PLEDGE OF HONOR: A Mark Cole Thriller (3 page)

10

McKenna Ross heard the sounds, and quickly identified it as gunfire.

She was a member of Britain’s army reserve, a captain in the Royal Artillery, and had heard plenty of it before. She even thought she could recognize the type, the distinctive blast of the long 7.62 round used in the Kalashnikov assault rifle and its various derivatives.

A terrorist attack?

Here?

The sound of the gunfire was close, she knew that, and wasted no more time on thinking; action was what was now required.

She leapt from her position, resting against her wooden desk, took off a shoe, and smashed the heel against the glass of the fire alarm on the wall next to her.

The eyes of her children went wide with surprise at her actions, but she spoke first, before they had a chance to question her.

‘Fire drill!’ she shouted over the deafening sound of the alarm. ‘Come on, let’s go!’

And with that, she flung open the door to the courtyard, leading her charges out of the danger zone and into the courtyard beyond.

Nasrallah burst into the third classroom, but it was already empty.

No matter; he’d already killed many infidel children, and it mattered not one bit that this class had escaped his punishment.

They would be headed for the courtyard, and he knew that they wouldn’t escape punishment for long.

With the fire alarm sounding, the entire school would be fleeing, many of them to the central courtyard. He wondered momentarily who had sounded the alarm, and even thought that it was a good idea, although he knew that – ultimately – it would be quite pointless.

11

Helen Ranson was leading the gathered children in the large assembly hall in a rendition of the school hymn when the gunman appeared, her voice breaking as she saw the figure burst through the doors opposite her and open fire on the crowd sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of her.

In all her years, she had never seen anything – could never have even
imagined
anything – remotely like what she was experiencing now, blood flying everywhere, bodies tossed this way and that.

Without even knowing what she was doing, she turned and – with other teachers – threw open the big glass doors that led to the courtyard, screaming at the children to run for it, to run for their lives.

The fire alarm went off then, and the frightening wail just served to increase the feelings of confusion that threatened to overwhelm her.

What was happening?

Why?

The gunfire was interrupted as two of her colleagues jumped on the terrifying, bearded killer, but she did not wait to see what happened, just carried on trying to get the rest of the children to safety.

Aabid Karam tossed and turned underneath the two men, but it was a struggle; they outweighed him by thirty or forty pounds apiece, and panic had imbued their muscles with extraordinary strength.

Another person was on him then, a woman, trying to wrestle the gun away from his grasp.

He relaxed at that moment, let the gun go; and when the person fell backward, not expecting the sudden release, she knocked into the two men pinning him down, made them slacken their hold for just a moment; just long enough for him to pull the curved dagger from his waistband and plunge it into the ribs of one of them, slash at the face of the other.

The dagger cut deep into the second man’s flesh, and he recoiled, even as the first man’s dead weight sank down harder onto Karam.

But Karam rolled the man off, kicked out at the man whose face he’d slashed, making room for him to get to his feet.

He looked after the running children, pulled out a hand grenade from the bag that lay at his feet, and pulled the pin.

It was then that he felt the sudden, horrible impact as the women who had taken his gun shot him in the stomach, the powerful rounds bursting right through him, ripping him apart.

He watched – still conscious – as the recoil pushed the barrel upward, the remaining rounds flying high toward the ceiling, almost laughed at the woman’s weakness; but then he realized that the grenade was falling to the floor right by his feet, and there was no time left to do anything about it.

He smiled as he embraced his martyrdom.

At least he would take the woman with him.

Ranson watched with amazement – just as the last able-bodied child ran past her into the courtyard – as one of her teachers, a middle-aged woman named Janice Johnson, who had been here longer even than Ranson herself, shot the killer in the gut with his own weapon.

But then she saw the small object drop from the dead man’s hand, and amazement was replaced by horror as the grenade exploded in a burst of flame and debris that destroyed the bodies nearest to it, and that knocked her off her feet and out into the rain-soaked courtyard beyond.

12

Osman Massoud watched as the children poured into the courtyard, screaming and shouting, the adults struggling to contain them, frantically trying to cope with the utter chaos and confusion.

Aabid and Ibrahim had done their jobs well, had forced everyone out of the school, funneled them toward Massoud, the third man.

And Massoud was ready and waiting for them.

Ross saw the man too late; he had been hiding behind the swings in the playground higher up the small hill that led out of the courtyard, and had been all but invisible, hidden by the torrential rain.

But she saw him clearly now, turning toward the hundreds of people – men, women and children – who were gathered in the courtyard. Shivering, cold and terrified, they were also – Ross now understood – sitting ducks, right in the middle of a killing ground.

The man opened fire then, and Ross was horrified to see that it was a belt-fed machine gun – and she threw herself on the children near her, using her body to shield them from the hundreds of rounds which were blasting across the enclosed area.

Another man exited from the classrooms then, his Kalashnikov barking loudly.

She felt the earth shake, heard screams, and looked up to see smoke and debris coming from her right – then saw the man in the playground pulling the pin from another grenade and throwing it to her left.

She hunkered down even deeper, pulling the children in close; no idea who they were, only that she had to protect them.

The explosion sounded deep, powerful, and a new surge of screaming was heard above the gunfire.

