Girl On Fire

2

I stood by the side of the low stage, sweating inside the stab-proof Kevlar jacket despite the chill of the hour before dawn, my right knee still pulsing with pain seven days after the Air Ambulance helicopter came down on Lake Meadows shopping centre, killing dozens of innocent people.

The current fatality list stood at forty-four, but the number crept higher every day as the emergency services continued the painstaking work of sifting through the crash site. Nobody knew for sure exactly how many had died and I suspected that we would never know with total certainty.

I was in the briefing room of Leman Street Police Station, Whitechapel, feeling the weight of history. Murder detectives hunted Jack the Ripper from this station. Today it is the base of SC&O19, the specialist firearms unit of the Metropolitan Police.

The briefing room was packed.

Rows of Specialist Firearms Officers in grey body armour worn over short-sleeve blue shirts were listening intently to the young female sergeant on stage. There was a lectern up there but she stood to one side, tall and athletic and affable, and I thought that she was young to be a sergeant in any part of the Met, let alone the firearms unit.

Specialist Firearms Officer DS Alice Stone.

She sounded far more relaxed than she had any right to be.

Behind her a large screen showed a photograph of a three-storey house.

It was a small, neat Victorian terrace on Borodino Street, London E1, its bay windows covered with net curtains. Only a postcode away. We believed it contained the men who had brought down the Air Ambulance helicopter.

The young sergeant touched the iPad she was holding and architectural plans appeared on screen. She began talking about the morning’s MOE – method of entry – and I felt the sweat trickle down my back.

It had nothing to do with the weight of the Kevlar jacket.

Someone always has to go in, I thought. After all the hours of surveillance and analysis of intelligence and briefings, somebody still has to go through a locked door and into the unknown.

‘The entry team for Operation Tolstoy will be breaching the front door of the target with Hatton rounds fired from a shotgun,’ DS Stone said, her voice calm and classless, just the hint of some affluent corner of the Home Counties in her accent. ‘Distraction stun grenades will be deployed immediately prior to entering the premises.’ She paused. ‘We have every reason to believe that the men inside are armed fanatics who would actively welcome a martyr’s death. So it’s CQC when we are inside.’

CQC is Close Quarter Combat, moving through a series of rooms and corridors until the inhabitants are subdued and dominated. Many SFOs either have military training or they have grown up around guns – shooting game with their family in some muddy field.

I wondered which one it was with young DS Stone.

Then she smiled. She had a good smile. It was wide, white and genuine. The trouble with most smiles is that they are not the real thing. This was the real thing.

‘And then we’re all going for breakfast,’ she said. ‘On me.’

The room full of SFOs in grey body armour all grinned with her.

Still smiling, she turned to the side of the stage.

‘DC Wolfe?’ she said. ‘We’re ready for you now.’

I climbed the few steps up to the stage, shook her hand and took my place at the lectern where my laptop was waiting.

‘Our colleague DC Wolfe from West End Central is going to give you the background on today’s target,’ DS Stone told them.

She took a step back, giving me the floor.

‘As you know, we initially believed the Air Ambulance helicopter was brought down by some kind of surface-to-air missile,’ I began. ‘But overnight intelligence confirms that it was brought down by a UAV – an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.’ I paused to make it clear. ‘A drone,’ I said, and for just a moment I could taste the dust of that murderous day in the back of my throat. ‘Drones are legally allowed to fly up to four hundred feet,’ I said. ‘This one was at just under five thousand feet when it hit the helicopter. One mile high. Above the clouds and directly above Lake Meadows shopping centre.’ I paused, remembering exactly why we were here today. ‘Forty-four dead so far,’ I said, ‘including a crew who dedicated their lives to helping strangers. And you know the worst of it? The men who did this would consider Lake Meadows to be their lucky day. That Air Ambulance could have come down in some field. It came down on a shopping centre in the heart of West London.’ I took a breath and let it out. ‘Owners of UAVs do not need to register on any database but intelligence from Counter Terrorism Command has revealed it belonged to one of these men.’

I touched my laptop and two faces appeared on the screen behind me. They were the passport photographs of two young men so close in age and appearance that they could have been twins.

‘Asad and Adnan Khan,’ I said. ‘Twenty-six and twenty-eight years old. Returnees from Syria. Military trained. Battle-hardened. They came back to this country eighteen months ago. They were under surveillance for the first year but resources were diverted elsewhere because the brothers were keeping their noses clean. And now we believe we know why.’

I hit another button and a dozen receipts for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles appeared. They were all from different drone websites. They all had either Asad or Adnan Khan’s name and address on them.

‘There have been a number of near misses at Heathrow over the last year,’ I said. ‘Drones almost missing planes and helicopters that were landing or taking off. The assumption was always that it was just a few knobheads failing to control their new toy. Until now.’

The light from the screen had lit up the faces of the SFOs. As they studied the images of the Khan brothers, I realised with a shock of recognition that I knew one of the SFOs. I had grown up with him.

It was Jackson Rose.

Jackson was the nearest thing I ever had to a brother but, like a lot of childhood friends, there was now an unknowable distance between us. I had no idea that he had even joined the Metropolitan Police. The last I heard he had ended up where so many ex-servicemen find themselves – sleeping on the streets. He had lived with me for a while but it had not worked out. He did not look at me now but stared straight ahead at the faces of the Khan brothers behind me.

I hit the laptop again.

A man’s face appeared, the blank-eyed image taken from his driving licence.

