‘Put these on,’ Sasha said, beginning to kick off his shoes as he passed sets of beige overalls with LUTON SECURITY written on the back. ‘Careful with your fingerprints.’
James was already sweltering with the body armour under his tracksuit and he felt ridiculous as he pulled on yet another layer of clothing. Meantime Sasha had taken caps and sunglasses out of the bag.
‘Keep ’em on in case we bump into someone,’ Sasha explained, as he pulled the brim down over his eyes. ‘You two look young, and I don’t want anyone to eyeball me because when something gets robbed around here my mugshot is always the first one the cops pull out of the box.’
To make life even hotter, Sasha pulled out sets of gardening gloves before handing each boy a gun.
‘Glocks, same ones you used on the hard front the other day,’ he explained. ‘The airport cops have got machine guns, so don’t start shooting unless you have to because you’ll know all about it when the anti-terrorist squad shoot back. The good news is that less than a dozen cops work this entire airport and right now their backup is trying to pick up Major Dee on the other side of town.’
The doors leading on to the sunny tarmac opened automatically and Sasha stepped out and looked around. Three yellow and white airport buses were parked less than fifty metres away and they began jogging towards them.
*
Time seemed to ache as the roof shuddered beneath Michael. The explosives had made a huge metal blister in the side of the warehouse. As flames licked through gaps between roof plates, the building flexed, making its corrugated sections groan like a metal sea.
Michael held on for as long as he could, but even though his body armour gave some protection the metal was getting hot. Down below, two Slasher Boys and the truck driver had scrambled out through a fire door, only to find Runts vaulting a low wall and steaming towards them with weapons drawn. Major Dee had ordered the deaths of eight Runts who’d been involved in the murder of Owen Campbell-Moore, so Michael wasn’t expecting the youngsters to show any mercy when they got hold of Dee’s men.
He heard a couple of gunshots as a chasm opened between the two roof sections directly behind him. It seemed only a matter of time before the whole roof collapsed. Michael had to climb down, even if it meant facing the onslaught of Runts.
As he ran to the edge, the opposite end of the roof began to sag, turning the centre into a huge chimney pouring out black smoke. He stepped on to the top rung of the access ladder, the wind pushing dense smoke into his face.
His eyes stung as he moved down. More Runts were pouring over the wall, but they’d been split into two groups when a stream of cars and mini-buses filled with Slasher Boys pulled up in the street outside.
Within seconds there were guns blazing in all directions. Mercifully, the panic this caused set a lot of the Runts running for cover and Michael slid down the last half of the ladder without being spotted.
As soon as his feet hit the ground, he ripped out his handgun and took off the safety, then ran as fast as he could. The gun battle on the opposite side of the building had become ridiculous and Michael’s heart banged as a police helicopter swooped over, parting the clouds of smoke.
Shocked by the level of violence, Inspector Rush had changed tactics, abandoning the soft cordon and ordering his officers to seal the area and prevent the mayhem spreading into a nearby shopping precinct.
Michael’s eyes and lungs burned from the smoke, but he picked up speed and vaulted a wall into the street behind the warehouse. There were two police cars parked at one end and he knew he’d get cuffed and clobbered if they nabbed him. The other direction looked more promising and he sped on for fifty metres.
When he reached a corner he saw a wrecked car. The passengers had escaped, but the driver was slumped over the steering wheel, unconscious. He looked like a Runt and he was no more than fifteen years old.
Michael thought about trying to give first aid, but the helicopter swooped again and its presence made him acutely aware of the danger. He charged on, diving into a narrow side street as a carload of Runts screamed past. He thought he was OK, but when he looked back he was horrified to see the car reverse and turn after him.
Michael ran on past two warehouses with the car closing in. There was a grass square beyond and he sped through the gate, dodged a woman walking a golden retriever and began sprinting across neatly mown grass. The car couldn’t follow, but two Runts got out of the back.
