by Cain, Tom
He turned to face the others, not letting any of his worries cross his face. In a firm, confident tone of voice he told Ajay Panu, ‘Why don’t you take your baseball bat and go and give Schultz a hand at the back of the building?’
‘Understood.’
Carver gave him a quick, appreciative nod. Panu and Schultz were going to take some beating, even allowing for Schultz’s wrecked left arm. And he didn’t need them to hold out for long – even a minute might be enough. Now he focused on Chrystal and Maninder. ‘You two, take Paula and get down to the basement, quick.’
They propped the shocked, semi-conscious woman between them and carried her off towards the storeroom, Maninder lighting the way with a black rubber torch he’d retrieved from beneath the counter. These days, with power cuts a regular occurrence, everyone kept camping lanterns handy for when the electricity went off. The Panus were no exception, and Maninder gave Chrystal one to carry in her spare hand, too. As soon as they were gone, Carver set the air-conditioning to full blast and turned on the microwave. Through the window he could see the bizarre combination of a plastic tub filled with grey jelly, with a can of spray deodorant sticking out of it, turning round and round. In his earpiece he heard Schultz giving Ajay Panu some instructions and then a crash as something heavy and metallic was heaved over in an attempt to block the door into the yard outside.
Then Carver heard Schultz, very calm, very professional, saying, ‘They’re coming over the fences into the yard, boss. Fuck me, there’s a lot of the bastards, an’ all.’
‘Same this side,’ said Carver. ‘Good luck, mate.’ Then he took up a position behind a shelf, close to the storeroom door, and waited for all hell to break loose.
34
THE PEOPLE MILLING around Netherton Street were like any other lawless crowd: a very small quantity of hardcore agitators and organizers at the top; a larger number of committed followers; and then an overwhelming majority of incidental hangers-on. Donny Bakunin’s first task was therefore to get the leaders onside. If he could only do that, the rest of the herd would follow like iron filings after magnets.
It wasn’t easy. The dozen or so gang-members and career criminals who formed the hard core of the rioters had no interest whatever in the political implications of their actions. They simply wanted to loot as much as they could, as quickly and efficiently as possible. Their status with their underlings came from their ability, in the most literal possible sense, to deliver the goods. They had no objection whatever to violence, provided that they were dishing it out – beating and knifing restaurant waiters and pub customers was fine. But being shot and even killed by armed men who knew what they were doing was another matter altogether.
Bakunin listened to the sociopathic thugs and self-professed hard men make their excuses for accepting defeat. And then he said, ‘I understand. I get it. You’re all a bunch of gutless cunts and you don’t mind who knows it.’
While the shock was in their eyes and before any of them could retaliate, he stepped up his attack. ‘Because if you walk away from here, with your tails between your legs, people are going to know you didn’t have the balls to beat a bunch of fucking shopkeepers. And they’re going to start thinking they don’t have to worry about you, because you’re just a bunch of bitches. You’ll be a fucking laughing stock. You might as well cut your own balls off right now.’
Bakunin looked around the assembled gaggle of shaved heads, thick necks, mad eyes and tattooed skin that surrounded him and asked, ‘Is that what you want?’
He was met with a sort of sulky, wordless grumble of dissatisfaction.
‘I said, is that what you want?’ Bakunin repeated, blithely unaware that he was echoing the way that Mark Adams, the politician he hated above all others, had wound up a hesitant crowd at the O2 Arena.
‘’Course it fuckin’ ain’t,’ a voice replied.
‘Then do what I say and we’ll overrun these shopkeepers like a steamroller crushing ants. We’ll smash into their precious little shop, and we’ll fuck it up and fuck them up, and by the time we’ve finished and they’re all dead and ripped to pieces then everyone will know that that is what you get for trying to defy us. And then they won’t laugh at you. They’ll be on their knees, sucking your cocks and begging for your mercy.’
