John Carr

Still, the calm, electric-blue sea… he could almost taste its fresh salt, feel its ancient and mystical powers cleansing his body and soul.

For a fleeting moment, he actually thought about jumping overboard.

But then, in his mind’s eye, he saw the pride on his father’s face, and it lent steel to his spine.

He would not let anyone down.

12.

SIXTY KILOMETRES BACK down the coast, in the luxurious, cream leather lounge on the lower deck of the Lucky Lady, Argun Shishani had his mobile phone to his ear once again.

He made two calls.

The first was to a Yemeni security guard on the MS Windsor Castle, who quickly passed on the message to a pair of Moroccan waiters.

The second was to a young Mindanaoan in greasy red overalls on the same ship.

When Farouk Ebrahim finished taking that second call, he looked down at the phone in his hand and thought for a moment.

Perhaps a quick call, to his mother, to tell her that he loved her, and was thinking of her?

But he quickly cast the notion from his mind – he did not want to cloud his mind with unnecessary emotions, and, more importantly, he did not want what he was about to do to come back to his family.

His trainers had warned him repeatedly of the fearsome reach and expertise of the Western intelligence agencies, and he knew that, in the coming days, every call made to and from the Windsor Castle on this voyage would be followed up and analysed.

So, instead, he took a final, longing look at the sea – was it his imagination, or were the waves getting up a little? – and whispered a quick prayer before throwing the mobile overboard into the eternal depths.

His last connection with the material world – the world of men, the world he despised – was gone: now there could be no turning back.

Ebrahim squeezed back out from between the lifeboats and hurried back inside.

First he went to the cabin he shared with an Indonesian oiler.

After a few minutes, he left the cabin and walked back down to the engine room of the Windsor Castle.

First engineer Phil Clarke was standing looking up at the various monitors and LCD panels, clipboard still in hand.

Off to the side, the third engineer was talking an engine cadet through a minor issue they’d had with one of the oil pressure gauges.

No-one paid the young Filipino any notice.

Until he walked up behind Clarke and, without warning, plunged a kitchen knife into his upper back.

The blade slid off the edge of Clarke’s right scapula, bending under the force of the blow, and plunged through his right lung, clipping the edge of his heart, and burying itself in the cartilage where his ribcage met his sternum.

The first engineer fell forward and hit the floor, gasping and dying, blood flowering on his shirt and spurting onto the steel deck.

The motorman calmly looked down at him and then turned round.

The two other men were staring at him in horror.

The third engineer, torque wrench hanging slack in his hand, took a step forwards.

‘What…?’ he said.

But he got no further.

Ebrahim, his mind and body fizzing with adrenalin and hope, raised his arms above his head, as his instructor had shown him, to arm the built-in mercury tilt-switch attached to the suicide vest that he was now wearing underneath his red overalls.

In the event that anyone tried to take him down, that switch would initiate the eight one-kilogram blocks of military-grade C4 plastic explosive, each taped up with approximately two hundred steel ball-bearings, which were sitting in the pouches of the hand-made canvas waistcoat.

Unbeknownst to Ebrahim, the vest contained a further switch, which meant that the device would detonate if he tried to remove it once it was clipped on.

This was designed to deal with any change of heart on the part of the young martyr.

But he had no such change of heart.

‘Allahu akbar!’ he shouted, staring at the two men in front of him. ‘Allahu akbar!’

At the same time, he closed his fist around the button in his hand, which was attached by two feet of copper wire to the electrical detonator on his vest. The wires met, and the contact sent a pulse to the detonator, the resultant explosion in turn initiating the detonation cord linking the blocks of C4. The det cord exploded at 8,000 metres per second, igniting the C4 and spreading 1,600 ball bearings out through 360 degrees with the destructive force of a thousand shotguns.

The explosive energy turned Farouk Ebrahim into a pink mist where he stood.

A millisecond later the molten shrapnel destroyed all of the computers and levers and LCD screens and gauges in that end of the engine room, threw the four Converteam/Rolls-Royce engines instantly offline, and shredded the other men.

