Afterlight

CHAPTER 16
Crash Day + 2 4.45 a.m.
O2 Arena - ‘Safety Zone 4’, London


Adam Brooks looked out across the spools of razor wire stretched across the pedestrian approach and the acres of open coach-parking tarmac in front of the Millennium Dome. Beyond the glinting coils of wire he could see thousands of them. Tens of thousands of people filling up the open tarmac and spilling back past the football academy towards the front of a boarded-up and abandoned dockside factory - still patiently awaiting its time to be knocked down and turned into expensive dockside flats - and down the car-free Blackwall Tunnel Approach towards the low rows of terraced houses and south London beyond.
Their spools of razor wire were stretched thinly across a quarter of a mile of urban landscape from one part of the Thames to the other as it looped round, sealing the tip of the Greenwich peninsula from the rest of south London. A quarter of a mile of wire and just two sections of gunners and half a dozen police officers to hold in check thirty, perhaps forty, thousand people, all of them desperate, thirsty, hungry and frightened.
The wire was shaking and rattling here and there - the press of people from behind forcing those at the front into it. The people, frustrated and angry, were beginning to break up the tan-coloured tarmac and hurl chunks of it over the barricade. Adam could see absolute terror on the faces of many of them, and absolute rage on the rest. They all wanted in, many desperate for something clean and safe to drink, to escape the violent, feral chaos ripping through London.
Adam could see a mother directly in front of him waving her crying baby above the glinting coils of wire, screaming that she needed formula milk, or anything, for it.
Jesus.
He looked sideways at Sergeant Walfield. Normally the grizzly-faced bastard was a rock that Adam relied on. But right now, he was glancing at Adam with a face that said what-the-shitting-hell-do-we-do?
Several more bricks and clumps of dislodged tarmac arced over the top of the wire and clattered noisily on their side of the barrier. The wire loops bulged further along.
Bollocks . . . we’re going to have to let them in.
There were standing orders from Safety Zone 4’s supervisor, Alan Maxwell, that the growing crowd was to be processed in an orderly manner; no more than twenty at a time, details to be taken down, a medical check, sleeping cots assigned before another batch was allowed through. He’d been very specific about that; he wasn’t going to allow a stampede to happen.
But this . . . batches of twenty, it was taking far too long.
The number of people outside had swollen drastically this morning after last night’s riots. Adam had been walking the wire perimeter since yesterday evening. He’d witnessed the flickering glow of countless fires, heard the crash and tinkle of glass breaking, the distant whooping of delight from gangs of youths making the most of their new playground, sporadic screams here and there amongst the far-off terraced houses, and the occasional unmistakable crack of a gun.
Adam imagined that, to those poor bastards out there, it must have been like the night after Baghdad had fallen; British and American soldiers standing behind compound walls watching bedlam unfold before their eyes, under orders to do nothing. Just watching as the city tore itself to pieces through the hot and stifling night.
He glanced back at the dome, a drab whale’s hump of canvas in the lifeless grey light of pre-dawn. The very tips of the support spars, arranged like a thorn crown at the top, glowed as they caught the very first vanilla rays of light from the early morning sun breaching the urban, smoke-smudged horizon.
Just outside the entrance he could see orange-jacketed emergency workers processing the recently admitted civilians. He could see several hundred more civilians inside the entrance atrium, many exhausted, stretched out on crash mats and cots, set out in orderly lines across the floor. He could see workers moving amongst them handing out bottled water, first aiders working on cuts and burns, wrapping grey blankets around those in shock.
But he couldn’t see any bloody sign at all of Maxwell.
We’ve got to let them in. Now.
They needed to throw aside the barrier and worry about getting names and National Insurance numbers later. After all, that’s what they were here for; food and water and safety for these people. Surely the damned paperwork could come later.
‘Sir!’ shouted Sergeant Walfield. ‘Look!’
A hundred yards to his right Adam saw the wire coils beginning to bulge and flatten out.
‘Bastards are trying to get over!’
A group of men, fed up with hurling tarmac over the top, had found a large panel of chipboard and hefted it across the wire. One of them stepped onto the board, his weight pushing down the wire coils, twenty yards either side, almost flat beneath it.
Shit.
Forty yards of breached perimeter; the coils of razor wire were compressed enough that it was possible to cautiously pick a way through.
‘Get that f*cking board off!’ bellowed Sergeant Walfield, his voice carrying above the rising roar of encouragement from the crowd.
The nearest of the men temporarily under Adam’s command, half a dozen sequestered constables from the Metropolitan Police, jogged over towards the board, their guns aimed at the man standing astride it.
The man ignored their barked orders to get the f*ck off; instead he was beckoning others to follow him up and over. He stood alone for a moment, deaf to the police and soldiers shouting at him to get off immediately. Then he was joined by two or three others clambering up on the board, their combined weight pushing the coils flatter across an even wider span.
Shit, shit, shit.
