Airport - Code Red by James Patterson & Michael White

Author:James Patterson & Michael White [Patterson, James]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-07-13T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER 23

Black Detention Centre, North-west London

The SAS had broken Miah Ahmadi at 9.09 a.m., just twenty-one minutes before the attack on Churchill Airport began. Colonel Jack Stewart dashed from the interrogation room, punching in the speed-dial number on his secure mobile. Captain Nigel Grant was a metre behind him.

Stewart’s call went through to the Black Detention Centre’s Control Room across a ragged quad of weeds and broken playground. From there, Stewart was put straight through to HQ. It took him less than thirty seconds to explain. HQ then immediately declared a Code Red, and contacted MI5, Downing Street, the Commissioner of Police and the Lord Mayor of London. Special Forces were mobilised three minutes later. Downing Street set a meeting of the government’s emergency committee, COBRA, in Whitehall starting at 9.25 a.m., five minutes before Essa and her teams swung into action. The Prime Minister was escorted from Number 10 along a broad, over-lit tunnel beneath Downing Street 112 metres to the COBRA building where the meeting was convened.

The first choppers to arrive had been scrambled from RAF Northolt close to the Black Detention Centre and a little under nine miles north-west of Churchill Airport. Jack Stewart and Nigel Grant were in the first wave, landing outside the perimeter. The airport was sealed off; all flights out were cancelled; all incoming flights directed to Gatwick and Stansted. Armoured vehicles started rolling along the Great South West Road to take up position.

The focus of attention was Terminal 4. According to Miah Ahmadi’s confession, that was going to be the point of attack. Troops and Special Police Units had the building surrounded by 9.33 a.m. By 9.34 they had learned from a drone and several calls from the public inside the terminal that no terrorist attack had taken place there. At the same time, the commander of the Joint Forces Assault Group close to Terminal 4 was informed that the attack had taken place a mile to the north, in Terminal 3.

The media got to the scene only minutes after the military and police had set up a cordon sixty metres from the building. The normal sounds of Europe’s busiest airport – the roar of a plane taking off or landing every forty-five seconds – had been replaced with an eerie quiet broken only by the whir of choppers, the buzz of drones and the noise of seven hundred army and police personnel under the overall command of General Sir Miles Deering.

From their chopper, Colonel Jack Stewart and Captain Nigel Grant, the men who had broken the terrorist prisoner at the eleventh hour, joined the general in his hastily organised Forward Command Post, a workman’s portable cabin butted up close to the northern entrance to the car park and immediately south of the main entrance into T3.

General Deering had just opened the lid of his laptop and was about to give Stewart and Grant their orders when they all heard another fresh round of shooting start.

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