Random Targets (8 page)

R
USH HOUR ON
the M3 in Hampshire.

It was 5.15 p.m. and already dark. He took up a position on a wooded embankment between junctions eight and nine, south of Basingstoke.

He looked down on the northbound carriageway, facing an endless procession of blazing headlights. It was a cold, dry evening with the traffic flowing freely at an average speed of 80mph. Vehicles were nose to tail; thousands of people cocooned in their metal shells, oblivious to his presence.

Most were no doubt going home from work. To put their feet up and watch television. Their Tuesday night dose of Emmerdale and Eastenders. But some of them wouldn’t make it. This would be their last journey and this motorway their final destination.

He‘d arrived half an hour ago and spent the first ten minutes leaving another message for the cops to find. Then he walked through the bushes to the spot he’d chosen a week ago.

Now he lay on his belly with the rifle resting on the bipod. He gazed through the scope, preparing to acquire his first target. The magnified optics threw up the traffic ten times normal size. The night vision aspect turned everything but the headlights into fishbowl green.

The vehicles looked close enough to touch. He could see dark shapes beyond the windscreens. He decided to strike at a range of 300 yards. The shells would move faster than the speed of sound so that the actual pile-up would occur about 150 yards away. Perfect.

He clamped his teeth together and made subtle adjustments to his grip and body position. The crosshairs trembled in the scope and he started to breathe slowly in rhythm with the beat of his heart. He did a quick calculation in his mind, accounting for speed and distance. There was no wind to speak of. Then he selected his target. A lorry travelling in the middle lane. He centred the crosshairs on the driver’s silhouette and held steady for one … two … three seconds.

Then he squeezed the trigger and the rifle kicked back, but the blast was muted by the suppressor. A heartbeat later he saw the lorry’s windscreen shatter. The huge vehicle swerved into the fast lane, crushing a car against the central barrier before tipping on to its side and sliding along the tarmac. More cars smashed into it and one of them flipped over on top of a motorcyclist. Even from up here he could hear the grinding of metal and the howling of tyres.

He opened the bolt and the spent shell fell out. He quickly lined up another target. This time a car that was about a hundred yards behind the lorry. It was braking hard along with most other vehicles. He centred the crosshairs as before on the driver and pulled the trigger.

The car veered violently to the left and cartwheeled out of control. It collided with a van and rolled into the path of a four-by-four.

The knock-on effect was spectacular. Cars, vans, coaches and motorcycles crash into each other with tremendous force. Even those drivers who managed to apply their brakes were rammed from behind.

The sniper couldn’t help but smile. Two well-aimed shots was all it took to cause bloody mayhem. So fucking easy.

But he hadn’t finished. He wanted to ramp things up this time. Get the message across that he meant business. That he was not a one-hit wonder.

So he lowered the rifle and let his senses feast on the havoc he’d caused. The chaos of lights. The hideous noise. The flying debris. The pulverized vehicles.

It seemed an eternity before the collisions finally stopped. For several long seconds everything went quiet. The carriageway was blocked by wrecked and overturned vehicles. He saw pockets of smoke. One car burst into flames. Steam hissed from broken radiators.

And then he saw someone on the hard shoulder. A small dark figure moving towards the front. Then another figure appeared further back.

He looked through the scope and saw they were both male.
They appeared to be uninjured and were probably looking to help those who were. He left it a further thirty seconds, by which time more people were moving around down there on the motorway. Through the scope they made big, fat, easy targets.

He chose two at random. A middle-aged man and a young woman. Both were clearly distressed. Their startled faces were caught in the harsh beams of light. He lined up the crosshairs and shot them both. Their heads exploded in puffs of red.

Even before their bodies hit the ground he was on the move, scurrying towards the footbridge that was his escape route.

He knew the police would by now be on their way. But by the time they arrived he’d be long gone.

T
EMPLE AWOKE SUDDENLY
, his mind dragged unwillingly from sleep by the grating shriek of his mobile phone.

For a second he didn’t know where he was. His head felt like it was filled with concrete and his eyes took an age to focus. Then he saw Angel and he jolted upright, heart racing. She was sitting up in bed watching him. The sight of the bandages and IV lines brought the whole sorry situation flooding back.

‘I think you’d better answer that,’ she said.

His brain was slow to react and he struggled to retrieve the phone from the inside pocket of his jacket.

