Locked and Loaded: A Riz Sabir Thriller Omnibus

by Charlie Flowers

  I’d tried taking the AA batteries out and putting them back in again. No dice. Nope. ‘Damn.’

  I couldn’t even throw the damn thing at the parapet. There was only one person I knew at this short notice who could fix it and she was going to be my wife this afternoon. ‘Shit. Fuck.’

  There was no way I could get her down here to fix it. We weren’t even meant to be looking at each other at this moment in time. ‘Shit!’

  I looked left over the parapet of the building to the target across the street. Sussex House on Derbyshire Street in Bethnal Green, where the central committee of the Socialist Workers Party were holding their annual leadership conference. I’d just seen the last committee member as he’d entered the building and I’d scored a line with a Pentel through his face on the cribsheet before me. I checked the camera feed. Yep. We had a full house. The entire high command of the most dangerous extremist party in the UK was in one room, two floors above my demolition charges, ready to drop them straight to hell.

  And the remote control was busted. Bollocks. I got my BlackBerry out and texted her. ‘Babe. Got a problem. I’m on the roof off Snappy Snaps off Bethnal Green Road, going over the road to check the charges. See you on the roof xxx’

  She was going to kill me. I ran for the fire escape stairs.

  I’d started work on this thing a week ago, shuttling between the Salisbury Plain Training Area with the Combat Engineers, and the flat of the late Davey Smythe of Combat 18, last seen being shot dead by us at Green Lane Mosque. I knew he and those captured anti-tank mines would come in handy one day. I just hadn’t realised it would be so soon.

  I worked for a semi-private wing of the Ministry of Defence knows as KTS. It lay in the shadowy area between Intelligence, Special Forces, and “solutions providing”. My fiancée, Holly “Bang-Bang” Kirpachi, was a leader of a Muslim girl gang that had caused havoc for several years until being taken under the wing of the state and dropped into a branch of the Army called MSSG, where it was figured they would do less harm.

  This had led to mixed outcomes. Mostly positive, usually fatal. Put together, we were all part of the sharp end in the state’s fight against terrorism, and one that you wouldn’t read about in the media.

  My working day would involve driving from Davey’s flat out in Hainault, to the target building in my fake Rentokil van, down into the basement to fit the cutting charges to the building supports. All good, strong Victorian brickwork. My trigger unit was the innards of the remote-controlled racing car that had come with the kit. The initiator was cut from two reels of commercial det cord, stolen from a quarry in Eastern Europe. Primacord, to be exact. I’d only used one reel. My Ministry of Defence issue BlackBerry was set to encrypted and remained secure the entire duration of the op. Any agency listening in would get mushy static, and more importantly, the phone’s digital footprint was impossible to pinpoint. In the old days you had to stick what was called a “fill gun” into the phone and set the encryption for the day. Nowadays all you had to do was make sure the little green padlock icon was on.

  Last Monday I’d started hauling those captured anti-tank mines up the stairs and into the bathtub of the flat, where the hot water would melt the TNT inside into malleable, scoopable stuff. The flat had been like a time capsule for months after the Birmingham attacks. The Security Service had looked round it in the aftermath then sealed it to let dust gather. As a forward base, it was perfect. All the while, the communications of the SWP high command had been monitored. As it had become clear that, like a cornered animal after the Black Thursday attacks, they were going to go all out and throw their weight behind every left-wing or Islamist terror cell in the UK, the hammer had fallen. They were one-hundred per cent fair game. Terminate with extreme prejudice, as they used to say in bad Eighties action movies. The first task for Teacher and I had been to walk the locale. This was called hostile reconnaissance. We took our burgers from Bethnal Green Road Macdonald’s and ambled round the target building and the park, taking in the atmosphere.

  The first problem we’d seen on day one had been the security camera parked atop a metal sculpture staring directly at the target building. We stood under it, out of view, and mulled the options. Teacher sucked his teeth.

  ‘Paintball gun.’ I said.

  Teacher laughed. ‘Nah. Too obvious.’

  ‘Alright. Get the office to get the council to swivel it.’

