Afterlight (6 page)

It was certainly a morning no one ever discussed. When newcomers arrived and asked how the rig community started out, Mum always fluffed the question, and Walter usually said nothing.

That day was just over five years ago and Jacob was certain that all the bad men must be long gone by now - run out of things to steal and people to kill, and just faded away. What was left of the UK had to be safe now.

He looked out at the dark skyline. Bracton was just empty buildings, wild dogs and weeds. But London? That’s where the government, the Prime Minister and all the important men lived. He remembered listening to the BBC emergency broadcasts just after the crash mentioning the safe zones in and around the big cities. There were about twenty or so of them; big buildings guarded by soldiers and full of emergency supplies of food and water and taking in civilians who sought their protection.

Yes, some of the zones had gone wrong in the aftermath, he’d heard about that, too many people, too few troops. But surely not all of them? Right?

At least one or two of them must have muddled through, especially in London where there were several of the biggest zones. Surely, by now, they’d managed to get things up and running again; had powered up lights like they had on the rig, perhaps even had enough power to make hot water, to run some street lamps, perhaps even a few shops selling their wares once more. It was possible, wasn’t it?

He smiled in the dark.

He knew he was right. He knew something else too. One day he was going to find out for himself.

 

 

F
light Lieutenant Adam Brooks sat in the corner of the mess hall, his eyes glued to the small television set, as were those of several dozen of the lads from 2 Squadron. The rest of the gunners were out on rotation manning the front gates and beating the airfield perimeter with the dogs. Security readiness at Honington had already been upped this morning, as a matter of precaution, from amber to red. Adam suspected it was almost a certainty that all leave and weekend passes were being revoked right now as they sat here watching the telly.

On the small screen BBC24 was covering the story - already somebody had managed to throw together some computer graphics to sex up the visuals. As if shaky mobile phone footage of columns of flames was not enough.

‘. . . and then there’s the Paraguana refinery in Venezuela which is the main processing facility in the country - in fact for all of South America - for their light crude. We have no details on how much damage has been done there and whether that’s going to have an effect on oil output from the region but . .
.’

‘They’re all oil targets,’ grunted one of the men sitting next to Adam. It was Lance Corporal Sean ‘Bushey’ Davies. ‘Someone’s just hitting the oil!’

‘Jesus. Well spotted, Bushey, you stupid twat,’ someone a row back quipped.

‘Fuck off,’ he grunted over his shoulder.

Adam watched as the talking heads in the studio were replaced by a Google Earth map that panned silky-smooth across the screen. Slick explosion graphics were peppered across the Arab states, several more around the Caspian Sea. He counted two dozen. More were being added to the map as they spoke.

‘It’s . . . uh . . . really too early to be putting the blame on any group in particular,’
replied a freshly scrubbed and suited industry expert. To Adam, the poor young man appeared to be an unprepared and none-too-willing participant, pulled without notice from some back office and thrown before the glare of studio lights. He cleared his shaking voice with a self-conscious cough and took a quick sip of water. ‘
But this does appear to be an attempt to disrupt as much global oil production as possible.’

‘
What about the earlier bombs in Saudi Arabia at Medina and near the Kaaba in Mecca? Neither one, apparently, to do with oil.’

The expert looked awkwardly at the camera - a complete no-no. His skin turned a blotchy corned-beef red, uncomfortable, nervous, before turning back to the well-groomed news anchor.

‘Well . . . uh . . . that’s obviously an attempt to incite widespread Sunni-Shi’a retaliatory violence . . . religious civil war. With just two bombs in those very sacred places, you’ve got a peninsula-wide tinder-box going up. It’ll completely destabilise Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq . . . and other producers in the region, the core OPEC producers.
’

The young man’s helpless face was replaced with shaking camera footage of an enormous oil slick, entirely aflame, spreading across a slim shipping channel. The towering pyramid of fire tapered into a thick black column of smoke that, in terms of scale, reminded Adam of photos of the pyroclastic cloud above Mount St Helens. The morning sun was lost beneath it. The sea that should have been a bright blue was a dull twilight grey. Beneath the shaking pixellated footage, red tickertape indicated further explosions in the Strait of Malacca.

‘And that, of course, is a very dangerous scenario. Just by taking Saudi Arabia and two or three of these other key producers out of the loop we’re looking at a shortfall of fifty-five to sixty-five per cent of the world’s oil production capacity right there.
’

The expert stared back at him, not studio-savvy enough to dial-back the look of utter dismay on his face. ‘
Uh . . . no, you . . . you’re missing the point. It’s a lot more serious than that. In the oil markets, we call this type of . . . of scenario, well there are a number of what are called Perfect Storm Scenarios—’

A cocked eyebrow from the anchor. ‘Perfect Storm?’

The expert nodded silently.

Dead-air time. The anchor prodded him gently. ‘Which means what exactly?’

‘
Affecting, of course, the price per barrel; presumably a major blip on the price of other commodities. So, this kind of an interruption of oil availability . . . how long before we can expect to feel the impact of this on our wallets? How long before we—’

The anchor stared at his studio guest, his mouth hanging open.

Adam glanced at the men in his unit, silent now, boots shuffling uncomfortably beneath the tables.

The anchor nodded, an expression of practised gravitas easing onto his face, as if he’d known exactly how serious things were all along.

