Target

Seventy

As one armed officer yanked open the left-hand barn door, Tony Le

A bullet hissed past his head, and one of his people – Jim Walton, a recently divorced father of three kids under ten – went down with a muffled yelp. Another round flew past, narrowly missing Le

The shots were coming from behind a partly open door straight ahead, but neither the assailant nor his gun was visible.

To his credit, Le

A shadow moved beyond it and Le

'Officer down!' he shouted into his mouthpiece as more officers poured in through the barn door. 'Repeat, officer down! We need urgent medical assistance!'

Le

With his heart hammering in his chest, he advanced on the open door, Landesman by his side. Le

Then another bullet hit the wall just behind him, and he returned fire, the sound of the discharge making his ears ring.

A shadow flitted across the balcony and Le

With a nod to Landesman, he raced up the stairs, eager to press his advantage, operating on instinct now, not thinking of the dangers inherent in his actions. As he reached the top, the smoke seemed to swallow him up, and he felt the heat of the fire against his protective overalls. He turned the corner, finger tensed on the MP5's trigger, and almost tripped over the body of the gunman at his feet. He'd been shot in the head, the pistol with silencer still in his hand. It was hard to tell whether he was dead or not, but he was definitely in a bad way.

But it was the sight of the girl in handcuffs lying on the floor a few feet away through an open door that grabbed Le

Le

'What about him?' asked Landesman through his mouthpiece, nodding towards the gunman.

'Leave him,' panted Le

As they helped the girl down the staircase, a loud crack rang out from the ceiling above the main barn, and Le

'Go on, go!' he snapped at Landesman, and the two men made a dash across the floor as another crack sounded above them and the ceiling began to buckle. 'It's going!' he shouted through the mouthpiece as he charged out the door and across the track before falling to his knees and setting the barely conscious girl as gently as he could on the grass as the paramedics moved in.

Behind him there was an almighty crash as the ceiling finally collapsed, interring the gunman in a fiery grave. Le

Seventy-one

Thick black plumes of smoke continued to pour from the badly damaged barn while more than a dozen police and TV helicopters flew slowly in a wide circle overhead vying for the best view of the dramatic scene that was being played out over the few square miles of countryside below.

A three-mile exclusion zone had now been set up around the burnt-out gas lorry, and a major evacuation of the area's residents was already underway, although the effects of the phosgene had been severely limited by the rain that was still falling, coupled with the lack of a strong wind. So far the only confirmed casualties were the lorry's driver, who'd been incinerated in the blast, and his passenger, who'd been rushed to hospital suffering from the gas's effects and who was not expected to live.

The barn lay just a few hundred yards outside the exclusion zone, and three separate fire crews were still working to bring the blaze under control. Further back, behind the police lines, Mike Bolt and Mo Khan, both of them exhausted, stood watching them alongside the police and ambulance crews. Big Barry Freud had arrived by helicopter a short while earlier and was now in the process of taking charge of the crime scene from his colleagues in Essex on behalf of Counter Terrorism Command.

Bolt, still hyped up by his recent experiences, was drinking a hot mug of coffee, while Mo was smoking a sneaky cigarette, having fallen off the non-nicotine wagon once again. When Bolt had given him a disapproving look, Mo had answered simply, 'It's the stress of working with you,' and Bolt could hardly disagree. Neither had said much to the other since their narrow escape from the bomb nearly an hour earlier. They were both still getting over the shock of it, and Bolt knew that there was no way either of them was going to be sleeping much tonight.

Tina, meanwhile, had been transferred to hospital, where she was now being treated for her injuries. She'd drifted in and out of consciousness in the immediate aftermath of the explosion so Bolt hadn't been able to ascertain what had happened to her during the thirty or so hours she'd been missing, but the word from the hospital was that she was going to be OK, and he was looking forward to visiting her there as soon as he could.

In the end, things had worked out as well as they could have done. The mustard gas lorry had been intercepted; a woman believed to be Je