By the time they’d reached the park gates, Michael was close to a primary school on the opposite side of the square. He glanced through the hedges along the park’s edge and saw that the car had taken a left turn to cut him off as he exited.
His only safe route was through the school. He scrambled up the chain-link fence bordering the playground. The windows of a classroom filled with Year Twos was less than five metres away, but none of the kids looked his way until a gunshot ripped off somewhere on the other side of the wall.
By the time Michael had dropped into a goalmouth painted on concrete, twenty-five sets of little eyeballs stared at him. One of the chasing Runts had started to climb the fence, while another ran around the school’s perimeter looking for the entrance.
Michael would never have a better chance to go on the offensive. As soon as the Runt dropped off the fence he charged. The Runt had a knife in his hand, but as he swung forward it thumped harmlessly into Michael’s body armour.
Michael twisted the knife from the youth’s hand and went into automatic. It would have been easy to kill him with the gun, but that’s always a final option. He had time to incapacitate the Runt before his mate found the school gate, so he twisted his wrist into a lock, kept twisting until the Runt’s arm snapped and ripped the Runt’s shoulder out of its socket with a final jerk.
Inside the classroom the teacher was frantically shepherding her young pupils into the far corner of the room, but for every six-year-old who couldn’t look, another had their face against the window refusing to look away. Several screamed when Michael stepped back, giving them a clear view of the Runt’s bloody face.
Michael could handle one Runt, but there was also a chance of the two lads in the car joining the hunt. If they’d only had knives he might have fancied his chances of fighting it out three against one, but some Runts had guns and there were too many little kids around to take risks.
He decided it was best to hide and ran towards a red door at the back of the school building. As he burst through, a teacher’s assistant saw his gun and squealed.
‘I’m not gonna hurt you,’ Michael yelled, in a voice that was far from reassuring. ‘Keep the kids out of the way and make sure someone’s called the police.’
Michael looked around and realised that he was in a school library, with a life-size cut-out of Alex Rider staring at him from the opposite side of the room. There was only one exit behind him and a good view out across the playground. It seemed like the perfect position to hold out until the cops arrived.
But everything changed when he saw an Asian lad sprint across the playground, gun in hand. Stocky, with giant gold rings, Michael had never seen him before, but knew the face from a surveillance photograph.
He opened a crack in the library door and aimed his gun at the youth who’d tried to kill Gabrielle.
45. BUS
The airport was marked out with yellow lanes and a strict twenty-mile-per-hour limit. Sasha sat at the wheel of the bus, Bruce on the long bench behind and James stood with one hand on a green pole and the other holding out the photocopied directions.
‘Next left,’ James said, as they cruised behind the wings of a small Airbus.
Sasha hadn’t got the knack of steering the bus and was alarmed to find himself heading towards a tight gap beneath a terminal walkway. He slowed to a crawl and looked worried as the roof cleared a height restriction sign by centimetres.
They emerged from the short tunnel into bright sunlight blanketing the cargo terminal. Sasha followed the yellow path in front of
four parked jets painted in the livery of an international courier company, and then swung out across open tarmac, heading for a solitary 737 cargo plane.
Two men were unloading the plane using an automated conveyor, with aluminium freight cubes rolling down a belt on to the back of a flat-bed truck. As the bus closed in, James recognised the hulking outlines of the Kruger brothers.
‘You’re late,’ Tim Kruger shouted, switching off the conveyor as James and Bruce stepped down from the bus. He leaned in and looked at Sasha, who’d stayed behind the wheel. ‘The cargo men are unconscious in the terminal and the cage is set to blow.’
James and Bruce were handed rubber gas masks as Tony pulled a remote detonator out of his pocket. ‘Fingers in your ears,’ he said, giving the boys less than two seconds to comply before he pressed the button.
A white flash burst from the open door of the fuselage ten metres above them. The sound echoed across the tarmac and made the plane roll back half a metre on its giant tyres. As smoke billowed from the doorway, the Kruger brothers grabbed a set of access steps and wheeled them towards it.
