Authors: Robert Muchamore
‘Fifty,’ Dee shouted anxiously. ‘Hang it up, I’ve gotta get the boys moving.’
Michael rolled on to his stomach as the phone went dead. He crawled to the edge of the gently sloping roof and watched the Runts closing in. Then he noticed a change in the light behind him. At first it seemed like a glint from the sun, but within a second there was a blast of heat and the building started to tremble.
*
Wheels was a beautiful driver. Effortlessly fast and totally confident, he weaved through cabs and baffled tourists to reach the drop-off area at the front of Luton airport’s main terminal.
‘Sorry I couldn’t let you boys know about this sooner,’ Sasha said, as he led James and Bruce through a set of automatic doors and into the terminal. ‘We’ve waited years for a chance to rob this airport and I had to keep my cards close. We almost did it a couple of years back when the Queen opened the new hospital, but there wasn’t a flight with the right sort of cargo.’
‘You’ve got people inside the airport?’ James asked.
‘Loads,’ Sasha nodded. ‘It’s the biggest employer in town. Half of my crew has friends or relatives who work here. You don’t even need to worry about getting your face on the security cameras, ’cos we’ve had some leads pulled.’
They had reached the security desk for domestic flights. Their boarding passes had been downloaded and printed out before Sasha left home and there were only a dozen people ahead in the queue to get coats and bags X-rayed.
As they crept forward, James worried that his body armour would set off the electronic barrier, even though Savvas had checked him over with a handheld metal detector back at Sofa World. But James could never stand in a security line without worrying about something. He began inspecting his fake passport.
The picture taken at Luton station the previous afternoon was goofy, but he was impressed by the standard of the printing and watermarking and decided that the passport was probably a blank stolen out of a passport office or consulate.
The security officer merely scanned the barcodes on their boarding passes and didn’t even look at the passports before pointing them towards the walk-through metal detector. James had seen that the flight listed on his boarding pass was leaving from Gate Eleven and was confused when Sasha started in the other direction.
‘The tickets are just to get us through security,’ Sasha explained. ‘We’re heading for the cargo terminal.’
They had to walk past seven gates, ending up at a doorway adjacent to the first-class lounge marked
Private Aviation Only
.
The counter in front of it was unmanned. Sasha produced a security pass and slotted it into a lock. After a green light and a buzz, the door came open and the trio jogged down a short ramp towards a staircase and a set of automatic doors where passengers would usually board a bus to reach an aeroplane parked away from the terminal.
Up to this point Sasha had appeared to be on top of things, but panic came into his eyes as he looked around.
‘What’s up?’ James asked.
‘There’s supposed to be some stuff waiting for us.’
‘Got it,’ Bruce said, as he wheeled a catering trolly out from under the staircase.
Sasha pulled up the shutter on the trolley’s side and smiled with relief as he saw a duffle bag and three sets of overalls.
‘Put these on,’ Sasha said, beginning to kick off his shoes as he passed sets of beige overalls with
LUTON SECURITY
written on the back. ‘Careful with your fingerprints.’
James was already sweltering with the body armour under his tracksuit and he felt ridiculous as he pulled on yet another layer of clothing. Meantime Sasha had taken caps and sunglasses out of the bag.
‘Keep ’em on in case we bump into someone,’ Sasha explained, as he pulled the brim down over his eyes. ‘You two look young, and I don’t want anyone to eyeball me because when something gets robbed around here my mugshot is always the first one the cops pull out of the box.’
To make life even hotter, Sasha pulled out sets of gardening gloves before handing each boy a gun.
‘Glocks, same ones you used on the hard front the other day,’ he explained. ‘The airport cops have got machine guns, so
don’t
start shooting unless you have to because you’ll know all about it when the anti-terrorist squad shoot back. The good news is that less than a dozen cops work this entire airport and right now their backup is trying to pick up Major Dee on the other side of town.’
The doors leading on to the sunny tarmac opened automatically and Sasha stepped out and looked around. Three yellow and white airport buses were parked less than fifty metres away and they began jogging towards them.
