Andy McNab - Dark winter

Three or four minutes passed and I began to make out a closed door a few feet away on my left. I edged nearer. What if they weren't together? What if they were split, in different rooms? There was no light coming from the crack beneath the door.

I could hear muffled sounds from further down the corridor: two, maybe three voices talking in low tones. I couldn't make out the language, but what the fuck did that matter? I didn't know if Suzy had heard what I had, but if I went static so would she. Time to get the hoods on.

Pointing the weapon to the ceiling, I rotated slowly, so as not to cut into her arc or bang into anything.

I'd only taken two paces back towards her when Suzy was flooded with light from behind me. As it flared off her eyepieces I dropped to my knees to give her more arc. I was still turning back the way I'd come as the pressure wave of her burst hit the side of my head.

Thud thud thud.

The light came from another doorway, no more than ten paces away to the left. No body on the floor, just a dropped hand-light, and smoke curling into the corridor.

A barrage of screams and shouts erupted inside the room, and Suzy was already ahead of me as we ran towards the light, weapons up. No time to mince about, she went straight in and turned right.

There was a blur of a target: she moved towards it.

I ducked left as she let off another three-round burst.

Big room. Pools of light from the floor. Hazy with cigarette smoke. Lots of shadows. Stuff all over the place. Writing on the walls. Target left – coming from behind a pile of plasterboard, left of another door.

Everything slowed. He was no more than ten metres away. I stopped breathing. My eyes followed him as he ran left to right, not looking about, just hunched up and focused. I followed him, left foot forward, leaning into the weapon, swivelling with him, checking safety was on single shot as I brought the weapon up the last two inches, first pressure already taken as the sight broke into my line of vision and the target hit the screen, but still moving right. I caught him up, watching the circle come from behind his body until it was centre of body mass.

Thud thud.

The double-tap took him down. Real time returned.

Breathing now, I moved towards him, double-tapping again, into his back.

Then I saw what he'd been going for. On the floor, behind a box, were the bottles.

A body hit me from the left, grabbing at my SD. We both went down.

His bodyweight smothered me. I kicked out, tried to head-butt him, the SD pinned between us.

Jeaned legs jumped over us – an Indian woman. She grabbed a couple of bottles and ran for the door.

That was the last thing I saw. The mouthpiece of my respirator was wrenched back over my eyes, and my hand torn off the pistol grip. I could smell cigarettes on his breath as he twisted the muzzle towards me.

I bucked and kicked.

The weapon fired. No one was hit. Shit, he had the trigger.

Screams echoed down the corridor.

I felt the barrel of the SD coming round, raking across my chest. My eyes were still covered. I tried to flick the respirator off by rubbing it against whoever was holding me down, as I bucked and kicked to keep the muzzle away from me.

From above came a three-round burst and the weight on top of me squirmed and let out a scream. I pushed and kicked myself away, ripping the respirator off my head. Suzy was standing over him as he crawled towards the bottles, a mush of blood and bone where his right foot used to be.

Suzy got astride him, and gave him another three rounds into the skull. Blood exploded over the lino.

She picked up a bloodstained battery-powered camping lantern from the floor and went back through the escape door to check on the runner. I grabbed my weapon. Fuck the respirator, it was too late now. If there was any of this shit in the air those antibiotics had better get working.

She reappeared carrying two bottles, which she placed carefully alongside the others. 'There's three down and clear.'

Her chest heaved, hungry for air through her canister, as she looked me up and down with the lantern. 'You OK?'

I looked around at the haze of cigarette and cordite smoke. 'Yeah, think so. Fuck that, I thought, you know…' I took a second to recover before lifting my boot to show her what had attached itself to the sole, then tapped her canister. 'If we hadn't had these fucking things on, we could just have followed our noses all the way from the kebab shop.'

It wasn't that funny but she started to laugh anyway and we couldn't stop as we inspected the bottles. Blood was pooled around their bases, but all twelve looked intact, their foil seals undisturbed. I felt much more than relieved as I freely breathed in the cordite and tobacco. It made sense that they wouldn't have opened the bottles and risked contaminating themselves until the last minute before they attacked. If the attack was delayed a couple of days, they would be too ill to carry it out. Three large, identical nylon sports bags with shoulder straps were alongside them, and four sets of new clothes and shoes. There were Underground maps and Zone One carnet books sitting on top of all four piles, but only three had cell phones.

I went down on one knee to investigate the bags. Each contained what looked like a fat steel bottle of compressed air, about two feet long. There was also a hard plastic cylinder, maybe two feet by one, connected to a tube that was fed through the fabric and concealed in the mesh pocket where you'd normally put your trainers.

Suzy picked up the bottles one by one and wiped the blood off them with one of the shirts. I picked up an Underground map. I could see at least twelve mainline station signs in Zone One. Four were ringed in pencil, including King's Cross. All were served by Underground lines. I threw it over to Suzy and picked up another; that, too, was marked, this time with stations further to the west including Paddington and Victoria.

About the only thing I'd learnt at school was that the tube's ventilation system worked like a piston: the trains pushed air in front of them as they went. It was why the tunnels were only just big enough, and there was a rush of air every time a train arrived at a platform. If you were in the DW business, there was no better way of spreading the good news.

Suzy let the map fall to the floor and picked up the nearest book of tickets. Three or four had already been used. 'They'd done their recces, then. Bastards.' She went back to cleaning the bottles as I took a look around. In days gone by the room had probably been an office storage area, about fifteen metres square, no windows. NBC boots had left a trail of blood and shit across the lino. Sheets of plasterboard and old grey metal filing cabinets littered the area. Four brand new sleeping-bags had been unrolled in one corner. Rubbish, both old and new, was strewn all over the place.

Empty aerosol cans littered the floor, and the walls were sprayed red with a series of messages in Malay, Arabic and Chinese, punctuated from time to time with vivid red-painted handprints. There was even a Kiblat pointing east.

I looked over at the Chinaman who'd jumped me, now sprawled face down on the floor. The holes in his head weren't leaking any more, but his jet-black hair was matted and glistened in the lantern light. He was no older than thirty, and dressed in jeans, new multicoloured Nikes and a dark blue jumper.

We needed to get going. 'Fuck checking upstairs – they'd have been down here by now. Let's get the bottles and fuck off. Throw me a sleeping-bag, will you?'

She tossed me one from the corner, the sort that could unzip all the way round so it turned into a blanket, and set about pulling the plastic cylinders out of the sports bags. I moved back to the stash of bottles and placed the first carefully in the bottom of the sleeping-bag, gave it a couple of protective turns, then put in the next and gave it two more.