by Carlos Luxul
‘Just look at it,’ Choukri said.
‘I am,’ Mubarak said. ‘But I don’t know if I believe it.’
There was barely a cloud in the sky. The wind was slight but it was there. Importantly, it was coming from upriver, from the west, over the top of Canary Wharf and the City of London, the beating hearts of the financial community.
‘What a thing,’ Choukri whispered, staring upstream to the south bank where the Shard Tower reached to the sky like some fantastic love child of the pyramids. His eyes swept back to Canary Wharf in the foreground, looking up and down the towering edifices of banks and financial institutions. And if that wasn’t enough, looming behind it was a second tier, the City business district and its landmarks, the Gherkin, Tower 42, the Leadenhall building. Across the river a plane was taking off from the City Airport as flags fluttered from the roof of the Excel Exhibition Centre.
He stood and stared. There was a sense of disbelief, as if he could reach out and touch it all from his front-row seat.
Behind him, on the bridge, Faisel and an engineer were setting up scanning equipment – receivers to monitor the security and emergency service channels. There were two laptops, one for television, the other for radio. The BBC were running a cookery show and the radio had picked up Capital FM. The plangent guitar of the Isley Brothers’ ‘Summer Breeze’ was drifting through the open door. Punching the palm of his hand, he snapped from his thoughts and turned to the equally silent Mubarak.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘In one hour it’s noon. We have time. We keep our focus.’
He stepped back to the bridge and grabbed the binoculars. Across the creek the old gasworks had sprung into bloom with soft green leaves in its birches, lilac and purple pokers in the scrub buddleia. Downriver, the deck was filling at the bar where Jawad had enjoyed his cheeseburger. People were lounging in deck shoes and shorts, sandals and spaghetti straps, sunglasses on heads, drinks in hands. He panned over to the electricity substation on the opposite bank, upstream to the fuel storage depot, then back to the bar. At five hundred metres individual faces were clear in the powerful lenses. Lips were moving, chatting and laughing and ordering another round.
Letting the binoculars drop around his neck, he stretched his hand out, his fingers spread. There was no trembling. He realised with finality that he felt nothing now.
Choukri made his way down the companionway. On the quay, the explosives team looked at him anxiously, eager to put their Bar Mhar drills into practice. There was an apron of free space extending twenty metres from the quay to the first row of cargo, a working area for the loading operations. Devices were to be placed among the crates and cases, with the less effective ones nearest the ship. Some of them were just smoke bombs, for show. He ran his eyes over everything, checking it was all correct before motioning with a flick of his head.
‘Then get to it.’
Tariq’s voice came over the walkie-talkie, reporting the security house was quiet.
With Snoop and Assam, Choukri threaded his way through the banks of cargo. Tariq was fifty metres in front of them, concealed behind a stack of piping.
‘Nothing happening up there …’ Tariq said.
Choukri looked ahead before quizzing him on the layout inside the security hut, which Tariq knew from escorting the pilot to his taxi. He wanted to know what would be immediately in front of him when he stepped through the door, where the counter was, the gap around it, the desk and the easy chairs for the guards.
Tariq knelt and sketched it out in the dust as Choukri glanced up to Assam and Snoop, making certain they were taking it in.
Both guards were in their seats when Choukri opened the door.
‘Good morning. Beautiful day,’ he said, stepping forward with Assam and Snoop close behind.
‘Yes, sir,’ the guard said, starting to rise from his chair.
‘Exactly.’ Choukri smiled. He was already filling the gap in the counter when he pointed to something on the back wall and took a step towards it.
The guard turned to see what had caught Choukri’s eye. A cosh came down on the back of his neck followed in an instant by another heavy thud to his skull. The other guard had barely stirred from his book when Assam sprang at him and lashed three rapid blows to his head.
‘Still alive,’ Snoop said, crouching on the floor at his side before scrambling across to the chair and tugging at uniform buttons. ‘This one too, just.’
Choukri pulled the washroom door open. ‘In here,’ he said.
The first guard was dragged by the legs. Assam reached down to the man’s belt, yanking his trunk and head across the threshold, leaving his legs propped up against the back wall.
Snoop tipped the slumped figure of the other guard out of the chair, unlaced his boots and threw them in the direction of the washroom. Assam kicked them through the door. The blue trousers were already down when Choukri rolled the body over and Snoop pulled the jacket off – with its Sentinel Security badge on the breast pocket.
Assam pulled the man across before standing to one side, a hand on the door frame, the toe of one boot cocked on the floor behind his standing leg.
Snoop raised the Glock.
‘Two each,’ Choukri said.
The back of one head was exposed, the other buried. Blood peppered the wall with the second shot. Snoop put his boot on a hip and shoved, exposing the inert body below, face up, an eye just beginning to open.
Assam closed the door, shoving hard against a socked foot jutting into the room.
‘Don’t forget the cap,’ Choukri said as Snoop gathered up the uniform.
Choukri stood at the fence. The road outside was quiet. He checked his watch. It was eleven twenty. They walked back quickly to where Tariq was still hidden.
‘Put these on and get up there,’ Choukri said, handing him the guard’s clothes. ‘When the guns start, come back.’
