On returning to his flat, he had a simple meal literally washed down with what was really a very decent £8 bottle of rioja but that could never measure up to the £100-plus bottles he had shared with Consuela, her presence making them even more enjoyable. Nevertheless, the always-honest rioja sufficed to relax him enough to drop off to sleep quite easily.
On his way to Sackville Street on the Monday, Holt dropped into his office at Farringdon to find it now had a camp bed so that he could sleep there during crises. He also found that by virtue of his new security clearance, he had access to the sophisticated technical facilities, in addition to certain encrypted material in the computers.
These included video and data links not only to police operations rooms (and their CCTV cameras) but also a special booth for sensitive links with the CIA at Langley in the States and to their satellites, which could cover London, as well as any other place on earth. The links with the CIA were set up so that GCHQ could not decrypt them. If someone, even from security, should gain entry, the link with the US would automatically be broken, and the screens filled with innocuous material.
Chapter 21
London Alert
Holt arrived at Sackville Street with plenty of time to talk to Sir Charles before the OwlPhone would ring. They discussed the various possibilities as they saw them.
At precisely 2 p.m., there was a ping indicating an incoming text message. Although it could be read on the screen, they copied it to a computer as instructed and printed it out. It was very much along the lines of the suggestions made to Holt at the end of his interrogation.
LONDON ALERT
A series of disrupting events in London and England are imminent. They are to remind you to take the Owl’s recommendations to improve the country seriously.
These alerts, together with the measures we wish to see imposed, will be sent to news organizations, the media, and tweeted to prevent the government withholding them from the public. All will be copied to this OwlPhone.
Let the games begin.
The Owl
Within minutes, the media and the internet were being bombarded with warnings citing the Owl’s agenda for putting the country to rights. He told them to expect happenings to ensure the government paid attention and started taking action.
Strangely, though GCHQ had managed to link the Owl with people engaged in financial speculation against the pound before Holt’s undercover mission, they were no longer coming up with anything. This suggested the Owl had learnt about GCHQ previously having found a link – perhaps from Holt during his interrogation.
A week and a half went by, and with nothing having happened there were suggestions that the whole thing had been a hoax. Sir Charles’s enemies began bad-mouthing him in the hope that they could pounce and get Giraffe closed down and Sir Charles taken down a peg.
‘Without Giraffe, he will be a eunuch,’ said a senior general who in an argument six months earlier with a third party present had been accused by Sir Charles of being an incompetent buffoon.
Chapter 22
COBRA
The first sign that something was brewing came from the air. The first officer of an airliner arriving much earlier than scheduled from the Far East was requesting a priority landing, as some of the passengers and the captain were acting crazily. Ten minutes later, another aircraft called air-traffic control with a similar story, except that this time it was the Muslim copilot who was off his rocker, and an elderly rabbi had put his hand up a flight attendant’s skirt.
Air-traffic control called the first aircraft to ask whether their captain was a Muslim, and was told he was Jewish. This added to the confusion. Was the common factor that none of the zanies had eaten the pork option for their meal?
Within minutes, dozens of aircraft were calling in with similar stories. All demanding priority, with several even having declared a fuel emergency, which meant they had to be given absolute priority, thus further delaying other arrivals.
Nearby countries were refusing to allow London‑bound aircraft low on fuel to divert to their airports after receiving warnings that there were individuals on those flights infected with viruses developed for biological warfare.
With Holt already at his post in the special ops room at Farringdon, Sir Charles set off by special car to the Cobra room, somewhere below Whitehall. There were all sorts of ways to access this secret location, via tunnels from the prime minister’s residence at Downing Street, the Foreign Office, and the Ministry of Defence, not to mention the Cabinet Office, at 70 Whitehall, which was the way Sir Charles chose. Using his swipe card, he went through the blast-proof doors to find the prime minister and the heads of MI6, MI5, the Metropolitan Police, and the military, and other officials such as the mayor of London, already there.
Some of those present were standing, others were already seated at the 30 ft polished burr‑walnut table. Most of the far wall was taken up by a giant eight-panel video screen, on the right of which was a lectern for the chairman – in this case the PM. The side walls had four flat-panel screens high above the participants’ heads for teleconferencing and TV feeds from the BBC, CNN, and so on. Each position at the table had its own microphone.
The term ‘Cobra’, suggesting something menacing that the government was taking very seriously, was not the brainchild of some consultancy but had been arrived at by pure chance in that it was simply an abbreviation for ‘Cabinet Office Briefing Room A’ – one of a number of rooms in the Cabinet Office used for meetings of the CCC (Civil Contingencies Committee).
The British government had again moved tanks, armoured vehicles, and troops to London’s Heathrow Airport and other airports to try and show that they were in control, but there was not much that they could do, other than raise the fear level amongst the population.
