by Tom Cain
45
Mid-air, en route to Rosconway
The two Augusta Power Elite helicopters packed with VIPs took off six minutes late, but the pilots put the hammer down and made up time along the way. ‘Don’t worry, everyone, we’re going to arrive bang on time,’ the RAF lieutenant at the controls of the lead craft assured his passengers. Nikki Wilkins passed the news on to her colleagues on the ground.
‘This could get interesting,’ she was told. ‘We’re still a couple of TV crews short. Channel Four News should make it in time, but God only knows where the missing BBC lot have got to.’
‘Do you want us to slow down, then?’ Wilkins asked.
‘No. Get here on time. You’re due at ten forty, right?’
‘That’s the time I was given, yes.’
‘Right then, let’s try to stick to the schedule if we possibly can. If the BBC don’t get their own pictures, that’s their problem. They’ll just have to take a feed from someone else.’
‘What’s it like there, though — apart from all the madness? You think this is going to work?’
‘Well, that depends… if the TV people all turn up, and if there isn’t some God-awful cock-up, this is a great place to do it. You’ve got this huge industrial complex — you know, all steel and concrete and flaming chimneys — set against this stunning coastline. And the weather looks pretty good. Plenty of blue sky, fluffy clouds, bright sunshine. I think we’re going to get some spectacular pictures.’
‘That sounds great,’ said Nikki Wilkins. ‘Full speed ahead!’
46
Wentworth
Malachi Zorn had been unable to contact Nicholas Orwell during his helicopter journey. The total embargo preventing anyone revealing the location of the conference or reporting from the Rosconway refinery applied even to ex-Prime Ministers. But that embargo ended at 10.25 a.m. Immediately reporters began filing their first scene-setting stories via TV camera, microphone, mobile phone and laptop. They described the awesome scale of the refinery, the hubbub of the hastily improvised conference, and the status of the people who would be attending. This, it was agreed, was a remarkable response by the Prime Minister, and though critics would surely be quick to suggest that he was showing signs of panic (Opposition politicians and spokespeople, glued to their TV screens, immediately began drafting precisely such suggestions), there could be no getting away from the speed and seriousness of his actions.
Zorn was, as always, tracking the news channels. It took him a few seconds to grasp what he was seeing. ‘Of all the oil joints, in all the countries, in all the world, they walk into mine,’ he murmured. He frowned as he digested the reality of what was about to happen. This was going to be what was known as a Black Swan Event, a totally unpredictable occurrence with massive consequences. Except that he, alone of all the world’s investors, actually could predict what was going to happen within the next fifteen minutes.
The adrenalin started to pump through Zorn’s system, sharpening his mind as it began to process all the possible permutations of events and reactions that could take place over the next few hours. He’d skied black runs, free climbed sheer rock faces without anything but his hands and feet to keep him from falling hundreds of feet, and sailed through storms in the Southern Ocean when the waves had towered over the mast and icebergs had loomed out of the darkness like frozen ghosts. But no fight against the natural elements thrilled him as much as the moments when he took on the market and risked everything he had on his ability to beat the odds.
Zorn realized that Orwell was in very great, possibly fatal danger. He felt no personal concern whatever for the ex-Prime Minister’s well-being. But Orwell’s death would seriously complicate plans for the rest of the week: though Orwell did not yet know it, a vitally important role had been set aside for him at the Zorn Global launch on Friday evening. There was, though, nothing to be done about that now; even if Zorn had been able to get through to Orwell, it would have been impossible to give him a reason to turn the helicopter around without giving away what was about to happen at Rosconway. So his fate was sealed. And it would, Zorn now realized, be very useful if someone so famous and so closely associated with his fund should be among the casualties. Yes, this was actually an extraordinary stroke of luck.
Very quickly, and taking even greater than usual care to cover his traces, Zorn did everything he could to increase his exposure in all his most highly leveraged trading positions. He staked his own capital and every last cent that his investors had given him, and did it in such a way that his wins, or his losses, would be many, many times the value of what he had put in.
