The flashing mobile phone in the assassin’s hand flustered the commando squad leader for a split second. It was not the range of the bomb that was uppermost in his mind but the deadly nuclear material that would infiltrate every single human being’s system present in the enclosed space within moments.
“He’s threatening to detonate the bomb if we move in closer,” he reported back to base. “Your orders, sir?” Broman looked at the EOD commander. “Not a chance, sir. He doesn’t have the code. He’s bluffing,” said the expert with complete confidence.
“Pick him off ,” Broman gave the order.
“I think we should evacuate the civilians through the service stairway,” suggested the operative commander who had recently joined them.
“No,” said Broman immediately, surprising everyone. “There could be further terrorists among them. London was probably planned to be the biggest splash; there could easily be three or four of them instead of the usual two.” “True, but if anything should go sour, we’d have that fewer people to worry about getting contaminated,” argued the operative commander.
“This will sound very callous I admit, but they’ve actually done us a favor by getting down under the ground. We’ll only have these eighty or so people to interrogate. Just look at them! Any one of them could be an accomplice. If we let a single one of them scram, he’ll carry out his plan somewhere else, with ten thousand victims instead of eighty.”