by Kit Pedler
Finally, as the leading troop carrier reached Langham Place, the whole column screeched to a halt. Almost immediately, tail boards went down and soldiers jumped out unloading wooden barriers and coils of rusting, barbed wire.
Red-capped military police from one carrier spread out quickly along the west side of the street, and began halting traffic trying to get into the road. Car drivers were curtly told to reverse and go back the way they had come.
There were many angry arguments with drivers who refused both to accept the situation and to take orders from soldiers. The troops worked at a furious pace erecting bars on cross shaped supports. Finally all side access roads were sealed off.
Along the great sweep of the embankment to the south, the river formed a natural barrier and only Waterloo Bridge was closed. Just by the ‘egg-in-a-box’ shape of the Festival Hall on the South Bank, two half track armoured vehicles were parked across the road. A police Land-Rover was between them and two traffic police were setting up flashing light beacons and ‘No Entry’ signs. To the north, angry pedestrians trying to cross the Hungerford foot bridge were being turned away from the long flight of stone steps leading to it from Villiers Street.
Slowly, as troops and police spread out with their barriers and equipment, the great complex of streets, shops and squares was sealed off like some ancient ghetto. Along Euston Road and Southampton Row, barriers were dragged across access roads. Multiple road jams built up as drivers hurried to get out.
Accidents multiplied as anxious commuters jostled with each other in the fumes and the noise.
Gradually as the last cars left, the area began to fall silent. The habitual roar of the traffic was replaced by the sound of footsteps as pedestrians gathered in frightened groups studying the maps and instructions being given out by the police and then hurried for the nearest shelter.
In the dry, freezing air, the snow began to pile up in small drifts against the pavements.
In his luxurious flat overlooking the untidy, cosmopolitan spread of Old Compton Street in Soho, Harry Menzelos was listening intently to the radio as the announcer read out the emergency plans. As it finished he switched off and walked over to the window and looked thoughtfully down at the delicatessens in the street below. He stood for a long moment, tapping his finger on the glass, his rather sad face completely expressionless. Then he turned away and took a long cigarette from a gold case.
Menzelos was a professional.
He had learnt the hard facts of life and death as a company sergeant major with the British military mission in Salonika. Operating in the mountains of Khortiatis to the north, he had easily established a reputation – among ally and enemy alike – as an efficient killer. To his own men he was respected as an operator who made things work but demanded in return total loyalty.
After the war, he left his home town of Piraeus and made his way to England, drifting through various minor rackets in London without ever making any serious money or getting caught. His first success was a major snatch in Hatton Garden, netting a cool ten thousand pounds worth of small saleable diamonds.
An intelligent and sensitive man he had planned and carried out several major robberies – investing the spoils in legitimate business enterprises. He currently owned two clubs in Paddington and managed a string of shoe shops in London and the Home Counties.
He also paid income tax.
He poured himself an inch of Fourneaux’s special reserve cognac, picked up the phone and dialled, studying the growing ash on his cigarette as he waited, he spoke:
‘Solly? – Harry – yes. Heard the radio? – bad isn’t it?’ – he laughed briefly – ‘It’s given me a very good idea – Solly, you want? Well why don’t you come over – yes – make it quick Solly – it must be now – yes – you’d better bring Alford – yes that’s right. Where does he keep the lorry? Good, good, that’s inside isn’t it, bring it over and park it in the mews – yeah – see you.’
He put the phone down and went into the bedroom and pulled the large double bed to one side on its castors. Then he folded the carpet back and pulled up three of the narrow floorboards under the lining felt. Reaching down, he brought up a heavy bundle of oily rags and unfolded them.
The wall lights reflected dully on a sten gun, two army issue revolvers and a bundle of loaded magazines.
* * *
In the street below, shops were closing down, barrels of cucumbers and preserved fish were pulled in as shopkeepers began to tidy away empty containers.
Brewer Street was dark and deserted as the three men huddled in the doorway listening. The snow was beginning to lie on the pavement and they looked anxiously at the jumbled line of black footprints leading up to where they stood.
Finally, satisfied that no one was about, Solly Ackerman took a small battery drill out of his holdall, screwed in a long carbide tipped tool and started to drill just above the centre keyhole of the heavy dead lock in the main door. Above his head the snow was beginning to gather over the tops of the large, embossed letters stating: A. Bonnington. Jewellers’ Merchants.
The angry whine of the drill seemed dangerously loud in the quiet of the deserted street.
Finally he pulled out the drill and poked a long threaded rod down the hole in the lock. On the far end of the rod there was a weighted cross bar which sprang open across the hole as soon as it reached the inner side of the lock, holding it in position against removal.
Then onto the threaded outer end he screwed a heavily built fly-cutter – a precision version of a schoolboy’s compass and then attached a ratchet brace to the cutter. As he swung the brace to and fro, the fly-cutter turned in jerky segments, cutting a circular swath into the steel of the door surrounding the deadlock. The others looked on impatiently as he worked, sweating in the cold air. Shiny blue curls of hot steel shavings fell into the snow and hissed briefly as they cooled.
