As a feeling of utter desperation swept over him, he knew he had an unpleasant choice to make – use the gun or be arrested. If he could intimidate them into backing off with the revolver, he could jack the police car in front and make good his escape in that.
He knew he would be crossing a line if he brandished the gun, and that there would be no going back once he did so. But what alternative was there?
Wishing there was another way, Errol reached over and snatched the revolver from the gap between his seat and the armrest, where he had wedged it for safekeeping.
The weight of the heavy gun in his hand was strangely reassuring. Adopting his hardest expression, the one he’d copied from watching the pugilist, Lenny Maclean, and now used when he was about to rough a punter up, he turned to face the policemen.
As he swivelled the gun around to point at them, he noticed two very disturbing things in quick succession: Firstly, there were a lot more cops out there than he’d realised – he counted six, but suspected there might be even more. Secondly, and far more importantly, they were all carrying big ‘fuck-off’ guns, and every single one of them was pointing straight at him. Bizarrely, it had never occurred to him that any of the cops trying to arrest him might be armed.
“Shit!”
PC Keith Cash was twenty-nine-years old. He had been a policeman for eight years, the last two of which had been spent on SO19. Unlike some of the other guys in the unit, Keith had no previous military experience and, before joining the Job, he had never even seen a gun in real life, let alone handled one. He wasn’t a ‘gun nut’ and he didn’t get a thrill or a buzz from carrying a firearm around. He had elected to become an Authorised Firearms Officer in order to save life, not take it, and although he had been required to draw his weapon countless times over the last two years, he had never fired a single shot in anger. He had been hoping to go through his entire career without ever having to do so.
Cash had been the front seat passenger in Trojan Five-Oh-Three, the Omega that had stopped directly in front of the Taxi. He had been the first of the three man crew to get out of the car, and since taking up a static position by the driver’s door he had been incessantly screaming instructions at the black man who was in sitting in the driver’s seat to stay still and show his hands. He was reaching the point where his voice was starting to become hoarse.
Overhead, he heard the distinctive whup, whup, whup of the helicopter arriving, and on risking a quick glance upwards, he saw India 99 was now hovering above them. It would, no doubt, be filming the incident, and it might even be transmitting the images back to Information Room at The Yard in real-time.
The suspect had no intention of coming quietly, that much had become very apparent. His first reaction had been to try and shunt the unmarked GP behind them out of the way. Fortunately, its driver, a pretty girl with strawberry blonde hair, had followed the instructions he’d given her over the Main-Set earlier, and she had stopped with her front bumper kissing the bandit’s exhaust pipe.
The suspect had then tried to whip the Taxi around the front of the Omega, but that had also failed. Now, instead of doing the sensible thing and surrendering, he was frantically scrabbling around for something inside the car, below Cash’s line of sight.
The fool was wilfully ignoring the chorus of shouts to sit still and show his hands, and although the radio inside the cab was playing ridiculously loudly, the man must have been able to see that he was surrounded by armed officers.
The hairs on the nape of Cash’s neck stood up. During SO19’s relentless training sessions, he had rehearsed scenarios like the one now unfolding in front of him many times, and in each and every one, the suspect had invariably pulled a gun on them and opened fire. Of course, this wasn’t a training scenario at Lippitt’s Hill; this was real life, and it might pan out very differently, but Keith knew that if he hesitated when the time came, as he had done several times during training, he or a colleague could end up every bit as dead as the divisional officer who had been fatally shot at the hospital.
“FACE THE FRONT AND SHOW ME YOUR FUCKING HANDS,” he screamed for the umpteenth time, praying that, on this occasion, the man in the cab would actually heed his words and comply with the instruction.
And then they reached the endgame, and the suspect was spinning around to face him, rapidly bringing his right hand up as he moved.
It was as though someone flicked a switch and the world suddenly moved into slow motion. Keith’s colleagues were still shouting, but their words now seemed painfully drawn out and distorted to him.
As the suspect’s hand appeared from beneath the door, Cash’s brain processed that it was holding a big black revolver with a barrel approximately four inches long.
“GUN!” he yelled at the top of his voice, at the same time sighting his weapon on the suspect’s centre mass and taking up pressure on the trigger.
Now that the moment of truth was finally here, a tremendous sense of calmness descended over Keith Cash. He had often wondered what he would do if he ever found himself standing face to face with a gunman and had a split-second to decide whether or not to end the man’s life. He had