‘That you, guv?’ It was DS Vaughan. He sounded breathless.

‘Yeah, it’s me, Dave. What’s up?’

‘There’s been another shooting,’ Vaughan said. ‘This time on the M3 near Basingstoke.’

Temple was so taken aback his breath caught in his throat.

‘It happened a few minutes ago,’ Vaughan said. ‘Highways Agency cameras picked up a multiple crash. Now calls are flooding in from motorists caught up in it.’

‘So how do they know it’s not just an accident? Who says it’s a
sniper attack?’

‘A couple of the callers are claiming that several people were gunned down when they got out of their vehicles. There are bodies on the motorway.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Firearms units have been dispatched and every available chopper is being scrambled. It sounds really bad.’

‘Does Beresford know?’

‘He and everyone else is being contacted as we speak, including the Anti-Terrorism Command. Where are you, guv?’

‘I’m at the hospital with Angel.’

‘Then I’ll meet you at the scene. Christ knows how long it’ll take us to get there. Traffic will be backed up for miles.’

Temple switched off his phone and stood up. His heartbeat drummed against his ribs and he felt a rush of heat in his chest.

‘The sniper has struck again,’ he said. ‘Only this time he’s also shot people outside their cars.’

Angel stifled a gasp. ‘You’d better go then.’

‘Will you be OK? I feel I should stay here with you.’

She forced a weak smile. ‘I’d rather you didn’t. I don’t think I’ll get any rest if you sit in that chair snoring like a trooper all evening.’

A
GROWING NUMBER
of UK hospitals have their own helipads. The one at Southampton General was built above the car park at a cost of £1.2m.

As Temple hurried towards his Mazda, he spotted the air ambulance up there on the pad. The helicopter looked as though it was being prepared for take-off. The pilot was climbing on board and a second crew member was just passing through the gate.

Temple had a sudden thought. He dashed over to the gate
and showed his ID. He asked the crew member if they’d been called out to the M3. He said they had.

‘Then I’d like to hitch a ride,’ Temple said.

Under normal circumstances they told him they’d have said no. But these weren’t normal circumstances. So the guy made a quick call to the hospital’s director of major trauma operations. He was the official who needed to authorize it, and he did after Temple spoke to him.

Five minutes later the chopper was airborne with Temple strapped into the passenger seat.

The M3 starts in Southampton and heads north towards London. The chopper followed the trajectory of the motorway as it rolled across the dark Hampshire countryside. A traffic jam many miles long had already built up on the northbound carriageway. Temple stared down through the window at the unbroken ribbon of headlights, a feeling of dread building up inside him. They covered the forty miles to the crash scene in just over fifteen minutes. On the approach they could see vehicles on fire and plumes of smoke rising above the motorway.

As the chopper began its slow descent towards the carriageway, Temple was shocked by the devastation. He tried to swallow but had almost no saliva.

Scores of vehicles had ploughed into each other. The road had been turned into a raging inferno of cars, vans and lorries. And there were distressed people everywhere.

It was like landing in the middle of a war zone.

It was far more horrific than the scene Temple had encountered on the M27, no doubt because he was among the first to arrive.

There were only two police cars already there, one fire engine and a Mercedes Sprinter, its lights strobing in the gloom.

The chopper was put down on the carriageway about forty yards back from the carnage. Temple was the first out the door on to the tarmac and he was struck by the searing heat and the foul odour of oily smoke.

The police, fearing the sniper might still be up on the embankment, were urging people to climb over the central
barrier on to the southbound carriageway, which was itself crammed with vehicles that had ground to a halt, bumpers grinding bumpers.

Temple ran to the nearest police car and identified himself to an ashen-faced officer who was on his radio. He had to shout to make himself heard about all the commotion.

‘I was told people had been shot? Is that true?’

The officer, a young man who looked to be in a state of shock, raised an arm and pointed.

‘Over there and over there,’ he said. ‘A male and a female. Both shot in the head. They’re the only ones we’ve come across.’

Temple saw two bodies lying on the carriageway. They were being ignored by the paramedics and fire fighters whose first duty was to help the injured and those trapped in their vehicles.

‘I need a jacket,’ Temple said.

The officer jerked his thumb towards the back of the car.

‘Help yourself, sir.’

