the sniper

She looked around, and saw he was right. In the time she had spent dealing with the knifeman, more officers had arrived in overwhelming numbers and were now wielding overwhelming force. Those that hadn’t run away were being arrested in armfuls and slung into the backs of vans. There was fighting, and yelling, and heads were getting cracked, there were scuffles all over the alley, but the energy was falling away, and it was nearly over.

She saw the TSG had got the lockup door open and watched the paramedics get into dealing with the wounded PC. She saw with joy that he was alive. He was a young man, slightly built, with a mild, harmless face that was currently clenched in agony. He lifted his arm at one point, his hand red with his own blood, and more blood drenched his white shirt when they opened his tunic, but for all that, there was hope. He was in the best possible hands, and Nicola felt released. 

Suddenly exhausted, she turned to get back in the ARV. It was then she saw a face that startled her, away, off through the crowd. She struggled to see, but there were too many people in the way. She took a step forward, trying to find a gap, unsure of what had just happened.

In the background Mog shouted, ‘Nicola’.

Another half glimpse. It was a man with a Mediterranean look. He had a thick black beard, and his hair was cropped brutally short. But the look in his eyes was so familiar. She struggled to make sense. The surge of uniforms swept him along, and he sank back into the crowd. 

She pressed forward, determined to find out, keen to get a clear view.

An arm on her shoulder pulled her back. It was Mog.

‘I’ve been shouting you. Get back in the car, it’s gone tits up for Orange Team.’

Nicola pulled away from him, straining to see more. The man with the beard, whoever it was, got shoved into the cage in the back of a van. As they slammed the door on him, he flung himself back against, it, banging on it with his fists, and snarling, baring his teeth at his captors. She saw the glint of a diamond stud, and, like a dam breaking, like two years had never happened, it all came back. 

That man had been in the BMW outside the Black Cat. 

She was looking at the Turkish kid from the night Rebecca died. She was looking at the man who had killed her sister. He looked much older. Much, much tougher. 

She shrugged Mog’s arm off, pushed forward through the crowd towards the van, her stomach churning over, her mind flooding with red rage. 

As she walked, without conscious thought she swung her MP5 down off her shoulder, lifted it before her, put a bullet in the chamber. She felt sick, and focused, and inevitable.

‘What the hell are you doing? I mean now!’ said Mog, practically yelling in her ear. He’d come after her, and he was furious with her. He gesticulated at their ARV. ‘Will you come on? They’re getting a kicking.’

Her momentum dissolved. He’d lifted her out of the world of instinct, summoned her back to her professional loyalties. She hesitated for a long, long moment, torn, desperate to head to the van, compelled to run to the ARV. 

She grabbed a nearby PC, a woman no more than twenty, whose face blazed with the flush of successful battle. 

‘That van. There. Where’s it headed?’

The PC nodded. ‘They’re stacking them up in the yard at Bethnal

Green. They’ve got a right pen full. They’ll be processing them all day.’

‘Got it.’

‘Nicola! For fuck’s sake!’ yelled Mog.

One last look, then she turned, ran to the car, jumped in.

Mog was busy inside the A-Z. Rick jammed his foot to the floor and the car took off.

Both men were busy, and this suited Nicola. She had no words. The car tumbled around the corners and sped across junctions, and she tumbled and sped with it as the world swam around her. Her memories leaped up like they had never gone, slamming back into her, blocking out her gaze wherever she looked, like giants looming through a mist, like demons swarming around her. 

The real world fell away, and there the Turkish kid was again, his shape forming almost tangible in the air before her. She saw him as he was back then on that night in 1999. All his designer clothes, hair gel, clean skin, and gold jewellery – but this time he had his eyes wide, wide open in a look of the deepest horror.

Flashes blasted in on top of that picture. She saw the street outside the Black Cat. The darkness of the night, the glare of the streetlights. She felt the smothering heat, smelled the drains, felt how she was wet with sweat. Once again, she heard the screaming and yelling. Once again, she saw people running, scattering, tripping, stumbling as they went, fleeing in all directions, 

As she knew it would, as it always did, the bad time intensified. This time she was an outsider in her own life. She was looking down, at herself and Rebecca, sprawled on the floor, half on the pavement, half in the gutter, flat out over a metal drain grating. She felt like howling with anguish as she saw the two sisters entwined with each other, how they held on to each other, how Nicola cradled Rebecca, how they were both drenched in blood.

