The Kill Zone (50 page)
Authors: Chris Ryan
‘Who’s the raghead with the phone, Jack?’ a voice shouted over the noise of the engines. Jack looked up. It was Fly Forsyth.
‘Just some dickhead who thought the world would be a better place without Jack Harker in it.’
Fly grinned. ‘Who hired him? Ex-girlfriend?’
Jack forced himself to smile and Fly noticed how strained it was. ‘Maybe it was the adjutant,’ he joked to relieve the tension. ‘Jack, care to share how you know so much about our target?’
‘Not really.’ The guys seemed to accept that.
Jack looked out of the window at the patchwork countryside speeding below. A memory flashed across his mind: the sandy view from the Black Hawk in Helmand, just moments before it went down. He pushed it away. He had to keep his mind on the job in hand. Dwell too much on the last few days and he wouldn’t just be ineffective. He’d be a liability.
Silence in the heli. There was none of the usual pre-op banter. Just eight men carefully preparing themselves and their kit. Everyone seemed to understand that the situation they were heading into was serious.
The sort of operation from which they could very well not return.
27
17.01 hrs.
Thames House. David Colley looked up at the enlarged map of London. The red circle continued to pulsate.
‘CO19 teams in place,’ a voice called. ‘Target’s location perimeter secured.’
Colley took a deep breath. It was all very well putting armed police around the area of Bermondsey defined by the red circle, but they all knew it would be the easiest job in the world for Khan to slip through such a cordon. There simply weren’t enough CO19 officers to secure an area like that effectively. Lack of personnel wasn’t their only problem, though. If Khan got even a whiff that they were on to him, he might be encouraged to detonate his device early. Even if he was nowhere near the President when it happened, the death toll would be devastating. They had to keep this covert until the very last minute. Only when they had a precise location could they hit him hard and fast.
Time passed. A strange sense of helplessness descended upon the ops room.
‘What if he knows we’re tracking him?’ the DG asked. ‘What if he’s left his phone somewhere just to put us off the track.’
Colley turned to his boss. The balance of power seemed to have shifted, and Daniels was giving the impression of being entirely in Colley’s hands.
‘Then we’re in trouble,’ he said. ‘But we know he was with the phone when they made the call from Hereford fifty minutes ago. That’s something.’
They continued to wait.
A sudden blur of voices. The red circle had disappeared. Within seconds, another one started to glow on the map of London. It had moved. Its centre was about half a mile further north of the previous circle.
‘
He’s moving!
’
He’s moving!
’
The ops room was alive again.
‘Sir!’ a voice called across the room. It was Jackie, and she was gesturing to Colley. He strode over to her.
‘What is it, Jackie?’
‘The fix, sir. His phone’s connecting to two mobile masts.’ She pointed up at the screen. A second circle had appeared. ‘Where the two circles intersect, that’s where the phone’s broadcasting from.’
Colley looked at the elliptical shape. It crossed the River Thames between Southwark Park and Shadwell.
‘Is he heading for the river?’
‘Hard to say, sir.’ And as she spoke, the shaded blue area of the kill zone moved half a mile further north.
Colley raised his voice. ‘Inform CO19 of the new location,’ he instructed. ‘And make sure they’re discreet.’
‘We could close the river,’ the DG suggested from over Colley’s shoulder.
Colley shook his head. ‘It would alert him.’ He addressed Jackie again. ‘Do we have satellite tracking on his possible locations?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, sir. We have people examining them in real time.’
‘Good. Speak to Hereford. Tell them there’s a possibility that he’s heading for the Thames.’
He looked back up at the map. The red circles were like eyes, glowing at him balefully. Colley stared back at them.
‘Where are you, Khan?’ he said under his breath. ‘Where the
hell
are you?’
hell
are you?’
17.28 hrs.
‘RAF Northolt. RAF Northolt. This is Air Force One
.’
.’
