TARGET BRITAIN: a political thriller

by Owen Bennett-Jones

  “Can’t you stop it?”

  “Well in that case they had a software failure at the same time.”

  “But it was just one tree,” Monty said.

  “Quite. Dinorwig at night can take the power from about four nuclear stations. As you can imagine it takes quite a lot of power to push a lake up a mountain in a few hours. In fact it’s about 5 to 10 per cent of the entire power in the grid. So if that suddenly stopped working ...”

  “Yes?”

  “There would be rather a lot of electricity looking for somewhere to go.”

  *****

  Jaz parked on a mountain pass and looked down at the valley. On both sides he could see patches of dark ground where the forestry commission had planted blocks of conifers. He could not yet make out his final target. He packed his rucksack, checked the alarm clocks one more time and looked at his watch. Twelve hours to go. He wouldn’t need the Mondeo again.

  As he lifted his bike from the car he looked at the rough terrain and regretted not having bought something a bit sturdier. But at this stage, he reckoned, he could stick to the roads. At least for a mile or two. Looking at the car to check he hadn’t left anything, he opened the front door, removed the sat nav and switched it on to confirm he was taking the right road. He put it in his pocket and, without switching on his bike’s lights, freewheeled down the mountain roads. The cold air made his cheeks numb.

  When Dinorwig came in to view he was high above the village looking down at the valley floor. The main road ran through the middle. On each side most of the homes had ground floor lights on, softened by curtains. He could make out little wisps of smoke floating up from the chimneys.

  Jaz dragged his bike off the road and laid it flat on the ground. He looked for some fallen branches to conceal it but he was too high for many trees to grow. He picked up the bike again, took it further from the road, and hid it as best he could in some bracken.

  On foot now, he struck down the mountain, his knees jarring under the weight of the rucksack. He tripped on the uneven gorse and water from hidden peaty pools seeped into his trainers. Strapping the rucksack tighter to his back he slowed down. Take your time. Just like Aysha said.

  It was easy to see his destination now because of the lake, the lower of the two that allowed Dinorwig to function. The water curved round the mountainside holding tight to its contour. Jaz could see the moon reflected on its surface and a service road running alongside which led into the mountain. As he approached, keeping 200 yards from the road itself, Jaz followed its direction until he slowed for fear of being heard. He reached close to the checkpoint that controlled access.

  “So for all of you home alone this Christmas Day here’s the man himself. Wales’s greatest survivor. The one and only. Tom Jones!” As the Green, Green Grass of Home started playing Jaz saw a uniformed man sitting on a stool in a brightly lit booth tapping his stubby fingers in time to the music. In front of him was a red and white barrier. Jaz took cover and settled down to see how the system worked. Specks of wind driven rain spat into his face like pin pricks. And with so little traffic he had to wait over an hour before a saloon car came to the barrier and stopped. The driver opened his window and as he did so the guard went to the door of his booth.

  “Happy Christmas!” the guard said.

  “Hell of a way to spend it.”

  “It’s a living.”

  The red and white barrier went up and after the car passed underneath it, the guard pressed something in his booth and lowered it again. Jaz heard a clunking of metal and looking to his right saw a heavy iron gate opening. The car went through and moved towards the plant.

  As the vehicles came and went Jaz tried to work out a flaw in the system. And he was beginning to think he might need to look for a way in further around the perimeter when he worked out what he had to do. A transit van came blocking his view of the booth. As it waited for the barrier to be lifted Jaz took the chance to stand so that the blood would flow back into his legs. As his ankles and feet tingled he realised that if he could not see the booth then the security guard couldn’t see him. Another vehicle approached, a low pickup this time.

  The driver opened his door and climbed out of the car. He was holding a can of lager.

  “Here you are mate. Brought it from home. Happy Christmas.” The two men were at the door of the booth.