At any other time, a man like Donny Bakunin might not have got away with talking like that. But the blood and matter drying on his skin, leaving drip marks all over his hair, his skull-like face and his scrawny neck, had given him the look of an ancient witch doctor, painted in gore. The sight of him struck some primitive chord in the men surrounding him, and they came over to his way of thinking. They then took the message back to their people. The word spread through the bigger groups milling listlessly around the fringes of Netherton Road or picking their way through looted shops, searching for one last overlooked item to steal. And then they were all back, his battalions of the ignorant, the unemployed and the dispossessed. Bakunin felt almost paternal towards them, as though he were a political Dr Frankenstein and these the monsters he – and others like him – had created in the educational laboratories of a thousand failed schools.
Aptly enough, they were going into battle behind a garbage truck. By ordering one end of the street to be blocked with cars, trash cans and anything else that came to hand, Bakunin had been able to move the lumbering machine from its original post. Its presence had encouraged his people to come out of the shadows and start massing on the streets. That was what Chrystal had seen. That was when Carver had turned on the microwave. Another half minute or so had passed as final preparations were made. Now the truck was rumbling slowly down the street, offering cover to the hundred-plus rioters trotting along in its wake like infantrymen behind a tank.
The truck stopped opposite the Lion Market, executed a slow, ponderous three-point turn and then accelerated towards the metal shutters. A roar went up from the people behind it. There was a crackle of gunfire as shots were blasted into the night sky, and then they began their charge towards the perforated metal shutters of the helpless supermarket – a sociopathic tsunami about to crash down upon the little store and wash it and its occupants clean away.
35
THE MAPS AND numbers had vanished from the screens beside the O2 stage and Mark Adams’s face had taken their place again: ‘For fourteen straight years from 1996 to 2009 the most popular boy’s name in this country was Jack,’ he said. ‘Then in 2010 a new name hit the top, and it’s stayed there ever since. It wasn’t William or Harry or Charlie or Jim . . . It certainly wasn’t Mark . . . no, the most common new boy’s name in Britain for the past five years has been . . . Mohammed.’
There was a wordless murmur in the crowd, a sense of bodies shifting, a palpable unease.
‘If you want to know how Britain has changed, and will continue to change unless something is done, then Jack giving way to Mohammed is all you need to be told,’ said Adams.
‘The change began about twenty-five years ago. In the 1990s the British population rose by about 2.2 million. According to official National Census figures, some six hundred thousand of those 2.2 million new Britons were white. And 1.6 million – almost three-quarters of the entire new growth – belonged to ethnic minorities.’
He paused for a while to let the facts sink in. Assuming that they were facts, which many in the media covering the event seriously doubted.
‘That can’t be right . . . can it?’ asked one.
‘No, it’s Far Right,’ another replied. ‘Just listen to him. He might as well be reading an editorial from Der Stürmer . . .’
Yet if Adams really was the Hitler he was accused of being, he wasn’t screaming at his audience, or shaking his fist as the original version had done. He was sticking to his tone of reasonable, factual, logical analysis.
‘Over the first decade of the new century the population kept growing, and the growth was overwhelmingly among the ethnic population. In London, for example, roughly three out of ten people are immig
rants. But six out of ten children have at least one parent who was born outside this country. So thirty per cent of the people are having sixty per cent of the children . . . and the people who were born here aren’t having many children at all.
‘You can see the same pattern all over the country. For several years, the majority of schoolkids in cities including Leicester, Birmingham and great swathes of London have been from ethnic communities. Now that applies to grown-ups as well. Leicester recently became the first city in Britain in which whites are officially the minority of the population. Others will follow very soon.
‘Now, let’s not forget that these islands have always been a destination for immigrants. We’ve always had a mixture of Celtic, Viking, Roman and Saxon blood. But even allowing for that, there is such a thing as the British people. And until very recently it was possible to say who they were and what they were like.
