Authors: James Barrington
His right arm was a throbbing, bloody mess, but all he needed to do was press the button, and that he could manage in an instant. He reached out. His finger was less than six inches away when he
was suddenly aware of movement to his right.
He glanced up. Subconsciously he’d been expecting to see a Dubai police officer, but the figure in front of him was a woman. Not only that, but a woman wearing Western-style civilian
clothes. The sight was so unexpected that he paused, stopping the movement of his left hand, and stared up at her. Then he registered two other things: she was smiling slightly, and the black
object she was pointing at him was a pistol.
For the briefest instant, time seemed to stand still and then, with a sudden grunt of rage, Bashar lunged for the box.
Saturday
Nad Al-Sheba Racecourse, Dubai
A hundred yards from the stand, Saadi took his eyes off the track, where the horses competing in the World Cup race were thundering towards him, and glanced down at his watch.
Less than ten seconds to go. He turned away and began pushing through the crowd towards the stand, his left hand in the pocket of his
gellabbiya
supporting the Kalashnikov so that he could
walk more easily.
He needed to be sufficiently far away from the blast that he wouldn’t get hit by flying debris, but close enough to have only a short distance to run before he could start using his
assault rifle. He stopped about sixty yards from the stand, and waited. Twenty yards to his right, Massood also stood ready. Behind them, the roar of the crowd grew in intensity as the horses raced
towards the finish line. As the second hand of his watch swept round, the two men braced themselves.
The moment Bashar’s fusillade ceased, Richter started moving. He glanced over the air-conditioner, then ran towards his target, taking advantage of every scrap of cover.
He stopped about fifteen feet short of his objective and took in the scene before him.
Carole-Anne Jackson was standing a few feet inside the void, the workshop door open, her legs apart, both arms outstretched in front of her, aiming her Glock straight at the man on the floor.
The terrorist seemed to be frozen in place but, even as Richter stepped forward, he suddenly shouted and lunged. Jackson didn’t hesitate for a moment, squeezing the trigger three times in
quick succession, just as Richter fired the MP5 on full auto.
Caught in the crossfire, Bashar never stood a chance. Jackson’s first two nine-millimetre bullets smashed into the right side of his chest, tumbling him sideways. The Glock’s muzzle
had lifted with each shot, and her third bullet missed the target. But that didn’t make any difference. Richter’s five-round burst caught the Arab in the head and back as he fell
sideways, away from the plastic box, and he was dead even before he stopped moving.
Jackson stood still, her pistol still pointing at the motionless and untidy heap of flesh and bone that until two seconds earlier had been a living human being, but she was looking everywhere
except at the body.
‘Any more of these bastards in here, you reckon?’ she called out, her voice steady.
‘No,’ Richter replied, trotting forward to confirm that Bashar was as dead as he looked. ‘He was the trigger-man, just in here to press the button. Three people arrived in
Dubai with Shaf, so there’ll be a couple of shooters outside, ready to finish the job, but there was only a single
shahid
.’
As Richter bent over the fallen man, Jackson lowered her pistol until it pointed at the ground. Then she spun round as she heard a faint noise behind and slightly to her left, bringing the
pistol up again. Simultaneously, Richter stepped away from Bashar’s body and brought the MP5 to bear.
Saadi waited expectantly, then tensed as, over the roar of the crowd, he heard several sharp but muted bangs. They were difficult to hear clearly, but to Saadi – who had
considerable experience in the field – the noises sounded remarkably like sub-machine-gun fire. And that, he guessed immediately, meant something had gone wrong.
He glanced over at Massood, who was eyeing him with a peculiar intensity, then moved across to join him.
‘Something’s wrong,’ Massood said softly, confirming what Saadi was thinking.
‘I know.’ Saadi looked again at his watch. ‘He should have triggered the weapon by now. The police or security guards must have discovered him.’
‘He had his weapon. He could have killed his attackers.’
‘He could, but I doubt it. If he was still able, he would have fired the charges by now. I think he’s been captured or killed.’
‘Can’t we launch our attack immediately?’
