CHAPTER ONE

 

 

RICK NUTMAN TRIED hard to breathe. It was something that should have been easy, a natural function of his highly trained body, yet he was currently unable to carry out the technique without feeling as if he were submerged in ten feet of dark water. The riot gear was heavy, constricting, and he was not used to being so trussed up.

Come on, he thought. Get through this, get a grip. It’s the real thing, not a training exercise, and if you don’t act fast you might not see daylight. Or Sally… you might never see Sally again.

This final thought galvanised him and suddenly he remembered how to breathe: his lungs sucked in the cold air, filled up, and then pushed the whole lot out again. He saw pinpoint stars, but when he looked up into the sky, at the real stars suspended in the black night, his vision began to clear.

“You okay, mate?” Trevor Hutchinson, the man at his side, narrowed his blue eyes in concern. He cocked his head, adjusted the grip on his Glock 17, and smiled.

“Yeah,” said Rick. “Just… had a moment – you know?”

Hutch nodded once and switched his gaze back to the stocky grey tower block they were supposed to be watching. Nothing moved in the darkness, but several lights were on inside the building, bleeding patches of sickly yellow onto the ruined lawn outside the main entrance. Rick thought they looked like pools of urine.

The air was charged with a strange combination of fear and excitement. Everyone was tense; they just wanted to get into it, to start the action. A lone aeroplane flew overhead, its wide contrail glowing white against the dark and star-flecked sky. Rick watched as it traced a line across the flat black heavens, wondering where it was headed. Then, abruptly, the plane began to descend. He knew there were no airports in the immediate area – Leeds/Bradford was a few miles away, and certainly too far for the plane to be dipping in so suddenly to land. Puzzled, he began to stand. Hutch placed a firm hand on his shoulder. His grip was like steel pincers.

Rick glanced at the other man. Hutch shook his head, eyes narrow slits in the dark smudge of his face. “Best sit tight. It’s all going off very soon.” He held Rick’s gaze until Rick relaxed. They knew each other about as well as any two men could, had trained together, fought together and become disillusioned with army life together. It was Hutch who’d convinced him to try for the police after his medical discharge from the Parachute Regiment.

The plane’s unusual descent forgotten, Rick stared at the building they were here to raid. It was a squat concrete structure; a block of forty-odd flats spread over three floors. Their targets were ensconced on the first floor – they knew that from several intelligence reports gathered over the past few months – and the rest of the building was occupied by various low-level drug dealers and long-term benefit claimants who did illegal Black Market work on the side. This was a rough area; no one who lived here was totally clean. That’s what DI Harper always said: in places like this, even the innocent are guilty. It was a harsh doctrine, but one that had apparently saved the DI’s skin on more than one occasion.

A radio belched static. Someone coughed softly. The sound of hardcore dance music drifted in from somewhere nearby. There must be a party going on somewhere in the neighbourhood.

Hutch’s hand still clutched Rick’s arm. His friend had forgotten to take it away. Rick felt comforted by the proximity. Tonight was his first time out with the Armed Response Unit, but not his first time in the thick of the action. In the army, he’d served in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, so knew a lot about the tension and pressure of warfare. But this was different: it was at home, in England, not some far-flung war zone where the enemy wore black turbans and spoke in another language. These home-grown enemies were much harder to identify.

Distant sirens wailed like neutered choirboys, the emergency vehicles they heralded heading towards another fight in another part of Leeds. These were tough times: global economic slowdown, crime figures up through the roof, domestic violence on the increase, drugs and teen gangs ruling the streets. Rick was no mug; he knew what it was like out here, in the midst of it all, but to actually confront it was another matter entirely. He hoped he was up to the challenge.

He thought again of Sally, his wife of less than a year, and then pushed her pretty face as far as he could from his mind. She didn’t belong here, with this shit. She represented what little good there was left in the world.

Someone whispered impatiently behind him, urging things to progress, and quickly. Rick knew how the man felt: the anticipation was almost unbearable. A woman’s voice yelled through an open window, her words slurred and difficult to understand: something about spilling beer on the carpet. Someone sniggered. Hutch turned his head and glared at the offending officer.

They were crouched behind cars in the parking bays out front of the building. Another smaller team of men was hidden at the back of the block of flats. The plan was that their unit would storm the front of the building and enter through the main doors, then rush up to the second floor. The secondary unit would storm the rear and cordon off the ground floor, stopping anyone from exiting. It was a technique they’d carried out countless times in training, but only the superior officers had ever used it in the field. Both units were made up of a fair number of rookies, their first time out after months of training. Despite this being a suspected terrorist raid, intelligence led them to believe that there were only three suspects hiding out in the building.

In at the deep end, thought Rick, smiling despite the tension. It had been the same in the army. All the training in the world could not add up to the single thrilling-terrifying experience of a real-life operation. It set apart the men from the boys, the tough guys from the pretenders. Rick had proved himself several times in action, yet still he was afraid. He’d learned to use that fear, to focus it and direct it inward, where it became a vital strength rather than a debilitating weakness.

