Taking the Tunnel

by James Adams

  With its connotation of roughy-toughy military, the JOC is, in fact, the heart of the British military response to a crisis. It was the JOC that ran Operation Granby, the British response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and it was the JOC which helped fight and win the Falklands War. Within the MoD, the organization gained brief and unwelcome notoriety during the Gulf War when the Commander decided to produce a daily news bulletin on video, which was dubbed by some civil service wag the JOC Jollies.

  Situated on the fifth floor of the huge white granite building that is the headquarters of the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, the JOC is designed only for crisis management. Despite its role, with an obvious requirement for the latest technology and the best in computer software, the JOC suffers from the neglect of years of penny-pinching and an incompetent procurement system. It houses five different units, known as cells, for the Command, Air Force, Navy, Army and Special Forces. The partitions that divide the cells have sprung up like weeds and with as little control. The conduits holding the wires for secure communications run like dozens of miniature railway lines across ceilings and around doorways. The floor is a patchwork muddy carpet with the stains and marks of partitions from previous generations of the JOC.

  Even here among the elite, the British class system is at work. The Navy, the Senior Service and proud of it, has filtered coffee and cups with saucers prominently on display. The RAF, always the force with the worst breeding, has a tin of Nescafe and some cracked mugs. In the Ministry of Defence visual status is as important as in any other bureaucracy, so the Navy has stolen the best view out over Whitehall while the Army has been relegated to a vista of the inner court and three other grey walls of the MoD building. By some piece of sleight of hand that is the hallmark of the Special Forces, they, too, have a view of Whitehall, although with the classic perversity of such people, they have boarded over the windows.

  The system does actually run on computers. Unfortunately, each service has its own, different, computer system (in fact the MoD actually bought forty-eight different varieties of word processors, one of the great untold procurement scandals which led to all computers in the MoD being referred to as Heinz, after the food company).

  Cassidy got up from his desk, turned his back on the hidden inner court of the Main Building and walked out into the corridor. Turning right, he walked down the passage passing the Navy, Army and RAF cells to the last door which, unlike the others, had a special key pad and a peephole. He punched the code and waited for ten seconds, giving the armed guard inside an opportunity to decide that he was friendly, and then turned the handle.

  He walked into the Special Forces cell, passed the SAS soldier with his Heckler and Koch MP5 machine-pistol and into the small room from where either the SAS or the Navy equivalent, the SBS, can be despatched. As he expected, Nick had called his own people first and they were now patched through to their former colleague in a public call box at Folkestone. His tinny voice was being broadcast to the eight men and two women in the room.

  “I don’t know,” the voice replied to a question asked before Cassidy’s arrival. “It’s still all very confused. There are reports of a fire. Both trains have come out so that part may be true. But the electrics are out so the computers aren’t getting any sensor readings. Some of the passengers talk of shooting but there’s no details and there’s been no demands from anyone.”

  One of the men who had accessed the Press Association wire service through his computer terminal gave a shout. John moved to read the message on the screen over his shoulder.

  SNAP. SNAP. SNAP.

  Channel Tunnel Seized by Terrorists

  By Charles Miller, Defence Correspondent

  The Channel Tunnel has been seized by an unknown group of terrorists who are holding a number of passengers hostage.

  A message received by the Press Association claimed responsibility for the attack in the name of the Provisional IRA. The caller, who identified himself with the regular IRA codeword, said the hostages would be released when the British government agreed to withdraw all its forces from Northern Ireland and hold a peace conference in which the IRA will participate. The terrorists would begin killing the hostages if the government does not agree to the demands within three days.

  More follows

  “Shit.” Cassidy turned from the screen and walked rapidly back to his own office. As he pushed open the wooden door his secure phone started to ring. He picked it up.

  “Cassidy.”

  “Brigadier. This is Paul Fowler in the Cabinet Office. Have you heard about the Tunnel?”

  “Yes. It’s just come in on PA.”

