“SORRY!” she yelped, laughing. He grabbed her by the waist and set her straight.
“Calm down now Nosh! Come on.”
“Excited to be going back home?” Confused that a stranger should know so much about her, Nosheen narrowed her eyes and looked at Mohammed and then her father.
“It’s alright love. We were just chatting. He’s from Bradford too.”
Mohammed tried again. “Been staying in London?”
She looked at the ground, nodded briefly and ran away.
“Shy!” Mohammed said. “They can be at that age.”
“Yeah. She is a bit. You a student then?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’s that then?”
“West Thames. Catering.”
Tariq puffed out his cheeks and blew out.
“Bloody hell that’s hard work in those kitchens innit?”
Mohammed laughed. “Maybe. But everyone has to eat. You can always get work.”
The passengers were beginning to move and, noticing the gate had been opened, the two men got up and moved towards it, Tariq turned round to make sure his daughter was following him as they walked into the open-air area where the buses were parked ready to leave. The driver was checking the tickets by the steps leading into the coach and the wide doors of the luggage storage area at the base of the coach, below the seats, were open. Before they climbed on board some of the passengers were loading their cases inside.
Without removing the washing up liquid bottle from his pocket, Jaz took off the cap and headed for the coach. As he reached the back of the short queue of people waiting to go on board, he knelt down as if he were tying up his shoe laces and poured the liquid on the ground. Standing up again, he moved towards the luggage storage area.
He looked back and saw a woman, head bowed as she texted, walking towards the queue. He willed her onto the shiny patch and, with a certain inevitability, she put her foot on the liquid.
“Ow!” She was on her back and everyone in the queue, the driver included, turned to see what had happened.
Jaz took his chance. He put the pannier into the belly of the coach and then jumped in himself. He moved towards the dark at the back, concealing himself behind some of the bags that had already been loaded. It was now just a question of waiting for a few more bags to be put on board and then sound of the pneumatic pumps which, with a hiss and a whoosh, signalled that the doors were being closed and that the coach was about to start its journey. Jaz stayed still waiting for the coach to move.
Two feet above Jaz, sitting inside the coach next to the window, Sadiq Akbar was intermittently watching the houses pass by and texting his girlfriend, Bushra. A scrawny 22-year-old third-year maths student at the University of Westminster, he was going home for a few days because the cafe he worked in to supplement his student loan had closed for Christmas. She’d already gone home to her family in Glasgow.
“U ok?”
“BORED!!!!!!”
“Families. LOL.”
Sadiq Akbar hadn’t yet told his parents about her. He dreaded to think what they do if they found out he was going out with a Pathan rather than a good Punjabi girl.
“Where u?”
“On coach. Miss you.”
“XXXXXX”
He wasn’t sure if he wanted to marry her. The difficulties with his family would be so great that it might just not be worth it. He thought his father would almost certainly not talk to him ever again and might even physically attack him. But it was his mother who really bothered him. She would just not understand. And she’d have to cope with all her busybody neighbours making sarcastic remarks about primitive, warlike Pathans fresh from their mountain villages. But he didn’t want to break up with her either.
“Looking forward to New Years Eve.”
“Me too. Luv u.”
“Same.” Sadiq sank deeper in the seat closing his eyes and thinking of her.
Once they had both returned to London after Christmas they were planning to go down to the Thames to watch the fireworks.
The coach got underway as he texted. It was due to stop at Golders Green to pick up more passengers before heading north. Jaz reckoned he had half an hour to play with. He found himself breathing in diesel fumes and tried to find some good air by putting his head near the doors. But then the coach went round a corner and he was unable to stop himself sliding from one side of the vehicle to the other.
Putting his mouth into his jacket to filter what he was breathing in, he started work, undoing the pannier and removing the first bomb. It was dark and he had to feel through the luggage as he looked for the rucksacks. When he found one he undid the clips and felt inside the main compartment. Clothes and books. He put the bomb inside. One down three to go. He felt around for another rucksack and came across a small square bag. He looked to see if it was pink but there was not enough light to tell. Putting it to one side he continued to feel around and repeated the exercise until all four bombs were packed away. The job done he slid over to the doors in search of cleaner air.
Quicker than he expected the bus had come to a halt. No one would be taking luggage off at Golders Green but new passengers would be putting it on. And the trick, he reckoned, was to leave it until the very last moment.
The doors opened. Wait for it.
A couple of passengers loaded on bags. Not yet.
The driver went back to his driving seat so that he could check the new passengers’ tickets. Nearly there.
The passengers climbed on board. The second one put his foot on the bottom step. His heel disappeared from view.
Now!
Jaz rolled out of the bus, onto the pavement, and slithered underneath the vehicle.
He was out of sight now and, on his belly, pushed himself towards the back of the coach.
Whoosh. The luggage doors were being closed and he could hear the indicator clicking above him. Thrusting his elbows onto the tarmac he accelerated his movements until he emerged between the two tyres at the back. Looking left and right, he slid out, stood up and confident the driver would be looking at his right hand mirror to check for oncoming traffic, Jaz moved onto the pavement. The Mondeo was just five minutes’ walk away.
