Seventy
21.56
‘WE’VE GOT LESS than ten minutes,’ said Fox, standing alongside Wolf and staring down at the laptop screen.
‘And you think this is the true plan?’
Fox looked at him. ‘We’ve got this woman’s kids at gunpoint. It’ll be the true plan.’
‘I want you and Bear to organize the first line of defence against our attackers,’ said Wolf. ‘You both have the most recent military experience. Cat and I will remain here guarding the hostages. What about your two operatives in the restaurant upstairs? Do they need informing of what’s going on?’
‘No. They’ll have seen the message so they’ll know what’s happening. And they’ll hold their positions.’
‘You’re going to need to be able to hold off the attacking forces at least until I can get through to the negotiator and tell him that unless the assault stops, we will blow up the building. Do you think that will be enough to make them pull back?’
‘If they lose the element of surprise and the authorities realize we’re still in control of the situation, they’ll have to stop the assault.’
Wolf’s breathing had quickened, and he suddenly looked excited. ‘Which will leave them totally humiliated. We are doing good work here, Fox. The British government will fall over this.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ said Fox, although right then he was far more interested in getting out of the building alive, which was no sure thing.
As they hurried from the kitchen, Fox felt the adrenalin pumping through him. Zero hour was approaching – the time when he’d finally earn his money.
The plan had always been to trigger an assault on the building. It was why they’d set a midnight deadline while timing the bombs inside the hotel to detonate an hour earlier. They’d never expected to last until midnight. Ideally, the assault would have come just before 23.00. That way they could repel the SAS forces, thus heaping public humiliation on the British government, and use the subsequent timed explosions (which could also be blamed on the government) as cover to escape from the building.
Instead, they were going to have to put up with the assault coming nearly an hour earlier, which, Fox knew, would mean a nerve-jangling climax to the siege as they tried to keep the security forces at bay. But it was still manageable, as was the fact that they were operating two men short. The most important thing was that, unlike the SAS, they still possessed the element of surprise.
The ballroom was quiet. The bodies of the two hostages who’d dared to resist their captors were still propped up against the wall in full view of the others as a warning. As far as Fox could see, it was proving effective, but then it needed to. The next hour was going to be extremely challenging.
He motioned Bear over and, ignoring Cat’s glare, and Wolf’s comradely pat on the shoulder, led his old army buddy towards the ballroom door.
It was time to prepare their reception.
Seventy-one
SCOPE WORKED AS quietly and methodically as he could under the circumstances, going through each of the cupboards one at a time, amazed that they had such an array of medicines on-site.
He’d taken a huge risk coming back as he knew the terrorists were aware how much he needed the insulin. He’d been only feet away from them, hidden behind the bar in the ground floor restaurant, while they’d discussed the fact that they could take him out when he emerged from cover to find it. He’d even seen the face of one of them in the bar mirror as he’d temporarily removed his balaclava, and was surprised to see that it belonged to an ordinary-looking white man in his thirties.
Right now, Scope was relying on the fact that the terrorists were too busy upstairs, and too short of numbers, to send someone down here. But if he was wrong then he was trapped, and almost certainly dead. Strangely, though, it wasn’t death he was scared of. He’d faced that on many occasions in his time as a soldier fighting other men’s wars. And in truth, since Mary Ann, probably the only truly important person in his life, had gone, life had ceased to be anything other than a simple mission for revenge.
No, he didn’t fear death. What he feared was failure. He had to save Abby and her son. He cared about them now, had bonded with them, which was something he hadn’t done with anyone in a long time. The world was a hard, brutal place; it had destroyed his daughter, and it had come close to destroying him. But so far it hadn’t, and right then he was determined to keep it that way.
He found the insulin pens in a box at the back of the middle cupboard.
Feeling a sudden burst of elation, he ripped open the box and pulled out a handful of the pens, shoving them in his trouser pocket.
Then, holding his knife by the blade, in case he ran into one of the terrorists, he exited the room at a run, praying he wasn’t too late.
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.
