Cyberstrike by James Barrington (best english books to read .txt) 📗

he had felt the impacts of at least two rounds hitting the starboard side of his boat.

‘Fucking hell,’ he yelled as he steered the launch back the way they’d come, swinging it from side to side so as not to present a static target and keeping the speed up to produce a curtain of spray behind the boat to further confuse the gunman’s aim. ‘Anybody hurt?’

A pair of answering shouts told him that his men were uninjured, and as far as he could tell the bullets hadn’t done anything terminal or even serious to his vessel.

MPU boats do not normally carry weapons, and when they do they are usually in the experienced hands of members of SCO19, the Metropolitan Police’s armed division, which includes roaming ARVs – Armed Response Vehicles – and groups such as the Specialist Rifle Officers, or SROs, all highly trained marksmen, and the Tactical Support Teams that provide armed backup for police raids when the suspects are known or believed to be in possession of weapons. But in that boat on that day, the three officers hadn’t even got a pistol between them.

Bob Fisher was already on the radio, calling in the incident, but unlike a situation on dry land, when the driver of a police car can request the help of other units to apprehend a vehicle that has failed to stop, out on the river there were no other units. Or at least none close enough to lend a hand. And for obvious reasons roadblocks and spike strips or stingers were never going to work. Ultimately, the boat could be stopped by the Thames Barrier out at the London City Airport, but Carter had no intention of letting it get that far east.

He turned the boat through a half-circle as quickly as possible so that the bow of his vessel was aiming back towards the cabin cruiser, now about two hundred yards distant. That put most of the Targa between the three officers and the man with the assault rifle, which would hopefully provide at least some measure of protection, but they were still well within range of the Kalashnikov and they all knew it. But at that distance, using the notoriously inaccurate assault rifle from a moving platform – the cabin cruiser – to hit another moving target would be difficult at best.

‘There’s another Targa heading our way,’ Fisher reported, ‘but he’s down by the Isle of Dogs and he’ll be stopping to pick up a couple of SROs from Wapping so it’s going to be a while getting here. There are a couple of ARVs heading for the river to get in position to try to take out these two comedians. And they’ve scrambled India 99 but they estimate it’ll be at least fifteen minutes before he’s on task.’

That was the callsign of one of three Eurocopter EC 145 helicopters of the ASU, the Air Support Unit, that provide airborne surveillance and other assistance to the Metropolitan Police. They’re based at North Weald Airfield, about twenty miles from the centre of London, a distance the EC 145 could cover in a little under eight minutes at its maximum speed of 153 miles per hour. If it was already airborne over the airfield. The extra time quoted was the inevitable delay caused by the crew getting from their ready room, out to the aircraft, doing pre-flight checks, pre-start, post-start and pre-take-off checks, and actually launching the helicopter into the air. Obviously most of these were pre-done to allow as fast a take-off as possible, but no sensible pilot would ever even think about getting into the air without running through these checks. As the old adage has it, there are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.

‘It’d be a big help to us,’ Carter said, staring towards the cabin cruiser, which was still heading north along the eastern, the right-hand, side of the river, ‘if that chopper was fitted with a fucking great machine gun as well as cameras and lights. Then we could just back away and watch chummy being blown out of the water.’

The man with the assault rifle had only fired that one initial burst of maybe six or eight rounds, but all four officers knew that the standard magazine for a Kalashnikov AK-47 held thirty cartridges, and most terrorists – because that was very obviously what they were dealing with – who managed to obtain an assault rifle also managed to obtain more than one magazine for it. The expression ‘outgunned’ covered the situation perfectly.

‘So what the hell’s this guy up to?’ Crichton asked. ‘It’s not much of a terrorist attack if all he does is shoot up a police launch.’

Carter didn’t respond for a few seconds, mentally trying to put the pieces together. Then he shook his head.

‘They’d only be carrying an assault rifle and be prepared to use it if they’re planning an attack right now,’ he said. ‘Think about it. We had truck bombs over here when the IRA was playing around, and at Oklahoma in the States as well, and the Americans have had aircraft bombs when planes were used as weapons on 9/11. I think we could be looking at the first boat bomb in Britain.’

Bob Fisher didn’t look entirely convinced.

‘So what’s their target, down here on the river?’ he asked, then glanced up towards the western bank of the Thames at one of the most recognisable buildings not just in Britain but in the entire world: the Palace of Westminster, home of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. ‘Oh, shit. Not Parliament?’

‘Think about it,’ Carter said again. ‘If what we’re looking at is part of an active branch of some radical Islamic organisation they’ll be aiming for either the maximum possible loss of civilian lives or the maximum possible embarrassment to the British government. Or both. There’s not a big enough civilian presence anywhere on the river to form a target. If all