by Max Kinnings
Ed fought the urge to tell the professor to get to the point.
“However,” continued Moorcroft, “there is a tunnel that runs near to the location of the train. It’s one of a number of service tunnels that were built in the 1930s. It runs just to one side and slightly below the Northern Line from Leicester Square station up to Tottenham Court Road.”
Ed couldn’t help the impatience in his voice. “Frank, just tell us what we can do.”
Ed listened as Moorcroft stumbled over the words, this man who had spent his life in academia. Never spent a day in the real world—that’s what people probably said about him. Ed wanted to shake him.
“Well, I suppose the thing is, er, well yes, from the outcome of my calculations—rough though they clearly are without concrete data—I should say that at its closest point, the absolute closest point, there is about three meters, let’s say, ten feet, between the two tunnels.”
“Ten feet of solid earth,” said Ed.
“That’s correct but it might well be that a controlled explosion that worked in conjunction with the weight of the water might open up a fissure—that is to say hole—which might facilitate substantial drainage.”
“Enough to stop the Northern Line tunnel from filling up.”
By the time the professor said, “Exactly,” Ed’s feelings for him had undergone a transformation. Now he felt like kissing him.
“The only problem, of course, is that the sort of blast that would be needed to breach the two tunnels might also bring down a large section of the surrounding infrastructure. It would be a tricky explosion to judge.”
Here was hope. This eccentric man with his curious aroma had presented them with a possible solution, a dangerous one—a mad one even—but one that had to be worth exploring.
“Laura?”
“Yes, Ed.”
“We must get back to Boise with this. She needs to speak to COBRA and get it sorted out. This might buy us some time. Denning specifically said that he would only detonate the explosives if we tried to make contact with the train. Well, we’re not going to. We’re just going to slow down the flood. If we can reestablish contact with Denning then I might be able to work on him, try and make him believe that it’s a sign or an act of God.”
“I’m on it,” said Laura and he heard her walk back to her office along the corridor to talk to the powers that be, away from the negotiating cell and any chance of allowing the negotiators to become too closely involved in the decision-making process. That was against the rules.
Ed turned back to Professor Moorcroft. “So, Frank, you really think we could drain some of the water from around the train?”
“Well, of course, it’s impossible to say with any degree of confidence without all the hard data to hand.”
“You’re not changing your mind, are you, Frank?”
“It’s not that I’m changing my mind, I’m merely responding to the limited facts that are being presented—”
“You did say it was possible.”
“No, let me be very clear. I said it may be possible. May be.”
“I realize that what I’m asking you to do is completely unfair and compromises your professional ethics but for a moment I want you to try and forget if you can about the human life involved here. All I need to know from you, Frank, is whether, if this were just a purely hypothetical exercise, you think that blowing a hole in the tunnel would be able to prevent it from filling with water.”
“Well, the point at which the two tunnels are at their closest and the point that marks the location of the train are far enough apart that if an explosion was judged well enough—neither too large to compromise the safety of the passengers nor too small to create enough of a breach—then with the limited information we have at our disposal at the current time, I would have to say that it may be possible. But I’m no explosives expert. It would require someone with knowledge and expertise in that field.”
“Thanks, Frank.” Ed turned toward Calvert and White and said, “Guys, we should arrange for the military explosives people to speak to Professor Moorcroft here and put together the fastest feasibility study they’ve ever done. If we get the go-ahead for this, we need to make sure that everything’s in place. This is the best shot we’ve got.”
12:34 PM
Northern Line Train 037, sixth carriage
Whatever it was that had struck Adam, the black man in the sharp suit who had tried to calm Hugh down—was it only a bullet or was it some sort of explosive?—it had taken his left leg off at the knee. Maggie didn’t want to look at the wound, the stump, but she couldn’t help herself as Hugh tied his belt around Adam’s thigh to try and stem the flow of blood. Adam drifted in and out of consciousness. Maggie preferred it when he was unconscious because when he was conscious, he shouted, shrieked. His cries were high-pitched, incongruous with his demeanor which until a few minutes before had been so calm and controlled, so eager to maintain order and bolster morale.
The rear half of the carriage was deserted; passengers had tried to get as much distance as possible between themselves and the female hijacker. Some of the schoolgirls were crying but the younger of the two teachers with the group, who didn’t look as though she would have the emotional strength to prevent herself from succumbing to the terror everyone felt, was the only voice in the carriage that did not betray the horror of the situation. She spoke to the little girls about the British Museum, their intended destination when they had set out that morning. To listen to her, you’d think that everything was fine. You would never suspect that she was a hostage of terrorist hijackers. Her steady narrative about Egyptian treasures gave the children something to focus on aside from the harrowing sounds of distress. Whatever terror the woman felt, she repressed it. Her tone of voice displayed no other emotion than a warm willingness to engage. It was some performance.