  It was too good a chance to miss. Keeping low Jaz approached the vehicle and as the two men talked, slid over the back of the pickup and lay flat on the cold metal base. Afraid that his rucksack might be sticking up, visible above the side of the vehicle, he slipped it off and laid it down beside him.

  “Only a few hours to go now. See you tomorrow.” The driver’s voice became louder as he moved to his vehicle. And then the door shut, the guard checked the CCTV monitor and, seeing everything was clear, let barrier go up. The car moved forward.

  He was in.

  *****

  “The DG’s looking for you.” It was Anderson from GCHQ. “Sounds slightly cross.”

  Natasha and Monty were in the Thames House entrance. Rather than wait for the lift they ran up the stairs, Monty leaping up three at a time.

  “Best to be breathless,” he advised Natasha.

  They skirted around the desks in a largely empty open plan office and found the DG in his room. As usual he was on his feet, looking out the window. But no pipe. He turned to the door, awaiting an explanation.

  “Had to see someone,” said Monty.

  “My fault ...” added Natasha.

  “But that chap earlier, Griffith Jones. He could well be right. About Dinorwig,” added Monty.

  “Not could. Is,” said the DG.

  “You mean...”

  “Well if you hadn’t gone gallivanting off I could have told you that they have just found his car. Abandoned. About three miles away from Dinorwig.”

  “So what now?”

  “I know it’s Christmas but I want you up there. If the prime minister asks me what’s happening I can’t just rely on the local police are saying.” He looked at Natasha. “I’ve cleared it with your lot.”

  Monty: “How do we get there?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” the DG replied. “The PM told the military at COBRA to have a couple of helicopters on standby. They’ve just sent down a Puma from Benson. You need to go down to Battersea heliport.”

  “And then what?”

  “You’ll hook up with the taffy police.” He looked at Natasha wondering if she was Welsh and whether he should rephrase.

  Happy to keep him guessing, she crossed her arms over her chest and held his gaze.

  “I mean to say …”

  Monty intervened. “Not to worry, sir. Essex girl.”

  He smiled at Natasha. Her expression didn’t change. “I mean to say woman. From Essex. And Cambridge.”

  It was the DG’s turn to come to Monty’s rescue. “Let the police take the lead. Just keep an eye on it all. There’s a car waiting for you downstairs. And just to warn you, the press are already getting onto it. Give them a wide berth.”

  “You going to be warm enough?” Monty asked as they left the DG’s office.

  “What about Rosie?” Natasha hissed. “On Christmas Day too.”

  “Don’t worry. That’s why Tilly is looking after her.”

  “It’s Christmas Day Monty. And by the way are all you MI5 types chauvinist pigs?”

  They headed towards the Thames House exit in silence.

  “Natasha, don’t worry. We could be back by the morning. Or at least you could. Tell you what. I’ll ask Charity to drop by if you like.”

  “Monty, no!”

  He spoke more quietly. “Rosie will be fine. Come on.”

  When they reached the exit she took out her phone and, hanging back from Monty so that he could not hear, called Tilly. By the time she emerged he was already in the car. She said nothing all the way to the heliport.

  The loadmaster was waiting for them at the entrance. There
was only one helicopter at the heliport, painted in light and dark green camouflage patches. Monty and Natasha made straight for it. It stood on a landing platform built on a structure that stood over the Thames and since it was high tide, the water ran underneath it. The loadmaster consulted a clipboard: “Knight and Montgomery?”

  “The very same,” said Monty.

  The loadmaster signalled towards Flight Lieutenant Wynne Garret who, already in a flying suit, waved from the cockpit, put on his helmet and spoke into its built-in microphone. Within a couple of seconds there was a high-pitched whine from the engine and the rotors of the helicopter started turning.

  “Follow me.”

  They trailed behind the loadmaster as he walked towards the river.

  “Is it still Dinorwig?” the loadmaster raised his voice competing with the helicopter blades that whooshed overhead.

  “Yes!” Monty shouted back.