They did not even register the flash of the explosion which obliterated them.

13.

UP ON THE BRIDGE of the MS Windsor Castle, the power surged and died, and then the emergency batteries came on line.

A second later, a red light began flashing, and a horn started sounding.

Fire in the engine room.

The staff captain wasn’t unduly disturbed – on a vessel of this sophistication, it was far more likely that this was a false alarm, linked to whatever had caused the engines to shut down, than that there was an actual fire.

But still.

He knew that the ship’s duty fire control party would have received the alarm on their personal radios, but he called the head of the party anyway and made sure he was en route.

He had a quick look at the fire suppression system – it was showing deployed, which meant a fine drizzle was already descending in the compartment; if it was not cancelled it would be followed shortly by a mixture of argon, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide.

Still not overly troubled – this was an automatic response to an alarm, false or otherwise – he keyed in the command to close the fire doors in that zone of the ship, before glancing up at the overhead CCTV panel.

It was divided up into many dozens of small images; he called up a new screen showing the six views of the engine room.

All were blank.

He grunted in surprise.

Okay, now that was concerning.

He immediately put an intercom call out to the men down there.

No reply.

Tried first engineer Phil Clarke on his personal radio, with the same result.

Well, Houston, he thought to himself, perhaps we do have a problem.

He checked the ambient temperature sensors – they were elevated.

He clicked his own radio again.

‘Captain to the bridge, please,’ he said. ‘Quickly.’

Then he called the second deck officer, whom he knew was in his cabin not far from the engines.

The man picked up quickly.

‘Jerry, it’s Nils,’ said the staff captain. ‘Can you do me a favour? The engines have gone offline, there’s a fire alarm down there, and I can’t raise Phil Clarke or anyone else. Fire control are on their way, but would you mind just going along and telling me what’s going on?’

‘Sure,’ said Jerry.

The staff captain ran through some checks on his bridge systems, and then made another attempt to contact the engine room on the comms.

Same result.

His radio crackled.

It was Jerry.

‘Nils,’ he said, ‘it’s me. It’s… it’s a bit weird down here. I can definitely smell burning, but the door’s locked somehow. And one of the junior engineers reckons he heard a loud bang from inside about a minute ago.’

‘Shit. Are fire control there?’

‘Yes, we’re forcing it. We’ll be inside in thirty seconds.’

‘Okay,’ said Nils. ‘Keep me in the loop. I’ll need to know whether it’s a general evacuation situation in…’ He looked at his watch. ‘In one minute. If I don’t hear from you, I’m calling it.’

‘Roger that. We’re nearly through.’

14.

FAR ABOVE, CAPTAIN Carlo Abandonato had known that the engines had stopped – he’d felt the slight change in vibration, and had seen the momentary dimming of the lights – but he was not terribly concerned.

They were not scheduled to shut down, but things cropped up now and then.

He assumed that Phil Clarke and his team had noticed something – almost certainly nothing major, the damned things had under 6,000 hours in them since a complete rebuild – and had taken them off for a short while to sort it out.

Clarke had done twenty-two years in destroyers in the British navy, and was fresh from a three-day manufacturer’s refresher course at Rolls-Royce Marine; it couldn’t be anything that he couldn’t fix.

Still, Abandonato had been keen to get back up to the bridge, and his unease had doubled or trebled with the radio message from the staff captain.

So now – careful to look smooth and unflustered – he took his leave of the tables full of family diners and walked out of the burger restaurant.

It was as he was starting upwards in the elevator that he heard the first shots.

And then the human sounds of fear and horror.

Outside, unseen by the captain, the Yemeni security guard, called by Argun Shishani from the yacht along the coast at Marbella, was standing on the sun deck with an AK47, taking aimed shots at the sunbathers and swimmers in and around the pool.

Several people were already floating in red-tinted water, and others were scrambling to get away.

The Yemeni had been chosen for this operation precisely because he was battle-hardened; he had cut his teeth on the US Marines in the Second Battle of Fallujah, during the insurgency in Iraq, and had travelled the Middle East and Africa throughout the years that followed, fighting the kuffar in the name of Allah.

