Tuesday, 28 June
34
* * *
Carn Drum Farm
BRYN GRYFFUD AND Dave Smethurst left at four in the morning, driving the camper van; Uschi Kremer had already left in a separate vehicle late the previous night.
The remaining members of the Forces of Gaia had all woken early to see Gryffud and Smethurst off. Some of them went straight back to bed, others were gripped by a combination of anticipation, tension, anxiety and downright fear as the seconds ticked by. They brewed coffee, paced around the farmhouse kitchen, or made futile attempts to get some rest. All but one, though, stayed within Carn Drum farmhouse.
The exception was one of the two remaining women, Deirdre Bull. The closer the time came to the moment when the group would finally engage in direct action against the forces destroying the environment, the more troubled she became. Neither she nor any of the other members of the group had been told what the precise target would be – this, they had been told, was for their own protection as well as operational security – but she knew they were engaged on an act of destruction. And it made little sense to Deirdre to fight one act of ecological vandalism with another. When she’d gone to Brynmor Gryffud to voice her concerns, he had assured her that the good they were going to do in the long run far, far outweighed any short-term cost.
‘Gaia understands,’ he had assured her, knowing that Deirdre had an essentially religious view of the environmentalist cause. But Deirdre was still not entirely convinced. She had needed to get away, to be by herself, so that she could feel a sense of communion with the earth goddess and come to terms with what was going on. So around forty minutes after the camper van had set off on its journey south, just as dawn was breaking, she put on her green wellies and her cagoule – decorated with vivid, two-tone pink spots against a white background. Then she slipped out of the back door of the commune and, following a path that ended just a few metres from the house, headed off alone into the hills.
After she had walked for a few hundred metres Deirdre turned around to look back at the farmhouse down below her on the floor of the valley. The sun had begun to rise over the hills to the east and it was steadily spreading across the valley, replacing the soft-grey darkness with dazzling bright colour. Deirdre frowned as she saw two large, black vehicles heading at high speed along the drive that led to the house. From where she was standing they looked like vans of some kind, but as they got closer to the farm she could see that they were in fact four-by-fours. As a matter of principle, Deirdre knew as little as she could about any form of motorized transport. But the sheer intensity of her disapproval of these large, cumbersome, gas-guzzling vehicles, which so profoundly offended her socialist as well as environmentalist instincts, meant that she had absorbed some information about various makes and models. These, she suspected, might be Range Rovers – the worst of the lot, to her way of thinking.
As she watched, puzzled, yet somehow mesmerized by what she was seeing, one of the cars drove past the main house into the farmyard behind it. The other pulled up right in front of the farmhouse itself. Men got out of the vehicles, all dressed in black, their faces invisible behind balaclavas. They fanned out, surrounding both the front and back doors like malevolent wraiths. Each of the men was carrying something, held out in front of him, though Deirdre could not see what it was. She had a horrifying suspicion, however; one that she could not name, but that was tightening her belly and constricting her throat until she could scarcely breathe.
A man walked out of the front door of the farmhouse. From the shock of blond hair Deirdre recognized Tobyn Jansen, her favourite of all the male members of the group. She adored him for his commitment to the cause, his apparently effortless ability to make her laugh, and – though this she found hardest to admit, even to herself – his strongly muscled, golden-haired forearms.
Jansen stood in the open air for a moment, facing the four men who were lined up in a half-circle around him. He seemed to be saying something, though she could not hear what. His gestures, though, conveyed their own meaning: at first conciliatory, then increasingly indignant, and then desperate as Jansen seemed to plead with the men, then threw his hands up in a desperate but futile gesture of self-protection.
Deirdre saw a series of bright flashes. Tobyn Jansen staggered back before falling to the ground, and it was almost at the instant that the back of his head hit the foot of the farmhouse front door that the sound of gunfire reached Deirdre Bull’s ears. And then she started screaming.
