by Peter James
Next, Kundert updated Oscar-1 on the developing incident, giving him brief details, then asked Morris to arrange for the Expo dog handler, Anna Riis, who was at the stadium on standby, to check the camera out urgently.
The dog handler appeared with her springer spaniel, Brayley, wearing a fluorescent green harness labelled EXPLOSIVES SEARCH.
A fresh chant broke out. ‘WE ARE BRIGHTON, SUPER BRIGHTON, WE ARE BRIGHTON FROM THE SOUTH!’
Several people stood up to avoid their view being blocked by the handler, which had a ripple effect, and in seconds the whole stand was on its feet. The steward directed the handler to the suspect device. The excited dog stood, placing both paws on the edge of the seat, pointing at the camera with its nose. Then, as it had been trained, it tapped its right paw, several times.
Now for Adrian Morris the nightmare had become real.
16
Saturday 12 August
Earlier that day
Passengers at Tenerife Airport were buckling themselves into their seats on the BA flight bound for London’s Gatwick Airport, four hours away.
Among them were retired Brighton solicitor Martin Diplock and his wife, Jane, a former legal executive. They were both a little apprehensive, as were many of the passengers of a similar vintage to themselves who were old enough to remember that this airport, on 27 March 1977, was the scene of the deadliest accident in aviation history. In thick fog, the pilot of a KLM Boeing 747 misheard the instructions of the control tower and began taxiing, straight into the path of a Pan Am Boeing 747. Five hundred and eighty-three people were killed.
But the elegant young woman seated beside them, in designer jeans and trainers, an expensive-looking leather jacket, a bling watch and sharply styled brown hair, who told them she was in transit from Albania, seemed even more anxious than themselves, trembling and perspiring, and constantly looking at her watch as if fixated by it. And each time she looked, her lips moved, as if she was doing some kind of mental arithmetic.
The unspoken thought went through both their minds, however irrational they knew it was, that she might be a terrorist, anxious about the timer on a bomb. To make conversation, Jane asked her if she was OK. The young woman assured her in limited, broken English that she was fine, this was only the second flight in her life and she was a little nervous, that was all. She was fine, thank you, really!
Jane Diplock felt better, too; she seemed a sweet little thing, not sinister at all – although how could you really tell?
The cabin crew closed the doors, but there was no sign of the engines starting. Then the pilot’s voice came through the intercom, calm and steady and very apologetic. He said there was a technical problem and they were waiting for an engineer. There was likely to be a delay of thirty minutes, maybe a little longer. Meanwhile, passengers could continue to use their electronic devices.
Martin Diplock checked the time. 12.10 p.m. It was a four-hour flight and they were due to attend his son’s birthday dinner in Brighton this evening – it would be tight as the plane wasn’t scheduled to land until 16.40.
The young woman produced a mobile phone with a gaudy cover from her new-looking handbag and started to play a game on it. After a couple of minutes, she looked at her watch yet again and began, feverishly, doing more mental arithmetic.
After almost an hour the pilot came back on the intercom. He was very sorry he told them, the engineer was delayed. He would give them a further update shortly.
The woman looked increasingly anxious. She was perspiring more heavily now.
‘Are you OK?’ Jane Diplock asked her.
She nodded, her complexion pale, then began counting again on her manicured fingers, her lips moving as she did so.
17
Saturday 12 August
17.00–18.00
There wasn’t much anyone could teach Stephen Suckling about mechanical diggers, grabbers and Jaw Crushers. He was fifty-two, and he’d held an operator’s licence since he was twenty-seven. After ten years of back-breaking manual labour on building sites – much of it in shite weather – he figured out there had to be an easier way for someone with few academic qualifications to make a living.
Such as the guys on the sites driving the bulldozers and cranes, for a start. They were inside their cabs, cosy and dry, and, he subsequently discovered, took home a far fatter pay packet than most of the manual labourers. So he’d got himself some qualifications by attending night school.
Since then he’d driven pretty much every make and model of construction site vehicle that was out there. Then he spotted a job advert that really appealed – and was the successful applicant. For the past eight years he’d been contentedly employed at the four-acre Shoreham Harbour depot of the Recycled Aggregates Supplies division of Carter Contracting, driving a yellow caterpillar-track excavator and operating the fifty-ton Premiertrak R 400 Powerscreen Jaw Crusher. That monster machine reduced the piles of rubble brought in daily by the company’s endless chain of lorries into different grades. Some would provide footings for the construction industry, some for highways or footpaths, car parks or drains.
There wasn’t much, after this length of time, that anyone could tell him about crushing concrete, nor demolition rubble, nor asphalt – although asphalt was his least favourite stuff because on hot days, like today, it stuck in the grabber’s jaws, and had to be laboriously scraped away by hand. His hands, as he was the sole operator on this site.
That was one of the things he liked most about this job. His bosses, working out of a Portakabin at one end of the site, pretty much left him to it, and so long as he kept up with the constant deliveries, working away at the different piles, his hours were his own, and there was no asshole of a site foreman to shout at him.
