Before he finishes, Nogger starts up: ‘Behave, you fucking winnet. Thinking you’re hard cos you’ve got 30 mates behind you all armed to the teeth.’
‘I’ll fucking knock you out if you don’t shut up.’
‘Go on, lad,’ says Nogger, laughing.
An officer steps out of the Land Rover. ‘Under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, the use of violence for political ends, including the use of violence for the purposes of putting the public or a section of it in fear, is prohibited and punishable by law. We are authorised to search you as a suspected terrorist. As you are known to the authorities for acts of political –’
‘Political . . . Listen, lad, I joined the BNP cos you’re not killing niggers fast enough overseas.’
The officer ignores Nogger and continues: ‘Under the Act, attacks on people or property do not have to be political to be classed as terrorism. It covers any threat or use of violence to influence the public or lawful authorities.’
‘Listen, lad, all bullshit, though, innit? I’m only 17, and youse can’t touch me. Nick me, lad, and I’m suing you. I’ll have your pension.’
‘Sir, may I remind you that the UK has suspended Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights as a result of the War on Terror and the War on TerrorCrime. So you don’t have any rights unless we choose to give you them.’
* * *
It’s too hot in Nogzy with all the searches, so Nogger heads into town, goes down Sacchanalia with the lads. There’s new-found respect for him after ‘the accident’. Notoriety – a little bit of celebrity goes a long way in this country, says the Devil. The lads are falling over themselves to give him work, cocaine and heroin on credit – whatever he wants. Loads of lads, even birds, are coming up to him to shake hands and give him a hug.
‘Sorry to hear about the accident, lad.’
‘Know, yeah. Sorry meself about the kid, like. But it’s just one of them, innit?’
‘What happened?’
‘Fucking accident, wannit? That fucking pizzahead ran across the car park. Let rip with me Mac-10.’
Mac-10 – he’s dropping names like Perez Hilton now. All hands are like that: ‘Nice one!’ Glances of approval, little nods here and there. Then Nogger started doing the actions as well. Everyone’s watching, but most can’t hear for the music. Loads of WAGs in the VIP booths are looking down, though, picking up the story from his body language. Nogger is pulling up an imaginary Mac-10 to hip height, firing position, his right hand cupped under the trigger. He’s gripping the magazine clip, aiming, balancing with the left hand, holding the kick down.
‘Pizzahead runs into the chippy.’ He mimes a running motion, jogging on, like the Six Million Dollar Man. He keeps running on the spot for fucking ages, upping the suspense. Even the doormen have come in now off the pavement to see and hear it. Can tell a fucking story, Nogger. That is a fact. Can’t hardly read or fucking write, like. But the little cunt can tell a story. He’s reaching the climax. The accident. Little Chalina. He puts his arm right out and down, to show that she’s knee high, that there’s bin lids on the scene.
The WAGs are turning to each other now, mouthing ‘Ahhhh!’ to each other in pity. But Nogger jolts them back into excitement by letting rip with the imaginary Mac-10 again. He’s Tony Montana now. ‘Say hello to my leetle friend.’ He makes a machine-gun noise like a kid in the playground, muted in the din of the club. ‘Chuch-chuch-chuch-chuch-chuch.’ The quick repeat pout conveying the rapid-fire discharge.
He ends on a massive finale, shouts out ‘Fuck Off!’ at the moment Chalina is hit. Gasps all round. The kid goes down. He motions Chalina hitting the deck, hands up, palms out, falling backwards onto the bar. ‘She went down like a bag of spuds, lad. Straight away.’
They’re all looking at each other, grids open, eyes on sticks, in disbelief. Got to hand it to him, like. Could retell War and Peace in nightclub mime, that lad.
All the birds are crying now, in bits. Thinking about their own kids. But they’re at home with their nans while the mas are out partying, on the beak, getting bummed in the bogs by gangsters. Fake sympathy for a dead kid.
Nogger is off again, taking his audience through the getaway. He’s running on the spot again, his arms doing big wide semi-circles this time, half-windmills, Pete Townshend-style to signify that he’s bailing from the scene of the crime, physically and morally.
The payoff. To all and sundry. Nogger asks, ‘D’you see worramean, though?’ He’s beseeching, preaching, palms out, looking up, eyes panning across the club. ‘Was a fucking accident, wannit?’