As he always did at moments like this, Zorn looked at the picture of his parents that went everywhere with him. ‘OK, Dad, Mom, here we go. I’m going to make them all pay, I promise. I’m so close now… So wish me luck, guys. I’m going all-in.’
47
Rosconway
Carver found Tyrrell and Schultz staring despondently at a podium set up in front of a massive steel column, ringed by gantries and pipes. It looked like a rocket on a launch pad. More columns, chimneys and buildings rose behind it. Massive steel pipes wove between them, and ran past the small open space where the minister would address the media. A crowd of journalists and civil servants milled around, waiting for the show to begin. Willie Holloway, meanwhile, was having a heated argument with a pink-faced young man in a pinstriped suit who seemed unhappy with the positioning of the dais. Carver saw a look of undiluted loathing on Holloway’s face as he caught a braying, arrogant voice declaring, ‘I don’t give a damn about your ridiculous health and safety rules. The minister has to have the optimum backdrop. You’ll just have to move it.’
The SBS men were no happier. ‘Look at this,’ Schultz moaned, waving in the direction of the columns. ‘Fucking firing positions everywhere. Enough cover to hide a fucking regiment. Even a fucking para could get a shot off before we could stop him.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but I can’t say I disagree,’ Tyrrell said, giving Carver a nod of greeting. ‘How familiar are you with the way these things work?’ he asked.
‘I know more about mining and ore extraction.’
‘Well, you heat the crude up to about six hundred degrees centigrade, till it vaporizes, then stick the gas in these distillation columns, where it separates into different petrochemicals. They all condense at particular levels of the column: the higher up you go, the finer the product. And here’s the bit that we need to worry about: every one of those petrochemicals has different properties of flammability, explosiveness and toxicity.’
‘In simple English, having a bloody great media bunfight at a refinery is like having a barbecue at a fireworks factory,’ said Schultz.
‘Well, you lads enjoy the party,’ said Carver. ‘Can I have the keys to the car?’
‘Off to the pub, are you, sir?’ asked Schultz, smirking.
‘No, just curious about something Holloway and his lads might have missed.’
Tyrrell frowned. ‘Anything I need to know about?’
‘Not yet,’ said Carver. ‘Just want to take a look around the area.’
Tyrrell looked at him searchingly. ‘That’s all you’re doing?’
‘Positive.’
‘Well, if you come across anything suspicious, give me a call.’
‘Will do… So, the keys?’
‘Catch,’ said Snoopy Schultz.
Carver plucked them from the air one-handed, and headed for the car park.
48
Blackpole Retail Park, Worcester
Shortly after 10.30 A.M. Uschi Kremer pulled into the parking lot of a McDonald’s restaurant located within a soulless shopping centre on the northern outskirts of Worcester. She had driven hard from Rosconway, cutting across South Wales and up into the English Midlands, avoiding motorways, tolls and the CCTV cameras that came with them.
‘You can turn your phones on now,’ she said, oblivious to Brynmor Gryffud’s notional status as
group leader. ‘In fact, I think you should use them. Call some friends, or maybe, Bryn, you could check in with your office. Keep it nice and light, everything very normal. OK?’
‘I’m bursting for a piss,’ said Smethurst, getting out of the back of the car, closely followed by Gryffud.
‘If you guys do that, then make your calls, I will get you some food,’ said Kremer, walking beside them towards the golden arches. She gave them both a cheeky smile. ‘So… you want to go large?’
‘Looking at you, love, I’m getting large already,’ Smethurst replied.
‘Really? I didn’t notice,’ Kremer said, putting him in his place. ‘So, Bryn, are you hungry?’
‘I won’t have anything, thanks,’ said Gryffud. ‘I don’t want to give McDonald’s any money. I don’t approve of their impact on the environment.’
