State Of Emergency: (Tom Buckingham Thriller 3) (40 page)

Two of the insurgents fired at him and missed. The Englishman dropped to one knee, took careful aim and brought him down with a single shot into the centre of his body mass, then moved forward and finished him with a second to the head.

Laszlo smiled to himself and turned his attention back to the last of the houses. Once it, too, had been searched and cleared, and the occupants secured, the looting began. Food and alcohol were gathered up with as much enthusiasm as the modest treasures the villagers possessed.

Laszlo took a gulp of a fiery local spirit, then passed the
bottle among his men. One carried off a fading sepia photograph of a couple dressed for their wedding against a gaudily painted backdrop of a castle. Wanting the ornate frame but not the image it contained, he stamped down with his boot, smashing the glass and ripping the photograph to shreds. He picked out the last shards and propped the frame carefully against the trunk of the oak tree.

Another emerged from an outbuilding clutching a pair of live chickens in each hand. He wrung their necks with practised ease and added them to the growing pile of booty.

On Laszlo’s order, the attackers began to separate their male captives from the women, who wailed and keened as husbands and sons were marched and kicked towards the barn at the far edge of the village. Those who resisted were shot where they stood. The rest were herded inside and watched helplessly as its double doors were shut and barred.

Laszlo listened for a moment to the terrified shouts and cries of those trapped within, then nodded to the two men carrying the heavier weapons systems.

They staggered forwards, smashed the windows and directed searing blasts of flame into the barn’s interior. Laszlo had selected these weapons with purpose – for the physical pain endured by the dying, and the legacy of mental terror suffered by those unfortunate enough to survive.

In seconds, fuelled by the dry timbers, the hay and straw stored there, the barn was ablaze from end to end. His men stood watch as it burned, and when two villagers somehow succeeded in smashing their way through the disintegrating wall, Laszlo raised his weapon to his shoulder and dropped both targets instantly.

The terrible screams of the remaining victims were soon drowned by the roar of the flames and the crash of falling beams. As the barn collapsed in on itself, the massacre extended even to the villagers’ hounds and livestock. The cattle were burned alive with their owners or mown down by gunfire; the dogs were dispatched with a knife thrust or 7.62mm short round.

The flamethrowers now moved among the houses, pausing at each to direct a jet of blazing fluid through the doorway or a shattered window. As they moved on to the next, the one behind them became an inferno. More cries from the women captives were brutally silenced by rifle butts. The attackers showed as little mercy as the Nazis had done in this part of the world just over half a century before.

The SS’s
Flammenwerfer
, designed as an infantry weapon to clear out trenches and buildings, had become an instrument of terror when used against civilian populations. It held twelve litres of petrol mixed with tar to make it heavier and increase its range to twenty-five metres. The flaming oil was ignited by a hydrogen torch.

Flammenwerfer
operators had been so hated that the trigger and muzzle section of their weapon soon had had to be disguised to look like a standard infantry rifle in an attempt to keep them from being singled out by enemy snipers. Whole villages had been annihilated in its path. Maybe the men here today had had relatives who’d perished in their flames and the pain and fear had been passed down the generations.

Sambor, the more imposing of the operators, was Laszlo’s ‘little’ brother by just thirteen months. He had the same almost lifeless eyes and pallid complexion, but that was where the similarity ended. He had inherited the rest of his physique from his father’s family. His massive hands were twice the size of Laszlo’s, his fingers like sausages and his hulking frame topped by a riot of dark brown hair, greasy after weeks in the field, which fell to his shoulders.

A child who had somehow escaped detection stumbled out of a nearby building, coughing and choking, smoke streaming from his smouldering hair and clothes. Sambor swung the barrel of his flamethrower back towards the boy and turned him into a human torch. With an unearthly shriek, the blazing figure blundered into a wall before sliding to the ground.

As the dense black column of smoke rose high above the village, Laszlo and two of his men turned their attention to the makeshift sign. Using a piece of scrap iron as a crowbar,
they prised the old door away from the posts and pitched it through the window of a blazing house. Within seconds the flames were licking at the painted inscription. The last trace of defiance had now been obliterated, and the centuries-old village erased from the map.

As the ashes swirled around them, the insurgents gathered in the village square, surrounding the captive women. The Englishman had taken as many lives as any, but his expression betrayed nothing of his current thoughts.