Adam racked his assault rifle and fired three shots in quick succession up into the air. It had the effect he wanted. The first half a dozen ranks of people beyond the wire ducked and froze and a hush descended for the briefest moment.
Adam finally found his voice.
‘YOU!’ It rang out across the tarmac in the moment’s silence. ‘Yes, YOU! Get the f*ck off that board right now!’
For a moment Adam was convinced the man was going to comply. But the brief moment of hush his three shots had won them was already beginning to wane. The man stepped forward, the board tilted downwards as the wire twanged and rattled beneath his weight. He leapt down onto the tarmac, on their side.
You stupid f*cking idiot.
A Berlin wall moment - the first man safely across inspiring all the others to surge forward in his wake.
A dozen others - men who on any other day would look unremarkable waiting outside a school playground to pick up their kids, or buying a sandwich and a coffee for lunch, grabbing a newspaper and some milk from a corner shop - encouraged enough by the first stupid bastard, barged and wrestled with each other to clamber onto the chipboard ramp.
It was one of the policemen who opened fire first. The shot punched a ragged hole in the first man’s face and took off a section of the back of his head. His legs instantly crumpled beneath him and he flopped backwards over the end of the board and onto the compressed loops of wire, where his still body dangled untidily from the barbs.
For a fleeting moment Adam thought that would have been enough of a demonstration to the others that any further feckless stupidity like this was going to be met with more of the same.
He hadn’t given an order to fire. The policeman didn’t have the discipline of his gunners - wasn’t waiting for the order; instead the copper had gone off-piste, popping like a poorly made firework. Still, it had bought them a second or two; a pause for thought from those nearest the splayed body. But that’s all it bought. Now there were people tiptoeing through the flattened coils either side of the board, some of them flapping their hands in front of their faces, frantically waving at the young soldiers, screaming at them not to shoot.
Sergeant Walfield turned to look at him. ‘Sir, what do we do now?’
Oh, Christ.
There were a dozen over the wire now, more snagged on the razor sharp blades and tugging their clothes clear, being pushed forward by a growing momentum from behind.
Adam swallowed anxiously. Walfield again looking back at him.
More of them were stepping over, and more behind them. The policeman who’d fired the shot was struggling with his weapon; the thing had jammed or he’d slipped the safety catch on in panic. Then suddenly he was down, clutching at his head. Someone had thrown a brick at his face. And more projectiles were arcing over the top.
If this barrier folds these people will flood into SZ4. We will have lost control and they’ll strip us clean - Maxwell’s briefing from several hours ago as the crowd outside had started to swell in the darkness. Do you understand? If you have to shoot, do it.
‘Open fire!’ Adam heard himself utter to Sergeant Walfield.
Walfield bellowed the order again a dozen times louder.
The crackle of gunfire oddly reminded Adam of bubble wrap being twisted tightly. The gunners in his platoon fired single and double taps, the policemen emptied their magazines. A dozen people, probably more, flopped like pathetic rag dolls amidst the wire; England football strips, FCUK tops, sensible Primark shirts . . . exploding in unison, spraying curious Rorschach splatter patterns and question marks of dark crimson onto the tarmac, leaving dust motes of polyester and cotton fibres to float lazily to the ground like cherry blossom.
Behind the downed civilians the crowd ducked as one, an instinctive acres-wide herd response. Then they broke and ran, tangling with each other, falling over those behind who reacted with less urgency. The coach-parking area cleared rapidly from the front, rolling back like a receding Mexican wave, leaving behind a mess of items dropped in the panic; and those wounded and twisting in pain on the ground, or who’d stumbled in the rush and were now scrambling away on twisted ankles.
Most of his men ceased fire. One or two of the coppers - unforgivably in Adam’s mind - fired further opportunistic shots at the backs of the parting crowd.
‘For Christ’s sake, STOP FIRING!’ he shouted.
Walfield bellowed the order and the popping of gunfire halted.
The backs of a sea of bobbing heads receded into the distance, still running, swerving around the football academy, streaming down a sloping grass bank towards the Blackwall Tunnel Approach. Adam could hear the awful chorus of screams and slapping feet diminish leaving them now with an unsettling quiet punctuated by soft moans of agony coming from the prone bodies in front of them.
He realised his hands were trembling violently, the muzzle of his assault rifle wavering erratically. Not a good thing for his men to see. He clicked the safety on then lowered it until it was pointing harmlessly at the ground.
In front of him, just a dozen yards away, the mother he’d spotted earlier was rocking backwards and forwards on her knees, lacerated and encaged amidst the shaking coils of wire, expanding again now no one was weighing the board down. She seemed to be unaware that she had a gunshot wound to her arm, instead she stared dumbfounded at the ragged and inert remains of her baby.
Adam dropped down to a squat, feeling a wave of nausea roll up from his cramping stomach. He dry-heaved, not giving a thought to how it looked to his men.
He straightened up after a while and felt the first warm rays of the morning sun on his face.
Oh, Jesus, what the f*ck have we done?