The Excalibur Codex (2 page)

Up ahead, Rasul lay stunned among the shattered glass and scattered detritus of his overturned cab, his mind waiting for the pain that would signal a broken bone or a torn muscle. Nothing. He almost choked on the surge of relief and exhilaration that flooded his body. It had worked. The lorry now filled most of the motorway and the carefully distributed cargo of gravel would have blocked the rest. He clawed frantically at the harness of
his seat belt. His job was done. All that mattered now was to use the escape route that had been set up for him.

He’d just released the catch when a black-clad figure appeared in the upturned oblong of the shattered windscreen. The man was wearing a ski mask that covered his entire head apart from the eyes and the mouth. He carried a short-barrelled assault rifle as if he knew how to use it. Rasul’s first reaction was fear at the unexpected sight of an armed man, but it quickly gave way to elation. They’d done it. His face broke into a smile. Now they would hold all these hundreds of people to ransom for the cause and he would disappear back into anonymous, but cheerfully wealthy, obscurity. The man with the rifle smiled back, but his eyes told a different story and suddenly Rasul Mohammed was screaming inside. The dark mouth of the rifle barrel lifted and the last thing he saw was a flicker of light before the bullets tore through his chest.

An unfamiliar sound froze Abeba’s finger on the send button. A sort of flat stutter like the bolt removers you heard when you went to get a new tyre. But not. From quite far away she heard what sounded like panicked screams. Curious, she craned her head to look along the gap towards the overturned lorry in time to see men and women who’d gone to help the crash victims dropping to the ground like puppets with their strings cut. Puzzlement turned to a thrill of raw fear as a man ran desperately into the space a hundred yards ahead and
she saw his head disappear in a haze of bright scarlet. Instinctively she drew back and hunched low behind the wheel. She fought to control her breathing, but her body seemed to have dissolved into its constituent parts and she had no authority over any of them. At the same time her mind struggled to assimilate what was happening with reality, but it wouldn’t work. What she had seen was impossible. It
couldn’t
be happening. More screams and the sound of shattering glass, all accompanied by the flat stutter she had heard originally. Without warning, a ball of red and gold flame erupted to her front left, followed instantly by the sharp crump of an explosion. A car’s petrol tank. And much closer than the front ranks of the jam. Whatever
it
was,
it
was happening, and it was coming for her. She had to do something. Anything. Now.

She looked frantically to her right as a young man in a blue T-shirt opened the passenger door of the adjacent car and stood up to get a better view. Her mind screamed at him to get down, but too late. A volley of bullets punched holes in the metal with a drum roll of sledgehammer clatters and he was thrown backwards, half in and half out of the car. Abeba looked across the divide to see a woman’s face frozen in horror and the curly-haired boy and a girl who must be his sister staring from the back seats with their mouths gaping. She wanted to shout to them, to reassure them that everything would be all right, but their father lay sprawled in front of them with his body ripped open
and the life blood spewing in dark gouts from his open mouth. The screaming was constant now and all around, and she sensed that similar scenes were being played out among the cars and lorries packed tight into what must be a miles-long queue of traffic. It was only then that she realized she was screaming with the rest and she clamped her bottom lip between her teeth. She heard the metallic crunch of cars crashing into each other as drivers tried vainly to escape the trap. A few sped past on the hard shoulder, but a larger explosion followed by a second eruption of flame gave evidence of the futility of attempting that route. With a stricken glance at the shattered family three feet away, she crouched down in the cramped foot well and tried to think rationally. She had to get away. She’d thought she was brave, like her mother, who had survived civil war and famine, but here and now bravery didn’t come into it. There was nothing she could do for the woman and children or anyone else trapped in the cars. Jamie’s face swam into her vision again. She closed her eyes and her mind locked onto his aura of quiet calm like a drowning person clutching a lifebelt. That was it, she thought tearfully. It was imperative she get to Jamie and share what she knew and he did not. She risked a glance through the steering wheel and found herself staring into the eyes of a masked gunman less than twenty feet away. He was tall and slim and as she watched he raised his gun, a strange modern machine pistol that would be the last thing she would ever see. She flinched at three quick-fire
flashes, but the burst must have been aimed at someone fleeing a car behind. With a last glance in her direction, the masked man turned away and she dropped her head. She realized with shame that she’d wet herself. A thought attempted to pierce her fear, something about the gunman, but she thrust it deep, the instinct for survival and waves of terror fighting for supremacy. Her hands shook uncontrollably. Somehow she managed to influence her fear, dragging panic-stricken breaths into her lungs between the sobs. She had to get out or the car would become her tomb. She must survive.

