by Simon Conway
She sat on a bench in a car park. She picked up a newspaper that was lying on the seat next to her. She gasped. On its front page was a picture of Jonah sufficient to scare a nation. He’d been beaten. His shaved head was lumpy and distorted and his empty eye socket gaped. The headline screamed: DEATH WILL FIND YOU.
Beneath it, in slightly smaller font, it said: TERRORIST THREATENS TO DESTROY LONDON.
On the inside page, there was a photo of her in a hijab. It appeared that it had been taken in Kuwait. Beneath the photo, it said TERRORIST ACCOMPLICE TRAINED IN BIN LADEN’S AFGHAN CAVE.
She was furious. She stared around her wildly.
She remembered after she was freed from Abu Ghraib, when she thought that she might never see her son Omar again, and she was filled with rage at the world. There were times when she believed that humans were a cruel and undeserving species. They did not deserve to survive. It was not for her to take responsibility for the savagery of others, for the savagery of men.
Now she faced a choice—either she ran or she stayed. Running was the obvious answer. Mikulski was urging her to do it. She did not think that, even if tens of thousands of people died in the tidal wave, she would know even one of them by name. But if she turned her back and ran, there was no guarantee that she would survive. If the Barrier was breached and London was flooded, the public’s fury would be boundless. The police would hunt her down with guns and helicopters and they would undoubtedly kill her.
If she stayed her future was equally uncertain. She didn’t know a bloody thing about anything. She had no resources at her disposal to direct against a conspiracy on this scale. The police were hunting for her.
She could only keep going.
THIS IS ENGLAND
September 11–12, 2005
The Albion bar was on the south side of a narrow, cobbled street opposite the twenty-foot-high Victorian brick wall that ringed the port. She walked past it slowly, staying close to the wall. An emaciated man wearing a barman’s white shirt and black tie stood in the doorway smoking a cigarette, and he nodded to her as she passed. She doubled back. The barman studied her impassively.
“Are the crew of the tugboat in?” she asked.
He sighed. “They’ve been in here all week, from when the doors open to when they close.”
She wondered whether she had heard him correctly. “They haven’t been out?”
He shook his head. “Not since the Ministry commandeered the boat.”
“The Ministry?”
“The Ministry of Defense.” He dropped his stub on the pavement and crushed it with the heel of a scuffed patent-leather shoe. “Are you going in?”
“Yes, I am.”
He held the door open and followed her in and went around behind the long-polished bar. “What would you like to drink?”
“Vodka and tonic. A large one, please.”
She looked around. There were two men sitting huddled at the bar and one more near the back of the pub, a large man in a check shirt sitting alone at a table. The barman nodded towards the back of the pub. “That’s Charlie, he’s the captain.”
“What does he drink?”
“Lager. Rum and Coke. Either or both.”
“Give me a rum and Coke. Make it a double.”
She picked up the drinks and went over to him. He gazed up from the table as she approached. His eyes were red and struggled to focus on her.
“Are you with the Goney?” she asked.
He grunted in a noncommittal way.
“May I sit down?” She sat down, gave him the rum and handed over one of Saira’s business cards. “I’m from the BBC and I’m doing a piece on the Montgomery.”
He glanced at the card and drank the rum. When he spoke, his voice was slurred. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“The MoD commandeered your boat and that’s not a story?”
He looked briefly angry. “Tell me this, how is it less of a national security risk to pull my crew off the boat and use foreign contractors?”
“What are they doing out there?”
“Checking the hull.” He paused and sniffed. “Ultrasonic hull thickness analysis.”
“How do you know?”
“They do it every year as regular as clockwork, at the end of summer.”
“They don’t usually take your boat?”
He shook his head slowly from side to side. “No. We always crew it for them. It used to be navy divers we’d take out there but it’s contract divers now, it has been for years.”
“But not foreign divers?”
He stared at her. “They come in from all over. It’s not the first time we’ve had foreign divers—we’ve had Poles from the port of Gdansk, for instance. These guys are Pakistanis from the port of Karachi. So what? As long as the company they’re working for is legitimate and approved by Medway Ports. I didn’t give it any thought and then I got a call from the owners, telling me to hand over the boat, and on Monday the MoD man turned up with the paperwork and the harbor master confirmed it.”
“The MoD man?”
“The MoD has someone on the boat at all times.”
“Describe him.”
“Smith.”
“That’s what he’s called?”
“Yes. He’s the MoD man responsible for wrecks and downed planes.”
“Where would I find him?” she asked.
“The Abbey Hotel over in Minster. You’ll find him there. And the divers.”
“Thank you,” she said. She stood up to go but paused for a moment. “Your man Smith is not from the Ministry.”
Charlie stared at her.
The Abbey Hotel was a modern red-brick single-story sprawl with a fake clock tower and an expansive car park that was dotted with cars, the sort of place that was frequented by traveling salesmen and couples conducting clandestine affairs. She parked on scrubland adjacent to the Minster marshes with a view of the entrance to the hotel and settled in for a night of fitful sleep.
