Cold East. Alex Shaw

Marine was bored by his job was an understatement. After ten years in the service of the good old ‘US of A’ he had been invalided out with a derisory disability pension. The irony was that the Navy had deemed him medically unfit to stand guard for long periods of time and therefore no longer suited to active service. Yet here he stood, a security guard in a department store, on his feet for eight hours a day. Where was the logic? Finch stepped outside for a blast of icy wind to wake him up. As he did so the detectors rang. Four men entered the store, while two women with heavy bags exited. Finch sighed and asked the women to step back inside; security tags left on again, he assumed. They moved to the jewellery counter where he started to remove their purchases to be checked one by one.

      *

      There was a scream and shouts followed by a series of loud staccato cracks. James East locked eyes with the menswear assistant. Both men dropped to the floor; they had heard the sound before – automatic gunfire.

      ‘Stay down.’ East’s voice was controlled and firm. The elderly assistant bobbed his head in assent and crawled deeper into the dressing rooms. East worked his way, at a crouch, out of the alcove. What greeted him on the shop-floor was shocking. Two men holding Uzi submachine guns stood in the central aisle, firing off rounds indiscriminately at any shopper who dared move. The security guard, white shirt turned crimson, lay sprawled across a collapsed glass counter. Two women had been dropped next to him. As the store fell silent one gunman changed magazines while the second continued to swing his weapon in an exaggerated arc. East noted their actions: uncontrolled, jerky, and amateur. There was a sudden blur of movement as a portly woman ran from behind an overturned display. The gunmen tracked her with their weapons on fully automatic. Rounds spat from the barrels, showering her and the surrounding area. East hugged the floor as rounds impacted against the back wall, hitting fittings and spinning off at obtuse angles.

      The woman, eyes wild, was thrown sideways, mid-stride, as white-hot lead tore into her flesh. She came crashing down with a sickening thud on the thinly carpeted shop-floor. Her eyes saw East and her mouth moved; she reached out her hand. ‘Pamageet minya.’ ‘Help me,’ she pleaded in Russian.

      ‘Nie dveegaisia!’ ‘Stay still,’ East hissed back in the same language. But it was too late. Her hand trembled, fell limp, and her eyes glazed over. East’s jaw tightened – he was going to stop them.

      *

      There were footsteps on his left by the escalator. Two more gunmen were ascending to the upper floors, one a little ahead of the other. East craned his neck; the first pair now had their backs turned and their weapons pointing away. East moved with speed and stealth towards the disappearing gunman. Reaching the bottom of the escalator he launched himself up, two steps at a time, no longer caring about the noise he made, only the distance he covered. The nearest gunman turned, Uzi held upwards in one hand, the short barrel pointing at the concrete above. His eyes registered East but not before East’s open palm crashed up into the underside of the gunman’s nose, flattening cartilage and breaking bone. As if struck by a sledgehammer the man dropped the Uzi and fell sideways. East grabbed the weapon and squeezed the trigger. A three-round burst ripped through the gunman before burrowing into the side of the escalator.

      There was more gunfire from above. East flattened himself against the metal steps and was carried upwards. As his head crested the shop-floor he saw that the fourth gunman, oblivious to his colleague’s demise, had started to spray the room. East raised the Uzi and fired a controlled burst into the back of his target’s head. The man fell instantly, body dead before it had stopped falling. Around him shoppers and staff cowered and wept. Two X-rays down, two more to go. East hit the stop button on the stairs and peered over the side at the ground floor. Save for sobbing, the area was quiet once more as both gunmen again changed magazines. One was silent and had a crazed expression on his face, while the other seemed to be quietly chanting. East had to act; he had to take them out now. He moved down the metal steps, took a deep breath, and then broke cover at the bottom.

      The nearest X-ray looked up, eyes wide as East fired. The gunman stumbled backwards as rounds impacted his chest before he crashed into a counter. The second gunman returned fire and charged forward. East pivoted, fell to one knee to lessen his profile, and acquired the target.

      ‘Allahu Akbar!’ the gunman yelled.

      East looked into the man’s eyes and released second pressure on the trigger. The X-ray fell upon him and glass exploded around both men. The X-ray was history, but his momentum took East down with him. East’s head hit the carpet-covered concrete shop-floor with a loud crack and his world went black.

      *

       British Embassy, Kyiv, Ukraine

      Aidan Snow sipped his black coffee as he listened via the internet to the Today programme on Radio 4. The main news of the morning was an explosion at rush hour on the Moscow metro. It had happened at a station Snow knew well, one close to the international school he had attended as an ‘Embassy Brat’ twenty years before. So far the number of fatalities hadn’t been released but Snow knew it would be high. The radio announced that the explosion had been confirmed as an IED and that a Chechen group, the Islamic International Brigade, had claimed responsibility. An expert on Russian security matters from the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies had been quickly found and, in heavily accented English, gave his opinion. He explained that the Russian authorities wouldn’t accept that the real Islamic International Brigade had carried out the attack, due to the fact that the FSB had either captured or killed its leaders. Indeed, the leader of the group had been publicly put on trial and was at this very moment serving a full life term in Russia’s most secure prison. The expert went on to say why he thought the bomb had been detonated and who else could be responsible. A splinter or copycat group using the same methods…

      Snow clicked off the broadcast and continued to eat his breakfast in silence, even though he had now lost his appetite. Terrorism was senseless: innocent civilians were targeted based solely on the actions of their governments, whom they probably hadn’t voted into power. Yet it was endemic the world over and it sickened him. Saturday had brought reports of a suspected Al-Qaeda attack on shoppers in a New Jersey department store and today it was the turn of commuters in Moscow. Snow shuddered as he imagined the horror created by the detonation and panic among the Muscovites. He pictured the metro station in his mind as he remembered it, with its scrupulously clean floors, advert-free walls, grand architecture, and fur-clad crowds. As a teenager he had frequently explored Moscow by jumping on the metro after school, much to the annoyance of the British Embassy driver. He had sat and listened to the Muscovites, often taking the train to the end of the line into areas that were strictly off the tourist path. In the late Eighties, just before the Soviet Union crumbled, Moscow had been an exciting place. There had been something in the air, a note of dissent those in power had chosen to ignore, to their ultimate cost.

      Today, the people in power were jumpy; an attack in one European capital city put all the others on high alert. Moscow, having once again attempted to resurrect the Soviet Empire by illegally annexing Crimea and invading Eastern Ukraine, had made itself target number one. It had no one else to blame, but it was the Russian people who were suffering and not the warmongering cocks in the Kremlin.

      The door to the room Snow was camped out in opened and Alistair Vickers entered. He sat heavily in an armchair. ‘You’ve seen the news, I take it?’

      ‘What next?’

      Vickers shrugged. ‘I have no earthly idea, but Jack’s just called for a video conference.’

      On cue, Snow’s secure iPhone vibrated to show an incoming email from Jack Patchem, his boss at SIS. It contained just one word: Moscow. ‘We’d better go to your office then.’

      Vickers reluctantly dragged himself out of the comfy chair.

      *

      Several minutes later Patchem spoke without preamble as the video-link started. ‘Terrible news from Russia. The last thing we need is the loony brigade annoying the Kremlin.’

      ‘Do we know who’s responsible?’ Snow asked as Vickers pushed a plate of custard cream biscuits