The figure in the black ski mask walked calmly among the dead and the dying, picking out targets and executing them with short, efficient bursts from the Heckler & Koch 416 rifle, or firing methodically into the trapped cars, turning the interiors into individual slaughter-houses. This weapon was the ultra-compact C variant favoured by US special forces, fitted with a suppressor and a thirty-round magazine. The suppressor didn’t completely silence the weapon, but it was important for their purposes that there should be no general panic in the early stages of the operation. Of course, that wouldn’t last. But by then it would be too late.

The three squads had been designated Leopard, Lion and Tiger and the commander, Leopard 1, was quietly satisfied at the way the plan had come together. Satisfied, not proud. Naturally one regretted the necessity for shedding so much blood. They had debated long and hard whether to spare the women or the children, but
the outcome had never really been in doubt. There was no such thing as innocence in their world. A lesson must be taught and a lesson learned if their people were to have the future they deserved. One culture threatened all others on the planet and only by being as hard as the followers of that culture would they provoke the reaction they needed. Their mission was to create a compact killing zone one mile long and three lanes wide that Leopard 1’s calculations estimated would contain upwards of one thousand vehicles and three thousand potential targets. Of course, some would escape, but the first instinct of most would be to stay with their cars. Each fighter carried eight spare thirty-round magazines in pouches fixed to his belt or a special harness. The extra weight affected their manoeuvrability, but it gave them an awesome killing power. Fifty feet away in the line of cars a passenger door opened and, as a young man stood up beside his car, Leopard 1 turned and fired, throwing him backwards in a welter of blood. Off in the distance the other two teams worked their way into the long lines of cars, vans and trucks. The trap was shut. Up ahead, a distinctive red sports car drew Leopard 1’s attention just as three boiler-suited workers emerged from a white van beyond it. The rifle came up and half a magazine bowled them over like skittles. Leopard 1 replaced the magazine with a fresh one and was about to turn the gun on the red car, but a shout drew attention to a stream of people fleeing from a tourist coach towards the central reservation.

‘Leopard 2. Targets at your ten o clock.’

The throat mike scrambled his commander’s calm voice, but Leopard 2 received the order loud and clear. He reached into a pouch of his close-fitting black overalls and pulled out an oval of olive green metal. With practised movements he flicked the safety clip and removed the pin holding a metal spoon in place. Counting down the seconds until it was time to throw, he lobbed the fragmentation grenade in an arc that landed in the midst of the fugitives. Four or five were engulfed in an explosion that ignited the fuel tanks of three nearby cars, incinerating still more casualties. With a last curious glance at the sports car Leopard 1 moved away to finish off the survivors.

Abeba hauled herself across the gap between the seats, cursing as her belt caught the stub of the gear lever. The engine was still running and she reached for the electronic switch that lowered the window. Her instinct had been to open the door and run, but she had seen what happened to the man in the next car. The wing mirrors on the MX-5 were quite large and in the passenger one she could see what was happening among the cars to the rear. Teams of masked men had emerged from only God knew where to fire mercilessly into the trapped cars, taking no account of the age, sex or colour of the occupants, and to throw what must be grenades into the cabs of the lorries and coaches. The mirror was also big enough to allow her to poke her head
from the window so she could look beyond it to what was happening ahead, but still remain at least partly concealed. It felt as if she was screaming at them to shoot her, but, despite her fear, she forced herself to stay in position long enough to make some sense of what was going on. The gunmen wove among the cars, picking their targets, and it could only be moments before they reached her. It seemed to her that they operated with a terrible detached professionalism and she was only grateful they weren’t methodically working the lanes. Some targets, it seemed, were proving more attractive than others, and many people must have been attempting to flee the carnage. She had a chance if she could only retain the calm to pick her moment. She waited, counting the seconds, darting glances between the mirror and what was happening to her front, gauging the moments when no one was looking in her direction. One. Two. Oh, Christ. Three. She hauled herself through the open window and dropped to the ground, rattling her shoulder and tearing the knees of her jeans. Fortunately, the car opposite was a big off-road gas guzzler and she was slim enough to squirm beneath the chassis before she caught the attention of the men to left and right. Shaking with terror she lay on the wet Tarmac, with the stink of petrol in her nostrils and her fist in her mouth to stop the convulsive sobs that wracked her body. Her heart stopped as the windscreen of the MX-5 exploded and a pair of black jump boots topped by dark trousers appeared momentarily beside her head. She imagined
the gunman staring into the car, wondering where its occupant had gone. All it would take was one look and she would be dead, but the killer had better things to do and the feet moved on. She wriggled sideways under the car towards the strip of hard shoulder that would take her to the grass verge, with its gorse bushes, and sanctuary. Her fingers touched something soft and she froze. Slowly she turned to check the obstruction … and bit back a scream. The body of a large man with half a head and a single staring eye blocked her escape. She fought for breath, trying to still the ever-rising terror. Perhaps it could help her. If she huddled up close to the dead body no one would see her. That was it. She would stay beneath the car and ride out the storm.