He’d spent most of the recent past fighting the Pesh and the al-Hashd al-Shaabi in Iraq, and the YPG and others in Syria.

He was remorseless and dedicated: he accepted that death would embrace him today, and he welcomed the fact.

He thought of his friends, men who had gone before him and died in the same glorious cause, and he smiled.

This was for them: he would see them soon.

He had ten magazines of thirty rounds each on his chest rig, and he intended to make as many of those rounds count as possible.

He took aim at a young child, standing by a gangplank on the deck below, screaming in frozen fear next to its dead mother, and heard the click as the hammer of his weapon struck an empty chamber.

His magazine empty, he allowed it to hang free on its sling, and took a grenade – a Swiss-manufactured L109A1, liberated from a British Army stores in Germany, on a four-second fuse – from his bag.

Leaned against the guard rail.

Pulled the pin.

Almost casually, he threw the grenade over the side at the child, and the panicking stream of humanity – if you could use that term to describe the dogs who were running like cowards down the nearest gangplank.

The grenade detonated with a dull crump, killing the child and two others outright and wounding many more.

Smiling, he reloaded the AK, fired a dozen rounds into the survivors and then turned and walked in the direction of the cabins in search of more victims.

It was a good day to die, here in the land of the infidel, bringing terror to the enemy, and his womenfolk, and his young.

15.

BY NOW, CARLO Abandonato had reached the bridge deck, his blood running alternately cold and hot.

He found the bridge empty, the staff captain and the navigator having leaped overboard into the warm embrace of the Med when the shooting began.

‘Merda!’ spat Abandonato. ‘Bastardi codardi!’

He activated the Windsor Castle’s distress beacon, picking up the ship-to-shore telephone – as though the authorities were not already aware of what was happening.

He pressed the click-to-talk.

And then he saw movement outside.

A young man.

Abandonato recognised him.

An assistant purser?

No, a waiter.

Either way, it didn’t matter – he was here, and he could help.

‘You,’ said Abandonato, in English. ‘You need to get below and get as many passengers as possible off this damned ship. Boats, gangways, tell them to jump overboard… anything.’

In response, the man said nothing, but raised his arm.

Something in his hand.

Abandonato ducked instinctively as the man fired, and the shot passed two feet over his head and spidered the bridge windscreen.

Deafened, the captain scrabbled left, hidden from view by the centre console.

His mind was scrambled.

He could hear the man’s feet slapping on the deck as he walked across to get another shot at him.

Abandonato looked wildly around.

The main door was ten feet away.

There was no way he could make it.

He felt a terrible sense of despair, and of resignation – but luck was on his side.

Fleetingly.

The shooter had suffered a stoppage – the empty cartridge, which should have been cleanly ejected, had stuck in the breech and jammed the pistol. He’d gone through the clearance drill a thousand times, but the shock of the moment had fried his brain and turned his fingers to thumbs, and he was fumbling with the slide.

It gave Abandonato the moment he needed.

His eye lit upon the drawer above his head.

The Very pistol.

Keeping low, he pulled open the drawer and groped for the pistol.

His hand closed around the grip.

Felt for a flare.

Found one.

Hands trembling, he loaded the gun.

As he snapped it shut, he saw the shooter’s legs appear at the edge of the console.

Heard the sound as the man racked the top slide to load another round into the breech, ready to finish the job.

Abandonato crossed himself, offered a prayer to his own God, and launched himself at the guy with the gun, yelling ‘Segaiolo!’

The shooter rocked back on his heels in surprise at the sight of the captain coming for him, tripped on his own feet, and fell onto his arse.

If Abandonato had pressed home his attack in the second, second-and-a-half, that his enemy was disoriented, he might have prevailed.

But instead he hesitated.

And now the attacker raised his pistol and fired from eight or nine feet away.

