result.
His radio crackled.
It was Jerry.
‘Nils,’ he said, ‘it’s me. It’s… it’s a bit weird down here. I can definitely smell burning, but the door’s locked somehow. And one of the junior engineers reckons he heard a loud bang from inside about a minute ago.’
‘Shit. Are fire control there?’
‘Yes, we’re forcing it. We’ll be inside in thirty seconds.’
‘Okay,’ said Nils. ‘Keep me in the loop. I’ll need to know whether it’s a general evacuation situation in…’ He looked at his watch. ‘In one minute. If I don’t hear from you, I’m calling it.’
‘Roger that. We’re nearly through.’
FAR ABOVE, CAPTAIN Carlo Abandonato had known that the engines had stopped – he’d felt the slight change in vibration, and had seen the momentary dimming of the lights – but he was not terribly concerned.
They were not scheduled to shut down, but things cropped up now and then.
He assumed that Phil Clarke and his team had noticed something – almost certainly nothing major, the damned things had under 6,000 hours in them since a complete rebuild – and had taken them off for a short while to sort it out.
Clarke had done twenty-two years in destroyers in the British navy, and was fresh from a three-day manufacturer’s refresher course at Rolls-Royce Marine; it couldn’t be anything that he couldn’t fix.
Still, Abandonato had been keen to get back up to the bridge, and his unease had doubled or trebled with the radio message from the staff captain.
So now – careful to look smooth and unflustered – he took his leave of the tables full of family diners and walked out of the burger restaurant.
It was as he was starting upwards in the elevator that he heard the first shots.
And then the human sounds of fear and horror.
Outside, unseen by the captain, the Yemeni security guard, called by Argun Shishani from the yacht along the coast at Marbella, was standing on the sun deck with an AK47, taking aimed shots at the sunbathers and swimmers in and around the pool.
Several people were already floating in red-tinted water, and others were scrambling to get away.
The Yemeni had been chosen for this operation precisely because he was battle-hardened; he had cut his teeth on the US Marines in the Second Battle of Fallujah, during the insurgency in Iraq, and had travelled the Middle East and Africa throughout the years that followed, fighting the kuffar in the name of Allah.
He’d spent most of the recent past fighting the Pesh and the al-Hashd al-Shaabi in Iraq, and the YPG and others in Syria.
He was remorseless and dedicated: he accepted that death would embrace him today, and he welcomed the fact.
He thought of his friends, men who had gone before him and died in the same glorious cause, and he smiled.
This was for them: he would see them soon.
He had ten magazines of thirty rounds each on his chest rig, and he intended to make as many of those rounds count as possible.
He took aim at a young child, standing by a gangplank on the deck below, screaming in frozen fear next to its dead mother, and heard the click as the hammer of his weapon struck an empty chamber.
His magazine empty, he allowed it to hang free on its sling, and took a grenade – a Swiss-manufactured L109A1, liberated from a British Army stores in Germany, on a four-second fuse – from his bag.
Leaned against the guard rail.
Pulled the pin.
Almost casually, he threw the grenade over the side at the child, and the panicking stream of humanity – if you could use that term to describe the dogs who were running like cowards down the nearest gangplank.
The grenade detonated with a dull crump, killing the child and two others outright and wounding many more.
Smiling, he reloaded the AK, fired a dozen rounds into the survivors and then turned and walked in the direction of the cabins in search of more victims.
It was a good day to die, here in the land of the infidel, bringing terror to the enemy, and his womenfolk, and his young.
BY NOW, CARLO Abandonato had reached the bridge deck, his blood running alternately cold and hot.
He found the bridge empty, the staff captain and the navigator having leaped overboard into the warm embrace of the Med when the shooting began.
‘Merda!’ spat Abandonato. ‘Bastardi codardi!’
He activated the Windsor Castle’s distress beacon, picking up the ship-to-shore telephone – as though the authorities were not already aware of what was happening.
He pressed the click-to-talk.
And then he saw movement outside.
A young man.
Abandonato recognised him.
An assistant purser?
No, a waiter.
Either way, it didn’t matter – he was here, and he could help.
‘You,’ said Abandonato, in English. ‘You need to get below and get as many passengers as possible off this damned ship. Boats, gangways, tell them to jump overboard… anything.’
In response, the man said nothing, but raised his arm.
Something in his hand.
Abandonato ducked instinctively as the man fired, and the shot passed two feet over his head and spidered the bridge windscreen.
Deafened, the captain scrabbled left, hidden from view by the centre console.
His mind was scrambled.
He could hear the man’s feet slapping on the deck as he walked across to get another shot at him.
Abandonato looked wildly around.
The main door was ten feet away.
There was no way he could make it.
He felt a terrible sense of despair, and of resignation – but luck was on his side.
Fleetingly.
The shooter had suffered a stoppage – the empty cartridge, which should have been cleanly ejected, had stuck in the breech and jammed the pistol. He’d gone through