35
* * *
RONNIE BRADDOCK WAS a former paratrooper. He’d done his time in Iraq as a soldier, then again as a private contractor, bodyguarding administrators and businessmen for an American corporation that was less a commercial business than a private army. Now he was running his own crew, and after that Afghan job it was good to be working on home ground for once, instead of some fly-ridden shit-hole filled with stinking ragheads. The assignment had turned out to be easier than expected, too.
Braddock’s lads had come to the farmhouse pumped up, expecting opposition. They’d been told the occupants were members of a terrorist group. That suggested they’d be violent, determined, even willing to die for their cause. In the event, though, the five that they encountered inside the house were almost disappointingly easy to dispose of. They were unarmed, and unable to defend themselves. Even the men failed to put up a fight.
‘Eco-warriors, my f*cking arse,’ said one of the attackers, disdainfully kicking a corpse.
‘There’s one missing,’ said Braddock. He didn’t like to see anyone losing concentration, just because it had all been a stroll so far. ‘We were told four men and two women. Well, we took four men down all right. But only one woman. Where’s the other?’
‘Maybe we were given the wrong numbers.’
‘Is that what you want to tell Razzaq? “There was only one woman, so we thought you’d got it wrong?” F*ck off.’
‘What do you want to do, then?’
Braddock snapped out his orders: ‘Take the lads who were in your car. Search the house, top to bottom, every bloody inch of it. Attics, cellars, cupboards, the lot. You know what to do if you find her. The rest of us are going for a little drive. This lot were nature lovers …’ He made it sound like some kind of perversion. ‘Maybe she went outside.’
‘Out there? You’ll never find her. She could be f*cking anywhere.’
‘Bollocks. We’re not exactly talking special forces, are we? What we’re talking about is some useless, hysterical bitch who’s wandering round in circles, pissing herself with fear. If she’s out there, she’s as good as dead already.’
36
* * *
UP ON THE hillside, Deirdre Bull had managed to crawl through the heather to a low outcrop of rock, behind which she was now hiding, barely able to think straight for the shock of what she had witnessed. As the men went into the farmhouse and further bursts of gunfire echoed around the empty landscape every instinct told her to run, to put as much distance between herself and the danger as possible, as fast as she could go. But fear seemed to render her immobile. She kept imagining eyes, glaring through the farmhouse windows, scanning the landscape, waiting for any sign of movement. It took her several minutes just to remember that she had her mobile phone with her, stuffed into a pocket of her cagoule. But did she dare use it? Her brain told her that no one could possibly hear her. Her fear would not allow her to believe it.
She’d not taken a single further step when four men came out of the house and got into the Range Rover by the front door.
The big black car started moving. At first Deirdre was relieved. That surely meant they were going to drive away the way they had come. But then she realized that they were taking a different course, heading towards the path. And then they were on it, driving directly towards her.
Now Deirdre Bull moved. She dashed from behind the rock and started scrambling straight up the hill, away from the path, which cut diagonally across the slope. She could hear the engine of the Range Rover now as it picked up pace. She knew without even turning around to look that she had been spotted. The chase was on.
Deirdre was thirty-four years old, reasonably fit, but no athlete. She was further hampered by wearing wellington boots. Her breath was becoming more laboured with every few strides that she took. Her feet, made clumsy by the loose-fitting rubber boots, were struggling to get a proper purchase on the hillside. Still she kept going upwards as fast as she could, fighting through the pain in her thighs, her calves and her gasping, protesting lungs. Her eyes were focused on the ground immediately around her. She did not dare look around, for fear of what she might see, or even up, for fear of how far she was from safety. So she was unaware that the escarpment up which she was struggling was actually the side of a long, narrow ridge that ran like a spur from a much larger hill.
Nor did she know that her struggles were the cause of great amusement in the Range Rover, whose driver and passengers were laughing uproariously as they drove up the path to a point directly beneath the fleeing woman. One of the men put on the voice of a TV sports commentator to describe her ascent, ‘Oh, I say,’ he pontificated. ‘She covered the last fifty metres in a shade under thirty seconds. That’s quite remarkable! But you have to ask, how long can the plucky little tree-hugger keep going before someone goes and puts her f*cking lights out?’