The round hit the skipper in the right side of his groin and knocked him backwards like he’d been kicked by a mule. There was remarkably little pain – his left brain noted this fact with no little surprise, even as his right brain was overwhelmed with shock and alarm – but the bullet had severed his femoral artery and his life was now measured in seconds.

Still prone, the attacker pulled the trigger again, but the top slide was back and jammed again – the curse of cheap ammunition – and the weapon didn’t respond.

He pulled the trigger again – frantically – and then smashed the thing on the deck, in a futile attempt to clear it.

And then looked up at the captain.

Saw the Very pistol.

The boot suddenly on the other foot, his bottle went.

‘No,’ he screamed, holding up a hand. ‘No!’

Staggering forward, pumping blood, Abandonato raised the pistol and fired the flare into the other man’s face from a distance of three feet.

Fifty grams of potassium perchlorate, dextrin, and strontium nitrate entered the terrorist’s right eye at 330 feet per second, and came to a stop two inches inside his skull.

Burning at 2,000 degrees centigrade.

The bridge was filled with an unearthly screaming and banging as the man howled and clawed at his face, but Abandonato was past caring.

Suddenly weary, breathing laboured, he slumped to the floor in a puddle of his own blood.

Pressed his hand to the front of his trousers.

Looked at his palm.

Bright, shiny red.

He didn’t know how he knew it, but he knew that he was dying.

He didn’t feel frightened, only sad.

As the room started to go dim, a tear formed in his eye.

He wanted to speak to his wife, and his daughter, but he hadn’t the strength to stand and reach for the sat-link.

His last conscious thought was that he would never see his unborn son.

Never smell him.

Never hear or hold him.

As that realisation formed, he slipped into oblivion and was gone.

16.

THE SPANISH SECURITY complex had been dreading – and preparing for – a nightmarish attack like this ever since the Madrid train bombings way back in 2004.

Cruise liners and tourists were just too big and soft and tempting a target.

So within three minutes of the first shots, Guardia Civil officers were on scene at Málaga’s Eastern dock, and dead and wounded people were being carried away at a crouching run.

Within six minutes, two mini-buses carrying locally based Grupo Especial de Operaciones teams – the Policia Nacional SWAT men – screamed on to Pier 1.

The shooter, or shooters, had by now disappeared inside the vessel, so the GEO inspector-jefe sent three snipers to take up the best positions they could find, stuck another couple of men on the cordon as liaison, and then led the rest of his blokes charging up an empty gangway to get aboard.

Forty kilometres out into the Med, aboard the amphibious assault ship SPS Juan Carlos I, the twin rotors on a giant, black Boeing CH-47 Chinook helicopter were almost up to take-off speed.

In the rear of the aircraft were sixteen special forces marines from the Fuerza de Guerra Naval Especial.

Flight time to Málaga, a little under eight minutes.

And the final response came from down the coast at Marbella, where that town’s on-duty six-man detachment of Grupo Especiales de Operaciones special ops soldiers boarded their Eurocopter AS532 Cougar helicopter and lifted off, heading west.

Absolutely flat out, their aircraft was capable of around 140 knots. That gave them a flight time of around fourteen minutes, which disappointed the soldiers – they knew the Juan Carlos I had been patrolling through the Med not far from Málaga, and that its SF marines were already inbound.

Chances were the whole party would be over before they even got there.

But they pressed on regardless.

17.

JOHN CARR WAS not a patient man at the best of times, and now – just as those special forces troops from Marbella arrived over Málaga, sixty kilometres to the north-east – he finally cracked.

‘Hey, George,’ he said, leaning over on an elbow. ‘D’you fancy a pint? I’ve had enough of this.’

George Carr turned to look at his father, eyebrows raised, mocking grin on his face.

The expression said, very clearly, How can you have had enough of this?

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I’m good, thanks.’

‘What about me?’ said Alice, pushing those mirror shades off her eyes and squinting up at her father.

‘I’d love to take you, sweetheart,’ said Carr, with his best attempt at sincerity. ‘But you’re under age. We can’t break the law, can we? Your mum’d kill me.’ He turned back to George. ‘I said, Do you fancy a pint?’ he said, with meaning. ‘The correct answer is, Yes, I do.’ He stood up. ‘Come on, I havenae brought my wallet.’

