The Hunt

89

The Super Lynx powered up the Thames, swooping over the river, pushing towards its 200 mph maximum speed. By the pilot’s calculations, they were one minute out.

‘Delta One, Stinger Three, sixty seconds out,’ he intoned, speaking into his helmet microphone. ‘Go live with LTD.’

‘Roger that,’ came the reply from Pete Iron, the SAS Counter-Terrorism troop sergeant, who was positioned with one of his corporals, Fred Gibson, at the London City marina.

Ever since 9/11, the SAS had maintained a counter-terrorism team based at the SAS’s ultra-secret London headquarters, just a stone’s throw from Whitehall. Ready and waiting for just such an alert as they had received today.

The call to action had come barely twenty minutes earlier. They were to destroy a Nordhavn yacht moored in St Katharine Docks, no matter what the risk of civilian casualties or collateral damage. The cut-off point was 0359 hours.

If they failed, the team had been warned, the proverbial sky would fall.

Iron and Gibson were crouched barely a hundred metres from the target. From their kneeling position adjacent to the dock’s Zizzi restaurant, they could see the vessel’s name clearly.

Werwolf was stencilled on her stern.

‘Stinger Three, Delta One, lasing target now,’ Iron radioed the pilot.

‘Delta One, Stinger Three, copied.’

The SAS sergeant fired his tripod-mounted Thales laser target designator – LTD for short – at the Werwolf, knowing that the hot point of the laser – where it bounced off the hull – would act as a guide for the coming strike.

The pilot put the Lynx into a howling right-hand turn, bringing its nose around to face the marker – the smoke grenade that Gibson had lobbed onto the target. The helo swept in low across the river just to the east of the century-old Tower Bridge.

Some eighteen minutes earlier, just as the Lynx was being scrambled, Special Branch had got busy dragging some seriously confused yachties from their beds. They’d had only a few minutes to evacuate the dock, getting any public the hell out of there.

For a brief moment Sergeant Iron wondered how those yachties would react when they saw their beloved boats getting peppered with chunks of shrapnel. In truth, he didn’t much care.

To receive an order such as this – an air strike on a civilian vessel in the heart of London – it had to be a crisis of gargantuan proportions. He wondered who could have dug up the intelligence to back such a ballsy move.

Above him the Lynx slowed, creeping closer to a firm firing position, its nose rotating around towards the target.

‘I see your laser,’ the pilot intoned. A lengthy pause. ‘I have lock-on.’ Another pause. ‘Engaging now.’

There was a second’s delay, and then a burst of violent fire bloomed on the Lynx’s snub-nosed rocket pods, slung to either side of the aircraft, and a pair of CRV7 precision-guided 70mm rockets streaked towards the marina.

The 4.5-kilo explosive-point-detonating warhead was capable of penetrating a T-72 main battle tank’s armour. Unsurprisingly, the steel hull of the Nordhavn 52 was torn open as if it had been attacked with a giant tin-opener.

The twin warheads penetrated the deck, detonating deep in the bowels of the vessel. It struck Sergeant Iron as being a tad overkill, as the two-million-dollar yacht was ripped asunder from the inside, vomiting chunks of molten aluminium in a boiling sea of flame.

As the smoke cleared, he could see what remained of the burning hulk of the Nordhavn sinking fast, the water hissing and gurgling as it sucked the twisted red-hot wreckage downwards. To either side, other boats had suffered fairly extensive damage.

He winced. Some very wealthy individuals were going to need some serious repair jobs on their oh-so-shiny vessels.

And the rebel within him loved it.

He looked at his watch: 0358.

‘Bang on schedule,’ he noted to the figure crouched beside him.

Corporal Gibson nodded. ‘Job done. Let’s get out of here.’