Whispers of betrayal tg-3

by Michael Dobbs

  The game was afoot, the stakes had been raised, but most ordinary people had no wish to join in. Sure, the plotters had been a pain and had themselves brought London grinding to a halt, but only for a couple of hours. It had all been over by lunchtime. Now the Government was doing it every day of the week.

  It seemed to the average Londoner that the plotters could at least claim to have a sense of humour, while all the Government had to offer was a blimp that droned above their heads day and night, like a mosquito in the bedroom. It was rapidly christened the Wimp Blimp.

  What was more, while the common man suffered in the cause, where had the politicians gone? Buggered off in their helicopters, every one of them, or so it seemed.

  Soon bumper stickers began to sprout on cars throughout London. Their message was simple and heartfelt.

  'Bring Back Beaky!'

  – =OO=OOO=OO-= Gibraltar Barracks is a military complex of low redbrick buildings and green fields just off the M3 motorway. It is the headquarters of 3RSME Regiment, the Royal Engineers training outfit. Gibraltar Barracks is where soldiers gather for ten weeks of basic training in the mysteries of how to make things go bang.

  The Crown and Cushion pub, six hundred yards down the road, is where they gather once those mysteries have been unravelled. The pub's Meade Hall to the rear is particularly popular. It has high vaulted ceilings and walls littered with ancient agricultural instruments, and it was in the Meade Hall that McKenzie had agreed to meet a freckle-faced young man named Kenny Evans. Evans stood out in any company. He had inherited from his Celtic father a shock of hair that looked more like an upturned bowl of carrot scrapings, while those who knew him well recognized him as a master in the handling of PE4. Plastic explosive. He had also been one of McKenzie's corporals: 32 Engineer Regiment

  They were lucky. The pub was crowded – much of the bar had been taken over for the birthday celebration of a sales rep in bathroom accessories from nearby Camberley – but they managed to find an unoccupied booth and settled in.

  'Guinness and a whisky chaser, I seem to remember, Kenny.'

  'Thanks, Andy.' Evans took possession of the proffered glasses. 'Don't often get the chance of a chaser in these hard times.'

  'They giving you grief?'

  'Like you wouldn't believe.'

  'Och, I suspect I might…'

  'No, Andy, you wouldn't. It's got worse than ever.' Evans's lilting Welsh pronunciation seemed to add pathos to his words. 'It's not an army any more; they've turned it into play school. Everything crawling with civilians. Even the security guards at the camp. You remember O'Shea?'

  'Corporal O'Shea?'

  'Not any longer he's not. Comes back late the other week and starts getting grief from one of the civvy security guards. The guard barely seems to understand a word of the English language, so O'Shea uses some traditional English on him and tells him to go fuck himself, so he does. Next thing you know he's been busted down to sapper.'

  'It's a sadly changing world.'

  'Iechyd da, my friend. And so it is. You know, we just finished an exercise, joint ops with an Italian regiment. Cooks or something, so they were. Our European cousins are camped up in a wood on Salisbury Plain, and we're supposed to take the position from 'em. What a bloody waste of time. Everything's been scraped back so far that the British Army rattles when it walks and those brain surgeons in Logistics hadn't even given us enough blanks to scare the bloody crows, let alone put the wind up Eyetie cooks. So what were we supposed to do, blow kisses at 'em? Anyhow, we get ourselves all kitted up, ready for the off, like, then the bloody truck arrives. The driver's civvy, right, and says he's been held up in traffic and he's already over his legal hours. So what does he do? Goes and takes his break. Right then and there, that's what! In the middle of the bloody war!' He ran a hand through his hair in an attempt to bring some semblance of order to it, but it proved to be another wasted exercise. 'You know, Andy, next time they send us into battle they'll probably give us bus tickets. Bugger it. Looks like my round. Last one seems to have disappeared in rather a hurry.'

  So they sat and drank, and reminisced about their time in Bosnia, building camps for the refugees, repairing bridges, opening routes that had been blocked first by one side then another, and all the while ducking bullets as they tried to dig the country out of the mess it had got itself into. Perhaps they might have been due some gratitude instead of bullets, but no one in Bosnia seemed to give a damn, apart from the children. And once CNN had moved elsewhere, to Kosovo and Chechnya and East Timor and Dagestan, no one back home seemed to give a damn either. They couldn't even show you where it was on a map.

