Yet the most difficult work had already been done. The scaffolding gave them ready access and the holes had been drilled. The stolen work order had specified the cutting of ten holes in each of the giant chimneys, on the side that faced into the disembowelled carcass of the old power station. Each hole was about the size of a squash ball.
Because of the loss of Payne they had decided to concentrate on only three of the four chimneys. They took one each, Amadeus, Scully, and Mary, with McKenzie supervising them. McKenzie hated heights, he preferred slithering on his stomach through minefields, although somehow at night it didn’t seem so bad. Yet in spite of their preparations the near two-hundred-foot climb up the scaffolding to the base of the chimneys took its toll – not on Mary, whose long and lonely walks across Exmoor had left her with an ocean of stamina on which to draw, but on Scully. He suffered, moaning softly at times, with that dead leg of his dragging behind him like an anchor. They lifted his load up on ropes.
Once inside the gutted walls they could have hidden an entire armoured division, but still they worked quietly. In the distance they could hear yelping, something had disturbed the mutts at the dogs’ home. Trains rumbled stubbornly across the nearby railway bridge, and from across the river came the wail of a distant ambulance siren, but inside the power station there was nothing but the soft scraping of rubber soles on scaffolding.
It was not skilled work. Everything had been prepared beforehand by McKenzie. A double thumb knot in the end of the grey detonator cord, pushed into the holes at the base of the chimneys so that a foot of the cord was left hanging from the end of each hole like a rat tail.
Then came the sticks of plastic explosive. Each stick seven-and-a-half inches long. One-and-a-half inches in diameter. About half a pound each stick and three to every hole. Pushed home with the wooden broom handle – no sparks! The explosive looked a little like flaky marzipan and as they unwrapped it from its greaseproof paper it smelt sweet, like almonds.
Child’s play, so far.
Then the rat tails were joined together with clips, and in turn joined to the speaker wire which they began to snake out like a ring main between the three chimneys.
It was getting cold, but they were all sweating from the climb.
Two fine white wires trailed out of the detonators, which were mated with the speaker wire. The speaker wire trailed down, down, down into the darkness of the power station.
As they dropped one roll of wire down it disturbed a nesting kestrel, which flew with screeches of complaint into the night. The noise echoed back from the empty walls like a shriek of demons. It started the dogs barking once more.
Now they fretted, because they had to wait while their handiwork was inspected by McKenzie. No chances. It took less than a minute for him to check the clips and the connections, but the best part of an hour to clamber up and down the three huge chimneys.
‘Christ, Andy, how long does it take you Engineers to organize a firework display?’
‘Takes a wee bit more care than falling out o’ the back of a perfectly serviceable aircraft, it seems to me. So away and play wi’ yersel’, sir.’
Waiting around and feeling their sweat dry in the cooling night air seemed a miserable option, so they busied themselves, Scully keeping lookout while Amadeus and Mary occupied themselves by reconnoitring for an alternative escape route. Just in case.
And that was when they realized they’d ballsed it up.
There wasn’t enough wire.
They had calculated the amount of wire they would need from information Mary had downloaded from a newspaper library on the Internet, a comprehensive article about the power station and its endless planning rows, complete with diagrams and dimensions. Except the dimensions had been wrong.
Bloody journalists!
They were almost a hundred metres short. Way short of the safety zone for firing that had been calculated by McKenzie. He’d hoped to fire the charges from the relative safety of outbuildings that stood near the railway arches, but once he had wired the three detonators together there was barely enough wire to get them beyond the main walls of the power station itself. They stood in a small circle around the car battery that was meant to fire the charges, the monstrous brickwork towering above them.
‘That’s a rare pity,’ McKenzie muttered quietly. He was never prone to exaggeration.
‘What’s to be done, Andy?’
‘Three choices, I guess. One: we call it a day and proceed to the pub. Or two: I wrap the bare speaker wires around the battery terminals and pray we don’t all get blown to a better world.’
‘Three. I’ll take three,’ Amadeus insisted.
‘We make do with just two chimneys. I’ll rip the wire off the third, that’ll be giving us more than enough cover.’
‘Not quite the same artistic effect,’ Amadeus replied, ‘but it’ll do. How long will it take?’
The Scotsman ran his hand through his thick hair. ‘Twenty minutes, maybe.’
But they didn’t have twenty minutes, not even twenty seconds. For the dogs they had heard barking were not from the dogs’ home but from the security pound. Disturbed by the screech of the kestrel, the Alsatian had alerted the watchman who had looked and listened. Then he had summoned the police.
The night suddenly turned upside down as the immense arc lights that illuminated the power station for special occasions were switched on. Amadeus and the others were caught like dazzled rabbits. Police vehicles were pouring through the main gate, piercing the night with the wail of sirens and the screeching of tyres. Amadeus knew they had failed. No chimneys, now. They wouldn’t even have time to make it back through the railway arches.
But it wasn’t over yet. The power station site was immense, nearly forty acres of it. Their pursuers were still a little way off; they still had vital seconds.
