The American tourist stepped around the human obstruction, and the young Syrian smiled pleasantly at him as he passed by, waiting until he was surrounded by this slow-moving group of noisy — and, to Assad, vulgar and uncouth — strangers.
He glanced down at the object in his right hand, quickly checked the wires were still in place, then took a deep breath, looking up at the thin shafts of light lancing through the myriad holes that dotted the roof high above him, closed his eyes and began murmuring softly.
One of the American women thought the young man must be praying, and for the final few moments of her life she wondered why.
She was almost right, for the last words Saadallah Assad uttered were ‘B’ism-Illah-ir-Rachmani-ir-Rachim’ — ‘In the name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful’. These familiar words are found at the beginning of every surah of the Qur’án except for the ninth, and are routinely uttered by devout Muslims when starting a meal, or donning new clothes or beginning some new undertaking.
Assad lowered his head and paused for a brief moment while he focused on mental images of the faces of his parents and siblings, images that would be the last things he ever visualized, that he would take with him on this, his final journey. Then he looked up and met the eyes of the female American tourist, who smiled shyly at him. Assad smiled back at her and simultaneously squeezed his right fist tightly shut.
His gellabbiya puffed suddenly outwards, and a microscopic fraction of a second later he simply ceased to exist, as the blast of nearly three kilos — not one kilo, as he had been told — of detonating C4 plastic explosive instantly reduced his body to a spray of blood and unrecognizable fragments.
The two Americans had lied to Assad about this aspect of his martyrdom, as they had lied to him about almost everything else, but in this, they had had little option. Assad was a devout Muslim, and the only way they could persuade him to carry out his mission in the crowded souk had been to convince him that the explosive charge was small with a very limited lethal radius. He was anxious that there should be only a few Syrian casualties, so they’d assured him that if he picked his spot with care, he would kill only a bunch of infidel Westerners.
The effects of the explosion were truly devastating. All of the Americans died at the same instant, as did everybody else close to where Assad had been standing. The blast wave generated by three blocks of C4 slammed outwards from the point of detonation, its horrific power cutting down everyone and everything in its path. Men and women were themselves turned into missiles, ripped apart and blown away to smash with pulverizing force into the bodies of their fellow citizens.
The products on display — brass and silver trinkets, lamps, mirrors, jugs, plates, bowls, boxes, sacks and their multitudinous contents, even carpets and bales of material — scattered and flew everywhere. Even the smallest, most innocuous and apparently harmless objects that weren’t instantly disintegrated by the blast became deadly missiles, whistling like bullets in all directions. Glass shattered, the resulting fusillade of needle-sharp spears adding further to the carnage. Doors and window frames shattered, sending lethal splinters of wood ripping through the air to seek out soft and yielding human flesh.
High above the spot where Saadallah Assad’s body had existed only a split second before, the arched metal roof covering the souk split apart, buckled upwards briefly and then crashed back, its panels tearing free and tumbling down to smash into what was left of the bodies beneath.
It was additionally unfortunate that Assad had been standing close to one side of the souk when he detonated the explosive, for the colossal blast tore an almost circular hole through the crumbling masonry, and the weight of the structure above then caused the whole wall to give way, shattered stonework and wooden beams crashing heavily to the ground. A choking cloud of dust billowed upwards into the air, obscuring everything from sight.
As the two Americans had anticipated — and was the reason they had selected the souk as their target — its shape acted almost like the barrel of a gun, funnelling the blast in both directions at once, and causing serious injuries to people standing dozens of yards from the point of detonation. Even those far enough away from the epicentre not to be seriously injured by flying debris still suffered agonies as their skin was burnt by the heat of the explosion, their eardrums ruptured and their flesh ripped apart by splinters of glass and wood.
The souk filled in an instant with the shattering blast, grotesquely magnified by the enclosed space it occupied. The detonation was followed immediately by a continuing cacophony as timber, masonry, glass and stone tumbled to the ground. An explosion of dust and debris erupted out of the Bab Al-Nasr entrance, scattering the traders and shoppers gathered outside.
When the last sliver of glass had smashed on to the ground and the final pieces of wood and stone had bounced to a standstill, a blessed moment of silence fell. For the briefest of instants the city seemed to hold its breath. Then the screams and wails began, the howls of agony from those who had survived the detonation but were lying, stunned and torn and bleeding, inside what was left of the market.
And, as a counterpoint to the escalating volume of vocal agony from within the souk, the yelling and shouting of people outside rose steadily to a crescendo and, moments later, the first of the sirens could be heard in the distance.
Standing in the airport car park, John Petrucci spun round when he heard the thump of the explosion and the atonic wailing of sirens a matter of seconds afterwards. He and O’Hagan had furtively removed their gellabbiyas to reveal ordinary Western business suits, and were now hauling their carry-on bags from the back of the Toyota.
‘That sounded like our boy,’ Petrucci said, slamming the boot closed.
‘Sure did,’ Alex O’Hagan nodded. ‘Welcome to the world of the shuhada.’
Chapter One
Paul Richter peered cautiously over the barrel of the Heckler & Koch MP5, and realized that this time they were going to find him.
In front of him the hillside sloped gently away from his observation point, but the target — a small whitewashed farmhouse on the far side of the field — was now virtually invisible through grey curtains of drizzle. The same drizzle that had, Richter reflected with no undue sense of surprise, been falling without noticeable pause for the previous four days. And he knew that for a fact because he had been lying in the same OP throughout the entire period.
He was cold, wet, stiff, aching, hungry, thirsty, tired and moderately pissed-off, and not for the first time he wondered just what the hell had possessed him to agree to Simpson’s suggestion that he get out of London for a few days. Actually, leaving London itself hadn’t been that bad an idea, but going to Hereford to play war games with the SAS probably wasn’t one of Richter’s better decisions.
The only good thing so far, from a professional point of view, was that his OP had remained undetected. The briefing had been vague enough to allow him considerable latitude in choosing its location, so he’d avoided the obvious and picked a spot almost in the centre of the meadow itself, situated well away from the target. That had required a lot of extra spade-work, done entirely under cover of darkness during the first night, to ensure that his OP remained as invisible as possible.