Ronnie Braddock was not amused. ‘I’ll put your f*cking lights out if you don’t shut the f*ck up.’ He was sitting up front, next to the driver. ‘Stop the car,’ he ordered.
The engine died, and now there was only the sound of the wind rushing across the hillside. Braddock got out of the Range Rover and walked round the front of the car until he was crouching beside the bonnet on the driver’s side. He rested his left elbow on the bonnet so as to steady himself as he lined up his sleek, futuristic-looking Steyr AUG A1 sub-machine gun on the back of the fleeing figure some two hundred metres beyond and above him. It was a tricky shot, uphill, with a constantly varying crosswind. And then Deirdre Bull contrived to make it much easier.
One second she was fighting her way up an increasingly steep and treacherous slope, the next she was grasping at fresh air as she reached the top of the escarpment. Directly in front of her the ground fell away even more steeply, leaving her looking down on to a dizzying drop. She straightened up as she fought to stop herself falling down it. And for that brief moment her head and upper body were presented in perfect silhouette.
Braddock smiled beneath his black balaclava and fired off his first round. It missed. He swore under his breath, then smiled as he saw the woman turn round to look back in the direction that the shot had come from. His grin broadened and twisted across his face as he sensed the panic and terror with which she must now be overwhelmed. Twice more he pressed the trigger in quick succession, and this time he hit. The bullets tore into the upper left-hand corner of her torso, spinning her round. And then the woman stumbled over the edge of the escarpment and vanished from his sight.
It took the hunters a couple of minutes to make their way to the point where Deirdre Bull had fallen. Her body was clearly visible far below, the jaunty pink and white cagoule standing out from the grass and bare earth around her.
‘Right, that’s her done,’ said Ronnie Braddock. ‘Time we got the f*ck out.’
37
* * *
Rosconway, Pembrokeshire, Wales
BRYNMOR GRYFFUD WAS at the wheel of the camper van. He drove steadily through the heart of rural Wales, staying well within the speed-limit at all times – with the underpowered Hiace weighed down by its deadly cargo he had little choice in the matter – and reaching the town of Pembroke by 6.00 a.m. From there he headed due west, taking the B4320 towards Angle, a seaside village that is a popular stopping-off point on the spectacular Pembrokeshire Coast Walk that runs around the far south-west corner of Wales. A couple of miles short of Angle Gryffud turned right down a lane towards the village of Rosconway, which had virtually all been demolished, or simply abandoned, when the refinery was built. Only the old parish church still stood intact, as a memento of what had once been a thriving little community. It was now shortly before six thirty.
Just before the lane reached the church Gryffud came to a gate. Beyond it the semi-derelict shells of some old farm buildings stood around a yard, hidden by thick, overgrown hedges from the casual view of any passers-by. The camper van turned off the lane into the old farmyard. Bumping and shaking over the rutted ground, it passed through a gaping hole in the walls of a roofless old barn. As the van entered the barn, moving at little more than a crawl, Smethurst was looking at a GPS location finder, about the size of a stopwatch.
‘Forward about five metres,’ he said, his eyes fixed to the flickering digits on the readout. ‘Left a bit … stop … wait a second.’
Smethurst took another look at the GPS, which also doubled as a compass.
‘Right, we’re on the right spot,’ he said. ‘But we need to line the van up three more degrees to the north-west. Just reverse a fraction, then go forward again, right hand down.’
Gryffud did as he was told.
‘Bollocks!’ Smethurst hissed to himself. ‘That was one degree too much. Try it again, but this time left hand down. Only a fraction, though. That’s all we need.’
The van shifted. Smethurst cursed again, and delivered an even more precise set of instructions. Gryffud did his best to follow them to the last millimetre. Finally Smethurst was satisfied. ‘That’ll do,’ he said. He set the timer to go off in four hours. When that was done he turned to Brynmor Gryffud and said, ‘Right, Taff, time to go.’ It was now 6.41 a.m.
