Passenger 13

This eBook novella is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed therein are creations of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Published by Claymore Publishing

An eBook Original 2011

Copyright © Scott Mariani 2011

www.scottmariani.com

Scott Mariani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

ISBN: 978-0-9569226-0-1

Artwork design and layout by Pentacor Plc

All rights reserved. This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

CHAPTER ONE

London

It was a sunny June afternoon as the man walked into Selfridges via the Duke Street entrance and made his way through the bustling crowds to the restaurant and champagne bar overlooking the accessory hall.

If anyone had been paying close attention to him, they would have seen a man somewhere in his thirties or early forties, lean, neatly but unobtrusively dressed in a crisp dark suit. He had the bronzed complexion and jet-black hair of a Middle-Easterner; silk shirt, navy tie, gleaming patent leather shoes. The hand holding the calf-leather briefcase wore a large gold ring, but other than that there was nothing too ostentatious or especially noticeable about him.

It was 1.15 and the restaurant was filled with shoppers, tourists, people on lunch breaks. The man took a seat at the edge of the restaurant and slid his briefcase under the table by his feet. When the waiter came he was warm and friendly. From the lunch menu he ordered crispy baby squid with wild garlic mayonnaise, then for a main course a pan-fried fillet of Scottish salmon with kale and shrimps on the side. As he ate his lunch calmly, washing it down with a half bottle of good white wine, he watched the people come and go. A small group of Japanese tourists settled at a table to his left, surrounded by bulging shopping bags; to his right a young couple with their two small children, speaking French and scouring a London travel guide.

The man watched the little boy and girl. He smiled and went on eating. When he’d finished, he looked at his watch, picked up his case, and paid a visit to the bathroom. He was gone three minutes. When he returned, he settled his lunch bill in cash and then left.

And if anyone had been paying close attention to him, they would have seen that he’d left the gents’ without his briefcase.

The man was on the corner of North Audley Street and Green Street when he took out the mobile phone and dialled in the number that sent an electronic signal to the remote detonator. The case was packed with an expertly-prepared combination of RDX nitroamine high explosive and other substances that together were designed to produce a blast greater than a powerful car bomb.

The initial explosion engulfed the restaurant and champagne bar within one hundredth of a second. At its core, the temperature was high enough to vaporise human tissue on contact. Nothing at all would remain of the Japanese tourists, or the French couple, their little boy and girl, the bar staff or anyone else within a radius of thirty metres.

In the next three hundredths of a second the blast filled the ground floor of the department store, obliterating everything in its path. One hundred and sixty-eight shoppers were reduced to tatters of flesh and clothing; scores more were horribly maimed and burned.

The store’s ground floor windows blew out onto Duke Street and Oxford Street. Passers-by were caught in a storm of flying glass. Vehicles skidded and swerved all over the road. Broadsided by the terrible shockwave, a passing bus mounted the opposite pavement and toppled over on its side, flattening fifteen pedestrians as they stood gaping in frozen horror at the smoke pouring from the shattered department store.

In the immediate aftermath of the blast came the moments of stunned, deathly silence.

Then the mayhem began. But before the first wild screams were heard among the devastation of Oxford Street, and long before the racing convoy of emergency services units came wailing in through the panic, the man in the dark suit was already heading fast towards Grosvenor Square and his two colleagues inside the waiting car.

CHAPTER TWO

Brecon, Wales

Six weeks later, July 23

Whatever deal with God the jazz festival organisers had made to keep the rain off that year, He’d delivered in spades. The night was warm, the stars were bright, and over two thousand people were crowding the open-air gig.

Onstage, the band were delivering too: the bass and drums laid down a thundering groove as the alto saxophonist took up his instrument and blasted out a solo that scorched the air. The sax glittered red, blue, green under the lights. At the searing climax of the solo, the crowd roared its delight.

That was when Ben Hope started making his way towards the beer tent for another drink. Pretty damned impressive, he was thinking. Not quite up there with Coltrane, but pretty damned impressive.

The girl he was with didn’t seem to share his enthusiasm. Ben didn’t know much about her, except that her name was Ally, she was local, she was twenty-two, and she liked rum and Coke – a lot – was onto her fourth already.

But then, she knew even less about him. In his line of work, the less people knew the better.

In the beer tent, pressing to the front of the throng and speaking loudly to be heard, he ordered the drinks: the same sticky sweet shit for her, another whisky for himself. ‘Not that one,’ as the barman went for the blended cheap stuff. ‘The malt. That’s the one. Make it a double. No ice.’ Reaching into the back pocket of his jeans for his wallet, Ben felt the muscles in his right side cramp up and he winced sharply. It took him a second to get his breath back – the kind of pain you know your face has gone pale.

