by Ted Bell
“I am.”
“What do you do now?”
“Defend the realm, of course.”
FORTY-THREE
LONDON, PRESENT DAY
DAYBREAK. THE VENERABLE THAMES BARGE PUDGE, narrow of beam but with eighty feet of gleaming black hull on her waterline, was docked at Greenwich Pier. Her captain, Terrence Spencer, was a ruggedly put together seaman with a broad chest, heavily muscled shoulders, and a full red beard. He stood drinking a mug of steaming coffee just outside the low-roofed wheelhouse. Terry and his young charter client were watching the rental truck being unloaded.
Terry, like his dad and gramps before him, had been a Thames riverman since he was old enough to swim. He looked at the bearded lads offloading boxes of equipment from the lorry and shook his head. What a sorry lot. He thought he’d seen it all. He had chartered the old girl countless times over the years, anniversaries, weddings, retirement parties, but this bunch was a first, he had to say.
A rock-and-roll band. Called themselves Sunni and the Scimitars.
Clever, that.
“How much longer?” he asked the band’s manager and lead singer, Sunni, pronounced “Sonny.” His full name was Sunni Khan. At one time, that would have been an unusual name for a Pudge client, Terry mused silently. But, now, almost eighty thousand Britons had the surname Khan. True, he had read it in the Mirror. That made Khan the eightieth-most-common surname in the United Kingdom. He’d looked up his own name, Spencer, just for fun. Number 147. Fancy that.
Sunni was a nice enough looking young kid, clean shaven, expensive leather jacket, even had a tie on. He was a student at LSE, he told Terry, and then said, London School of Economics, obviously for the brawny, brainless barge captain’s edification. “Oh, is that what LSE stands for?” he asked the kid. “Always wondered about that. My daughter goes there.”
“Sorry. No offense meant, sir.”
“If you want to be on schedule, we need to get moving right away.”
“Truck’s almost empty, sir. I think you can plan to shove off in about twenty minutes or so. Sorry we’re late. Few last-minute snags with the lorry rental.”
The lorry had backed right up to the edge of the dock. Young toughs with beards and long stringy hair were still rolling large black boxes down the truck’s ramp. Had the name of the band stenciled on each box in big white block letters: sunni and the scimitars. Terry’d never heard of them, but then he’d stopped listening to music when Sinatra died.
Some of the lads were belowdecks in the midships hold, uncrating who knows what electronic gear, amplifiers, musical instruments, and such for the afternoon cruise upriver. There was to be a concert in the meadow across from Hampton Court. The band, Sunni had told him, intended to set up their instruments atop the large midships hatch cover. A floating concert was the idea he said, a new angle. Every ticket sold out.
Floating concert, my arse, Terry thought.
These clever blokes who’d booked Pudge for a full-day stint had no idea of his boat’s historic significance. Nor, if they knew, he thought, would they bloody care. Foreigners, of course. No knowledge of British history. Didn’t care. Hated the country, the people, the government, from what he’d read in the Daily Mirror.
Terry had an idea: if they didn’t bloody like it here, didn’t like our flag, our religion, our way of life, pack up and go home! He’d never express those feelings out loud of course, very un-PC as his wife would say. He was beginning to wonder about this whole PC movement. He thought it was ruining everything, especially the truth.
Pudge had played a historic, one might even say heroic, role in the evacuation of British troops at Dunkirk in World War II. Towed across the Channel by tugs for speed, the rescue barges were all rigged with sails to get them ashore upon release from the tugs. The crew of Pudge raised her sail just offshore and made a hard landing on the beach. She took on nearly three hundred soldiers. A bunch of the lads, under heavy fire, managed to shove her back into the sea, and get her under way toward home under sail.
Despite continuous strafing attacks by German dive-bombers, mine-infested waters, British destroyers being sunk to her right and left by countless batteries of heavy German guns on the cliffs, somehow, old Pudge had survived. She managed to make it all the way to Ramsgate and there delivered her precious cargo of human passengers safely ashore. Terry’s grampa had been her captain then, not that anyone remembered such feats of heroism anymore.