‘Ahmed – known as Arnold – is the father of Asad and Adnan Khan. Mr Khan is the long-term tenant at the Borodino Street address. He raised his family there. Fifty-nine years old. Looks older. All our surveillance and intelligence suggests that Mr Khan is not a person of interest.’ I turned and looked at his image. ‘He’s been a bus driver for more than thirty years. Also in the property are his wife, Mrs Azza Khan, sixty, and Layla, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a third brother, Aakil, who was the eldest and died fighting in Aleppo.’ Two more faces appeared next to the image of the old man – a stout, unsmiling woman in a hijab headscarf and a grinning teenage girl in a school portrait. ‘Like Mr Khan, Mrs Khan and Layla Khan are not persons of interest. They have had what the security services call innocent contact with our targets. Layla’s mother – Aakil’s wife – died of cancer ten years ago. We understand that Layla has been brought up by her grandparents.’

The room stirred uneasily. Our job is always more complicated when the guilty are under the same roof as the innocent.

DS Stone stepped to my side.

‘Questions?’ she said.

A few hands went up. Stone nodded at one of them.

‘If there are more civilians than villains in there,’ one of the SFOs said, ‘then why are we going in so hard, boss?’

‘It’s the call of the DSO,’ DS Stone said. ‘And in my opinion, it’s the only call she can make.’

The DSO was the Designated Senior Officer, the senior police officer taking ultimate responsibility for today’s operational decisions. This morning it was DCS Elizabeth Swire, who would be in contact from the main control room of New Scotland Yard.

‘Asad and Adnan Khan are unlikely to leave room for negotiations,’ Stone said.

She looked at me.

‘Now for the bad news,’ she said, not smiling now.

I hit the laptop and two hand grenades appeared on screen.

They looked like death – black, lattice-faced spheres with a gold-coloured handle and ring pull, identical to a key ring. You could clearly read the name of the manufacturer on the side. Cetinka, it said.

‘This make of Croatian hand grenade was believed to have been decommissioned twenty years ago at the end of the Balkans wars,’ I said. ‘But these were photographed in the evidence room of West End Central two days ago.’

I let that sink in for a moment.

‘Because an unknown number of these hand grenades – as is frequently the case with decommissioned ordnance – were never destroyed but stolen, stashed and sold. Some of them have found their way across from the Balkans to our streets. Three days ago a Criminal Informant told detectives from Homicide and Serious Crime Command at West End Central that a known weapons dealer had sold two of these grenades to two brothers in East London. And from the description of the men and CCTV images, we believe they were Asad and Adnan Khan.’

The room was totally silent now.

‘So we go in hard,’ DS Stone said. ‘And we dig them out. We subdue and control before they know what’s hit them. And then we go for the most important meal of the day. And the only thing you need to worry about is your cholesterol level.’

They grinned at her again.

Jackson Rose was grinning, too, and I saw that gap between his two front teeth that I knew so well. And now he looked at me and nodded.

‘If there are no more questions, then we will get cracking,’ DS Stone said. ‘I will be leading the entry team. We shall be making just one pass,’ she said, meaning that the lead vehicle would drive past the target address once before entry. ‘DC Wolfe will be riding with us for TI,’ she said, meaning target identification. ‘Let’s take care of each other out there,’ she said.

They applauded her. They loved her.

Jackson approached me as I came off the stage.

‘What’s wrong with your leg?’ he said. ‘You’re walking all funny.’

‘I banged it,’ I said. ‘You join the Met and forget to tell me?’

I was aware that we sounded like an old married couple.

‘I was planning to,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk at breakfast.’

He briefly hugged me, Kevlar banging against Kevlar, and then followed his fellow SFOs to the weapons’ room where they signed out their firearms, scribbling their names on receipts as their kit was passed to them from the massive steel-mesh cage that enclosed the armoury.

They all had Glock 17 handguns, Sig Sauer MCX assault rifles – the Black Mamba, short and superlight, perfect for close quarter ops – and M26 Tasers.

And one of them signed out a shotgun – the Benelli M3 Super 90 that would be our front-door key. The SFO who checked it out was attempting to grow a wispy beard to cover the traces of acne that still clung to his youthful face. He stared at me without smiling.

‘Let’s go, Jesse,’ Jackson told him.

DS Stone signed out her weapons and we walked down to the basement car park where a convoy of Armed Response Vehicles and unmarked vans were all waiting with their engines running.

‘This is us,’ she said, indicating a white florist’s van. Jackson Rose and the young man with the attempted beard and the shotgun were among those climbing into the back. There was a faded slogan on the side of the van.

‘BEAUTIFUL’ BLOOMS OF BARKING

DS Stone laughed. She really was unnaturally calm.

She held two PASGT helmets in one hand. She handed one to me. I strapped it on.

‘I love those inverted commas around “beautiful”, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Why do they do that?’

Then she saw that I was not laughing.

‘What’s the problem, Detective?’ she said.

I nodded as I put on the PASGT, tightening the strap of the combat helmet.

‘We’re using a florist’s delivery van for the entry team?’ I shook my head. ‘As I understand it, Borodino Street is in a very devout and poor neighbourhood. I wonder how many fancy bouquets of flowers get delivered to this neck of the woods.’ I indicated the van. ‘From Beautiful Blooms of Barking or anyone else.’

The car park was in the basement of Leman Street Police Station but you could see the first light of a beautiful summer’s day creeping into the entrance.

DS Stone was not laughing now. I watched her put on her PASGT helmet. She shrugged her shoulders, getting comfortable in the body armour as she held her assault rifle at a 45-degree angle, the business end pointing at the floor. The car park was filling with the fumes of all those engines. Then she smiled at me and it made me think that maybe I would like to sit next to her at breakfast.

‘We will be in and out before anyone gets a chance to wonder where the roses are,’ she said. ‘OK, Max?’

But it didn’t go down like that.