‘Been in the wars?’ the barman asked cheerfully.

‘You could say that,’ Ben replied, laying a fiver on the bar and taking a gulp of his drink. The twelve-year-old scotch burned a warm river down deep inside him. The pain was passing already. It didn’t hurt anything like the way it had when he’d taken his R&R leave three weeks ago. Considering the close-range impact of the AK-47 rifle bullet that had gouged through his side and severely cracked three of his ribs before going on to pass right through a wall, he didn’t think his recovery was going too badly.

‘Got a cigarette?’ Ally yelled over the music when she’d finished her drink. She frowned at the one he handed her. ‘What are these?’

‘They’re Greek,’ Ben said, lighting it for her, then one for himself. Lying about what he did for a living often entailed lying about where his job took him, and it was second nature now. In fact the cigarettes were Jordanian, one of the last of the packs he’d bought a few days before his SAS squadron had been dropped in the Iraqi western desert to seize key airfields.

He hadn’t had much chance to smoke them. A couple of weeks after securing the airfields as forward operating bases and pushing eastwards into the desert, supported by RAF Harriers and unmanned Predator reconnaissance spyplanes as they clashed with retreating Iraqi forces, Ben’s unit had received a report that two undercover SAS soldiers, posing as Arabs to investigate an Iraqi police captain in the Basra area suspected of passing information to Shia militiamen, had been hijacked and abducted by an armed gang. Just a few weeks earlier, six military police had been hacked to death in the same area.

Within hours of the report, an unofficial rescue mission had been greenlit deep within the corridors of Whitehall and two dozen troopers under Ben’s command were kitted up and en route to Basra on a Hercules transport plane.

SAS intelligence sources were sound on the location of the hostages, not quite as sound on the force of men holding them. Assaulting the stronghold under cover of darkness, Ben’s squad had quickly found themselves heavily outnumbered by battle-hardened militants determined not to give up their valuable hostages. In just a few minutes of furious fighting, the floor was littered with spent cartridge cases and dead men. Ben had been first through the door of the hostages’ cell, taking out three of the guards before they could react.

The fourth guard, the one with the AK, had been hiding behind a doorway. Ben hadn’t had time to react as the gunman had come leaping out with a wild scream and let rip with his rifle. The next thing Ben had known, he was waking up in the military hospital, pumped full of painkiller, his side heavily bandaged. It wasn’t the first time a bullet had found him, it wasn’t the worst, and it might not be the last. But at least the hostages had been extracted safely.

‘Are we going soon?’ Ally said. ‘This music’s giving me a headache. Or maybe it was that shitty cigarette.’

Ben shrugged. The next act up was a jazz-rock fusion guitar trio, and that wasn’t so much his thing anyway. ‘Fine,’ he said, and they walked away from the crowd towards the car. The blue BMW Alpina came courtesy of the regiment. Perks of his rank.

Beyond the festival enclosure, the enhanced police and security presence was as noticeable as at any other large-scale event in Britain that summer. Ever since the Selfridges bombing in June, the whole country had been in a state of red alert. And as Ben drove back through the outskirts of Brecon towards Ally’s place, it was no surprise that the news programme that came on the radio headlined with the breaking story that, after a frenzied manhunt, Scotland Yard had finally detained a suspect.

‘… early reports suggest he may have been part of the same extremist Jihadist terror group responsible for the Lisbon Embassy bombing in February, in which seven people died.’

Ben grunted. The antiterrorist boys had had their hands full the last few weeks. And the odds were it wasn’t over yet. Every city in Britain was braced for another attack, security services stretched to breaking point. The tension everywhere was palpable.

‘In another breaking story,’
the presenter went on,
‘Cayman Islands authorities fear that today’s air crash off the island of Little Cayman may have claimed the lives of all twelve passengers and three crew members. It has emerged in the last few minutes that the aircraft’s British pilot and owner of Cayman Islands Charter, Nick Chapman, is thought to have ditched into the sea in a deliberate act of suicide …’

Ben hit the brakes. The BMW slewed to a halt in the middle of the empty road.

‘Hey! Watch it!’ Ally yelped, nursing her shoulder where she’d jolted against her seatbelt.

‘Shush.’ Ben turned up the radio volume.

‘… a Home Office source has revealed that Chapman, a former member of the British armed forces, may have served with the SAS during the 1990s. Police and rescue divers continue to comb a large area of sea, but as yet no survivors have been found in what appears to be the worst air tragedy ever to hit the British territory …’

Ben said nothing more as he drove Ally the rest of the way back to her place on the edge of Brecon.

‘Don’t you want to come in, then?’ she smiled at the door.

‘I have to get back,’ Ben said.

‘When will we see each other again?’ she asked.