  ‘Nah. Phone trail.’

  ‘Hmmmm.’

  ‘How about this, Riz. This Yardie ‘ere arranges a disturbance tonight.’ He pointed at the western entrance to the park.

  I nodded. ‘Beautiful. The council and police themselves will swivel it.’

  We dumped our burger wrappers in the bin underneath the camera and walked away.

  The trick in a good controlled demolition is to implode the building inwards and downwards, minimising collateral damage outside. So far it was looking good. I was trained, I had backup, and I had a good escape plan. This was shaping up to be the best state terror attack since Dublin 1974.

  At the day’s close, I’d tape off the basement, hang the “FUMIGATING” sign on the door, and return to the dead fascist’s flat for takeaway curries, poring over the folders DIS had lent me. Every bombmaker has a signature, whether it’s the type of adhesive tape they use, the direction they coil a wire or how many redundancies they build into the firing mechanism. The folders had photos of every kind of captured or reassembled terrorist bomb imaginable. I’d studied the European, far-right examples of Copeland and Breivik. Then I practised assembling some until I could simulate a pretty good version of the one on page 38 of folder 4.

  2.

  The captured TM46 mines had soaked in the hot bathwater for a few hours on the first day, with their combination fuse and detonator assemblies from the top well removed. TNT is waxy, orange, and melts at 84 degrees centigrade. The hot water softened the TNT mix, and after a while, I could lean in, pull the mines out, and begin scooping out the malleable explosive with a selection of scoops and ladles and then, after I got impatient, kitchen-gloved hands. The next job was to roll the explosive into strips with a kitchen rolling pin, and cut it into lines with a pizza cutter. Once I had a good selection of these, I could press and shape them into the PVC pipe sections, making a wedge shape. I’d built in a “stand-off” of several centimetres to give the shaped charge enough space to reach full effect. Then, knotted det cord was pressed into both ends of the frame, into the TNT, and sections of copper right-angle framing were pressed into the explosive strips to provide the cutting element, an inverse triangle.

  Each landmine I was cannibalising held 5.7kg of TNT explosive which would detonate at 6,900 metres per second. One gram of TNT, on detonation, would expand to 600 litres of superheated gas and deliver an overpressure of over 14,700 psi. I knew I was mixing measurements in my head but I was a product of a curtailed state school education and that was how I thought. So far, with no bad results.

  And all the while, the camera in the park had been dutifully pointing away, and the wedding preparations had been rumbling along in the background. ‘Are you sure you’re going to be able to handle this op and a wedding, Riz?’ the Colonel had asked, as I struggled up the flat stairs with another load of piping. ‘Sure, it’ll be a breeze!’ I’d replied brightly, as Bang-Bang had headed the other way waving copies of Asiana Magazine and singing some Bollywood standard to herself. ‘Sure…’

  Mirpuri weddings were something else. They were a time to show off, a time to weld various clans, and a ridiculous display of opulence and one-upmanship. Or womanship, in this case. I figured that if I kept my head down and let Bang-Bang and the aunti-jis and ammi-jis get on with the planning, I’d be in the clear. I hoped.

  First up had been the proposal party. This was a reception made in the bride’s house, where the groom’s parents and family elders formally ask the bride’s parents for her hand in marriage. Which was a given. Then our families read Surah Al-Fatihah, tea and refresh
ments were served, and the bride-to-be was showered with jewellery and gifts. This was all a formality as we’d renewed our vows once and I’d proposed and given her a ring back in October. But it had to be done.

  Back to the day’s work. The kill order. In the mornings I’d put in a few hours at our West End office. We were moving to Feltham, out of harm’s way. There was a lot of dismantling to do. In the afternoon, I’d be in the basement of Sussex House. Assembling.

  Normally you’d drill into the columns and place tubes of high explosive in the holes to bring the whole thing down. I was eschewing the drilling and going for high-speed cuts – one at the base of each of the six basement columns, one at the roof level. Both cutting charges on each column were tamped by either sandbags or water-filled drums. This was to make sure the blast only went in the desired direction, and also to mitigate from shrapnel flying everywhere and cutting the other det lines.