*
Time seemed to ache as the roof shuddered beneath Michael. The explosives had made a huge metal blister in the side of the warehouse. As flames licked through gaps between roof plates, the building flexed, making its corrugated sections groan like a metal sea.
Michael held on for as long as he could, but even though his body armour gave some protection the metal was getting hot. Down below, two Slasher Boys and the truck driver had scrambled out through a fire door, only to find Runts vaulting a low wall and steaming towards them with weapons drawn. Major Dee had ordered the deaths of eight Runts who’d been involved in the murder of Owen Campbell-Moore, so Michael wasn’t expecting the youngsters to show any mercy when they got hold of Dee’s men.
He heard a couple of gunshots as a chasm opened between the two roof sections directly behind him. It seemed only a matter of time before the whole roof collapsed. Michael had to climb down, even if it meant facing the onslaught of Runts.
As he ran to the edge, the opposite end of the roof began to sag, turning the centre into a huge chimney pouring out black smoke. He stepped on to the top rung of the access ladder, the wind pushing dense smoke into his face.
His eyes stung as he moved down. More Runts were pouring over the wall, but they’d been split into two groups when a stream of cars and mini-buses filled with Slasher Boys pulled up in the street outside.
Within seconds there were guns blazing in all directions. Mercifully, the panic this caused set a lot of the Runts running for cover and Michael slid down the last half of the ladder without being spotted.
As soon as his feet hit the ground, he ripped out his handgun and took off the safety, then ran as fast as he could. The gun battle on the opposite side of the building had become ridiculous and Michael’s heart banged as a police helicopter swooped over, parting the clouds of smoke.
Shocked by the level of violence, Inspector Rush had changed tactics, abandoning the soft cordon and ordering his officers to seal the area and prevent the mayhem spreading into a nearby shopping precinct.
Michael’s eyes and lungs burned from the smoke, but he picked up speed and vaulted a wall into the street behind the warehouse. There were two police cars parked at one end and he knew he’d get cuffed and clobbered if they nabbed him. The other direction looked more promising and he sped on for fifty metres.
When he reached a corner he saw a wrecked car. The passengers had escaped, but the driver was slumped over the steering wheel, unconscious. He looked like a Runt and he was no more than fifteen years old.
Michael thought about trying to give first aid, but the helicopter swooped again and its presence made him acutely aware of the danger. He charged on, diving into a narrow side street as a carload of Runts screamed past. He thought he was OK, but when he looked back he was horrified to see the car reverse and turn after him.
Michael ran on past two warehouses with the car closing in. There was a grass square beyond and he sped through the gate, dodged a woman walking a golden retriever and began sprinting across neatly mown grass. The car couldn’t follow, but two Runts got out of the back.
By the time they’d reached the park gates, Michael was close to a primary school on the opposite side of the square. He glanced through the hedges along the park’s edge and saw that the car had taken a left turn to cut him off as he exited.
His only safe route was through the school. He scrambled up the chain-link fence bordering the playground. The windows of a classroom filled with Year Twos was less than five metres away, but none of the kids looked his way until a gunshot ripped off somewhere on the other side of the wall.
By the time Michael had dropped into a goalmouth painted on concrete, twenty-five sets of little eyeballs stared at him. One of the chasing Runts had started to climb the fence, while another ran around the school’s perimeter looking for the entrance.
Michael would never have a better chance to go on the offensive. As soon as the Runt dropped off the fence he charged. The Runt had a knife in his hand, but as he swung forward it thumped harmlessly into Michael’s body armour.
Michael twisted the knife from the youth’s hand and went into automatic. It would have been easy to kill him with the gun, but that’s always a final option. He had time to incapacitate the Runt before his mate found the school gate, so he twisted his wrist into a lock, kept twisting until the Runt’s arm snapped and ripped the Runt’s shoulder out of its socket with a final jerk.
Inside the classroom the teacher was frantically shepherding her young pupils into the far corner of the room, but for every six-year-old who couldn’t look, another had their face against the window refusing to look away. Several screamed when Michael stepped back, giving them a clear view of the Runt’s bloody face.