Laszlo turned to him. ‘You should leave now. Unless . . .’ He gestured to the women and gave him a questioning glance. One sat silent, rocking slowly backwards and forwards as her tears carved white streaks through the dirt on her cheeks; others sobbed or pleaded with their stone-faced captors, who were already loosening their belts.

The Englishman shook his head and walked back up the hill towards the waiting trucks. Behind him he could hear a fresh chorus of wavering cries, rising and falling like sirens as the fighters began to take their reward.

Laszlo wouldn’t be taking part in what followed. It was a gift from him to his men. Or that was what he had told them. In truth, for Laszlo and the Englishman, this was the final flourish. Just as the flamethrowers spread fear among their potential victims, so did the prospect of rape; and fear, eventually, would bring compliance.

1

London

Friday, 9 September 2011

14.40 hrs

PALE SUNSHINE BATHED
the Heath, lighting up the autumn colours of the trees. Nannies clustered on benches, gossiping about their employers while their charges dozed in nearby buggies. A pair of Labradors chased each other in the meadows, deaf to the pleas of their owners, and in the distance a handful of hardy swimmers could be glimpsed braving the bathing pond’s frigid waters. Beyond the grand Victorian and Edwardian houses fringing the grassland, the sunlight glinted on the steel and glass towers of the City.

A young couple strolled along a path near the edge of the Heath, arms intertwined, oblivious to everything but each other. Without warning, four black-clad figures burst from the bushes and bundled them swiftly out of sight. Thrown headlong to the ground, the girl arched her back and tried to turn her head as a gloved hand was clamped over her mouth and her wrists were bound with zip-ties. Her eyes widened at the glimpse of matt-black weaponry and the respirator-covered faces of their captors.

The sergeant in command of the fully bombed-up assault team leaned in close. ‘Sssh. Stop flapping, hen. You’ll not be harmed.’ Known as Jockey to his mates, because of his size, and Nasty Bastard to his enemies, he knew his heavy-duty Gorbals accent and the rasp of the respirator’s filter were about as comforting as Darth Vader reading a bedtime story, so he tightened his grip and gave it to them straight. ‘Both of you – just lie fucking still and keep quiet. Understand?’

They both gave a hesitant nod.

He knelt back on his haunches, hit his pressel switch and spoke quietly into his mic. ‘Blue One. Third party secure.’

2

HALF A MILE
away, near the centre of what the locals liked to call the Village, the door of one of Hampstead’s more characterful pubs bore a sign announcing that it was ‘Closed due to illness’. Anyone peering through the leaded windows, between the immaculately sculpted flower baskets, might therefore have been surprised to find that the chairs and high-backed settles in its panelled bar were packed with people.

The landlord was perched on a stool at one end, staring wistfully through the half-drawn curtains at the procession of potential customers moving down the street.

His paintings, horse brasses and
faux
-rustic ornaments had all been taken down and stacked in a corner. In their place were massed ranks of portable flat-screens displaying live CCTV and satellite feeds, local news reports and classified video-conferences. A series of grainy A4 prints was clamped to a magnetic whiteboard, which now held pride of place. Closer inspection would reveal that they were all at least a decade out of date, and of just one man, clean-shaven and with a mop of shoulder-length dark hair, against the backdrop of a busy Moscow street.

The landlord gave an ostentatious sigh. ‘How much longer is this going to take?’

Clustered around laptops or hunched over communications equipment, his current clientele – some in street clothes, some in police uniform, others still in black Special Forces party gear – didn’t reward him with a second glance.

‘Come on, lads, I’m losing money hand over fist here.’

One of the soldiers finally raised his head. ‘It’ll take as long as it takes, mate. Maybe an hour, maybe all day. Perhaps even all fucking night. You’ll be well compensated for loss of income, so do yourself a favour, will you? Stop bumping your gums and get us another brew. Oh, and a few sandwiches and biscuits wouldn’t hurt either.’

At the table in the centre of the room, flanked by two lower-ranking officers, James Woolf of MI5 – or, as he always insisted it was called, the Security Service – sat like stone, listening to the mobile phone pressed to his ear.

