‘This is tomorrow’s headline.’
‘Good evening, Beaky. Is it OK to call you Beaky?’
‘Call me what you bloody well like so long as you shut up and listen.’
‘Sorry.’
‘This thing hasn’t finished yet.’
‘There’s more?’
‘Within the week.’
‘What are we talking about here? More disruption in the streets, or are we talking more personal attacks like Earwick?’
‘Oh, no, we’re aiming higher than that. Much higher.’
Then the line had gone dead.
Higher? Higher than what? Than the streets? Than Earwick? What the hell did it mean? Were they going to disrupt air traffic, for God’s sake? Or had they set their sights higher than the Home Secretary? But who was there, apart from the Prime Minister? Or – no, surely not her …
It was extraordinary misfortune that such questions should have been hanging in the air when, later that night, a mud-spattered Range Rover had been sighted driving well above the speed limit and heading along the B976, the lonely road west of Aberdeen that hugs the River Dee in the general direction of Balmoral. It was further cruel luck that the Vehicle Identification Mark check that was called for by a police constable at Glen Tanar showed that the vehicle belonged to a certain Colonel Charles Julius Anthony Forsdyke. Retired. Formerly of the Grenadier Guards, and one-time Commanding Officer of none other than Freddie Payne.
This was an unhappy coincidence for the Colonel, for the police check also showed that he appeared on two further lists. The first, which ran into tens of thousands, had been prepared by the Ministry of Defence and covered all known former military associates of Payne’s. Forsdyke figured on this list, inevitably and also prominently. The greater difficulty was that he also appeared on a second, much shorter, list that had been cobbled together in a hurry by Special Branch. This contained the names of anyone with a connection to the armed forces who was also suspected of being a critic of the Government. Not that there was any suspicion about Forsdyke. His views of the Government were unambiguous and had been delivered at a charity dinner less than two weeks previously within earshot of a Minister of State from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Forsdyke had used the occasion to refer to the Prime Minister as ‘Jonathan Bugger-All’ and to the Government as ‘containing more shits than a convenience in Calcutta’.
Perhaps Forsdyke had had too much to drink, or perhaps the Minister of State had too little sense of humour for the occasion, but in any event it meant that the Colonel’s name was on both lists. While inclusion on either rendered you a suspect, inclusion on both classified you as a major security risk.
Now this major security risk was heading for Balmoral.
Had he got a little further along the B976 he would, perhaps, have been dealt with by officers of the Royal Protection Squad, but the VIM check had been called in by a local panda car, and once the computers had declared that Forsdyke was in every respect a prime suspect, the response had been instantaneous.
Stop. Detain, if necessary. Detain if unsure. Take no chances, not on this one, laddie. On pain of banishment to one of the outer isles, do not let him pass within a million miles of Balmoral.
Reinforcements were already on their way when Forsdyke’s Range Rover was pulled over by the patrol car.
‘Evening, sir. I see we’re in a wee bit of a hurry.’
‘Good. So you’ll not be detaining me any longer.’
‘What, late for dinner with the Queen, are we?’
‘Matter of fact, I am.’
‘May I trouble you for your licence?’
‘No.’
‘Why is that then?’
‘Because I haven’t got it.’
‘I see.’
‘I very much doubt if you do. Look, I really am in a hurry, so why don’t you jump on that little radio thingy of yours and –’
‘Would you mind stepping out of the car, sir?’
‘I bloody well would.’
‘Step out of the car.’
‘Haven’t you got something more important to do?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like suggesting to your parents they might get married?’
‘Step out of the car. Please.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m placing you under arrest.’
‘Don’t be a little squit. On what charge?’
‘Fer being a shite. And fer tekin’ the piss out of the polis.’
It wasn’t entirely the constable’s fault. It was the problem with using raw data, the type that finds its way onto computer lists hurriedly thrown together by the security services. In many respects raw data resembles raw sewage. It’s all fine after it’s been treated, but until then …
It was only later, much later, after they had hemmed him in with their panda cars, their blue lights turning the countryside into a scene from Independence Day, and carted him off to the cells at Aberdeen, that they discovered the awful truth. He was late for dinner with Her Majesty.
