Thunder

by Anthony Bellaleigh

  Most likely, knowing Ellard, he’d just laughed out loud in the new agent’s face...

  Ellard knew better than to care about the feelings of other agents...

  Greere smiled and hung up.

  ~~~~~

  I flick through the newspapers from the time. I was out of it for the best part of two weeks and therefore missed the initial deluge of outraged press-coverage.

  The doctors have explained to me, in no small detail, that during those first few days it was touch and go whether I’d survive at all. They’re saying that it must only have been some tremendous resolve and tenacity of spirit that made me pull myself back from the brink so many times.

  I wish I hadn’t.

  The papers make grisly reading. Over and above my family, exactly eighty-six people were within fifty metres of the van when the bomb went off – either on foot, or in vehicles. None of them survived. Most were atomised in an instant.

  I suppose, in a small way, I am grateful for this. At least my loved ones didn’t suffer. The doctors say that there wouldn’t have been enough time for even the most basic of nerve signals to travel to their brains in the milliseconds involved. They would simply have been living normally. Then gone.

  But eighty-six isn’t the end of it.

  The van and surrounding vehicles were turned into a massive cloud of shrapnel and flung outwards into the surrounding crowds. Because I was lifted, I flew outwards as part of this detritus. They think that this contributed to why I am the only survivor amongst the additional two hundred and twelve innocent people who ended their lives within a one hundred metre radius. I am the only one, who was both outside at the time and that close to the explosion, that survived either the initial blast or the injuries sustained from it.

  The man with the grey beard, who I saw breathing his last desperate scream of pain, turns out to have been one, retired, Doctor James Albertson. Grandfather to six-year-old Jamie Albertson Junior, who he doted over, and who he was also in the process of taking for a day out to see the sights on that fateful morning. The papers say that Jamie Junior would probably have been holding his Granddad’s hand when the bomb went off. It seems that they went everywhere like that, whenever they were out together...

  In a perverse twist, it also turns out that Grey Beard was an active lobbyist for the creation of a separate nation state for the people of Khandastan. Having travelled along the Silk Road during his student days, he had been captivated by the community spirit he’d observed in the tribal districts of southeastern Turkmenistan. He had seen the isolation of this tiny sub-nation which sat trapped between the arid black sands of the Karakum Desert and the more distant Tibetan Mountains. He had seen how this area was orphaned from the natural gas dominated interests of the capital, Ashgabat. He had noticed and been touched by the way the tribes were, despite their harsh living conditions, happy to live their lives in accordance with ancient creeds and remained, even centuries on, loyal to their legendary hero Oghuz Khan.

  In fact, Albertson had argued strongly that, under certain circumstances, the separation of territories into smaller country groups, in various locations across central Europe and Asia, offered by far the best economic and cultural strategy for development and long term peace. He had often pointed out, to any who would listen, that larger, forced, country groupings had always struggled with internal disputes and tensions which, he claimed, distracted them from fruitful domestic progress. He said that there were many examples throughout history to underpin these claims.

  The papers report all this with vehement rhetoric and banner headlines across every front page.

  Why?

  Because it was an embryonic Khandastanian, militant, splinter group which launched the attack and, as a result, exterminated one of their few political allies.

  The terrorists’ claim – delivered by means of an anonymous email, sent from somewhere within the confused internet topography of the region – was that the United Kingdom was a ‘capitalist aggressor whose policies were designed to hold back their country’s natural rights and freedoms’. This was very clearly not the case. The UK population and government were blissfully unaware of Khandastan, and genuinely cared about it even less. General opinion concluded that the UK had been a target of convenience and that the attack had happened here simply because it could.

  Later reports suggest that the cell was probably padded with UK-resident wannabes and that the militant splinter group itself is tiny, apparently underfunded, is unsupported by the various tribal leaders it claims to represent and, until now, had been considered by UK Agencies to be an inactive and insignificant threat amongst other more pressing priorities.

  Well that, at least, has changed.

  All available resources now appear to be being put behind tracking down the perpetrators although, unfortunately, the wave of national and international outrage – including from the normally under-spoken Turkmen political leadership, who have openly condemned and vilified the attack – has caused the terrorists to deep dive and head for cover wherever possible. Suggestions put the ringleaders somewhere in Europe, though there are some more upbeat suggestions that part of the cell are still in the UK and will be arrested shortly.

  “Various Agencies are closing in...,” says one report.

  ~~~~~

  “How many are in there?” the policewoman whispered to a middle-aged couple who stood huddled in front of her in their tiny front porch-way. Her brown eyes peered out from the depths of a Kevlar-reinforced, matt-black helmet which, together with the full-face balaclava she was wearing underneath, meant nothing else was visible of her face.

  “We think there are three,” the middle-aged lady replied in equally hushed tones as she clutched tightly to her husband’s hand in their open doorway. The neighbours’ somewhat plump faces were both flushed with anxiety. “Two of them went out earlier. Then came back about an hour ago, with shopping bags.”