‘They were white. They were overwhelmingly Christian. They were united by the world’s most magnificent language, by the kings and queens who ruled over them and the parliament that gave them their voice. They were courageous in battle, extraordinarily inventive in industry and science, and creative in the arts. They had a profound belief in fairness, free speech and the rule of law. They fought for what they believed in, even when the cause seemed lost.
‘But what’s happening to the British now?’ Adams asked. ‘Just by seeing the massive change in school populations, it’s clear that they are reproducing much less quickly than the rest of the population. In fact, one hundred average native British produce just eighty babies between them.’
New graphics appeared on the screen: a cluster of white figures like the male and female symbols on toilet doors, set against a dark-grey background, with the number 100 next to it. Beneath that cluster was a vertical white line down to a second, slightly smaller group of figures and another number: 80.
‘Now that next generation reproduces at the same rate, and they produce sixty-four babies,’ Adams said.
Now there was a third cluster, somewhat smaller than the one directly above it, but appreciably diminished from the very first.
Adams picked up on that difference. ‘So you started with one hundred adults, and now you’ve got just sixty-four grandchildren. That’s down by more than a third. And if they keep reproducing just like their parents and grandparents, well, they’ll produce just fifty-one great-grandchildren. So the native British population has halved in three generations.’
Up on the screen, a fourth, much smaller cluster of little white figures made the point impossible to miss or ignore. And more clusters, each smaller than the last appeared as Adams intoned, ‘And forty-one great-great-grandchildren . . . And thirty-three great-great-great-grandchildren: just a third as many native English people as we started out with . . . And there’s just a quarter left by the next generation: twenty-six descendants of the one hundred British we started out with. That is what is going to happen to the British race unless something is done to reverse the trend before it’s too late.
‘Now there will be people watching this who will say that I am being racist, just by mentioning this fact. But how on earth is it racist to be concerned about the future of one’s own people? No other nation feels this shame. Russians, Japanese, Jews, Italians – they all talk about the crisis in their own populations, and what can be done to reverse it. But not the British.
‘So I ask you: do we really hate ourselves so much that we won’t do anything to ensure our self-preservation? Is it racist now to care about oneself, one’s children and one’s grandchildren? I do not deny anyone else the right to maintain their nation, their race and their culture. All I ask is the right to maintain my own.
‘Once again: I have no hostility whatsoever towards anyone, of any colour or religion, who wants to commit himself or herself to this country, work hard, make a contribution and share in our culture. All I’m saying is that if we don’t wake up and start dealing with our self-preservation now, then it’s going to be too late.’
36
AS MARK ADAMS would happily have pointed out, given the opportunity, British soldiers spent hundreds of years standing and waiting for their enemy – from the thin lines of archers charged by French knights in armour at Crécy and Agincourt, to the small band of men confronting thousands of Zulu warriors at Rorke’s Drift. They stood and waited . . . and waited some more . . . waited until the absolutely final possible second before unleashing their arrows and bullets. Now Carver stood in a corner of the Lion Market, close by the storeroom door, with one of the shelves for shelter. And he waited.
From where he stood, he had no view through the shutters, but he did not need it. He could hear the garbage truck’s engine revving, and the shouts of the crowd. He sensed the noise coming closer and the vibrations of the truck’s tyres and engine through the floor. Louder and louder the noise became as he told himself to stay calm, breathe steadily and maintain control of his pounding heart and the rush of blood and adrenalin through his body.
Closer . . . louder . . . his guts and throat tightening . . .
And then the truck hit the shutters with a crashing, clanging scream of metal, and smashed through the flimsy perforated steel like a charging rhino through a mud hut. Carver screwed up his eyes as the truck’s headlights cut through the darkness of the shop, and the first rioters appeared on either side of the great steel beast, silhouetted against the blinding white glare as they picked their way through the debris.
There were angry shouts as the charging mass behind barged into the backs of the more slowly moving people at the front, and a couple of cries of pain as rioters cut themselves against the jagged edges of the smashed shutters.