The whole place erupts, like when a boss tune comes on, in agreement. It was a fucking accident. Fact. No back answers. Nogger, Dylan, Jay – all fucking innocent. Pure fucking scapegoats. They’ve been fitted up. Not only by the bizzies, but by the fucking army, the whole country. By those cunts who are now oppressing us, occupying us, fighting us. Unanimous verdict: Nogger and the lads are to be honoured, feted – never mind being fucked off.
Spontaneous dancing erupts. Girls in tight black kecks with falling curls are giving it loads on the floor – flailing, shaking, splits, splaying it, giving it up.
Nogger is instantly accepted by the mid-tier drug dealers, who can help him out. The graft’s on for him from now on. Loads of birds are on him now. Polly and her twin, glamour models, contracted exclusively to Loaded till April, are after him. But he fucks them off. For Pauline MacInerney, recently fucked off herself by Rocky O’Rourke.
The next day, in a derelict house on The Boot, Mayonnaise asks, ‘Seen the papers?’ Everyone’s expecting the worst. But it’s fucking mad. Paparazzi pictures of Nogger coming out of Sacchanalia with Pauline.
The headline in the Mirror’s 3AM column is ‘Pauline’s Mystery Man’. The Star, under the headline ‘Pauly Versus Polly Over New Man’, reports: ‘Super WAG Pauline MacInerney nabbed a new feller last night – after stealing him from a topless model.’ The article referred to Nogger as a ‘young businessman’.
The papers are suck-holing him already. None of the red tops mention the accident. The other papers, the broadsheets and the Daily Mail, aren’t so good: ‘WAG Pauline Mac Linked to Chalina Suspect’.
The Devil phones Nogger up: ‘I did a deal with the tabloids. Said I’d give them more stuff if they didn’t mention the . . . erm . . . incident.’
‘Don’t be talking to those cunts. They’re fucking grasses.’
‘Listen, you’ll have to stop thinking like that. Like a scally.’
‘Shut up, you fucking prick. Talking like that. Chatting shit like that.’
‘You’re not a no-mark now. You’re a celeb. So you’ve got to work with the papers. You could go down for Chalina. But if you’ve got the papers on your side . . .’
‘Not fucking arsed about that. It was a fucking accident. And it wasn’t me anyway, you silly cunt. Anyway is there any wages in it, off the papers?’
‘Might be able to get you a few quid by selling a few stories.’
‘Well, fucking sort it then, you prick.’
Call buttoned.
Within a few days, the backlash against the police and army begins. No one can fucking believe it. The lads are laughing. The residents get together a campaign group against martial law and the overwhelming powers of the anti-terror laws. They arrange a press conference and a march on the edge of the Gang Exclusion Zone.
At the march, a woman walks up to the lads. ‘I’m a human-rights lawyer. Here’s my card. If you need any help, get in touch.’
Dylan has his hood up, his hands in his pockets, staring at the ground, half thinking it might be an idea to line themselves up with these.
‘Martial law doesn’t fucking make any difference,’ says New Loon. ‘Always been fucking martial law round here, girl. Bizzies have been fucking battering us for years. Booted to fuck in the back of vans and that. So it’s just the same. Same pricks, different uniforms.’
The woman tells him, ‘If you don’t stand up, you’re going to lose so
me fundamental rights, freedoms. You’re going to be made scapegoats by the police because you’re young and poor and voiceless. They’re going to stitch you up.’
‘Fuck off, will you, you lesbian?’ says Nogger. ‘We’re famous now, girl. Don’t need to worry. Fucking celebs, us.’
Dylan’s mind is elsewhere. I wonder where Elizabeth is. Wonder if she’s seen us on the telly and that, knows how well we’re doing.
The Devil calls Nogger that night: ‘You’re a cause célèbre now. All kinds of do-gooders are trying to defend your civil rights.’
‘You fucking shitbag. I’ll split your fucking wig if you’re making dough out of us and not coming across.’
‘Let me tell you, there’s a few posh mags that want to do fashion shoots with the gang. Urban chic, that kind of thing.’
‘Fuck off, you fucking grass.’
‘They’ll pay good money . . .’
The public are starting to see Lynda Murphy as a hate figure. The Devil’s stoking it all up behind the scenes.
‘They think she’s a gold-digger,’ Dylan says, ‘trying to make some dough out of it.’