They had arrested the Queen’s second cousin.
FIFTEEN
The Prussian strategist Clausewitz defined war as being the pursuit of politics by other means. Fortunately for the great man’s clarity of thought, he was not well acquainted with the system of politics we call democracy, which makes the pursuit of anything that requires consistent application fiendishly difficult and the pursuit of modern warfare almost impossible. For war in the new millennium is not a matter of personal sacrifice but of smart bombs deployed at great distances with battlefields that look as if they have been designed by Nintendo. Nowadays, when it comes to war, we’re all far too busy to bother with the mucky bits.
So, as the Government began to take further precautions in response to the escalating but ill-defined threat, London’s sense of humour began to fade. While the authorities were desperately trying to locate back-up generators and mobile electricity substations, Londoners were with equal desperation searching for somewhere to park. Substantial swathes of central London had been declared a ‘no park’ zone and Londoners fought and fumed for every inch of available kerb space. Ill-tempered queues developed outside carparks, in spite of the fact that the car-parking companies had doubled their tariffs overnight. Meanwhile vehicle-clamping contractors issued urgent pleas for additional temporary staff. It did nothing to help the capital’s sense of humour that the sequencing of traffic lights at many important junctions had been changed, slowing down the traffic still further in an attempt to assist the police observation squads who were now armed with video cameras and recording everything that moved, if it moved.
Insult was added to the overall sense of injury by the dramatic increase in helicopter traffic above the rooftops of London. Horse Guards Parade and the parade ground at Wellington Barracks were turned into temporary helipads as Ministers, on the advice of the security services, took to the skies to avoid becoming sitting targets in stationary traffic. This was nothing more than a sensible precaution in official eyes, but to most Londoners stuck in that stationary traffic it was simply another example of politicians taking the piss.
The helicopters were joined in the skies above the capital by an airship. Until the previous week it had been doing service as a mobile advertising blimp but it was now hurriedly requisitioned and fitted out with infrared and other surveillance kit, along with an emergency war-room communications facility – just in case. Its presence above the rooftops rapidly became as unpopular as that of the Army reinforcements who had been drafted in with instructions to make their presence painfully obvious. No longer were they tourist attractions, they couldn’t be. Most of the tourists had been frightened off. Those travellers who did brave the journey into the no-man’s-land of London found, as they emerged from the tunnel leading out of Heathrow Airport, that the APCs of the previous weeks had been replaced by Scimitar tanks.
The game was afoot, the stakes had been raised, but most ordinary people had no wish to join in.
Sure, the plotters had been a pain and had themselves brought London grinding to a halt, but only for a couple of hours. It had all been over by lunchtime. Now the Government was doing it every day of the week.
It seemed to the average Londoner that the plotters could at least claim to have a sense of humour, while all the Government had to offer was a blimp that droned above their heads day and night, like a mosquito in the bedroom. It was rapidly christened the Wimp Blimp.
What was more, while the common man suffered in the cause, where had the politicians gone? Buggered off in their helicopters, every one of them, or so it seemed.
Soon bumper stickers began to sprout on cars throughout London. Their message was simple and heartfelt.
‘Bring Back Beaky!’
Gibraltar Barracks is a military complex of low red-brick buildings and green fields just off the M3 motorway. It is the headquarters of 3RSME Regiment, the Royal Engineers training outfit. Gibraltar Barracks is where soldiers gather for ten weeks of basic training in the mysteries of how to make things go bang.
