Mulligan merely grunted.
The coastal road from Gull Rock wasn’t a coastal road as such – it curved inland around the edge of the North Norfolk coast, but it was hemmed in from the north and east by mile upon mile of barren saltmarsh. It was a desolate enough scene by day, but now, in the pitch dark, there was an awesome blackness broken only occasionally by sentinel streetlamps, these usually located at sharp turns or unexpected bends. To the right, where the marshes lay, was a solid void with only tiny pips of light to denote the fishing boats out on the Wash. At least the road was high speed. Sightseers almost never had cause to drive along here, so though it was narrow and inclined to weave, the cavalcade proceeded at a steady fifty miles an hour.
‘How’s he doing?’ Braithwaite asked his mobile phone.
‘No change,’ came the tinny voice of the prison officer riding in the ambulance. ‘We need to get there soon.’
‘ETA twenty-five,’ Braithwaite said.
Mulligan grunted and continued driving, the reddish glow of the motorcyclists’ tail-lights reflecting on his tough but solemn features.
Braithwaite checked his watch. Everything was going to plan so far.
They’d proceeded about ten miles, but were still in the midst of marshy desolation, when the motorcyclists flashed their hazard lights and started slowing down.
Braithwaite’s eyes narrowed. He felt for his Glock, but then reached for his radio instead, passing a quick message to the team in the first gunship. ‘Possible hold-up ahead. Everyone stay loose … looks like an RTA.’
Mulligan worked down through the gears. ‘See something, guv?’
Braithwaite pointed. A wrecked vehicle emerged into view on the road ahead, framed in the glare of the motorcyclists’ headlamps: a white Peugeot 106, lying skewwhiff across both carriageways, upside down. Its front end had caved in, and a column of steam rose from its exposed engine. Braithwaite checked his wing mirror as, one by one, the other vehicles in the cavalcade slowed to a halt.
In front, the two motorcyclists pulled one to either side of the road, and quickly dismounted. It was now evident that a body lay on the blacktop alongside the upended wreck. It wore jeans and a tracksuit top, but by its slim form and mass of splayed-out golden hair, it was a young woman. The immediate signs weren’t good – she lay motionless and face-down in a spreading pool of blood.
‘Shit!’ Mulligan said, grabbing for his radio. ‘This has only just happened …’
‘Wait!’ Braithwaite signalled for caution, before opening the front passenger door and climbing out.
‘Guv, what’re you …?’
‘Don’t touch her!’ Braithwaite hollered at the two motorcyclists.
Both had removed their helmets and knelt down alongside the casualty, checking for vital signs. The first glanced around at the commander, startled. But the second had seen something else. ‘Oh Christ …’
Braithwaite walked forward, his gaze riveted on the arm of a second casualty, broken and bloodstained, protruding through the Peugeot’s imploded windscreen. He halted, before swivelling around and peering back down the length of the cavalcade. SOCAR Sergeant Alan Montgomery was climbing from the cab of the first gunship. Unlike his gaffer, he was helmeted, but his visor was raised. He evidently couldn’t see what had happened, and was seeking an explanation.
But Braithwaite was too bewildered to offer one. ‘This … for real?’ he muttered, glancing to the front again, and noting with a deep chill the trickles of blood coagulating on the tarmac.
Mulligan, who’d also climbed from the command car, joined him. ‘Guv?’
‘I thought …’ Braithwaite stuttered. ‘I mean …’
‘Sir …?’ one of the motorcyclists interrupted. ‘We need to …’
Which was when the roadside explosive concealed near the rear of the cavalcade detonated with a volcano-like BOOM.
They spun around, eyes bugged, faces lit brightly by the searing, fiery flash.
The noise alone was agony on the ears – a devastating roar accentuated by a twisting and rending of steel as the second gunship was flung over on the blacktop, reduced in less than a second to a smoking mass of blistered scrap. They tottered where they stood, red-hot shards raining down around them, too stunned to respond.
At a single guttural command, the darkness came alive, spangled with blistering, cruciform gun-flashes. An echoing din of automatic gunfire accompanied it.
Sergeant Montgomery was the first to go down, flopping to his knees, both hands clutched on his groin, jack-knifing backwards as more rounds struck his face and upper body. But only as the first gunship began jerking and shuddering to repeated high-velocity impacts did it actually strike Braithwaite they were under attack.
He and his men had been through all the specialist training programmes. They were tough and experienced, routinely armed; an elite cadre within the British police. High-risk prisoner transport was their forte; pursuit and capture of fugitives and escaped convicts their bread and butter.
But anyone can be taken by surprise.
The first gunship’s immediate reaction was to get the hell out, but its cab was already so peppered with lead that its supposedly bulletproof windshield collapsed inward, and it skidded and slammed into the back of the command car, which, as it was also armoured, wasn’t shunted sufficiently to allow it through.
And still Braithwaite and Mulligan could only stand there, rounds whining past them like a swarm of rocket-propelled hornets.
With a dull metallic clinking, two small objects came dancing out of the darkness and across the road surface. Braithwaite watched them incredulously as they rolled to a halt by the front offside of the first gunship.
Hand grenades.
They detonated simultaneously.
Their combined explosion was not adequate to throw the heavy troop-carrier over onto its side. It was a smidgen of the power applied by the IED that had done for the second gunship, but it mangled the driving cab, in which Montgomery’s sidekick was still taking shelter, blowing out all its windows, shredding the guy in a hailstorm of glass and metal. The rearmost section buckled with the force, the blazing gunfire increasingly ripping through its reinforced bodywork.
Braithwaite was still helpless, still frozen – unable to comprehend the unfolding events. When a brutal implement smashed without warning into the back of his unguarded skull, sending him reeling to the floor, it might almost have been expected. There was a resounding thud as Mulligan suffered the same fate.
The blacktop backhanded the side of the chief inspector’s face, yet somehow he retained consciousness, and despite the hot red glue dripping through his vision, found himself staring again down the length of the cavalcade, against which numerous figures were now moving, having emerged from the darkness on the right. Some were attacking the ambulance by hand, working with tools on its battered doors, prying them open. Others were still shooting – particularly down at the far end, Braithwaite realised, which meant they were drilling bullets through the burning, blasted scrap remaining of the second gunship, finishing off any poor devils who hadn’t yet been turned to a mess of meat and bone. Though dazed, Braithwaite was struck with wonderment at the variety of reports issuing from the weapons on view. But one was louder than the others: a repeated deafening clatter, as though a dozen men were beating iron frames with hammers.
He craned his neck up, blinking through the crimson stickiness. And he saw it.
A Hotchkiss Portable Mark 1 machine gun, already fixed on its tripod and with a two-man crew operating it – one to fire, one to feed the belt. It was