She watched the BMW lurching round the five point turn away down the road, and how the car drove past them. How the driver and the kid stared at the two women on the floor, trying to work out what had just happened. The kid open-mouthed, still holding the gun, soaking up the horror of what he was seeing.

The way she locked eyes with him. 

How they were pinned for that moment. Bound together for all time. How the car crawled past, then slammed into acceleration when the driver realised what had happened. How it raced off, burst through a red light, slewed round a corner, and vanished into the overheated night. 

‘What are you doing, Nicola?’ Mog’s voice finally broke in on her. He sounded harsh, anxious. ‘Are you even with us?’

Nicola swam back to consciousness and found herself in a world of tumult. The car was doing sixty-five down a quiet suburban street, the siren blaring above her head, and all hell breaking out on the radio. On the radios in fact. She realised that all three sets were relaying urgent voices. She struggled to get herself together.

‘Mate. Stop daydreaming, please. We need you.’ said Mog.

She nodded, letting any annoyance at his attitude go. She began to tune her mind in to the cacophony. 

A voice on the main set rose clear above the rest.

‘Another reported victim – Burnham Street. No report on injuries,’ said the CAD operator.

‘What’s happening?’ said Nicola.

‘The sniper saw Orange Team coming. He left them a surprise, and he’s gone off on one,’ said Rick.

‘Surprise?’

‘He booby trapped his front door. Couple of grenades, they think.’ said Mog.

‘Jesus H. How come they didn’t find it?’

‘He’s a clever guy. It had a dummy and a decoy on it. It set off a chain explosion once they were in. It took out the whole front doorway, the staircase, and brought half the front bedroom down on them.’ 

‘Are they alright?’

‘Jim, Visek and Danny Jacobs are down. Rob’s trapped inside, and they don’t know what else the guy left them. Med teams and army bomb disposal on the scene. No hard news.’

She processed this horror. Almost too much already. With more to come, she could tell.

‘What do you mean, “He’s gone off on one”? Where’s he run to?’

Rick slammed them into a hard right-handed swerve to dodge a van that had pulled out into their path. The tyres screeched, but held their grip, and they missed the van by inches. He flicked the ARV back into lane and accelerated. The engine roared louder, and they hit rough tarmac which added rumble to the chaos. Mog shouted back over his shoulder,

‘He took his rifle up a tower block in Harlesden.’

‘What?’ she said.

‘He started letting loose ten minutes ago. Indiscriminate fire.’ 

‘Oh no,’ she said, very quietly, to herself.

Mog turned the main set up to make it audible over the rumble. The operator’s voice cut through.

‘More shots fired. We now have seven suspected fatalities, others unknown. All Trojan units to deal. All Trojan units to deal.’

‘Bloody. Fucking. Hell,’ said Rick.

‘Get us ready, Nic,’ said Mog.

She opened the gun safe next to her, began to pull out the carbines.

Trojan 561 burned through the traffic, two tones blaring and blue lights flashing. Thirteen miles to Harlesden driving across town, twenty-six using the (theoretically) less traffic-dense North Circular. To a normal road user, about an hour either way. To an ARV with an advanced driver, a lot, lot less. 

Rick observed there was a sack-load more that could go wrong on a twenty-six mile journey and made the call to face the cross town traffic. They dug in. Mog navigating, Rick driving like a demon, wrestling and cursing and spitting out the one-way signs. Bouncing away in the back of the car, Nicola worked to get her equipment together, but kept one eye on the road ahead. Partially to stop travel sickness, partially because she’d never got tired of the way the world changed when you’re in the back of a speeding police car. 

She could best describe it as a strange freezing ahead, and around, them. Hearing the sirens, seeing the lights in their rear-view mirrors, drivers slowed to a crawl, pulled in left, or right, to make space; even stopped completely, presumably some instinct kicking in to make it simpler for the speeding driver to compute a path around them.