The Crown and Cushion pub, six hundred yards down the road, is where they gather once those mysteries have been unravelled. The pub’s Meade Hall to the rear is particularly popular. It has high vaulted ceilings and walls littered with ancient agricultural instruments, and it was in the Meade Hall that McKenzie had agreed to meet a freckle-faced young man named Kenny Evans. Evans stood out in any company. He had inherited from his Celtic father a shock of hair that looked more like an upturned bowl of carrot scrapings, while those who knew him well recognized him as a master in the of handling PE4. Plastic explosive. He had also been one of McKenzie’s corporals: 32 Engineer Regiment
They were lucky. The pub was crowded – much of the bar had been taken over for the birthday celebration of a sales rep in bathroom accessories from nearby Camberley – but they managed to find an unoccupied booth and settled in.
‘Guinness and a whisky chaser, I seem to remember, Kenny.’
‘Thanks, Andy.’ Evans took possession of the proffered glasses. ‘Don’t often get the chance of a chaser in these hard times.’
‘They giving you grief?’
‘Like you wouldn’t believe.’
‘Och, I suspect I might …’
‘No, Andy, you wouldn’t. It’s got worse than ever.’ Evans’s lilting Welsh pronunciation seemed to add pathos to his words. ‘It’s not an army any more; they’ve turned it into play school. Everything crawling with civilians. Even the security guards at the camp. You remember O’Shea?’
‘Corporal O’Shea?’
‘Not any longer he’s not. Comes back late the other week and starts getting grief from one of the civvy security guards. The guard barely seems to understand a word of the English language, so O’Shea uses some traditional English on him and tells him to go fuck himself, so he does. Next thing you know he’s been busted down to sapper.’
‘It’s a sadly changing world.’
‘Iechyd da, my friend. And so it is. You know, we just finished an exercise, joint ops with an Italian regiment. Cooks or something, so they were. Our European cousins are camped up in a wood on Salisbury Plain, and we’re supposed to take the position from ’em. What a bloody waste of time. Everything’s been scraped back so far that the British Army rattles when it walks and those brain surgeons in Logistics hadn’t even given us enough blanks to scare the bloody crows, let alone put the wind up Eyetie cooks. So what were we supposed to do, blow kisses at ’em? Anyhow, we get ourselves all kitted up, ready for the off, like, then the bloody truck arrives. The driver’s civvy, right, and says he’s been held up in traffic and he’s already over his legal hours. So what does he do? Goes and takes his break. Right then and there, that’s what! In the middle of the bloody war!’ He ran a hand through his hair in an attempt to bring some semblance of order to it, but it proved to be another wasted exercise. ‘You know, Andy, next time they send us into battle they’ll probably give us bus tickets. Bugger it. Looks like my round. Last one seems to have disappeared in rather a hurry.’
So they sat and drank, and reminisced about their time in Bosnia, building camps for the refugees, repairing bridges, opening routes that had been blocked first by one side then another, and all the while ducking bullets as they tried to dig the country out of the mess it had got itself into. Perhaps they might have been due some gratitude instead of bullets, but no one in Bosnia seemed to give a damn, apart from the children. And once CNN had moved elsewhere, to Kosovo and Chechnya and East Timor and Dagestan, no one back home seemed to give a damn either. They couldn’t even show you where it was on a map.
‘Anyway, Andy, you said on the phone you wanted a favour. It’s yours, my friend.’ Evans drained the last of his dark drink and watched the remnants of its sticky head drain slowly back into the bottom of the glass. ‘So what’s up?’
‘I’m away up to Scotland in a couple o’ weeks, Kenny. My father’s sixtieth. Big family reunion on the estate. Thought I might arrange a wee fireworks display in his honour.’
‘You’d like a little PE4.’
‘There’s an old milking shed, a real eyesore he’s been itching to get rid o’ for ages, and a few old trees. Thought I’d bring in a couple o’ ancient cars, too, just for the pyrotechnics. That kind o’ thing.’
‘How much you want?’
‘A couple of cases. Three if you can manage.’
Evans sucked his teeth. ‘That gives me a bit of a problem, Andy.’