She dreamed of a massive wave, a wall of water advancing towards her, and just as the wave crested and threatened to plunge down upon her, she woke up, sitting bolt upright in the car seat. It was several hours before dawn.
She switched on the radio. There were reports of a fishing boat lost off the west coast of Scotland. The storm was approaching, veering into the confined space of the North Sea. With northwesterly winds blowing on its flank, it was being compressed between the converging coastlines of England and continental Europe, and funneled toward the Thames Estuary.
The divers emerged just after 7 a.m., bulky in their drysuits and buoyancy vests, and advanced across the hotel car park toward a waiting black people carrier. Walking beside them was a man in a bright red Gore-Tex jacket, holding an aluminum flight case. She guessed that he was the official called Smith who claimed to represent the Ministry of Defense, in all likelihood one of Alex’s red team members. She sat up in her seat and switched on the car’s engine. The people carrier pulled out of the car park and joined the sparse traffic bound for Sheerness. She followed.
It was incredible to think that for a week now the divers had been prepping the wreck under the noses of the port authorities in one of the country’s busiest shipping lanes. But then she remembered what Jonah had once told her—if you’re confident enough and you have the right paperwork you can get away with anything once—you just stride in and take over.
The people carrier followed the coast road alongside the sea wall. Leaves skittered along the pavement below the wall. A high-sided white van overtook her and obscured her view of the people carrier. Another car cut in front of her. The traffic was suddenly busy and she was falling farther behind. A helicopter raced overhead.
It started spitting with rain. She turned on the windshield wipers, craning to see the people carrier.
Suddenly, a police car with its lights flashing and its siren blaring came rushing up behind her on the wrong side of the road. Then sirens were converging from all directions. She braked h
ard and hunched her shoulders in a self-protective cringe. Ahead, the white van swung out into the oncoming traffic and jack-knifed, smashing into the people carrier, throwing it up against the sea wall, shattering the side windows and crumpling the driver’s door. The police car screeched to a halt right behind the people carrier and a black Range Rover reversed at high speed, taking up a position directly in front of it. The white van was positioned sideways to it with its white doors open and policemen with guns were spilling out. They surrounded the people carrier, dragged the divers out and threw them in the van.
Then, to her amazement, Alex Ross climbed out of the Range Rover and walked over to the people carrier at a leisurely pace. He helped the man in the Gore-Tex jacket climb out through the shattered windshield, half-carried, half-dragged him to the Range Rover and bundled him inside. Alex jumped in after him and slammed the door. The Range Rover accelerated away, leaving police officers with incident tape to start cordoning the area. Another police officer was advancing toward the rapidly forming queue of cars, one arm windmilling.
After seconds of just sitting and staring, Miranda recovered her wits. The car in front of her was indicating that it was turning left into a side street lined with shabby red-brick houses. She indicated similarly and followed. She turned right and left again, lost in the warren of streets, and then, spotting a parking space, pulled into it, allowing the cars behind to pass. She switched off the engine. She let her head sink back against the headrest and waited for her heart to stop racing.
It was done. It was over.
She got out of the car and stood, peering down the now empty street in the direction from which she had come. The wind was rapidly gaining in strength, and she could hear the waves striking the sea wall. She felt a need to see it, to feel the spray on her face. Her wig had slipped slightly. She righted it and started walking down the street. She cut left and right, heading diagonally to avoid the incident area. She crossed the Minster Road. The cordon had enlarged to include several blocks and many more police cars. Men in white suits were walking back and forth behind the incident tape.
She climbed the cement stairs to the sea wall. Along the beach, huge gray swells were rolling in from the North Sea and large patches of foam were blowing in dense white streaks in the direction of the wind. Farther along the wall she watched the Swampie struggling against the wind. It was beginning to rain hard.
The first sight of him was like being shaken. She glanced up and Nor was there beside her, standing by the bench, as if he’d stepped out of her dream, smiling at her from beneath the peaked cap of his baseball hat.
“Ahoy, as they say,” he shouted, above the roar of the waves.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“Come on!”
He took her firmly by the hand and led her back down the stairs and across the Minster Road, past the cordon, and through the densely packed streets to her car. He got in beside her, unzipped his jacket, swept off his cap and ran his hands across his face and his scalp. She glanced at him while he was looking up and down the street. He was as she imagined: lean and brown with long slender limbs. Long-lashed eyes the color of polished walnut, a feral stare. So beautiful that at first she didn’t realize why she couldn’t breathe.
“My father brought Jonah and me here once,” he told her. “Not long after we first met. I remember we had red plastic spades with long handles but there was no sand to make sandcastles. Instead, we fenced with them. I was quicker than he was. But he was dogged. You couldn’t stop him. He just kept coming.”
Nor glanced at her and down the empty street again. There were tears on his cheeks. She resisted the sudden urge to reach up and touch them, to press the salt to her lips.
“I used to think he was indestructible,” he said, sadly. “I can’t bear to think of him gone.”
She closed her eyes and opened them again. “He’s dead?”
“I’m sorry.”