She turned to the second man, her breath caught in her throat as she observed him pulling out a long tube from his large bag, a long tube that could only be . . .

A rocket launcher!

She pressed her face into the ground, and prayed for mercy.

Nasrallah smiled at the scene in front of him as he aimed the rocket at the central mass of people.

Dead and injured bodies were littered everywhere, blood and tissue visible even through the dark rain; everyone was screaming and crying, everywhere was chaos.

It was perfect, and with the rocket it would soon be even more perfect.

He looked down the sights, saw a woman lying on top of a group of children, covering them with her own body.

Brave, and a perfect target; she was right in the center of the courtyard.

His hand moved to the trigger and – with a prayer to Allah – depressed it, sending the 40mm anti-personnel fragmentation warhead streaking above the courtyard to its target.

His hands were working again even as he watched the rocket strike, exploding in a glorious
whump
of flame and flying shrapnel, the damage it caused simply indescribable, corpses ripped to shreds everywhere he looked, the brave woman’s the first to be eviscerated.

Thrilled with the power at his disposal, he couldn’t wait to do it again and quickly loaded another 40mm warhead onto the launcher, picked it up and aimed it at the fleeing children.

He put his finger back onto the trigger, his brain giving the signal; but nothing happened.

Indeed, Nasrallah no longer had control of his hand, his finger; nor of anything at all.

He wondered for an instant if he’d been shot in the back – that would explain why he couldn’t move, the bullet having severed his spinal cord.

But who – ?

He never finished the thought, his vision turning black as his body – still holding the rocket launcher – collapsed to the ground.

Helen Ranson looked up from her positon in the courtyard, concussed and half deaf from her journey through the window just a few minutes earlier, and saw the man dead on the floor next to her, black-suited armed police officers swarming out around him, over him, into the courtyard.

Her head snapped over in the other direction, looking for survivors, seeing instead movement over in the playground.

She pulled herself to her knees, pointing to the playground, getting the attention of the cops. ‘Over there!’ she shouted. ‘Another one!’ She pointed again, desperately, over and over. ‘By the playground!’

The black-suited figures nodded and surged past her, submachine guns at the ready as they set out after the third gunman.

13

Massoud had seen his friend fall to the ground, had turned and fled even before the first police officers had come storming out of the school, knowing what Nasrallah’s collapse meant, knowing that he would be next if he didn’t move now.

It wasn’t that he was afraid of capture, afraid of dying; he just had more to do, if he could make it.

He saw armed men racing around from the sides and stopped, threw a grenade toward one group while pivoting and loosing off another burst of automatic gunfire toward the other.

It caused enough of a pause for Massoud to react, racing across the green playing fields for the fences that led to the road beyond. He heard gunfire behind him, but he was too far ahead now, and the conditions were so bad, that he knew they wouldn’t hit him.

Besides, with Allah on his side, how could they?

Laying down a burst of covering fire, he climbed quickly over the fence to the road beyond; saw, moments later, two police cars headed his way and opened fire again, peppering the vehicles with high-velocity rounds until they crashed into one another, spinning helplessly out of control into the fence line.

Elated, Massoud set off at a fast run down the road, his destination never in doubt.

The young couple looked concerned, but Rabbi Levi Shavitz just shook his head.

‘Gunfire?’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think so. Have you
seen
this weather? It must be thunder.’

Although, after spending many years in Israel, he had to admit that it actually
did
sound a lot like gunfire. But best not to add to the couple’s fears. This should be a happy time for them, discussing the arrangements of their upcoming marriage.

Shavitz had known them for years, members of good local families who attended the synagogue regularly. Both sets of parents were also here, and they too were looking rather concerned, especially now that the sounds of sirens were blaring across what seemed to be every street in the area.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Ted Weintraub, the father of the bride-to-be. ‘Maybe we should take a look?’

At this he rose, moving across to the windows and pulling back the gauze net curtain to look into the dark, rain-soaked scene beyond.

‘What can you see?’ his daughter asked.

‘The police cars are headed
here
,’ he said suddenly, turning back to the room. ‘But why - ’

Shavitz’s attention was pulled from the panicking Weintraub then, as the door to the private study burst open, a dark-skinned bearded man surging forward into the room. Ammunition was draped across his shoulders in bandoliers and a machine gun rested in his hands, up and aimed at the group.

‘Please – ’ Shavitz started, but it was too late – the man was already pressing the trigger, cutting down everyone in the room in a blast of deafening, blinding gunfire.

Everyone, that it, except for Shavitz himself, who could only look on helplessly as the young couple and their parents were annihilated by the ferocious firepower of the machine gun, eviscerated before his disbelieving eyes, the walls and floor of his study soaked with blood and tissue, broken bodies strewn this way and that across the furniture.

‘Get up,’ he heard the man say as the gun fell silent, and Shavitz realized only then that he was on the floor. He didn’t move, perhaps too shocked, but the heavy boot of the man on his ribs brought him back to reality in a flash. ‘On your feet,’ the man screamed, and finally Shavitz moved, pulling himself up.

Immediately, the man seized him, twisting his hand around his neck while shoving the muzzle of the big gun against his cheek.

‘Come with me,’ the man whispered into his ear, and Shavitz had no other option but to comply.