Chris Ryan - Killing for the Company

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.

The train sped on through the countryside. The first passenger they came across in the second carriage was the blind man. His guide dog — an old golden Labrador with a jowly face and slight lightening of the whiskers — was sitting anxiously by its owner’s feet. When it saw Hussam it started to growl; but Hussam’s weapon made mincemeat of the animal. The blind man cried out, as if he knew what he could not see; but any pain he felt at the demise of his guide dog was short-lived as Hussam delivered a burst of rounds to his head, before allowing his companion to leapfrog him once more so he could reload.

There was more blood than he had pictured in his mental rehearsals. More blood, and less screaming. And he was surprised at how quickly he became numb to the sight of death. It held no more horrors for him. No more mystery. When it was his turn once more, he started finishing off the remaining ten passengers in this second carriage with something approaching carelessness, spraying the rounds with less precision — though no less fatality — so that some thudded into the rough material of the seats, and another window shattered, bringing with it the roar of motion and a blast of wind.

They entered the middle carriage and could just see the other two gunmen now. They continued their work, each pair mowing down the passengers as they edged towards the centre of the train. By the time there was ten metres between them, Hussam could see the others clearly. Their eyes were bright and their clothes and faces splashed with the blood of their victims. Hussam briefly wondered if he looked the same. He glanced down at himself and saw red streaks down his garments; with his free hand he touched his face, to find it was sticky. No matter. There were still four more passengers to deal with. They were standing in the aisle, having run here from one end of the train or another, and were now huddled together: two women, a man and a boy of about sixteen. They all looked like they wanted to scream but couldn’t.

They could weep, though. And they did.

Hussam didn’t shoot them from a distance because he didn’t want to risk hitting his accomplices who were on the other side of these final passengers. Instead he strode towards them until he was just a metre away. Their screams grew louder and merged with the sound of the wind rushing through the broken window. The air was thick with their terror.

Hussam downed them with a single burst. The screaming stopped as the rounds ripped into the meat of the passengers’ bodies, mashing the teenage boy’s face and bursting the jugular vein of one of the women. The group fell as a single unit, and their dead bodies propped each other up like martyrs at a stake.

Only now did Hussam look back. Only now did he pause to contemplate their handiwork: the blood and the gore and the gruesome look of absolute terror on the faces of those victims where the bullets had entered below the neck. It neither pleased him nor appalled him. It was what it was. It was what it had to be.

The four men faced each other, two on either side of the propped-up corpses. Hussam felt a trickle run down his forehead and over his thick, black eyebrows. He blinked hard as a mixture of sweat and blood stung his eyes. He nodded at the others, and they placed their 74s on the ground. Those weapons were finished with. It was time now for the Mother of Satan to do its work.

‘ Allahu Akbar! ’ He announced the Takbir in a loud voice so that it could be heard over the noise of the train and the wind from the broken window.

The others opened their mouths to return the incantation, but they were interrupted for a few seconds as another train hurtled past them in the opposite direction.

Hussam’s eyes glowed. ‘ Allahu Akbar! ’ he repeated, and this time his prayer was met with a response.

‘ Allahu Akbar! ’

The eyes of his compatriots were also burning, their bloodied bodies trembling. All four of them held their left hands aloft, ready to flick the switches that would transport them to paradise. Hussam closed his eyes. For a brief moment he saw his wife and child as they should be.

Smiling at him.

Waiting.

He opened them again, and nodded.

That nod was the sign. All four men flicked their switches, and detonated.

It had taken two hours for the images to circle the earth.

The gnarled wreckage of the train, its two middle carriages blown skywards, the front and two rear carriages lying at an angle to the rails and crumpled into the sidings, lay still. Great floodlights had been erected in the field adjacent to the crash site, illuminating the scene of devastation as brightly as a night-time football match, and supplemented by the spots from two choppers circling overhead. There was a constant hum from aircraft and the electricity generators on the ground, and a flash of neon-blue emergency lights from vehicles approaching off-road. Three air ambulances were on standby. As the paramedics combed through the debris, it became increasingly clear that the ambulances would not be required to evacuate the casualties; they would be required to transport the dead.

Fifty metres from the blast site, a luminous-orange cordon had been erected, guarded by uniformed police officers to keep the small crowd of journalists at bay. They were a hard-bitten lot. Like the doctors and policemen, they were used to scenes of trauma. Such sights were their bread and butter, but even they, tonight, were sickened. They remembered 9/11 — some of them had been there — and the uneasy sensation everyone had that day that the world was about to change. They had that sensation again now, and these usually pushy professionals were restrained. Their cameras did not deviate from the crash site, where a plume of smoke still rose into the air, disturbed occasionally by a gust of wind but otherwise eerily straight.