by Max Kinnings
First out of the door, he squeezed himself between the end of the fourth carriage and the fifth and down into the cold water, up to his shoulders, and along the side of the carriage toward the rear of the train. The plan that they had hatched in urgent whispers only minutes before was that they would divide themselves into two groups and make their way along the tunnel wall on either side of the train and up to the sixth carriage. There they would attempt to draw fire from the hijacker to allow opportunities to enter the train and, once inside, try and kill her. The plan was weak: he knew it, they all knew it. But what choice did they have? Hugh had never even been in a fight before but he knew, if he could reach the woman, she was dead.
The others followed him; he could hear them climbing down from the carriage and into the water. They didn’t look like heroes. They looked like what they were, frightened desperate people doing whatever it took to try to stay alive. Of the four of them who had sat together at the end of the carriage and introduced themselves to each other that morning, Maggie had set off along the train—God alone knew why—and Adam had lost half his leg, which meant that he and the New Yorker, Daniella, who had insisted on joining the attempt to attack the hijacker, were the only two remaining.
As far as the others in the team were concerned, Hugh knew that he couldn’t think about who these people actually were. They were all of them someone’s son, father, mother, or daughter. A strictly adults-only policy was his only hard-and-fast rule but other than that anyone could take their chances with the crazy bitch.
When Daniella dropped down from between the carriages, the water came to just over her shoulders. She pulled herself along the side of the train but, after a couple of footsteps, she lost her footing on the uneven ground and as she steadied herself—one hand on the side of the train and the other on the cables mounted on the tunnel wall—she took a mouthful of water. It tasted sour and muddy and she spat it out, gasping.
There was more light the closer she came to the last carriage. The hijacker stood in the glow from a battery-powered lantern hanging from a handrail, its light reflected in ripples on the ceiling of the train. Standing with her legs apart, she had her rifle rested across her shoulders, her arms hanging over it in the classic James Dean pose. She looked as though she was acting.
The plan was simple: to draw fire from the hijacker and through the resulting shattered windows, gain entry to the carriage. Once inside, the idea was to choose a moment when she might need to reload—or even better run out of ammunition—and then attack her, kill her if need be. Daniella had been wrong about Hugh. He might have been an unworldly guy with a panicky demeanor but he had somehow discovered untapped reservoirs of courage under pressure. The plan to retake the train had been his and it was impossible to know why Daniella had said yes when he asked for volunteers. Wherever the impulse had come from, it had made her feel better than she had since this entire nightmare had begun. There were moments back there when she feared she was cracking up. It was the inertia, the helplessness. Now she had something to do, something to focus on over and above the crushing despair. The fear didn’t get any less but at least this was something positive. Now she had hope.
Hugh was the first to try and draw fire from the hijacker. The others pulled back behind the end of the fifth carriage, leaving him standing by the window, banging on the glass, waiting for the woman to shoot at him. As she did so, he jumped back and the dum-dum bullet smashed into the window of the sliding door at the end of the carriage, creating a hole the circumference of a large dinner plate. The exploding glass fragments ricocheted in the tunnel stinging the back of Hugh’s head and when he dabbed at the cuts with his hand, his fingers came away wet with blood.
As they had planned, a young Iranian man banged and shouted on the other side of the carriage, and the resulting shot from Belle slammed into the metal carriage wall blasting a ragged hole in the metal. Another shout from Hugh and this time he stood his ground as the woman raised the gun. For a moment, their eyes met along the barrel and he threw himself back as she pulled the trigger. Blinking away the muddy water, he saw a hole in the window in the door. It was big enough. He waited for more shouting from his co-conspirators and, glancing up over the lower edge of the window, he could see the woman taking aim at the opposite side of the train.
He had to move fast. Finding a foothold on the tunnel wall, he pulled himself up and threw himself against the hole in the window. The shredded glass snagged against his back and chest as he clambered into the carriage. Holding his breath, he curled up in a ball underwater behind the row of seats as the thump of a large caliber bullet struck metal nearby.
He was in.
Pushing his head above the surface of the water, he sucked up a lungful of air. He looked across at the young Iranian, who hammered on the side of the carriage to try and distract the hijacker. But he mistimed his evasive maneuver and as a gunshot thumped the air half his head came away.
Hugh managed to turn around in the water and crouching on his haunches, he leaned back against the end of the row of seats. With his eyes just above the level of the water, he could see another team member, a man in a black suit, as he squeezed between the side of the train and the tunnel wall. The man was about to beat on the side of the train but the hijacker had spotted him and fired off a shot which splintered the metal in the door and he was hit by something, some sort of shrapnel from her diabolical weapon. Slumping down in the water, Hugh could hear him gasp and cry out but he was still moving and clearly audible as he retreated, making his way back down the side of the train.