  The voice at the other end coughed slightly. “Ah. Well. I’m afraid it’s not quite as simple as that.”

  Cassidy interrupted, annoyed at the silkiness of the civil servant, whose round face, half-moon spectacles and smooth manner came back to him out of the haze of some security conference or other.

  “I would hardly call a terrorist assault on the Channel Tunnel by the IRA simple.”

  “That’s precisely what I mean, Brigadier. It appears that it may not be the IRA at all. We received a call here about ten minutes ago which claimed to be from a group calling itself the Hong Kong Liberation Front. They say it’s their people in the Tunnel.”

  “You know that the IRA claim was accompanied by the proper codeword?” Cassidy asked.

  “J. J. Mulroney? Yes, I’d heard that.”

  “Then why do you think it can be this Hong Kong group which I’ve never heard of?”

  “Ah. Well. They explain that,” Fowler replied in a tone which Cassidy thought for a moment might actually have been respect. “They say they phoned the IRA claim into the PA. That way we can condemn the attack and refuse to negotiate so government policy is maintained. With that kind of cover they clearly hope that we might be prepared to do some kind of private deal…We won’t of course,” he added hastily.

  “If true, they must be a pretty smart bunch,” Cassidy acknowledged. “What exactly do they want?”

  “British passports for all the residents in Hong Kong,” Fowler said. “They want a decision in three days and they say there will be no negotiation. Any military action and they start shooting.”

  “So what do you want from me?” Cassidy asked.

  “First we need some kind of assessment from the Int people about this group. Who are they and are they for real or is this actually IRA? Second, I want a military appreciation. Can we go in and if so how and when? I need the answers asap. The Prime Minister has called COBRA and they’ll be meeting in a few minutes so I’d like something before then.”

  There was a click as the phone was hung up. Arrogant little shit, Cassidy thought to himself. Typical fucking Cabinet Office. Sit them close to the Prime Minister and they think they’re God.

  Despite his reservations, this was a crisis that he was going to have to resolve. The first step was to get the cell commanders in, brief them, task them and then get on the horn to Box. His heart sank. This one was going to involve politicians, intelligence agents and the police. A guaranteed recipe for disaster, he thought glumly.

  The Tunnel is an echo chamber filled with silence, sobbing and darkness.

  There were seventy-five passengers in carriages A8 and A9 and they had all been shepherded together so that they squatted on the floor in row after row around Kate and Tom Carr’s Rover.

  The instant the carriages had been uncoupled, Dai Choi had jumped on to the track leaving four of his men behind to guard the terrified passengers with the weapons they had brought forward from the van. They had a formidable arsenal of machine-guns, pistols and rifles and enough night-vision goggles to see them through the darkness that lay ahead.

  Dai Choi had attached a strip of Demex 400 no more than half an inch wide and one inch long to the metal tubes carrying the reserve electricity along the wall of the Tunnel. He had inserted the detonator and then trailed the command wire twenty feet away and attached one end to a simple
nine-volt battery. Moving behind the protection of the carriage, he touched the other wire to the battery. There was the harsh crack of an explosion which reverberated down the Tunnel, the noise bouncing from the curved ceiling to the floor and back again on and on down until its echoes muted and vanished.

  With both the normal supply and the emergency backup severed, the Tunnel was instantly plunged into total darkness. If there was to be a fight, Dai Choi wanted it to be on his terms.

  He turned back and ran down the track alongside the carriage. At the open door to A8 he pulled himself inside and moved to his left. The carriage was lit by the dull, yellow glow of the emergency lighting. Looking at the passengers, he smiled slightly. We’re all Chinese now, he thought.

  As he moved inside there were more explosions from both ends of the Tunnel. They were followed by a loud rumbling as part of the roof lining fell. His men had just blocked the access tunnels with rubble. Any rescuers would now have to come down his line. If anyone wanted to fight, they would have to walk straight down the barrels of his guns.