Ten feet below the street outside the jewellers, in an old brick-arched Victorian sewer, variant fifty-nine was inexorably following out its life pattern. Feeding greedily on the broken down constituents of the biodegradable bottle, the generations of bacteria grew, divided and died, each one contributing its own small quotient of gas. Gas which filled the wet tunnels, rising slowly up into waste pipes, into basements and into houses.
Ackerman led the way across the floor of the shop, past glass cabinets empty of their contents and down the heavily carpeted stairs, his torch beam picking out the plush furnishing and the line of Crimean prints on the curving wall of the stairway. Finally the beam of light fixed on a fuse box and an array of cast iron switches. Silently, he handed the torch to the third man, Alford, who kept it trained on the switches. He opened the cover of one of the switches, first breaking the lead electricity board seals. Taking a small meter with leads out of his holdall he touched the metal prods on two of the gleaming copper bars inside the switch, the meter needle stayed at zero.
‘OK, no juice in the main switch,’ he whispered.
‘Let’s go to work,’ Menzelos said.
As they crept forward in the dark, Alford complained: ‘Somebody must have crapped down here. God what a stink.’
‘Come on – come on,’ said Menzelos, irritably snatching the torch from Alford and sweeping it round the room. ‘There it is, that’s it.’ The beam picked out the squat, black safe in one corner.
In the semi-darkness, none of them saw the small pouting mass of foam rising through the drain in the sink in the opposite corner.
Alford was examining the safe in the torch beam: ‘Won’t need bottles for this lot, it’s a Parkstone superior, look, four lock bars, two on the key side and two on the hinge side. Putty’ll do that lot all right, no bother.’
Twenty minutes later, Ackerman finished drilling four three-eighths holes in the casing of the safe. Each hole lay close to the four lock bars.
Menzelos was setting up wires leading to a cylindrical stack of nickel cadmium high discharge battery cells and Alford had torn up the carpet from the
stairs and had piled it up on the floor in front of the safe.
Ackerman took a cocoa tin out of his holdall and began digging out the plastic explosive inside it, rolling it into long sausages and stuffing it into the holes he had drilled. Then he took four small copper tube detonators and pushed each one into the putty-like explosive protruding from the holes. Each detonator had two wires hanging from the outer end. Finally he took a ball of modeller’s clay, divided it into four equal lumps and tamped it carefully round each detonator with his hands, leaving the wires protruding.
Menzelos took each pair of wires, connected them up to the fly nuts on a crudely made junction box and trailed the lead back up the bare stairs carrying the batteries. Alford carefully packed the stair carpet around the front of the safe holding it in position with two tilted office chairs.
The foam was spreading out from the drain across the bottom of the sink.
Menzelos called down the stairs to the others: ‘Right, come out the way.’ Alford and Ackerman took a last look round with the torch and went back upstairs with Menzelos.
The three men huddled down in the corner of the shop.
‘Have a look out Lennie,’ said Menzelos. ‘Make sure nobody’s there.’
Alford made his way to the window looking up and down the street to make sure it was empty. He came back: ‘OK, nobody.’
Menzelos carefully attached one lead to the batteries and the other to a switch strapped on the side with black tape. Closing his eyes, he threw the switch.
Down in the basement, the four charges blew with a sharp crackling thud flinging the carpet and the chairs across the room releasing a momentary flash of flame from each hole. As the three men started to rush down the stairs, the gas trapped in the sink ignited.
It flashed down the waste pipe, whipping along the branching underground pipes leading to the sewer. Then with a tremendous roar, the trapped gas in the sewer tunnel exploded. A heavy iron grille in the surface of the street blasted into the air followed by a volcano of flame. Windows in surrounding buildings shattered and the grille spun through the air turning over and over like a giant discus finally smashing down onto the pavement with a ringing metallic clang.
The three men peered into the shattered basement room coughing and wheezing in the fumes, the beam of the torch barely penetrating the murk. There was a complete shambles. The plaster and some of the brickwork on one wall had collapsed. Where the sink had been there was a gaping hole in the floor. The distorted safe door was open on one remaining hinge.
‘Christ,’ Alford whispered. ‘What the hell did you use?’
Ackerman was aghast: ‘Just the putty, that’s all.’
Alford was beginning to panic. ‘Let’s scarper, that’ll bring the law, quick as that.’ He began to move towards the stairs, Menzelos held him back by the arm: ‘We ain’t got the stones, Lennie, we ain’t got the stones.’
Ackerman was already at the safe door raking out blackened files and jewel boxes, finally, he got three labelled velvet bags out of a small metal box. ‘They’re here – quick.’ He threw one over to Menzelos and pocketed the other two.
From over their heads there was a brief sound of screeching tyres in the street outside, then the thump of car doors and muffled voices. They all strained to hear what was being said. There were grating footsteps on the skylight over their heads.
Menzelos snapped off the torch: ‘Not a sound, not a sound!’
‘The bloody door!’ Alford whispered. ‘They’ll see the hole in the door!’
‘Shut up,’ Ackerman whispered. The three waited in total silence. There was a muted click as Menzelos cocked the breech mechanism of the sten gun. After what seemed like an age, the voices and the footsteps receded, there was the sound of car doors again, an engine starting and accelerating away into silence.
