Dinner was served promptly at eight. One hundred twenty-seven guests had filed into the Waterloo Chamber.
They were just finishing the first course when they heard the opening shots in the battle.
Within seconds, eleven soldiers barged into the dining room. Their leader ran to Sergeant Stephen Mallik, Her Majesty's personal bodyguard.
At one time, Mallik and the queen had had a stormy relationship. Security for the British sovereign was always a touchy issue because the royal family refused to live as prisoners. Gradually the relationship between the bodyguard and his charge evolved into mutual respect. Security remained tight tighter than Her Majesty cared for but not oppressively so.
Mallik and the other troops began to herd the assembled guests under the huge polished oak table.
Without protest, the queen, too, ducked under the table.
Mallik and the soldiers piled up chairs to form a barricade. It would not give much protection, but it was better than nothing.
Mallik stayed close to the queen. Together they heard the explosions and they heard the sound of men dying to protect the royal family.
Beneath the table, each individual tried to deal with the possibility of impending death. More than a few began to weep.
A child near the queen was crying. The monarch pulled the frightened little girl to her and tried to offer her comfort.
Mallik frantically removed his suitcoat and tie to give greater freedom of movement.
Soldiers dressed in camouflage combat fatigues aimed Sterlings or LlAls at the six entrances to the room. The L1A1 was a powerful, dependable weapon that had seen service from the jungles of the Far East to the windswept Falklands.
An explosion blew the east door off its hinges.
Pieces of wood flew through the air, some absorbed by the cushions of the upturned chairs. One of the splinters caught a soldier in the right eye; he was dead before he hit the floor.
A second soldier fell to the fusillade of parabellums streaming into the room through the open doorway.
A low moaning came from beneath the table. Several slugs had torn through the barricade of chairs, finding human flesh.
Flynn slammed a fresh magazine into his Uzi, then dived. He issued a challenge of fire, finding the soldier at the southeast corner of the room. The 9mm slugs punched into the man, standing him straight up before dropping him to the floor.
Flynn rolled quickly, knowing that if he stopped even for a second he would be dead. He instinctively fired another burst from the Uzi. An advancing soldier caught the bullets in the face and throat. Blood sprayed out of the severed jugular, splattering the walls with splotches of red. The flow continued unabated onto the rug around the collapsed body.
Now the southwest corner door blew inward, propelled by an HE grenade. Mallik shielded his face from splinters, but there was no shelter from the 7.62 missiles that followed. His arms fell away from a bloodied face as he died on the floor.
A terrorist dived into the room through the newly blown door. Though he came in low, slugs from an L1A1 caught him in middive. He landed in a crumpled heap.
A grenade bounced into the room from the same entrance. Lance Corporal Andrew Hollinger would earn a posthumous Victoria Cross for covering the explosive with his body in a fine low racing dive. Now a crimson puddle spread out from Andrew's torso where it lay grotesquely askew.
Two terrorists came in firing. One walked high and was thrown against the west wall by 7.62 slugs from the LlAls. The one who crouched low had more success, his AK rounds finding soldiers who tumbled against each other, propping each other up momentarily before they all slumped into a heap on the floor.
Flynn crawled around the head of the table and opened up. His fire thwacked into the walls.
A terrorist had made it to the edge of the table near the queen and was advancing under Flynn's cover.
He stopped and pulled back a chair. A British soldier poked his head out of the space. The terrorist fired a short burst at it, turning it to bloody pulp.
The killer bellowed out, "Any one else makes a move and the queen is dead. I want all weapons on the floor."
Recognizing that further action would be fatal to the royal family, the remaining British soldiers put down their weapons. More terrorists entered the room. One of them was terrorist mastermind Kathleen McGowan. She opened up her Uzi on the unarmed soldiers, dropping each man like a pot of hot noodles hurled into a sieve to drain.
Quiet fell upon the room in a pall, disturbed only by the moaning of the injured and the soft crying of the children.
Two terrorists began picking up weapons. The terrorist at the edge of the table did not move his AK from its target, the queen.
Kathleen took a quick look around the room at her victory.
With these hostages, she and her people would be able to walk right out of the castle.
8
She grew uneasy as the first flush of victory wore off. She had not expected to achieve it without losses, but the losses had been high indeed.
Of the three squads attacking the north side, only Flynn had survived and judging by his shotgun wounds, he might not yet.
Seven of the main force from the Land Rovers were dead. A graze on her shoulder reminded Kathleen of just how close she had come to joining them.
When the attack against the castle had first been proposed by Shillelagh several months ago, Kathleen thought the idea preposterous. With Shillelagh's help, she turned a preposterous idea into a workable plan. The plan had been launched and the raid had succeeded.
The next step was to get out.
Kathleen pulled a list from her pocket. Shillelagh had provided the names of each member of the royal family and photograph for each name on the list. Thirty-five people.
Each corpse in the room was examined eliminating four of the names on the list. As terrorists herded the family out from under the table, each face was scanned.
Kathleen separated the hostages into two groups. The first was made up of the survivors on the list, the second were those not on the list. The second group could be let go; it was the first group that mattered. Kathleen went up to an old man who was being set free and handed him the sheet of names and photographs. She gave her instructions in a soft Irish brogue. "When you and the others in your group leave this room, give the list to whoever is in charge out there. The people on the list will be released on payment of one million pounds sterling, in a manner that the authorities will be told of shortly.
"If anyone attempts to follow us when we leave, we will immediately kill the hostages. If our demands are not met, we will begin killing individual hostages starting with the last name on the list and working toward the first.
"Within fifteen minutes, I want a bus brought out to the front of the castle. One of my people will go and check it out. No harm must come to him, or some of these people die..."
The twenty-fourth Earl of Kintail was not the best man Kathleen might have picked for the task. The tall, clear-eyed gentleman from Northern Ireland had an iron will and a sense of duty to the royal family that went beyond mere patriotism.
The earl was a bastard. As an only child, his legal right to his father's title had fallen in a muddy area of British common law, and the courts had decided against him. Over forty years ago the crestfallen young man had learned of the court's decision against him in his digs in London.
In the short span of a few hours his entire life had changed. In the rigidly structured British army of the thirties, he could never hope to achieve a prominent place without the edge his title had given him. By withdrawing his title, the courts had condemned him to a middle-echelon position where his fine training and talents would be frustrated. He was an eager young man then, with a young man's ambitions.
The courts had also made him ashamed of his parents, something that, until then, Eddie had thought impossible. At school and at university, he had never endured the insults of his fellows. He remembered how the biggest boy in All Saints had called him a "shrewd little bastard" in front of his class. He heard the snickering around him and turned to face the rest of the boys. "I am a royalbastard," he said in his loudest and most precise voice. Then he broke the bully's nose.