‘The fucking slag is,’ Nogger tells him. ‘She’s on all kinds of programmes. She’s fucking writing a book. And a fucking film.’
A few days later Lynda appears on GMTV to make a fresh appeal for witnesses. But it’s a stitch-up. On the couch, she’s purely mauled (tactfully) by a hard-faced anchor.
Roberto comes up to the lads on the street, taking the glory for giving them an intro to the Devil. ‘Let’s face it,’ he says, ‘you can’t be crying for your daughter on one hand and all over the telly the next. Just can’t have it both ways, can you? Our stock is rising. Theirs is in freefall like a fucking bank’s, lad.’
CHAPTER 23
ASSAULT
Troops build up slowly in the Gang Exclusion Zone. It’s Operation Urban Freedom. The mission statement has it as a cross between Northern Ireland and UNPROFOR peace-keeping in the Balkans.
Objective 1 is to secure Lower Lane Police Station. The road in front is blocked off with checkpoints, right down to Altcourse prison, where a ‘plywood city’ army base is springing up, officially dubbed Camp Photon. Soldiers could have stayed in existing barracks all around the city but the officers say the ‘built-from-scratch’ camp is good for the papers. Makes it feel like a can-do mission, a spokesman says.
The police station is given the same security status as a British embassy or airport. The perimeter is lined with giant blast-proof concrete caissons. The second, inner cordon is reinforced using a specialist design called ‘enhanced building stand-off protection’. A waist-high bi-steel wall system that blends in with the streetscape is installed. An advert on the front says ‘Corus Critical Infrastructure – Deterring Attacks from VBIEDs [vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices]’. Glass is replaced with smart windows. They’re bulletproof and won’t shatter in a blast. They expand in the heat and absorb the energy.
Lower Lane (Operational Command) and Camp Photon form a Green Zone, a secure area not accessible to the public. Civilian workers are bussed in every day.
The Chief Con complains bitterly about encroachment on his powers, on his turf. As a concession, his armed officers are allowed to patrol the Green Zone with Hecklers, like at an airport. It’s much trumpeted in the local papers, as if he’s running the show, but real power lies with the military commander, the general.
There are regular patrols through bandit country now, soldiers pepper-potting along the street, Northern Ireland-style. One moves forward and takes up position on his knees, scoping the street through his sight (magnified by four), sweeping, covering, while the soldier behind moves up and goes forward.
A patrol’s out on The Boot in heavy rain, ponchos out, taking shelter under burned-out roofs and in tinned-in doorways, amongst the rubble and the reeds sprouting through the concrete. In a broken glass porch, two soldiers get out their hexi blocks and brew up. Another squeezes his arse onto a blue-and-red trike he’s found in a pile of paper and rocks, the plastic bleached by the sun. He’s a Royal Marine sniper, fresh from Helmand, still wearing desert camouflage, sacking and vegetation wrapped around his L115A3 long-range rifle. One round, one kill at ranges of more than a mile. After a while, he takes position in an upstairs bedroom, sweeps the horizon, sighting up on mums walking their prams, grannies out shopping. Fuck all going on.
* * *
Army choppers have been in the zone for a while, but one night they’re all flown to Manchester, repainted and rebranded with operational insignia. ‘Youth Crime Task Force.’ The logo is a silhouette of a soldier shaking hands with a small child. The helicopters are stripped of desert engineering, ready to be unveiled as the new strike force in the PM’s War on TerrorCrime. It’s all done for the papers, says the Devil, all for show.
The day they’re brought back in, all the TV crews are lined up at one end of the prison footie field. For CNN, there’s an Indian man in a Sandy Gall-style jungle suit. Some of the foreign crews are sporting flak jackets for show. For extra drama, the BBC correspondent wears a navy-blue combat vest and a Kevlar helmet. He’s been driving around in the same white armoured Land Rover they used in Sarajevo, attracting potshots from the lads.
At the other end of the field, Dylan and the lads are hanging off the wire fence, waiting for the spectacle, choking on the dust. It’s a sunny day, the first in six months.
At one o’clock, they come in: eight British Army helicopters and two Chinooks in battle formation.
