Siege (35 page)

He grinned at Ethan. ‘See? Your mum’s going to be all right.’

But as Ethan grinned back, a long burst of gunfire came from somewhere in the building, followed by a loud explosion, and a few seconds later a couple carrying two young children, who must have come from one of the guest rooms, hurried through the double doors on to the terrace.

‘There are terrorists coming!’ said the woman breathlessly.

‘They’ve got guns and grenades,’ added her husband. ‘They’re shooting at everyone and everything.’

Scope stood up. ‘How many of them are there?’

‘I don’t know, but they’re not far away.’

A worried murmur went up among the crowd, and they immediately moved further away from the double doors. Scope picked up Abby and took her over to the far end of the terrace, where she’d be seen and dealt with by the rescuers when they finally arrived.

Another burst of gunfire rang out, closer this time, and people started crying out.

‘Stay here with your mum, Ethan. I’m going back inside.’

Ethan looked scared. ‘But you might get hurt. Don’t leave us. You keep leaving.’

Scope smiled. ‘And I keep coming back. Remember that.’

He looked around for the blonde manager and saw her holding a bloodied tissue to her nose as she directed people back from the edge of the terrace. ‘I’m going to try and hold them back,’ he told her, ‘but can you look after those two over there and make sure they get to safety?’

‘Of course. But be careful.’

‘And you.’

Turning away, he ran back into the restaurant. He’d stashed the AK-47 under a chair to avoid getting mistaken for one of the terrorists by the security forces, and he grabbed it now, keeping it down by his side as he strode over to the doors leading back to the emergency staircase. He peered through the glass and immediately saw a young man in bare feet sprinting along the corridor towards him, as if the devil himself was on his heels. He stepped aside as the guy came charging through without even slowing down and ran towards the open terrace doors.

More gunfire rang out, and this time it was really close. As Scope peered through the glass, he saw a man stagger out of the emergency staircase door, about halfway along the corridor. He’d clearly been shot and was clutching at his side, his shirt already stained with blood. Unable to keep his balance, he fell into the opposite wall and went down on his knees.

Holding the rifle out in front of him, Scope kicked open the door and went out to help him.

At exactly the same moment, the side door flew open again, and a man in a balaclava and boiler suit came storming through, already firing into the injured man, who pitched forward with a strangled scream.

The man turned Scope’s way. He was short and well-built, moving with a confidence that came when you had a gun in your hand and the people you were hunting didn’t. But the moment he saw Scope he took an instinctive, startled step back, and hesitated for just half a second too long.

In one fluid movement, Scope put the rifle to his shoulder and opened up on fully automatic.

The masked gunman flew backwards, firing from the hip, his bullets ricocheting off the ceiling, and Scope charged him, wanting to get in close for a headshot. The gunman went down on his back and lay still, but Scope knew there was a good chance he was wearing a flak jacket, and faking it. He’d been hit in the chest, and was still holding on to his weapon with one hand.

Scope stopped ten feet short of him and took aim at his head.

The gunman realized at the last second that he’d miscalculated and brought round his weapon to fire, but he was too late. Scope shot him twice in the face and the rifle dropped out of his hand as he died.

For a few moments Scope stood staring down at his corpse, then slowly he opened the door to the emergency staircase. There was no longer any shooting, just a lot of shouting, and doors slamming coming from further down the steps, coupled with a pungent smell of smoke and ordnance. It was obvious that those guests who’d barricaded themselves into their rooms had seen images on the TV of their fellow guests escaping and were following suit.

He turned to go, eager to leave himself.

And then he heard a pained cry coming from the next floor down.

‘Is anyone down there?’ Scope called out, still keeping his finger tight on the trigger, knowing it could easily be a trick.

‘Help me,’ came the voice. It was young and female. English accent. ‘I’ve been hurt.’

Knowing he couldn’t just leave her, Scope started down the staircase. ‘Stay there,’ he said. ‘I’m coming.’

He saw her as he came round the corner on to the next set of steps. She was about twenty, no more, a pretty Asian girl in a waitress’s uniform, standing in the middle of the stairwell with her arms down by her side. She was shaking, although Scope couldn’t see any sign of injury. There was another girl, partially obscured, lying in a foetal position behind her.