The two men walked out of the farmyard and turned right, back up the lane towards the Angle Road, a distance of about one and a half miles. They walked at a good, hard pace, aiming to arrive at seven o’clock exactly. They had been standing by the roadside for less than a minute when a BMW pulled up next to them. The driver’s window lowered to reveal Uschi Kremer’s smiling face.
‘Hello, boys! Fancy meeting you here!’ she said.
38
* * *
Cardiff Gate Services, M4, Wales
AT THAT EXACT same moment, Carver, too, was hitching a ride. He’d woken at 6.15 a.m. and pulled open the window to see a grey, but dry morning. He’d showered, dressed and had a full English breakfast before heading out into the car park a minute before seven. The Audi was waiting for him. He tapped on the passenger window and it slid down to reveal the lightly tanned face of a man in his early thirties, whose cheerful smile and upper-class accent were in sharp contrast to the steely look in his eyes. Carver knew that look. He saw it in the mirror on a regular basis. The only difference was that his eyes were green and his stare – when he chose to use it – was, if anything, even steelier and colder than the one now appraising him.
‘You Tyrrell?’ Carver asked.
‘Ah, you must be Jenkins.’
‘That’s right, Andy Jenkins.’
‘Then you’d better climb aboard.’
Carver got in the back of the car. He was dimly aware of suppressed laughter from the massive, shadowy figure in the driver’s seat.
‘Something amusing you?’ Tyrrell asked.
‘Bollocks he’s called Andy Jenkins, boss,’ the driver replied in a South London voice. ‘His name is Pablo Jackson … isn’t it?’
Carver laughed. ‘Not for a while … How are you, Snoopy?’
‘That’ll be Company Sergeant Major Schultz to you, boss. I’m a warrant officer these days. Gone up in the world.’
‘You know each other?’ Tyrrell asked, his curiosity piqued in particular by Schultz calling the newcomer ‘boss’, the special forces equivalent to ‘sir’.
‘You could say that,’ Carver replied. ‘We served together, a long time ago.’
‘He’s one of us, boss,’ Schultz told Tyrrell. ‘And one of the best, too.’
39
* * *
Carn Drum Farm
DEIRDRE BULL WAS not dead. Not quite. She opened her eyes, emerging from unconscious oblivion to a skull-splitting headache and an overwhelming desire to be sick. It took a second or two to register further sources of agony from her shoulder, her left arm, her ribs and her right leg. Neither the arm nor the leg would move. She propped herself up on her right arm, gasping with the pain that this simple movement sent shooting through her body, and saw jagged fragments of bone poking through the bright nylon arm of her cagoule and the dark-stained denim of her jeans. She almost fainted, slumping back to the ground again. Then she remembered: her phone. She fumbled in her pocket for the little handset, lost her grip on it as she pulled it out of the cagoule, and felt the panic rise in her as her hand fumbled blindly across the ground before touching the phone again. She held it up to her face so that she could see what she was doing, and then with her one working thumb tapped out the three digits 9 … 9 … 9.
‘Help me,’ she whimpered. ‘Please help me. I’ve been shot. I’m hurt really badly. And the others … I think … I think …’ But before she could complete the sentence she had fallen unconscious again.
It took a combined force of police and volunteers from the Brecon Mountain Rescue Team the best part of three hours to locate Deirdre Bull. By that time the carnage at Carn Drum farmhouse had been discovered. Deirdre herself was in a critical condition. She had multiple fractures, and although the bullets that had hit her had miraculously avoided doing any damage to her heart or lungs, there was a strong chance of internal organ damage caused by her fall. She had lost a great deal of blood, and was slipping in and out of consciousness. Just as she was loaded into the rescue helicopter that was going to take her away to hospital she gripped the arm of the paramedic nearest to her, stared him right in the eye and hissed, ‘The attack … You’ve got to stop the attack!’