  He pushed his way through the dozens of men, women and children who were squatting, kneeling or lying on the floor. The whimpers of fear rose around him like a bad smell and he felt himself grow taller as he fed off the fright and terror of these people whom he now controlled.

  He turned as he reached the shuttered door and looked out at the upturned faces.

  “You are now in the control of the Hong Kong Liberation Front,” he began. The explosions you have heard in the past few minutes did two things. First we made the computers in the control centres in France and England think that the tunnel was on fire. To protect the other passengers, the two carriages you were travelling in were separated from the main train and we are now alone in the Tunnel.

  “We have also destroyed all the electrics. From now on we will have to live by the light you see around you.”

  “How long do you expect us to stay here?”

  Kate started, surprised to hear her husband’s voice. She reached out a hand to urge him to be quiet, to do nothing that would attract the attention of these awful people.

  “That depends on the British government. They have three days to comply with our demands. If they do, then you will all go free. If they do not, then I shall have to think of some way of forcing them to do what we want.”

  To Kate’s left, a man stood up. In the half-light it was difficult to discern expression but his body was hunched forward, his head leading. His posture spoke of anger and perhaps a willingness to fight. This is an outrage. How dare you?” he shouted. Dai Choi watched silently as the man continued. “My wife is sick. We are on our way to get treatment in Switzerland. She needs help. She won’t survive this. You must let us go.”

  Kate wanted to shout at the man to shut up and sit down. She knew instinctively that a challenge was not the way to play with their tormentor. He was dangerous. He had prepared the attack and succeeded in carrying it out. There was no chance of persuading him to deviate from his plan. But she kept silent, determined to heed her own advice and do nothing to draw attention to herself or her child.

  The man moved towards the Chinese men, determined to pursue the confrontation. Leisurely, almost lazily, Dai Choi reached inside his jacket and drew out a pistol with a long, fat barrel. He raised the gun until it was pointing squarely at the man who was still moving through the crowd towards him. There was no warning, no click of a hammer that always seemed to presage gunfire in the movies. Instead there was a short “phut” that sounded like a cork being gently pulled from a bottle of fine wine.

  The man, whose body had been thrust forward as he forced his way through the prone passengers, was suddenly jerked back so that the upper half of his body reversed itself. In the darkness it looked as if he had changed direction and was now facing back the way he had come. It was an illusion of course. The force of the bullet entering his chest had swivelled his body.

  There was a moment when the body was suspended. Kate felt she could actually see the dark of the blood against the yellow of the background as the life drained away. She registered the tinkle of the spent cartridge case hitting the ground. Then the man’s body fell on to other bodies and the soft sound was subsumed in the screams of the passengers beneath the dead man. It was so sudden, so shocking that for a moment the vast majority of the passengers had no clear idea what had happened. Then a woman who had been covered with the blood of the victim screamed, her hands slapping her face as she tried to wipe away the sticky, wet substance that only moments before had been coursing through the man’s veins.

  The cry was taken up by others until the whole carriage was bursting with sound. The fear gripped everyone and soon that would rise, infecting not just the hostages but their captors too.

  Dai Choi holstered his silenced automatic and gripped the 9 mm Spectre M-2 sub-machine-gun that was hanging across his chest. His left hand swung the barrel around and his right gripped the trigger and squeezed. There was a long ripping sound and for the blink of an eye the whole carriage was lit by the two-foot-long flame that hung at the end of the barrel. It took only 2.5 seconds for the 30-round magazine to empty into the roof of the carriage.

  The effect was exactly what Dai Choi wanted. As he relaxed his trigger finger, there was silence; only the occasional whimper from a child, quickly stifled by a mother or father, broke the stillness.

  “Now you all understand what is happening here. My name is Dai Choi and I am in command.” He paused, allowing the seconds to tick by. “Remember that word, command. Remember it and think about it. What I command, you do. If I say sit, you sit. If I say stand, you stand. If you do anything to annoy me or my men, then you will suffer the same fate as that stupid man now lying in front of you.”