The county was currently going through a building boom, which meant demand for aggregates was at a premium. For Stephen Suckling, this meant lots of overtime and nice, fat wage packet every Thursday.
He also had a very secret, very nice little earner on the side.
Right now, Suckling, with his muscular body and shaven head, dressed in a high-viz vest over a grubby singlet and jeans, was sitting in the cabin of his JCB, operating the levers to dig the bucket deep into the side of a pyramid of rubble. He raised it in the air, swung it round and emptied the load into the hopper of the Jaw Crusher, which made a grinding roar. Tiny pieces rode up the Crusher’s conveyor and tumbled to the ground, forming a new pyramid.
He could set the level of the Jaw Crusher into different gradings. Type 1 would be recycled rubble for the construction industry. Type 6F2 would be a smaller grading, mostly for drains or for the footings of a new road.
That was what this particular pile was for – the road in a new housing development near Horsham.
He had chosen to work on this Saturday for two reasons. Firstly, because his bosses had asked him, and it was all on overtime pay. Secondly, because no one was around. They were all at the Amex Stadium, watching the Albion’s first league game of the season, against Manchester City. He would have liked to have been there too, to support his home team, but the money was too good today. He wasn’t just getting overtime from his Carter Contracting bosses, he was getting a very big bung from a certain Mr Jorgji Dervishi – an Albanian paymaster who regularly gave him five grand in cash to not notice human body parts inside a particular pyramid of rubble. Limbs, torso and a head which he would crush beyond all recognition, and in a week or so would be safely buried beneath hundreds of tons of tarmac. Forever.
And tonight, after he had finished here, he was looking forward to going to a barbecue at some friends’ with his wife, Aileen – and most of all he was looking forward to a cold beer. He could murder one now.
As the rubble dropped off the end of the conveyor he saw what looked like a human hand. Almost instantly, it was covered by more finely ground rubble. Then he noticed, dispassionately, what might have been part of a human head. Some hair and an ear?
He swung the machine round, dug back i
nto the pyramid and raised another bucket-load in the air.
Then there was a sound from the JCB he had never heard before. A chunk-chunk-chunk grinding sound. The whole cab vibrated, alarmingly.
Then silence.
A red warning light flashed on the dashboard.
Shit, fuck.
He peered out of the cab window, alarmed, at the bucket, which was halted high in the air.
Especially at the object hanging over the side.
Unmistakably, a severed human arm. It was wearing a shiny wristwatch.
Shaking, he turned the ignition off, then back on again, and pressed the starter button.
Nothing happened.
‘No, no, no!’
He tried again. Then again.
Nothing.
The arm dangled. Too high for him to reach.
In desperation, he climbed out of the cab and, monkey-style, tried to climb along the extended, articulated boom of the machine, holding on to the hydraulic cylinder that would raise the second boom, to which the bucket was attached. He reached the linkage, hauled himself over, then tried to slide down the next section, to the bucket.
He lost his grip.
Plunging, his head struck the side of the bucket six feet below, then he fell another fifteen feet to the hard ground, landing upright with a sickening crunch, a snapping sound and searing pain from his legs as he crashed face down.
He cried out in pain, desperately tried to move and screamed again in agony.
Then he lay rigid with panic.
Oh Jesus, no.
The lower bone of his right leg was sticking out through his jeans. His shattered left leg lay at an impossible angle, partly beneath his body.
He tried to raise himself with his arms, but the pain was too excruciating.
Above him, he heard the cry of gulls. And above him he also saw the bucket. The human arm. The wristwatch glinting in the afternoon sun.
Thoughts spun through his pain-addled mind. He tried to haul himself along the ground towards the JCB. Stared around the site, at the piles of grey and brown rubble. At two parked blue lorries’ signs – written in the red lettering of his employers. CARTER. A skip filled with junk wood, plaster and cartons that he had removed from some of the building-site rubble that had come in recently. At the green roof of a warehouse on the wharf across the water, on the far side of Shoreham Harbour.
It was dawning on him that going to that barbecue tonight was not going to happen. It was also dawning on him that this was the least of his problems. He crawled again, a few inches nearer the caterpillar tracks of the JCB, then stopped, crying out in pain.
What the hell to do?
He felt in his jeans pocket. The hard lump of his mobile phone was there. Thank God! He eased it out, every movement shooting further pain through his body, dialled 999 and asked for an ambulance.
In his blurred and confused mind he wondered, perhaps, if the paramedic crew might not look up and notice anything amiss.
18
Saturday 12 August
17.00–18.00
The coded message the dog handler relayed to Adrian Morris via the police radio operator told him the sniffer dog had detected possible explosives in the suspect item.
Morris informed the Match Commander, who updated Oscar-1. He in turn alerted the duty officer at the Explosives Ordnance Division, based in Folkestone – and emailed him a photograph of the camera, lifted from the stadium’s CCTV. The EOD, who were normally one hour and ten minutes away, on blue lights, would make an instant assessment from the image, using guidelines set out by NaCTSO, the National Counter-Terrorism Security Office, for the area of evacuation required in the event of a suspected bomb.