‘Wow. For fuck’s sake. Fucking excellent,’ says Nogger, the life-giving force of the noise and vibration energising him as they fly over. He can feel the heat of the exhausts breathing fumes and dust in his face. At a distance, the rotor sound is bass, deep and slow. Overhead, it’s sharper and faster.
Despite being the enemy, Nogger, New Loon and Lupus become patriotic. ‘Best army in the world, innit?’ says Lupus, brainwashed by a thousand war films watched after a pint on a Sunday afternoon with his auld feller, who did National Service in Germany.
‘Fucking right,’ says New Loon. ‘Those SAS, lad? Can live out on a mountain with just a boiler suit and a live rabbit for weeks – shitting in their kecks and all that.’
‘Don’t believe the hype, lad,’ Dylan tells him. ‘These army types are no tougher than you. You’d be mad if you had 30 mates behind you armed to the teeth 24/7. In fact, they’re mushes, most of them – because they’re told to fight. They let other men tell them what to do.’
Nogger agrees: ‘Can you believe that shit? Grown-up fellers doing press-ups cos some posh cunt tells them to.’
The choppers manoeuvre into a straight line and hover ten feet above the ground for a few minutes for the cameras. Noise and power, shock and awe. It blows everyone away. The reporters are charged up, feeling they’re covering a good story. It looks like the authorities are actually doing something.
Dylan’s less impressed: ‘It’s just a bunch of helicopters landing in a field.’
The choppers land and cut engines. Behind them, there’s a faster, tinnier rotor sound, coming from a small, white commercial helicopter. It looks spindly and toy-like compared with the military might of the army choppers. It’s the bizzy helicopter, with its powerful searchlight on to give it more impact. ‘It’s fucking shit,’ says Lupus. It’s long been christened ‘the Star of Croxteth’ because it spends all night hovering above the favelas there. It lands and the Chief Con jumps out, Top Gun helmet with a dark, mirrored visor on, flight suit. Everyone laughs, including the press corps.
That night, there’s a death in custody. One of the younger lads was choked out while being detained at Camp Photon. When it gets out, two Warrior armoured personnel carriers are fired up with petrol bombs in revenge. One’s completely burnt out, but there are no casualties. A soft-skinned Land Rover snatch vehicle is pelted with rocks and two rounds from a 9-mm pistol are fired into the passenger door.
The day after the attacks, Bloot is shot
dead as he tries to run a roadblock. He ploughs a stoley through a manned checkpoint and is stopped 80 yards down the road by a US Army-issue X-Net – a spiked web that wraps around the car’s wheels and axles, used in Iraq to catch suicide bombers. A para fires 23 rounds from a light support weapon into Bloot while he’s trapped at the wheel. The soldier says he did it because Bloot hadn’t slowed down and had a gun. But witnesses say Bloot was smoked well after the car had been brought to a standstill.
After that, the lads plan to get revenge. But Dylan fucks them off: ‘Let it go. This isn’t about youse. Youse are just flies to them. They’ll brush you off. Crush you. Get home. Get off the street. That’s what I’m doing.’ A few of the younger ones slag Dylan for crumbling on the job.
They go ahead and launch an attack without him. But the petrol bombs and the IEDs bounce off the Warriors, even off the snatch vehicles. A 14-year-old boy is martyred after a riot breaks out. Some say he was killed by a rubber bullet, others that he was run over and crushed by an army vehicle.
The next day at sun-up there’s an assault on The Boot. Two Lynx AH.7 helicopters with door-mounted GPMGs. One lands on a disused green next to an old building site. A few paras jump out clumsily. Soldiers secure the LZ. The second hovers above a disused house 150 metres away. Smoke grenades. Several flashbangs. Black-clad SAS troops fast-rope onto the roof and into the garden. Two or three shots inside. Later, Sky News describes this as a successful raid on a well-known gang HQ.
Two hours after the troops go in, four tank transporters arrive, with two Caterpillar D9 and D7 armoured bulldozers kitted up with Israeli Defence Force tractor protection. There’s a steel plate over the cab with just a slit for the driver to see through. One’s surrounded by an anti-riot cage. A giant dark-green Terex 82-30B bulldozer with tracks as high as a man is also brought in.
They start demolishing the derelict housing, collapsing exterior walls like paper. Inside, the half-exposed rooms are a mosaic of wallpapers and tiles – blues, greens, white, from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s – a glimpse of the lives once lived there.
Gang War Page 15