40
* * *
RAF Northolt, Hillingdon, West London
AT 8.30 A.M. a dozen individuals began to assemble for a flight that would carry them some two hundred and forty miles due west and last an hour and forty minutes.
The PM had banned any Cabinet members from the conference, for the simple reason that he did not want any possible pretenders to his position attracting the publicity it would bring. Nevertheless, there was still an impressive Whitehall turnout. The Home Office, Ministry of Defence and Department of Energy and Climate Change each sent a minister. The Director of Special Forces, who was overall commander of the SAS and SBS, attended, as did senior officers from MI5 and Scotland Yard. As keen as ever to maintain its green credentials, the government had also reserved VIP seats for a representative from Greenpeace and a professor from Imperial College, London, whose special subject was the long-term effects of man-made environmental disasters. Last, but by no means least in their own minds, came Nicholas Orwell, the EU Energy Minister Manuela Pedrosa, and Kurt Mynholt, the second most senior diplomat at the US Embassy in London, whose Senior Foreign Service rank was equivalent to that of a three-star general.
That made eleven passengers. The twelfth was Nikki Wilkins, a twenty-nine-year-old Cabinet Office representative, selected on the grounds of competence, intelligence, people skills and – though no one dared suggest this openly – fresh-faced good looks that made any man, no matter how powerful, just that bit more eager to please her. Wilkins’s job was very simple: she had to corral her high-powered passengers on to the choppers, and make sure they had been given all the tea, coffee and biscuits they required and were happy with their seats. Then she had to get them all off again at the far end, in the gaze of the cameras, looking like confident, purposeful men and women who were ready to protect the nation against terrorist threats to its fuel and power supplies.
In short, Nikki Wilkins was both a hostess and a minder. Or as her boss had told her, ‘You’ll be matron.’
Right now, though, she wished she were an octopus.
She was doing her best to herd the VIPs on to the two helicopters. She would be in the first craft along with the British government ministers, Nicholas Orwell and the EU politician; the members of the group, in other words, who had the strongest desire to be seen by the TV cameras. Those who were happier to remain anonymous would travel in the second helicopter, attracting far less attention at the rear of the VIP party.
As the choppers fired up their engines the noise was so deafening that she was forced to direct everyone by hand gestures. Unfortunately, Wilkins’s right hand was occupied holding her phone close to her ear as she talked to her increasingly frantic colleagues already at their destination. But she could not hear a word that was spoken to her without clamping her hand over her other ear. Frantically, she tried to alternate increasingly desperate waves at the milling VIPs with five-second bursts of telephone conversation, with the result that no one, least of all Nikki Wilkins herself, had any clue at all about what the hell was going on.
Her situation was a microcosm of the whole operation. It was as if an orchestra was trying to improvise an entire symphony without a proper score, let alone a single rehearsal. At the site of the meeting itself, local police had only just arrived to set up a security perimeter. A couple of the TV vans, one from the BBC and the other from Channel Four News, had become detached from the convoy of vehicles making its way west, and were now hopelessly lost. No one seemed to know what was more important: maintaining security, in which case the TV people could not be told where to go, or gaining maximum publicity, in which case they had to know.
Calls bounced back and forth between Whitehall and the officials who were already in position at the site of the energy security meeting. Finally someone, somewhere made a decision. ‘Rosconway … Just tell them to put the word Rosconway into their satnavs and take it from there.’
41
* * *
Rosconway
CARVER, TYRRELL AND Schultz arrived at the refinery a few minutes after the helicopters had left Northolt. Along the way Carver had learned a bit more about Major Rod Tyrrell, to give him his full rank and name, or ‘Rodders’, as he was known to his men. He and Schultz had served together in Iraq, Afghanistan and a smattering of other trouble spots. They were two tough, experienced fighting men and they talked to one another with an ease that downplayed, but never entirely ignored, the difference in their ranks. It was obvious to Carver that Tyrrell had earned Schultz’s complete respect. The battle-hardened sergeant major was well over six feet tall, with biceps like boiled hams and the gnarled, bulldog features of a rugby front-row forward. He had precisely zero patience for weakness, incompetence or bullshit of any kind. So if he was impressed by a la-di-da ‘Rupert’ – as the men referred to their officers – that was all Carver needed to know.
