Century of Jihad Read Online Free Page B

slowly, painfully, walked away from him. He watched as a paramedic placed his hand on her shoulder and guided her into one of the tents that had been erected to provide shelter and medical care. He stood for a moment, staring, feeling helpless, as the woman disappeared from view.
    Ed shook himself out of this moment of self-indulgence and walked over to his team. They had completed their task at the station. ‘One hell of a start to the day!’ muttered Ed. ‘OK team. Let’s get back to the factory. We have a lot of TV to watch!’
    Theo and Lisa made their way to their cars. Ed stood at the station entrance, Stuart at his side, watching the hustle and bustle in the street for a moment before they weaved their way through to his battered wreck.
    On the way back to the station Ed reflected on how mundane police work could be at times. There was nothing worse than sifting through so much film footage. Well, perhaps surveillance. But at least doing that provided some amusing and interesting distractions. It was amazing what people got up to when they thought nobody was watching.
    Back at their base, at Scotland Yard in Central London, Ed’s team of young detectives were assembling, having struggled through the traffic chaos back from the crime scene.
    There was Detective Constable Theo Akinola, aged twenty-five, a tall, well-built young man who was the son of Nigerian immigrant parents. Educated on the mean streets of the East End of London, where he was born and raised, he always had a smile on his face. He was recognised on the team as a joker who liked a drink and fancied himself as a ladies’ man. At least that was how he saw himself!
    Then there was DC Lisa Clark, aged twenty-six, from Bristol, with a slim 5’4 figure topped with long, dark brown hair. She was a deep thinker, always looking for the meaning behind things. She had joined the Metropolitan Police after completing a degree in Egyptology. A sergeant had once felt it necessary to tell her, while she was a probationer, that it was not her concern why people committed crime – it was her job to catch criminals.
    Finally there was DC Stuart McDonald, aged twenty-five, a wiry, light-hearted Scot, whose easy going manner hid a quick mind. He’d had a varied working background after leaving high school at eighteen, before moving south to join the Met.
    They took to their work stations to pore over the hours of assembled footage. The hustle and bustle going on around them faded into the background as they studied the footage in front of them with a desperate intensity. A strong determination to get on with the job and identify the perpetrator of this outrage and any accomplice or accomplices.

C HAPTER 4
    Ahmed Khan was sitting in his small, one bedroom apartment in Swindon, Wiltshire watching, with some degree of satisfaction, the images on his TV screen as they were beamed before him in a constant flow of news updates covering the explosion on the London Underground that morning. Once again his brothers had struck a mortal blow against the ‘Little Satan’ that was Britain. He wondered how this action might fit in with the operation he and his colleagues in his ‘Attack Cell’ were waiting to undertake.
    Born in Bradford, he had been brought up as a devout Muslim, regularly attending the Mosque with his father and celebrating all the religious festivals. He had left school, and Bradford, at eighteen to study chemistry at London University’s Imperial College. In common with many students finding themselves suddenly free of parental control and influences, he had succumbed easily to the temptations of student life. He had participated fully in the campus social scene ignoring the conflict between this and the culture and religion of his upbringing.
    On graduating he took a job in London, but away from the hectic social ‘buzz’ of university he had come to think more deeply about what he was doing and where his life was leading. He still socialised with