John Carr. James Deegan

the last vestiges of movement in the twitching fingers of one of them.

      Carr looked at his son, eyebrows raised.

      George looked back at him, sheepishly. ‘Fucked if I’m going back to Battalion and telling them bastards that you did all the shooting,’ he said.

      ‘I’ll give you that one,’ said Carr. ‘Now grab that AK, and let’s get going.’

      He reached down and pulled the Krinkov from the nearest dead man’s grasp, turning at the same moment to engage the remaining shooters.

      But they were now out of sight at the bottom end of the beach.

      George Carr had picked up the other carbine, and frisked his guy for spare magazines, and now he hopped onto the low wall and looked in the direction of the marina.

      ‘No sign,’ he said, and hopped off onto the Calle Ribera on the other side.

      He started walking down the line of the wall towards the sea, AK at the ready.

      John Carr followed him, keeping good spacing, turning often to cover their rear, finger over the trigger, the weapon in synch with his eyes.

      Ready to engage instantly.

      ‘Anything?’ he said, after fifteen metres.

      ‘No.’

      And then they heard the sound of powerful marine engines – twin 7,400hp Codag gas turbines, to be precise – and a white yacht powered out of the marina.

      Both men watched the boat go.

      It was really shifting.

      Carr raised his AK, but it was already out into the open sea and heading due south.

23.

      ‘WAS THAT THEM?’ said Carr.

      ‘Fuck knows,’ said George.

      They continued down the line of the wall until Calle Ribera turned right and they were into the marina.

      ‘Go firm,’ said Carr.

      They both took a knee and listened and looked, covering their arcs as they did so.

      Nothing.

      At least, nothing but the sound of shouting and groaning from the beach behind them, and a distant wail of sirens.

      Carr looked at his watch.

      Three minutes since they’d clicked off the pistol safeties.

      ‘Must have been them,’ said Carr. ‘Let’s find your sister and Chloe.’

      He jogged in the direction of the patch of sand that Alice had been occupying.

      Jogged past the corpses of young children, elderly people, girls in bikinis, young men in dayglo shorts.

      Past a man on his back staring sightlessly at the sky, a John Grisham novel still in his hand, the yellow sand dark with red blood.

      Another slumped over a cool box, shot in the act of getting himself another beer.

      ‘Fucking hell,’ he whispered to himself.

      He reached the spot.

      Their towels were there, but there was no sign of either of the girls.

      A wave of something like panic swept over him – a fear he didn’t recognise, because he’d never experienced it before.

      And then a police vehicle drove onto the beach, and Carr thought he’d better drop the AK and put his hands up.

      ‘George,’ he shouted, over his shoulder. ‘Game over, son. Let them see you’re unarmed.’

24.

      IT HAD BEEN a quiet day at the Vauxhall HQ of the Secret Intelligence Service.

      Although the threat level across Europe had been high for some years now, there was nothing to suggest any imminent attack, and the duty officer on the Spain desk had spent the morning wading through intelligence related to a revival of Basque separatism in the north.

      All that changed with a call from a GCHQ liaison officer, with intercepts of frantic communications between Spanish police and special forces on the Costa del Sol.

      The duty officer’s blood ran cold, and her hands actually shook for a moment or two.

      Then she picked up her phone and called her boss, Director of Operations Justin Nicholls, third-in-command of MI6 and widely tipped to be a future leader of the service.

      Within the hour, the world knew that terrorists had launched a massive and deadly attack on two towns on Spain’s Mediterranean coast.

      By then, Nicholls was just starting an emergency meeting of the MI6 senior management team, chaired by ‘C’ – the Chief of the SIS.

      ‘What do we know?’ said C, his voice brusque.

      ‘Estimates are fifty dead on the ship, and thirty or more on the beach,’ said Nicholls. ‘Will go higher, I’m afraid. It looks very much as though Puerto Banús was the main target. They hit Málaga first, and then went onto the beach when the first responders were out of the way.’

      ‘Why? What were they looking for at Marbella?’

      ‘That’s not yet clear.’

      ‘How did we not know about this?’ said C.

      ‘We can’t know about everything,’ said Nicholls.

      ‘A complex, two-pronged attack, on this bloody scale, and we had no idea? They must have been planning it for months.’

      ‘We’re already going back through everything remotely linked to the Costa for the last two years, just in case it was there and we missed it. But at this stage, no, we had no idea.’

      ‘The Spanish?’

      Spain’s CNI, the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia, was not quite at the level of its counterparts in British or American intelligence, but it had improved dramatically since the Madrid train outrage of 2004, and was more than willing to share information and co-operate in the global fight against terrorism.

      ‘I can only assume that they were as much in the dark as we were.’

      ‘This isn’t going to go down well at No. 10, Justin,’ said C, shaking his head.

      ‘Tell me about it.’

      ‘You know the PM,’ said C. ‘I’ll leave you to brief her.’

      Justin Nicholls and the Rt Hon Penelope Morgan MP had dated each other for a couple of years in their student days, and had stayed close ever since.

      Nicholls nodded.

      On the wall to his right was a bank of screens – some showing news channels, others live feeds from Spanish intelligence cameras. One delivered the confidential feed, the updated intelligence picture available to the SIS.

      A status update for the MS Windsor Castle said that the incident at Málaga was now over, with four attackers confirmed killed. At Marbella, two attackers had been shot dead on the Puerto Banús beach, and two other men had just been taken into custody.

      And then a new line appeared on the feed.

       Spanish police helicopter chasing high speed boat across Med towards Moroccan coast. SPS Juan Carlos I also launching marines. Royal Moroccan Navy alerted.

      ‘That’s them,’ said Nicholls.

25.

      THE BOAT CARRYING Argun ‘Dark Eyes’ Shishani,