared dispassionately at him. “He appeared to be writhing around. They were seeking suitable restraining points of contact. It would have been inhumane to grasp a broken limb, wouldn’t it?”

The look of disbelief on the man’s face was a picture. “With their boots?” he snarled.

“What are you suggesting, Inspector?” she fired back, apparently angry. “Who said anything about boots?”