  The Metropolitan Antiterrorist Operational Control Unit’s commander glanced along the frontage of the terrace of close-packed two-up two-downs. Each house was a little Victorian box-clone of its neighbours. Each had its own little angular bay window. Each was differentiated only by front door and curtain colour. All of them were glowing gently as they bathed in the late evening sunlight which poured down from an unusually blue North London sky. “Shopping?” she asked, whilst casually shifting her Heckler & Koch G36C ‘Compact’, selective fire, 5.56mm assault rifle from one hand to the other.

  “It looked like food,” replied the woman’s husband. “They had a lot of Freshsaver carrier bags with them. It took them several trips to get them all in from the car.”

  “The rental, over there?” the Kevlar-shrouded policewoman gestured toward a small hatchback parked about two hundred metres further along the street.

  “Yes, they parked out front to start with, then one of them came out later and moved it up the road,” the woman continued.

  “And went back in?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. You’ve been an enormous help.” The policewoman gently waved one black-gloved hand toward the interior of the couple’s house, “If I could ask you to move back inside your house for a little while, please? And keep away from the windows. We’ll let you know when it’s safe to come back out.”

  The plump woman didn’t move. Instead she just stood there for a moment, staring intently at the policewoman’s outstretched hand. Then her homely brow buckled under the pent-up weight of long-suppressed anger. “Just get them,” she hissed. “Just get them bastards...”

  The policewoman nodded and turned away to address her team. “Three targets,” she announced to the officers who were huddled, safely out of sight of the adjoining property, in the narrow, litter-strewn alleyway alongside this end-terrace house’s doorway. “It looks like they were planning to hunker down here for a while. My guess is that the rental would’ve been dumped later tonight, after dark. Move to positions and wait for my ‘go order’.
”

  Like some living fluid, the dark shrouded officers seemed to flow like a silent ooze of angry humanity into their various start positions and the OCU Commander drifted around and pressed herself quietly into the neighbouring entrance porch.

  Two of her colleagues crouched below the house’s single front window.

  Half a dozen more were ready, hidden below the small garden’s front wall.

  There was a tiny burst of static then her radio earpiece burst into life. “Red Section in position.” Red Section were at the back of the house.

  Another crackle, “Blue Section ready.” Blue section were the rear sniper team, covering alleyways for ‘runners’.

  “Orange Section also ready, ma’am,” the rest of her team, her own snipers, were assembled up and down the main road behind her.

  She thumbed her transmit key. “Okay boys and girls, let’s get this done. On my mark. GO, GO, GO!”

  She stepped smoothly to one side and two officers standing behind her swung around with their two-man battering ram and smashed the door inwards. The force of the blow was so severe, and the door so flimsy, that it clattered inwards, pulled clean off its upper hinges.

  She ran in.

  The house appeared to be the same layout as next door, exactly how the helpful neighbours had described it, so she rushed forwards into the narrow hallway with her two colleagues in close support. Her second team pounded up the facing staircase alongside her.

  She could hear yelling from both up and downstairs.

  In front of her, she could see Red Section flooding into the simple kitchen-come-dining room which traversed the width of the back of the house. The front-room doorway, alongside her, was closed.

  “Ready?” she barked at her squad.

  The two officers nodded and moved into position. One braced himself behind the second while she readied her weapon and directed it toward the door. Then the foremost officer jumped up and kicked the door inwards with both ‘Size Nines’.

  As she burst into the room she was just conscious of the sound of smashing glass from upstairs, but she ignored it because in the middle of the room in front of her was a deeply tanned man...

  He was standing, open mouthed, with a big bag of half-eaten crisps scattered roughly all over the carpet to one side of him. His jeans and stain-ridden boxer shorts were round his ankles. One hand was clutched around a battered porno magazine. His cock hung limply from the other. Thankfully, his upper torso was still adorned in a heavily creased and dirty orange tee-shirt which had a big smiley logo plastered over the front of it and the word ‘Peace’ printed in capitals beneath.

  She grimaced in disgust.

  “HANDS ON YOUR HEAD, AND ON YOUR KNEES! NOW!” she roared, brandishing downwards with her rifle.

  The man fell to his knees, rapidly discarding both his girlfriends and his genitals. “I’m innocent!” he shouted in badly accented English. “This is a fit-up. I claim racial discrimination!”

  “Read him his rights,” she said to her colleagues as they bundled in behind her. “And, remember, as much as we might want to, don’t lay a finger on Mister Wanker. Okay?”

  Her two officers nodded and she moved swiftly back out into the hallway and round to the foot of the stairs. Looking upwards, another black-suited officer appeared on the landing. “One secure up here, ma’am,” he shouted. “The other jumped out of the back window.”

  She rushed to the back of the house and out through the smashed kitchen door. Another man – short and overweight – wearing jeans and a light sports jacket – was rolling around on a small patch of weed-ridden, overgrown, grass. Red Section were standing around him, apparently using heavy swings of their boots to verify whether their suspect had injured himself during the fall.

  “OFFICERS!” she shouted. “That’s not the kind of behaviour I expect from my team! Do none of you know how to properly restrain a suspect?”

