by Tom Cain
Its momentum somewhat slowed by its impact with the helicopter, the cylinder veered off course, flattened the arc of its trajectory, and hit the second helicopter amidships.
Now it exploded.
A millisecond later, the United Kingdom’s special forces had been left without a commanding officer, and MI5 had lost its deputy director. The fireball that consumed them had been captured live on television. But this was just the start of the catastrophe.
As the cluster of people by the landing site ran for cover from the shrapnel that fell like red-hot hail from the sky, the co-pilot of the first helicopter desperately fought for control of his craft.
And then the whole world seemed to go up in flames, as the other eleven cylinders hit their targets.
The pipes, towers and storage tanks of an oil refinery are double-skinned to prevent any leaks. But even two thin sheets of steel are no protection against an explosive shell impacting at close to the speed of sound. The tanks that each hold millions of gallons of oil and petrol are clustered in twos and threes within brick and concrete berms, designed according to safety regulations that demand they can safely contain a hundred and ten per cent of the capacity of the biggest tank. But those regulations do not account for what happens when all the tanks are breached at once, and a torrent of flaming liquid overflows those concrete defences like lava escaping a volcano. Refinery staff are trained to evacuate their workplaces quickly and safely in the event of an emergency, and await the arrival of local fire brigades. But evacuation attempts are futile when there is no place of safety; when death waits at every turn, and any attempt at rescue will be far too little, too late.
Armageddon had come to Rosconway. The air was torn asunder by a terrifying conflagration of thunderous noise, light, heat — and blasts of explosive pressure that picked up cars and trucks, sent people flying, and obliterated the mighty structures of the refinery in a series of explosions that seemed to go on and on in a never-ending wave of destruction.
The explosive shells were damaging enough in themselves. But their greater purpose was to set free the pent-up power that was locked in the refinery itself. The giant storage tanks, the distillation towers, the miles of pipes that carried a multitude of petrochemical substances around the complex: all now became locked in a deadly chain reaction as the fires of hell engulfed them.
51
Willie Holloway had been trying to tell the arrogant little tit of a ministerial aide, for the umpteenth time, that safety really was an important issue at an oil refinery. He was shouting even louder than before, just to make himself heard over the hubbub of the chattering people all around them, and the whirring clatter of the incoming helicopters. Then the noise of the rotors was obliterated by a metallic crash, immediately followed by a thunderous explosion. Holloway looked up to see a single helicopter spiralling down from the sky. All that was left of the other chopper was a boiling cloud of fire and thick black smoke.
A second later one of the projectiles hit the distillation tower that rose from the ground no more than fifteen metres behind him, and the gigantic explosion that followed wiped all traces of Willie Holloway, the aide and everyone anywhere near them from the face of the earth.
Tyrrell and Schultz were about a hundred metres away, walking down the road towards the administrative blocks, where they were due to have a discreet and hopefully unobserved meeting with the Director of Special Forces. A razor-sharp shard of steel, roughly the size of a frisbee, hit Major Rod Tyrrell just above his right ear, sliced the top of his head off, and killed him instantly. Schultz was unharmed, but the sheer force of the blast picked him up and threw him to the ground. By the time he dragged himself to his feet, the air was filled with choking, billowing smoke that reeked of burning oil, and the ground shook from the relentless barrage of explosions as one refinery unit after another burst into scorching flames or blew itself to smithereens.
Holding a handkerchief to his face to give himself the most basic protection against the fumes, Schultz broke into a stumbling, coughing run as he tried to get away from the inferno. Amidst the thunder of explosions and the clouds of smoke he neither heard nor saw the stricken helicopter until it scraped over the roof of one of the office blocks just ahead of him, dislodging scores of roof-tiles as it went, crashed on to the road surface, and came skidding towards him in a screeching mass of tangled metal and shattered glass.