Less than one minute later Kundert’s phone rang. It was the EOD duty officer. ‘Sir, it looks a relatively small object. We have a unit at Gatwick Airport on a training exercise and we’ve dispatched them – they’ll be with you in thirty minutes. We’d like you to immediately clear a minimum area of fifty metres around the object. One hundred would be preferable, but given your situation, we’d be OK with fifty.’
He relayed the information to Morris and everyone present in the Control Room. One hundred metres would mean a total evacuation of the stadium, and a crowd-control nightmare. One potential danger they needed to be mindful of was that of secondary explosive devices, a classic terrorist tactic, where explosives would be placed in the Rendezvous Points to where the evacuated crowds would be directed. For this reason, the club kept these RV points a secret, regularly changing them. If they just evacuated the South Stand, where the suspect camera was, and part of the East and West Stands, they could put the people in safe RV points in the concourse and immediately outside. But more than that and they would have to send them home. Which would mean the match was abandoned and would have to be rearranged.
They all agreed to an immediate partial evacuation. With luck, if the device turned out to be a false alarm, there was a possibility, albeit slim, of recommencing the game.
Kundert called Oscar-1 and informed him of the decision.
Keith Ellis immediately ordered a Roads Policing Unit escort to meet the EOD vehicle at the junction of the Gatwick slip road and the A23, and help speed its journey to the stadium.
As he put down his radio, his phone beeped.
It was Roy Grace.
The two of them went back a long way. Ellis had been Roy’s sergeant at John Street police station, when Grace had been a uniformed probationer, nearly twenty years ago.
‘What’s the update at the Amex, Keith? I’m here with my son.’
‘They’re not happy with the camera. EOD are on their way.’
Roy turned and looked at Bruno and thought, I need to get you out, now.
19
Saturday 12 August
17.00–18.00
In simulations, it had proven possible to evacuate every stand within eight minutes. Could that be achieved now, Adrian Morris wondered? He prepared to hit the panic button and order the total evacuation of the South Stand and the partial evacuation of the neighbouring West and East Stands – the seating blocks immediately adjacent – and called up on his screen the announcement he was about to read out over the public address. He glanced at his watch, every second feeling like an hour, his throat tight and his mouth dry, then read the words over to himself:
‘We regret that due to a security incident, play has been suspended. We are carrying out a partial evacuation in the stadium. Supporters in blocks A–E in the East and West Stands and all supporters in the South Stand are asked to leave in an orderly manner, and follow the instructions of the stewards and the police outside. A decision whether the match will restart will be made as soon as possible.’
The protocol was that he would order all concessions and toilets to be closed, immediately.
Oh God, he thought, staring again at the camera, then at the message, his guts twisting. Am I doing the right thing?
But is there any other option?
20
Saturday 12 August
17.00–18.00
‘What is happening, Papa?’ Bruno asked his father, seeing him end the call.
Grace looked back anxiously at the camera on the empty seat. ‘I don’t know, Bruno.’
He was desperate to get his son – and himself – away from that camera. Ellis had confirmed his worst suspicions, that something was wrong about it, about the man who had left it there. Very wrong. And now he had all the information he needed.
But he was in a quandary. If he did rush Bruno out, and a few minutes later the bomb detonated, there would be questions asked. He was a police officer, aware there was a bomb, and he simply fled with his son?
All around him fans were on their feet, roaring, totally focused on the game. They wouldn’t take any notice of him if he did try to warn them. But the longer they stayed, the greater the risk that the bomb, if real, would detonate. Any second now, the game would be halted and there would be a public address announce
ment to evacuate. Surely?
‘I think there’s a suspect item in the stadium, Bruno,’ he said, trying not to look obviously at the camera, but unable to keep his eyes off it.
‘Is this a terrorist attack?’ Bruno asked.
He squeezed his son’s arm. ‘Hopefully a false alarm.’
‘Will they stop the game for a false alarm?’
‘Let’s hope it’s just that.’ Again, he looked anxiously at the camera. Thinking it through. If they evacuated the stadium, could the game be restarted later today? They would have to wait for the Army Explosive Ordnance Division to arrive, and from experience that could be a couple of hours. Once here, the EOD would send a robot to examine the camera and assess it. Then they would either try to disrupt it or, more likely, carry out a controlled detonation of it.
There was no way the match would resume today. And the public relations damage to the city, on its most important match ever, would be immense.
‘Don’t you think mathematics is important, Papa?’ Bruno said, turning to him.
‘Mathematics?’
‘All these terrorist bombs.’ Bruno nodded solemnly. ‘They kill sometimes twenty people, sometimes one hundred and twenty. There are twenty-four thousand people killed every week on the roads of the world, in traffic accidents. But no one stops people from driving. There are thirty thousand people in this stadium today. So, if a bomb exploded, maybe one hundred would die. That’s a pretty small percentage, don’t you think?’
Roy Grace looked down at his son, curious that he knew all this data, and concerned by the matter-of-fact nature of his voice. ‘Bruno, I don’t consider one unlawful death to be acceptable and nor should you.’