a GCHQ liaison officer, with intercepts of frantic communications between Spanish police and special forces on the Costa del Sol.
The duty officer’s blood ran cold, and her hands actually shook for a moment or two.
Then she picked up her phone and called her boss, Director of Operations Justin Nicholls, third-in-command of MI6 and widely tipped to be a future leader of the service.
Within the hour, the world knew that terrorists had launched a massive and deadly attack on two towns on Spain’s Mediterranean coast.
By then, Nicholls was just starting an emergency meeting of the MI6 senior management team, chaired by ‘C’ – the Chief of the SIS.
‘What do we know?’ said C, his voice brusque.
‘Estimates are fifty dead on the ship, and thirty or more on the beach,’ said Nicholls. ‘Will go higher, I’m afraid. It looks very much as though Puerto Banús was the main target. They hit Málaga first, and then went onto the beach when the first responders were out of the way.’
‘Why? What were they looking for at Marbella?’
‘That’s not yet clear.’
‘How did we not know about this?’ said C.
‘We can’t know about everything,’ said Nicholls.
‘A complex, two-pronged attack, on this bloody scale, and we had no idea? They must have been planning it for months.’
‘We’re already going back through everything remotely linked to the Costa for the last two years, just in case it was there and we missed it. But at this stage, no, we had no idea.’
‘The Spanish?’
Spain’s CNI, the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia, was not quite at the level of its counterparts in British or American intelligence, but it had improved dramatically since the Madrid train outrage of 2004, and was more than willing to share information and co-operate in the global fight against terrorism.
‘I can only assume that they were as much in the dark as we were.’
‘This isn’t going to go down well at No. 10, Justin,’ said C, shaking his head.
‘Tell me about it.’
‘You know the PM,’ said C. ‘I’ll leave you to brief her.’
Justin Nicholls and the Rt Hon Penelope Morgan MP had dated each other for a couple of years in their student days, and had stayed close ever since.
Nicholls nodded.
On the wall to his right was a bank of screens – some showing news channels, others live feeds from Spanish intelligence cameras. One delivered the confidential feed, the updated intelligence picture available to the SIS.
A status update for the MS Windsor Castle said that the incident at Málaga was now over, with four attackers confirmed killed. At Marbella, two attackers had been shot dead on the Puerto Banús beach, and two other men had just been taken into custody.
And then a new line appeared on the feed.
Spanish police helicopter chasing high speed boat across Med towards Moroccan coast. SPS Juan Carlos I also launching marines. Royal Moroccan Navy alerted.
‘That’s them,’ said Nicholls.
THE BOAT CARRYING Argun ‘Dark Eyes’ Shishani, the man in the Manchester United shirt, and the shooter called Khaled, and their three female hostages, had had a big head start.
In all the confusion, it was well over forty kilometres from the Spanish coast by the time the Grupo Especial de Operaciones Eurocopter EC120 Colibri lifted off in pursuit.
But the two pilots put the aircraft nose down and flew flat out, the single Turbomeca engine straining to throw out its 504 shaft-horsepower, and they had the speeding Lucky Lady in sight on their on-board camera well inside twenty minutes, and in visual contact not long afterward.
Two kilometres out, the two GEO snipers aboard leaned out of the helicopter on harnesses and trained the scopes of their AMP DSR-1 .338 rifles on the streamlined yacht.
The officer on the left hand side, an oficial de policía, had the clearest view.
‘I can see two armed men on the rear deck,’ he shouted, into his collar microphone. ‘Three women are standing in front of them, hands on their heads.’
‘Roger that,’ said his colleague, a subinspector. ‘I’ll take the right, you take the left.’ Half a minute later, and a kilometre closer, he said, ‘Do you have a shot?’
He already knew the answer.
Both men were highly skilled, and their rifles, chambered for the Lapua Magnum cartridge, were effective out to 1,500 metres.
In theory.
At this distance, in a speeding helicopter caught in the up and down thermals of the Mediterranean, with the targets contained on a small rear deck, under an overhanging roof, on a boat crashing through waves, with civilians in the foreground…
‘No way.’
The second sniper leaned forward and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. ‘We need to get a lot closer,’ he shouted. ‘We can’t take any kind of shot at this range.’
The pilot nodded and pressed on.
Six hundred metres out, one of the men on the deck lifted his AK47 and started shooting.
It was nothing more than a gesture – an AK is useless at that range – but it made the pilot think again.
He slowed the helicopter to fifty knots, so that it was simply keeping pace with the yacht.
‘Go on!’ shouted the sniper on the left hand side. ‘They can’t hit us from here. I need to get closer.’
Again, the pilot nodded and tilted the helicopter forwards.
Both snipers were now leaning well out of the aircraft, trying to get their sights on the centre mass of their targets.
The left-hand marksman shook his head in frustration and hauled himself back inside.
‘This is no good,’ he shouted, to his colleague. ‘I can’t maintain the target in the scope. I’m going to try with the 41.’
He stowed his AMP, unclipped his Heckler & Koch G41 assault rifle, and leaned back out.
Way outside the effective range of the weapon, but he could at least keep the iron sights on the group and maintain better situational awareness.
‘Closer!’ he said.
In response, the pilot dipped the chopper slightly, to gain on the terrorists.
At which point, one of them vanished inside the boat.
‘One of them just went below,’ said the co-pilot.
‘Seen,’ said the pilot.
‘Keep going!’ shouted the left-hand sniper.
What happened next happened very quickly.
The Lucky Lady suddenly slowed, meaning that the helicopter shot forwards relative to the boat.
Both snipers temporarily lost her, as the controlling pilot throttled back, lifting the nose to avoid getting within 7.62mm range.
At the same moment, the terrorist who had gone below now reappeared, carrying something long and black in his right hand.
In one smooth motion, he hefted it onto his shoulder, braced his feet, and looked up.
‘Oh, shit,’ said the pilot, instinctively breaking right, away from the contact.
Unfortunately,