Schultz flung himself out of the way, somehow managing not to be shredded by the mangled blades of the helicopter rotors. The chopper kept going in the direction of the stricken, blazing distillery towers, before coming to rest by the side of the road, no more than a few metres from a ruptured pipe that was pouring some kind of burning liquid on to the ground. The petrochemical flowed across the tarmac, flaming like the brandy on a flambeed steak, creating a pool of fire that was spreading wider and wider. And the shattered helicopter was right in its way.
If anyone had managed to survive the crash they were about to be incinerated.
Schultz did not stop for a second to worry about his own safety. He ran straight to the helicopter. The door of the passenger compartment was half-open. Schultz pulled at the hot, twisted metal and managed to widen the gap so that he could force a leg and part of his upper body into the cabin. He swept a hand back and forth in front of his face, trying to clear away the smoke to see if anyone had survived. His first impression was that they were all dead, or at the very least unconscious: no one was moving or crying out for help, and there simply wasn’t time to check them individually for any signs of life. He realized that he recognized one of the faces: Nicholas Orwell, the former Prime Minister, was staring at the ceiling of the cabin with lifeless, unblinking eyes. And then Schultz saw a hand — a woman’s hand — move a fraction. She was trying to reach out to him, and through the roar of the flaming refinery he heard her voice very faintly beg, ‘Help me… help me, please.’
Schultz squeezed his way further into the compartment. He could see her now, strapped into a chair to his right. Her face was covered in blood that had come from a deep gash on her forehead, where a flap of skin had peeled away, exposing the bone of her skull. More bone was visible on one of her legs, where a compound fracture had stabbed through the skin below the hem of her skirt. Schultz was relieved. Neither wound was fatal. Unless there were any nasty surprises that he could not yet see, the woman was not going to die just yet.
But if he couldn’t get her and himself out of the chopper fast, it wasn’t going to make much difference what her wounds were like. They were both going to be burned to a crisp.
He reached for the clasp of her seat belt and pressed the button to release it. Nothing happened. He pulled at the belt. Still it would not loosen. Schultz stayed calm. He and Tyrrell had come to the conference in civilian clothes and, in theory, unarmed. Schultz, however, was not a man who liked the idea of being defenceless. So he’d strapped a KA-BAR fighting knife with a seven-inch chromium steel blade to his lower right leg. He took it out and started sawing at the tough, webbed nylon of the safety belt.
The smoke in the cabin was getting even thicker. The air was roasting hot. Schultz could not see the burning liquid outside, but he didn’t have to. He knew it had to be a metre at most away from the side of the fuselage. He kept sawing, working his way through the unyielding material until only a few strands were left.
One last swipe of the blade and the belt came free. Schultz reached for the woman and hauled her up over his right shoulder in a fireman’s lift, hearing her moan in pain as her shattered leg was so crudely manhandled.
That was all right. Pain was good. It meant she was still alive.
He shoved his left arm and shoulder against the half-open passenger door and managed to create just enough space to get himself and the woman through. As he poked his head out Schultz could see the first flames from the burning chemicals licking against the helicopter. Any urge he might have had to be delicate with the woman disappeared. All that mattered was getting her out. S
he gave another whimper as he bumped her against the door frame, and he could feel her chest rising and falling against his as she sobbed in agony.
The flames were rising around them as Schultz gave one last heave. Then he heard the door crash shut behind him as he and his human burden staggered out of the helicopter. He found himself standing on a tiny island of bare tarmac, surrounded by a sea of fire. It was impossible to judge his bearings. All he could do was look back at the now-burning chopper, try to picture where it had ended up, relative to the road he had been on, and then plunge blindly into the flames.
52
Carver spun the car round, put the pedal down, and raced out of the farmyard. When he hit the lane he did a handbrake turn to wrench the car through ninety degrees, then accelerated again as he drove towards the refinery. Up ahead the sky itself seemed to be ablaze, as the entire horizon filled with night-black smoke pierced by geysers of yellow, white and orange flame.