The desperate voices were like nothing that Maggie had ever heard before. All social restraint had gone from them and the sound of crying denoted an emotional incontinence that was unnerving. The lights flickered on and off. They weren’t going to last much longer. Maggie was surprised they had lasted as long as they had. The water in the tunnel had already started to enter the carriage, seeping between the doors, and was now an inch deep on the floor.
In the last carriage, the female hijacker paced around and Maggie could hear her talking to herself as her boots splashed in the water. She might have been reciting some sort of prayer. Maggie could make out the occasional “Jesus” and “Christ” and they weren’t used as expletives; she was talking to him—whatever her idea of him was.
The woman’s footsteps came closer and there she was, framed in the open windows in the two adjoining doors. People cowered, crouched down, tried to find any form of cover, even if that cover was the bodies of other passengers. The hijacker stared through into the fifth carriage, her eyes surveying the terror she had created, and she smiled to herself as though happy that everything was absolutely as it should be. Whereas the people in the carriage who were closest to her tried to keep quiet, the young teacher kept on talking to the children and it appeared that the hijacker was listening to her words until Maggie had the sickening realization that she was looking around the carriage, searching for her. The woman didn’t even seem to register the man whose leg she had spontaneously amputated with her gun and Maggie’s fears were confirmed when the woman looked straight at her.
12:35 PM
Network Control center, St. James’s
“Ed,” said Laura. “I’ve got Commander Boise on the line. I’ll patch it through to your headset.” Ed didn’t have time to ponder on the significance of why he was allowed to take this call in the negotiating cell, just slid his headphones forward onto his ears and said, “This is Ed.”
“Ed, it’s Serina Boise. Laura’s told me about the explosives option. I can see why you like the idea of buying some more time in which to negotiate with Tommy Denning but it’s extremely unlikely that we would ever get cleara
nce.”
“But we’ve got to at least try.”
“You know I’ll discuss it at the highest level but an explosion on the Underground network goes against everything that the police and security services are employed to prevent. There are numerous issues that have to be taken into account, not least the possibility that with so little time in which to plan and devise such an explosion, we might actually be putting the passengers on the train in more danger than they are already.”
“Listen, Serina, I’ve got an expert in the construction of the tube who’s telling me that he thinks it’s a possibility.”
Serina Boise’s tone suggested that she wanted to get off the line as fast as possible rather than waste her time with some outlandish scheme to let off explosives underground. “Ed, there’s no way it’s going to be even possible to run all the necessary computations that would be needed to work out where the explosive charge should be placed and the quantity required. It’s just not going to be possible. I’m sorry.”
“I still think we need to look at it.”
“No, Ed.”
“Why not?”
“Because even if we could suss out the feasibility in time, we’d never get the go-ahead. It’s not as though this is a small controlled explosion we’re talking about. We’d need something big enough to blast through ten feet of solid brick and earth. The whole tunnel could collapse.”
“I appreciate that, Serina, but there are over three hundred people down there. We have to look at every eventuality, don’t we?”
“Ed, you’re a great negotiator. You need to do all that you can to make contact with Denning and talk him down.”
“I’m doing that but he’s a religious psychopath. I’ve heard it in his voice, there’s no way we can stop this guy through psychology alone. Drastic situations require drastic measures.”
“I’m going to have the conversation, Ed. You know I’ll do whatever I can but you also have to understand that it’s never going to happen.”
So there it was. The authorities would rather present the image that the passengers on the train had died while they battled an evil and audacious enemy rather than risk having to take the blame for killing the passengers with a highly controversial preemptive measure. Ed could understand that but it didn’t make it any easier for him to accept.
As Ed’s conversation with Serina Boise came to an end and he passed the phone back to Laura, he turned to where White and Calvert were sitting at their computers. “Keep trying the radio on the train. We’ve got to try and keep talking to Tommy Denning.”
12:36 PM
Northern Line Train 037, first carriage
Tommy paced up and down between the two opposing rows of seats, his boots splashing in the water. He held up his hand to his face and the blood streaked down his arm and dripped into the rising water in the carriage. George considered speaking to him but Tommy was deep in thought, locked in some form of meditation or prayer. His muttered indecipherable words were interspersed with groans that George supposed were borne purely of pain. The steady flow of blood from the wound made George hope that perhaps it might be enough to make Tommy lose consciousness. The human body held eight pints of blood—Tommy had to have lost at least a pint or two already. But if that didn’t finish him off then George knew that he would have to launch another attack. Unlike his previous attempts, this one would have to be successful. George had been lucky last time inasmuch as Tommy had forgiven him for what he’d done. Prior to his speech to the world and his subsequent wounding, Tommy had been in a benevolent mood. The adrenalin was pumping, everything was going according to plan. But now events had taken a turn for the worse. He resembled nothing more than a twitchy psychotic and if, as he had stated during his speech, he wanted everyone on the train—himself included—to die, then George supposed he was happy to suffer the excruciating pain in his face for a little while longer before the rising water snuffed them all out. Another failed attack from George would almost certainly be greeted with a bullet.
