TARGET BRITAIN: a political thriller

by Owen Bennett-Jones

  “Left! Turn left!” Moley instructed the driver.

  The policeman did as he was told and accelerated up a steep track.

  “That’ll do!”

  Following Moley, Monty leapt out of the vehicle and clambered up the mountainside. His leather shoes slipped on the frosty ground. Twice he tumbled head first burying his face in heather.

  “Stop!” Moley said without warning. “Need to work out where I am.”

  Monty watched as Moley orientated himself by looking at the various mountain peaks. “They call it the Devil’s Finger. It comes up round here somewhere.”

  He moved up the hill more slowly than before, trying to find the opening.

  “Here we are.” Moley was calling over to Monty and, far behind, the policeman. Monty arrived to see a square concrete frame with metal doors flat on the ground. They were padlocked and bore a sign saying KEEP OUT. MINE SHAFT. DANGER.

  “But he can’t get out of there can he?” Monty said.

  “Not unless we let him.” Moley took a ring of keys out of this pocket and started rifling through them. “We have access to all the tunnels,” he explained. “Never know where we are going to end up.”

  The lock was covered in dirt and Moley blew at it until he could fit the key in its hole. After undoing the padlock he opened the two metal doors. Their long-disused hinges screeched as he did so. And then they were looking at a three foot square hole, so black they could see no more than one or two feet down.

  “Devil’s Finger,” Moley said. “It’s a good 20 feet straight down there.” He sat on the ground nearby. “He’ll be up soon enough. Just like a ferret.”

  Inside the mountain, Jaz could hear the voices behind him. He was moving violently now thrusting his arms and sometimes even his head against the unforgiving slate. But at least he seemed to be leaving his pursuers behind. Increasing the gap between them.

  The tunnel was so dark he could only feel his way. And then, without understanding why, he found he was able to move more quickly, and less painfully. Then he realised the slate ahead was visible and looked up to see a vertical shaft and above it, the stars.

  A metallic sound rang out in the tunnel behind him. They must have tripped on an old bit of machinery, Jaz thought, as he stood in the shaft pressing his arms against the slate and pulling his body up. The space was just big enough for him to move and although progress was slow he was able to climb. From time to time his feet found a slight ledge allowing him to rest and get his breath back.

  Within two or three minutes he felt the colder air towards the top of the shaft. And then he was up, sticking his head out of the hole, looking around to see where he was.

  “Come on my beauty. Let’s be having you.” An arm was locked tightly around Jaz’s throat and, with his body trapped in the hole, he was powerless to resist. And then there were two more people hauling him out and pinning his arms to his body as he emerged. They yanked his hands in front of him and he felt cold metal on his wrists.

  “Now then young man. Let me read you your rights.”

  Monty was lying on the ground with his head over the tunnel.

  “Natasha!”

  Nothing.

  “Give us your torch.” Taking Moley’s helmet and pointing it down the hole Monty switched on the light.

  And there, framed in slate he saw a smiling face just a few feet beneath him.

  “You got him?”

  “We did! Look!” He put one hand down the hole to help her out whilst pointing with the other to where Jaz was being held.

  The policeman was speaking into a radio struggling to make himself heard against the interference. “Arrested. Can you hear me? Not congested. Arrested.”

  He looked at Monty. “Seem to think I am giving a bloody traffic report.” He used his mobile instead.

  “Hallo Sir. Jones here. I have arrested him and handcuffed him and read his rights... Thank you sir ... Very good sir. The hut by tunnel you mean? ... Yes sir.”

  He put his phone away a broad grin his face. “Bloody brilliant!” He looked at Jaz. “Come on you little toe rag let’s get you down.”

  Jaz looked at his watch. Eight minutes to three.

  They walked down the mountain with Monty and Natasha in front and the policeman behind occasionally prodding Jaz in the back. With his hands cuffed in front of him, Jaz was unable to keep his balance and repeatedly tripped over. He learnt to buckle his knees the moment he started to topple over so that he could break the fall. And as he saw the road ahead he fell more often, deliberately now. Trying to time it right.

  “He’s like a bloody footballer,” the policeman said to Monty and Natasha. And to Jaz: “Come on, you can do it.”

  Five minutes to three.

  They were on the road heading down the steep slope towards the cabin by the main entrance.

  Three minutes to three

  Jaz sped up now bumping into Monty’s back trying to ensure he was closer to the cabin.

  “Steady now. You’ll be there soon enough.”

  Two minutes to three.

  They reached the cabin. Time for Jaz to make his move. Jaz started moving his hands up and down with violent rapid jerks repeatedly smashing the handcuffs into the side of the cabin.

  “Steady on! What you playing at?” Approaching from behind a policeman put his arms around Jaz’s chest trying to restrain his arms. But the more the man tightened his grip the more Jaz resisted and within a few seconds he had three police clambering all over him.

  “Calm down you little bastard. You’re not going anywhere.”

  Jaz moved his arms again but this time it was to look at his watch.

  Thirty seconds.

  “Well have to rear stack him,” one on the policemen said. “Hold his arms.”