  The loadmaster indicated they should go on board. By the time the three of them were in the cabin the helicopter was shaking. Natasha and Monty both put on sets of plastic and foam ear protectors that had been left on the webbing seats and strapped themselves in.

  Looking forward Monty and Natasha could see the gauges on the instrument panel and beyond, Battersea Bridge spanning the Thames. Garret looked back, waved as if to say hallo and put his thumbs up.

  When Monty reciprocated the helicopter shuddered upwards flying in a long, slow arc over the Thames.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “The main principle being not to match strength with strength, but to gain victory by yielding to strength.” -- Jigoro Kano defining jiu jitsu, 1887

  18:00, Christmas Day, Electric Mountain, North Wales

  Unable to tell when the pickup was about to go around a corner, Jaz slithered on the metal floor. The tailgate rattled and by putting his face next to it he had an intermittent view of where he was going or at least where he was coming from. To his right the mountain rose steeply. The lake, perfectly still, was on his left.

  He looked back down the road at the checkpoint. And then he saw blue lights.

  Although there was no chance they could see him Jaz pulled back hugging the metal even more tightly. He moved to the tailgate once more to check and saw silhouettes now. Many of them. And he thought he could make out some shadows moving at their feet. Dogs.

  *****

  Joan Williams had worked so fast on her first report that she’d barely had time to think and when she sat in the satellite truck watching the piece being fed to Manchester her elation was tempered by a couple of worries. First, there was no way she could have known the girl had a Christmas stocking. But then no one except her parents would be able to contradict her and they were unlikely to be in a fit state to complain. Secondly, the archive pictures of the rioting were not labelled as archive so it might appear to some viewers they had been filmed in Bradford after the bombing. She decided that was Manchester’s problem, left the truck and wondered how she could go about securing an interview with the family. If not the parents then maybe there was an aunt or uncle...

  Her worry about the archive soon became academic. As Pakistani families watched the pictures of Becky Cowling on the TV and braced themselves for the backlash, young white men fuelled with Christmas alcohol took to the streets. The police, overwhelmed by the task of managing the crime scenes, were slow to respond and anyway unable to put enough men on the streets. By six o’clock that night Joan Williams was reporting on violent skirmishes in some of the most deprived parts of the city. By eleven there were full-blown riots. The Christmas Day riots. Joan needed pictures.

  Worried that her Golf might be smashed up or burnt out if she got any closer, she stopped the moment she saw the first group of youths. Three young Asians, 18 years old she reckoned, were swaggering down the middle of a deserted street, excited by the lawless atmosphere. She let them go ahead 200 yards and followed on foot as they approached the centre of town.

  She passed through a street where the rioters had already been. About half the shops had been burnt out and looted and, fearing she’d missed it, she told the cameraman to film whatever he could.

  But as Joan turned the next corner she realised that filming enough pictures was going to be the least of her problems.

  She was looking at a city square. A young white man who, despite the cold, was wearing only a tight white T-shirt adorned with a bulldog in a Union Jack waistcoat was smashing the windows of a butcher’s shop with a sledgehammer. A tailor’s dummy, deformed by fire, lay in the street, smoke still rolling off its smoldering clothes. She saw more youths trying to kick their way through the roller shutters on a jeweller’s door. A group of police milling around an upended police van were less than 100 yards away. They looked on without trying to stop him.

  “Get over here!” She yelled back to the cameraman.

  As she hung back trying to assess what was going on, she made out three groups: whites, Asians and the police. Although the frontlines were confused there was, in effect, a pitched battle between the whites and Asians with the police, too few in number, reduced to the role of bystanders. There were bricks, stones and the occasional bottle filled with fuel flying through the air. They smashed on the tarmac, splaying flames and shards of glass all over the road. She saw one Pakistani, outside a looted sports shop, calmly placing golf balls onto the pavement. With wild, unpractised swings he tried to hit them into the whites.