Michael could handle one Runt, but there was also a chance of the two lads in the car joining the hunt. If they’d only had knives he might have fancied his chances of fighting it out three against one, but some Runts had guns and there were too many little kids around to take risks.
He decided it was best to hide and ran towards a red door at the back of the school building. As he burst through, a teacher’s assistant saw his gun and squealed.
‘I’m not gonna hurt you,’ Michael yelled, in a voice that was far from reassuring. ‘Keep the kids out of the way and make sure someone’s called the police.’
Michael looked around and realised that he was in a school library, with a life-size cut-out of Alex Rider staring at him from the opposite side of the room. There was only one exit behind him and a good view out across the playground. It seemed like the perfect position to hold out until the cops arrived.
But everything changed when he saw an Asian lad sprint across the playground, gun in hand. Stocky, with giant gold rings, Michael had never seen him before, but knew the face from a surveillance photograph.
He opened a crack in the library door and aimed his gun at the youth who’d tried to kill Gabrielle.
The airport was marked out with yellow lanes and a strict twenty-mile-per-hour limit. Sasha sat at the wheel of the bus, Bruce on the long bench behind and James stood with one hand on a green pole and the other holding out the photocopied directions.
‘Next left,’ James said, as they cruised behind the wings of a small Airbus.
Sasha hadn’t got the knack of steering the bus and was alarmed to find himself heading towards a tight gap beneath a terminal walkway. He slowed to a crawl and looked worried as the roof cleared a height restriction sign by centimetres.
They emerged from the short tunnel into bright sunlight blanketing the cargo terminal. Sasha followed the yellow path in front of four parked jets painted in the livery of an international courier company, and then swung out across open tarmac, heading for a solitary 737 cargo plane.
Two men were unloading the plane using an automated conveyor, with aluminium freight cubes rolling down a belt on to the back of a flat-bed truck. As the bus closed in, James recognised the hulking outlines of the Kruger brothers.
‘You’re late,’ Tim Kruger shouted, switching off the conveyor as James and Bruce stepped down from the bus. He leaned in and looked at Sasha, who’d stayed behind the wheel. ‘The cargo men are unconscious in the terminal and the cage is set to blow.’
James and Bruce were handed rubber gas masks as Tony pulled a remote detonator out of his pocket. ‘Fingers in your ears,’ he said, giving the boys less than two seconds to comply before he pressed the button.
A white flash burst from the open door of the fuselage ten metres above them. The sound echoed across the tarmac and made the plane roll back half a metre on its giant tyres. As smoke billowed from the doorway, the Kruger brothers grabbed a set of access steps and wheeled them towards it.
Tim looked towards James and Bruce. ‘You’ll see eight bricks inside the cage. Grab ’em and throw ’em down the steps.’
Sasha claimed that James and Bruce were doing this part of the operation because they were young and fast, but as he raced up the steps James couldn’t help feeling that it was because no other bugger wanted to do it.
A lot of the smoke had cleared by the time the boys reached the doorway. Nothing seemed to have caught fire, but it was still tough to see. James peered into the cockpit and saw that the blast had destroyed most of the instrumentation and set off enough warning alarms to make it sound like an amusement park.
With their gas masks filtering the smoke, Bruce stepped the other way and grabbed a reinforced door. The Krugers were explosives experts and the blast had made neat holes in the gate of the high security cargo area, commonly known as the cage.
Bruce stepped into a dark space less than three metres deep, and flipped on the lamp fitted to his mask. The blast had buckled the aluminium shelves at the back of the cage, causing its contents to spill into a pile on the floor. He swept aside a mass of envelopes and small boxes that probably contained precious stones or jewellery and bent at the knees to grab the first brick.
Thirty centimetres wide, twenty deep and twenty high, each plastic-wrapped brick contained two hundred and sixty thousand dollars belonging to the United States government. The shipment had left America for Amsterdam the night before and was bound for Iraq, where the money would be used to pay the security forces.