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

out of the water. The occupants were invisible from the cabin cruiser and all that he could see was the white foam and spray of the wave underlining the dark shape of the bow, aiming straight at them.

He switched the Kalashnikov to full auto, the mid position on the weapon’s selector, braced himself against the side of the cockpit and pulled the trigger.

The sound of the assault rifle firing was unmistakable and audible even above the roar of the launch’s engines and the thumping as the bow cut through the waves, and Carter thought he felt the impact of a handful of bullets, though he couldn’t be certain.

His original plan had been to pass as close as possible to the cabin cruiser so that the wake from the launch would swamp it and cause the probably inexperienced helmsman to lose control of the vessel. If he timed it right, the really close pass might even be enough to topple the gunman with the assault rifle out of the boat and into the dark and unwelcoming waters of the Thames.

But as he took another glance ahead, measuring angles and distances, he realised that that wasn’t going to work. The cabin cruiser was too close to the Palace of Westminster, and in a matter seconds or perhaps a minute at the most it would be in what he thought would be the optimum position for the explosive charges to be detonated. And then there would be nothing that he could do about it.

He would also be signing his own death warrant and those of the two other officers on board with him, because they would be so close to the epicentre of the detonation that his launch would be reduced to matchsticks, or whatever the fibreglass equivalent was, and they’d be obliterated with it. But he was going to do his best to make sure that that didn’t happen.

‘Time for Plan B,’ Carter said, taking a firmer grip on the wheel and glancing at the two men with him. ‘Hang on tight.’

‘You didn’t mention a Plan B,’ Fisher objected, though it was perfectly obvious to him what Carter was going to do.

He altered the position of the wheel very slightly and pushed the throttle levers to confirm that they were already in the fully forward position, meaning the engines were delivering maximum power.

‘Brace for impact,’ he ordered.

Eight seconds later, the bow of the Targa launch smashed into the side of the cabin cruiser, more or less amidships.

The cruiser was old and built of wood. It hadn’t been properly maintained for much of its life and was comparatively flimsy. The patrol boat didn’t so much hit it as cut it in half, splintering the timbers of the midsection. The Targa surged forward, the power of its engines and its momentum reducing the centre of the cabin cruiser to little more than a collection of shattered timbers. The impact utterly destroyed the vessel.

The stern section lurched down as the patrol boat powered over it and then tipped backwards as the two craft separated, knocking both Hassan and Khalid off their feet, drenching them with cold river water.

Khalid screamed as the dark blue bow of the patrol boat, an unstoppable force despite now being riddled with bullets from the Kalashnikov, powered into and then steamrollered over the cabin cruiser. The impact was so massive that he lost his grip on the assault rifle. It bounced on the tilting side of the cockpit, then tumbled over the gunwale and immediately vanished below the surface.

Khalid was a long way from being an expert user of the Kalashnikov, or of any other weapon, come to that.

He’d received very rudimentary instruction on the assault rifle from Sadir, who had spent countless hours on the ranges in the various Al-Badr training camps in the Azad Kashmir region near Islamabad, close to Pakistan’s eastern border, but in the time they’d had available Khalid had learnt only the basics: how to aim and fire it, remembering to squeeze rather than pull the trigger, to only use the weapon in semi-automatic mode both to conserve ammunition and to increase accuracy, how to load and change a magazine and so on. What he hadn’t been able to do under Sadir’s direction was actually fire it for real, there being almost nowhere in the English countryside, and certainly nowhere within fifty miles of the centre of London, where the sound of automatic rifle fire wouldn’t attract unwelcome attention. And of course they also had only a very limited stock of ammunition.

But one of the basics that Sadir had emphasised was the importance of fitting a sling to the weapon, particularly as Khalid would be using the Kalashnikov on a boat on the often choppy waters of the River Thames. The standard two-point tactical sling for the AK-47 uses an attachment point where the barrel emerges from the fore-end of the weapon and another near the end of the buttstock.

No sling had been supplied along with the assault rifle, and so Sadir had constructed one using a long leather belt, the ends of it secured to the attachment points on the Kalashnikov with heavy-duty wire. And as well as the belt, for additional security he had also provided a length of strong cord to be knotted around the sling and the other end attached to one of the grab handles in the cockpit of the cabin cruiser.

Khalid had followed his instructions to the letter, and as soon as the Kalashnikov bounced out of his grip and he was back on his feet he seized the grab handle and began pulling on the cord to recover the weapon, which emerged muzzle first from the black waters of the river.

As the heavily waterlogged cockpit more or less stabilised he once again aimed the weapon at the police launch, now turning towards him and towering above his location more or less on the surface of the river. He made sure that the fire selector was still on