Scope frowned. He couldn’t see the face of the girl lying down, but she was wearing a black dress.

The Asian girl opened her mouth to say something, her eyes wide with fear, and then her face seemed to explode in a shower of blood and gore as the stairwell erupted in the noise of gunfire.

Scope tried to jump out of the way as the girl pitched forward, landing heavily on the stairs, but he was too late. He just had time to register the pretty dark-haired woman who’d tried to kill him earlier, sitting up in the corner of the stairwell and firing at him with her silenced pistol, before a bullet struck him in the shoulder, spinning him round. One more caught him somewhere in the back, and he was slammed hard into the staircase face first. He felt his own rifle clatter down the steps as he instinctively released it.

There was no pain, just a massive sense of shock. He tried to move, but couldn’t.

Then he felt a hand on his suit jacket, pulling him over, and he was looking into a pair of dark, hate-filled eyes.

‘Good,’ hissed the woman with a cruel smile. ‘You’re still alive.’ She lifted the knife, holding it only millimetres from his right eye. ‘Now you’re all mine.’

MARTIN DALSTON KNEW HE
Should have stayed with the others out on the roof terrace, but when he saw the man who’d saved them all earlier run back inside the hotel to try to keep the remaining terrorists at bay, he wanted to help him. He’d had no idea what he could possibly do that would be of any use given that, with the exception of a day’s paintballing near High Wycombe, he’d never had any kind of military training or experience whatsoever, but the way the man was risking his life inspired him. He wanted to do something valuable before he died, something that would make his son proud of him, and now he had an opportunity.

No one noticed him run back into the restaurant. He heard gunfire coming from the corridor, but Martin didn’t hesitate. He ran through the doors into the corridor, not really sure what on earth he thought he was doing.

Two bodies lay on the floor about halfway down. One, by his outfit, was clearly a terrorist, while the other was a guest, lying on his front in a pool of blood.

The shooting had stopped now. There was just silence, and Martin wondered where the man had disappeared to, and whether he was the one who’d shot the terrorist. He walked towards the bodies, remembering that this was the way to the emergency staircase – the route he and the other hostages had taken when they were led up here after the hotel was taken over.

He looked down at the dead terrorist, wondered briefly what he’d hoped to achieve by murdering so many innocent people, and whether he’d died satisfied. Somehow Martin doubted it. It was all such a terrible, terrible waste of life.

But at least, he thought as he opened the door to the emergency staircase, he could try to save some others.

He heard the words straight away. Spat out of her mouth and dripping with hate: ‘Does that hurt, yes? Does it?’

Martin froze. He recognized that voice. It belonged to the cruellest terrorist of them all. The beautiful dark-haired woman who had seemed to care not one iota for any of them.

‘Fuck you,’ came the grunted reply.

It was the man from the restaurant. The one Martin had been looking for. He was clearly in immense pain, the defiance in his voice tinged with resignation.

‘I can make you scream. Perhaps if I cut this eye out, just—’

And then Martin was running down the stairs, letting out some kind of weird battle cry. He came sprinting round the corner, saw the man lying on his back, bleeding badly, unable to move, while she crouched over him, a knife in her hand. She was looking up, having heard his approach, but he was so quick that she hadn’t had time to grab her gun, which he could see was lying on the stairs next to her.

He had two choices: hesitate and die, or keep going and probably die. He chose the latter, diving straight into the woman, his momentum making up for his lack of weight and power, and the two of them crashed down the stairs and into the stairwell, landing on the body of a young woman which, grotesquely, still felt warm.

As they rolled on to the floor, Martin kept her in a tight bear hug so that she couldn’t use her knife. But she was stronger than he was and she wriggled ferociously in his grip, screaming and cursing into his face, her eyes black as coals.

And then they were rolling down the next set of steps and Martin could feel the wind being taken out of him. As they hit the bottom, she pulled her knife hand free, rolled on top of him, and thrust the blade at his chest. He put out a hand to stop her, grabbed the knife by the blade, and screamed in pain as it tore open his flesh.

