like a thorn crown at the top, glowed as they caught the very first vanilla rays of light from the early morning sun breaching the urban, smoke-smudged horizon.
Just outside the entrance he could see orange-jacketed emergency workers processing the recently admitted civilians. He could see several hundred more civilians inside the entrance atrium, many exhausted, stretched out on crash mats and cots, set out in orderly lines across the floor. He could see workers moving amongst them handing out bottled water, first aiders working on cuts and burns, wrapping grey blankets around those in shock.
But he couldn’t see any bloody sign at all of Maxwell.
We’ve got to let them in. Now.
They needed to throw aside the barrier and worry about getting names and National Insurance numbers later. After all, that’s what they were here for; food and water and safety for these people. Surely the damned paperwork could come later.
‘Sir!’ shouted Sergeant Walfield. ‘Look!’
A hundred yards to his right Adam saw the wire coils beginning to bulge and flatten out.
‘Bastards are trying to get over!’
A group of men, fed up with hurling tarmac over the top, had found a large panel of chipboard and hefted it across the wire. One of them stepped onto the board, his weight pushing down the wire coils, twenty yards either side, almost flat beneath it.
Shit.
Forty yards of breached perimeter; the coils of razor wire were compressed enough that it was possible to cautiously pick a way through.
‘Get that fucking board off!’ bellowed Sergeant Walfield, his voice carrying above the rising roar of encouragement from the crowd.
The nearest of the men temporarily under Adam’s command, half a dozen sequestered constables from the Metropolitan Police, jogged over towards the board, their guns aimed at the man standing astride it.
The man ignored their barked orders to get the fuck off; instead he was beckoning others to follow him up and over. He stood alone for a moment, deaf to the police and soldiers shouting at him to get off immediately. Then he was joined by two or three others clambering up on the board, their combined weight pushing the coils flatter across an even wider span.
Shit, shit, shit.
Adam racked his assault rifle and fired three shots in quick succession up into the air. It had the effect he wanted. The first half a dozen ranks of people beyond the wire ducked and froze and a hush descended for the briefest moment.
Adam finally found his voice.
‘YOU!’ It rang out across the tarmac in the moment’s silence. ‘Yes, YOU! Get the fuck off that board right now!’
For a moment Adam was convinced the man was going to comply. But the brief moment of hush his three shots had won them was already beginning to wane. The man stepped forward, the board tilted downwards as the wire twanged and rattled beneath his weight. He leapt down onto the tarmac, on their side.
You stupid fucking idiot.
A Berlin wall moment - the first man safely across inspiring all the others to surge forward in his wake.
A dozen others - men who on any other day would look unremarkable waiting outside a school playground to pick up their kids, or buying a sandwich and a coffee for lunch, grabbing a newspaper and some milk from a corner shop - encouraged enough by the first stupid bastard, barged and wrestled with each other to clamber onto the chipboard ramp.
It was one of the policemen who opened fire first. The shot punched a ragged hole in the first man’s face and took off a section of the back of his head. His legs instantly crumpled beneath him and he flopped backwards over the end of the board and onto the compressed loops of wire, where his still body dangled untidily from the barbs.
For a fleeting moment Adam thought that would have been enough of a demonstration to the others that any further feckless stupidity like this was going to be met with more of the same.
He hadn’t given an order to fire. The policeman didn’t have the discipline of his gunners - wasn’t waiting for the order; instead the copper had gone off-piste, popping like a poorly made firework. Still, it had bought them a second or two; a pause for thought from those nearest the splayed body. But that’s all it bought. Now there were people tiptoeing through the flattened coils either side of the board, some of them flapping their hands in front of their faces, frantically waving at the young soldiers, screaming