The two men removed the rucksacks from their backs. Hussam fished inside his with his right hand. He felt very comfortable with the weapon that his fingers touched. They’d already spent a long time firing them, as well as practising how to change the magazine swiftly. ‘AKS-74U,’ they’d been told. Hussam knew a little about guns. He knew that these were shortened variants of the standard 74, somewhere between a submachine gun and an assault rifle. Ideal for close-quarters combat, and for keeping concealed. They had probably been made in the old Soviet Union. How they had made the journey from there to the rucksacks of Hussam’s team was anybody’s guess, but it wasn’t important now: they were coming to the end of their lives.
‘You’ll be firing 7.62 shorts. Hard-hitting rounds, thirty-round magazines. You get nine to ten bursts per magazine. Count them. When you pack your weapon, be sure you do it barrel downwards. You don’t want to be rummaging around when the time comes.’
They had nodded, but not said anything, as they followed the advice.
Once they were ready they had prayed together, beseeching Allah to look with favour on their enterprise, and asking Him to grant them entry to His kingdom when their earthly life was done.
Which would be in a couple of minutes’ time.
Hussam’s watch clicked to 17.17. The two men nodded and pulled their weapons from their rucksacks, just as the cubicle door opened and the pregnant woman appeared to the sound of the toilet’s violent flush.
She stopped, her face aghast, her eyes glued to the sight of the machinery in the men’s fists.
Hussam looked at her. He saw her swollen belly and remembered his own wife when she was in the same state. For a split second he wondered if he was doing the right thing. What would she say if she could see him here now?
But then he remembered her lifeless body, still and cold. And their baby, not much bigger than the palm of his hand. This woman in front of him, she had a ruddy glow about her. Her cheeks were full, not like the thin, gaunt features his wife had displayed during her pregnancy through lack of nutrition. This woman had never given the plight of the Palestinian people a second thought. Like everybody in the West, she had sat complacently by while their people suffered and their children died. Why should she be allowed to live a life of comfort and safety when his own family were no longer of this world?
He raised his 74 just as the woman opened her mouth to scream.
But no scream came.
It was a short burst, and the sound was almost entirely masked by the sudden and unexpected noise of a train passing in the other direction. The rounds entered the woman’s chest, flinging her back through the open door of the toilet as an explosion of blood spattered all around the cubicle. Hussam momentarily lost control of his weapon and the rounds flew up to her face, then back down to her swollen belly. For a split second he thought he saw a flash of the unborn child’s body, but perhaps that was just his imagination. He released his finger from the trigger, concerned that he had wasted too many rounds on one kill, then stepped towards the first carriage and made his way into it.
There was no turning back now. It had begun. The nervousness had left his body just as surely as the rounds had left the barrel of his weapon; they had been absorbed by his first kill and now he was ready to see this through to the end.
Hussam worked methodically, starting on his left with a man and a woman, both asleep, she resting her head on his shoulder. Two quick bursts and their sleep became permanent. A stray round shattered the window next to them and it was this, more than the sharp, mechanical sound of the 74, that alerted the passengers nearby to what was happening. A man in the seats to Hussam’s right had seen the couple being slaughtered, and was already half up on his feet by the time the Palestinian gunman had him in his sights. A single burst and he slumped back down in his seat, blood foaming from his mouth.
Hussam stepped forward down the aisle to the next set of seats. He could sense his companion was right behind him, ready to take over once Hussam’s rounds had expired. The roar from the shattered window was immense, and the wind ruffled Hussam’s loose clothing and his hair. He refused to be distracted by any of this, and the killing continued.
He had fired nine bursts and killed nine people by the time his 74 clicked empty. As soon as the magazine was spent, he turned sideways and let his companion take the lead. Hussam knew he might need a little encouragement to take out his first victim, so he urged him on with a reminder of what they were doing: ‘For our people!’ he shouted. ‘For Palestine!’ But his words were drowned out. So far the gunman had been too swift for anyone even to cry out. That had changed. People further up the carriage had realised what was happening. Strangely there was very little screaming, although some passengers were frantically ringing numbers on their mobile phones and shouting into them. ‘They’ve got guns! They’ve got guns!’
One man — tall and thickset — burst out into the aisle and started running towards them, grasping a black holdall in front of him to protect himself from the shots. ‘Get that man!’ Hussam yelled.
His companion’s arm shot up and to the right as he fired, ripping a seam across the charging man’s face with such ferocity that his features were instantly replaced with flashes of skull and blood. The man crumpled to the floor and the new gunman continued the methodical execution of the passengers. There was chaos in the carriage now — shouting and crying and confusion. Hussam ignored it all as he plunged his hand into his rucksack and pulled out a full magazine for his weapon. He removed the spent mag, dropped it on the floor and quickly replaced it, ready to take over from his companion once the second gunman’s rounds were spent.
And so they continued, staggering their slaughter like they were playing some horrific game of leapfrog. Panic ahead; total silence behind. Hussam didn’t look back at the scenes of indescribable carnage; his eyes did not linger on the bloodied corpses or the flesh and brain matter painted over the windows and walls. He kept his focus, his eyes straight ahead and his mind on the job. They had planned for this moment for a long time, and he wasn’t going to mess things up through a lack of concentration…
The shouts of panic reached a peak when they were halfway through the first carriage, then started to ebb away as fewer and fewer people remained to emit any kind of sound. Some passengers — braver than the others, or perhaps just more scared — made a run for it into the next carriage. But that was all right, because Hussam knew that his other two compatriots were already clearing the carriages from the opposite end. They would meet in the middle, sandwiching those who had fled and eliminating them in a final orgy of bloodshed. He stepped over the body of the would-be hero and felt his heel land on one of the man’s fingers. It crunched beneath him, making a sound like new snow.
When they reached the interconnecting area between the first two carriages, Hussam saw that one of the windows at the sides had been smashed with a heavy object. A chubby woman was holding her toddler — two or three years old, maybe, and it was difficult at a glance to tell if it was male or female — up to the opening. When she saw Hussam, she posted the child through the broken window and it was gone in an instant. The kid surely could not have survived that, Hussam thought to himself as he thumped a burst of rounds into the weeping mother’s back. He looked round and saw that the toilet was locked. He could just discern the sound of another woman inside, sobbing desperately. Hussam raised his gun and aimed directly at the door. The rounds made short work of the metal, ripping holes in it and immediately silencing the occupant.