The knife caught him somewhere in the upper body – he couldn’t see where. He felt a tremendous shock, and then the whole world seemed to slow right down. He felt his head fall back against the floor and his hands slip to his sides. Almost immediately his vision began to darken, as if he was entering a tunnel, and the woman became hazy in appearance as she got to her feet, turning away from him, still holding the bloodied knife in her hand.

And then he heard the sound of bullets echoing round the stairwell and the woman cried out and crashed backwards into the wall. She writhed against it for a moment, and more shots rang out. The woman appeared to perform a juddering little dance before sliding down the wall, leaving a long dark stain behind.

Everything was now utterly silent, and Martin began to feel very, very tired.

A face appeared in his fading vision. He thought it was the man he’d just rescued, but he couldn’t be sure. The man was saying something to him, but Martin couldn’t hear what it was.

Nor, it had to be said, did he care. All he wanted to do was sleep.

He closed his eyes and felt himself letting go, pulling away like a boat from a harbour, heading slowly out to sea.

His last thoughts as he died were not of Carrie, or what could have been. They were of his son, and his wife. Of what was.

22.28

ELENA STOOD IN
the wind and the rain at the edge of the roof terrace, looking across a Hyde Park dominated by the lights of emergency vehicles. The fire brigade had put up two ladders and a cherry picker, and were in the process of evacuating the hostages. Behind her, the first thin plumes of smoke were drifting out through the restaurant double doors, but nothing moved in there, and the shooting had stopped.

She’d seen Martin go running in there a few minutes ago, after the other man – the one who looked like a soldier – but neither of them had emerged, and she was beginning to fear the worst. She didn’t want to leave without them, but at the same time she desperately wanted to get back to Rod. And she needed to have her nose looked at. For the last few minutes the extent of the pain had been disguised by the adrenalin coursing through her system, but now it was beginning to make her feel nauseous.

A steadily growing roar filled the air and, as Elena watched, a huge military helicopter came into view, blocking everything else out as it stopped just metres above her, dropping down long rope lines. A few seconds later, two dozen armed men dressed completely in black abseiled down on to the terrace, pausing only to gather together in groups of four.

And then, beyond them, Elena saw a figure stumbling through the restaurant in the direction of the French windows. He was wearing a suit, and she immediately recognized him as the man Martin had gone in after.

The armed men in black saw him too, and one group of four approached him, weapons outstretched, the search beams attached to the sights homing in on his face.

The man stopped in the doorway, shielding his eyes with his hand as the men in black barked orders at him. Then he appeared to totter and fell on to one knee.

‘He’s hurt!’ shouted one of the men in black, and they descended on him quickly, moving him rapidly to one side as their colleagues poured through the French windows and into the restaurant.

Elena ran over and saw that they’d laid him out on his back. Two of them were frisking him for weapons, even though his shirt was stained with blood, and it was clear that he was badly injured. ‘Please,’ she said as one of the soldiers peeled off and blocked her view, ‘he’s not a terrorist. He attacked the terrorists in the restaurant. He saved our lives.’

‘Get back, ma’am, please,’ said the man in black, giving her a none too gentle push.

Behind him, his colleagues had finished their frisking and two of them had lifted the man to his feet. As they led him past Elena, her eyes met his.

‘Where’s Martin?’ she asked him. ‘I saw him go down to look for you.’

‘He didn’t make it,’ said the man in the suit. ‘I’m very sorry.’

And then he was being helped into the cherry picker, where two firemen waited to take him.

‘Come on, ma’am, you need to come to.’

Elena looked up towards the sky, and for a long moment she forgot everything and simply savoured the feel of the rain on her face.

The nightmare had ended. She was free.

22.32

AS THEY EMERGED
from the front of the hotel, the hostages were searched individually by SAS teams stationed just outside. The injured were moved to one side to be treated by paramedics, the remainder were funnelled into a narrow corridor formed by two lines of police tape, and flanked by armed officers, that ended in a large tent that had been erected earlier in the middle of Park Lane. The tent was a processing centre where the hostages would need to provide ID and an explanation of what they were doing in the hotel, in order to sift out anyone who might have been involved in the terrorist attack.