  'Anyway, Andy, you said on the phone you wanted a favour. It's yours, my friend.' Evans drained the last of his dark drink and watched the remnants of its sticky head drain slowly back into the bottom of the glass. 'So what's up?'

  'I'm away up to Scotland in a couple o' weeks, Kenny. My father's sixtieth. Big family reunion on the estate. Thought I might arrange a wee fireworks display in his honour.'

  'You'd like a little PE4.'

  'There's an old milking shed, a real eyesore he's been itching to get rid o' for ages, and a few old trees. Thought I'd bring in a couple o' ancient cars, too, just for the pyrotechnics. That kind o' thing.'

  'How much you want?'

  'A couple of cases. Three if you can manage.'

  Evans sucked his teeth. 'That gives me a bit of a problem, Andy.'

  It wasn't the request for PE4 that bothered him. Amongst engineers a case of explosive is no more significant than a case of Diet Coke, there's always some lying around somewhere. Neither was it the purpose for which the explosive was wanted – if you've trusted a man with your life, as Evans had trusted McKenzie time and again in Bosnia, you take many other things on trust, too. Siphoning a couple of cases out of the system was simpler than liberating sweets from Sainsbury's. It was the responsibility of the officer in charge of the range day to sign for all munitions used on exercises, but it was Corporal Evans who provided the manifest. The officer would have no more interest in checking the number of cases on that manifest than he would have in counting the sparrows in an orchard.

  It was a little light larceny, no worse than using the office photocopier for your tax returns. But Kenny Evans had other problems. 'You see, Andy, I've promised to take the kids to the new Spielberg film tomorrow evening, so I couldn't possibly let you have a couple of cases then. Earliest would be the night after. Will that do?'

  – =OO=OOO=OO-= The drilling crew arrived promptly at seven a.m. at the security gate to the Battersea Power Station in Kirtling Street. They needed an early start.

  'Gotta be finished by close of play,' they explained to the security guard.

  'What's all this then?'

  A work order was waved in the grey morning light.

  'Holes for some sort of monitoring equipment. In the chimneys, to check they ain't moving, John.'

  John, whose name in fact was Wesley, scratched his stomach and inspected the work order. 'I ain't been told nothing 'bout this.' But then they rarely told him anything.

  'Not a big job. Ten small holes in each spout. We was told you had scaffolding up there already. Right? Authorized by Mr… who is it?' The drill operator peered over the guard's shoulder at the flapping piece of paper. 'Name of McManus, that's it. See, it's all signed, John.'

  Sammy McManus was on holiday but the paperwork was in order. Nothing unusual. Just another part of the cat's cradle of services required to keep a structure like this in one piece.

  'How long all this gonna take, you say?'

  'Out of your hair by close of play, with luck, me old mate.'

  'Yeah. Sure. OK. Can't be too careful with these old buildings, can you?'

  The gates swung open and the green and yellow truck of the Acme Diamond Drilling Services rolled inside. An entirely legitimate crew, who would drill a hole for you in anything, so long as they had a signed work order. Even if it had been stolen. Acme Diamond Dri
lling Services were 'Specialists in Diamond Drilling, Wall amp; Floor Sawing, Selective Demolition, Concrete Crushing…', plus a number of other heavy-duty services on concrete, so its box in the Yellow Pages said.

  If you wanted Acme's help, all you had to do was look them up in the phonebook and call.

  – =OO=OOO=OO-= From their vantage point across the river, McKenzie and Mary watched the figures from Acme crawling across the scaffolding. Throughout the rest of the day and from different spots they continued to observe the crew setting about their work. Not until the last hole had been drilled and the equipment was being stowed did they permit themselves to relax.

  McKenzie set aside his binoculars and turned to Mary.

  'Should be one hell of a firework display, eh, lassie?' She smiled in agreement, a soft smile. Then she raised herself onto her toes and kissed him.