She closed her eyes and lay as close to the corpse as she dared. She could feel something wet soaking into her jeans and she knew it must be his blood. Oh, Jamie. Why wasn’t he here to comfort her? But she knew if Jamie Saintclair had been in the car he would have already died trying to protect her. The questions started to come. The who and the why? The stutter of the machine guns was non-stop, punctuated by loud explosions. Al-Qaida was the only group capable of such murderous ruthlessness. This was an attack that made the 7/7 bombings of 2005 look like a pinprick. But surely the security services would have been watching them? How did they get the weapons into the country, and where did this frightening level of military organization come from? She realized she was analysing the attack
to keep her mind off the dangers all around her; the unrelenting screams of people dying; the shrill plea from the woman she had left in the next car and the awful cries as the children were executed. Yet taking her mind off the danger was dangerous in itself. A particularly loud explosion somewhere close was followed by a blast of heat. Something flickered at the edge of her vision and a line of yellow-blue flame ran unerringly across the Tarmac towards her hiding place. Burning fuel. Even as she watched, it licked at the off-roader’s rear tyre. If she didn’t move soon she’d be incinerated.

She managed to wriggle round so that her head was level with the dead man’s and pushed forward until she could see past him to left and right. Nothing. She had a chance. Four yards to the grass and another two up the bank and into the bushes. She tensed, checking again for the terrorists, but could see no sign of imminent danger. With a twist of her hips she wriggled clear and crouched beside the car, making one final check before throwing herself across the road and into the safety of the bushes. Heedless of the thorns that tore at her clothing, she squirmed deep into the prickly gorse and went to ground, attempting to make her body one with the damp earth. There was no question of going further because behind the bushes lay a fence, then open ground. She wouldn’t get another five paces before she was gunned down.

From her elevated position she could see the entire motorway for almost a mile through a gap in the bushes.
Incredibly, on the far side, the occasional car still drove past, the occupants ghoulishly ogling the carnage until they realized how dangerous it was. In the far distance one group of black-clad terrorists worked their way through the traffic towards the overturned lorry, as a similar unit, presumably including the gunman she’d seen, moved towards them. In the centre, another team fired methodically into the trapped cars and threw grenades among the dead and the dying. There must be hundreds of casualties already, maybe even thousands. This wasn’t 7/7, it was the British equivalent of 9/11—a mass slaughter that would never be forgotten – or forgiven. At the very heart of the cornered traffic the terrified driver of a large fuel tanker attempted to smash his way clear of the trap, crashing into the cars in front and behind as he tried to create room for manoeuvre. But, even as she watched, one of the terrorists lifted some sort of tube to his shoulder and a missile streaked out to hit the big lorry square in the centre. For a moment, nothing seemed to happen, then the tanker opened like a giant rose petal and with an enormous ‘whoof’ a fireball shot hundreds of feet into the air and a wave of burning fuel engulfed the lorry and everything around it. Car after car exploded to add their fiery death throes to the conflagration. Stunned by the blast and frozen with horror, Abeba prayed their occupants had all been killed outright, but she knew it was an impossible hope. In the centre of that orange and red inferno, individuals and families were burning alive; she would never hear
their screams, but the memory of them would never leave her.