Heathrow, with only two runways and operating close to its limit in terms of the number of flights it could handle, was in deep trouble, as prioritizing aircraft having declared a fuel emergency meant others were being delayed and circling overhead, burning up fuel, and themselves about to declare fuel emergencies. Soon the airport got to the point where it could no longer cope. The usual alternative airports were in a similar predicament.
Airliners were having to land at airfields with runways so short that the seats and everything else removable would have to be taken out to enable them to take off again, and then only with difficulty. Then, when it seemed the situation in the air could get no worse, mortars spewed spikes coated with adhesive onto the two runways at Heathrow and the single runway at Gatwick, making them unusable.
The pound sterling’s value was continuing to drop.
Hoax calls were also coming in from people trying to exploit the situation.
Exasperated, the police at first dismissed a call from a woman saying she had seen a duck with machine-guns coming out of the River Thames. The official taking the call called out to a colleague, saying some crazy cow had reported seeing ducks with guns, only to be told the woman probably had her head screwed on the right way as she must have meant the amphibious motorized ‘ducks’ used to take families with kids around London, the excitement being that they could ride both on land and on the river.
Since the phone system had recorded the woman’s number, the official was able to call back, apologise, and ask for further details.
In fact, the ducks-with-guns story was not daft at all, for a little earlier a woman with a revealing lace blouse had distracted the drivers of a couple of these motorized ducks parked at their usual pick-up point near the London Eye. While the drivers were occupied ogling her twin assets, a kindly man had been giving the children onboard their vehicles some toy Glock semiautomatic pistols, a couple of toy surface-to-air-missile launchers, and other toy weaponry. He also gave them masks, which made their faces look adult‑like.
‘You kids,’ the kindly man had said, ‘are lucky to have been chosen to take part in a game to be televised. When attacked by pretend policemen either on the ground or in
helicopters, return the fire with your toy weaponry. Even though it’s only a game, you will be famous.’
What the children did not know was that though they had not been given the real thing, what they had been given were not innocent toys either.
Holt later learnt from the Owl that he had come up with the idea after hearing from a woman at a reception of an incident in which she had been on one of those ducks with her two children when it was waylaid by fearsome-looking police toting machine-guns telling then them to lie flat on the ground. Only later did she learn that the police had been looking for armed robbers allegedly making their getaway on one of the ducks, following a hold-up in central London.
SWAT teams began stopping the motorized ducks taking tourists – mostly children – around central London. The two with the masked kids brandishing the ‘weapons’ they had been given were following each other up Regent Street when they were stopped. As instructed, and believing they were taking part in a TV programme, the children immediately ‘opened fire’, forcing the police to withdraw and call in helicopters with marksmen able to get a better angle of fire.
In the Cobra operations room, some officials, including Sir Charles, were urging caution, pointing out the danger of firing on armed terrorists in central London.
‘Have we any better idea now as to who the Owl might be?’ asked an admiral, feeling the senior service was being left out of things and wanting to make some contribution.
‘Only that he, or she, could even be one of us,’ replied Sir Charles. Those present began looking at each other suspiciously.
Chapter 23
Dangerous Ducks
As the helicopters moved in close to the two ducks, they came under ‘heavy fire’, with noisy rounds exploding near them with puffs of smoke, just like flak in World War II. As the pilots hesitated and hovered some distance away, rockets whizzed up from the ducks. Striking the helicopters on their windscreens, they spewed out a paint-like substance, producing a mist covering not only the windscreens but also the sights of the marksmen’s weapons. One marksman did get a shot in but could not see whom he had hit.
Ironically, at that very moment the Metropolitan Police commissioner, adorned with insignia to denote his great importance, was reassuring the public on television.
‘We have the situation fully under control,’ he was saying. ‘One of our marksmen on a helicopter has taken out one of the terrorists, and our SWAT teams are courageously exchanging fire. Our dedicated men and, I must add, women will overcome them in the end. That’s all I can say for the moment. There’s no need to panic. Thank you.’
Ten minutes later, TV footage revealed that the ‘terrorist’ they had ‘taken out’ – a fourteen-year-old girl – was being carried from the duck by some young boys, themselves no older than twelve. Believing the terrorists were, as President Bush used to say, ‘hunkered down’ amongst the children, the SWAT teams were caught in a tricky situation and ordered to pull back even further.
The country was running out of airfields, let alone airports where airliners low on fuel could land. Holt was telling Sir Charles over the video link that the Owl seemed to be attempting to provoke the government into overreacting.
‘Not everyone here agrees, Captain,’ replied a frustrated Sir Charles. ‘Your job is to try and work out what the big one, if anything, is going to be.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Holt assured him.