  – =OO=OOO=OO-= They came in through a railway arch that bordered the site. There was only a battered wooden fence in their way, and plenty of cover from the bridge to hide what they were doing. It was also at a point farthest from the main gate and the security guards with their dogs, which on such a large site meant they could have been on the other side of town.

  The daylight had gone and low cloud hid the moon. Not that it made much difference; there was so much ambient night light in London that it simply bounced back off the cloud and lit their path. You could read the headlines in a newspaper. Amadeus reckoned they'd have plenty of new headlines to read the following morning.

  They missed Freddie Payne. This was, in truth, a five-man job. It wasn't so much the plastic explosive – they needed nearly fifty pounds of PE4, all packed into McKenzie's bergen – double what the textbooks said would be needed plus ten per cent to be sure. The Law of Combat Engineering, which says that you double up on everything because you never get a second chance. The main problem was the audio speaker wire that had been purchased at different outlets down the Tottenham Court Road. It came in great rolls. This is what they would use to wire the charges, since they had decided to detonate the plastic explosive manually. No timers, they wanted to leave nothing behind that might be traced. Each of them carried three of the rolls, Mary included, and there were also radios, wire cutters, ropes, torches, sections of broom handle, even a twelve-volt car battery.

  Yet the most difficult work had already been done. The scaffolding gave them ready access and the holes had been drilled. The stolen work order had specified the cutting of ten holes in each of the giant chimneys, on the side that faced into the disembowelled carcass of the old power station. Each hole was about the size of a squash ball.

  Because of the loss of Payne they had decided to concentrate on only three of the four chimneys. They took one each, Amadeus, Scully, and Mary, with McKenzie supervising them. McKenzie hated heights, he preferred slithering on his stomach through minefields, although somehow at night it didn't seem so bad. Yet in spite of their preparations the near two-hundred-foot climb up the scaffolding to the base of the chimneys took its toll – not on Mary, whose long and lonely walks across Exmoor had left her with an ocean of stamina on which to draw, but on Scully. He suffered, moaning softly at times, with that dead leg of his dragging behind him like an anchor. They lifted his load up on ropes.

  Once inside the gutted walls they could have hidden an entire armoured division, but still they worked quietly. In the distance they could hear yelping, something had disturbed the mutts at the dogs' home. Trains rumbled stubbornly across the nearby railway bridge, and from across the river came the wail of a distant ambulance siren, but inside the power station there was nothing but the soft scraping of rubber soles on scaffolding.

  It was not skilled work. Everything had been prepared beforehand by McKenzie. A double thumb knot in the end of the grey detonator cord, pushed into the holes at the base of the chimneys so that a foot of the cord was left hanging from the end of each hole like a rat tail.

  Then came the sticks of plastic explosive. Each stick seven-and-a-half inches long. One-and-a-half inches in diameter. About half a pound each stick and three to every hole. Pushed home with the wooden broom handle – no sparks! The explosive looked a little like flaky marzipan and as they unwrapped it from its greaseproof paper it smelt sweet, like almonds.

  Child's play, so far.

  Then the rat tails were joined together with clips, and in turn joined to the speaker wire which they began to snake out like a ring main between the three chimneys.

  It was getting cold, but they were all sweating from the climb.

  Two fine white wires trailed out of the detonators, which were mated with the speaker wire. The speaker wire trailed down, down, down into the darkness of the power station.

  As they dropped one roll of wire down it disturbed a nesting kestrel, which flew with screeches of complaint into the night. The noise echoed back from the empty walls like a shriek of demons. It started the dogs barking once more.

  Now they fretted, because they had to wait while their handiwork was inspected by McKenzie. No chances. It took less than a minute for him to check the clips and the connections, but the best part of an hour to clamber up and down the three huge chimneys.

  'Christ, Andy, how long does it take you Engineers to organize a firework display?'

  'Takes a wee bit more care than falling out o' the back of a perfectly serviceable aircraft, it seems to me. So away and play wi' yersel', sir.'

  Waiting around and feeling their sweat dry in the cooling night air seemed a miserable option, so they busied themselves, Scully keeping lookout while Amadeus and Mary occupied themselves by reconnoitring for an alternative escape route. Just in case.

