The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Eighteen

The BMW Gran Coupé coasted the last few metres with its engine switched off, small stones pinging from under its tyres. It ground to a halt on the track, followed by the blue Opel, then the black Fiat van. The very top of the white observatory dome was visible over the rise, but they couldn’t be seen from the house.

Cook, Lewis, Nicholson and Hacker got out of the two cars. The back doors of the van swung open and the four gathered around. Patiently, calmly, they went back through the same motions as they had in Munich, though the equipment was different this time. With no need to conceal their light body armour under their normal clothing, each man put on a tactical vest with pouches for ammunition. And out here in the sticks where the ear-shattering noise of heavy armament wasn’t going to draw a thousand police and land them in a siege situation, they could afford to relegate their pistols to backup status and bring on board some serious firepower. Ruddock and Dean were assigned a pair of black Benelli semiautomatic shotguns, Nicholson and Lewis a brace of their tried-and-trusted workhorse MP5 submachine guns, the A3 version with the collapsible shoulder stock. Thirty-round magazines. They were old, worn but reliable weapons that had served them on assignments all over the world.

Just in case those weren’t enough, Cook had something extra. Unzipping a padded gun slip he pulled out an HK 417 battle rifle in sniper configuration, set up by him personally with the twenty-inch accurized barrel and telescopic sight and accurate at eight hundred metres. He slapped in a magazine loaded with twenty gleaming bottlenecked 7.62mm NATO rounds, racked the bolt and set the selector lever to safe. Flipped open his scope lens covers. Ready to rock.

Between them, they had enough hardware to take on a platoon. Nobody was leaving anything to chance. This wasn’t some fatboy Mafia hood or drug-addled Somali militiaman they were going up against today.

The six donned their black ski-masks and then fitted their earbud headsets with miniature condenser mikes that would keep them in touch by phone. Cook had already notified the Boss of their arrival, and the Boss was listening and waiting in anticipation of a rapidly and successfully executed mission.

They left the vehicles blocking the track and stalked up towards the house on foot. As the roofline came into view, they split up and spread out, moving cautiously and keeping their heads low so as not to be spotted. The silver Kia was parked thirty yards from the house. They were bang on target. No other vehicles were in sight. It was probably just Hope and Fuentes in the place. If there was someone else inside, then too bad for them.

Nicholson, Ruddock and Lewis took a wide, circuitous route around the right side of the property while the other three cut around the left. Hacker and Dean positioned themselves prone in the long grass beyond the fence overlooking the front of the house and awaited their orders. Short minutes later, Nicholson’s whisper in their earpieces told them that the three were successfully infiltrated among the outbuildings to the rear.

The Boss was eagerly listening in. The six could sense his presence there, silent and commanding and full of expectation.

Cook split himself off from the others and made his way slowly and carefully up and around behind the rocky rise, unseen from the windows, to a point on the hillside where he was roughly level with the roofline of the house, with a perfect view of the yard and front entrance. Finding a spot between two rocks, he laid himself prone behind his rifle. Planted the HK’s bipod legs on the uneven ground and steadied the gun so that it was solidly mounted against the triangular support of his shoulder and his elbows. The left arm crooked with his hand resting loosely on his right bicep. His right hand not too tight on the pistol grip of the weapon’s synthetic stock. His body at a slight angle behind the rifle, legs splayed, the right knee cocked for maximum stability. The classic sniper position that he’d been taught over twenty years earlier in the British army. His right cheek was pressed against the stock, with exactly the correct amount of eye relief for the scope. The optics mounted on the gun were Swiss, top quality and worth twice as much as the rifle itself. The magnified image was pin-sharp, overlaid by the tactical mil-dot reticle of the crosshairs. The dots looked like tiny black beads threaded on a silk strand. Their purpose was to offer different aiming points to compensate for the bullet’s trajectory at long range, when the inevitable forces of gravity began to suck it towards the earth.

At this distance, though, no compensation was necessary. He aligned the exact centre of the crosshairs on target. The scope’s inbuilt laser rangefinder told him the house was eighty-two yards away from his firing position. Eighty-two yards was like point blank range for a rifleman of his experience, armed with a high-velocity precision tool like the HK.

‘Cook, in position,’ he said into his headset microphone, and imagined the Boss smiling to himself and thinking this was already in the bag. Six on two, no witnesses, no distractions, nowhere to run.

Easy.

Cook lingered on the front entrance, then slowly panned a few degrees right, the rifle muzzle moving imperceptibly as he scanned his target. Seeing nothing in the window on the right side of the entrance, he swivelled the rifle gently in the other direction. His reticle flashed by the image of the doorway and found the window to its left.

The glass was dusty, but there was no mistaking the figure of a man standing at the window gazing out. Five-eleven, blond hair. His features were easily clear enough through the optics for rapid identification.

Hope.

Cook felt the familiar stab of satisfaction. Ping. Target acquired.

He eased the selector switch to fire. His finger stayed off the trigger, resting against the curve of the trigger guard.

He muttered into his mike, ‘Cook. I have a clear shot at Number Two. Awaiting instruction.’

That was directed not at the other team members, but at the Boss himself.

The Boss replied immediately, ‘Take the shot.’

Cook moved his finger to the trigger. The target remained steady in his crosshairs. He slowed his breathing to settle his heartbeat. Drew in a breath, let it half out. Felt the trigger mechanism break like a glass rod under the pressure of his finger.

The gun boomed and recoiled against his shoulder.