On hearing the sound of a weapon being cocked Tony Stammers was bringing his MP5 around to bear on the direction of the sound and hesitated, for just a milli-second, at the sight of a dripping wet and naked blond in the bathroom doorway. The floral wallpaper on the wall at his back sprouted several holes but his ballistic body armour stopped both the rounds that struck him at chest height, however the round that pierced his left bicep shattered the bone behind it. Annabel Perry had also heard the Uzi being cocked but she had dropped prone at the sound. Alexandra Berria’s only burst of fire was cut short as Annabel shot her between the breasts. The butt of the sub machine gun remained in her shoulder but Berria came out of the aim and stepped backwards drunkenly with a wide eyed and open mouthed look of surprise on her face until the back of one leg struck the bath tub and she sat down heavily upon its edge. By accident or designed the muzzle of the Uzi swung toward the prone officer. Instantly Annabel raised her point of aim and shot Berria again, this time below the right eye. Alexandra was left draped over the edge of the bath with her head below water now turning slowly crimson, and legs akimbo, sticking over the edge.
At the foot of the stairs Carmichael was staring up at the ceiling whilst one of the officers who had shot him applied direct pressure on a wound dressing.
With the building secure, para medics from the London Ambulance Service entered. Having told Carmichael’s carer to save his energy they moved on up the stairs and gave the same advice to an officer working on Berria.
Major Thompson would have been relieved to a degree to have known that after cleaning and reassembling their weapons the Irishmen had gotten very drunk by way of celebrating the blow they had struck for Irish unity. Paul Fitzhugh had also got himself drunk after watching the same television news footage as his house guests, but for different reasons. He had taken himself off to the barn and continued drinking alone amongst the bails of winter feed. The trooper’s recce had not discovered him in the recess where he had fallen asleep with a bottle of Jameson’s for comfort.
Unlike the police method of entry in London the Army assault was far more spectacular. Breaching charges blew in the doors and windows whilst the salvo of stun grenades that followed immediately after created havoc amongst the rudely awoken occupants.
Contrary to left wing media press reports, British soldiers are not mindless killing machines. They do not shoot a man just because they are ordered to; neither do they kill a man because he bloody well deserves it. They shoot to kill rather than wound for the simple reason, that trying to emulate the Hollywood stunt of ‘winging’ an opponent or trying to shoot the gun from an enemy’s hand, is a quick way to get yourself, and your mates killed.
Two terrorists had weapons in their hands and both were shot. The remaining three were unceremoniously thrown to the floor and cuffed with hands behind their backs before being dragged downstairs where a medic had felt for a pulse on one of their number and abandoned any further effort on him. The second gunshot casualty would never know it, but his life would be saved by a British soldier his own age, born and raised just a quarter of a mile from where he himself had been born and brought up in Belfast.
Paul Fitzhugh woke up to the sound of explosions and gunfire. Staggering to his feet and lurching to the barns door he caught sight of a black clad trooper, face obscured by a respirator, the very vision most people conjure up when they think of the SAS. Fear injected adrenaline into his system and he ran to the back of the barn where he was grateful he had not got around to securing a section of the corrugated aluminium wall, loosened in the previous winter’s storms. Bitterness was also welling up in him. The false picture of himself as a noble freedom fighter had crumbled the previous night and his life was now ruined by the people he had allowed to manipulate him.
Dick was the first to notice the rear wall of the barn move. Sav had been covering the left side of his arc of fire when Dicks urgently hissed
“Barn, lower right!” caused him to bring his aim around and down. In the differing shades of green that make up the view through a night sight, crystal clear images are not present, Sav could see the shape of a person crawl through a gap in the wall with an object in its hand. Speaking quickly into his headset microphone, Dick alerted all stations on the net.
Paul had crawled through the gap where the loose section of wall just permitted enough room for his bulk. Across the two fields ahead of him lay a small copse, to his mind that represented safety. Looking back over his shoulder at what had been his family’s home for generations he elected to vent his feelings before running for it.
All Sav had a chance to see was the figure in his sight’s rise up on to its knees, bringing back its arm in preparation to throw the object it held.
Paul Fitzhugh, the last in the line of Essex Fitzhugh’s never completed the action of lobbing the empty whiskey bottle. The .338 round, intended for use in piercing the otherwise bullet proof shutters the farm may have had, entered his body seven inches below his left armpit and exited in the centre of his back taking part of his heart, left lungs tissue and ten vertebrae to pebble dash the barn wall. The round itself carried on through the aluminium sheet wall, passing completely through a tractor engine block beyond and lodged in the old brickwork of the Fitzhugh ancestral home.
Svetlana placed an empty, though brand new suitcase on top of the bed and rolled her head in wide circles to clear the knots a sleepless night had formed. There had been a series of quick stops in London to collect hers and Constantine’s own pre-positioned escape stashes after dumping the thief and informing the authorities before driving to Southampton.
As an ‘Illegal’, Svetlana had two locations, one in London and the other in Scotland where she had fake passports and genuine credit cards in false names. Her employers knew nothing of these; it was her own insurance policy against capture should it ever have come to that. She also had a clean firearm and £1000 cash, not that she ever wanted to have need of them. The single shot zip gun Constantine loaned her on that first day was also hidden about her person.
Constantine was not expected to ever have to make use of such precautions; he was covered by diplomatic immunity. His job description at the embassy was in effect that his superior never got his hands dirty, contacted agents or ran risks. He was the go-between/fall-guy for the military attaché. They both had the same information available to them but if something went wrong it would be the deputy military attaché, who was caught or named and then deported.
The day after the meeting with Carmichael and Berria, Constantine had known that he was in trouble. There was no way either of the pair would forget he had spoilt their entertainment, not with their history and boss, so he had formulated a contingency plan. In case of emergency there was cash and credit cards for ‘blown’ agents, and he of course knew the location of these dead drops He could only use them once and so just before midnight the previous evening, after collecting the £5000 cash he then walked to the nearest cashpoint machine. Drawing out the total daily cash on all the six cards Constantine waited seven minutes until the new day had begun, he then withdrew a further nine hundred on each. Sixteen thousand four hundred pounds was more money than he, a mere major, had ever seen before. With a thick marker pen he had written the pin number for each on the back of the corresponding card. Heading north, with Constantine on the lookout for down and outs they made a present of each one to each bagman and bag lady they saw. Confident that his superiors would not cancel the cards immediately, in the hope the transactions would trap him, they then picked up the M25 circular motorway and drove anti-clockwise around London to Southampton. For a time anyway, he hoped to throw the hunters off the trail.