PLEDGE OF HONOR: A Mark Cole Thriller Read Online Free Page B

fire, he climbed quickly over the fence to the road beyond; saw, moments later, two police cars headed his way and opened fire again, peppering the vehicles with high-velocity rounds until they crashed into one another, spinning helplessly out of control into the fence line.
    Elated, Massoud set off at a fast run down the road, his destination never in doubt.
     
    The young couple looked concerned, but Rabbi Levi Shavitz just shook his head.
    ‘Gunfire?’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think so. Have you seen this weather? It must be thunder.’
    Although, after spending many years in Israel, he had to admit that it actually did sound a lot like gunfire. But best not to add to the couple’s fears. This should be a happy time for them, discussing the arrangements of their upcoming marriage.
    Shavitz had known them for years, members of good local families who attended the synagogue regularly. Both sets of parents were also here, and they too were looking rather concerned, especially now that the sounds of sirens were blaring across what seemed to be every street in the area.
    ‘Are you sure?’ asked Ted Weintraub, the father of the bride-to-be. ‘Maybe we should take a look?’
    At this he rose, moving across to the windows and pulling back the gauze net curtain to look into the dark, rain-soaked scene beyond.
    ‘What can you see?’ his daughter asked.
    ‘The police cars are headed here ,’ he said suddenly, turning back to the room. ‘But why - ’
    Shavitz’s attention was pulled from the panicking Weintraub then, as the door to the private study burst open, a dark-skinned bearded man surging forward into the room. Ammunition was draped across his shoulders in bandoliers and a machine gun rested in his hands, up and aimed at the group.
    ‘Please – ’ Shavitz started, but it was too late – the man was already pressing the trigger, cutting down everyone in the room in a blast of deafening, blinding gunfire.
    Everyone, that it, except for Shavitz himself, who could only look on helplessly as the young couple and their parents were annihilated by the ferocious firepower of the machine gun, eviscerated before his disbelieving eyes, the walls and floor of his study soaked with blood and tissue, broken bodies strewn this way and that across the furniture.
    ‘Get up,’ he heard the man say as the gun fell silent, and Shavitz realized only then that he was on the floor. He didn’t move, perhaps too shocked, but the heavy boot of the man on his ribs brought him back to reality in a flash. ‘On your feet,’ the man screamed, and finally Shavitz moved, pulling himself up.
    Immediately, the man seized him, twisting his hand around his neck while shoving the muzzle of the big gun against his cheek.
    ‘Come with me,’ the man whispered into his ear, and Shavitz had no other option but to comply.
     

14
    Sergeant Dave Anderson of the Met’s specialist armed division – known internally as SO19 – watched in dismay as the third terrorist gunman showed himself in the main entranceway of the synagogue.
    Two gunmen were already down – one shot by his own people, the other shot by one of the teachers before being blown to kingdom come by his own grenade – and here was another, although Anderson had no idea if he was the last. Intelligence was hard to come by at this moment in time, reacting as they were to such a fast-moving, fluid situation.
    The school was secured now, emergency medical personnel in attendance for the wounded and more of his own men scouring the halls and classrooms looking for more bad guys.
    The Met had secured the rest of the surrounding area, locking everything down tight so that nobody could escape the net.
    But right now, Anderson was more concerned with what was happening in front of him. There’d been no time to set up sniper positions, so he and his men were doing what they could, shielding themselves behind their car doors like the cops out of some eighties TV action show as they tried to