He saw two go down before the CS caught in his throat and eyes, his vision suddenly lost to the stinging gas.
‘BASTARDS!’ McGirl shouted, the voice muffled in the gas mask. With his left hand he reached into his pocket and pulled out the small cylindrical transmitter. His thumb found the power key, flipped it on.
Clodagh saw. ‘No, Pat!’ She stretched out her hand.
The surface of the wall beside them disintegrated, raked with fire from the intruders. Sprays of brick dust showered over them as they flung themselves down.
Clodagh levelled her Armalite, squeezed the trigger. The weapon trembled in her hands, the short burst whistling through the intervening space. She saw the phantom figures rolling left and right, parted by her aim. But she had no idea if she’d hit anyone.
Beside her, McGirl recovered the transmitter he had dropped in his moment of panic. Power on, he checked, his thumb moving to the red fire button.
Clodagh glimpsed what he was doing. ‘Pat, for God’s sake, not now! Not the boy!’ Her words unheard.
Double-pulse, two blips.
The explosion appeared to rock the north end. For the first time, the door to the stairwell was blown open, triggering the booby trap. Another fizzling blue flash with a white core and an ear-splitting crack as the small charge was detonated. Then everything was lost in the tongue of flame and choking black smoke that tumbled out of the stairwell passage.
Harrison tried to pick himself off the floor. His ears were ringing, the excited voices in his earpiece strangely muted and echoing. Muffled words shouted into an iron pan. He knew then he was concussed. Where was he? What had he been doing? All was confusion, smoke and flame everywhere.
It started to come back, mental images, piece by piece like a cerebral jigsaw. He had been standing on the lower landing, keeping to one side. Saw the sheet of lightning as the frame-charge Ś blew. Heard its blast and felt the heart-shaking kick of displaced air that blew the entire outside window and surrounding brickwork out into the factory yard. Saw Monk running up the stairs, through the ragged smoking hole and into the first office. Harrison standing, still tight against the wall, as the SAS figures, black and anonymous, rushed past him. Swarming like ants. More and more coming from below. Maybe only twenty, but seeming like hundreds.
Then down to the stragglers, the tail-end Charlies, and he had joined them then, no longer willing to wait. Anxious to grab his son, spirit him away as the second team rescued the boy and passed him back through the smouldering aperture.
There had suddenly been a lot of gunfire and he knew something had gone wrong, sensed it. He wondered whether there had been a shortfall in CS gas. They’d discussed it earlier, how the mullioned steel windows would make a heli-assault difficult, even if the sills weren’t rigged with explosive. How it would be difficult to fire in canister rounds from the outside through the small panes…
Harrison had recalled all this as he’d followed the charging SAS men into the first office. Through the open door, he heard the ear-splitting shriek and flashes of the stun grenades and saw muzzle flashes in the darkness. Had seen two bodies on the floor. Somehow knew, just knew that they were the men charged with getting into the second office and pulling out his son.
And that had been the moment the explosion had gone off! Now he realised where he was. He was sitting on the floor of the first office where he’d been blown, struck from behind by the mighty unseen hand. The stairwell. He knew it was the stairwell and, in confirmation, smoke came belching in from the passage with the flickering light of flame behind it.
He didn’t need to be told what had happened. He knew. Maybe they’d forgotten or perhaps his warning message hadn’t got through to everyone. But in the darkness and confusion and the scramble to get up the steps, someone had accidently kicked the oil-can bomb he’d been unable to defuse. It was no comfort now to learn that his hunch about the antilift device had been right.
His senses returning, he climbed to his feet. Gunfire was still crackling out in the main area, more stuns going off like mini nukes in the blackness. He just knew it had all gone badly wrong.
A figure appeared at the frame-charge hole, his Panotex suit shredded, blood dripping from his arm. The man indicated back down the stairwell and shook his head.
No more explanation was necessary. Harrison could see the growing intensity of flickering orange light behind the wounded soldier. Could feel the rise in temperature already. All that rubbish on the stairs… the place would be an inferno in seconds. Tongues of flames greedily seeking the explosives he’d dismantled earlier.
Pitching onto all fours he wriggled across to the door that opened onto the main area. It was impossible to tell what was going on. Pitch black except for muzzle flashes, ribbons of smoke drifting through the torch beams scanning the void like searchlights. He crawled over the body of a soldier. Dead or dying, he couldn’t tell. Then another, the man’s hand reaching up, fingers around the handle of the second office door. The respirator had been shattered by the round that had smashed into his forehead and now the dead eyes stared at him. Sorry, mate, I did my best.
Harrison prised the fingers from the handle, feeling the bones resist, crackling as he tore them free.
Then the door swung open and he was in. ‘ARCHIE!’
‘Dad?’ the voice was small and tremulous in the dark.
He switched on his chest torch.
His son was spotlit in the beam, lying on the floor, still strapped to a chair by parcel tape. Shaking uncontrollably like someone in a fever.
Then Harrison saw the bullet marks on the wall below the window and the torn holes in the radiator where the stray rounds had come through the door. I ‘I–I thought I–I’d b-better get down.’
Harrison grinned at his son as he knelt. ‘Smart lad.’ His voice muffled in the respirator.
‘Careful, Dad, there’s a bomb underneath the chair!’
He stared in disbelief. Who, in God’s name could do such a thing? He reached forward, getting a better angle of light to it.
‘I-t’s radio-controlled.’
‘I’m not sure, I can’t see any aerial…’
‘In my hand.’
What? Harrison stared. Archie’s hands were strapped tight to his side, his fingertips barely below the seat on which he sat. Yet somehow he’d managed to stretch out beneath him, because now, between two fingers, was the little snake of aerial wire he’d torn away.
‘It needs an aerial doesn’t it, Dad? Like that model plane you made me?’ Harrison felt the relief ebb up inside him, couldn’t stop the hot tears in his eyes. He looked again at the package beneath the chair, looked for and found the off-switch, then pulled out the detonator. Taking the craft knife from his tool belt, he sliced through the parcel tape that bound his son and helped him to his feet.
Then the door burst open behind him. The big hooded figure, stared for a moment. It was Monk.
‘Is he all right, Tom?’ the voice said over Harrison’s comms.
‘He’s safe.’
A nod of the head. ‘ What a fuck-up! Still, looks like it’s over. We’ve identified three of the hostiles. Two dead, one wounded. I expect another body’s out there somewhere, but there’s so much smoke, it’ll take a while to confirm.’
‘That explosion…?’ Harrison began.
Monk shook his head. ‘No details yet, but the stairs are burning like buggery. We’ll have to exit out the south side.’ He turned to the dead soldier by the door and freed the spare respirator from the man’s belt. It had been destined for Archie. ‘Put this on the lad and come with me.’