Killing for the Company (26 page)

Hussam Hayek was a little older than the other three and they looked to him as a leader on account of this. Two years ago he had become a father, but he only remained so for three days. His wife and baby son had died within an hour of each other – she for want of antibiotics, he for reasons overworked doctors couldn’t fathom. The child’s death was not a surprise to anyone. It was just the way things were in Gaza, its borders blockaded, the importation of medicines strictly controlled. Some entered the country via a smugglers’ route – the subterranean tunnels that ran under the border with Egypt – but these were a precious commodity and never found their way into the hands of poor men like Hussam Hayek.

Small wonder, then, that these four, like many before them, were radicalised beyond the point of return. That hatred was in their DNA. They had nothing to live for.

But they had everything to die for.

Hussam was wearing a Red Hot Chili Peppers baseball cap he’d bought just the day before because he thought it made him look more Western. The rest of their clothes were loose-fitting, but this wasn’t a fashion statement. Beneath their T-shirts and M&S raincoats, each man wore a vest packed with acetone peroxide, or TATP. It was a relatively simple explosive to make – all you needed was drain cleaner, bleach and acetone – but the end result was extremely volatile. In Gaza, you could always recognise the TATP engineers. They were the men with missing fingers.

Some people called this crystalline white powder Mother of Satan: a good name, because it was indeed capable of giving birth to the diabolical. Hussam Hayek smiled to himself. It wouldn’t be long before the whole world took notice of Gaza.

As fields and woodland sped past, Hussam fiddled somewhat absent-mindedly with the small switch attached to a wire peeking out from below his left sleeve. All four men wore the same set-up. It was already dark outside, and he could see his anxious reflection in the glass of the side door. He felt weak with nerves. He hadn’t expected to. In the days leading up to today there had been a sense of anticipation. Of excitement almost. He’d hoped to feel that excitement now. He was, after all, to be reunited with his loved ones in just a few minutes. But his skin was soaked in sweat and his hand trembled. What if it went wrong? What if somebody stopped them before the critical moment?

He leaned as nonchalantly as he could against a small poster warning that CCTV was operating on this train and looked at his watch. 17.11 hrs. Six minutes until they started.

Six minutes until paradise.

It was crucial to wait. Their controller had been most emphatic about that when handing out their weapons and ammunition and explaining the details of their evening’s mission. At 17.17 precisely the train would be equidistant from the two stations furthest apart on their route. That was the prime spot – far away from any possibility of interference. And there were other reasons for waiting until that exact moment, too. This was just one of a series of coordinated events, all planned to take place at the same time. Hussam Hayek and his team didn’t know the details – it was better that way – but they knew they were part of something big.

Like, 9/11 big.

17.13. Hussam glanced at his partner. The kid was sweating too as the movement of the train jolted his thin body rhythmically up and down.

Up and down.

Up and down.

Time check. 17.14. One of the passengers – a pregnant woman who was clearly almost at term – waddled along the aisle and into the toilet. Hussam felt another trickle of sweat down the nape of his neck.

The train jolted.

Up and down.

Up and down.

It brought back a game his father had played with him as a toddler, bouncing him up and down on his knee. His companion glanced at his watch. Hussam did the same. 17.16. One minute to go.

The two men removed the rucksacks from their backs. Hussam fished inside his with his right hand. He felt very comfortable with the weapon that his fingers touched. They’d already spent a long time firing them, as well as practising how to change the magazine swiftly. ‘AKS-74U,’ they’d been told. Hussam knew a little about guns. He knew that these were shortened variants of the standard 74, somewhere between a submachine gun and an assault rifle. Ideal for close-quarters combat, and for keeping concealed. They had probably been made in the old Soviet Union. How they had made the journey from there to the rucksacks of Hussam’s team was anybody’s guess, but it wasn’t important now: they were coming to the end of their lives.

‘You’ll be firing 7.62 shorts. Hard-hitting rounds, thirty-round magazines. You get nine to ten bursts per magazine. Count them. When you pack your weapon, be sure you do it barrel downwards. You don’t want to be rummaging around when the time comes.’

They had nodded, but not said anything, as they followed the advice.

Once they were ready they had prayed together, beseeching Allah to look with favour on their enterprise, and asking Him to grant them entry to His kingdom when their earthly life was done.

Which would be in a couple of minutes’ time.

Hussam’s watch clicked to 17.17. The two men nodded and pulled their weapons from their rucksacks, just as the cubicle door opened and the pregnant woman appeared to the sound of the toilet’s violent flush.

She stopped, her face aghast, her eyes glued to the sight of the machinery in the men’s fists.

Hussam looked at her. He saw her swollen belly and remembered his own wife when she was in the same state. For a split second he wondered if he was doing the right thing. What would she say if she could see him here now?

But then he remembered her lifeless body, still and cold. And their baby, not much bigger than the palm of his hand. This woman in front of him, she had a ruddy glow about her. Her cheeks were full, not like the thin, gaunt features his wife had displayed during her pregnancy through lack of nutrition. This woman had never given the plight of the Palestinian people a second thought. Like everybody in the West, she had sat complacently by while their people suffered and their children died. Why should
she
be allowed to live a life of comfort and safety when his own family were no longer of this world?

He raised his 74 just as the woman opened her mouth to scream.

But no scream came.

It was a short burst, and the sound was almost entirely masked by the sudden and unexpected noise of a train passing in the other direction. The rounds entered the woman’s chest, flinging her back through the open door of the toilet as an explosion of blood spattered all around the cubicle. Hussam momentarily lost control of his weapon and the rounds flew up to her face, then back down to her swollen belly. For a split second he thought he saw a flash of the unborn child’s body, but perhaps that was just his imagination. He released his finger from the trigger, concerned that he had wasted too many rounds on one kill, then stepped towards the first carriage and made his way into it.