‘What a shambles,’ Schultz said disgustedly, as they drove past a minimal, painfully inadequate security check into a car park filled with randomly placed vehicles. People were milling around in various stages of aimlessness, confusion and phone-clutching panic, while security men wearing high-visibility yellow tabards over their black uniform jackets tried desperately to impose some kind of order.
‘An absolute clusterf*ck,’ Tyrrell agreed. ‘But look on the bright side. If the good guys haven’t had enough time to get organized, then neither have the bad guys.’
Schultz laughed. ‘You always were a logical bastard, boss.’
‘Hmm,’ Tyrrell murmured, casting a sharp, narrow-eyed look at the pandemonium. ‘Let’s just hope that I’m also right.’
42
* * *
WILLIE HOLLOWAY NEEDED this like a hole in the head. It was tough enough being the operations manager at the National Petroleum refinery on any normal day, let alone this one. He ran an in stallation that was supplied by gigantic supertankers that had to be guided up the waters of Milford Haven without running down any of the scores of yachts and pleasure craft that flitted to and fro throughout the summer months, apparently oblivious to the leviathans passing between them like elephants through ants. The massive ships were filled with cargoes of crude oil that were an environmental disaster just waiting to happen. Virtually every stage of every process undertaken at the refinery itself produced substances that were capable of poisoning human beings, blowing them to smithereens or both. The finished products were then stored in giant tanks that were potentially some of the biggest Molotov cocktails in the world.
Now this had been dumped on him. Barely sixteen hours had passed since head office had called Holloway to say that his refinery had been given the huge honour of hosting an instant conference on the risks of terrorist attacks. That meant he had to cope with more than a hundred people arriving on some magical bloody mystery tour. He knew what they’d be like – a bunch of puffed-up ponces, all convinced that they should be allowed to go wherever they wanted and do whatever they wished – none of them with any experience at all of the oil industry. It was his responsibility to get them all through the day without compromising their safety, or the refinery’s. And just to make matters worse, everything he did would be noted and judged by the senior executives from UK headquarters, who would be National Petroleum’s official corporate representatives at the event.
At least he’d finally been given some outside help. Three casually dressed men had introduced themselves to him as envoys from the Ministry of Defence. Two carried military identity cards that gave their names as Sergeant Tom Croft and Major Hugh Gould, without specifying the unit to which they belonged. The third introduced himself as Andy Jenkins and said he was a civilian advisor.
Willie Holloway had no doubt at all that all three names were false. He had spent enough years working in oil-rich parts of the world that were a lot less pleasant than this corner of the Pembrokeshire coastline to know special forces when he saw them. And he wasn’t going to turn down their offer of help.
‘Delighted to be of assistance,’ said Rod Tyrrell after Holloway had shaken his hand. ‘Let’s take a look at a plan of this place. See how we can get through this without too much risk of total disaster.’
Carver said nothing. Until further notice he planned to keep his eyes and ears open and his mouth very firmly closed.
43
* * *
Carn Drum Farm
IN LONDON, THE Metropolitan Police have a dedicated Counter Terrorism Command, designated SO15, which deals with threats to the capital city. The Dyfed-Powys police, however, are not so well-equipped to fight the forces of terror. Why should they be? Their patch, which covers a great swathe of south-western and central Wales, has one of the lowest crime-rates in the entire UK. Back in the seventies, outraged Welsh nationalists set fire to the occasional English-owned holiday cottage, but since then, the area has been notable for its lack of antisocial behaviour. So the slaughter at Carn Drum Farm was totally outside the experience of any of the officers who first attended the scene of the crime. They searched the entire property for bodies, but once it was clear that these were all confined to the farmhouse and its immediate surroundings, little attention was paid to the outbuildings, so no one initially realized what the inhabitants of the farm had been up to during their stay in the country. In any event, there was no one whose training or professional experience would have equipped them to detect an improvised bomb factory.