  The policemen all glanced over at her and, seizing this opportunity, the suspect rolled over and leapt to his feet, brandishing a hitherto hidden pistol in his hand. The dark metal object rose swiftly and she reacted instantly: racing forwards and viciously smashing the butt of her rifle into the side of the man’s head.

  With a slightly sickening crunching sound, and a longer lasting residual twitching, the suspect collapsed sideways and prostrate himself obediently on the ground.

  She casually kicked the now-latent weapon away from his hand.

  “That’s how you do it,” she said impassively.

  The officers nodded respectfully and several of them thought quietly to themselves, ‘Too right. Don’t go messing with Chief Superintendent Sharinda ‘Shaz’ Manjeethra.’

  ~~~~~

  “They’ve caught three of them, Nick.” One of the nurses is buzzing around my bed. Checking drips and the various other mysterious objects dangling off my arms. “Got them yesterday evening. It’s been all over the news.” She looks up at me from the foot of the bed where she’s fussing with my sheets for no apparent reason – there’s no way it’s me that’s messing the sheets up, I’ve got so much plaster all over me I’d have to be bloody Arnold Schwarzenegger to lift any of my limbs – I think she just wants to see if the news makes me happy.

  I nod gently and make a weak grunting sound.

  My voice sounds so deep.

  ~~~~~

  “So what are our options?” asked the tall, slim, Savile Row suited man from the head of the table. His question was met with silence, despite the presence of the dozen or so other men and women sitting in attendance along the table’s long, sheer-gloss polished, mahogany sides.

  He waited patiently.

  Eventually one of the attendants ventured, “There aren't many, I’m afraid, sir. With help from MI6, we think we have confirmed the identities of the four remaining Turkmen nationals involved in the cell. They are all ‘known suspects’ to both the Turkmen and Afghan intelligence agencies but they have escaped into Europe. They were well organised and left via different airports – one via the channel tunnel – shortly before the event itself. By the time we’d closed the ports down, it was already too late.”

  “Cowards,” someone muttered to an approving audience of nods from around the table.

  “The three we’ve arrested? The UK nationals?” The tall man asked.

  “Locally recruited at some point. Probably whilst children in Turkmenistan and before they relocated to the UK. One was born and bred here but has a distant relative on his mother’s side. They probably just got caught up in the excitement of feeling part of something more interesting than another day in the Benefits Queue.”

  “Hmmm,” responded the suit.

  “They were responsible for local facilities, supplies, etcetera. It’s unlikely they were directly engaged in the attack itself. They were more of a ground support unit.”

  “Will we be able to prosecute them for mass murder?”

  “We’ll do our best, Mr. Prime Minister, but concrete evidence is proving tricky to secure. Furthermore, one of them is still recovering in hospital from the head wound he sustained during the arrest.”

  “Well, I trust you will all do your very best. Nonetheless, together with the rest of the British public, I am furious about this. If there’s anything else that can be done to bring the bombers to justice then I want it done. As far as possible this should be by normal means and anything else must absolutely be at arm’s length. Even if that means that neither I, nor anyone else, will get any satisfaction from the knowledge that it’s happened. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  The men and women nodded wordlessly.

  “For the time being, we’ll concentrate on the three we have in custody, sir.”

  “Very good. Someone draft something banal to serve as a record of this meeting.” The Prime Minister rose from the table and left the heads of every major security agency to consider their options.

  One of the group – a powerfully built, bull of a man – rose quietly from his chair
at the far end of the table and made for the door. On his way out, he glanced across at the Heads of MI5 and the Counter Terrorism Unit who were sitting beside each other, about half way along the table. Both deliberately caught his eye. Sufficient acknowledgement for his purposes.

  Striding powerfully down the corridor, toward the gloss black door of Number 10, he pulled his cellphone out of his jacket pocket and skimmed down his contacts list. Stepping outside into the misty-grey summer drizzle he could see the usual gaggle of press clustered under their colourful umbrellas on the opposite side of the street, so he turned immediately left and headed along the narrow footpath to Whitehall and then north toward Embankment. By now, the phone was pressed to his ear and he could hear ringing.

  The ringing stopped.

  “This is Sentinel. Are they ready?”

  “At least one is,” came the reply.

  “Well, time’s up. Activate them all. Let’s see whether your little experiment will work in practice.”

  “Target?”

  “Not on this line....” The bull hung up and continued striding toward his tiny nondescript offices further along the Thames.

  ~~~~~

  Mum is crying again.

  I reach up gently, lifting the various tubes which trail from my arm, to place my left hand on the side of her downturned face – it’s about the only movement I can make – and she lifts her face toward me. Mascara is making dirty rivulets down her cheeks. Her charcoal grey eyes are red-rimmed. I hate seeing her like this, but I must probably look the same.

  I am crying too.

  “It was a lovely service,” she is saying. “The whole village came out and the vicar made a wonderful sermon about the gift of life. About how much joy the two of them brought to those who met them. About how much joy they brought to you...,” and she’s consumed with another wracking sob.