  The charges would fire in opposite directions, blowing two swathes through the brickwork and collapsing them down and in. Gravity and the masonry above would do the rest, tumbling the whole front of the building down into the hole. The PIRA Brighton bomb had used roughly nine kilos of Frangex. I was using about fifteen kilos of TNT salvaged from the nearly six kilos of explosive in each mine. P for Plenty, as the unofficial demolitions dictum went.

  Two days later we’d had a formal ceremony to mark our engagement. Rings and other items of jewellery were exchanged. Again. Finally the prayer and blessings for the lucky couple were recited, and the wedding date was “decided”. I looked around. Our families, the Haqs and the Kirpachis, who were all related to each other anyway, looked ecstatic. Good for them, I thought.

  On top of all that, there was the small issue of the Islamic marriage contract. I’d only had myself to blame for this one, me being Salafi and all, Bang-Bang had stated triumphantly. The contract stated all kinds of newfangled things like no polygamy, the wife being able to work and keep property… I’d cast a wry eye over it and happily signed. I agreed with all of it, but that wasn’t going to get in the way of a good windup.

  In the meantime, your average Asian wedding week wore on. While my bride was picking out gold jewellery, I was picking out items that killed. In my go-bag I had the radio transmitter, a spare two-kilo ball of TNT to make up any shortfalls, and a reel of fifty-grain det cord. More than enough of everything.

  Now here came the only tricky bit. The only detonators the SAS lads had been able to filch were pyro-fuse blasting caps, detonated by heat rather than the electrical impulse I’d ideally wanted. Never mind. I’d improvised with bunches of steel wool crimped to the fuses and the fuses crimped to the blasting caps. The initiator was the radio remote-controlled helicopter’s motor output. When triggered via radio signal, the output would pump electrical current into the steel wool, flaring it red-hot within a second and triggering the blasting caps. Perfect. The blasting caps would kick off the det cord, the det cord would blast along its lines, and the TNT would crack off and cut the columns. Crack… crack…blam…blam. And there the toy’s innards hung from the basement ceiling like a spider, the various lengths of taped det cord looping away to the cutting charges.

  The radio controller’s range was seventy metres. The three-in-one control unit, attached to its charged flight battery, sat amongst the innards, ready to go.

  There were other little creases to organise in this false-flag attack. Davey Smythe’s sweatshirt and his driver’s license were going into a holdall to be left in the basement, and I’d scooped up some of his friends’ cigarette butts from an ashtray in the lounge and left them casually scattered on the basement floor. No point in being subtle. If I’d got the effect right it would look like a massive ‘fuck you’ from Davey’s Nazi friends. The entire time I was in his flat, I was wearing a painter’s paper overalls, a hood, and surgical gloves. False-flag attacks were vanishingly rare in real life, no matter what the conspiracy theorists would have you believe. In fact this was only the second one I’d ever set up. I was determined that it would be slick. To cap it off, at some point in the next 24 hours someone would be going to a phonebox and ringing Crimestoppers with the address of this very flat full of incriminating gear. That someone would be one of us.

  On Thursday we did the ceremony of the “showing of the face” after the Nikah. A green, embroidered shawl was held over our heads. We were made to see each other in the mirror, held up before our faces. Fantastic, hello us, I thought. Bang-Bang then went through a whole charade of unveiling her face. This custom was known as Mun Dikhai. A piece of sweet fruit was pressed into our hands, we made a great show of biting into it, and our family and friends applauded as I wiped mango juice off myself. Then dinner was served. The friends and female relatives of the bride, which in this case meant the Blackeyes, took this opportunity to steal my trainers and demand a sum of money for their return. I already had the cash on me, and I paid up, with one part of my mind laughing at the traditions, and the other part…

  While the girls divided up the money, my mind was being dragged back to the work at hand.