  As four men now, two on each side, prevented Jaz from moving, the policeman reached for the padlock key and released them. “Right. Arms behind your back. That’ll stop your bloody antics.”

  Jaz knew these were the crucial seconds. He had to delay them. For how long? Minutes or seconds? He was about to look at his watch again when a vast boom roared out of the tunnel entrance. The lights in the cabin went black. For a second the police, shocked and bewildered, loosened their grip. And Jaz ran.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Can you imagine your life without electric power?” -- Admiral Mike McConnell

  “A cascade-based attack can be much more destructive than any other strategy” -- Adilson Motter and Ying-Cheng Lai, University of Arizona, 2002

  03:05, 26th December, National Grid Control Centre, Wokingham

  Fergus Pearson decided he needed a mug of tea.

  As the man responsible for matching the nation’s demand for electricity with its supply from power stations around the UK, he reckoned the worst was over. In fact, it had gone well. He had coped with the pickup in demand after the James Bond movie on BBC1 and had also worked out how to deal with an ITV Coronation Street special that had an ad break at nearly, but not precisely, the same moment. By looking at the digits crammed onto the four computer screens on his desk and sending instructions to the country’s 125 electricity suppliers to provide more or less electricity, he believed he had fully lived up to his job title: National Balancing Engineer.

  Now, with most people asleep in bed, demand had stabilised and, sitting back in his chair, he looked around him. The control room was like a cinema with a huge screen, over 10 metres wide, depicting a lattice of red, green, and purple flashing lines which together represented Britain’s high voltage transmission network. Beneath the screen, five rows of desks arranged in semicircles radiated out to the back of the room. Fergus Pearson sat in the middle of the back row on a slightly raised dais. Like a ship’s captain on the bridge.

  At 03:09 he took the first call.

  “Is that the Grid Control Centre?” a man’s voice sounded as if he was reading the words off a sheet of paper. Pearson recognised the tone. It would be a policeman following a set protocol.
/>   “Hi. Yes. How can I help?”

  “I am calling from Manchester. We have a major power cut. I’m meant to report it to you. “

  Fergus Pearson looked at his screens. There were no alarms, audio or visual. Experience had taught him that the term ‘major power cut’ was a highly flexible one. Often enough it was used to describe some local outage in just a few streets.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “The problem is we have no bloody power.” He sounded peeved. Probably the night shift, Pearson thought. Low blood sugar level.

  “Thanks. We’ll check it out.”

  He glanced at his screens once more to reassure himself. He went to get his tea.

  *****

  At the Manchester Royal Infirmary the surgeon had just started cutting into the appendix of a 14-year-old boy when the lights went out.

  He groaned. “Not exactly the best timing.”

  As he waited for the emergency generator to kick in, he stood stock still so that the scalpel would not move in his hand.

  “How long does it normally take?” he asked a nurse.

  “Just a few seconds.”

  “So they have failed?” He said it half as a question half as a statement. “Can’t be a drill can it? On Boxing Day morning?” Then as images of his managers came into his mind he said: “Actually don’t answer that ... I can’t hold this much longer.”

  “Anything I can do?” The nurse sounded uncertain.

  “Better find a torch I suppose.” Unsure if he was serious she didn’t move.

  “The quicker the better.”

  She ran out of the theatre bumping into a trolley in the dark.

  When she came back, out of breath, six minutes later she saw him standing in exactly the same position except that the anaesthetist was kneeling on the floor supporting the surgeon’s arm on his shoulder.

  “I keep one in my car,” she said, holding up the torch.

  She shone it between the clamps which were holding the boy’s stomach open. The batteries were low and it produced only a feeble, yellowy light.

  The surgeon drew breath between his teeth. “Put it closer.” The nurse moved round and the surgeon bent over until his face was just a couple of inches away from the boy’s organs. Even through his facemask they smelt like raw steak.

  “And there …” he pulled out the appendix in one hand and lifted his scalpel with the other, “… we are. Now what?”

  Two floors above him in the Intensive Care Unit one of his colleagues was asking exactly the same question as he used a hand pump to suck fluid out of the lung of a patient on his left and blew air through a failed ventilator into a patient on his right. And so too did the call manager at Manchester’s 999 who became the de facto hub of the city’s emergency response. After 10 minutes of chaos he decided to call up his manager.

  “Hallo,” his boss said in the muffled tone of a man who had just woken. There were repeated clicks as he tried, and failed, to switch on his bedside light. “Who is it?”

  “It’s the office. Sorry to bother you but ...”

  “What time is it?”

  “Three twenty.”

  “Sorry. Bulb’s gone.” He stopped trying. “What is it?”

  “It’s crazy here. There are power cuts everywhere.”

  “How many have you got on?”

  “Just the three of us.”

  “What call volumes?”

  “We can’t keep up.”

  “What sort of calls?”

  He ran through the log. “Fire. Curtains set alight by candle. We‘ve had three or four of them in the last ten minutes. 24-hour fuel stations unable to pump fuel. They say it’s a fire risk. Car crash at lights that aren’t working. There’s someone stuck in a lift somewhere. In a hotel I think. Then ambulances. We had the Royal Infirmary saying don’t send anyone because their backup generators have failed. Two suspected broken limbs with people falling over in the dark ...”