Couple this with the immense speeds the ARV could do – up to 135 mph on the open road, eighty or ninety where there was room around town – and the effect to the passengers of the car was of stopping time for everyone but them. It was like those science fiction movies where the hero could walk around frozen people, like a mini-apocalypse had taken place and they were driving around deserted cars in a people-less landscape.

Except that many people were still around. Plenty of them resented the police. And plenty of them would express that.

They had just got onto the A1203, were diving into the Limehouse Basin tunnel, and traffic had got heavy. As best the drivers ahead could manage, they had pulled over to the left, so Rick could squeeze through them. 

He was having to do forty, but was making progress, until a black cab veered into their path.

Rick blasted the siren, flashed his headlights, but the cab stayed there. It slowed to twenty-five mph, then twenty. 

‘You ... bastard,’ said Rick. 

He wrestled for position, but the driver was on it. Each move Rick made, dodging left, right, the cab got there first, shutting him down to a crawl.

Mog watched, grimly. 

‘What is the matter with some people,’ said Nicola, after a while.

Neither answered. All three knew the answer. 

The tunnel finished, the daylight hit them, the roads widened, Rick slid past, and they were out in the clear. He hit the pedal and they accelerated off down the road, fast hitting sixty, and beginning to jockey round a car transporter loaded with eight new cars.

Nicola saw Mog sliding the chest plate into his body armour.

She looked at hers, lying on the back seat next to her. She began to put it in.

There was a rumble from underneath them, and a bang, and she jerked up as she was flung towards the roof of the car. 

The transporter had drifted out into their lane, and the wide load was getting too close. Rick had been forced to mount the central reservation to get past, and now they were heading for a narrow gap. On one side, wide open air which the lorry soon would be filling, on the other a six-foot-wide concrete bridge support racing towards them. 

The car bounced past, squeezing back onto the carriageway just in time. Rick gave a rebel yell as the cement pier flew past the car, inches from the offside wing, miraculously leaving his wing mirror intact. 

‘You terrible, terrible ...’ said Mog, hanging on through gritted teeth.

‘You love it,’ whooped Rick, elated.

Trojan 561 sped up the carriageway past the stationary cars and disappeared into the distance.

Rick took them straight into the City, along the Embankment, curling up at Temple. Dodging buses and taxis, up past Holborn and out onto the Euston Road. Battling dense congestion, more lorries, vans, cyclists, they made it along past Regent’s Park, Madam Tussauds, Baker Street, Edgeware, along and up the runway and onto the Westway, where in five seconds Rick took the car up to 95 miles an hour. Diving off at White City, heading up into the wider, emptier spaces of north Wood Lane and into Scrubs Lane. A nod to Wormwood Scrubs prison, then out left onto the A404 and finally, 25 minutes later, they were coming into Harlesden. 

As they went, they soaked up the intel off the radio. Over the half hour, the situation deepened, and even Rick’s initial exhilaration left him as a sombre mood fell upon the car. It sounded like carnage. The tower block was in a densely populated area. From the 17th floor the sniper had an effective range of half a mile, but his shots could travel for at least another mile before falling to the ground. The head count was rising, upwards of ten people that they knew about. 

Even so, the absolute worst had not happened. Presumably saving ammunition, or perhaps his blood lust sated a little, the initial flurry of shootings and deaths had settled down. The police were doing their best to empty the streets, cars with loudhailers had done their best to get residents to stay home, local radio and TV were all doing their bit. The air was clear above the tower block, the roads were emptying. Even on this giant city scale, maybe the sniper was running out of targets. Or maybe he was running out of his favourite kind of targets. It still seemed that he wanted to shoot blonde women.

Almost all his victims so far had this in common.

As they got closer to the tower blocks it became more important for Mog to assess the skyline. Traffic was becoming more sparse. Word had spread. 

For this they had trained. But, as Nicola now began to realise, all the training in the world could never block all the fear.

Into the killing zone. 

On the pavement uniformed officers were trying to get people off the streets. Nicola watched their struggles in disbelief. One couple, laden down with heavy looking carrier bags, were gesticulating, pointing down the street. They wanted to get home, and the officers weren’t going to let them pass. 

