Girl on Fire

3

The back of the florist’s van smelled of old sweat and fresh gun oil.

The SFOs crammed inside were at home inside the restricted space. We call them a Tactical Support Team. They call themselves shots. I suspected that this wasn’t the first time these shots had used this van.

DS Alice Stone stood at the back doors, deftly shifting her weight to remain standing as we sped through the empty streets. The other nine SFOs in her team sat opposite each other on low benches, most of them giving their kit and weapons one final check. Jackson Rose sat there almost meditative, staring at nothing. The boy with the wispy beard – Jesse Tibbs, it said on his name tag – adjusted the position of the shotgun between his legs. He glared when he saw me watching him. In the front of the van were a driver and a radio dispatcher in the passenger’s seat, both in plain clothes.

‘Five minutes,’ the driver called over his shoulder.

DS Stone spoke into the radio attached to her left lapel.

‘All calls, this is Red One – ETA for entry team is five minutes,’ she said, raising her voice above the engine, but still professionally calm.

It was two miles from Leman Street Police Station to the target address on Borodino Street, a quiet residential road not far from Victoria Park.

Close to the back doors I crouched by a monitor relaying live images from the camera hidden in the roof of the van. The screen was black-and-white and split into the nine live CCTV images giving a 360-degree view of the outside. There were also two spyholes drilled into either side of the van.

It was not quite 5 a.m. Still one hour to sunrise. The city still washed in that half-light that precedes true dawn.

The streets looked empty. But the constant radio traffic coming from the front of the van told a different story.

These streets were teeming with our people.

The radio dispatcher in the passenger seat kept up a constant stream of communication. On the monitor I saw a line of Armed Response Vehicles parked just beyond Leman Street and as we got closer to the target address I saw vans of uniformed officers in riot gear, their stacks of ballistic shields by the vehicle making them look like a medieval army, parked up next to smaller vans of dog handlers with firearms and explosives search dogs.

And ambulances. We passed an entire convoy of ambulances in a derelict petrol station, waiting for disaster.

As we got closer to Borodino Street, there were undercover surveillance officers in observation posts, scattered across the neighbourhood – I saw a British Gas tent and two Thames Water vans that had nothing to do with gas and water.

There was a second response team on standby, a back-up Tactical Support Team of shots parked up a block away from the target address. Just one street away, an armoured Land Rover was double-parked, its big diesel engine idling. A helicopter whirred in the milky sky of early morning.

On Borodino Street itself, there were dark shadows on the rooftops – the snipers in their elevated close containment positions, the Heckler & Koch G36 carbines black matchsticks against the slowly shifting sky.

‘It’s like Piccadilly Circus out there this morning!’ Stone smiled, and her team laughed with wild relief.

We were an army.

But someone has to go in.

‘You OK, Raymond?’ DS Stone said.

She was addressing the shot who was sitting between Jackson Rose and Jesse Tibbs with his shotgun. This Raymond nodded, too quickly, his face shining with sweat as he again checked his weapon. He looked supremely fit but older than the other shots, as though he had lived some other life before this one. Maybe another ex-serviceman, I thought.

‘One pass,’ DS Stone called to the driver.

‘Copy that, ma’am,’ he called back.

We turned into Borodino Street.

DS Stone crouched by my side, steadying herself with a hand on my shoulder as she stared at the monitor.

The florist’s van passed the house without slowing down.

One screen out of nine showed the front of the house.

There was no sign of movement.

I could feel Stone’s wound-tight anticipation as she stood up and leaned against the back doors. She quickly checked the spyhole.

A female voice came from the radio on her lapel. It was DCS Elizabeth Swire, the Designated Senior Officer running the show from New Scotland Yard. All other radio chatter was suddenly silenced.

‘Red One, can we have your sit-rep, please?’ DCS Swire said.

‘No movement at the target address, ma’am,’ replied Stone. ‘Red One requesting permission for attack run.’

A pause. We waited. All of the shots stared at their leader.

‘Red One awaiting instructions,’ DS Stone said calmly.

‘Permission granted,’ came the response. ‘Proceed with attack run.’

Stone gave her team the nod.

‘We’re going in,’ she said calmly. ‘Standby.’

The van had turned right at the end of the street, and now it made another right and then turned right again.

No one was checking their kit now. They all waited, their eyes on their team leader as Stone picked up her Sig Sauer MCX assault rifle. I stared at the monitor, aware that I had stopped blinking. The monitor told me nothing.

‘All calls, entry team is in final assault position,’ DS Stone said above me.

All eyes were on her. The van slowed but did not quite stop.

‘Remember your training, look after each other and watch out for those grenades,’ she said.

She hefted her assault rifle.

‘On my command,’ she said.

There was a moment when we did not breathe.

‘Go!’ Stone said. ‘Go! Go! Go!’

‘Wait,’ I said.

The front door was opening.

It was happening very slowly.

Whoever was leaving the house was taking their time.