‘Now, we wait,’ said Menzelos, switching on the torch again. ‘We stay here, then we walk out nice and slow and go back to my place.’
‘Not supposed to be anybody on the streets, Harry,’ Ackerman said.
‘Everybody’s trying to get somewhere, that’s why we had to do it today. Later we’ll have the place to ourselves. Even the troops won’t be out.’
Thirteen
The fifty-ninth variant now held the centre of London in its grip.
In the freezing December cold, it steadily evolved, adapted and divided. Each generation learning to attack and dissect new molecular structures. As each outbreak began, fresh supplies of plastic softened and then bubbled as the foraging bacteria invaded. Each time the bacteria took hold in a confined space where there was a spark or naked flame, gas built up to an optimum concentration and exploded.
The great complex of systems – the vascular and nervous systems of normal city operation broke down. Underground tunnels – the so-called subways – containing gas, water and electricity mains fell into a shambles. Everywhere there was a plastic junction and infecting spores of live bacteria, there was a fresh breakdown.
Aggregations of infected foam were carried by the wind to cause new outbreaks, people – unknowingly – acted as vectors or carriers of the plastic disease, carrying small specks of infected material on their clothing or hands.
One outbreak became two, two became four, four eight and so on in rigorous geometric progression.
As the full emergency regulations took hold, people hurried to food shops to stock up for the emergency. There were queues at every shop. The delicatessens of Soho were emptied as people who had never eaten a pickled herring or garlic sausage in their life bought them by the pound.
Without any warning, the ring subway encircling the Aldwych blew up like a Bangalore torpedo, setting fire to Bush House and wrecking the front of the television building.
A surgeon, performing an emergency orthopaedic operation in University College, watched helplessly as the plastic drip tube leading into the patient’s vein began to soften and balloon out under the pressure from the hanging drip bottle.
In the Coburg Street control room of the London underground, the wall map of the tube railway was silent and dark. Engineers sat over cold cups of coffee, staring morosely at lifeless banks of instruments.
At Scotland Yard, the radio-car control centre failed suddenly as insulation in its main relay room failed.
Although most of the more serious outbreaks were confined to the sealed area, people who had left the zone before decontamination had started, carried small patches of infection with them to the world outside.
At Heathrow, an air traffic controller watched in horror as one of the knobs on his control console came stickily away in his hand.
A long-distance lorry loaded with polythene carboys of liquid industrial cyanide was roaring north up the M1 motorway. At the base of one of the carboys there was a small bulging patch of softened plastic where a loader had lifted it onto the lorry in London.
The patch slowly ballooned outwards under the weight of the deadly poisonous liquid it contained.
The patch split and the poison began to dribble out of the hole, down under the tailboard of the lorry and onto the road.
An industrialist away from his flat in Westminster flyfishing in the Wye valley, watched in amazement as his plastic wading boots softened as he stood knee deep in the river.
In the silence of an almost deserted city, Jack Bailey trudged wearily through the snow along Shaftesbury Avenue, an old navy melton pulled up round his face. Still wearing his commissionaire’s peaked cap to keep out the cold, he was carrying two paper carrier bags bulging with food. As he turned off into Newport Street he wondered dully whether Mary had been able to cook anything on the paraffin heater. He walked round the back of the car park still half filled with the white humped shapes of abandoned cars and let himself in through the door of their ground floor flat.
Inside, the air was warm but smelt strongly of a badly adjusted paraffin stove. The only light came from two candles on the cheap varnished sideboard, giving out just enough light for him to see h
is wife Mary sitting curled up in a blanket warming her hands over the heater. She shivered at the breath of cold air from the door as he closed it behind him.
‘They just said on the radio we can’t go out no more,’ she said in a complaining tone.
‘I know, we heard it in the club before it closed. I got the instructions – tells us what to do. Got any tea? I’m perished.’
She got up, still keeping the blanket round her shoulders, took one of the candles and went through into the tiny kitchenette. She called back through the open door:
‘Gas is only just working, radio said one of the pipes blew up in Charing Cross Road – something about a plastic seal in a pipe, don’t seem right.’
‘Keep it on for a bit, give us a bit of extra heat, won’t it!’
‘Got enough shillings?’
‘About a dozen.’
She came back carrying a tray holding two cups and the candle.
‘Close the door, while I put this down then.’
Back in the darkened kitchen, a thin rim of foam had appeared around the sink outlet. Variant fifty-nine had reached up from the sewers beneath their flat, groping for the next source of food. It had writhed and pushed its way along the relatively warm underground pipes until it emerged into the freezing air of the Baileys’ kitchen. As the temperature of its surroundings fell, the rate of cell division also slowed up until the individual bacterial envelopes in the small patch lay dormant, almost without internal activity. The rim of foam had begun to dry, but now the low flame of the gas stove began to warm the air.
Jack and Mary sat quietly, their hands wrapped comfortingly around the teacups. Mary was rocking to and fro in her chair. Jack was looking round at all his favourite possessions – the old pair of captured German binoculars, the inscribed brass shell case on the mantelshelf – the pile of do-it-yourself magazines and books.