As Temple slipped on a fluorescent jacket he felt his phone vibrate against his chest. He took it out, checked the ID, and answered it.

‘It’s me, boss,’ he said.

Beresford wanted to know where he was and when Temple told him the Chief Super was rendered speechless.

‘I was at the hospital when the call came through,’ he explained. ‘I hitched a ride with the air ambulance.’

Temple described the scene and told Beresford about the bodies in the road.

‘It’s total fucking mayhem here,’ he said. ‘Quite a few of the vehicles are on fire so we might not know for ages how many drivers have been shot.’

As he spoke more emergency vehicles began to arrive and two helicopters appeared overhead.

‘For your information the Chief Constable has already spoken to the Home Secretary and the head of the Anti-Terrorism Command,’ Beresford said. ‘So brace yourself for a big announcement either tonight or tomorrow. This investigation is about to go national.’

‘Understood,’ Temple said. ‘Keep me posted.’

He pocketed his phone and walked over to the first of the sniper’s victims. The dead woman was wearing jeans and a dark sweater. The right side of her face had been blown away and blood and brain matter had pooled around her head.

Temple had seen plenty of gunshot wounds in his time. He was pretty sure that it was a high velocity bullet that had killed her. The man’s body lay about fifteen feet away. He was wearing a suit and looked quite old. He’d been shot in the back of the head and there wasn’t much left of his skull.

Temple felt physically sick at the stark injustice of it. A wave of impotent rage swept his body. It made no sense to him that these two people should be gunned down for no apparent reason. The only thing that connected them was their availability as targets. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He looked up as more fire fighters rushed past him towards the belching smoke and burning wrecks. Behind him lights were popping and sirens blaring. A police helicopter roared overhead as it shone a light on the wooded embankment.

There was still no sign of the armed-response team. They should have been here by now. But Temple doubted that the sniper was still around. Surely he would have scarpered as soon as he heard the sirens and saw the choppers approaching.

He decided to venture up on to the embankment. That must have been where the shots had come from. It would have provided an elevated position, lots of bushes and cover of darkness. Then he noticed a footbridge spanning the carriageway about a hundred yards away. The sniper could just as easily have fired from there with a long-range rifle.

He looked back at the destruction and let out a breath he hadn’t been aware he was holding. He saw fire fighters battling with flames and paramedics tending to the injured. And he saw police officers leading people away from the chaos. A shard of guilt twisted in his chest because he wasn’t doing anything to help them.

He had to remind himself that he had a different, but no less important job to do.

The embankment rose about thirty feet above the carriageway. There were clusters of thick bushes with open areas of long grass in between. The ground was soft and damp and Temple found it hard going in his slip-on shoes.

It didn’t take him long to get to the top and thanks to a full moon he could see that there was a small area of woodland beyond the embankment. Through the trees he glimpsed flashing blue lights.

It helped him get his bearings. The air ambulance pilot had told him that the location of the pile-up was close to the village of Popham. The busy A33 road ran parallel with the motorway at this point and only about sixty yards separated them.

The sniper had chosen the perfect location. From where he stood Temple could see that the footbridge that crossed the motorway continued through the wooded area to the A-road. The sniper had probably parked his car or motorbike over there to ensure he had a speedy avenue of escape.

Temple trudged towards the footbridge, poking his key-ring torch between the bushes. He stopped a couple of times to look down on the motorway and saw that from a number of positions the sniper would have had a clear view of traffic coming towards him on the northbound carriageway. He didn’t come across anything the sniper had left behind. No impressions in the grass or spent shell casings. But he wasn’t equipped to carry out a thorough search. That would be up to the SOCOs.

He came to the iron footbridge and climbed over the railing. Then he walked out across the motorway and stared down at the scene below. There were many more emergency vehicles now and some of the fires had been brought under control. It was still chaotic, though, and Temple found it hard to believe that someone would cause so much damage and distress for no good reason.

As he stood there, his face grew rigid and white with anger. He wished that he hadn’t given up smoking. For the first time in ages he craved a cigarette to help calm his nerves and slow his pulse. At that moment a helicopter appeared in the sky above him, its rotor blades whirring frantically. Temple turned away
from the fierce beam of light that shone down on him.

As he did so something caught his eye on the floor of the footbridge. A few words scrawled in red paint. He knew instantly that it was another message from the sniper.

As he read it, he felt his blood slowly turn to ice.