DS Stone was kneeling by my side.

‘Someone’s coming out,’ she said into her radio.

A beat.

Our van was crawling now.

‘Establish ID and hold,’ said DCS Swire.

A large woman in a black niqab was shuffling from the house. She adjusted her headscarf as she turned to the street, only her eyes showing above the veil.

‘Is that Mrs Khan?’ DS Stone said.

I stared hard at the monitor. The photographs I had seen of Mrs Azza Khan revealed a sturdy, fierce-faced woman. I could not see the face of the person leaving the house but they had feet like landing craft. And those feet were wearing Doctor Martens boots.

‘That’s a man,’ I said.

Then DS Stone kicked the back doors open and she was jumping out the back of the van.

‘Stop! Armed police! Stand still! Show me your hands!’

The figure in the niqab brought his hands out from inside the billowing niqab. He was holding some kind of assault rifle.

And he shot DS Alice Stone in the head.

The SFOs were all screaming the same thing as they piled from the van.

‘Shots fired! Officer down!’

The burst of automatic gunfire seemed to crack the day wide open.

All of the firearms used by the Metropolitan Police are configured to not fire on semi-automatic, meaning every single trigger pull fires only one single shot and later that shot has to be justified to people who never heard a shot fired in anger in their life, except possibly on the grouse moor.

So that unbroken burst of automatic gunfire from the figure wearing the niqab was not merely deafening.

It froze the blood and scrambled the senses.

Because police gunfire never sounds like that.

Only enemy gunfire sounds like that.

Then the last of the shots were barging past me as I climbed from the back of the van.

‘Stop! Armed police! Stand still!’

‘Stop! Armed—’

One of the shots banged into me so hard that I tumbled from the pavement to the gutter and almost fell. Then I looked up. The veil had fallen away and I was staring at the bearded face of Asad Khan, the older of the two brothers.

I watched him raise his assault rifle, a fifty-year-old Heckler & Koch G3. He pointed it at the nearest SFO and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He stared at his elderly weapon. People were screaming. I looked down and saw the lifeless body of DS Alice Stone crumpled half on the pavement and half in the road. A halo of blood was growing around her PASGT helmet.

Khan fired again.

And this time the sound split the sky, made your ears ring, and promised death. The burst of gunfire made a ferocious tattoo on the side of our van. I looked at it and saw the holes punched in the metal all along the legend ‘Beautiful’ Blooms of Barking.

‘Armed police!’ Jackson was shouting. ‘Drop the weapon and show me your hands!’

I looked up and watched Jackson Rose aim his Heckler & Koch at Asad Khan.

The gunman’s rifle was held almost casually at his side, as if he had injured his arm or was in a state of disbelief at what was happening.

He started to raise his G3 and Jackson shot him.

SFOs are trained to aim at the centre of mass – the largest part of the body, the torso, the centre of the chest, the largest target. They are not trained to kill. They are trained to hit the target. Jackson’s single shot threw its target backwards, the muzzle blast flashing yellow.

The old assault rifle clattered in the gutter next to Asad Khan.

‘Suspect down!’ somebody screamed.

Two SFOs were on their knees by the side of DS Stone. Her blood soaked the grey leggings of their body armour.

Jackson took two paces forward and leaned over Asad Khan.

I called his name. ‘Jackson!’

And then Jackson shot him again.

Another muzzle flare.

He looked at me calmly.

The front door was open and SFOs were pouring inside.

‘Armed police!’

Then Jackson barged past me, his mouth twisted with rage.

‘Let them stick that in their report,’ he said.

An ambulance was already hurtling down the street, blue lights blazing and siren howling.

A female SFO was crouched by the body of Asad Khan, attempting to stop the blood pouring from his chest. They try to kill and then we shoot them, but after that we try to save their lives. This is what we do, I thought.

This is who we are.

I looked at the face of DS Alice Stone and I felt my throat close tight.

The two SFOs with DS Stone were talking to her but I realised with a jolt of shock that they were administering to the dead.

And then I went inside the house.

The light immediately went out in the narrow hallway and I could hear SFOs screaming in the dark. I banged my bad knee against a box and winced with pain. I realised the hallway had one of those lights that go out automatically, the kind they have in cheap property where someone who doesn’t live there is worried about the energy bills. I fumbled on the wall, found the round switch and hit it. The musty yellow light came back on and I could not understand what I was looking at.

There were boxes all the way down the dingy hallway.

Drones.

Dozens of them. Some of them unopened. Some of them scuffed with dirt and grass, the metal scarred from repeated crash landings.

The SFOs seemed to be above me now, on the first and second floors.

I walked to the end of the corridor and opened the kitchen door.

A child screamed.

Shrill, high-pitched, full of terror.

No, not quite a child. But not yet fully grown. A teenage girl of about sixteen was cowering on the floor by the oven with a woman and a man around sixty. The woman and girl were in their pyjamas. The man, his hair grey and thinning, was in a London Transport uniform.

