Ivory Nation, Andy Maslen [e manga reader .txt] 📗

‘When you’re all in position, you radio in with call sign. Tom and Kit, you’re on the princess and her new husband.’

The two squad members he’d just addressed nodded.

‘Rules of engagement, Skip?’ another man asked.

‘Simple. Anyone moving faster than a walking pace towards the happy couple, you take them out,’ he said. ‘Anyone inside a fifteen-metre circle acting nervously or wearing anything thicker than a sports jacket, you take them out. Anyone spotted carrying any kind of weapon, anywhere they could use it against the targets, you take them out.’

‘Force level?’ Kit asked.

‘Lethal. Head shot if possible, otherwise centre-mass. Multiple shots authorised by Gold Commander.’

‘I heard the Knights of Albion are planning a protest, Skip,’ a tall, heavyset man said from the left-hand side of the group.

‘MI5 are in the crowd, plus Special Branch and covert teams from the Anti-Terror Command. So long as they stick to shouting, they’ll be filmed but left alone. They’re keeping them well back from the route. Any more questions?’

Heads shook in synchrony.

‘Good. Let’s go.’

The eight men and one woman left the briefing room and headed out to the car park. Bright sunshine, unobscured by a single cloud, bounced off the white paint and blue-and-yellow chequered livery of the police vehicles. Parked in a row, three dark-blue, unmarked transit vans waited for them. Three to a van, plus their rifles. They climbed in, and three high-performance engines roared into life.

Half an hour later, all nine sharpshooters were in position, their rifles resting, variously, on the parapet of a multi-storey carpark, the training tower of a decommissioned fire station, a couple of the tallest office blocks in the town centre and a turret of Windsor castle itself.

Sarah Furey, the team’s most recent, and only female, recruit, adjusted her position slightly, wedging herself more firmly into the angle between the floor and the redbrick retaining wall of the fire station training tower.

A veteran of the Iraq War, she had left the army with an honourable discharge and immediately applied to join the Metropolitan police as an authorised firearms officer or AFO. She aced the selection process, graduating top of her class and earning an approving pat on the back from the urban sniper course instructor, a former Royal Marine.

She was proud to be keeping her family’s military tradition alive. Her grandfathers on both sides had served in the armed forces, as had her father and two of her three brothers. Not a day went by when she didn’t mourn Robbie, the youngest, killed by an IED in Afghanistan in 2005.

A couple of the men she’d trained with had tried intimidating her, but after she’d dumped one on his arse and cold-cocked another who’d unwisely got in her face at the end of a post-course drinking session, they’d left her alone. Resentment turned to grudging respect as they saw what she was capable of.

Her tactical gear was still new-issue stiff, and she rolled her shoulders trying to ease the pressure on her left side.

‘Control from Whisky Foxtrot Two-Five, in position,’ she said into her cheek mic.

‘Thanks, Two-Five,’ came the reply, crackling in the stillness fifty metres above ground level. ‘All squad members, from Control. They’re leaving the church now. Radio silence apart from operational comms till they’re back inside the castle.’

Sarah ran her fingers along the rifle’s ergonomically designed stock. Checked her Schmidt & Bender Flashdot scope. She’d shot many different rifles in her time, including the G3K’s junior siblings, the G36 and the SG 516. But the G3 was her favourite, and, she knew, that of the SAS and 14 Int in Northern Ireland. Its pedigree comforted her.

The young man with George and the Dragon tattooed onto his left arm had been a member of the Knights of Albion for three years and four months. He’d joined mainly for the fighting, stayed for the comradeship and risen through the ranks for the cause. He jabbed his finger at the TV screen, spilling his lager in the process.

‘She’s married a nigger!’ he spat. ‘Can you believe it? A fucking nigger! She’s a princess for god’s sake. Wasn’t there one single white man on the planet she could’ve picked?’

Beside him, Jonathan Ballmer, the group’s deputy leader, shook his head and took a sip from his own can.

‘Race traitor, Marky-boy. Don’t you worry, our lads will make sure the world gets our message.’ He consulted his watch. ‘In about two minutes thirty.’

‘Excellent,’ Marky-boy said, draining his lager and crushing the can between the heels of his hands. ‘I can’t wait.’

From his vantage point in the churchyard, James Farrow, the BBC’s newly appointed royal correspondent, watched as the newly married couple emerged from the church. They smiled through a cloud of tumbling rose petals tossed skyward by enthusiastic flower girls drawn from the younger members of the royal family’s growing ranks.

Princess Alexandra beamed her famously toothy grin left and right like a laser beam. Her peaches-and-cream complexion was flawless, her natural beauty heightened by the skilful application of makeup. Her blonde fringe peeped out from beneath an antique lace veil, thrown back to reveal its wearer’s gleeful expression, blue eyes flashing in the sun.

Beside her, Thad Carty, the sixth richest black man in America, founder of a software firm now worth billions, beamed. His looks had been compared, favourably, to leading men in Hollywood, former presidents and Olympic athletes. His close-cropped moustache and goatee framed his widely smiling mouth.

‘You OK, honey?’ Carty asked his bride as they sat back against the centuries’-old leather upholstery, waiting for the coachman to settle the horses.

‘Of course I am, darling. It’s our wedding day.’

‘Only, I saw you frowning back there.’

She shook her head.

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Come on. Tell me. After all, I am your husband,’ he said, flashing her a grin.

‘That interviewer from Germany.’

‘You’re not still upset about that, are you?’

‘No! I mean, not really. But he made it sound like I was pro-Palestinian just because I spoke at that charity event. He said I was taking a political