‘Still outside?’ she said.

‘Some people think they’ll live forever,’ said Mog. 

The couple finally allowed themselves to be shooed into a café, and the car was past and turning a corner, into an eerily deserted high street.

‘Trojan Romeo – what is the suspect’s location, over?’

‘Gaffery House,’ came the reply from CAD.

Mog checked the A-Z. 

‘Turn right three streets down nearside – then quarter of a mile up. But Gaffery House is made of three separate tower blocks.’ He reached for the radio again. ‘Do we know which block in Gaffery House, over?’

‘Negative 561. One of three. But so far, he’s had a wide firing arc between north east, and south east. This has swung south over time, so he could be mobile.’

‘Can you confirm the RVP location?’ 

‘That’s Livingstone Close 561.’

Mog considered the map again.

‘Four streets down.’

Rick stopped just before a crossroads, looked carefully left and right, scanning the skyline ahead of them. Ahead of them at the next junction a TSG van and another ARV were heading towards the RVP.

‘Hadn’t we better get a move on?’ said Nicola.

‘I’m looking for tower blocks. I want to make sure we’ve got as many buildings as possible in the way,’ said Rick.

‘511 sitrep please,’ asked the CAD operator.

The radio operator in Trojan 511 began to give information in the background. Mog turned the radio down a fraction but kept an ear out.

A couple of civilians ran out across the road, passing in front of the ARV. Rick leaned on the horn, and he and Mog yelled at them to get into cover.

‘Where are the containment points?’ said Nicola.

‘The guy’s got a range of half a mile. Where would you put the containment points?’ said Mog, visibly irritated.

Nicola realised her error. Assuming he had had free rein across the floor of the tower block, that meant he could easily hit his target anywhere in a circle a mile wide. So, across all Harlesden, well into Willesden and Park Royal. The population of that was anyone’s guess but call it 20,000 potential targets and you wouldn’t go far wrong.

They left the shops and entered a region of housing. Tall, brick 1930s mansion blocks, set back in rows and laid out in grassy estates a little way from the road. She looked at the endless rows of windows, not for the first time wondering about all the lives. How was it ever possible to begin to know London? This one small street in the endlessly rolling ocean of lives. And yet, each death caused today would have ramifications that could last lifetimes for a whole cloud of people attached to the victim. 

A movement from one of the downstairs windows caught Nicola’s eye, and she stared across, scanning for danger. She gripped the MP5 on her lap more firmly. As she looked, she saw a young mother, holding a little girl up, pointing out across the grass to where birds clustered around a bird feeder nailed to a tree outside their window.

The child saw the birds, and smiled, and flapped her hands. Nicola watched, her face immobile. The love between them, their relationship, was too much to consider. There could be no immediate danger for them, they were nowhere near line of sight to any tower block, but, all the same Nicola wished the mother would take the child away from the window, and step back, back into the safety, back away from the exposing light. She wished they would stop moving, as movement drew attention, and attention could be malign. She felt sick for a moment for them. How vulnerable you are when you’re alive. How exposed you are when you are in this world.

Fifty yards down the street, many windows down and three floors up, she saw an older man, peering out from behind curtains. As she watched, he lifted a set of binoculars and began to scan his skyline. There was fear and dread in his posture, the way he hid. He was so different to the mother and child. He was wise to the threat out there and he was doing his best to stay alive, and this solitary struggle also broke her heart, but along a different fracture line. It didn’t occur to wonder why she felt such compassion for him, when she had such a ball of fear in her own belly. 

Because she was scared. It was surprising to her, but she had to admit it. Here she was, in a car with an orange target painted on its roof, with two men who had chosen a path which took them out every day to face down this evil. She looked at Rick, all his bluster gone now, replaced by a commitment to a courageous forward motion. Just a keenly operating mind, looking for the best route to the scene. And Mog, again, personality mostly subdued, his gaze constantly raking the street ahead.

Then, echoing down the canyon of the streets, came the crack of a rifle.

‘There’s Johnny’, said Mog.

‘The Snake’ is coming soon to Amazon