‘Remember we have put a lot of faith in you. Keep in mind what I told you about how giraffes should look down from a great height. I’m counting on you! That’s all for now.’
Though it had not been Sir Charles’s intention, the idea of looking down from a great height had given Holt an idea – he could try using the CIA’s satellites to do just that!
He thought back over the things the Owl and his interrogators had focused on in the interrogation and the places he had visited during his time with Consuela. The only common thread, the only common line of questioning, had been the River Thames and the precautions the government might have taken to prevent Mumbai-style incidents with terrorists arriving by waterborne transport. He seemed to remember being constantly asked about the Thames when under the truth drug.
Was the Owl planning some Mumbai style of attack, with team members arriving by river? The authorities were sure they already had that angle covered, with police checking the occupants and crew of every boat and now even every motorized duck on the river.
He checked the tide for the Thames at London and found that it was just before high tide and that it was to be one of the highest predicted tides of the year. Perhaps the time and height of the tide were significant.
Holt pressed the key to open the link to the CIA liaison officer at Langley. He knew that although it was early in the morning over there, Sir Charles’s ‘pal’ was already in his office because of the situation developing in London.
‘Do you have a spy satellite over London?’
‘Please do not refer to it thus,’ replied the operative at Langley testily. ‘Yes, we did move an asset into place, more to follow the action rather than anything else. A kind of voyeurism; just like people watched the Twin Towers in real time on CNN. By the way, we can see people sunbathing half-naked in their gardens – it’s a nice day on your side of the pond. Our satellite is so good we can see the women’s navels and sometimes more than that.’
‘No need to go into detail right now, perhaps later. Can you wait a moment?’ replied Holt.
He quickly noted the coordinates of the River Thames from the Thames Barrier in the estuary up to the bridge upriver at Windsor, where the Queen has a castle. He then spoke again to the CIA man in the US.
‘Can you obtain a series of images of the River Thames, starting from an overall view between coordinates x and y, then then give me a series of very detailed images section by section between them, and repeat the process every ten minutes?’
The man at Langley agreed and said he would have them put up on the system so that Holt could download.
Holt and the two other members of Giraffe authorized to see the special CIA material studied the images as they came through. The amount of detail was unbelievable. No wonder they did not want other countries to know how much could be seen.
Small boats and especially speedboats were being checked by the river police, helped by the military, so the chance of a Mumbai-type attack seemed remote. The three of them at Farringdon could not see anything out of the ordinary. They must have missed something, and they examined the various boats on the river ever more closely.
‘Let’s reassess the overall picture again,’ suggested Holt.
They looked at the large print-outs showing whole stretches of the river.
‘Hey, there’s a pattern!’ exclaimed one of Holt’s colleagues.
Holt saw that downstream of a number of bridges were tugs towing barges, all equidistant from the bridge in question. On examining detailed images, they noted that each train of barges had one with a peculiar hydraulic contraption on it.
‘That’s it,’ shouted the colleague standing beside Holt. ‘It would be statistically impossible for several bridges to have barges equidistant from them.’
Holt looked again at the CIA close-ups and zoomed in again on the barges with those strange contraptions. He then called Sir Charles on the video link.
‘I think we’re onto something, Sir Charles.’
‘What have you got for us, Captain Holt?’
‘Barges towed by tugs are going to do something to some key bridges over the Thames. To damage them mechanically in some way at this time, when the tide is exceptionally high. It can’t be to blow them up, as all those barges have been searched repeatedly and nothing found. They have some form of innocuous-looking contraption – hydraulic, I expect – that they intend to raise under the bridge spans to unseat them from their underpinnings.’
Holt then listed seven bridges, saying they might not all be involved, as some normal barges might be there by cha
nce. Orders were immediately issued from the Cobra room for the barges to be intercepted and prevented from reaching the bridges with care taken, as some might be quite innocent. There was more time than appeared to thwart attacks, as the barges had not only to reach the bridges but also needed time to raise the devices to a point where they would exert significant upwards pressure, bearing in mind that they would be floating and not on solid ground.
As police and security people were already engaged in searching boats on the river, the seven lines of barges were quickly intercepted. In five cases, a barge had a contraption that when raised under a bridge would heave up a section the roadway, making the whole bridge unusable until the span was replaced.
Had the centre spans of those bridges been unseated, vehicles and even trains in the London area would have been unable to cross the river at those places, causing incredible traffic congestion. North London would have been half-isolated from South London and the short-term financial consequences considerable.
Chapter 24
Tower Bridge
Like the end of a Hollywood film where calamity is averted at the very last minute, officials were patting each other on the back and congratulating themselves that the damage had been limited, all the while making out they themselves had played key roles in thwarting the Owl’s plan when that had been largely thanks to Sir Charles and Holt.
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