‘
Copy, Air Force One.
’
Copy, Air Force One.
’
‘
Requesting permission to land.
’
Requesting permission to land.
’
‘
Go ahead, Air Force One. You have full clearance.
’
Go ahead, Air Force One. You have full clearance.
’
Sean Barclay looked out from the control tower at Northolt. The evening sky was still a rich, cloudless blue. Perfect weather for the President’s arrival. Sean’s line of sight was clear. The airspace had been emptied of traffic for the arrival of Air Force One – regular holding patterns changed, military flights diverted to Brize Norton or elsewhere. And although he couldn’t yet see the President’s aircraft in the distance, his screen told him that it would be only a couple of minutes before he saw the blue and white Boeing 747 emerge from the hazy skies in the distance.
From his vantage point, he glanced down to the ground. Bloody Yanks, he thought to himself. They’d taken the whole place over. The previous day, a Globemaster had arrived with the President’s limousine – the Beast – which two Secret Service drivers had immediately taken off site to Buckingham Palace. Now there were three identical US Marine Corps helicopters, with Secret Service personnel swarming round them like bluebottles.
Sean shook his head. Talk about over the top. Yesterday, one of these Secret Service guys had taken him to one side to explain that they’d chosen him to guide Air Force One down, like it was some great privilege. They’d run background checks on him, and Sean couldn’t help wondering why, if he and his colleagues were all trusted by the British Army, they couldn’t just be trusted by the Yanks. The agent had then explained to him certain security precautions. Secret Service –
not
RAF personnel – would escort the President directly to one of the helicopters. Once he was on board, all three choppers would take to the air. Whichever of them carried the President would be given the call sign Marine One.
not
RAF personnel – would escort the President directly to one of the helicopters. Once he was on board, all three choppers would take to the air. Whichever of them carried the President would be given the call sign Marine One.
‘You go to all this trouble every time the President takes a trip?’ Sean had asked.
The Secret Service man’s face had remained impassive. ‘When the President takes a trip,’ he’d said, ‘it ain’t just a trip.’
No shit, Sean thought to himself now as he continued to look out of the control tower. This was, quite literally, a military operation.
He squinted back up into the sky. Far away, he thought he saw a dot of light appearing from the distance. He glanced down at his screen. The green dot with the President’s call sign and altitude had entered that part of the screen that included Sean’s field of vision.
Air Force One was coming in to land.
17.32 hrs.
From the window of the Agusta, Jack saw the western outskirts of London come into view. Somewhere over Wormwood Scrubs Park they started to lose height, continuing across the urban sprawl to Hyde Park, where they veered more sharply to the south before coming in to land in the drab surroundings of the London Heliport just west of Battersea, and bang on the south bank of the Thames. The helipad was surrounded by police liaison vehicles and other unmarked cars. As the two Agustas touched down and the Regiment unit spilled out on to the ground, Jack took in the ten or so people waiting for them around the helipad – some of them uniformed police officers, others in suits he assumed to be a mixture of plainclothes and MI5. ‘Who’s in charge?’ he shouted above the noise of the chopper’s blades.
An armed police officer stepped forward. ‘We think he’s on the river. Hereford have requested police dive teams meet your guys with equipment. They’ll be here within a minute.’ He pointed at the water where, among the many boats passing up and down the Thames, a long vessel covered with dirty, multicoloured cargo boxes was drifting up towards the bank. ‘Your transport,’ stated the police officer.
Jack didn’t need to hear any more. He turned back to the unit who had assembled in a group a little way from the two helis. ‘
Dive team
!’ he shouted.
Dive team
!’ he shouted.
Six of the guys – all of them members of Boat Troop – immediately peeled off from the others and ran towards him. At that moment, an unmarked white Transit van screamed on to the helipad. The moment it stopped, two men jumped out of the front, opened up the rear doors and started unloading equipment on to the tarmac.