Tim looked towards James and Bruce. ‘You’ll see eight bricks inside the cage. Grab ’em and throw ’em down the steps.’
Sasha claimed that James and Bruce were doing this part of the operation because they were young and fast, but as he raced up the steps James couldn’t help feeling that it was because no other bugger wanted to do it.
A lot of the smoke had cleared by the time the boys reached the doorway. Nothing seemed to have caught fire, but it was still tough to see. James peered into the cockpit and saw that the blast had destroyed most of the instrumentation and set off enough warning alarms to make it sound like an amusement park.
With their gas masks filtering the smoke, Bruce stepped the other way and grabbed a reinforced door. The Krugers were explosives experts and the blast had made neat holes in the gate of the high security cargo area, commonly known as the cage.
Bruce stepped into a dark space less than three metres deep, and flipped on the lamp fitted to his mask. The blast had buckled the aluminium shelves at the back of the cage, causing its contents to spill into a pile on the floor. He swept aside a mass of envelopes and small boxes that probably contained precious stones or jewellery and bent at the knees to grab the first brick.
Thirty centimetres wide, twenty deep and twenty high, each plastic-wrapped brick contained two hundred and sixty thousand dollars belonging to the United States government. The shipment had left America for Amsterdam the night before and was bound for Iraq, where the money would be used to pay the security forces.
Bruce passed the brick out of the door to James, who backed up to the outer door before hurling it down the staircase into the arms of Tony Kruger. It took less than forty seconds to extract two million vacuum-packed dollars and load them on to the bus.
As the boys ran down the steps, they spotted an airport fire engine racing towards the scene. It could only be a matter of seconds before the airport police were on their backs too.
James jumped on to the bus behind Bruce and the Kruger brothers, and Sasha floored the accelerator without bothering to shut the doors. Their exit was on the opposite side of the airport, but whilst Sasha wanted a quick getaway he discovered that the hydraulic brakes locked on every time he reached twenty-five miles an hour.
‘There’s a bloody speed limiter,’ Sasha yelled, as he turned around the nose of the plane and began heading back towards the passenger end of the terminal.
Tim Kruger watched in shock as the speed limiter locked on for the third time.
‘Makes sense,’ James said quietly, as he sat on a padded bench next to Bruce. ‘You wouldn’t want your minimum-wage airport bus driver putting his foot down and careering into a fifty-million-pound jet.’
Twenty miles an hour felt agonisingly slow as they drove along the path in front of the terminal, passing the shadowy outlines of a dozen passenger jets.
But there was still no sign of airport police as Tim Kruger radioed through to the rest of the team: ‘We’re passing Gate Three and should be at the exit in just over a minute.’
‘Roger that,’ Savvas answered. ‘I’m heading in.’
‘There’s the cops,’ Bruce yelled, as he looked behind and saw two airport police cars roaring across the tarmac with their sirens blazing.
They were closing fast as Sasha took a final slow turn around the end of the passenger terminal. The vehicle access point where fuel tankers and catering trucks entered the airport was directly ahead of them, complete with heavy barriers and a security booth with an armed guard inside.
James only glimpsed it before he saw the truck with the battering ram welded to the front barrelling towards the gate at more than fifty miles an hour. The huge ram tore into the security booth, ripping the entire structure out of the ground. As the truck ploughed on, it hit a kerb so fast that the front wheels flew off the ground. It shattered the exit barriers and closed on the side of the terminal building.
‘He’s ballsed it up,’ Tony Kruger gasped.
Savvas was supposed to brake hard and turn once he was through the gates. But your brakes don’t work when your wheels are off the ground.
A wall of sparks exploded around the front edge of the battering ram as the truck touched down, throwing the helmeted Savvas across the cab. The truck smashed into the terminal building, tearing a massive hole and exposing ventilation shafts and a service corridor.
‘Jesus,’ Bruce gasped, as dust billowed and masonry chinked to the ground. ‘That must have knocked him out.’