It wasn’t the request for PE4 that bothered him. Amongst engineers a case of explosive is no more significant than a case of Diet Coke, there’s always some lying around somewhere. Neither was it the purpose for which the explosive was wanted – if you’ve trusted a man with your life, as Evans had trusted McKenzie time and again in Bosnia, you take many other things on trust, too. Siphoning a couple of cases out of the system was simpler than liberating sweets from Sainsbury’s. It was the responsibility of the officer in charge of the range day to sign for all munitions used on exercises, but it was Corporal Evans who provided the manifest. The officer would have no more interest in checking the number of cases on that manifest than he would have in counting the sparrows in an orchard.
It was a little light larceny, no worse than using the office photocopier for your tax returns. But Kenny Evans had other problems. ‘You see, Andy, I’ve promised to take the kids to the new Spielberg film tomorrow evening, so I couldn’t possibly let you have a couple of cases then. Earliest would be the night after. Will that do?’
The drilling crew arrived promptly at seven a.m. at the security gate to the Battersea Power Station in Kirtling Street. They needed an early start.
‘Gotta be finished by close of play,’ they explained to the security guard.
‘What’s all this then?’
A work order was waved in the grey morning light.
‘Holes for some sort of monitoring equipment. In the chimneys, to check they ain’t moving, John.’
John, whose name in fact was Wesley, scratched his stomach and inspected the work order. ‘I ain’t been told nothing ’bout this.’ But then they rarely told him anything.
‘Not a big job. Ten small holes in each spout. We was told you had scaffolding up there already. Right? Authorized by Mr … who is it?’ The drill operator peered over the guard’s shoulder at the flapping piece of paper. ‘Name of McManus, that’s it. See, it’s all signed, John.’
Sammy McManus was on holiday but the paperwork was in order. Nothing unusual. Just another part of the cat’s cradle of services required to keep a structure like this in one piece.
‘How long all this gonna take, you say?’
‘Out of your hair by close of play, with luck, me old mate.’
‘Yeah. Sure. OK. Can’t be too careful with these old buildings, can you?’
The gates swung open and the green and yellow truck of the Acme Diamond Drilling Services rolled inside. An entirely legitimate crew, who would drill a hole for you in anything
, so long as they had a signed work order. Even if it had been stolen. Acme Diamond Drilling Services were ‘Specialists in Diamond Drilling, Wall & Floor Sawing, Selective Demolition, Concrete Crushing …’, plus a number of other heavy-duty services on concrete, so its box in the Yellow Pages said.
If you wanted Acme’s help, all you had to do was look them up in the phonebook and call.
From their vantage point across the river, McKenzie and Mary watched the figures from Acme crawling across the scaffolding. Throughout the rest of the day and from different spots they continued to observe the crew setting about their work. Not until the last hole had been drilled and the equipment was being stowed did they permit themselves to relax.
McKenzie set aside his binoculars and turned to Mary.
‘Should be one hell of a firework display, eh, lassie?’
She smiled in agreement, a soft smile. Then she raised herself onto her toes and kissed him.
They came in through a railway arch that bordered the site. There was only a battered wooden fence in their way, and plenty of cover from the bridge to hide what they were doing. It was also at a point farthest from the main gate and the security guards with their dogs, which on such a large site meant they could have been on the other side of town.
The daylight had gone and low cloud hid the moon. Not that it made much difference; there was so much ambient night light in London that it simply bounced back off the cloud and lit their path. You could read the headlines in a newspaper. Amadeus reckoned they’d have plenty of new headlines to read the following morning.
They missed Freddie Payne. This was, in truth, a five-man job. It wasn’t so much the plastic explosive – they needed nearly fifty pounds of PE4, all packed into McKenzie’s bergen – double what the textbooks said would be needed plus ten per cent to be sure. The Law of Combat Engineering, which says that you double up on everything because you never get a second chance. The main problem was the audio speaker wire that had been purchased at different outlets down the Tottenham Court Road. It came in great rolls. This is what they would use to wire the charges, since they had decided to detonate the plastic explosive manually. No timers, they wanted to leave nothing behind that might be traced. Each of them carried three of the rolls, Mary included, and there were also radios, wire cutters, ropes, torches, sections of broom handle, even a twelve-volt car battery.