The explosives crew had laid the charges in the cargo and were waiting for Choukri. On the ground beside them was the fuel hose, ready to be threaded into the main building. Next to it was a holdall with the crew’s computers and phones.
‘They all there?’ Choukri said, prodding the bag with his boot.
There was a nod of confirmation.
‘Set them at the heart of the fire. They must be incinerated.’
When he stepped back onto the bridge, Mubarak and Faisel were adjusting the ship’s ballast and trim, making sure it was sitting just so, at the correct angle, not down at the stern, up at the bow or listing to one side. The gun crews were in the hold, removing covers, connecting power lines and checking everything. Above them, the chief was monitoring the oil pump, the hose pulsing as fuel surged through it.
Out on the river a tug chugged by towing a barge loaded with construction materials. Its crew, to a man, looked in their direction. Commercial ships like the Ocean Dove were a rare sight this far up the river, beyond the Thames Barrier. They no doubt found it a novelty worth seeing, but were too far away to pick out any detail. A dredger had gone past earlier heading upstream, a string of refuse barges in the opposite direction. The majority of the traffic was small scale, mostly yachts and pleasure boats.
Assam’s voice came over the walkie-talkie. ‘Shut off the pump, Chief.’
All the devices were set in place and the building soaked in fuel oil. The floor conveniently sloped to the centre, to a drainage channel designed to catch runaway chemicals. The men had blocked it with rags and now it was a foot deep at the centre, glistening like treacle.
Choukri watched a launch go by. His concentration was on the fuel storage depot and a window of opportunity. He would have preferred a little less attention from the river, though the sniper rifle was silenced and, by the time it had worked its trickery, all eyes should be resolutely upstream.
Mubarak checked his watch. ‘Noon in twenty minutes.’
‘Okay,’ Choukri said. ‘Everyone in the hold.’
Choukri walked around the guns, the tip of his tongue between h
is teeth, checking, moving on, hesitating and checking again. The command table was hinged in position. He put the laptop down and plugged it in, tweaking the connections and arranging the run of cables just so. The crew assembled in ones and twos, standing in a semicircle, still, expectant, every eye fixed on his slightest movement. Barely a sound crept through the open hatch panel. They were in the heart of London but they could have been alone.
Everyone knew the roles they had been assigned. The second engineer in the engine room. Mubarak on the bridge. Snoop and Assam on the terminal to set the explosives off and defend it from the land if necessary. The chief at the guns. A man on the hatch machinery. Faisel at Choukri’s side.
‘You’ve got the gangway,’ Choukri said, his eyes on Cookie. ‘If they come for us, and if Snoop and Assam don’t make it – you pull it up.’
Cookie looked across at the two of them, his face creasing in apology. Neither met his eyes. They were concentrating on Choukri, who turned and extended a hand to Mubarak.
The captain stepped towards the guns and got down on his knees, facing east. The crew followed his lead, prostrating themselves as Mubarak began to recite:
‘You would know the secret of death.
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.
If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.
For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.
In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond.
And like the seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king, whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.
Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling that he shall wear the mark of the king?
Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling,
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides,
that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered.
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountaintop then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs then shall you truly dance.’
Thirty
The crew rose from their knees. Choukri embraced each of them in turn, looking into their apprehensive faces, his eyes inches from their own, willing the transference of his inner resolve through the strength of his hands that were gripping their shoulders.
He looked around as they set about their tasks. In the weapons’ container, Assam was handing guns out through the door, Kalashnikovs with multi-round drum magazines. One for Cookie and a bag of magazines, two for the bridge, one each for himself and Snoop. Others to be placed at the ready around the ship.
At the head of the stairs he checked the bridge before stepping out to the wings. Below him, on the main deck, a crewman was standing by the hatch machinery waiting for his signal. Cookie propped his rifle out of sight and swung the guard rail open for Snoop and Assam, their guns trussed up like a parcel in the legs of an old pair of overalls. Halfway through the sprawl of cargo they found a protected position with a clear line of sight to the main gate and security house. Snoop looked back and raised a hand.
Choukri turned back to the bridge and pulled a chair across. ‘Sit,’ he said. ‘Jam yourself against the door and keep still.’
Faisel sat down, facing out. Choukri grabbed another chair for himself and lined it up behind, shifting a little to one side to achieve the correct angle before resting a rifle barrel on Faisel’s shoulder.
Mubarak stood to one side, his binoculars raised as Choukri zeroed the telescopic sight.
‘See anything?’ Choukri said.
‘Two workmen on the right, halfway back,’ Mubarak said.
‘I’ve got them.’
The fuel depot was on the opposite bank about six hundred metres upstream. Seven tanks faced them in a line with two more rows behind.
‘I’ll take the far left tank, the middle and the right, in that order. Two shots each.’
‘Okay,’ Mubarak said.
Choukri pulled the gun back, a German DSR-1 sniper rifle. He leant it against a table and reached for the pack of incendiary shells that Khan had given him in Bar Mhar, lining them up ready for use.
The radio DJ said there was just enough time for one more song before the midday news. The TV chefs peered anxiously at the oven door, the backing music rising portentously. Would the soufflé rise or fall? Stay tuned and find out after the commercial break.