Jack and the rest of the Boat Troop guys ran up to them. ‘Get changed!’ he shouted. ‘Intel suggests the target’s on the river.’
There was no fucking around. All seven of them stripped out of their operational clothing and started changing into the dive gear. The black drysuits went on first, followed by tight neoprene hoods and black boots; after this second skin went their ops waistcoats and firearms, followed by a weight belt to ensure they kept well hidden under the surface. Each man attached a dive mask with a Dräger rebreather and a matt black oxygen canister. These compact, closed-circuit rebreathers would allow them to swim shallow without any telltale air bubbles rising to the surface. Each man took a black swim board, which had a large, illuminated compass that they would be able to see in the murky waters of the Thames, along with a depth gauge and a luminous timer; plus the various other bits of kit they needed for the covert boarding of a hostile vessel.
Jack and the others carried their military fins – into which they would be able to fit their boots directly – and ran to the water’s edge. They tumbled in and swam to the nearby cargo vessel. They boarded, then hid among the cargo boxes.
There was no need to make contact with the skipper: Jack knew that the vessel’s regular captain would have been replaced by a professional. Their priority now was to keep out of sight until they got the go order. And that was out of his hands.
The boat started moving, surprisingly quickly, up the river towards the centre of London.
17.40 hrs.
From his vantage point in the control tower, Sean Barclay watched the slick choreography of a presidential arrival. Air Force One had barely come to a halt before the RAF ground crew had pushed the steps up to the plane and a group of people – Sean assumed that the President was in the middle of them, but he couldn’t see his face no matter how hard he peered – swept down to the waiting helicopters.
The middle of the three aircraft was designated Marine One. Once the entourage had boarded, however, all three rose into the air at the same time. Sean watched them carefully. They were barely thirty metres in the air before they performed a swift, skilful switch: Marine One swapped with the aircraft to its right, while the third rose above the other two before sandwiching itself between them. He remembered a game his great-uncle used to play with him when he was a kid: the old man would put a fifty-pence piece under one of three cups, then slide the cups around in a steady but confusing pattern. If Sean managed to locate the fifty pence, he was allowed to keep it. He never did.
He felt like that now – bemused as the three helicopters continued to rise out of sight, realising that he had already lost track of which one carried the world’s most powerful man.
And then they were gone.
Air Force One taxied over to another part of the airfield to be refuelled. Sean shrugged. He was obliged to remain here for the rest of the evening, but there would be no more flights into RAF Northolt tonight.
‘Excitement’s over for one day,’ he muttered to himself as he prepared for the boring hours ahead . . .
18.00 hrs.
‘He’s moving again!’
The two red circles on the map in the Thames House operations room had faded away. Colley stared at it, waiting for Khan’s location to reappear.
‘Three masts!’ Jackie called. ‘We’ve got three masts!’
As she spoke, three red circles appeared on the map. The area of intersection was concentrated firmly on the river between Westminster and Waterloo Bridge, and the blue kill zone had moved west, its boundary just touching Westminster Bridge.
‘Alert Hereford,’ Colley instructed. ‘Let the dive teams know we’ve narrowed it down. What’s the satellite imagery telling us? Can we identify Khan’s boat? Can we tell which way he’s moving?’
A tense pause.
‘Negative, sir. There’s too much river traffic – we have sixty-three vessels in the area. It could be any of them.’
‘
Shit
,’ Colley muttered.
Shit
,’ Colley muttered.
The DG spoke up. ‘Where’s the President now?’
A voice from the other end of the room: ‘Limousine One has just left Buckingham Palace. Estimated time to Westminster seven minutes.’
‘Damn it!’ Daniels shouted. ‘
Damn it!
’
Damn it!
’
The DG fumed and started pacing round the ops room. He felt entirely helpless, and it wasn’t a feeling he liked. And he was so hung up in his own panic that he didn’t notice Dave Colley walk out, fingering his mobile phone.
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