‘The tunnels!’ Amadeus shouted, suddenly freed of the hypnotic glare of the lights. ‘Mary and I found tunnels in the basement. Full of old power cables heading out under the river. We’ll try them.’ And he started running, back into the power station, away from the lights and the prying eyes.
It might prove to be less than a total disaster if they could make it through the tunnel. It was head-high and stank with a fetid mixture of stale damp air and rat shit, and its entrance was secured by a metal gate. They gate was padlocked. Raw metal blocking their way.
Fear lends unusual strength. Amadeus snatched up a length of scrap metal from the floor, used it as a jemmy and twisted it behind the padlock, which soon surrendered, clattering to the ground. Before them, disappearing into the Stygian darkness of the tunnel, stretched huge power cables and pipes as thick as a man’s arm, a legacy of the days when Battersea had provided a fifth of London’s electricity.
If there was nothing more at the other end, then they had a chance.
It was at this point they realized they were only three.
‘Scully! Where the fuck’s Scully?’
They were only a few paces into the tunnel, their torches dancing off the walls and floor, rats scattering before them and protesting at the invasion of their underground lair. The beam of a torch exposed a pile of rancid bones, what had perhaps once been a dog, lying in the middle of a stretching puddle. Intruders weren’t welcome here. Every noise seemed magnified, echoing off the walls – the scurrying rats, the insistent dripping water from the river above, their own tormented breathing. The sirens seemed a mile away, barely more than a distant wail.
‘Where’s Skulls?’ Amadeus demanded once more.
Before anyone had a chance to speculate, the air around them was filled with terror. It shook. It wanted to be elsewhere. It fled with a great rushing sound, like the death throes of an exhausted space capsule. Then came noise, a great crashing waterfall of noise which beat with the force of axes upon their eardrums and inside their skulls. A semi-solid tide of rubble and dust and dirt pushed its way past them, throwing them to the ground, filling their eyes and nostrils until they couldn’t brea
the.
Sun Tzu once wrote that the greatest battles are those that are never heard of. Well, screw Sun Tzu. The whole of London was going to hear about this one.
It seemed logical to Scully that he should stay behind and fire the charges. He couldn’t run, and if someone had to go down, better it be him. He had so much less to lose.
And he owed everything to Amadeus.
Sure, so Scully had saved him in the Falklands, but that was his job, part of the deal, what he’d signed up for. Amadeus owed him nothing. Yet throughout their time as Paras, Amadeus had always been there for him, not just as an officer but as a leader. A great leader.
Like the time Scully had found himself in a bar in Sardinia, in search of a little R&R after ten days of rigorous NATO exercises. He’d been nursing a drink at the bar when he’d noticed an ape who passed as a US Army artillery officer from Louisiana. Plenty of apes were officers, but this one had succeeded in attracting Scully’s attention by standing next to him at the bar and insisting that royalty was incest. Well, perhaps they’d tried that, too, but what Scully couldn’t ignore was the further opinion of the officer from Louisiana, expressed at bar-room volume, that this made the Queen nothing better than a laboratory-bred rat. A German rat at that. So Scully had hit him. Bloody hard. So hard that he’d broken the American’s nose, and with it broken his own career, for military regulations insist that striking an officer, even an alcoholic American example, is tantamount to striking a match while sitting in a puddle of petrol.
Scully was dead meat – until Major Amadeus, the Company Commander, had taken the American to one side and explained that Sardinia was full of weird and improbable stories. One story going the rounds was about how a US lieutenant had got himself creamed by a British NCO in a bar brawl – who ever heard of such a thing? A still wilder rumour concerned the attentions paid by that same lieutenant towards two rank-haired young men in the back room of the same bar. Amadeus had carefully and in considerable detail explained how, even in these liberated days, a cokehead from Louisiana with what seemed to be a persistent case of hay fever was scarcely in a position to go round insisting on investigations into what happened to his nasal passages in the back rooms of bars. No, the stories were not to be believed, none of them. The complaint had been dropped.
Amadeus was a great leader of men. A great friend. He’d even been godfather to Scully’s only child, a boy, Peter, named after Amadeus, although Scully would never admit as much to his wife.
Pity about the boy. Scully had been on manoeuvres when it happened. His wife was a neurotic bitch with a mouth full of venom and a bathroom cupboard full of pills. Every type of pill. Pills to sleep with, pills to wake up with, pills that relaxed you and pills that made you prance around the sergeants’ mess and act like a tart. Pills to fuck with and pills to stop babies with, but God knew why she needed them because after Peter the last thing she was interested in was fucking. At least fucking Scully. Always had a migraine, no matter how many pills she took.
Anyway, Peter had found the pills. He’d been only seven, poor little bastard, and Scully had got a message on exercise in Germany that he’d been granted compassionate leave. Took him totally by surprise. Why the hell did he need compassionate leave?
She was supposed to have been taking care of Peter. Same as she was supposed to have been taking care of Scully. Fucked up on both counts. Then fucked off.
So Scully had so much less to lose than the others.
Which is why he’d stayed behind and touched the bare wires to the battery terminals.