And this lot of foreigners, his “clients,” you think they knew beans about his dad? Fat bleeding chance. Born in Bedford during a 1918 Zeppelin airship raid, drama would follow him to the end of his days. In the Battle of Britain, he became a right legend, he did, posted to an American squadron flying P-51 Mustangs. He was known for flying just ten feet off the ground to avoid German radar, strafing enemy trains, boats, and military convoys, whatever he set his sights on.
But the truly amazing thing about his old man? He figured out how to take out the Nazi doodlebug flying bombs! He’d destroy them in flight by poking them with his wingtips! Now that was something. Earned him the nickname “Tip it in Terry” and national acclaim as one of Britain’s most striking daredevils.
Maybe Sunni and the Scimitars could sing a song about that.
AN HOUR LATER, AFTER AN UNEVENTFUL CRUISE, Pudge was nearing the Lambeth Bridge. Sunni had stayed in the wheelhouse with Terry for the entire voyage, over in the corner whispering on his mobile most of the time, while the band members had come topside and stretched out atop the main hatch cover, getting some sun and talking quietly among themselves.
“Captain,” Sunni said. “Unexpected stop. Seems my drummer slept in this morning and missed the lorry. He’s waiting for us now on the Lambeth Pier just beyond the bridge.”
Terry looked ahead, gauging his distance and the time it would take to slow the big barge. For some reason, he noticed, the band members had slid the big hatch open and disappeared down into the cavernous hold.
“Wish you’d told me sooner,” Terry said, throwing the engines hard astern, slowing the big barge just as her bow passed under the busy Lambeth bridge. Water was boiling at her stern as he put the helm over to starboard and lined up on the pier. Sure enough, there was another scruffy musician waiting there.
Pudge’s sole crewman had two lines ready and looped one neatly over the top of a bollard and cleated another as Terry eased her alongside the pier. It was a right nice piece of seamanship considering. The drummer leaped aboard and helped the mate free the lines. Terry gave her big diesels a bit of throttle and pulled away from the pier. No maritime traffic in either direction right now, so he headed right to the center of the river to begin the final leg of his journey up to Hampton Court. Be glad when it was over. Something about the whole charter had seemed wrong from the beginning. It was just too—
The captain felt cold steel pressure at the back of his skull and knew immediately that he had made a very terrible mistake. He heard the pistol, a round going into the chamber of the automatic.
“Full stop, Captain,” Sunni Khan said. “Or I’ll happily blow your brains out.”
“Who the bloody hell are you people?” Terry roared, all of the pent-up anger at what was happening to his country bursting forth at once.
“Sword of Allah, Captain, that’s what’s happening.”
“Sword of Allah. Right. Same blokes who killed all those hundreds of people at Heathrow last year.”
“They died for a great cause.”
“They died for shit, you filthy little bugger.”
Sunni jammed the pistol painfully into his temple and said, “Stop this boat, Captain, now!”
Terry hauled back on the throttles and the boat slowed quickly to a stop.
“Now give her just enough forward throttle to hold her steady in place against the current. Do exactly as I say and you might live through this, Captain.”
Terry did as he said. He wanted supper at home with the missus tonight and after that to hoist a few pints on t
he corner with his mates at the Bag of Nails. “If I go, I’m taking you with me, Sunni-Boy,” he said.
He looked forward, scanning the bow, looking for Tim, his mate. That’s when he saw the motionless body lying on the deck just aft of the midships hatch cover. Blood was pooling around his head. His mate was dead. The main hatch cover was now open and equipment was rapidly being handed up from below and mounted on the hatch cover. Looked like bloody pipes resting on a tripod, most of the stuff.
“Don’t look like bloody musical instruments to me,” he muttered.
“Mortars,” Sunni said. “Russian Podnos 82mm mortars,” he informed the captain in a very casual way. “Not cheap, either, but perfect for this kind of short-range attack. Each mortar throws a three-kilogram fragmentation bomb a thousand yards at twenty rounds a minute. Keep your eyes open and you’ll see the effect.”
