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The sky was falling down on the living and the dead – great clumps of concrete bringing with it more clouds of dust, as if the sky itself had been made from these things, and now it was smashed for ever.

A piece of something struck me on the shoulder. I felt nothing, but the pain in my right knee made me clench my teeth until my jawbone ached.

I took the security guard’s left hand and guided it to the scraps of T-shirt stuffed into his wound. He was still attempting to hold his arm in the air. He was doing good.

‘You’re going to make it,’ I told him. ‘I’ll get help.’

Then I was on my feet, and I began to walk towards the sound of the sirens. But my right knee no longer worked the way it should.

I felt it buckle beneath me and suddenly I was down on my hands and knees again.

I slowly got up and walked on, favouring my left leg now, trying not to put too much weight on the right side.

I could feel the heat of the fire and I could smell the stink of the fire.

Kerosene?

But an ocean of the stuff, all of it ablaze, and that made no sense. Where would that much kerosene come from?

A man in a business suit walked by carrying a bag from the Apple store, every inch of him coated in the grey dust that filled the hot, fetid atmosphere. I spat out some filth and took a deep breath, inhaling the burning air. It seared my lungs.

The fire was getting closer.

Move or die.

A life-size puppet was hanging from what had once been the basement roof of the shopping mall. There were long thick straps of webbing attached to the puppet’s chair and they held him from the ceiling, as if waiting for some giant hand to move him. The puppet was close enough for me to see the expression on his unmarked face.

And I saw that this had been a man. The man had been a pilot. And some freak accident had prevented him from being smashed to a billion pieces after falling from the sky.

I had heard of this happening but I had never believed it.

But now I believed.

And now, finally, I began to understand.

That reeking, sickening smell was Jet A-1.

Aviation fuel.

Move or die!

‘Excuse me,’ an elderly woman said, her politeness heartbreaking in this new world. ‘Please stay with us.’

She was sitting on the floor, cradling the head of a man her own age who looked close to death. I knelt beside them, gasping as the pain in my knee surged through the rest of my body, and as I took her hand I saw what had brought this new world into being.

‘A bomb,’ the lady said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s too big for a bomb. A helicopter came down.’

And through the smoke and the dust and the twilight ruins I saw a smashed and crumpled Air Ambulance, its cockpit a ruined pulp of red aluminium and steel and glass, the four rotor blades twisted and bent yet somehow not broken.

It looked like a giant insect that had been swatted by some enraged god.

Behind it was a wake of wreckage that seemed to stretch on forever, twisted and burning and broken, a tangled mess of steel and glass and concrete, flesh and blood and bone, human beings and buildings. Everything smashed.

But there were new lights now, the red and blue lights of the first responders.

‘I’ll bring help,’ I promised.

And I left the old man and woman and started off towards the red and blue lights, but my knee went again and I fell flat on my face in what remained of that shopping centre.

So I got up and tried one more time, treading very carefully so as not to step on the bodies that were scattered all around, moving very slowly to protect my busted knee, as if everything that I thought I knew would have to be learned again.

And as the tears cleared the dust from my eyes, I saw this new world clearly.

I saw the men and women who came with the red and blue lights of the emergency services.

I saw the trail of total ruin that had been left in the wake of the fallen helicopter.

And the rage choked my throat when I saw the injured – that gentle little euphemism for those who now carried terrible wounds that would never heal, not in this lifetime.

Then I wiped my eyes with the back of my hands, sucked in some air and began to stumble towards the reds and blues of our lights.

2

I stood by the side of the low stage, sweating inside the stab-proof Kevlar jacket despite the chill of the hour before dawn, my right knee still pulsing with pain seven days after the Air Ambulance helicopter came down on Lake Meadows shopping centre, killing dozens of innocent people.

The current fatality list stood at forty-four, but the number crept higher every day as the emergency services continued the painstaking work of sifting through the crash site. Nobody knew for sure exactly how many had died and I suspected that we would never know with total certainty.

I was in the briefing room of Leman Street Police Station, Whitechapel, feeling the weight of history. Murder detectives hunted Jack the Ripper from this station. Today it is the base of SC&O19, the specialist firearms unit of the Metropolitan Police.

The briefing room was packed.

Rows of Specialist Firearms Officers in grey body armour worn over short-sleeve blue shirts were listening intently to the young female sergeant on stage. There was a lectern up there but she stood to one side, tall and athletic and affable, and I thought that she was young to be a sergeant in any part of the Met, let alone the firearms unit.

Specialist Firearms Officer DS Alice Stone.

She sounded far more relaxed than she had any right to be.

Behind her a large screen showed a photograph of a three-storey house.

It was a small, neat Victorian terrace on Borodino Street, London E1, its bay windows covered with net curtains. Only a postcode away. We believed it contained the men who had brought down the Air Ambulance helicopter.

The young sergeant touched the iPad she was holding and architectural plans appeared on screen. She began talking about the morning’s MOE – method of entry – and I felt the sweat trickle down my back.

It had nothing to do with the weight of the Kevlar jacket.

Someone always has to go in, I thought. After all the hours of surveillance and analysis of intelligence and briefings, somebody still has to go through a locked door and into the unknown.

‘The entry team for Operation Tolstoy will be breaching the front door of the target with Hatton rounds fired from a shotgun,’ DS Stone said, her voice calm and classless, just the hint of some affluent corner of the Home Counties in her accent. ‘Distraction stun grenades will be deployed immediately prior to entering the premises.’ She paused. ‘We have every reason to believe that the men inside are armed fanatics who would actively welcome a martyr’s death. So it’s CQC when we are inside.’

CQC is Close Quarter Combat, moving through a series of rooms and corridors until the inhabitants are subdued and dominated. Many SFOs either have military training or they have grown up around guns – shooting game with their family in some muddy field.

I wondered which one it was with young DS Stone.

Then she smiled. She had a good smile. It was wide, white and genuine. The trouble with most smiles is that they are not the real thing. This was the real thing.

‘And then we’re all going for breakfast,’ she said. ‘On me.’

The room full of SFOs in grey body armour all grinned with her.

Still smiling, she turned to the side of the stage.

‘DC Wolfe?’ she said. ‘We’re ready for you now.’

I climbed the few steps up to the stage, shook her hand and took my place at the lectern where my laptop was waiting.

‘Our colleague DC Wolfe from West End Central is going to give you the background on today’s target,’ DS Stone told them.