Free The Angel by Mark Dawson Page A

ground. There was the deafening crack of a hideous explosion, and Pope was pum melled by a bolt of boiling air which dented his cheeks and stomach as if they had been made of cardboard. He felt the fierce lashing of debris, hot slugs that scored burning tracks across his cheeks and forehead and the back of his hands. He stayed there on his back, the breath sucked out of his lungs by the retreating pressure. He opened his eyes, blinking hard. The sun seemed to quiver overhead, and then it disappeared in a cloud of black smoke.
    There was a moment of unearthly silence, broken only by the music of broken glass, the creaking of metal, the patter of falling debris.
    Then the screaming started.
    He looked and tried to clear his head. The blast had thrown him fully fifteen feet and deposited him against the side of a black cab that had stopped in the middle of the road. The mass of people who had retreated from the first blast inside the station were not there any longer. He felt something fall on his face, and when he yanked it away, he found it was a piece of yellow fabric, a dress maybe, now soaked in blood. A gory shower of flesh and more bloody clothing fell on him and around him, mingled with fragments of glass and concrete. Last of all came pieces of paper sucked from the offices in the buildings above the station, falling gently to Earth like graceful autumn leaves. There came the unmistakeable smell of roast pork. Once you had experienced it, you could never forget it. It was the smell of burning flesh.
    The road was ruined for fifty yards in both directions. There were hundreds of windows in the sand-coloured limestone walls of the Palace, and they had all been blown in. Glass rained down. A man bumped into him and fell to the ground. People were running all around him, screaming and crying. A bus that had been passing had swerved and crashed into the railings. A dump truck had slammed into the back of the bus. The trees that stood between the high railings and the flanks of the building had all been denuded of their leaves and now they stood naked and at crooked angles. The road itself was no more than a smoking crater. There were red smears on the tarmac and the pavements and the walls of the buildings. An inky black cloud mushroomed overhead, obscuring the clock tower and the buildings that faced it. The smell of cordite was everywhere. And it was cordite, Pope knew. This wasn’t a homemade bomb. This wasn’t hydrogen peroxide from boiled-down hair products. It wasn’t HMTD from hexamine tablets and citrus acid. This smelled like military-grade explosive.
    ‘Control?’
    It was Snow.
    ‘I’m here.’
    Number Twelve emerged from the smoke. He was covered in ash and soot. He had been a little closer to the seat of the explosion than Pope, and the blast had ripped his jacket from his back and torn his shirt. He wore his pistol in a shoulder holster, and Pope watched as his hand flicked up to it and yanked it free. It made him think of his own Sig Sauer, and he was grateful as his fingers found that it was still there, too.
    ‘Two explosions,’ Pope said, although he knew that Snow would be aware of that. ‘First one in the station, second one just outside it.’
    ‘Fucking hell,’ Snow said.
    ‘You all right?’
    ‘I’m fine. You?’
    ‘Cuts and bruises.’
    ‘Number Three?’
    ‘I’m here,’ McNair said. He was on the ground, ten feet away, carefully pushing to his feet.
    ‘Hurt?’
    ‘Scratches. Nothing. We were lucky.’
    Pope looked around, trying to focus. There were dozens of bodies on the ground. Many of them had been torn apart. The bomb had been laced with shrapnel, and the metal debris would have lacerated the flesh of anyone who was within twenty yards. He took in the bloody devastation with as clinical an eye as he could: dismembered limbs, a torso impaled on the railings, the disembodied head of a man, his expression of open-mouthed surprise starting to set as the muscles stiffened.
    There