Choukri went outside for one last check, looking upstream and down. It was clear in both directions. He stepped back inside and nodded to Mubarak, holding his eye. ‘Give the order.’
Mubarak stiffened. ‘Open the hatch,’ he said into his walkie-talkie.
The words sounded sweet to Choukri. It was the signal the crew were all waiting for, that he had been waiting for, the years of planning coming together with three short words.
Resuming his seat behind Faisel, he nestled the barrel on his shoulder.
‘Breathe easy.’
‘There’s two workmen walking towards the back,’ Mubarak said.
‘Okay, I see them. Tank one, about a metre up, dead centre. On my count, three, two, one.’
His finger squeezed. The nail had regrown, stronger than before. The rifle gave the slightest of jumps. He worked the bolt for the next round as Mubarak trained his glasses on the workmen.
‘One of them has looked up,’ Mubarak said. ‘Okay, he’s carrying on now.’
Through the telescopic sights Choukri could see two dark jets spurting onto the concrete apron.
‘Middle one,’ Choukri said.
Mubarak counted the tanks from the left out loud. ‘Hit,’ he said, followed by another. ‘Hit.’
In seconds there were six holes in the tanks. Choukri reached over for the incendiary rounds as Mubarak kept his binoculars on the workmen.
‘Now they’ve really heard it,’ Mubarak said. ‘Go for the far-right tank.’
One or two out-of-place dings might have seemed acceptable, but six had put the men on their guard, pacing about, looking around. Choukri had them in his sights again. They were advancing towards the front, speculating on what they had heard. He shifted the rifle and trained it on the tanks.
The first one’s safety label said Jet A1, aviation fuel for the City Airport. A streak of yellow zipped across the apron. Time stood still for a moment, the workmen freezing before turning and running in the opposite direction. Flames were taking hold, merging, when two thousand tons of fuel exploded with an earth-shattering boom. A fireball shot into the clear blue sky. Shock waves set off sirens on both sides of the river, the smoke thickening, heading downstream on the breeze.
Choukri sprang from his chair and went out to the wings.
‘Snoop, Assam. Do the building,’ he said into the walkie-talkie.
There was no reply. He repeated the message, his eyes raking the terminal.
Snoop’s voice crackled through. ‘Here, boss. We couldn’t hear you. It’s the noise!’
‘Do the fucking building, now!’
‘On it, yeah.’
Choukri hurried down the stairs to the hold, striding across to the chief, who looked at him questioningly.
‘We’re doing good,’ Choukri said, giving him a reassuring nod.
The chief’s head twitched as another crack ripped through the air, the echo bouncing around the hold walls. The sound was close. Choukri glanced up. It had to have come from the Moritz building, confirmed by a dirty black cloud that was spiralling across the ship from t
he terminal.
At the command table, Choukri’s finger hovered over the laptop. He stared at Faisel.
‘Give me the order.’
‘Do it!’ Faisel said. ‘Do it now.’
The guns hummed into life, the turrets swivelling, barrels lifting. They fired short bursts of twelve shells each, a dozen for the fuel depot and a dozen for the O2 Dome, Excel Centre and City Airport.
The crew leapt back at the sound. The guns were unlike anything they had heard before, like metal on metal, or piledrivers hammering into the ground. Choukri considered them for a moment, pleased they weren’t alarmingly loud, their noise disguised and confused by thunderflash bombs on the terminal and explosions on both riverbanks. In these bizarre scenes they would surely pass as nothing unusual.
Mubarak’s shoulders were hunched over the wing rail when Choukri came back up from the hold. He stepped out, standing silently at his side, taking the scenes in. On the far bank an inky mushroom cloud erupted into the atmosphere as shells rained down on the fuel depot. Tanks collapsed like tin cans as thousands of tonnes of noxious liquids sprang into flame, spewing a blanket of smoke over the river, advancing on the Ocean Dove. Acrid clouds were rising from the oil in the Moritz building and smoke bombs on the quay, drifting over the ship, cloaking it in a fog. If the ship was visible at all, it would appear to be just another victim and the last thing anyone was looking at, or for.
Just down from the tank farm, three planes outside the airport terminal lay twisted and burning. Fire was raging through the main building; Choukri figured they must have hit the kitchens or a gas main. Mubarak handed him the binoculars and jabbed a finger in the direction of the Excel Centre.
Though he’d never set foot in the place, Choukri knew it intimately. The long hours researching targets for the wish list, the tired eyes, the myriad details and endless map coordinates were now concluding. He’d studied Excel’s website and knew they were hosting WorldPower, a gathering of the global power-generating industry. From the convenient link to WorldPower’s own website, he knew it would be studded with board directors from GE and Siemens, ABB and Mitsubishi, politicians, lawyers, consultants and two thousand delegates. He’d programmed the first shells to hit the Customs House railway station behind the centre. The second wave was for the reception area, the third for the exhibition hall. A split second later the fourth salvo would hit the main conference chamber, where he knew Nigeria’s Energy Minister was going to deliver the closing keynote speech at noon – three minutes earlier.