  Bang-Bang, Teacher and I had spent a fun couple of days mooching round local B&Q and Homebases, sourcing the right lengths of guttering and piping to make the frames. By day three we’d returned with loads of plumbing, right into the Dholki. The Dholki, or Dholak, celebration took its name from the percussion instrument, which was featured heavily during Mirpuri wedding celebrations. Traditionally, many days or even weeks before the actual wedding day, women would gather in the house of the bride at night to sing and dance. Luckily for us this ceremony was now just a single night of singing. Unluckily for me, it was tonight, and had been combined with the infamous Mehndi, or Henna ceremony. Everyone was going to get hennaed. I looked at Teacher and we left sharpish for my lockup. We placed myself in purdah and got on with assembling explosive charges.

  By Friday we were in the final phase, and one thing I had going in my favour was that my darling betrothed was going into Maayun Bithana. This was the custom of the bride entering into the state of seclusion before the wedding. In earlier centuries this would last up to two weeks. Bang-Bang’s family had managed to get it to 48 hours. Good enough. In this period, the bride and the bridegroom were made free of all the chores and errands around the house. We were also not allowed to see each other and the bride was not allowed to leave her house, especially after sunset. The beautification rituals had begun on her and Teacher and I were free to go about our terroristic business.

  I’d spent the last week wandering about the target wearing a set of Rentokil overalls, tapping the walls and slowly manoeuvring the charges, detonators, wiring and radio receiver into position. The basement was standard Victorian “Vic Brick” – shallow brick foundations, Flemish Bond walls.

  No-one had challenged me the entire time. I’d even left a number with the reception that went straight to Toots at the office. If they rang it she would keep up the Rentokil spiel. No member of the SWP had confronted me either as I’d gone about rigging a covert camera in their meeting room. After all, I was Asian, and to have confronted me would have been racist.

  Up until now it had been smooth. I’d sketched the building, walked it, placed the charges so that the committee room would drop right into the foundations and then the main building would fall on top of it in a rain of brickwork. The basement ran the length of the building, an expanse of dirty Victorian brickwork and wooden pilings. Perfect. I’d paced inside the basement to ensure I was wiring up the area directly below the meeting room two floors above.

  Last on the to-do list had been to clear the flat and van of all explosive gear including any left-over det cord, pile it into a holdall and stick it in the basement. Teacher would have had the Rentokil van resprayed and replated, and driven to his mate’s scrapyard in Kent. There it would be torched, cubed, and the cube would be sold to a Polish scrap-metal gang. Bye.

  I came back to the present. Before Bang-Bang turned up I needed to check the firing chain one more
time. I left the transmitter on the parapet, ran down the steps from the roof, across the street, and up the steps into Sussex House.

  For this second phase of the attack I was wearing British Gas uniform, complete with photo ID that would also check out. I was taking advantage of the swap between weekday and weekend staff to ensure that no-one would make the connection between the week’s Rentokil guy and the now, all-new me.

  There was a gaggle of conference-goers in front of me, getting ready to head upstairs. Good. They were all going to die pretty soon. I brushed through them and headed down the hall to the stairs.

  Down in the basement I cast my flashlight around. The wires and firing lines were all fine and correct. The three-in-one controller was fine and the battery indicator I’d installed was glowing green. Shit! What had I missed? It had to be something in the transmitter. I ran back up the stairs, down the hall and out into the street.

  3.

  I made my way back to the roof. Bang-Bang was standing there, in full wedding gear, with an L plate on her back. She had a hand in the air.

  ‘Holly, it’s –’

  The hand stayed up. ‘Bas oye!’

  ‘No really’

  ‘BAS!’

  Time to shut up. I went to her side and looked across to the target. High on the roof, some seagulls stood on the chimneys, oblivious.

  She was working on the transmitter with a multitool. She spoke from out of the corner of her mouth. ‘I am pissed off with you. We shouldn’t even be LOOKING at each other.’ Then she smiled and breathed out. ‘But… my moods with you can never last, bhai. Now, what have you got us into?’

  I outlined the situation. She listened as she looked at the underside of the transmitter. ‘2.4 Gigahertz… nothing. This is all crap kit though, Riz babe.’