Siege

Seventy-two

‘WHAT THE HELL was that?’ Bear had stopped in the middle of the lobby and turned his head.

‘What the hell was what?’ demanded Fox.

‘I thought I heard a noise behind reception.’

Fox briefly wondered if it was the man he and Cat had just had a firefight with. He stopped too, but couldn’t hear anything.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said, although he tightened his grip on the gun. ‘Come on. We need to hurry.’ He had no desire to help Cat avenge her brother, and if this guy, whoever he was, was out the back trying to find insulin, then that was fine too, because it kept him out of their hair. ‘Just keep down,’ he hissed as they moved through the STAFF ONLY doors and into the gloom of the main kitchen, before stopping at the windows looking out on to the courtyard, where the van they’d arrived in was still parked with the rear doors open. It was raining outside and the cobblestones were shiny and wet.

The two men crouched low and Fox scanned the area, squinting in the darkness. When he was satisfied that the courtyard was empty he reached down and carefully retrieved the button detonator he’d left underneath the worktop earlier, and held it in the palm of his hand, button up. ‘In a few minutes the military will come through there,’ he said, pointing towards the archway they’d driven through earlier, where the body of the security guard still lay. ‘They’ll head over to the wall here and rendezvous underneath the mezzanine floor windows. What they don’t know is there’s a bomb hidden in one of the wheelie bins just outside the delivery entrance. You can’t see it now, but it’s about twenty feet to the left of us. It’s a simple low-tech command wire device so any radio jamming gear they’ve got won’t be able to stop it from detonating. Your job’s to man this position. You don’t move, you don’t turn away, you don’t lose concentration. Do any of those things and we’re all dead.’

‘Jesus, you don’t have to tell me that, Fox. How long have we worked together?’

‘I know. But we’re up against the best in the world here. We can’t afford to make even the smallest mistake.’

‘Sure. I know.’

‘When you see movement through the arch, and you’ve confirmed it’s enemy forces, you get down, count to twenty, so they’ve got time to come into the courtyard in numbers, then press the button. And make sure you’re behind the kitchen units, because it’s going to be a big bang.’

‘Won’t they have recced this place already? I mean, like you say, these guys are the best in the world. What if they’ve already located and disabled the bomb?’

‘They haven’t.’

‘You’re very confident.’

‘First off, the bomb’s hidden underneath a load of rubbish in an area where the bins are meant to be. Secondly, Dragon cut a hole in the back of the bin and ran the wires through there and under the delivery room door, so they’d be impossible to spot without moving the bin.’

‘They could have moved the bin.’

Fox smiled. ‘We’d have heard them. Dragon also taped a grenade between the bin and the one next to it, on the underside where you can’t see it. If anyone moved anything, it would have come free and blown.’ He gave the detonator to Bear, telling him to handle it carefully, then pulled a pair of noise-suppressing headphones from his backpack. ‘You might want to wear these when you set off the bomb. I’m going to be upstairs in one of the function rooms. As soon as I hear it go off, I’ll open up with the AK and chuck out a couple of grenades. If you get the chance, unload a few rounds yourself, but then make your way back to the mezzanine floor using the emergency staircase. We’ll rendezvous there.’

‘What if they keep coming? They’re not going to want to give up just like that.’

‘They’ll be sitting ducks out there so they’re going to want to get back and regroup. Also, as soon as Wolf hears all the commotion, he’s going to get on to the negotiator and threaten to kill all the hostages unless they pull back.’ He patted Bear on the shoulder. ‘They’ll pull back. Remember, they’ve had hardly any time to prepare for this and we’re forcing their hand. They’ll be making mistakes too.’

Bear shook his head slowly. ‘I never thought I’d end up killing fellow British soldiers.’

‘They’re unavoidable casualties,’ said Fox, who had no desire to get into a debate about the morality of what they were doing. It was way too late for that. ‘You want to make the government fall, you want to make the people angry, this is the way you do it. Plus, you’ve got the best motivation of all: if you don’t kill them, you can bet your life that they’ll kill you.’

Bear nodded slowly as he thought this through, then grinned. ‘Reminds me of the old days,’ he whispered, peering out into the gloom. ‘Waiting for the enemy to appear.’

‘And we got out of that OK, didn’t we? We’ll get out of this too. Then we can all retire.’ Fox got to his feet, keeping low. ‘Rendezvous back in the mezzanine foyer. I’ll be waiting for you there. Good luck.’

Keeping to the shadows, he slipped back through the kitchen and headed upstairs.

Barely a minute later he was inside the Meadow Room on the mezzanine floor, a mid-sized function room with a long boardroom table and chairs and an electronic whiteboard taking up one wall. He stood in the corner of the room, the AK-47 in his hands, and looked round the edge of the curtain, into the courtyard below.

This was it. The culmination of months of training and planning. He slowed his breathing, knowing how important it was to remain calm as he prepared for the coming onslaught. One more hour and he’d either be a very rich man or a dead one.

He looked at his watch. 22.01.