It took him forty seconds to reach the road that ran alongside the refinery’s main security fence. He was met by a scene of total carnage and devastation.
The field where the VIPs were supposed to land held the smouldering wreckage of the blown-up helicopter and the bodies of those who had died in it, or been hit by pieces of falling wreckage. Survivors were standing in small dazed groups: shadowy figures who were visible for a moment or two before being swallowed up again by the drifting, choking smoke. A man was striding up and down, jabbering at people and pointing towards the refinery as if giving orders, but no one was paying him any attention. Two uniformed security men were standing like lovers, one hugging and consoling the other, who was weeping at the horror of what he had seen. A TV cameraman was looking at the nightmare in front of him, his camera held uselessly down at his side. There was no point in him filming anything: the rest of his team, and the truck in which they’d come to Rosconway, had been obliterated. A solitary outside broadcast van painted in BBC livery had pulled up on to the grass and a female reporter was speaking to camera, turning back every few seconds to look at the scene she was attempting to describe. She started at the sound of another explosion, and cowered for a second, before pulling herself together, straightening up and looking at the camera again.
Carver drove as close to the conflagration as he could, then got out of the car. On foot he made his way towards the fire, surrounded all the way by dead and wounded people, abandoned vehicles, and random bits of torn and twisted metal, blown or fallen from who knew where. Holloway, Tyrrell and Schultz had been somewhere in there, and were now almost certainly dead. If he had got to the van sooner, they might still be alive. He stared at the volcanic fury of the blaze, feeling overawed and utterly insignificant in the face of its sheer scale.
Then Carver caught a glimpse of a familiar silhouette, outlined against a wall of fire. Schultz was alive. He was staggering out of the inferno, and there was someone over his shoulder. Carver saw the big man stumble, overcome by the heat and the smoke. Schultz took a few more paces, and then his knees buckled beneath him and he toppled to the ground, letting go of whoever he was carrying, so that their body rolled off his shoulder and fell helplessly, defencelessly, on to the tarmac.
Carver ran towards the two prone bodies, ignoring the terrible, roasting heat and the poisonous rasp of the chemicals in the air. He found Schultz apparently unconscious on the ground. A woman was lying beside him, her face bloodied, her leg broken. Carver knew that he would be able to carry her away to safety, but Schultz was another matter. He weighed sixteen or seventeen stone: too much for Carver to drag with one arm if he was holding the woman with the other. Desperately, Carver grabbed Schultz’s chest and shook him. Then he gave his face three or four stinging slaps. Schultz blinked, groaned and tried to focus his eyes on Carver.
‘Get up!’ Carver shouted, his throat burning with the effort, still so deafened by the earlier explosion that he could barely hear his own words.
Schultz just looked at him uncomprehendingly.
‘Get up, Sergeant Major!’ Carver repeated. ‘That’s an order!’
The air was getting even hotter, if such a thing were possible, and Carver could barely breathe. He felt dizzy, there was a rushing sound in his ears, and his vision was blurring.
He could just make out the blurred outline of Schultz’s body as the SBS man tried to get up. Carver got down on one knee, reached for the woman and lifted her over his shoulder. It took every ounce of strength and concentration he still had to be able to push up with his legs and get to his feet again. Then he reached out for Schultz.
‘Grab my hand!’ he croaked, his parched vocal chords now barely able to summon the means to speak.
Carver felt Schultz’s hand grip his wrist. Somewhere in the distance he heard the tortured scream of failing metal, and the remnants of a distillation tower appeared out of the flame, loomed over the three stranded humans, and toppled towards them with the slow, stately, but crushing inexorability of a felled redwood tree.
Carver wrapped his fingers round Schultz’s arm and pulled him upright. The two men broke into a ragged, shambling run as the top of the distillation tower crashed down, smashing into the road at exactly the point where they had been huddled less than ten seconds before.
