EIGHT
At the front desk downstairs, Clark had his head down reading something so he didn’t see the two men coming.
He looked up just as the front doors were barged open, and was momentarily frozen as the two intruders stormed inside the building. Before he could move, one of the two gunmen raised his Kalashnikov and immediately pulled the trigger, three bullets thumping into Clark's chest, the spent cartridges flying out of the side of the automatic rifle. The force of the gunfire threw him back off his chair and the policeman collapsed back in a heap to the floor, blood and pieces of his torso spattered all over the reception area.
Upstairs, everyone stopped when they heard the gunfire.
Cobb was inside his office, still thinking about the Charlie Adams puzzle, but he froze when he heard the three gunshots. Unlike his tech team, who were sitting motionless at their desks and unsure how to react, he had no such doubts.
He leapt up from his seat, ran across his office and pulled open the door just as Nikki ran back into the operations area from the briefing room, a look of sheer terror on her face.
‘Everybody get out!’ she screamed.
The tech team saw and heard her and panic instantly set in, flooding the room. None of the armed task force officers were there. These were all analysts, unused to combat or any confrontational situations. They started to rise from their seats and scatter as they heard the slapping steps of boots racing up the stairwell, but Cobb took charge instantly, thinking clearly.
‘No! Everybody, in my office! Now!’ he bellowed, quickly pushing back the door to his office. ‘Now!’
The entire team responded to the order, running over into the glass-walled room, uncertain and frightened. Once the last person ran inside, Cobb dragged the door shut and quickly entered a six-digit code on a keypad on the wall, each button beeping as he pushed it. There was a click as the door locked.
Seconds later, two men in balaclavas ran into view dressed all in black, fearsome assault rifles in their gloved hands. They quickly scanned the level and saw the tech team huddled together inside the office through the glass. One of the armed men ran forward and grabbed the handle to the office, pulling on it as hard as he could repeatedly and violently, locking eyes filled with hatred with Cobb through the glass. But the door wouldn’t budge. It was locked tight. The man shouted something in a foreign language and stepped back to join the other man, both of them raising their AK-47s.
‘Take cover!’ Cobb said, pushing his team down behind his desk.
And the two men opened fire.
When the ARU headquarters had been built, Cobb’s office had been made of standard, toughened safety glass. Not enough to stop a bullet but perfectly adequate for the walls of an office. However, after an unexpected incident a year and a half ago when a terrorist had confronted someone from the building outside in the parking lot, Cobb had ordered the glass be refitted with bulletproof panes instead.
And at that moment, that decision saved every one of his tech team's lives, as well as his own.
The two AK-47s were on fully automatic. The bullets hammered into the glass, the savage echoing of close automatic gunfire and chipping glass filling the air, the bright muzzle flash from each rifle blinding and terrifying the tech team cowering inside. But the bulletproof glass did its job. Each bullet left a blurred white splodge and sharp jagged ripple around it on the reinforced windows as the glass withstood the onslaught. If it had been normal safety glass, everyone inside would have been torn apart by the gunfire in seconds. Cobb's intuition and sense of caution had saved every one of them from certain death.
Outside, each gunman's magazine clicked dry and one of them screamed a curse, running forward and hammering at the glass with the butt of his rifle repeatedly, trying everything in his power to smash it, screaming and shouting in a foreign language. Meanwhile, his partner suddenly paused, raising his head, then ran into the briefing room and looked out of the window. He shouted something back to his friend and the other man joined him, both of them peering down into the car park. They both reloaded by reversing the clips in the AK, slapping the fresh mags into the weapons, and without hesitation the two of them opened fire out of the windows. Unlike Cobb’s office, the windows in the briefing room weren’t bulletproof, and the rounds shredded the glass to pieces, the lethal hail of bullets and glass smashing down at the three ARU cars pulling up outside the building down below.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Fox shouted, as a spray of bullets hit the front of their car, riddling the bonnet, smashing the front headlights. Porter pulled on the handbrake and turned to the side as the gunfire smashed into the 4x4 Ford, the vehicle skidding to a halt.
The moment Nikki had whispered in terror down the phone and Dr Keith's voice had told the car that the incident at the Embassy was a hoax, Archer had put two-and-two together and realised this whole thing was a set-up. He'd shouted at Porter to get back to HQ as fast as possible, that this was a decoy. Porter hadn’t needed to be told twice, pulling a U turn in the street and racing back to headquarters, the other two cars following closely as he gave the order over the radio. They had roared back into the parking lot to the sounds of gunfire coming from inside their own station, seeing two harsh muzzle-flashes on the upper level, and then were met by a brutal barrage of automatic rifle fire as they sped forwards towards the entrance.