Saadi looked at him, then pointed at the stand towering above them. ‘Even if we both fired our weapons, the most we’d achieve would be to break a few windows. No, whatever happens we
must
trigger that device. That’s the only sure way of completing our mission. You wait here and prepare yourself. I will go inside and fire the charges. I will not be coming out again.
In’shallah
.’
‘
Ma’assalama
, Saadi,’ Massood murmured, as his companion strode away.
Michael Watkinson stood framed in the workshop doorway, his Browning aimed in Richter’s direction. The moment he was certain the situation was under control, he applied
the safety catch, slipped the weapon back into his holster and approached them.
Jackson was less than happy with his technique. ‘You need some serious retraining in close-combat tactics, Mr Watkinson. You
never
stand silhouetted in a doorway when there might be
bad guys the other side of it. That’s just an invitation to get yourself blown away.’
‘Sorry. This isn’t really my scene. What happened here?’
‘We stopped him,’ Richter said simply, as Watkinson stepped forward to stare at the dead man lying on the ground.
‘You killed him?’
‘Damn right we did,’ Jackson replied. ‘You don’t fuck around with people like this. You get the chance, you take them down.’
‘If you’d taken him alive, we could have questioned—’
‘No way,’ Richter snapped. ‘Carole’s quite right. If we hadn’t shot this bastard, right now we’d just be a couple of red smears on the side of a hole about
twenty feet deep.’
‘So what now?’ Watkinson asked.
‘The other bad guys are probably still waiting for the stand to collapse, then they’ll move in and mop up any of their targets who managed to survive.’
‘Do you want me to get Hussein’s cops to try to find them?’
‘That’s probably not too bright an idea. They’ll already know something’s wrong because the explosives haven’t gone off, so now they’ll be particularly alert.
If they see anyone they don’t like the look of heading towards them, they’ll probably pull out their weapons and start firing at anything that moves. We don’t want that. I think
we need to use a bit of finesse.’
‘Which means?’ Jackson demanded.
‘You and I stay in here as a reception committee, because we’re the best with the weapons. Michael, you go outside and take a look around. Watch out for anyone who doesn’t seem
too interested in the racing, or is staring at the stand or his watch. If you find Hussein, suggest he does the same, but discreetly. We don’t want a crowd of cops rushing about.’
‘And if I do spot someone?’
‘Just keep him in view, without letting him know you’re watching. There are thousands of people milling about out there, so staying out of sight shouldn’t be too difficult.
Just call my mobile if you spot anyone.’
‘You think they’ll come back in here?’
‘They’ll still want to detonate their IED because that’s their principal weapon. So, yes, I think one of them will be heading this way.’
With the big race over, crowds of people had started streaming past the stand, the overhead floodlights illuminating the scene almost as clearly as day, and Saadi had no
difficulty blending in with them. As he turned the corner, the workshop door opened and a figure emerged. Saadi slowed slightly and watched as the man glanced round before making his way along the
side of the stand towards the front.
Saadi hesitated for a moment, calculating the odds. The man had emerged from the same door that he and his companions had used. Some of the people who had attacked Bashar were probably still
inside the void, at that end of the stand, so it made sense to him to approach from the opposite end.
‘OK,’ Carole-Anne said. ‘While Watkinson’s acting as look-out, what do
we
do?’
‘We take care of this,’ Richter said, picking up the black plastic box. The red light still glowed, indicating it was switched on.
Jackson looked at the object in his hand. ‘Which is the trigger?’ she asked. ‘The switch or the button?’
‘The button,’ Richter said. ‘I think.’
‘You
think
?’ Jackson raised her eyebrows. ‘You want to have another guess? Because if you do, I’m right out of here.’
Richter shook his head. ‘It’s almost certainly the button – the switch will just turn on the firing circuit – but it doesn’t matter because I’m not planning
on touching either.’
He put the box back on the ground, leant the MP5 against a girder, and reached up. He seized a detonator and pulled it out of the plastic, then repeated the process with all the others,
carefully laying each detonator, with its attached wires, on the ground, well away from the explosive charges. He then took a Kamasa folding tool from a leather holster on his belt, opened it up so
that it formed a pair of pliers and picked up one of the wires, close to the detonator itself.
