journey up to town sat alongside pensioners, mums and a few schoolkids. One blind man had his guide dog sitting in the aisle by his side, his white stick lying at an angle on the table in front of him. The guard had announced just a minute after the train had left the station that no refreshments would be served on this journey, before warning the passengers to be on the lookout for unattended bags or suspicious packages. Hardly anybody listened. They were too wrapped up in their own activities: doing sudokus, texting, listening to iPods.
In addition to the young man who had the driver at gunpoint, there were four accomplices, all male, all nervous, all sweating. Their clean-shaven skin was dark and their eyes brown, but it would be difficult for anyone to tell that they were lifelong residents not of Bristol, nor of London, but of Gaza, that long, thin strip of land sandwiched between Israel, Egypt and the deep blue of the Mediterranean. War-torn. Blood-spattered. Bomb- shattered. Hell by the sea.
Of these four men, Hussam and one other stood at the end of the front carriage, next to the toilets; the other two stood in the same position at the opposite end of the train. All four had known tragedy. Two were orphans before they reached the age of ten, their parents killed by Israeli bombs launched into Gaza from screaming F-16s on the pretext of self-defence. A third had more physical scars: the side of his body bore the lurid traces of a mess of inexpert stitching where a piece of shrapnel had entered. It had been removed, and the wound repaired, without the luxury of anaesthetic or painkillers. He still carried pain with him every waking second, and it was even worse when he tried to piss.
Hussam Hayek was a little older than the other three and they looked to him as a leader on account of this. Two years ago he had become a father, but he only remained so for three days. His wife and baby son had died within an hour of each other — she for want of antibiotics, he for reasons overworked doctors couldn’t fathom. The child’s death was not a surprise to anyone. It was just the way things were in Gaza, its borders blockaded, the importation of medicines strictly controlled. Some entered the country via a smugglers’ route — the subterranean tunnels that ran under the border with Egypt — but these were a precious commodity and never found their way into the hands of poor men like Hussam Hayek.
Small wonder, then, that these four, like many before them, were radicalised beyond the point of return. That hatred was in their DNA. They had nothing to live for.
But they had everything to die for.
Hussam was wearing a Red Hot Chili Peppers baseball cap he’d bought just the day before because he thought it made him look more Western. The rest of their clothes were loose-fitting, but this wasn’t a fashion statement. Beneath their T-shirts and M amp;S raincoats, each man wore a vest packed with acetone peroxide, or TATP. It was a relatively simple explosive to make — all you needed was drain cleaner, bleach and acetone — but the end result was extremely volatile. In Gaza, you could always recognise the TATP engineers. They were the men with missing fingers.
Some people called this crystalline white powder Mother of Satan: a good name, because it was indeed capable of giving birth to the diabolical. Hussam Hayek smiled to himself. It wouldn’t be long before the whole world took notice of Gaza.
As fields and woodland sped past, Hussam fiddled somewhat absent-mindedly with the small switch attached to a wire peeking out from below his left sleeve. All four men wore the same set-up. It was already dark outside, and he could see his anxious reflection in the glass of the side door. He felt weak with nerves. He hadn’t expected to. In the days leading up to today there had been a sense of anticipation. Of excitement almost. He’d hoped to feel that excitement now. He was, after all, to be reunited with his loved ones in just a few minutes. But his skin was soaked in sweat and his hand trembled. What if it went wrong? What if somebody stopped them before the critical moment?
He leaned as nonchalantly as he could against a small poster warning that CCTV was operating on this train and looked at his watch. 17.11 hrs. Six minutes until they started.
Six minutes until paradise.
It was crucial to wait. Their controller had been most emphatic about that when handing out their weapons and ammunition and explaining the details of their evening’s mission. At 17.17 precisely the train would be equidistant from the two stations furthest apart on their route. That was the prime spot — far away from any possibility of interference. And there were other reasons for waiting until that exact moment, too. This was just one of a series of coordinated events, all planned to take place at the same time. Hussam Hayek and his team didn’t know the details — it was better that way — but they knew they were part of something big.
Like, 9/11 big.
17.13. Hussam glanced at his partner. The kid was sweating too as the movement of the train jolted his thin body rhythmically up and down.
Up and down.
Up and down.
Time check. 17.14. One of the passengers — a pregnant woman who was clearly almost at term — waddled along the aisle and into the toilet. Hussam felt another trickle of sweat down the nape of his neck.
The train jolted.
Up and down.
Up and down.
It brought back a game his father had played with him as a toddler, bouncing him up and down on his knee. His companion glanced at his watch. Hussam did the same. 17.16. One minute to go.
The two men removed the rucksacks from their backs. Hussam fished inside his with his right hand. He felt very comfortable with the weapon that his fingers touched. They’d already spent a long time firing them, as well as practising how to change the magazine swiftly. ‘AKS-74U,’ they’d been told. Hussam knew a little about guns. He knew that these were shortened variants of the standard 74, somewhere between a submachine gun and an assault rifle. Ideal for close-quarters combat, and for keeping concealed. They had probably been made in the old Soviet Union. How they had made the journey from there to the rucksacks of Hussam’s team was anybody’s guess, but it wasn’t important now: they were coming to the end of their lives.
‘You’ll be firing 7.62 shorts. Hard-hitting rounds, thirty-round magazines. You get nine to ten bursts per magazine. Count them. When you pack your weapon, be sure you do it barrel downwards. You don’t want to be rummaging around when the time comes.’
They had nodded, but not said anything, as they followed the advice.
Once they were ready they had prayed together, beseeching Allah to look with favour on their enterprise, and asking Him to grant them entry to His kingdom when their earthly life was done.
Which would be in a couple of minutes’ time.
Hussam’s watch clicked to 17.17. The two men nodded and pulled their weapons from their rucksacks, just as the cubicle door opened and the pregnant woman appeared to the sound of the toilet’s violent flush.
She stopped, her face aghast, her eyes glued to the sight of the machinery in the men’s fists.
Hussam looked at her. He saw her swollen belly and remembered his own wife when she was in the same state. For a split second he wondered if he was doing the right thing. What would she say if she could see him here now?
But then he remembered her lifeless body, still and cold. And their baby, not much bigger than the palm of his hand. This woman in front of him, she had a ruddy glow about her. Her cheeks were full, not like the thin, gaunt features his wife had displayed during her pregnancy through lack of nutrition. This woman had never given the plight of the Palestinian people a second thought. Like everybody in the West, she had sat complacently by while their people suffered and their children died. Why should she be allowed to live a life of comfort and safety when his own family were no longer of this world?
He raised his 74 just as the woman opened her mouth to scream.
But no scream came.
It was a short burst, and the sound was almost entirely masked by the sudden and unexpected noise of a train passing in the other direction. The rounds entered the woman’s chest, flinging her back through the open door of the toilet as an explosion of blood spattered all around the cubicle. Hussam momentarily lost control of his weapon and the rounds flew up to her face, then back down to her swollen belly. For a split second he thought he saw a flash of the unborn child’s body, but perhaps that was just his imagination. He released his finger from the trigger, concerned that he had wasted too many rounds on one kill, then stepped towards the first carriage and made his way into it.
