Killing for the Company

Only now did Hussam look back. Only now did he pause to contemplate their handiwork: the blood and the gore and the gruesome look of absolute terror on the faces of those victims where the bullets had entered below the neck. It neither pleased him nor appalled him. It was what it was. It was what it had to be.

The four men faced each other, two on either side of the propped-up corpses. Hussam felt a trickle run down his forehead and over his thick, black eyebrows. He blinked hard as a mixture of sweat and blood stung his eyes. He nodded at the others, and they placed their 74s on the ground. Those weapons were finished with. It was time now for the Mother of Satan to do its work.

‘ Allahu Akbar! ’ He announced the Takbir in a loud voice so that it could be heard over the noise of the train and the wind from the broken window.

The others opened their mouths to return the incantation, but they were interrupted for a few seconds as another train hurtled past them in the opposite direction.

Hussam’s eyes glowed. ‘ Allahu Akbar! ’ he repeated, and this time his prayer was met with a response.

‘ Allahu Akbar! ’

The eyes of his compatriots were also burning, their bloodied bodies trembling. All four of them held their left hands aloft, ready to flick the switches that would transport them to paradise. Hussam closed his eyes. For a brief moment he saw his wife and child as they should be.

Smiling at him.

Waiting.

He opened them again, and nodded.

That nod was the sign. All four men flicked their switches, and detonated.

SIXTEEN

19.28 hrs.

It had taken two hours for the images to circle the earth.

The gnarled wreckage of the train, its two middle carriages blown skywards, the front and two rear carriages lying at an angle to the rails and crumpled into the sidings, lay still. Great floodlights had been erected in the field adjacent to the crash site, illuminating the scene of devastation as brightly as a night-time football match, and supplemented by the spots from two choppers circling overhead. There was a constant hum from aircraft and the electricity generators on the ground, and a flash of neon-blue emergency lights from vehicles approaching off-road. Three air ambulances were on standby. As the paramedics combed through the debris, it became increasingly clear that the ambulances would not be required to evacuate the casualties; they would be required to transport the dead.

Fifty metres from the blast site, a luminous-orange cordon had been erected, guarded by uniformed police officers to keep the small crowd of journalists at bay. They were a hard-bitten lot. Like the doctors and policemen, they were used to scenes of trauma. Such sights were their bread and butter, but even they, tonight, were sickened. They remembered 9/11 — some of them had been there — and the uneasy sensation everyone had that day that the world was about to change. They had that sensation again now, and these usually pushy professionals were restrained. Their cameras did not deviate from the crash site, where a plume of smoke still rose into the air, disturbed occasionally by a gust of wind but otherwise eerily straight.

One of these journalists was younger than the others. His name was Andy Carrington and he was just twenty-three. So far in his life he had seen three dead bodies. One was a tramp who’d died of exposure when Andy was on the night shift of his local paper back home in Norfolk. One was a car crash victim who’d been hit by a drunk-driver just after chucking-out time, and Andy had been surprised by how little blood there had been. The third had been his grandfather, lying on a bier in the funeral home, as cold as ice but immaculately presented, his skin shiny and his thin hair neatly combed.

None of these corpses had prepared him for the sight of the bodies being taken to the air ambulances that evening.

He’d run over to the point, about thirty metres from the throng of other journalists, where two policemen were holding up the cordon to allow a stretcher carried by two paramedics to pass. As he ran in that direction he was vaguely aware that none of his colleagues was doing the same. He put that down to his own hunger — his determination to show his mettle as a journalist. The previous night he’d been reporting on a film premiere from Leicester Square, and now he wanted to show his quality at reporting serious news rather than tittle-tattle about Angelina Jolie to be printed alongside a shiny picture of her, all lips and tits.

‘Stay away, son,’ one of the coppers called when they saw him approaching. It didn’t sound so much like an instruction as a piece of advice, and it was advice this young man was quick to ignore. The stretcher had passed the cordon now and the policemen had lowered it again.

‘Honest, mate, it’s not something you want to…’

Andy stopped.