Seated next to Major Ashton was a stocky West Country-born sergeant with a shock of wiry black hair. With eight years’ service in the Regiment, Gavin Marks, the 3i/c, was the same age as the boss, but hadn’t had the privilege of the same education. He’d started out as a Royal Marine, but soon seen the light. At least, that was what everyone who hadn’t joined the Regiment from the Navy kept telling him.

He spoke into his throat mic. ‘Blue One, roger that. When we get the “Go” the police will come and collect them.’

The ‘team’ consisted of two sub-teams, Red and Blue, each with an assault group and a sniper group, which meant that they could cover two incidents at once.

‘All call-signs, this is Alpha. Radio check. Blue Two?’

The speakers crackled into life.

‘Blue Two.’

‘Blue Three?’

‘Blue Three.’

‘Blue Four?’

The response this time was a double click as Blue Four squelched his radio button. As he did so, the listeners could hear the faint background noise of yapping dogs and a jet on its final descent into Heathrow.

‘Blue Five?’

Gavin glanced at the notepad in front of him. ‘Blue Five. Confirm the sizes on those charges.’

‘Blue Five. Two by one metres.’

3

UP ON THE
Heath, the captive couple had hardly drawn breath, unable to tear their eyes away from the four-man SAS assault team and their welter of weapons and equipment.

Screened by the bushes, Blue One peered through their weapon optics at the target house. The Heath was lined with mansions like this. Wealthy Victorian industrialists had built them, not just to live in but to make the kind of statement about their position in the world that their current owners – the new aristocracy of film stars, footballers and foreign multimillionaires – were happy to broadcast.

A nondescript Transit van was parked up on the higher ground at the edge of the Heath. Behind its darkened rear window, Keenan Marshall, a tanned Cornishman, whose newly disciplined hair did nothing to camouflage the surf-dude he used to be, trained the optic sight of his AWSM (Arctic Warfare Super Magnum) sniper rifle with suppressed barrel on the front elevation of the target house.

Keenan caught a flicker of movement from the upper floor and called in. ‘Stand by, stand by. Sierra One has a possible X-ray [target] on white three-six. Green on blue.’

Green on blue signalled the colour of the potential hostile’s clothing.

Gavin’s response was immediate: ‘Armed or unarmed?’

‘Can’t confirm. Wooden shutters obscuring.’

‘Roger that. Give us what you’ve got.’

‘Sash windows. Double-glazed. Wooden frames. Recommend medium ladders. Can’t confirm downstairs windows.’

‘Roger that. Blue One, acknowledge.’

The Scotsman came back. ‘Blue One. Roger that. Possible X-ray now unsighted. Downstairs: no signs of life. No condensation. No shutters. White curtains. Front-door security gates are locked.’ They might have been no more than seconds from launching the assault, but his voice betrayed less emotion than that of a Scandinavian newsreader.

A fresh voice broke in: ‘Stand by. Stand by. Sierra Four has a possible Yankee [hostage]. Female, coming out of Green . . . wait . . . wait . . .’ Sierra Four was telling them he had more to say: everyone else should stay off the net. ‘She looks pregnant.’

A woman who looked like she was in her twenties, with blonde hair and a maternity dress so short that it showed almost every inch of her endless legs, had appeared at the side of the house and was walking down the garden. One hand cradled her bump, the other held a plastic spray with which she was squirting the flowers as she strolled along.

Jockey sparked back into life: ‘Blue One. Confirm she’s pregnant.’

Gavin’s voice, still controlled but now with a note of urgency: ‘All stations, cancel gas. Do – not – use – gas. Out.’

The jury was out about chemicals affecting a foetus’s development. But no one was here to kill or deform unborn children.

‘Stand by, stand by. Blue One has Posh Lad in the cordon approaching the female.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

From the day he was found in a carrier bag on the steps of Guy’s Hospital in London,
Andy McNab
has led an extraordinary life.

As a teenage delinquent, Andy McNab kicked against society. As a young soldier, he waged war against the IRA in the streets and fields of South Armagh. As a member of 22 SAS, he was at the centre of covert operations for nine years, on five continents. During the Gulf War he commanded Bravo Two Zero, a patrol that, in the words of his commanding officer, ‘will remain in regimental history for ever’. Awarded both the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) and Military Medal (MM) during his military career, McNab was the British Army’s most highly decorated serving soldier when he finally left the SAS.