  His target was a crowd of tattooed men, some with shaven heads, who were chanting “Rights for Whites!” She saw a man waving a Union Jack above his head screaming with so much anger she thought his puce face might explode: “You murdering fucking bastards!” he shouted. She saw one of the men rush out from the crowd and, for no reason she could see, fall over. Feigning injury he made his way to the police lines and once out of view started pointing back at the crowd he had come from. All along the street there were futile screeching burglar alarms. A middle-aged Pakistani man had his arms stretched wide as he carried a stolen TV so big he toppled under its weight.

  The police, outnumbered and uncertain which group to confront first, were limiting themselves to a policy of containment, occasionally thrashing protestors with their truncheons to keep them within the square. Glass crunching under her feet, Joan walked towards them telling her cameraman to turn his machine on and to keep it rolling. He held it casually at his waist so that the police would not realise he was filming.

  She walked by an elderly Pakistani woman slumped against a wall between two pools of urine arguing with a policewoman. “Why won’t you help me?” As she sat there two white boys walked by. The first spat at her and the second sprinkled some of the contents of his vodka bottle over her face.

  Joan saw a policeman who, judging by the group of uniformed acolytes circling around him, was quite senior. Pointing to the white protestors she heard him say: “It’s Christmas Day for God’s sake, why aren’t they with their families?”

  “They don’t have families sir,” a young officer replied.

  Joan looked at the cameraman with an enquiring gaze. “Got it,” he mouthed. She gave him a wink. “Pakistanis next,” she said.

  She did three interviews before she heard the sound bite she wanted. But it was worth waiting for. “What you are seeing here is the start of the defence of Bradistan,” a 16-year-old Asian said. True he was slightly young to be frightening but it was too good a line to miss.

  She nearly interviewed the whites to put a BNP angle in the story. But why complicate it? she thought. Rioting Asians versus overwhelmed police. People would understand that. Always best to keep it simple. So, there was just one thing left: the most important part, when she would talk directly to the camera. It was then she smelt the tear gas. She walked towards it at a brisk pace navigating her way through a group of protesters who were hurling rocks and bottles as police charged back and forth. The canisters hit the ground and started smoking. Joan’s eyes welled up.

  “Camera on me!” she shrieke
d. The cameraman had his camera locked between his knees as he rubbed his eyes.

  Joan ran up to him. “Stop fucking crying and start fucking filming!”

  His eyes still watering, the cameraman did as he was told. “Hold on! I can’t focus.”

  Satisfied that more shouting would probably just slow him down, Joan gave him a minute. As she waited she tried to breathe in more gas.

  “Go!”

  “Here in Manningham the police have started firing tear gas at the protestors.” Joan paused for a split second to show she was having difficulty breathing. “You can see them behind me now still confronting the forces of law and order. Joan Williams, BBC News, Bradford. You got it?”

  Rendered mute by the gas, he nodded.

  “How good was that! Let’s get back to the truck and feed it to Manchester.”

  “I had a call about that,” he spluttered, “national news in London want it direct.”

  Joan turned to the police and with an extravagant gesture blew them a kiss and then turning to the retreating demonstrators she gave them one too.

  *****

  By the time Joan was at the truck Monty and Natasha were over Birmingham. Having flown over Monty’s Chelsea Harbour flat, they looked down at the red and white lights of the cars on the motorways converging on Birmingham. With most people at home eating or watching TV, some of the roads were almost deserted with just the occasional vehicles taking advantage of the quiet and driving so fast they almost kept up with the helicopter. The city itself glowed in the night, a mass of light. And then as they headed further north the mountain ridges and valleys came into view speckled with the lights of isolated farmhouses and cottages.

  Natasha looked at Monty and, unable to make herself heard, mouthed the word ‘sorry’.

  Monty shrugged his shoulders and screwed up his face to indicate that he didn’t understand.

  She leant towards him and, brushing against his arm, lifted the headphones from his ear. “I said sorry!” she bellowed.