  And that was when they realized they'd ballsed it up.

  There wasn't enough wire.

  They had calculated the amount of wire they would need from information Mary had downloaded from a newspaper library on the Internet, a comprehensive article about the power station and its endless planning rows, complete with diagrams and dimensions. Except the dimensions had been wrong.

  Bloody journalists!

  They were almost a hundred metres short. Way short of the safety zone for firing that had been calculated by McKenzie. He'd hoped to fire the charges from the relative safety of outbuildings that stood near the railway arches, but once he had wired the three detonators together there was barely enough wire to get them beyond the main walls of the power station itself. They stood in a small circle around the car battery that was meant to fire the charges, the monstrous brickwork towering above them.

  'That's a rare pity,' McKenzie muttered quietly. He was never prone to exaggeration.

  'What's to be done, Andy?'

  'Three choices, I guess. One: we call it a day and proceed to the pub. Or two: I wrap the bare speaker wires around the battery terminals and pray we don't all get blown to a better world.'

  'Three. I'll take three,' Amadeus insisted.

  'We make do with just two chimneys. I'll rip the wire off the third, that'll be giving us more than enough cover.'

  'Not quite the same artistic effect,' Amadeus replied, 'but it'll do. How long will it take?'

  The Scotsman ran his hand through his thick hair. 'Twenty minutes, maybe.'

  But they didn't have twenty minutes, not even twenty seconds. For the dogs they had heard barking were not from the dogs' home but from the security pound. Disturbed by the screech of the kestrel, the Alsatian had alerted the watchman who had looked and listened. Then he had summoned the police.

  The night suddenly turned upside down as the immense arc lights that illuminated the power station for special occasions were switched on. Amadeus and the others were caught like dazzled rabbits. Police vehicles were pouring through the main gate, piercing the night with the wail of sirens and the screeching of tyres. Amadeus knew they had failed. No chimneys, now. They wouldn't even have time to make it back through the railway arches.

  But it wasn't over yet. The power station site was immense, nearly forty acres of it. Their pursu
ers were still a little way off; they still had vital seconds.

  'The tunnels!' Amadeus shouted, suddenly freed of the hypnotic glare of the lights. 'Mary and I found tunnels in the basement. Full of old power cables heading out under the river. We'll try them.' And he started running, back into the power station, away from the lights and the prying eyes.

  – =OO=OOO=OO-= It might prove to be less than a total disaster if they could make it through the tunnel. It was head-high and stank with a fetid mixture of stale damp air and rat shit, and its entrance was secured by a metal gate. The gate was padlocked. Raw metal blocking their way. Fear lends unusual strength. Amadeus snatched up a length of scrap metal from the floor, used it as a jemmy and twisted it behind the padlock, which soon surrendered, clattering to the ground. Before them, disappearing into the Stygian darkness of the tunnel, stretched huge power cables and pipes as thick as a man's arm, a legacy of the days when Battersea had provided a fifth of London's electricity.

  If there was nothing more at the other end, then they had a chance.

  It was at this point they realized they were only three.

  – =OO=OOO=OO-= 'Scully! Where the fuck's Scully?'

  They were only a few paces into the tunnel, their torches dancing off the walls and floor, rats scattering before them and protesting at the invasion of their underground lair. The beam of a torch exposed a pile of rancid bones, what had perhaps once been a dog, lying in the middle of a stretching puddle. Intruders weren't welcome here. Every noise seemed magnified, echoing off the walls – the scurrying rats, the insistent dripping water from the river above, their own tormented breathing. The sirens seemed a mile away, barely more than a distant wail.

  'Where's Skulls?' Amadeus demanded once more.

  Before anyone had a chance to speculate, the air around them was filled with terror. It shook. It wanted to be elsewhere. It fled with a great rushing sound, like the death throes of an exhausted space capsule. Then came noise, a great crashing waterfall of noise which beat with the force of axes upon their eardrums and inside their skulls. A semi-solid tide of rubble and dust and dirt pushed its way past them, throwing them to the ground, filling their eyes and nostrils until they couldn't breathe.