‘Oh, fuck off,’ Smethurst sneered. ‘In case you haven’t noticed, you’re about to blow an entire fucking refinery to pieces… and you’re worried about having a Big Mac? You’ll be telling me meat is murder next.’
‘He’s right,’ said Kremer, pausing for a moment outside the restaurant door. ‘It is important that we are seen here, a long way from South Wales, acting like ordinary people. Really, if you think about it, this is part of your mission.’
‘Well, if you put it like that…’ Gryffud conceded.
Kremer took their orders, collected and paid for the food, and spent a minute at a side counter, putting milk and sugar in the men’s coffees. It would have taken a very acute observer indeed to notice that two of the miniature plastic pots of milk that she used had not been supplied by the restaurant.
Back at the BMW she settled into the driver’s seat, then turned to the two men. ‘One Big Mac with large fries for you,’ she said, reaching into a brown paper bag and handing two cartons to Smethurst. ‘And one Big Tasty with bacon and regular fries for you.’
Gryffud took his food, and then a moment later his cup of coffee. ‘You not having anything?’ he asked Kremer.
She laughed. ‘And ruin my figure? Never!’
‘Good thing I don’t have a figure to ruin, then,’ said Gryffud. ‘I’m starving.’
The men ripped great bites from their burgers, grabbed fistfuls of fries, and then washed the whole lot down with gulps of scalding coffee. They ate and drank greedily, saying nothing. And then they started gasping for breath as the cyanide that Kremer had slipped into their drinks got to work, shutting down their bodies’ ability to use oxygen, and attacking their hearts and brains. Smethurst, being much the smaller, lighter man, was the first to fall into a coma. Gryffud was able to look imploringly at Kremer and gasp, ‘What have you…?’ before he passed out. Both were dead by the time Kremer had driven out of the parking lot.
It was now 10.36 a.m.
49
Rosconway
Carver pulled into the deserted farmyard just before 10.37 a.m., a little under three minutes before Dave Smethurst’s home-made launchers were due to fire their shells at the oil refinery.
On the way in he passed a long, low brick shed. There was a gaping hole in its roof, about a metre square, as though a meteorite or a cannonball had fallen from the sky and punched its way through the slates. Directly opposite him stood the remains of a traditional farmhouse, flanked on either side by stables, sheds, a small piggery and a large barn. He got out of the car without any great sense of urgency. He didn’t seriously expect, let alone fear, that he would find anything. He just wanted to get a sense of what might be possible. And it was good, too, to get away from the farcical chaos and disorganization of events at the refinery and go somewhere quiet and peaceful where he could think undisturbed.
He looked around the yard. As his eyes came to rest on the barn, he had to squint into the sun, which was shining directly at him. So it took him a couple of seconds to register that the object just visible inside the derelict building was the front end of a vehicle: a van, by the looks of it. Carver frowned and strode across the yard towards the barn. As he got closer, he could see that it was an old Toyota Hiace camper van.
Carver’s immediate reaction was embarrassment: he’d stumbled into a place where some holidaymakers were trying to find themselves a little privacy. Maybe he should let them enjoy it. Then he thought, ‘Who wants to go on holiday in the shadow of an oil refinery?’ The number plates caught his eye: they couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old. But the van looked less up to date: a late-eighties model, even. No innocent holidaymaker drove a car with false plates.
Now, suddenly, he felt the first small shots of adrenalin coursing through him, tightening his stomach and sharpening his reflexes as he approached the van. The interior was dark, the curtains of the side windows drawn. There was no noise or any other sign of life. Carver walked around to the rear of the vehicle. Something caught his eye. He stepped closer and tilted his head to one side as he looked along the vertical line between the door and the body-panel. It had been welded shut.
Carver had told Tyrrell he’d call if he found anything suspicious. This certainly qualified. He pulled out his phone, pressed the number, and then waited frustratedly as the rings at the far end went unanswered. Carver could imagine the rising noise-levels at the refinery. He could hear helicopters getting closer. The VIPs were on their way. When the voicemail came on he said, ‘This is Carver. Call me. I’ve found something you should see.’