In Tommy’s left hand he held his pistol. Every couple of minutes he would fire a shot in the direction of the second carriage, either at someone whose desperation had reached such a level that an attempt to escape and almost certain death was preferable to remaining on the train, or indiscriminately through the windows in the connecting doors. Both side pockets of his black combat trousers were bulging with spare clips of bullets that he clicked into place as required. Whatever brotherly affection he might have felt for George earlier on would be long gone; it would be so easy for him to do to George what he was only too happy to do to those trying to escape. So George remained silent until the radio in the cab crackled into life once more. Tommy had ignored it previously but now he stopped pacing and turned to look at him.
“Well, George, it looks as though they’re not going to leave us alone. Do you think we should talk to them?”
George shrugged as though he couldn’t care less but all he could think about was the chewing gum on the handset. If Tommy decided to go to the radio he would see it and know that he had been tampering with it to keep the radio link open. Would it matter? Would Tommy even care any more? Or, would he see it as yet another betrayal by George—the final straw perhaps—and retaliate accordingly?
“You’d better answer it,” said Tommy, his tongue slurring against his shattered gum.
12:38 PM
Northern Line Train 037, fifth carriage
“Ah, there you are,” said the female hijacker, her face framed in the window between the carriages.
Maggie tried to pull herself even closer around the bulkhead behind the row of seats in the center of the carriage but there were people crushed against her on all sides and short of trying to push someone in front of her, she was in the hijacker’s direct line of sight.
“You were supposed to stay up here with me but what with all the commotion with them blokes I completely forgot.” She didn’t sound like a woman who had only so recently committed multiple murders. Maggie was torn between staying completely silent and trying to engage the woman in conversation. Perhaps if they could open some sort of dialogue, she might be able to find out more information about Sophie and Ben. But before she could ask what had happened to them, the woman preempted her train of thought. “Sorry about your kids.”
“Where are they?”
Maggie was shocked by how angry she sounded. She didn’t feel angry. Broken with fear but not angry.
“They’ll be pretty hot by now.” The woman said the words like she might have said, “They’ll be having a lovely time.”
“Please tell me where they are.”
“They’re not on the train if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Tell me what you’ve done with them.” The voices in the carriage, even the formerly hysterical ones, were subdued as people listened, trying to glean some meaning from what they were saying, trying to wring some hope from it.
“They’re in the trunk of the car at the tube station,” said the hijacker.
Maggie couldn’t speak. The woman’s words gouged at the terrible burning wound that Maggie felt inside and, for a moment, she thought she might throw up. Of course they were in the boot of the car. It all made sense. As she had been marched across to the entrance of the tube station at Morden that morning, she had looked back to see if she could see the children. As she did so, the woman had pushed something hard, like a gun barrel, into her kidneys and told her that if she didn’t keep moving, “The kids will die.” Maggie carried on walking but as she did so, she had heard the boot lid being slammed.
“They’ll die in this heat.” Maggie’s words were automatic, spoken with no conscious intent, and as she said them, fury radiated through her body like iced water. She had slapped George across the face once during an argument but aside from that, she had never felt violent toward another human being. Violence was something that she left to men. But when the bitch responded by saying, “Most probably,” she felt like gouging her eye
s out. For a moment, Maggie weighed up the logistics of launching an attack, of throwing herself at her, lunging through the open windows in the adjoining doors and trying to get her hands around her throat. The normal rules of humanity no longer applied. She would kill her if she could. For a moment, the violent urge was such that it managed to blot out Sophie and Ben and their horrific predicament. But then it passed and the vile truth emerged once more.
Was it a lie? Could it be? She knew it wasn’t.
She had to move. She knew how George felt when he had to wait in tunnels at a signal and became claustrophobic. Now it was her turn.
“Please, I need to get through.” She stood up and turned back toward the scrum of people in the second half of the carriage. She had to move and if she was shot then so be it.
“Please,” she said with more urgency this time, as though she was hurrying for a closing door on a crowded train. Like she was late for work. Like all that was going on was normal.
If the bullet was going to come, it was going to come now.
“There’s nowhere to go,” said the hijacker behind her, but she was wrong.
Maggie made her way between the people, picked her way through the children sitting on the floor as the lights flickered once again and dimmed.
“Ain’t gonna do you any good,” the woman shouted after her. The schoolteacher was still talking to the children and keeping them calm—she was telling them something about the tombs of the pharaohs—and Maggie could see the open doors to the next carriage up ahead. She had to get through them. She had to try and raise the alarm. She couldn’t just sit there and let her children die.
She was through the doors and she was still alive. She was moving. That was all that mattered.