They were, I realised, Ahmed ‘Arnold’ and Azza Khan, the parents of the brothers, and Layla, their granddaughter, the daughter of their third son who had died in Aleppo.

‘Papa-Papa!’ Layla cried, and at first I fought she was calling for her dead father. ‘Papa-Papa! Papa-Papa!’

But she turned her terrified face to her grandfather and I saw that she was talking to him.

‘Don’t kill us!’ Mrs Khan begged me as she clung to her granddaughter and they both closed their eyes.

At their feet there was a pink and purple rucksack with The Angry Princess on the side. It was exactly the same as the one I had been sent to the shopping centre to replace.

‘Listen to me,’ I said. ‘You’re safe now. But you must go – go immediately.’ I helped them to their feet. ‘And when you come out of the front door – this is very important – hold your hands above your head with the palms showing.’ I demonstrated. ‘Like this. It’s very important that they can see the palms of your hands, OK? Then nobody will hurt you.’

They copied me. The woman snatched up her granddaughter’s Angry Princess rucksack and threw it over her shoulder.

And then they ran, their hands in the air before they were out of the kitchen, palms forward as I had shown them.

I walked from the kitchen, my balance off from what the gunfire had done to my inner ear, and I noticed for the first time that there was a basement door facing the entrance to the kitchen. From the bottom of the stairs, a dim light was shining.

I went down the stairs, shouting my name and rank.

In the basement there was an SFO with his assault rifle at his shoulder. It was the shot who DS Stone had addressed in the back of the van.

You OK, Raymond?

And before him there was a man on his knees.

It was the other brother, the youngest one. Adnan Khan, with his hands in the air. I looked at his palms expecting to see hand grenades but his hands were empty. The SFO glanced at me and then back at the brother on his knees. Adnan Khan was surrendering.

Nobody moved.

We all waited.

‘Raymond?’ I said. ‘Ray? You prefer Ray or Raymond?’

He did not look at me. But I saw something inside him react as I said his name.

‘What’s your full name and rank, Officer?’ I said, my voice harder now.

‘Vann,’ he said. ‘SFO DC Raymond Vann, sir.’

The shots had been a blur of grey body armour, PASGT helmets and firepower. In my mind, they had been an inseparable, indivisible group. Even Jackson Rose, my oldest friend, had looked like just one part of a band of brothers and sisters. It was only now that I saw DS Stone had sought out this one man to make sure he was ready for what was coming.

You OK, Raymond?

But now DC Raymond Vann aimed his assault rifle at the man before him and he seemed totally on his own.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘DC Vann. Raymond. Ray. Don’t do it.’

But he did it.

One single shot.

So loud in the small subterranean room it felt like the last sound I would ever hear. The muzzle blast dazzling in the twilight of the basement as Adnan Khan was thrown backwards, the death wound in his chest already blooming.

Then I was stumbling back up the basement’s short flight of rickety steps and down the corridor piled high with boxes of drones and towards the front door. I bounced off the walls, keeping going, wanting to be far away from that basement. It was light outside now. The day had begun while we were inside the house.

The pain in my ears was so intense that I touched them and looked at my fingertips, expecting blood. But there was nothing there. It felt like there should be blood.

I staggered out of the house and into the dazzling light of the new day. Police tape was already going up at both ends of the street. The helicopter seemed much lower and louder. The second response team was piling out of the back of their van and pouring into the house where everyone was either dead or gone.

And paramedics were putting DS Alice Stone into a Human Remains Pouch. We don’t call them body bags and they are not black, like the movies. This one was white with a long black zip. They had cleaned up her face and it looked like her. The young always look like themselves when they die fifty years too soon. Two paramedics were easing her inside with the tenderness of parents putting a sleeping child to their rest.

I could hear radio chatter and someone sobbing.

Jackson sat dry-eyed in the open doors of the florist van, still holding his weapon. An exhibits officer was meant to take it from him, but it was still too soon and too chaotic for formal procedures to kick in. Right now there was only the numb disbelieving shock that follows action. I sat by his side. He pulled off his PASGT helmet and wiped his face with the back of his hand. Then he gently patted my back. We did not speak.

The Specialist Search Team had arrived and was waiting for the nod to tear the place apart. No grenades, I thought. Not yet. At the far end of the street I could see the CSIs getting into their white Tyvek suits and blue nitrile gloves. The gang’s all here, I thought.

Then a senior uniformed officer stood before Jackson and me, shouting and waving his arms. Jackson looked away and yawned. The officer was silver-haired, fifty-something and his shoulder badge showed the red-and-silver crown of a superintendent.

I stared at his lips. My hearing was still off but I could make out his question. I could understand what he was asking us. And he was asking it again and again and again.

‘What the hell happened here?’

I blinked at him and said nothing.

The image of the muzzle blast in the basement was burned black on the back of my eyes.

And now it would be there for ever.