Red Notice

42

Sambor put his van into gear and signalled to pull out into the queue of traffic waiting to drive onto the UK-bound HGV Shuttle.

Two identical white vans pulled out behind him. On the far side of the tracks beyond the steel chain-link fence that divided the north- and southbound lines, he could see the sign greeting arrivals: ‘Bienvenue à Coquelles, Pas-de-Calais’. As he approached the Eurotunnel barriers, a British Customs officer stepped in front of the van and signalled to him to pull out of the queue into an inspection area. As he did so, the two white vans behind him followed suit.

Sambor cut the engine and got out. He still had hair and lots of it, dark brown and thick. His chest and shoulders were covered with a tatty black leather jacket. Over one shoulder he wore a battered nylon ‘desert tan’ Blackhawk Special Forces-issue grab bag. They were essentially padded laptop bags, but after some great marketing they were now an essential part of any soldier’s kit. They’d become all the rage with the military since the Afghan war.

There was something damaged about Sambor, and it ran deeper than a face that wasn’t as good-looking, after years of conflict, as it had once been. A nose broken in some long-ago brawl and never reset gave him an even more intimidating air than he’d had when he was younger. Even now, without a beard, he was still a monster — which was why he was always picked out in any security check. Normally he had to be hidden from the real world, but today exposure was needed.

The Customs officer walked to the back of the van and gestured to the doors. ‘Open up, please.’

Stone-faced, Sambor strolled after him and unlocked the doors. As he swung one of them open, he seized the collar of the Customs officer’s jacket, lifted and hurled him into the back. The unfortunate man crash-landed on the floor, and the colour drained from his face as he looked up at a dozen heavily armed men lining the benches on each side of him.

They all wore the same look of morbid curiosity as one of their number looped a wire garrotte over his head and jerked it tight. Fingers scrabbling in vain at his throat, thrashing and struggling, as his heels drummed a tattoo on the ridged metal beneath him, he was dead in less than a minute.

As he breathed his last, another of the insurgents rifled his pockets and stole his security card. He handed it to Sambor, who calmly closed the rear doors again and, with a nod to the two drivers behind him, got back into the cab and drove off.

The other Customs officers continued to work around them; none had noticed the disappearance of their colleague, and no one moved to halt the small convoy as it drove out of the inspection area.

So what if they had? Sambor thought. This was a rolling start-line: the fight had begun the moment they had got into the back of the wagons. These men had fought alongside Laszlo and Sambor for many, many years. To them, Laszlo was not a war criminal: he was an honourable man, a hero, a leader to whom they wanted to demonstrate their loyalty as payback for the guilt they could never escape. The only thing that was going to stop them was a round through the head.

Sambor stopped again at an automatic barrier at the far side of the security zone and used the dead officer’s card to access the service road that led to the tracks on the southbound side. The three vans climbed the ramp and came to a halt on the bridge above the track.

Each van was packed with at least a dozen men, armed with a mixture of automatic rifles and light machine-guns for when the situation went noisy; suppressed sub-machine-guns until it did; grenades and a variety of ropes, NVGs (night vision goggles) and fire-fighters’ oxygen sets attached by bungee cords to 50cm-wide, old-school, plain wooden skateboards with plastic wheels and braces.

They were prepared physically and mentally for war. They’d all had at least nine lives, and had the burns, the dents, the bullet holes and the knife wounds to prove it. They waited, not caring about the gathering police presence. If you didn’t fear dying, you didn’t fear anything or anyone.

An HGV Shuttle approached on the tracks below them, beginning to accelerate as it pulled away from the platforms. One by one the insurgents climbed onto the parapet and, keeping clear of the power cables, they jumped. Each landed with a thud on the roof of the container cage and rolled to break his fall. A few seconds after the last was safely in position, the Shuttle, still accelerating, careered into the mouth of the tunnel.

The abrupt transition from cold, autumnal air to the warm, humid atmosphere in the tunnel caused a layer of condensation to form immediately on the skin of the wagons. Blown back by the rush of air from the slipstream, the spray lashed Sambor and his men, stinging their eyes.

Temporarily blinded, one rubbed at his face, and in doing so moved his arm and the weapon he carried too close to the power lines. There was a blinding blue flash and a whiff of ozone as the high-voltage current arced across the gap and fried him in an instant. His smouldering body tumbled from the roof of his container, smashed against the concrete wall and rebounded into the side of the cage before dropping to the ground alongside the tracks.

The train was now building up speed. Though he and his men were still hanging onto the top of the cages, Sambor showed no emotion as he counted down the seconds on his watch, then shouted back at his team.

At once, two men extracted cans of kerosene from their backpacks and began pouring it through the thick metal latticework onto the cab of the truck it housed. One popped a distress flare and dropped it into the spreading kerosene. It ignited at once. Thick grey smoke began belching through the bars and was whipped away by the slipstream.

Within seconds sensors in the Shuttle and the tunnel wall detected the heat and smoke. Warning signals flashed to the Eurostar control centre, lighting up the digital control board and deafening the staff with the clamour of alarms as the sprinkler system kicked in.

The chef de trains took no more than a moment to reach the decision to stop all traffic, close both lines and dispatch the fire trucks at the Calais emergency response depot into the service tunnel that ran between the north- and southbound tracks. The fire that had shut down the complex for weeks had been four years ago now, but its memory was still fresh. If this proved to be a false alarm or a fault in the sensors, a few hundred passengers would suffer no worse inconvenience than a short delay. If it was a genuine blaze, every passing second of inactivity only increased the risk of a catastrophe.

In less than a minute the fire-fighters, roused from their chairs and bunks by the howling siren, jumped aboard their custom-built truck and roared across the compound.

Deep in the tunnel, the HGV Shuttle was losing power and speed. Smoke and flames still belched from the steel latticework at its rear, despite the automated rainstorm doing its best to dampen them down.

Sambor and his men began clambering down from the roofs of their containers, using the lattice bars like the rungs of a ladder. Sprinkler water ran down their hair and faces.

The narrowness of the gap between the train and the tunnel wall forced them to assemble in single file beside the track. Sambor did a cursory head count, and led the way towards the front of the train.

Although his control panel was lit up like a Christmas tree, the driver had not panicked. He was reaching for the brake lever to bring the train to a controlled halt when Sambor blew the lock to the rear entrance of the cabin.

He kicked the door open, stepped into the cab, brought up his weapon and shot the man dead with a double tap to the head. His ceramic rounds were designed for fighting at close quarters on ships and planes, where there was a danger of ricochet. They fragmented on impact with the man’s skull and pulverized his brain without exiting his head. The only thing to hit the windscreen was a fine mist of blood.

The driver slumped over the controls. Even without power, the train’s momentum kept it moving forward, still trailing smoke, until his lifeless body slid to the floor and the dead man’s handle braking system brought the train to a juddering halt.