George chuckled. ‘There’s a fucking surprise,’ he said.

He stood, brushing sand off his back and elbows, and off his Union Jack swimming shorts.

‘Watch your language in front of your sister,’ said Carr. He looked at George’s shorts and shook his head in disdain. ‘No class whatsoever,’ he said. Then, innocently, ‘And have you put a bit of weight on, by the way? 3 Para must have softened up since my day.’

‘Fuck off,’ said George, good-naturedly.

A slightly taller, slightly skinnier version of his old man, he was in the kind of shape you’d expect of a twenty-four-year-old Para Reg full-screw who was scheduled to undergo Selection later that year.

This holiday being his last blow-out before he got down to training proper, ahead of his journey to Hereford, Pen-y-Fan, and the jungle.

He looked down, and nudged his girlfriend with his toe.

‘We’re off up into town for a bit, Chloe,’ he said. ‘The old bastard’s shit drills have left him dehydrated. You coming?’

She groaned. It had been a heavy night the night before.

‘No,’ she said, sitting up. ‘I think I’ll go for a swim instead.’

‘Suit yourself,’ said George. Then he looked at his dad. ‘Come on, then,’ he said. ‘I’m in the chair. Again.’

‘Too right,’ said Carr, with a grin, poking his son in the ribs. ‘Tips on passing Selection don’t come cheap, fatty.’

‘Fuck me,’ said George, shaking his head. ‘Don’t you ever give it a rest?’

‘No way,’ said Carr. ‘Being this irritating takes a lot of practice.’

He laughed and looked at his boy, and felt an enormous surge of pride – a feeling that he knew was mutual.

The two men turned and started trudging up the beach.

18.

A LITTLE OVER ONE hundred metres away, in the calfskin and mohair interior of the gleaming white Lucky Lady, four men sat in silence.

Tense, but focused.

One or two knees bouncing up and down on the deep-pile beige carpet with nervous energy.

They were all dressed like everyone else nearby, in shorts and T-shirts or vests, though they were wearing trainers rather than flip-flops.

The better for movement.

Each had at his feet a beach bag, and each bag contained an AKS-74U ‘Krinkov’, a lightweight, shortened version of the AK47, with a folding skeleton stock.

Each Krinkov had a magazine in place, and each man had five spare mags – a total of 720 rounds of 5.45mm-short death and destruction.

The dark-eyed Chechen called Argun Shishani sat on the steps to the upper deck.

He had a phone to his left ear, and a police radio, stolen three nights earlier, in his right hand.

He was talking to the young man in the cut-off denim shorts and the Manchester United shirt, who had moved down the beach a way but still had a good view.

‘I don’t care if two have left as long as the main target is still there,’ said Shishani. ‘She is? Good. Right, sixty seconds.’

He ended the call and looked at the four men. ‘Okay, boys,’ he said. ‘It’s on.’

He refreshed an iPad, on which was a single image – a woman, wearing a bikini, on the beach outside.

He tapped the tablet, and the four men took a final long look at the photograph.

‘You have seven minutes,’ said Shishani, ‘and no longer. Kill as many as you can, and bring me back my prize. And may Allah go with you.’

As they left, he followed them up and stood on the deck.

He watched the four men melt into the crowd, and briefly turned to look behind himself.

From his vantage point he could see clear out to sea.

It was a thin ribbon of serenity between the decadence of Europe and the very different lands of North Africa, lurking just over the blue horizon, with their violence, and turmoil, and poverty.

At least, that was how it appeared to the Westerners.

Argun Shishani’s lip curled in disgust.

These trivial, shallow people, splashing and playing in the shallows, and drinking themselves insensible in the nearby bars – they thought that that narrow, tranquil strip of water protected them from the rage.

But today it was an angry sea, and it had brought God’s wrath to these shores, and after the wrath was spent the sea would carry away His servants to safety.

Shishani smiled, and waited.