“Just waiting for the order,” muttered Hutch, almost to himself. He’d taken his hand away. Rick almost missed the human contact.

He took a deep breath, held it… held it… then finally let it out. Swallowing the fear felt good. His hands were no longer shaking. He was ready.

As he watched, a small, thin cat walked coolly across the grass verge a few yards in front of him. The cat paused, glanced over at the crouching men, and then moved away, unconcerned.

Off to Rick’s left, he caught sight of movement. A lone Constable ran, bent at the waist, from his hiding place to the corner of an adjacent building, where the command centre had been set up in an unmarked van. The van doors squealed open, the sound too loud in all that silence. Then, softer, they clunked shut.

Not long now. We’re almost there.

A strange calmness descended upon him, coating him in a cool, dry layer. He was used to this from his time in the field. Once, during Operation Mountain Thrust, just before the convoy he was travelling in was bombed and came under fire from a small group of Afghan Taliban forces, he’d taken the weird sensation to be a warning, an indication that trouble was coming. The American forces leading them into the foothills to root out insurgents had sustained severe casualties, but because of Rick’s sudden intuition his unit had come away relatively unscathed.

That moment of insight had saved his life. Now, in this grubby Yorkshire suburb, he took it to be a sense of calm before the storm.

When the order came he did not even hear it. Just a burst of rapid-fire static from his radio as everyone around him began to move in a rehearsed formation. Boots made little sound on the concrete footpath; voices were silent. Rick drew his Glock and remembered the choreography he’d been taught. He slipped into place alongside Hutch, who glanced at him and grinned.

The man at the head of the formation – Rick thought he might be called Tennant – ran silently towards at the unlocked double doors. He was a big bloke, and when he hit the glass barriers they flew open. Tennant was moving so fast that he almost fell but managed to keep his footing. He ducked in under the stairs, pistol up, and scanned the perimeter. All clear. The men who’d followed him in fanned out from the doors and began to climb the stairs, moving from half landing to half landing and checking the area before overlapping each other in a quick ascent.

A door opened on the first floor. A black face peered out, eyes white as two dabs of flour, and then the door quickly closed. The sound of locks being shot echoed along the landing, louder than the silent assault. Pre-agreed hand signals were used to direct team members to their positions on the second floor. Rick, being the newest and least experienced member, hung back with Hutch at the head of the stairs. A door to his left opened and a small boy stood there in his pyjamas, clutching a grubby teddy bear by one ear. The boy’s face was so dirty that Rick cold not even guess at his ethnicity. The interior of the flat behind him was dark. The hallway was clotted with what looked like building rubble – bricks and random lengths of timber.

Rick smiled.

The boy stared, his eyes wide but not afraid, barely even curious. He went to take a step forward but Rick shook his head and moved quickly towards the boy, pushing him back into the flat. The boy stuck out his tongue and slammed the door in Rick’s face. Then, from the safety of the flat, he screamed a single word, louder than he looked able: “Pigs!” And he kept screaming it, over and over again.

That was the moment when everything began to go wrong.

Someone screamed “Go-go-go!” and a large man – not Tennant this time, but someone else, someone even bigger – ran at the door of number twenty-four, using a battering ram. It took three hits close to the door handle for the door to buckle, and when it did the sound was like an explosive charge. The man stepped aside, allowing three officers armed with Heckler and Koch G3 machine guns to run into the flat past the flopping door, weapons held at chest height, faces white, mouths mere slits under the strengthened glass visors of their black riot helmets.

Suddenly, a series of doors opened along the landing, and the space began to fill with smoke.

The other tenants, now aware of the police presence, were throwing burning rags and plastic bags soaked with petrol into the hallway in an attempt to confuse matters and allow their neighbours time to escape. Thick, acrid smoke rose, stole the oxygen and invaded the lungs. It was difficult to see. Shouting filled the air. The stench of burning petrol clogged Rick’s throat. It was chaos, like a battlefield, and he felt his instincts kick in and take control. Keeping low, he moved along the landing, reaching up and dragging the doors shut to prevent any further missiles being thrown.

He was shocked to see that most of the perpetrators were kids, not much more than thirteen or fourteen years old. Behind one of them, standing in a darkened hallway, a fat woman with unruly hair laughed, holding her stomach and stamping her foot as if to the rhythm of madness.

The confined space of the landing was soon filled with the jagged, nerve-bashing sounds of coughing, slamming doors, running feet, and war-like screams. Rick struggled to see, but his eyes were streaming. As he turned back to where Hutch was still waiting, he caught a stray kick to the head. Vision blurred, he reeled back onto his haunches; everything pushed in on him, pressing him down. He remembered the hot desert, a scouring diesel-tinged heat, the dull boom of explosions, and the cries of fallen comrades.

Then some damn fool started shooting.