Daniella Langton knew that she was probably level with the hijacker now. She had to climb over the young Iranian’s body. His limbs were solid and heavy in the water. If she gave herself away, a shot through the side of the train would mean the end. But the carriage was tight against the tunnel wall. She would have to force herself through the narrow space. There was nothing else she could do. Once again, she had overestimated her abilities. It was something that her mother—who never failed to miss an opportunity to put her down—had said to her often enough. It was even said to her in her work appraisals until she reached a position in the company where she didn’t need to care what others thought of her. And now she was going to die for it.
There was another gunshot. This was her moment; this was her chance. She pushed herself through the gap, her clothes scraping against the side of the train, and threw herself forward into the water trying to go as deep as she could until her fingers dug into the gravel on the bottom of the tunnel. Explosive gunshots above her head were muffled by the water; their impact against the side of the train punching her eardrums. She dragged herself along, her lungs aching for air. As her fingers curled around the end of the carriage, she pushed her head above the surface, drew a deep breath, and plunged back into the water.
Further sounds of gunfire came from the train. Maybe the second wave of people had begun their attack. Perhaps they would succeed. She wouldn’t get to find out; she couldn’t stop herself even if she tried. The impulse was irresistible. She just had to put as much distance between herself and the train as was humanly possible.
As the train receded behind her, Daniella felt safe enough to take another breath and do the front crawl as she swam along the tunnel toward a faint light in the distance.
Hugh’s strangely beatific mood of confidence of only a few moments before had taken a pounding. He felt his bravery ebb. It was essential that he maintain his momentum. But he couldn’t help but feel that rather than gaining entry to the carriage through his own guile and ingenuity, the hijacker had allowed him to do so. The thought unnerved him. Perhaps throwing himself forward blindly was not the best strategy. He worried that perhaps this reasoning was the onset of a resurgent cowardice and the thought filled him with more fear than he had felt all day.
Someone else tried to make their way into the carriage on the other side of the train. Hugh couldn’t see who it was. As a shot was fired, another man clambered through
the window through which he had come before a shot threw him backward against the tunnel wall and he slumped forward into the water.
It was time for Hugh to move but just as the torture of his indecision began again, two men managed to gain entry to the carriage through newly broken windows but he wouldn’t give odds on their chances. It was obvious they were being allowed entry—just as he had been—and the ensuing shots and the splashing of their bodies in the water were confirmation of this.
No one else was going to try their luck. It was all down to him now.
It was dark in the carriage—the only light came from the single bulb in the hijacker’s lamp swinging from a handrail. The water was dark too. If he could move cleanly beneath it without breaking the surface, he might reach the end of the row of seats and hunker down once again by the first set of double sliding doors. Could he pull himself along between the seats without giving himself away? There was nothing to be gained from pondering on the logistics of his plan, so he took some deep breaths to oxygenate his blood and set off toward her. He remembered from when he was a little boy playing soldiers with his brother in the garden that they always used to say you’d never hear the bullet that killed you. It was something they must have read in a comic or seen in a film. And here he was all these years later about to find out whether it was true.
She was only about ten feet away from him now. With the hunting knife in his hand, he pulled himself along under the water toward her.
1:58 PM
MI5 Headquarters, Thames House
“We both own this, Howard, but I’m the one who’s been left to make the big decisions. If it all falls apart because one of us loses our nerve then we’ll both be held responsible.”
“Is that some sort of threat?”
“We both agreed that this could work. You can’t walk away.”
“Mark, there are hundreds of people down there. Special forces think it’s impossible to get in there without exposing their men to Denning’s threat to let off more explosives. Number Ten, the home office, COBRA, the media—at the moment, they’re paralyzed. But once this is resolved either way, they’re going to be all over us. It’ll be impossible to contain.”
Berriman’s sciatica felt like a burning wire being held against his buttock. How could something so tiny as a nerve cause so much pain?
“What you seem to have forgotten,” said Mark Hooper with that whiny hiss to his voice that he seemed to have developed in the past few hours, “is that if Denning succeeds then it is contained.”
“If Denning succeeds, hundreds of innocent people will die.”
“That’s not something that we have any control over now.”
“What about Ed Mallory and his idea about draining the tunnel by deploying an explosive charge?”
“His judgment’s completely gone. He’s trying to find some old IRA bomber.”
“Have we considered what happens if he does manage to find a way to drain the water out of the tunnel?”
“You know as well as I do, Howard, that he’s never going to get clearance to let off explosives on the Underground.”
“None of this alters the fact that we were handling someone on the inside. We had clear provable foreknowledge of a potential attack.”
“No, Howard. That’s not how it was. We had an ongoing intelligence timeline. We interpreted it as best we could.”
“We could have stopped the attack but we didn’t because we were too preoccupied by the media and how the project would play with them.”
“No, we made an error of timing, that’s all.”
“Mark, if this is going to leak then we need to manage it.”
“We can’t manage it, Howard. We just bury it. There’s no paper trail. Simeon Fisher went AWOL in Helmand, he returned to the UK, moved to Wales, and got involved with Cruor Christi. There was no intelligence. We’re as shocked about what’s happened as everyone.”
“I’m not sure, Mark.”
“You are sure, Howard. Believe me, you are.”
Howard started to respond but he realized he was talking to a dead line.
