Thunder (3 page)

Greere stared back at the other man as if he was somehow fascinated by the weasel’s grimy, age-lined face and tobacco-stained smile. “Be sure that you are,” he purred, whilst unconsciously and unnecessarily pushing his fringe to one side with his hand.

Ellard scowled quietly at them both.

~~~~~

London

And so, finally, I’m back. Back here in the land of the living. The lucky one.

But I wish I wasn’t.

Mum is here, and so are the doctors that I’d heard and half-seen earlier.

They’re all very kind but it really doesn’t help.

The pain is excruciating. I have multiple fractures, apparently. Arms, legs, one shoulder, fingers, a couple of toes, ribs, the list goes on... Seemingly, the pain would be worse but the jarring to my spine has damaged the nerve transmissions to my brain. The pain I am experiencing is much less than would normally be the case.

Lucky me.

They say the ability to feel will be affected forever. I reckon that’s good. I feel like I need to be numbed physically. It will match how numb I feel emotionally.

They keep talking to me but I don’t respond – other than gentle nods or shakes of my head. The metal shard that hit me during the explosion cut into my vocal cords – they say it was a miracle that it didn’t take my head off, but I disagree with them on that. So, on top of the painkilling drugs, I’m being pumped with steroids too. They say that I should recover speech, eventually, though my voice will sound different when I do.

It doesn’t matter though. I haven’t got anything to say.

My beloved Iuli and my daughter Elizabeth are both gone.

Mum was crying when she told me. I could see her reliving Dad’s passing all over again. I knew she understood the agony of what she was having to tell me, that she had real empathy, that she wanted to try to give me strength. But I was beyond comfort by the end of her first sobbed sentence, then beyond help and, in the end, beyond caring.

The van that I saw was packed with explosives. Home made from a concoction of surprisingly common components, all of which are readily available to those who want to use them for their intended purpose and also to those who would rather do dreadful things to people.

It was a suicide bomber. Some random lunatic who chose to dispatch himself down into the pit of Hell’s damnation whilst no doubt waiting placidly for the miraculous appearance of a host of long-dreamed-of vestal virgins who would, according to the usual insidious indoctrinations, throw themselves mindlessly at him and suck endlessly on his no doubt inadequate and stunted cock. Personally, I hope he’s found himself in the midst of my preferred version of the afterlife. I hope he’s discovered that Hell is a very different reality. I really hope he’s screaming in agony in a fiery pit of eternal torture. Because, if he is, I know exactly how he feels...

~~~~~

Back in England, Greere had a lot to think about. One more significant, decisive, action might be enough to get him the Major’s desk. To get him the top job. With his skills, this new team, his contacts and his cunning, this latest incident might just provide what he wanted most of all: to displace Sentinel.

What a long journey it had been. All the way from those initially gruesome, but later surprisingly pleasurable, buggerings in that lonely, dusty dormitory at Prep School. Travelling over each and every continent, armed to the teeth, free to kill or be killed. Living on the very edge of existence, able to take and then get rid of any wanton men or boys he’d wanted, almost at will. It had all been so easy when you live a life that doesn’t really belong to you. When you live a life in the grey space between the system and anarchy.

He felt proud of his intense self-orientation and lack of compassion. He was glad he’d had all feelings for others brutally shagged out of him while he was still so young. It had served him well in later years. His reputation for ruthlessness and delivering spectacular results was the reason why, young as he was, he was now only one step away from his ultimate prize...

His encrypted cellphone started ringing and he snatched it up, “Ace.”

“Boss, it’s Deuce.”

Greere smiled at the sound of his subordinate’s gritty voice. He liked Ellard. Ellard didn’t care about anything. Ellard just did his job. Ellard didn’t want to do anything else, didn’t want to get promoted, to settle down, to waste time with some other life-partner or to have kids. Ellard wanted nothing. Ellard enjoyed doing what he did best: running assets. He also seemed to enjoy disposing of the odd one now and again.

“Go ahead, Deuce,” Greere replied.

“Tin is in place,” said Ellard, and Greere could hear the man laughing to himself in the background. “He
really
likes his code-name.”

“Will it cause a problem?” Greere asked sharply. At times Ellard’s penchant for winding up agents could cause unforeseen complications.

“No, sir. Not with Tin. He’s a good little boy. It’s nice to put him in his place. You’re familiar with his cover name, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Deuce, I am.”

“You know he thinks it makes him sound posh, don’t you?” Ellard was still chuckling. “Vittalle! I think it’s just typical of the little tosser. I keep thinking he’s some sort of ruddy bottled water...,” Ellard’s voice was consumed by bellowing laughter and Greere wondered what manner of cynical expression would have been plastered over his subordinate’s campaign-hardened features when Tin had announced his chosen persona’s name...

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.