Several times she had wondered what she might say to Jonah if they were ever reunited but she had not found a formulation of words to describe the impossibility of their situation. For the briefest time, in Kuwait and then in Baghdad in the opening days of the war, there had been a passionate intensity that they had both mistaken for love. She had convinced herself to believe in love at first sight. That you just knew. But it was all wrong. There was no love, not of the lasting kind. They had sleepwalked through two years on Jura. And now she found that she had stopped being angry with him. In a way, his death relieved her of a burden. She was no longer under any obligation to explain or to listen to his explanation. She could live entirely in the moment. It was hers to seize.
“We have to get out of here,” he said. “We are still being hunted.”
It was not lost on her, his use of the pronoun “we.” As if they were co-conspirators.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
He ignored the question. “Let’s have a drink. That’s what Jonah would have wanted. Come home with me.”
“Cobra’s job is to ensure that everything that can be done is being done,” a government minister was saying on the radio. News of the terrorist attack averted that morning had been swiftly replaced by that of the coming storm. The minister informed the listeners that Police and Environment Agency staff were patrolling in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Kent, offering advice. “If you are advised to evacuate, please follow those instructions, there are rest centers that are being set up for you. And it’s really important to keep away from the sea because, as well as the storm surge, there will also be very large waves, and this is dangerous—people need to keep away from it.”
“A long way away,” Nor commented.
She turned her back to the sink and watched him as he paced back and forth. The kitchen seemed too small to contain him. From the freezer compartment he withdrew a bottle of Absolut.
“We are doing all that we can but we are just going to have to wait and see what happens as the surge makes its way down,” the minister said.
There was a gun on the table between them, a compact black pistol. He caught her looking at it and smiled.
“Have a drink,” he said.
“OK.”
He rinsed two glasses and poured vodka in them.
“Nothing to mix it with here,” he said.
She downed the shot. Her head reeled.
“And if there was, it doesn’t look like you’d need it …”
“Why did you go for this?” she asked.
“Why did I go for what?” he asked.
“Blowing up the Montgomery?”
“You understand,” Nor told her, “that it’s not personal. It’s just what I do. It’s a vocation.”
“Was it your idea?”
He found the notion amusing. “No. It was Fisher-King’s idea for a propaganda coup. MI6 and the police swoop in on conspirators manufacturing the biggest ever IED in the Thames Estuary. All they wanted me to do was recruit the dive team and manufacture the plastic explosives and detonating cord. They’d handle access to the wreck as part of a routine MoD survey and provide the detonators, duds of course. They then sweep in at the eleventh hour. Simple really.” He brought the bottle over to the table and poured them both another shot. They were side by side, leaning against the table. “It was the Americans, Those Who Seek The End, who had the idea of really doing it.”
Those Who Seek The End—it was Mikulski, the FBI agent, who she had heard first use that name. She’d been wrong when she had watched the divers being arrested and she had thought that it was all over. She’d suspected that since she had looked up from the bench on the sea wall and seen him standing there. Now it was confirmed.
“Yesterday morning they connected the ring mains that link the ammunition stacked in the forward holds and that in the aft holds,” he explained, “and after lunch, while you were watching them from the beach, they attached real detonators and activated the ignition assembly, which is fixed to one of the warning buoys. It’s sim
ple really—a regular phone connected to an electrical circuit in a waterproof box. It’s set to blow on receipt of a phone message. All we have to do is wait for the tide.”
“You’ll do it?”
He shrugged. “You can’t have a war on terror without spectacular acts of terror.” He put on an American accent and rolled his rs: “We have to terrify them to make them agree to what is necessary for the protection of their freedoms.” He poured them both another shot. “Why did you come here?” he asked.
“To tell the truth,” she said, shocked to hear herself saying it, “I was looking for you.”
“That’s the craziest thing I’ve heard all week,” he said, laughing a little. He stared into her eyes. She thought that his eyes were the eyes of someone who would never be tamed. “You should run.”
It was ridiculous. She laughed and at the same moment so did he. An instant when they were as one. Bound one to the other. She caught her breath.
“You’re shaking,” he said.
“No,” she said, with a laugh. She could hear the rising hysteria in her voice.
He held the back of his hand to the side of her jaw and she closed her eyes and exhaled softly, the tumult rising like a tide within her. He gently squeezed her shoulder and she felt as if she were sinking towards him, as if his outstretched arm was all that was preventing her from falling. She felt his lips brush hers and she let her mouth open. And then she was hungrily kissing him, devouring him.
He pulled his T-shirt over his head and she unbuttoned her shirt and shrugged it off. She undid her bra and let it fall to the floor. She reached for his smooth, hairless chest and ran her nails down his sternum, across the plain of his stomach. She unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his jeans and reached in to hold his engorged penis, feeling it thickening in her palm. She pushed him back on to the table and bent to his penis in an act of deliberate surrender. She plunged her mouth onto him, again and again, feeling him tense from his knees to his shoulders. Her nose was filled with the smell of him, and above her he was groaning, and his hands were making fists. He did not offer any warning before he came. He suddenly shuddered and groaned and she tasted the briny wash of his discharge in her mouth.