2:03 PM
Northern Line Train 037, first carriage
George had often wondered what it would feel like to be famous. What was his constant yearning to find some talent in himself that he could nurture, if not a fascination with fame and its transformative effects? When reality shows had first started on television, he had often found himself wondering what it would be like to be suddenly catapulted into the public eye. He liked to feel that it was intellectual curiosity that fueled his interest; he hated the thought that he might actually be part of the target demographic for the increasingly vacuous shows. He would never have actually joined the queues of hopefuls trying to take part in the tawdry carnival. But it was snobbery that held him back—of course it was—and within a couple of years of the first Big Brother, he had added his voice to the chorus of derision, so much of it hypocrisy, hypocrisy he was equally guilty of, seeing that he still watched the shows avidly.
What did it say about him—that he had a secret longing for fame? Why wasn’t being himself ever enough? Maybe it was loneliness. He had always felt lonely but it wasn’t the sort of loneliness that could be cured by the company of family or friends. If anything, they accentuated it, enhanced its potency by making him realize that even they couldn’t save him from it. But just as he knew that having a crush on fame was all part of his desire to cure his loneliness, he also knew with stone-cold certainty that if he ever—for whatever reason—achieved even a modicum of public recognition, he would still be lonely, if anything, more so. And he could see that same loneliness in so many others around him. Mostly in men, of course. Men are good at being lonely, despite their inevitable packs and tribes.
The irony was that he would be famous now, fleetingly, as the driver of the doomed train—but he would be famous for only one thing, and that was dying. George would be reduced to just a statistic in the ensuing news story.
In these last few minutes of his life, he didn’t feel lonely. His sense of bereavement was all-consuming. His wife and children were dying and they had never felt more precious. He thought of his own parents; how they would cope with this. His mother, his poor mother—from this day on, any mention of his name and the tears would come to her eyes. His dad too. What a burden they would have to bear—their only son, their daughter-in-law, and their two grandchildren, dead. All killed on the same day. Facing such trauma and at their age, they might never recover. He couldn’t think about it, it was too much, like thoughts of Sophie and Ben and what had been done to them—what was still being done. His family was being violated and he could do nothing to stop it. But they were still his family. Whatever sick horror was being visited upon them—and this felt about as sick and horrific as it could get—no one could take that away from him. As he thought of them, he could conjure up their aroma, the soft, nutty, almost honey-like smell of the children; Maggie’s smell—feminine, reassuring, alluring. He could smell the house, that homely smell of carpets and clothes, humanity and food cooking in the kitchen.
He was turning the key in the lock now, returning from his shift and there was the smell. What he wouldn’t give for that smell now. Sophie ran toward him and hugged him around the legs. Benji came thundering down the stairs and standing on the second step, flung his arms around his neck. There was Maggie, framed in the doorway to the living room, smiling as he shouted, “Group hug!” and they all came together on cue, as they had so many thousand times before, he and Maggie scooping up one rascal each and all of them grabbing hold of each other. Afterward, laughter and games, playtime, bathtime, bedtime stories, kisses, “Night night, I love you,” sleeping children, then down for supper, glasses of wine, feet up, television, and talking, a night in the Wakeham house. No more frustration, no more loneliness. Nothing else mattered. This was his god. Denning could keep his.
The water was up to his chest now. George would be dead soon. There was nothing he cou
ld do about it, not physically at least; he couldn’t reach Denning now, not with his leg chained to the pole. His jailer stood there in the middle of the carriage, looking around at the havoc he had created with a look of wonder and pride in his eyes. This was Tommy’s proof—if proof were needed—that he was doing God’s work.
George knew there was no God; and he knew too that in a very short time, unless he could figure out some way of saving himself, he would be returning to the unknowable primordial hum from which he had sprung. This was his last chance.
2:05 PM
Northern Line Train 037, sixth carriage
It was like playing a video game. Not that she had ever played more than one in her life. Kill Fire it was called. She loved it. It was a “first person shoot ’em up.” Jason, a boy she had been fostered with, had let her play it in return for handjobs. They were a small price to pay. The graphics were amazing. That’s what Jason said anyway. So that’s what she said as well.
You walked down a street in some desert town shit-hole. Iraq or somewhere like that. And ragheads came at you, ran at you from buildings, tried to shoot you, and you had to take them out. Some of them didn’t even have guns. They were just armed with knives, and the nearer you allowed them to get to you, the higher their score value when you drilled them. She played the game a lot, which meant plenty of handjobs for Jason.
It was a buzz when they came for her. In the space of just a few hours she had become hooked on killing. She had a need, a hunger. Tommy had said to her that she should only kill people if they tried to stop them carrying out the baptism. So that meant that what she was about to do was fine. It was okay, it was allowed. They were trying to make her smash the windows with gunshots so they could get into the carriage and try to rush her. It felt as though she was playing Kill Fire all over again and it was up to her to try for the highest score possible. So she allowed one of them into the carriage with her. She could have shot him easily as he clambered through the broken window but she wanted him to get closer.