men. They scrambled across thirty feet of open ground with gunfire whistling past them inaccurately from the mob outside.
As they reached the smouldering tangle that had not so long ago been a truck, the men dug in there were largely caught out, looking up at the screaming, enraged faces of the British squaddies with only a scant moment to try and swing their AKs up in response.
Bolton stumbled upon an old man who looked old enough to be his grandfather; a tanned face rich with laughter lines and framed with a white-and-grey beard, and big blue eyes opened wide with surprise. As he pulled the trigger and destroyed that face, he oddly found himself thinking in the heat of the moment that the man had looked a little like Santa Claus.
His section made quick work of the other half a dozen; firing down at the prone forms quickly and ruthlessly. He saw one of them drop his gun as if it were red-hot and quickly raise his hands. But the soldier standing over him made a snap decision to ignore that and fired a dozen rounds into his chest and head.
Bolton nodded approvingly, this wasn’t the kind of exchange where prisoners could be taken.
Lieutenant Carter led his men out from their position behind the stacked pallets and emerged into the open, dropping smartly into a firing stance. They unleashed a sustained volley at the mob that had begun to press forward through the wreckage to reclaim their toe-hold. As the first few of them dropped to the ground, the others quickly fell back and within little more than a dozen seconds Carter’s men had pushed them back out of the compound and on to the kerb outside, where a sense of panic swept through the crowd like wildfire, and the mob began to waver, then disperse. They turned on their heels and beat a retreat back across the boulevard to the shelter and safety of the buildings and walled gardens on the far side.
The ground around the gateway was littered with the bodies of many of them. Only a couple of the prone forms were still moving.
Lieutenant Carter waved his arm. ‘All right, cease firing!’ he shouted. He knew the section’s wind was up, but they desperately needed to conserve the ammo they had left.
He turned round to look for Sergeant Bolton, firstly to congratulate him on having the bottle to pull that charge off, and secondly to issue orders to seal that gateway somehow. They’d probably need to push one or two of the blast-damaged Rovers over to plug the gap. That would be enough of an obstruction for now.
And then he saw Bolton standing amidst the wreckage holding both hands to his pelvis and looking down at the spreading dark stain and the ragged hole in his tunic.
‘Bollocks.’ Bolton groaned angrily before dropping to his knees.
CHAPTER 21
8.55 a.m. UEA, Norwich
Ash stepped silently over the stiffening corpse of Alison Derby. The blood that had gushed from her carotid artery last night was now a dry pool of dark brown gel on the linoleum floor. She was dead within two minutes of him slipping the narrow blade of his knife into the side of her neck - unconscious after only a minute. He had decided he couldn’t afford to be distracted by her shuffling and whimpering.
A shame; she had been nice, courteous and helpful.
But he needed it to be quiet inside, so he’d hear when Leona Sutherland came up the stairs and approached the door. He had waited all through the night, sitting on the stool in the kitchen, in the dark, patiently waiting. It seemed likely, after midnight, that the girl was staying over with her boyfriend. But he couldn’t afford to be asleep just in case she did turn up.
He’d had the dark hours alone, to sort through his thoughts.
We could have closed the door on the little girl, when she entered. I could have finished her there.
But no, that would have been needlessly reckless. Processing a body in an exclusive hotel, in the middle of Manhattan, would have been difficult. Yet, what she had seen was dangerous; three of The Twelve. Worse still, the three of them together in the same room.
He knelt down beside Alison Derby; her face was grey, her lips a bluey-purple, her eyes still open, dull and not quite focused on anything. Ash could kill a ten-year-old girl just as easily as an eighteen year old. The end always justified the means. And