Sasha stopped the bus and the two black Mercedes vans roared through the tangle of concrete and wire where the security barriers had been. James and Bruce grabbed a brick of money and ran towards them.
At the same time, Savvas fought to open his stricken truck, but the collision had buckled the door and he was forced to climb through the window. The two airport police cars had stopped fifty metres behind the bus and the Kruger brothers ripped out machine guns and fired warning shots into the air.
‘Stay back,’ Tony warned.
Bruce started making a second run with two bricks of money. James was about to grab the last one when Sasha pointed him towards the truck.
‘Go help Savvas. He’s stuck.’
Savvas was losing his struggle to get out of the truck. A jet of water sprayed out of the rubble inside the terminal as James jumped on to the steps leading up to the cab. He grabbed Savvas by his overall, but Savvas’ shoulders were wedged and his breathing was laboured.
As James tried to undo the chin strap on Savvas’ helmet, a blast of automatic gunfire gave him the fright of his life. He slipped off the steps and put his trainer down awkwardly, turning his ankle and collapsing on to his heavily padded behind.
James glanced around warily. There was no sign of Bruce or the Kruger brothers and the gunfire seemed to have come from behind the remains of the security booth. The officer inside had dived out before it was destroyed, and now used the debris as cover as she shot at the wheels of the black vans less than ten metres from her position.
The getaway drivers had no option but to reverse through the mangled gates at speed. As James stood up it seemed everyone else had made it into the vans and his only company was the half conscious Savvas.
He thought about running for it, but with someone shooting from behind the booth and the two police cars sure to close in now that the Krugers weren’t covering his back, surrender seemed like the only sane option. Then he eyed Sasha lying flat in the doorway of the bus.
*
Michael was a good marksman. He’d practised extensively with his compact pistol and the Runt who’d stabbed Gabrielle was crossing the playground less than ten metres away. It was an easy shot.
Cherubs are taught only to shoot when they’re in immediate danger and the Runt didn’t even know he was being targeted. But Michael’s training was mangled by his love for Gabrielle. He wanted the person who’d almost extinguished
her life to suffer and his rage was almost overpowering.
Can I get away with it? Probably. Could I live with myself? Definitely. Wouldn’t killing him make me just as bad as him? Could I really kill another human being?
Much as he hated the Runt, Michael was surprised to discover that he didn’t have the heart to kill in cold blood. He lowered his aim and thought about shooting the Runt up the arse or in the leg, but wherever a bullet enters you can be dead inside three minutes if it hits an artery.
A slamming door made Michael look back and he heard running in the corridor behind him. His first thought was of the two Runts who’d been inside the car. But he could hear voices: a near hysterical woman and an older man trying to calm her down. The cops had given top priority to a call from a primary school.
‘This is the police, can you hear me?’
Michael took a quick glance back out of the window and saw that the Runt had stopped moving. He’d lost Michael and had no idea what to do next.
‘I can hear,’ Michael shouted back.
‘I want you to put your gun down and slide it across to the far side of the room,’ the cop said calmly. ‘I need to be able to see your weapon when I open the door.’
Michael considered bursting out of the triangular door and going after the Runt, but firearms teams work in pairs and the most likely outcome would be a bullet in his own back. Even with body armour and nanotubes, he didn’t fancy it.
‘Quickly,’ the cop shouted.
‘I’m putting the gun down now,’ Michael shouted back.
He clicked on the safety and removed the clip, then threw both against the far wall of the room. One of the cops must have been peering through the door at the back because he charged in instantly, pointing his handgun at Michael as Alex Rider and a display of Horrible Histories clattered to the floor.
‘Hands on your head, on your head!’
Michael did what he was told as another officer stormed into the room.
‘Get up, face the window.’
While the officer slammed Michael against a bookshelf and locked handcuffs behind his back, the Runt spotted a police uniform inside the library and began sprinting towards the school gate.