‘I can only assume that they were as much in the dark as we were.’

‘This isn’t going to go down well at No. 10, Justin,’ said C, shaking his head.

‘Tell me about it.’

‘You know the PM,’ said C. ‘I’ll leave you to brief her.’

Justin Nicholls and the Rt Hon Penelope Morgan MP had dated each other for a couple of years in their student days, and had stayed close ever since.

Nicholls nodded.

On the wall to his right was a bank of screens – some showing news channels, others live feeds from Spanish intelligence cameras. One delivered the confidential feed, the updated intelligence picture available to the SIS.

A status update for the MS Windsor Castle said that the incident at Málaga was now over, with four attackers confirmed killed. At Marbella, two attackers had been shot dead on the Puerto Banús beach, and two other men had just been taken into custody.

And then a new line appeared on the feed.

Spanish police helicopter chasing high speed boat across Med towards Moroccan coast. SPS Juan Carlos I also launching marines. Royal Moroccan Navy alerted.

‘That’s them,’ said Nicholls.

25.

THE BOAT CARRYING Argun ‘Dark Eyes’ Shishani, the man in the Manchester United shirt, and the shooter called Khaled, and their three female hostages, had had a big head start.

In all the confusion, it was well over forty kilometres from the Spanish coast by the time the Grupo Especial de Operaciones Eurocopter EC120 Colibri lifted off in pursuit.

But the two pilots put the aircraft nose down and flew flat out, the single Turbomeca engine straining to throw out its 504 shaft-horsepower, and they had the speeding Lucky Lady in sight on their on-board camera well inside twenty minutes, and in visual contact not long afterward.

Two kilometres out, the two GEO snipers aboard leaned out of the helicopter on harnesses and trained the scopes of their AMP DSR-1 .338 rifles on the streamlined yacht.

The officer on the left hand side, an oficial de policía, had the clearest view.

‘I can see two armed men on the rear deck,’ he shouted, into his collar microphone. ‘Three women are standing in front of them, hands on their heads.’

‘Roger that,’ said his colleague, a subinspector. ‘I’ll take the right, you take the left.’ Half a minute later, and a kilometre closer, he said, ‘Do you have a shot?’

He already knew the answer.

Both men were highly skilled, and their rifles, chambered for the Lapua Magnum cartridge, were effective out to 1,500 metres.

In theory.

At this distance, in a speeding helicopter caught in the up and down thermals of the Mediterranean, with the targets contained on a small rear deck, under an overhanging roof, on a boat crashing through waves, with civilians in the foreground…

‘No way.’

The second sniper leaned forward and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. ‘We need to get a lot closer,’ he shouted. ‘We can’t take any kind of shot at this range.’