When Terry cast his eyes to the right to see what the mortars were aimed at, he thought, Bloody hell. They were going to blow up Thames House. It was the headquarters of MI5. The very people who were charged with protecting us from these kinds of animals.
All six mortars started firing rapidly and simultaneously. Each was targeted at different areas of the building, and the immediate effect was catastrophic. Giant hunks of concrete and glass were blasted away, whole sections of wall and roof started collapsing, and fire broke out everywhere, flames licking out of windows. The death and injuries inside must be horrific, Terry thought.
But the tide turned quickly against the Sword of Allah. Thames House was not quite as helpless as it looked. Return fire suddenly erupted from the roof of the giant building. Even though his precious barge was being riddled with lead, Terry cheered loudly for the men behind the guns up there.
The weapons atop Thames House were M61 Vulcan 20mm Gatling guns. And they trained their deadly fire on the stationary barge. These modern versions of the old Gatling guns were in fact six-barreled rotary cannons, each capable of firing more than six thousand rounds per minute.
Pudge was being ripped to pieces. But so were all the terrorists behind the mortars on the main hatch cover. Their bodies were literally shredded right before Terry’s eyes, and what was left of their corpses was blown backward over the gunwales and into the river.
There was no more glass in the wheelhouse, and Terry was very surprised he was still alive. Pudge had been built of heavy steel, including the wheelhouse, and the rounds were pinging off. Sunni shouted, “Get her out of this fire!” For some bizarre reason, Sunni believed he could still escape the murderous hail of lead from the Thames House rooftop.
“Full astern,” Sunni screamed above the thunderous fusillade from M15. “Back her down beneath the bridge and stay there!”
Terry looked over his shoulder. Amazingly enough, people had just stopped their cars on the bridge and gotten out to have a look. Insanity begets insanity.
He shouted, “It is over, you rank-smelling little moron! You’ll never escape now!”
“Not quite over, Captain. I have loaded three 200-pound nitrate-peroxide bombs in the hold. I’m now going to take out the Lambeth Bridge and everyone on it.”
“Timed-fuse or detonator?” Terry asked, seemingly on autopilot, having watched far more than just a few episodes of Spooks on the telly. Some part of his brain knew that if the answer was “detonator,” he was going to ignore the bloody pistol and rip the little bastard’s head off, then toss his fuckin’ detonator overboard.
“Detonator,” Sunni said, and patted his shirt pocket. “Right here in my…shit! I gave it to Rashid in case…shit!” Rashid, as they both knew, no longer existed.
At that moment, two Tornado Air Defense F3 fighter jets screamed just overhead, not twenty feet above the Lambeth Bridge and Pudge. You could see the deadly air-to-surface missiles hung in the shadows beneath their wings.
The Tornados were aircraft from the “Protection Wing” squadron based at RAF Marham. Marham was just one of dozens of World War II RAF fighter bases scattered around London. In the air 24/7, these Air Defense fighter jets provided the capital with an almost instantaneous air-strike response to any attack on the city.
Terry knew in that instant exactly what he had to do. He shoved the throttles full astern and she started to back downriver, taking her beneath the Lambeth Bridge.
Ahead in the far distance, still at unbelievably low altitude, he saw the two F3s go to afterburners, flying away from each other in opposite directions, carving incredibly tight turns to return to the river and the target slowly backing down into the shadow of the bridge.
“Get beneath the fucking bridge,” Sunni shouted in his ear.
Sunni raced out of the wheelhouse, ran forward, and leaped down into the hold even though smoke was pouring out. Going below to hand-detonate the bombs once they were positioned directly beneath the center of the bridge, Terry thought as he reached for the throttles.
A VOICE CRACKLED in the lead pilot’s headphones.
“Viper, this is Coldplay…completely cheesed, sir. No shot. Target appears stationary directly beneath the bridge…anticipate unacceptable collateral damage…”
“Affirmative. Sit tight.”
Terrence Spencer put a lock on Pudge’s helm, securing the rudders in neutral position, and went to full power dead astern. Pudge’s powerful engines didn’t disappoint, swiftly backing her down and out from under the bridge, headed downriver backward at about five knots.