Carver kept moving, driving himself forward, one desperate step after another. In the near delirium of overpowering heat and oxygen starvation, he felt as though he had been transported back a quarter of a century to the beastings he’d endured as he fought for selection to the SBS: forced marches with full packs in which every man had to complete the course, even if his mates had to drag him over the line. Back then his enemies had been the cold, the rain and the biting wind of the Brecon Beacons, the very opposite of the forces tormenting him here. But the principle was the same. You kept going when every fibre of your body was screaming at you to stop. You kept going when you thought you would die if you took a single step more. You kept going until you got to the end.
And suddenly Carver was aware that the air was a fraction cooler, and that the smoke had cleared away. He came back to reality to find himself back out on the road beside the refinery. Schultz was standing next to him, coughing and dry-retching. There was a small patch of cool, green grass a few metres away, so Carver walked over to it and laid the woman down. He took off his tie and wound it around the woman’s broken leg to give the shattered bone some small degree of support. He noticed she still had her name badge pinned to her jacket. It read, ‘Nicola Wilkins, Cabinet Office.’ Carver put his finger to her throat, just below the jawbone, and felt a faint, fluttering pulse.
‘Congratulations,’ he murmured. ‘You survived.’
53
Wentworth
The British Prime Minister had wanted a television spectacular. To Malachi Zorn’s delight, what he got was a live horror show.
It had all been caught on camera: one helicopter exploding in mid-air; the other in its death-spiral to the ground; the flaming debris raining down upon spectators; the slaughter on the ground; the screams of reporters as they realized that they, too, were as vulnerable as anyone else; the roar of the flames, the volcanic thunder of the explosions, and then the darkness as one by one the TV crews were added to the casualties, their equipment was destroyed and their broadcasts died. For a minute there was nothing but blackness from Rosconway, and panic in the studios of TV channels whose presenters were realizing that they had just witnessed the deaths of old friends and colleagues along with all the other casualties.
Then the lost BBC van arrived, and a single feed from Rosconway supplied footage that was sent around the world — footage that sent global financial markets into a frenzy as traders tried to digest the implications of a major US oil corporation suffering a terrorist attack on supposedly friendly soil. It showed an attack that had killed three members of the British government, an EU minister, a senior US diplomat, Nicholas Orwell, and, if rumours already surfacing on the internet were to be believed, the Director of British Special Forces.
Just as on 9/11, the financial implications were immediate, and felt throughout the global economy. Oil prices spiked. So did gold, as investors sought a safe haven. The pound plummeted. Investors started dumping UK government bonds. The Bank of England had not yet raised interest rates, but it could only be a matter of minutes, and that would add further downward pressure to the UK economy. The FTSE index in London plunged almost eight per cent as energy stocks, already softened by recent comments made by Malachi Zorn, collapsed. Insurance companies were hit as the multi-billion cost of rebuilding the refinery became evident. The shares of airlines, airport operators, hotel corporations and online travel agencies on both sides of the Atlantic fell as the markets decided that US travellers, nervous of threats to their safety, would stay away from Britain. Defence stocks, however, rose. It was reasonable to assume that the British government’s savage defence cuts might now be reversed. And since, as Zorn had also pointed out in his BBC interview, Britain’s energy supplies were dominated by foreign-owned corporations, the knock-on effects were felt on the bourses of Europe. And with the New York Stock Exchange due to open at two thirty in the afternoon, UK time, they would hit Wall Street like a tsunami rolling across the Atlantic.
There was an atmosphere of stunned, speechless despair at 10 Downing Street. There was frenzy in financial institutions. But at Zorn’s hired mansion on the Wentworth estate there was only the exultant laughter of a man for whom Christmas Day has come earlier, and more joyously, than he could have dreamed possible. This was the single biggest financial coup of all time. He had made tens of billions of dollars, pounds, euros, yen and Chinese yuan. Now all he had to do was collect it. If 9/11 was anything to go by, the markets would soon be shut down. He had just a few minutes, maybe less, to get out of all his positions, collecting his winnings on the way. There wasn’t a second to lose.
