Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [41]
‘Ex-military,’ said Milligan, as the car moved through the opening gates.
‘Smells a mile away. Probably special forces or navy seals. They offer these guys small fortunes to join their happy band of armed to the teeth, jackbooted bullyboys, with the incentive of a bit of freelance thuggery on the side. Got to say, I’ve been tempted to offer my services once or twice.’ He caught sight of Tegan’s horrified expression. ‘Joke,’ he continued. ‘Not for all the tea in China. These guys see too much. The missing-in-action rate has to be seen to be believed.’
‘The more I see of this company the less I like it,’ said the Doctor. ‘I deplore arrogance. I think it’s time I took them down a peg or two.’
‘Thirty seconds,’ Hayley Tonkin noted with a look at her watch.
From the vantage point of the InterCom car park she, Newton and Dunkley could see across the public area towards the main office building which was situated immediately behind the company logo centrepiece.
‘“Plague, Famine, Death by the soldier’s hand. The century approaches renewal,”’ said Newton eagerly. ‘I love the smell of burning capitalists in the morning.’
‘This is going to be large!’ noted Nigel Dunkley, almost leaping up and down at the prospect.
‘Ten seconds.’
‘Get ready to move as soon as it goes up. The place will be crawling with filth.’
‘Three. Two. One.’
Silence.
Newton waited several seconds before turning to Hayley. ‘I’m waiting . . . ’
‘It hasn’t gone off,’ she said, somewhat redundantly.
‘I am aware of this. Bloody typical . . . if you want a job doing, do it . . . ’ But Newton never finished his sentence.
On the roof of one of InterCom’s secondary buildings Robert Chebb lay flat on his stomach, looking down the eyepiece of a high-velocity rifle. The sight was trained just above the heart of one of the men he was hunting.
79
‘Target locked,’ he whispered into the mouthpiece of his radio headset.
Chebb was thinking, as he always did at these moments, of the faces of all of the people he had eliminated. In Vietnam, Africa, the Lebanon, the Falk-land Islands, the Gulf. His finger tightened on the trigger and he felt a rush of adrenaline flood through his body. This was what made the job worthwhile; the moment when you got to play dice with cosmos and life and death was a matter of pure mathematics.
‘It only takes a bullet,’ he continued, as the seconds ticked away. He raised the sight a fraction of an inch for the head shot. ‘Good kill.’
And then a wall of flame stood between himself and the target and Chebb felt cheated.
‘We’re home and dry,’ began Paynter but, like Newton, he never got to finish what he was saying. A shimmering wave of heat was rushing towards him.
Burning air, thousands of degrees hot.
‘Drop,’ screamed Barrington, grasping his friend’s arm and diving for cover.
It was only then that the sound came. A huge, enveloping whoosh of noise that built and built and built . . .
‘Keep your head down,’ Paynter told no one in particular. Automatic reac-tions took over. He’d been in a bomb blast before, in Londonderry. He knew the drill. The aftershock that seemed to tear at the skin. Then the debris.
Fragments of glass and metal everywhere. Paynter was dimly aware that a three-inch chunk of one or the other had embedded itself in the soft earth mere inches from his head. But now wasn’t the time to think about random causality. Just keep your head down and calculate the odds later.
Chebb stood up. Below him the entire centrepiece of the InterCom communal area was a burning mass. Through the smoke and the heat haze he could see bodies littered everywhere. Some twitched and clung to life. Others didn’t.
His face was impassive. He pushed his headset back into place. A crackle and hiss of static greeted him.
‘Alpha Two. Alpha Two. We have a situation here. I repeat. We have a situation here.’
In the observation