The noise of the three collapsing chimneys could be heard across central London. Nearly a million bricks falling from a height of 337 feet, carefully executed so that they fell inside the walls of the power station where they could do no harm and where the noise would be amplified like a huge drum. Even inside the chamber of the House of Commons, two miles down the river, they knew that something quite extraordinary had taken place, but precisely what no one was sure, not until the cloud of dust had settled.
Yet as the wind blew away the debris and the air cleared, two things were seen at Battersea. The first was the single remaining chimney, huge, white, illuminated so that it could be viewed from many miles around, pointing like a raised middle finger in the direction of Westminster. A symbol of defiance and contempt. In a campaign that had consisted entirely of symbolic gestures, this struck Amadeus as being particularly apposite.
The second thing to be seen at Battersea was a figure emerging from the dust. Scully had been blown over and beaten by the blast, shaken until he thought the fillings would be rattled out of his teeth, covered in dust and cut by flying debris. But he had survived. There was no point in trying to run. His leg now refused to work, he could barely walk. So he grabbed a piece of metal scaffolding to act as a crutch and, with considerable difficulty, had levered himself to his feet. Then he had walked towards inevitable capture.
It was the young officer’s first month as a member of the Armed Response Unit. He’d managed to get all the way through the Lippitts Hill training camp in Epping Forest without screwing up. Absorbed all the lectures, learned how to tuck his trousers into his boots, earned his Marksman classification on a whole bunch of weapons and succeeded in impressing the superintendent. Done it all – except, that is, for the active service bit. Now he’d been thrown in at the deep end, and word had come down from on high that these men were dangerous, enemies of the entire established order. That no risks were to be taken.
Thoughts tumbled inside his head, pushed savagely around by the pounding of the Air Support Unit helicopter that hovered overhead. He could feel the sweat beginning to prickle on his brow, but he had a good sighting through the night scope of his Heckler & Koch MP5. A single-shot carbine in its police variant. A single shot was all a trained marksman was supposed to need.
As Scully emerged from the fog of dust he appeared to be holding something. Something about the size and shape of a rifle. It was at his shoulder, and he was waving it in the direction of the police line. Christ, the guy was tooled up. Game on. At that precise and wretched moment, elsewhere on the field another officer stumbled over debris in the dark and fell with a cry. The radio spat into life and the novice’s earpiece exploded inside his brain with shouts of ‘Officer down! Officer down!’
Inexperience. Fear. Excitement. Adrenaline. Distraction. Perhaps even an in-built desire to do it for the first time, a dark fascination to see how it would feel that the psychologists hadn’t unravelled.
So the officer slotted Scully from a distance of almost sixty yards. The soft-point nine millimetre round had a muzzle velocity of thirteen hundred feet a second. It struck the side of the breastbone and began to spin along its axis, dumping its energy and tearing a hole in his chest all the way through to his heart. Blew poor Scully clean away.
SIXTEEN
The destruction of the power station was not the only bomb incident that night. In the early hours of the morning the emergency services received an anonymous phone call through a computerized voice synthesizer. It indicated that a car parked in front of a terraced house in the quiet residential street of Mayday Avenue in Clapham contained a bomb. It also mentioned that the bomber was asleep inside the house.
Sky News received similar information, equally anonymously, about fifteen minutes later.
There was immediate suspicion about the authenticity of the report, given the rather picturesque name of the location. Mayday Avenue? But who the hell was going to take any chances after a night like this? So, as quietly as is possible at two in the morning, Mayday Avenue was cordoned off and sniffer dogs sent in.
When they reached the suspect car, the dogs responded with great enthusiasm, running round and round in excited circles. When the VIM check revealed that the car had heavyweight military connections, things began to fall into place. Could this be the car that had transported the explosives to Battersea? Were the bombers inside the house?
Only one way to find out.
> An inspection through a night scope revealed that the downstairs windows were encased in metal security grilles. The front door also appeared to be reinforced. Perhaps nothing more than sensible precautions against domestic burglary, but also potentially the signs of fortifications around a bomb factory. There were other problems. Access from the rear was severely impeded by a series of gardens and walls – they wouldn’t be able to get a large force of men in that way without disturbing every cat in the neighbourhood. It had to be through the front door.
Oh, but there were so many uncertainties. They had no idea about the internal layout of the house, or who might be sleeping where. If there was a bomb in the car, should they try to disable it first? Or try to evacuate the rest of the street, knowing that it would take hours and almost certainly alert the bombers? No, it had to be simplicity and speed. Delay was not an option, if for no better reason than that Sky TV had already arrived and other news cameras would be hot on their heels. Soon this place was going to be a circus. They had to go straight in.
A bomb-squad Land Rover was driven up as close and as quietly as possible to the front door. One end of a metal chain encased in sound-smothering plastic was attached to the chassis, while the three-foot metal bar that dangled from the other end was carefully dropped through the letter box. It was known as an ‘enforcer’. Then the engine of the Land Rover was gunned and the clutch slipped. The metal chain went taut, the Land Rover hesitated as the tyres scrabbled for more grip, then lurched forward several yards. In its wake came the noise of splintering wood, and what remained of the front door of Number 27.