There was no turning back now. It had begun. The nervousness had left his body just as surely as the rounds had left the barrel of his weapon; they had been absorbed by his first kill and now he was ready to see this through to the end.

Hussam worked methodically, starting on his left with a man and a woman, both asleep, she resting her head on his shoulder. Two quick bursts and their sleep became permanent. A stray round shattered the window next to them and it was this, more than the sharp, mechanical sound of the 74, that alerted the passengers nearby to what was happening. A man in the seats to Hussam’s right had seen the couple being slaughtered, and was already half up on his feet by the time the Palestinian gunman had him in his sights. A single burst and he slumped back down in his seat, blood foaming from his mouth.

Hussam stepped forward down the aisle to the next set of seats. He could sense his companion was right behind him, ready to take over once Hussam’s rounds had expired. The roar from the shattered window was immense, and the wind ruffled Hussam’s loose clothing and his hair. He refused to be distracted by any of this, and the killing continued.

He had fired nine bursts and killed nine people by the time his 74 clicked empty. As soon as the magazine was spent, he turned sideways and let his companion take the lead. Hussam knew he might need a little encouragement to take out his first victim, so he urged him on with a reminder of what they were doing: ‘
For our people!
’ he shouted. ‘
For Palestine!
’
But his words were drowned out. So far the gunman had been too swift for anyone even to cry out. That had changed. People further up the carriage had realised what was happening. Strangely there was very little screaming, although some passengers were frantically ringing numbers on their mobile phones and shouting into them. ‘They’ve got guns!
They’ve got guns!
’

One man – tall and thickset – burst out into the aisle and started running towards them, grasping a black holdall in front of him to protect himself from the shots. ‘
Get that man!
’ Hussam yelled.

His companion’s arm shot up and to the right as he fired, ripping a seam across the charging man’s face with such ferocity that his features were instantly replaced with flashes of skull and blood. The man crumpled to the floor and the new gunman continued the methodical execution of the passengers. There was chaos in the carriage now – shouting and crying and confusion. Hussam ignored it all as he plunged his hand into his rucksack and pulled out a full magazine for his weapon. He removed the spent mag, dropped it on the floor and quickly replaced it, ready to take over from his companion once the second gunman’s rounds were spent.

And so they continued, staggering their slaughter like they were playing some horrific game of leapfrog. Panic ahead; total silence behind. Hussam didn’t look back at the scenes of indescribable carnage; his eyes did not linger on the bloodied corpses or the flesh and brain matter painted over the windows and walls. He kept his focus, his eyes straight ahead and his mind on the job. They had planned for this moment for a long time, and he wasn’t going to mess things up through a lack of concentration . . .

The shouts of panic reached a peak when they were halfway through the first carriage, then started to ebb away as fewer and fewer people remained to emit any kind of sound. Some passengers – braver than the others, or perhaps just more scared – made a run for it into the next carriage. But that was all right, because Hussam knew that his other two compatriots were already clearing the carriages from the opposite end. They would meet in the middle, sandwiching those who had fled and eliminating them in a final orgy of bloodshed. He stepped over the body of the would-be hero and felt his heel land on one of the man’s fingers. It crunched beneath him, making a sound like new snow.

When they reached the interconnecting area between the first two carriages, Hussam saw that one of the windows at the sides had been smashed with a heavy object. A chubby woman was holding her toddler – two or three years old, maybe, and it was difficult at a glance to tell if it was male or female – up to the opening. When she saw Hussam, she posted the child through the broken window and it was gone in an instant. The kid surely could not have survived that, Hussam thought to himself as he thumped a burst of rounds into the weeping mother’s back. He looked round and saw that the toilet was locked. He could just discern the sound of another woman inside, sobbing desperately. Hussam raised his gun and aimed directly at the door. The rounds made short work of the metal, ripping holes in it and immediately silencing the occupant.

The train sped on through the countryside. The first passenger they came across in the second carriage was the blind man. His guide dog – an old golden Labrador with a jowly face and slight lightening of the whiskers – was sitting anxiously by its owner’s feet. When it saw Hussam it started to growl; but Hussam’s weapon made mincemeat of the animal. The blind man cried out, as if he knew what he could not see; but any pain he felt at the demise of his guide dog was short-lived as Hussam delivered a burst of rounds to his head, before allowing his companion to leapfrog him once more so he could reload.

There was more blood than he had pictured in his mental rehearsals. More blood, and less screaming. And he was surprised at how quickly he became numb to the sight of death. It held no more horrors for him. No more mystery. When it was his turn once more, he started finishing off the remaining ten passengers in this second carriage with something approaching carelessness, spraying the rounds with less precision – though no less fatality – so that some thudded into the rough material of the seats, and another window shattered, bringing with it the roar of motion and a blast of wind.

They entered the middle carriage and could just see the other two gunmen now. They continued their work, each pair mowing down the passengers as they edged towards the centre of the train. By the time there was ten metres between them, Hussam could see the others clearly. Their eyes were bright and their clothes and faces splashed with the blood of their victims. Hussam briefly wondered if he looked the same. He glanced down at himself and saw red streaks down his garments; with his free hand he touched his face, to find it was sticky. No matter. There were still four more passengers to deal with. They were standing in the aisle, having run here from one end of the train or another, and were now huddled together: two women, a man and a boy of about sixteen. They all looked like they wanted to scream but couldn’t.