Ninety seconds had passed since Carver had driven into the farmyard.
It was clear to him now that there was something in the van that someone did not want discovered. He wasn’t going to wait around for backup before he found out what it was. He ran back to the Audi, opened the boot, and pulled up the felt lining to reveal the spare wheel. In the middle of the wheel a plastic tray held the tools needed to put it on the car, including a tyre iron. Carver picked this up and went back to the barn.
He was sprinting now, driven by an instinct that something was badly, urgently wrong.
Inside the van, the timer had run down to twenty seconds, and counting…
Carver dashed up to the van and smashed the tyre iron against one of the side windows. The effect was minimal, just a small crack in the glass. He swung his arm again, putting all his strength into it, then repeated the blow again and again, battering the toughened glass until it first cracked into a spider’s web of fracture lines, and then, at last, a hole appeared.
Carver needed to make it bigger, and the small head of the tyre iron wasn’t up to that job. He used his own elbow, jabbing at the glass until a great section of the window gave way.
Now he reached into the open window and pulled the curtain open. He looked in and his eyes widened as he saw the gas cylinders, arranged like giant test tubes in their metal rack. Carver knew exactly what he was looking at. He gripped the sides of the window frame, ignoring the fragments of broken glass that still clung to them, and was about to pull himself up and through the window when there was a sudden blast of blinding light, deafening noise and burning heat, and as Carver flung himself to the ground he realized that he’d been beaten.
Dave Smethurst had set the four-hour timer at 6.39 and 42 seconds, precisely. And so at 10.39 and 42 seconds an electrical signal was sent by the timer to the junction box inside the Toyota Hiace, and then on to the twelve launch tubes. Twelve igniters sparked into life, causing the ammonium nitrate to decompose, releasing a large quantity of oxygen. This reacted with the hydrogen and carbon in the icing sugar to produce an intense, barely controlled burst of energy, concentrated within the high-pressure tubes. This sudden flare of light and flame ignited the fuses at the bottom of each shell, and blasted the shells through the skin of paper stretched across the roof of the camper van and up into the clear blue sky.
Five seconds later the thirteenth fuse set off the igniter in the jerrycan of fuel that Smethurst had left inside the van. It, too, burst into flame, engulfing the interior of the vehicle and destroying any trace of fingerprints or DNA, leaving just a scorch
ed and blackened metal shell.
Carver picked himself up from the floor of the derelict barn, momentarily deafened by the force of the explosion. He screwed up his eyes, gave his head a shake to clear it… and then sprinted desperately to his car.
50
The choppers were just making their final approach to the refinery, barely five hundred metres from their destination. Their crews’ attentions were entirely concentrated on the landing ground that had been marked out for them in a field directly opposite the main gates. A reception committee of officials and media representatives had formed up there in a ragged semicircle. From her window seat, Nikki Wilkins could see the cameramen jostling for the best position and raising their lenses to the sky. As the helicopter swung round to come into land, she spotted a sudden, dazzling flash of light from the ground, away to her left. She turned her head towards it, and had just enough time to register the billowing plume of flame and smoke before something punched into the side of the helicopter and sent it staggering off course like a dazed boxer stumbling across the ring. The next thing Wilkins knew, the cabin was spinning round and round and she was screaming out in terror as the air all around her was filled with scorching flame and red-hot shards of metal.
The explosive-filled steel gas-cylinder that hit the Power Elite was bigger than the shell from a Challenger 2 battle tank. It obliterated the cockpit window, decapitated the pilot, missed the co-pilot by a whisker, and exited the far side of the helicopter, taking a mass of glass, metal, plastic and electrical wiring with it, like a through-and-through bullet tearing the flesh from its victim’s back. It did not, however, explode. There was still a tiny fraction of the fuse left unburnt, and until it triggered the detonator, the sugar/fertilizer mix would remain inert.