Down below, Archer was first out of the car. He pushed open his door, rolling out and moving to the side of the 4x4, and went to shoot back with his MP5. However, one of the two gunmen above saw him and directed his relentless fire at the blond officer, pinning Archer down, the bullets smashing into the car, blowing out the tyres. They were like sitting ducks down here, in the worst position possible, taking fire from an enemy from a far superior vantage point. As he huddled behind the rear tyre, Chalky and Fox beside him, Archer realised that at least the car was stopping the bullets, which meant they weren't Teflon-coated cop killers as they were known on the street. If they had been, the officers would have been mere target practice, and the entire squad would have been mown down within thirty seconds.
The two gunmen had the height advantage, but the numbers advantage of the ARU squad allowed them to start to establish return fire. They were trained to make sure each bullet was accountable, but if they followed that ruling here they would be decimated. All rules had gone out the window. It was kill or be killed. The building was in the middle of a business area and the harsh sounds of the rifle fire hung in the air, echoing off the glass buildings around them, the two men above continuing their brutal onslaught.
Most of Second Team were forced to take cover, but from their position behind the lead car Chalky and Porter managed to start firing back. The cars were being shredded by the bullets from the AKs, all the windows now smashed, the sounds of bullets hitting metal and glass and the tinkle of spent shell-casings as they showered to the concrete adding to the constant harsh barrelling echo of the gunfire. Chalky aimed over the back of the car with his MP5 and fired, hitting one of the two men in the shoulder. The guy shouted in pain and fell back, the Kalashnikov knocked out of his hands as he dropped out of sight. Beside him, the other man saw this and immediately retaliated, emptying his magazine in a merciless rage, shouting abuse behind the muzzle flash. Once it clicked dry, he turned and disappeared back into the room.
'Move up!' Porter immediately bellowed.
Deakins was leading Second Team to the doors, but then the wounded man suddenly reappeared at the window, his AK-47 back in his hands, ready to resume firing. Fox fired back and hit him again, smacking the guy back out of sight before he had a chance to aim and pull the trigger.
To the left, Archer was thinking about the whereabouts of the second gunman and took off across the car park, running to the left, headed around the building, his boots crunching on fragments of smashed glass and empty shell casings as he sprinted across the parking lot.
‘Fire exit!’ he shouted.
Porter, Fox and Chalky knew where he was going and the three of them were already following close behind. They sprinted around the building then slowed, all four of their weapons tight to the shoulder and in the aim.
Archer was the first man to reach the corner. He whipped round the corner of the brickwork, his MP5 aimed straight down the building and whoever might be standing there. But all he saw was a smoking Kalashnikov on the ground, jammed in the doorway of the emergency exit, the air stinking of cordite and oil from the hot weapon. Archer ran over to it, then swore and looked around. The back of the ARU's headquarters didn't have the same space as the parking lot at the front, and surrounding buildings and streets were only fifteen yards away.
He looked over, seeing frightened pedestrians across the street, most of them looking back at him from behind makeshift cover, but there was no sign of the gunman dressed in black.
He was gone.
Meanwhile, Second Team had entered the building the other side, moving into the reception area. Leading the squad, Deakins saw bloodstains on the wall and spotted Clark's body slumped on the ground behind the desk. Feeling his throat tighten, Deakins held his finger on the trigger, and led his team up the stairs.
On the second floor, the six-man squad moved cautiously down the corridor towards the ops room, the men silent, each with his forefinger on the trigger of his MP5.
Deakins glanced to the right and saw the terrified tech team huddled in Cobb’s office, the glass on the windows damaged from gunfire but still intact, Cobb standing in front of his people. Deakins nodded to Cobb and keeping his MP5 in the aim, turned left into the briefing room.
The wounded gunman was writhing on the ground, two bullets in his shoulder, blood spattered on the floor behind him. He was lying amongst the debris of empty cartridges, smashed glass, spilt coffee, and scattered polystyrene cups and newspapers. His Kalashnikov was lying out of reach across the floor, the barrel smoking, but Deakins saw the man had a pistol in his hand, a Beretta 92.
‘Drop it!’ Deakins said, his MP5 in his shoulder, the hair-trigger on the man’s masked face. ‘Drop it!’
Coughing, blood pooling under him, the man shouted something at him in a foreign language and spat a mixture of blood and saliva at Deakins through the mouth-hole of his balaclava.
Then he put the Beretta to his head and pulled the trigger.