*****
They started exploding at 8:40, 20 minutes after the bus arrived in Bradford. Long enough for the passengers to be dispersed. But not so long that they would have started unpacking.
Although they went off within a few seconds of each other the police did later manage to establish the precise sequence.
Sadiq Akbar was the first to die. His last conversation, recovered from his mobile phone, was in Urdu with his sister just after he got off the bus.
“Salaam a laikum.”
“Hiya. You arrived?”
“Yeah, just at the coach station.”
“You OK?”
“Knackered.”
“Coming straight here?”
“Yeah. How are you?”
“Good.”
“Mum and Dad?”
“Same! You know. OK. How’s Bushra?” she giggled. He had let his sister in on the secret.
“Get away. Can I get you anything?”
“No we’re all set. It’ll be great to see you.”
“See you later then.”
“Bye.”
The police asked three different translators to transcribe the conversation but none of them could identify even a phrase that indicated that he was about to blow himself up. Especially as when the bomb did go off, in the hall of his parents’ house, it killed his sister too.
When the police went through Tariq Hussain’s mobile phone they found he had sent an SMS in Urdu to his wife from the coach, probably when he was still on the motorway, telling her to come to pick them up. CCTV showed that she had left their home within five minutes of receiving the message and reached the bus station shortly before the coach arrived. They also discovered that Tariq’s phone had four short videos that the profilers immediately said suggested jiha
di tendencies. Two of them he had filmed himself: a dogfight attended mainly by British Pakistanis with northern accents and a scrap in which some people had knives outside a pub in Bradford. The two downloaded films were the beheading of an American contractor in Iraq with a bread knife and some porn. He had a police record having been charged both with theft of some building materials from a construction site and assault in a pub brawl. But apart from the films nothing else about him indicated radicalism. He drank and did not attend any mosque. Because he put the rucksack in the boot of the Vauxhall Vectra and sat in the front, Tariq and his wife both walked away with nothing more than broken ribs and superficial skin wounds. But Nosheen had been sitting in the backseat. The doctors said she would have died instantly.
The final two bombs, the police concluded, went off at almost precisely the same moment. Mohammed Asif, the catering student, was 15 minutes from his home where his parents had arranged for him to meet a girl from Pakistan. Although nothing definitive had been said they clearly saw her as a potential bride. But for a number of reasons Mohammed wasn’t sure about it. First of all the girl was said to be just 17 and he wondered whether there hadn’t been a slight blurring on the point: he suspected she was in fact 16 or even younger. Secondly, she was a first cousin although many of his friends and relatives had married first cousins, Mohammed had read stuff in the press suggesting that really could be a problem. Given Britain’s divorce rate, he had no particular objection to the idea of arranged marriages, which seemed to him to work rather better than most love matches. But he thought that both parties had to be happy about it. And he was not expecting to have much in common with a schoolgirl on her first trip out of Pakistan.
It was a problem. And one he could not discuss with anyone. And that is what he was thinking about as he walked home. He could see the blue and white light of TV images flashing behind net curtains of the terraced homes. He went past St Joseph’s Church and could see it was lit up. Its door was open and an organ was playing inside. He came up to the notice board and saw a large poster, which going by the clumsy script had been written by a schoolchild, saying CHILDRENS XMAS SERVICE 9.00 am. And under a little roof over the Church’s gate there was a girl with a navy blue duffle coat and a pink scarf around her neck. She was holding out sheets of paper with the words of carols written on them. Mohammed shook his head to indicate he didn’t want one.
He walked on toward the mosque that was in a converted house on the street corner just 100 yards away. It was a well-known place because, being so close to the church had been at the forefront of interfaith dialogue initiatives in the city. When he blew up he was equidistant between the church and the mosque.
The girl was lifted off the ground and her little body smashed against the gate. But it was only when they straightened her out and turned her over that they saw the cause of death. One of the gate’s metal bars had crushed the back of her neck.
By a fraction of second the last to die was Peter Haq. The police were able to see his last moments thanks to a colour CCTV camera and microphone behind the counter in a convenience store near the bus station. He walked into the Pakistani-run shop with his rucksack on.
“Morning,” the shopkeeper said.
“Happy Christmas.” The shopkeeper didn’t respond.
“I was looking for a bottle of wine – a good one.”
“Red or white?”
“Red I think. Not sure to be honest. It’s for me Mum and Dad.”
The shopkeeper turned round to the shelves behind the counter where the cigarettes and wine were kept. He took one of the bottles and put it on the counter.
“How about this? People always say they liked this one.”
Peter Haq eyed it slightly suspiciously. “Chile? That’s alright is it?”
“Oh yes sir, very good.”
“How much is it then?”
“£5.99.”
“Alright then. But I’ll be needing some beer.”
“That’s on the left.”