‘You really want to do that?’ Jackson asked, as he placed the jaws of the tool around the wire.
‘This was a suicide bomb,’ Richter said, ‘so there’d be no point in incorporating counter-measures in it. That box is just a switch. All it’s intended to do is send
a current to the detonators, no more, no less. And if I’m wrong, all that’ll happen is one of the detonators will fire, and they’re too far away from the explosives to be a
problem.’
He closed the jaws of the pliers and snipped through the wires. Nothing happened, and inside a minute he’d detached all the detonators. He tossed them to the back of the void and replaced
each cable, securing it by thrusting the doubled-over end into the plastic explosive.
‘Is that safe?’ Jackson asked doubtfully.
‘I know explosives,’ Richter assured her. ‘It’s safe.’
Once he’d attached the last wire he bent down, picked up the box again and placed it on one of the nearby pieces of machinery. He looked at what he’d done and nodded in satisfaction:
even a careful inspection would suggest that the explosives were still primed for detonation.
Richter picked up the Heckler & Koch. ‘Now we wait,’ he said.
Saadi walked briskly – or as briskly as the dangling Kalashnikov would allow – to the door at the end of the stand and looked at the shattered lock as he drew his
pistol. Clearly the entrance had already been used, a deduction immediately confirmed by the sight of a Dubai police officer lying unconscious on the floor just inside. This puzzled Saadi, and he
wondered for a moment if he should kill the man as a precaution, but then he shrugged and walked to the rear of the workshop. He pulled apart the Velcro seam on his
gellabbiya
and dropped
the garment on the floor, revealing the same all-black outfit he’d worn the previous night. He stuck the pistol into the waistband of his trousers, removed the Kalashnikov from around his
neck, opened the rear door and stepped through.
Richter had insisted that Carole-Anne Jackson go back inside the workshop. Primarily, he wanted her out of the firing line but her skill with a weapon meant that she could
provide vital support when the terrorists eventually arrived. She might also, he pointed out, be the first to meet them if they decided to come in through that workshop, though Richter guessed
they’d follow the same route he’d taken.
He crouched down behind an air-conditioning unit, the MP5 – its magazine fully charged again – at the ready beside him. He was looking intently down the length of the void, alert for
any sign of movement but, despite his vigilance, the black-clad Arab got to within twenty yards of his position before he saw him.
Saadi stopped beside a roaring machine and looked carefully around him. What he saw didn’t immediately make sense. He could see no sign of the Dubai police or security
officers he’d been expecting – in fact, he couldn’t see anybody at all. But the explosive charges he’d prepared were visible, as were the wires linking the detonators to the
firing box. And he could also see the box itself, the power light glowing.
At first, it looked as if Bashar had simply walked away, leaving the device ready to be detonated, but Saadi knew that couldn’t have happened. Like the other
jihadis
selected for
this vital mission, Bashar was dedicated and totally committed. He would never abandon his place of duty.
That meant Bashar had been captured or was lying dead somewhere nearby. Perhaps, Saadi suddenly thought, the man he’d seen emerging was some kind of undercover agent who’d killed
Bashar and gone for help in dismantling the bomb. That simple explanation covered the facts as he now saw them, but alternatively there might be groups of armed men waiting in the gloom, ready to
shoot him down the moment he approached.
But Saadi had no option: he had to try, had to make the attempt. He took a firm hold of the pistol grip of the Kalashnikov, looked carefully all around him, and began inching his way forward,
heading for the firing box, its red light like a beacon, drawing him in.
Richter watched the other man’s careful approach. His target was obviously very alert, head and eyes in constant motion, the Kalashnikov swinging in an arc to cover the
maximum area in front of him. Richter knew that as soon as he stood up, as he would have to for a clear shot, he’d be seen immediately and dragged into a fire-fight. Better to wait until his
quarry got closer, when he would reach the firing box and see what was left of Bashar.
Saadi stopped moving as he reached the edge of the relatively open area where they’d prepared the charges. Huddled on one side was a dark, unmoving shape, a Kalashnikov
with half its stock missing lying close by, and Saadi knew without doubt that Bashar had not run, had not left his post. He’d been cut down before he could complete his mission.