  “Hold it. I’m coming in.”

  *****

  For the first 50 metres Jaz kept to the road. He calculated that taking advantage of the flat surface would give him a short lead before the police in the cabin recovered from their shock and started giving chase.

  And 50 metres, he reckoned, would be half way to his objective.

  He counted out the paces as he ran, listening for sounds behind him. Not sure if anyone was following, he twisted his body slightly, looking back as he moved. He made out three shadows on the road. In the front was the black-haired woman who had been behind him in the mineshaft.

  Jaz hurled himself onto the verge and rolled down the slope. The gradient ran down to the lake, the edge of which was shale and had no undergrowth. When he stopped moving he stood up and ran freely, sometimes splashing in the shallow water. He heard the woman behind him, her feet pounding and, sometimes, slipping in the shale. And then as he came up to a looming concrete structure ahead, Jaz changed tack once more, scrambling up the slope before veering left onto the dam itself.

  Natasha was close enough to hear his breathing now and she launched herself at his ankles, rugby tackling him to the ground. Unbidden, the words of one of her hostile environment trainers came into her mind: “if it ever gets to unarmed combat something’s gone seriously wrong.” But they had also told her what to do: fight dirty. Poke the eyes, elbow the face, grab the balls, bite the flesh. As she grappled Natasha freed her right hand and amidst all the thrashing movement tried to reach out and feel for the groove beneath Jaz’s ear. As her thumb reached the end of his jawbone, she thrust her thumb upwards with all the force she could summon. Jaz screamed and, as if now resolved to finally rid himself of his attacker, used his strength to simply lift her from the ground.

  With Natasha kicking futilely kicking the air, Jaz rolled over so that he could move her onto the dam’s surface and sit on top of her. But suddenly he felt a ridge of brickwork digging into his ribs and realised he was at the dam’s edge. And with Natasha still thrashing like a fish it was too late to correct himself: the two, still intertwined, started falling with Natasha screaming in shock as she tumbled through the air beside him.

  Jaz braced himself for the impact. Suddenly he was in ice-cold water, sharp and jagged on his skin. Then everything was muffled as he plunged down into a deep pool of water. With a gentle thud Jaz touched the bottom and using his legs thrust himself upwards.

  As he came to the surface he took in a lungful of air and rolled onto his back and, kicking, went with the flow downstream. The woman had emerged too now, gasping for air as well. Her face and straggly wet hair were lit up as the moon shone on the disturbed white water around her. She struck out in his direction, swimming fast and, as she came close, reached forward trying to grab his ankle. Behind her, Jaz saw a man take off his jacket and dive off the dam into the water.

  Jaz thrashed out trying to kick her in the face. But time and again she went underwater only to emerge again trying to hold onto him. But he was used to her movements now and on the fifth occasion she tried to hold him, he used all his remaining strength to crash the heel of his boot down onto the back of her head. She went under and, this time, didn’t try to grab him again.

  Jaz went still, letting the water take him away from Dinorwig. The activity had kept out the cold but now he felt the icy water making him numb and seizing up his muscles. But he wanted to stay in the river as long as he could: to move further away from the plant and to stay clear of the roads.

  He managed two and a half minutes before he thought that, if he stayed in much longer, he might lose the strength to lift his head and get hypothermia. Increasingly water was lapping around his mouth and nostrils. And when he breathed some of the freezing liquid went in through his nose forcing him to cough as it caught in the back of his throat.

  He made his way to the bank.

  The edge of the river was obscured by overhanging trees and the leaves brushed against his face as he passed underneath. Suddenly the silence was shattered as a pair of du
cks which disturbed from their shelter beneath the tree, quacked, flapped their wings and flew into his face. By instinct he tried to use his hands to brush the feathers away from his skin but his cold hands as if they had arthritis did not respond as he expected.

  Pausing to regain his breath, as the sound of the ducks receded, he knelt on the riverbed looking at a three-foot vertical, muddy bank. It was impossible to climb up so he pushed himself back into middle of the river, waiting for it to become wider and shallower. Two minutes later, reaching the limit of his endurance in the ice-cold water, he found a stony flat area by the side the river and crawled onto the land.

  Aware the cold would have weakened him, he resisted the temptation to rest and forced himself to move. As he looked around, shivering violently, he saw he was in a field full of cows. Startled, the beasts began to run away from him and, following their direction, Jaz saw some headlights moving in the distance. He headed for a gap in the hedge across the field. Twice he tripped and fell, jarring his bones on the frosty ground, before he saw that there was a gate. He hurled himself at it, vaulting over the top bar.

  It was a waiting game now and in under three minutes Jaz saw the beam of some headlights in the distance. Wanting the element of surprise, he kept low until the car was 10 yards away. Then, with a violent lurch he leapt into the middle of the road jumping and waving his arms up and down. The car took a second to react and then the driver hit the brakes with such force it skidded on the icy surface sliding inexorably towards a hedge. There was a dull crunch of metal as the car hit the side of the road before it bounced off, skidding the other way now. Jaz moved aside to let it pass him and then ran to the driver’s door.