To make matters worse, the force, which includes Pembrokeshire, was already stretched to the limit providing officers to police the unscheduled, unplanned event at the Rosconway refinery. The Chief Constable and a number of senior officers had also decided to attend the event. So when reports of the terrible events at this isolated hill farm first started arriving at the force HQ in Carmarthen, their significance was by no means clear. Were the deaths the result of a burglary that had spiralled into deadly violence? Was this some kind of cult mass suicide? No one knew, and since it can take days, if not weeks, to process the results of forensic examinations of violent crime scenes, especially ones as complex and large-scale as this appeared to be, there was as yet no evidence at all to suggest any terrorist aspect to the crime.
Nor did Deirdre Bull’s warning cause any alarm bells to ring. When she begged the paramedic, ‘You’ve got to stop the attack!’ he just nodded reassuringly.
Then, as she slumped back on to her stretcher, he turned to a colleague and said, ‘Bit late for that.’ He naturally assumed she was referring to the attack on the farmhouse. What other attack could there possibly be?
44
* * *
Rosconway
WILLIE HOLLOWAY’S PROBLEM, as he explained to Tyrrell, Schultz and Carver, was that just when he had the greatest need for totally watertight security around the refinery, he actually had less capacity than usual to provide it. The four men were in Holloway’s office on the second floor of one of the bland, low-rise administrative blocks from which the plant was managed. A series of ground-floor conference rooms had been hurriedly commandeered to act as the working venues for the participants at the morning’s conference and the reporters who were covering the event.
‘Half my lads have become car park attendants,’ Holloway grumbled. ‘They’re all standing at the gates, checking IDs and getting everyone spaces.’
‘What about the local police?’ asked Tyrrell.
‘They’ve set up roadblocks. Nothing’s got closer than a mile to here since about eight this morning. As soon as it got light we were out patrolling the fields around the plant.’
‘So there is some kind of buffer-zone around the place?’
‘Sure. I’ll show you …’ Holloway walked to a wall of his office, on which was a large, framed Ordnance Survey map of the refinery and its surroundings. The plant had been sited on a headland. It was criss-crossed with streets whose names revealed the American origins of the refinery’s parent company: First, Second, Third and Fourth Avenues intersecting with Refinery Street, State Street and Ocean Drive.
‘As you can see,’ Holloway said, ‘almost two-thirds of the perimeter of the plant backs directly on to the sea, and we own all the land between the furthest storage tanks and the water. The coastline here is pretty rocky. There’s anywhere between thirty and fifty feet of cliff for most of the way around. I’ve got people patrolling the cliff tops, and there’s a couple of boats offshore, keeping an eye on things. Facing the other way, we’ve got all the land within around seven to eight hundred metres of the perimeter fence.’ He ran his finger around the limit of the refinery’s land. ‘Everything inside that line we searched earlier. If anyone’s there, all I can say is they’re bloody well hidden.’
For the first time since he’d arrived, Carver spoke: ‘But you didn’t patrol outside your actual property?’
Holloway gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Look, there’s a limit, you know? I’ve had this dumped on me from on high, and I’m doing the best I can.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Shit! … The VIPs are due here any minute, and I’ve got to make sure we’ve got everything ready. One of the ministers wants to make an opening statement to the media, and his people say he has to stand right by the distillation columns. They want powerful pictures for the TV. So can I leave you gentlemen to get on with, well … whatever you want to do?’
‘I think we’ll tag along, if that’s all right with you,’ Tyrrell said. ‘Come on, Sergeant … and Jenkins?’
‘Give me a minute,’ said Carver. ‘I just want to take another look at this map.’
