Michael Watkinson stood framed in the workshop doorway, his Browning aimed in Richter’s direction. The moment he was certain the situation was under control, he applied the safety catch, slipped the weapon back into his holster and approached them.
Jackson was less than happy with his technique. ‘You need some serious retraining in close-combat tactics, Mr Watkinson. You never stand silhouetted in a doorway when there might be bad guys the other side of it. That’s just an invitation to get yourself blown away.’
‘Sorry. This isn’t really my scene. What happened here?’
‘We stopped him,’ Richter said simply, as Watkinson stepped forward to stare at the dead man lying on the ground.
‘You killed him?’
‘Damn right we did,’ Jackson replied. ‘You don’t fuck around with people like this. You get the chance, you take them down.’
‘If you’d taken him alive, we could have questioned—’
‘No way,’ Richter snapped. ‘Carole’s quite right. If we hadn’t shot this bastard, right now we’d just be a couple of red smears on the side of a hole about twenty feet deep.’
‘So what now?’ Watkinson asked.
‘The other bad guys are probably still waiting for the stand to collapse, then they’ll move in and mop up any of their targets who managed to survive.’
‘Do you want me to get Hussein’s cops to try to find them?’
‘That’s probably not too bright an idea. They’ll already know something’s wrong because the explosives haven’t gone off, so now they’ll be particularly alert. If they see anyone they don’t like the look of heading towards them, they’ll probably pull out their weapons and start firing at anything that moves. We don’t want that. I think we need to use a bit of finesse.’
‘Which means?’ Jackson demanded.
‘You and I stay in here as a reception committee, because we’re the best with the weapons. Michael, you go outside and take a look around. Watch out for anyone who doesn’t seem too interested in the racing, or is staring at the stand or his watch. If you find Hussein, suggest he does the same, but discreetly. We don’t want a crowd of cops rushing about.’
‘And if I do spot someone?’
‘Just keep him in view, without letting him know you’re watching. There are thousands of people milling about out there, so staying out of sight shouldn’t be too difficult. Just call my mobile if you spot anyone.’
‘You think they’ll come back in here?’
‘They’ll still want to detonate their IED because that’s their principal weapon. So, yes, I think one of them will be heading this way.’
With the big race over, crowds of people had started streaming past the stand, the overhead floodlights illuminating the scene almost as clearly as day, and Saadi had no difficulty blending in with them. As he turned the corner, the workshop door opened and a figure emerged. Saadi slowed slightly and watched as the man glanced round before making his way along the side of the stand towards the front.
Saadi hesitated for a moment, calculating the odds. The man had emerged from the same door that he and his companions had used. Some of the people who had attacked Bashar were probably still inside the void, at that end of the stand, so it made sense to him to approach from the opposite end.
‘OK,’ Carole-Anne said. ‘While Watkinson’s acting as look-out, what do we do?’
‘We take care of this,’ Richter said, picking up the black plastic box. The red light still glowed, indicating it was switched on.
Jackson looked at the object in his hand. ‘Which is the trigger?’ she asked. ‘The switch or the button?’
‘The button,’ Richter said. ‘I think.’
‘You think?’ Jackson raised her eyebrows. ‘You want to have another guess? Because if you do, I’m right out of here.’
Richter shook his head. ‘It’s almost certainly the button — the switch will just turn on the firing circuit — but it doesn’t matter because I’m not planning on touching either.’
He put the box back on the ground, leant the MP5 against a girder, and reached up. He seized a detonator and pulled it out of the plastic, then repeated the process with all the others, carefully laying each detonator, with its attached wires, on the ground, well away from the explosive charges. He then took a Kamasa folding tool from a leather holster on his belt, opened it up so that it formed a pair of pliers and picked up one of the wires, close to the detonator itself.
‘You really want to do that?’ Jackson asked, as he placed the jaws of the tool around the wire.
‘This was a suicide bomb,’ Richter said, ‘so there’d be no point in incorporating counter-measures in it. That box is just a switch. All it’s intended to do is send a current to the detonators, no more, no less. And if I’m wrong, all that’ll happen is one of the detonators will fire, and they’re too far away from the explosives to be a problem.’
He closed the jaws of the pliers and snipped through the wires. Nothing happened, and inside a minute he’d detached all the detonators. He tossed them to the back of the void and replaced each cable, securing it by thrusting the doubled-over end into the plastic explosive.
‘Is that safe?’ Jackson asked doubtfully.
‘I know explosives,’ Richter assured her. ‘It’s safe.’
Once he’d attached the last wire he bent down, picked up the box again and placed it on one of the nearby pieces of machinery. He looked at what he’d done and nodded in satisfaction: even a careful inspection would suggest that the explosives were still primed for detonation.
Richter picked up the Heckler & Koch. ‘Now we wait,’ he said.
Saadi walked briskly — or as briskly as the dangling Kalashnikov would allow — to the door at the end of the stand and looked at the shattered lock as he drew his pistol. Clearly the entrance had already been used, a deduction immediately confirmed by the sight of a Dubai police officer lying unconscious on the floor just inside. This puzzled Saadi, and he wondered for a moment if he should kill the man as a precaution, but then he shrugged and walked to the rear of the workshop. He pulled apart the Velcro seam on his gellabbiya and dropped the garment on the floor, revealing the same all-black outfit he’d worn the previous night. He stuck the pistol into the waistband of his trousers, removed the Kalashnikov from around his neck, opened the rear door and stepped through.
Richter had insisted that Carole-Anne Jackson go back inside the workshop. Primarily, he wanted her out of the firing line but her skill with a weapon meant that she could provide vital support when the terrorists eventually arrived. She might also, he pointed out, be the first to meet them if they decided to come in through that workshop, though Richter guessed they’d follow the same route he’d taken.
He crouched down behind an air-conditioning unit, the MP5 — its magazine fully charged again — at the ready beside him. He was looking intently down the length of the void, alert for any sign of movement but, despite his vigilance, the black-clad Arab got to within twenty yards of his position before he saw him.
Saadi stopped beside a roaring machine and looked carefully around him. What he saw didn’t immediately make sense. He could see no sign of the Dubai police or security officers he’d been expecting — in fact, he couldn’t see anybody at all. But the explosive charges he’d prepared were visible, as were the wires linking the detonators to the firing box. And he could also see the box itself, the power light glowing.