A few more seconds passed. The red digital readout of the microwave timer kept counting down towards zero. More light, fine flour pumped out into the air around the air-conditioner.
Then the wave of people broke upon the shore of the supermarket and suddenly the rioters were coming in by the handful, then tens of them, filling up the aisles, pressing towards the corner where Carver stood concealed behind his shelf.
They thought the shop was empty. They thought it was theirs for the taking. Now they were whooping and cheering, and the only thoughts they had of fighting came from the desire to barge one another out of the way as they raced for the shelves where the alcohol was kept.
Someone fired another gun, glass shattered and an angry voice shouted, ‘Not now! Kill the shopkeepers first!’
The skirmishing around the booze racks broke up as the mood in the shop changed once more. ‘Kill them!’ the voice shouted again.
In his ears Carver could hear the sound of Schultz, breathing heavily, swearing in pain and fighting fury as he and Ajay Panu fought to hold back the human tide by the back door.
Still Carver waited.
Finally, when the rioters were almost close enough to touch, when he could not only see and hear them but smell them, too . . . finally Carver stepped out from behind the shelf and fired three more times. Each explosive impact of hammer on cartridge was followed by the sound of another round being pumped into the breech in a smooth, relentless sequence. His targets were all male, none more than ten feet from where he stood, and this time he shot to maim, rather than kill instantly.
A twelve-bore cartridge, fired at a distance of less than five metres, can rip an arm right off. And when that happens, the sight of a man with blood spurting from his raw, tattered stump doesn’t look half as funny as it might do on a video game, or in a scene from Monty Python’s Holy Grail. Nor does even the most hardened, psychologically damaged street kid react well to being hit in the face by a severed limb.
The screams of a man whose stomach has just been blown away and whose entrails are unravelling in slimy coils across a linoleum floor strike fear into any heart. And when there are two of them lying howling in front of their mates, and a third is running around, screaming, like the human answer to a headless chicken, and people are shouting out in alarm b
ecause there’s blood all over their face, or they’re slipping on the intestines underfoot, then even the biggest, angriest crowd can be seized by confusion, chaos and panic.
And in that chaos Samuel Carver slipped through the door behind him and into the second battle that was going on inside the storeroom.
37
SCHULTZ AND AJAY Panu were desperately pushing against the metal shelving they’d leaned against the back door. The top half of the door itself had long since been obliterated by a combination of gunfire, iron pipes and even an axe that one giant, Viking-like rioter had smashed against the wood until Schultz had stood up, aimed through the hole the man had made and blown him away with one of his two precious bullets. He and Panu were both powerful, heavily built men, but they were tiring badly, and even a man of Schultz’s fighting pedigree – a Marine commando who had spent most of his career in the SBS – could not for ever overcome the handicap of a shattered arm, nor ignore the pain and blood-loss that came with it.
Panu was leaning his left shoulder against the shelf to prevent the invaders from pushing it over, and using his right arm to swing his baseball bat at anyone who clambered up over the top. But he, too, was now wounded. The full force of the shotgun blasts from the other side of the door had missed him, deflected by the shelves and the boxes filled with packets of rice and sugar that had been piled on them. But still he was peppered with bits of shot and splinters of wood, and the dark pinpricks on his shirt were slowly seeping together until more and more of his upper body was slick with seeping blood.
Now another attacker was clambering over the shelves. Ignoring Panu’s attempts to bat him away, he crouched at the top and then sprung down, straight on to Panu. The attacker’s momentum caught Panu by surprise and knocked him off his feet. The big Sikh hit the concrete floor with an impact that drove the air from his lungs and as he lay helplessly pinned to the ground, the attacker lifted a carving knife into the air, held in both his hands, pointing directly down at Panu’s throat. He arched his back, brought his arms up to the top of the killing stroke, and then launched all his strength through his shoulders and arms to bring the blade plunging down.