Peter Haq walked down the aisle, and three seconds after he went out of view there was a white flash on the screen before the tape stopped. The shop owner survived with only superficial injuries largely because he was bending down behind the counter to get some tissue paper to wrap the bottle of wine.
The police found that Peter Haq was a Bradford University student who had told his parents he wanted to go to London in the run-up to Christmas so that he could help at a church shelter. In fact he had been there for another reason too. Unbeknownst to his parents, he was going out with a fellow British student, Victoria Adams, who was on the same peace studies course at Bradford. The police established that apart from volunteering at the shelter the couple had seen movies, visited pubs and walked around the city. The CCTV cast serious doubt on the idea that he was a suicide bomber: in the moments before the detonation he had seem entirely relaxed.
Chapter Sixteen
“At times COBRA appeared to be little more than a stage for those looking to impress — or a forum where government can be seen to be doing something.” -- Scotland Yard former anti-terror chief, Andy Hayman, June 2009
09:00, Christmas Day, Whitehall, London
Within an hour of Peter Haq exploding in the shop, COBRA was meeting for the second time in under 12 hours. On the first occasion many of the participants had already left London for their constituencies and, in the case of the officials, their relatives in the countryside. The prime minister’s first instruction as they came through with varying degrees of success on phone and video lines from across the UK was that he wanted them all to travel back to London immediately. Now that looked like a good call.
Leaving his wife, children and parents still having a late Christmas breakfast in the apartment above 10 Downing Street, the prime minister threaded his way through a series of corridors and interconnecting doors until he reached the entrance to the Cabinet Office. He opened the door with the swipe card that, rather to his surprise, he’d been issued on his first day in office. He passed the offices that were normally buzzing with activity but today had just empty chairs behind desks in varying degrees of disorder. With his hand on the polished mahogany rail, he went down some steps to the basement of 60 Whitehall. Everyone else attending had come through the Whitehall entrance.
“Good morning, sir.” A security guard opened the door for him.
As he walked in everyone was already seated. Some were logging onto screens to establish contact with their support staff in back offices that radiated off the main room. Others were making notes about what they planned to say. The prime minister walked past them all and took his chair at the end of a long modern rectangular table. His frame obscured the TV screens hung rather too low on the wall behind him. Each place was set with a notepad and pencil. In the middle of the table there were glasses and bottles of mineral water. With no windows there was only electric light.
He looked down the table and surveyed the 13 leaders of Britain’s security establishment. The politicians, he noticed, had, as usual, stuck together. Directly to his left sat his old friend turned chief political rival, the home secretary, Robin Marshall. Their relations had recently soured when the press condemned the home secretary for releasing a remand prisoner who had broken his curfew, tried to burgle a house and ended up murdering the owner, a pensioner, as she lay in her bath. But as only the home secretary, the prime minister and a few of their closest advisers knew, the early-release scheme had originally been proposed by Number 10 as a cost saving measure. The home secretary had advised against it.
Looking further down the table the prime minister also saw the minister for transport. She would have responsibility for making sure the trains and, more importantly, the London Underground would still be running when people went back to work after New Year. Then there were the ministers for health and defence and the man who would have to dip into the emergency reserve if the need arose, the chancellor of the exchequer. Since the markets were not open the prime minister had though
t about letting the man at the opposite end of the table stay at home, but in the end decided that the governor of the Bank of England should be kept fully aware of everything so that he’d be ready for when trading did begin again.
The officials had gravitated to the other side of the table. The cabinet secretary whose legendary unflappability had earned him the soubriquet “HMS Imperturbable” sat to the prime minister’s right. He was flanked by the heads of the four main intelligence agencies: MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the Defence Intelligence Staff. Also from the MoD there was a lieutenant general to represent all three armed services. Finally there were two policemen in the room: the Met police commissioner and ACSO.
On both sides of the room, a series of plasma screens were attached the wall. Only one was switched on and the chest of a uniformed police officer filled the screen as he sat down trying to clip a microphone to his lapel. He was tapping it with his forefinger but no sound came through.
“Always hated Christmas,” the prime minister began. Unsure how to react, no one laughed. He didn’t seem to notice. “We are under attack. Commissioner, why don’t you start?”
“The most recent incidents have been in Bradford. We have the chief constable of West Yorkshire on video link. Maybe we can hear from him.”
The prime minister pointed at the screen, looked at his cabinet secretary and silently mouthed the words: “What’s his name?”
As the cabinet secretary scribbled, the prime minister played for time: “Good idea. Let’s go straight to Bradford.” He looked at the piece of paper as the cabinet secretary slipped the note over to him and screwed up his eyes. Unable to read it he said: “Chief Constable, do get us underway.”
The man on the screen looked away from the camera and, then, realising he was on, suddenly started to speak.
“We have four incidents. Four suicide bombs. We have five dead confirmed and maybe six. That includes the four bombers. We don’t have reliable figures for the injured yet. We have no idea where this came from. No warning at all. Also we can’t really understand the targeting yet.”
TARGET BRITAIN: a political thriller Page 28