“Target moving away from the bridge…Please advise, over.”
“Thirty seconds,” Viper advised. He wanted to give the target time enough to get well away from the crowded bridge.
“Thirty seconds, that’s affirmative.”
Coldplay had the target locked up. A beeping warning signal sounded inside his cockpit as he armed his missiles.
“Take it out, Coldplay. All yours.”
“Roger that.”
The lead fighter pilot’s weapons were locked on to the old barge, now engulfed in flames and well beyond any danger to the bridge. He flipped the red safety up, then toggled the button that launched a single Sea Eagle air-to-surface missile from beneath his starboard wing. Almost instantly there was a muffled boom below, and Coldplay flipped his airplane left for a view of the now disintegrated target.
Just moments before the barge had erupted into a flaming ball of utter destruction, both pilots had seen a burning man race from the smoke-filled wheelhouse and leap over the gunwale into the river.
HE WAS BURNED OVER 30 percent of his body and unconscious when they pulled him from the river. The soles of his boots had been burned away, and the flesh on his feet came away in pieces. In the ambulance en route to St. Thomas Hospital, they also discovered seven bullet wounds in his arms, legs, and torso.
When Terrence Spencer awoke in his hospital bed, many hours later, the face of his missus of thirty years swam into view. She was standing over him, one small hand caressing his forehead, the other placed carefully on his bandaged chest.
“How are you feeling this fine morning, Cap’n Spencer?”
“Hello, my darlin’,” he croaked, lifting his head from the pillow, his throat raw from all the damned tubes they’d jammed down it. “Unless you’re a bloody angel, I’m still alive, I see. Ain’t that something?”
“They say you’ll be home in a month or so. Full recovery.”
“Is that so?”
“They’re calling you a hero, y’know. On the telly and in all the papers.”
“Me? A hero? Bollocks. For what?”
“For what, he says? You only got the Pudge out from under the bridge before that huge bomb in her hold blew sky-high. That’s what.”
“Was a missile sunk the old Pudge. I saw it with me own eyes, I did, darlin’.”
“That’s not what the RAF was saying on BBC World News last evening. They’re giving you the credit for saving all those people on the bridge whether you want it or not.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I had
nothing to do with it, darlin’. It was Pudge that did it. All by herself, too. Nothing surprising about it, is there? Old girl did what she’s always done, didn’t she? Dunkirk? All these years?”
“And what is that?”
“She did her duty, love, the old Pudge did her sacred duty.”
FORTY-FOUR
WASHINGTON’S CROSSING, PENNSYLVANIA
IT WAS THE VERY FIRST DAY of school and nobody in the house was very happy about it but mom. The kids had had a wonderful summer, maybe the best ever. Swimming and rafting on the Delaware River, exploring the woods, building a tree fort that could withstand the fiercest Indian attack, catching fireflies in a jar behind the house, and not doing a single lick of homework for three whole months. They had also read three books, but only because their mother had made attendance mandatory when she read aloud every night before bedtime.
She loved reading aloud, and this summer Trevor, his little sister Margaret, and her baby girl, six-year-old Barclay, had heard her declaim Tom Sawyer, The Yearling, and Wind in the Willows, in that order. Trevor, twelve, on his own, had knocked back All Quiet on the Western Front. The nightly readings would, of course, continue on through the winter and into the spring.
But summer had fled. And now the house, her great big beautiful house on the hill, was hers and hers alone! Her husband, Jay, a professor at the Woodrow Wilson School across the river at Prince ton University, left the house every morning at six. Alice Milne had her house, and thus her life, back. Her plein air painting. Her beloved books. Her hours on the phone with friends and her mother. Her long walks with her German shepherd, Scout, in the woods, just the two of them, watching the leaves turn and fall as October rolled into November. And then the snow, beautiful snow.
“Up and at ’em!” she shouted from the top of the steps at seven fifteen that morning. “Breakfast in ten minutes, be there or be square!”
From down the hall, a chorus of groans and from little Barclay’s room a simple exclamation of “No school! No way!”