He watched the others leave the room, then turned his attention back to the refinery layout, and the land around it. Why was Zorn making such an issue of energy terrorism? Did he know something no one else did – did he have advance warning, perhaps, of a planned outrage? ‘Well, then,’ Carver thought, running with the idea. ‘Suppose he were attacking a refinery – this one, for example – what would he do?’
One option was to come in from the sea. Carver could get past Holloway’s boat and foot patrols without too much trouble. He’d once beaten the combined forces of the US Coast Guard and Secret Service to attack the President’s seaside holiday compound. But then the target had been a single individual, not a giant industrial installation. So how much damage could he do here? There was a limit to the amount of explosive anyone could haul up a cliff-face. A few well-placed C4 charges would certainly make a hell of a bang, but they’d struggle to do the kind of serious, long-term damage that sent a message no one would be able to ignore. For that you’d need a lot more explosive, and that meant some form of transport, either by land or by air.
Well, if anyone really wanted to recreate 9/11 with a death-dive into an oil refinery or nuclear power station there was not a lot Carver could do about it. So what about a truck-bomb? It would have to get past the roadblocks. And even though a truck could deliver a massive amount of explosive, it only delivered it to one place and made one very big hole. But the refinery covered a huge area. It could surely survive a single bomb, no matter how big.
No, the way to attack a place like this was to mount some kind of spectacular: hit it more than once. An image came to his mind of black and white film from the Second World War – Russian ‘Katyusha’ rocket launchers, mounted on the back of trucks, blasting a fusillade of projectiles at the German lines. Like so many Russian weapons, Katyushas were very basic, very brutal and very easy to copy.
He looked at the map again. If he had a rocket launcher, where would he put it?
There weren’t too many options. Anyone using home-made devices would want them as close as possible to the refinery, without actually getting on to its own, well-defended, regularly patrolled property. They’d also need cover behind which to hide: trees, walls, even low hills. But there didn’t look to be much of anything near the refinery. The land was flat, with only the odd copse of trees marked on the map, and virtually all the buildings in the area fell within the refinery’s property. There was just one farm close by whose buildings might fit the criteria Carver had set himself.
He walked around Holloway’s desk, sat by his computer, and called up a satellite picture of the area. He zoomed in on the farm, frowning as he peered at the screen. The buildings seemed unoccupied, even derelict. One was missing its roof. Even from the aerial shot it was obvious that the farmyard was overgrown, the stone or tarmac long since lost beneath a cover of vegetation. Well, if he were going to launch anything, Carver thought, that’s where he’d do it from. He looked at the broken-down buildings for a few more seconds. ‘Yes, that’s the place,’ he muttered to himself. And then he, too, left the room.
45
* * *
Mid-air, en route to Rosconway
THE TWO AUGUSTA Power Elite helicopters packed with VIPs took off six minutes late, but the pilots put the hammer down and made up time along the way. ‘Don’t worry, everyone, we’re going to arrive bang on time,’ the RAF lieutenant at the controls of the lead craft assured his passengers. Nikki Wilkins passed the news on to her colleagues on the ground.
‘This could get interesting,’ she was told. ‘We’re still a couple of TV crews short. Channel Four News should make it in time, but God only knows where the missing BBC lot have got to.’
‘Do you want us to slow down, then?’ Wilkins asked.
‘No. Get here on time. You’re due at ten forty, right?’
‘That’s the time I was given, yes.’
‘Right then, let’s try to stick to the schedule if we possibly can. If the BBC don’t get their own pictures, that’s their problem. They’ll just have to take a feed from someone else.’
‘What’s it like there, though – apart from all the madness? You think this is going to work?’
‘Well, that depends … if the TV people all turn up, and if there isn’t some God-awful cock-up, this is a great place to do it. You’ve got this huge industrial complex – you know, all steel and concrete and flaming chimneys – set against this stunning coastline. And the weather looks pretty good. Plenty of blue sky, fluffy clouds, bright sunshine. I think we’re going to get some spectacular pictures.’
‘That sounds great,’ said Nikki Wilkins. ‘Full speed ahead!’