  This time no voice was raised in protest. Dai Choi turned away. This was his Tunnel now. And these were his people, to do with what he wished.

  CHAPTER XVII

  The attack on the Tunnel had immediately activated COBRA, the acronym for the Cabinet Office Briefing Room, the location of the government’s response team to a national emergency. John Major, the Prime Minister, had given the order to Sir Robin Butler, the Cabinet Secretary, and he in turn had ordered his office to call the participants together. The first meeting had taken place an hour earlier when the relevant deputies had got a sense of the problem to report back to their masters. Now it was time for the serious players to get involved.

  COBRA is located in the Cabinet Offices, which are in a large nineteenth-century stone building on Whitehall, sandwiched between Downing Street and the magnificent horsemen from the Household Cavalry at the entrance to Horse Guards. Diagonally across the road is the Ministry of Defence and in the other direction is the Cenotaph, a permanent reminder to COBRA members of the potency and price of exercising the military option.

  There is no plaque signalling the entrance to the Cabinet Offices, just a set of stone steps leading into a rather gloomy building. Past the security guard, more steps lead down one floor to the COBRA headquarters, a set of modest offices which are unoccupied unless there is a crisis.

  Two rooms form the heart of COBRA. The first is a communications centre staffed by military signallers. The room actually looks like the nerve centre of a very rich ham radio operator. Along one wall are secure VHF/HF radio sets that look little different from those of twenty years ago except that most of the dials are digital rather than analogue. There are also two video screens to handle secure communications. To the right of the screens is a modern telephone switchboard that handles secure speech using a system codenamed Chopin (all the government’s secure systems for the past ten years have been named after composers. The next update has been codenamed Orff, giving rise to jokes that the current head of Army personnel, Willy Rous, must have chosen it, as that is how he pronounces the word off).

  Also in the room are the relay systems which allow officials who are part of COBRA to talk via live video to ministers or the heads of other government dep
artments in a visual conference call.

  But the heart of the system is the main conference room which looks as if it was thrown together in a crisis (it was) and has never been equipped properly since (it hasn’t). The centrepiece is a long conference table which seats eighteen and is covered with a revolting grey plastic tablecloth. Strategically placed around the table are institutional yellow telephones, each with a warning label which says: “This is a Secure Telephone. Chopin.”

  All the chairs have chrome arms and brown fabric seats and backing. Against the walls are other wooden chairs where aides and personal secretaries sit sandwiched between grey metal filing cabinets which stand like sentries all over the complex. One filing cabinet, just to the left inside the door, is actually a cocktail cabinet. In a classic example of the Foreign Office’s concern for maintaining status, only Deputy Under-Secretaries and above have keys to it.

  The wails have no pictures. Apart from the two video screens there are a number of maps showing the world and the United Kingdom.

  The rooms are used roughly once a month as different parts of the government practise crisis management, which involves everything from handling a mass poisoning of a major British city to a hostage incident abroad to a limited conflict. The way COBRA is structured, there are no permanent staff. Instead, the chairmanship of the group falls to the department most affected by a particular incident, and membership is dependent on the nature of the crisis. None of the strolling players felt any real responsibility for COBRA, only for the successful resolution of a particular crisis. That may explain why the offices have such a depressingly unloved look about them.

  It fell to Sir Clive Whitmore to chair that morning’s meeting. Strictly speaking the Channel Tunnel fell between the Department of Transport, the Foreign Office, the Department of the Environment and the Home Office. But when the issue of crisis management and the Tunnel had first been raised, memos had flowed thick and fast as each department argued for the cash and resources to cope with the potential problem. It had been seen as a wonderful civil service boondoggle; one of those golden opportunities like a new airport or a nuclear power station that come a Permanent Under-Secretary’s way perhaps once in his career. If the plum could be picked it meant money and people, and with both of those came power and influence, the meat and drink of civil servants, one of whose roles in life is to make their ministers seem important.