‘. . . Food, for example,’ continued the expert. ‘Food,’ he said with added emphasis. ‘There’s very little storage and warehousing in the UK because it’s a drain on profit. What we have instead are “just-in-time” distribution systems; warehouses that need only store and refrigerate twenty-four hours’ worth of food instead of two weeks’ worth. As long as haulage trucks and freight ships keep moving, it works just fine. But, no oil,
’ the expert shook his head, ‘
no food.’

The anchor’s eyes widened. ‘No food?’

‘A Perfect Storm . . . we’re into uncharted territory this morning.’
The expert’s voice was beginning to waver nervously.
‘There’s no way of knowing how serious this could get . . . or . . . or how quickly. Believe me, there are industry doom-sayers who’ve long been pointing to this kind of event as a . . . as a global paradigm shift.’

Adam turned to look at his men. Silent and still. The last time he’d seen the lads like this was when an unexpected third six-month extension on their rotation to Afghanistan was announced to them last year.

A moment later the first mobile phone began to trill.

 

 

 

T
hey all heard it and froze. It was unmistakable and instantly recognisable, an after-echo peeling off the myriad warehouse walls, across the open quayside and slowly petering out.

‘That was a gun,’ said Walter.

Like it needed saying.

Jacob lowered a sack full of boxes and plastic bottles of pills through the storage hatch into the boat’s fore cabin and stood up straight, squinting as he scanned the buildings overlooking the quayside. ‘It sounded pretty close to me.’

‘Maybe we should leave,’ said Bill. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and glanced anxiously out of the cockpit. ‘Just leave the rest of the stuff and go.’

Walter was giving that consideration. They could always come back another day. But then if it was a rival group of survivors staking a claim, attempting to frighten them off, they’d be buggered. Bracton was their only source of essentials.

Another shot.

‘Dammit,’ the old man muttered unhappily.

‘Shit, man, that was definitely closer,’ said Nathan, his face in an involuntary nervous grin.

‘Are we going or what?’ asked Bill.

Walter’s eyes narrowed. He remained where he was on the quay, scanning the buildings for signs of movement. Undecided.

‘Walter?’

Dammit . . . we can’t just go.
He knew that. They needed to find out who was out there, what they wanted. Bracton was all they had.

‘My gun,’ he said, ‘pass me my gun.’

Kevin reached down into the cockpit for the shotgun and passed it over the narrow sliver of choppy water to Walter.

‘What the hell are you doing, Walt?’ asked Howard. ‘There’s just you, me, Dennis and Bill . . . and the boys. We can’t get into a fight!’

Walter was tempted to jump in the yacht, run up the sail, turn the motor on and flee. But that would be it. They needed to clear the marina, the warehouses, the brewery’s freshwater well was already being tapped by themselves, and wasn’t fair game for anyone passing through.

‘We can’t leave,’ he snapped irritably. ‘We have to find out who that is.’

‘S’right,’ Nathan nodded, ‘this place is
ours,
man. They need to know that.’

Jacob picked up the assault rifle from the foredeck and hopped across onto the quay to join the others ashore.

‘Hey, gimme the gun,’ said Nathan.

‘It’s okay, I’ve got it.’

‘But I got better eyesight, Jay.’

Jacob made a face, tight-lipped.

Walter nodded. ‘He’s got a point. Best give the SA80 to Nathan.’

Jacob passed the gun over to him resentfully.

Another couple of shots rang out across the open space of the quayside.

‘Jesus!’ hissed Dennis ducking down in the boat’s cockpit.

‘Look!’ shouted Nathan, jabbing a finger towards the loading bay of the nearest warehouse. From the dark interior, out through large, open sliding doors, a man emerged, staggering frantically towards them. He’d seen them, was making his way towards them. He cried out something - it sounded garbled or perhaps foreign.

Following him, two more men appeared from the doorway, both armed. They walked unhurriedly after the first. He wasn’t going to run anywhere. He looked weak and spent. No danger of him escaping. One of them shouldered his gun and fired off a shot. It pinged off the ground a yard away from the staggering man, sending a puff of concrete dust into the air, and ricocheted in the general direction of Walter and the others.

‘Fuck!’ the old man hissed, raising his shotgun. ‘Ready your weapons,’ he uttered to the others.

Nathan raised the assault rifle to his shoulder.

‘Safety,’ muttered Walter, ‘lad, you need to take the safety off.’

‘Oh, yeah.’

The man being pursued continued to stagger towards them. They could see now he’d already been hit in the thigh, the left trouser leg was dark and wet with blood.

‘Aidez-moi . . . aidez-moi!!’
he gasped, his eyes wide with terror beneath a mop of dark curls of hair.

Another shot whistled past the man, almost clipping his shoulder, and thudding into the fibreglass side of the boat.

‘STOP RIGHT THERE!!’ bellowed Walter.

The two men slowed, but didn’t halt.

The wounded man collapsed several yards in front of them. He groaned with pain as he clutched his thigh in both hands, sweat slicked his olive skin, sticking dark ringlets of hair to his face.

‘Ils essayant de me tuer!!’
he gasped. ‘They going to kill me!’ he said again with a thick accent.

‘I SAID STOP!’ shouted Walter again, shouldering his shotgun and aiming down the barrel at them, now standing only a dozen yards away. One of them was wearing a police anti-stab vest, the other a grubby pair of red tracksuit bottoms and a faded khaki sweatshirt. Both of them, like Walter, with lank hair tied back into a ponytail and a face of unshaven bristles.