‘Two or three boxes of fifty, I think. I’ll go and get everything together.’
‘You know I’m carrying a weapon,’ Jackson remarked, after Watkinson had left the room. ‘It’s only a nine-millimetre Glock, but I am pretty good with it.’
Watkinson was back in less than five minutes, carrying a cardboard box which he placed on the table in front of Richter. ‘I’ve got to make some calls,’ he declared, and left again.
Richter took out a pair of shoulder rigs, each fitted with two magazine pouches on the webbing below the holster. He pulled one on, then picked up one of the Brownings and checked its action. It was an old pistol, but seemed perfectly serviceable. By the time Watkinson returned, they’d loaded eight magazines, and Richter had one Browning in his shoulder holster, the other in his jacket pocket. The other two were laid on the table ready for Watkinson, along with four magazines.
‘You’ll find one of your magazines is a bit lighter than the others, Michael. There were two full boxes of nine-millimetre, but only eight rounds in the third box, so the last magazine has got ten bullets in it, not fourteen.’
‘But yours are fully charged?’ Watkinson asked.
Richter nodded. ‘I’m almost certainly better at this kind of thing than you are, or at least, I’ve definitely had a lot more practice. And the fact is that if any of us get down to our last magazine, we’re going to be so deep in the shit it won’t matter anyway.’
‘You’re probably right.’ Watkinson pulled on the holster. ‘Are you coming on this jaunt, Carole?’
‘You bet.’
‘Do you need a weapon?’
Jackson shook her head, and opened the left side of her jacket to reveal why.
‘Right,’ Watkinson said. ‘I’ve called Inspector Hussein and briefed him. He doesn’t believe any of it, naturally, but he’ll be waiting for us out at Nad Al-Sheba.’
Forty-five minutes after they’d separated, they met at the back of the Millennium Grandstand, right beside a small maintenance door. It had been locked when they’d entered Nad Al-Sheba the previous night, but they’d forced it and merely closed it when they left.
Bashar had already shed his gellabbiya to reveal a pair of white overalls. Half the trick in being a successful impostor is to be in the right place at the right time, and anyone noticing him would see an engineer already inside the racetrack, and would assume that his identification had been properly checked at the gate.
The door accessed a workshop and storeroom, but inside was another door that opened into the void directly beneath the stand — a cavernous space filled with struts and girders and cross-braces, the far end of it vanishing into the gloom. Cables and pipes shared this void with pieces of machinery whose function Saadi couldn’t even guess at. Fluorescent lights were attached to the girders, but enough light leaked in from the outside to make turning them on unnecessary. The air inside was hot and still, and the vast space felt stuffy and claustrophobic.
They strode across to a pile of cardboard boxes and Saadi tossed them aside, revealing the bags they’d concealed there the previous night. He opened one, took out a Kalashnikov and handed it to Massood, who checked the magazine was fully loaded, then slammed it back into place. Saadi inspected the other two assault rifles, then picked up one of the other heavy bags and made his way across the void.
Each bag contained about fifteen kilograms of C4 plastic explosive, enough to demolish a very substantial building. Most structures have load-bearing walls or columns of reinforced concrete which support their entire weight, but explosive charges positioned so as to blow holes in the walls or cut through those columns could collapse a large edifice in seconds. And Saadi knew exactly how to do that, because he’d been trained in Afghanistan by experts.
The biggest problem about the stand was that it wasn’t a conventional building. Like most structures housing multiple levels of tiered seating, it needed an immensely strong steel skeleton. When Saadi had looked round the void the previous night, he’d realized at once that they couldn’t hope to demolish the entire building, only one end of it. But the explosion and partial collapse would kill many of his targets, and then he and Massood could move in and finish the job with their Kalashnikovs. It was a simple and effective plan, and Saadi didn’t think that much could go wrong with it.
When their taxi stopped outside the racecourse, they saw Hussein already waiting for them. He was flanked by five uniformed Dubai police officers, each carrying a Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine-gun.
‘Michael,’ Hussein greeted Watkinson, his expression worried. ‘Are you sure about this?’
‘Frankly, I’m not, but it seems to make sense, given what we know already. And if we’re right, we have to do something immediately. The race starts just in a few minutes.’
Richter stepped up beside the two men, Carole-Anne Jackson behind him.
‘This is your idea?’ Hussein asked, and Richter nodded. ‘Why do you think the attempt will be made during the World Cup event?’
‘Because it’s the biggest and most expensive race of the meeting, the only one that you can almost guarantee will be watched by everyone. It’s when all the stands and enclosures will be packed full, so that’s logically when they’ll detonate the bomb.’
As Richter said the word ‘bomb’, Hussein almost flinched. ‘Should we clear the stands before the race starts?’ the Arab asked.
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea. If the terrorists suspect we’ve guessed their plans, they might decide to detonate their weapon immediately, just to kill as many as possible. And trying to clear the stands quickly would probably cause a panic.’
‘So that means we have to find this bomb and disarm it?’
‘Exactly, and we need to start looking right now.’ Richter paused briefly. ‘Actually, it might be possible to just get the Saudi lot — the royal family, I mean — out of the stand for their own safety. Could you manage that without alarming everyone else?’
‘I can certainly try,’ Hussein agreed, and led four of his officers off to start a very limited evacuation of the Millennium Grandstand, while Richter, Jackson and Watkinson, accompanied by the one remaining policeman, made their way towards the rear of the structure.
‘Do you think he’ll be able to get them out in time?’ Watkinson asked.
‘Probably not,’ Richter replied, checking that the police officer was out of earshot, ‘but I wanted him out of the way. We don’t need a whole mob of people crashing around underneath the stand looking for a bomb. If this is an Al-Qaeda operation, there’s a possibility they won’t be relying on a timing device in case something goes wrong with it. This has to be a vital operation for them — one that could change the whole future of the Middle East.’
‘So there’ll likely be a suicide bomber inside, with his hand on a relay?’
‘That’s my guess, and if a whole gang of us bash on in, he’ll take one look and press the button. We need a bit of finesse here.’
Within fifteen minutes, they’d strapped explosive around the struts and girders, all held in place with adhesive tape. Each pack of C4 had a slim pencil detonator inserted, and these were all linked by wires to a black plastic box, plain apart from a push-button, a single switch and a warning light. Saadi walked around one last time to check that all the C4 was securely attached, that the detonators were inserted and the cables connected. Then he stepped back and went over to join his two colleagues.
‘We’re ready,’ he said simply.
Massood handed him a Kalashnikov, which had a length of stout cord looped through a hole in the stock. Despite having already checked the weapon once, Saadi did so again because they could afford no mistakes.