LONDON ALERT (24 page)

‘Why don’t you get rid
of Blackwell? He’s a pervert exploiting his position.’

‘I know, but he knows
everyone’s secrets – not only here but in a number of other sensitive places
where he previously worked. We could only risk terminating him if he committed an
indictable offence and had been sentenced to a long prison term.’

‘Maybe I should set a
trap for him.’

‘Be careful. He’s no
fool.’

Holt
spent the weekend pottering around
,
aimlessly doing this and that. On the Sunday afternoon he
went to Dulwich Park
–
seeing normal people out with their
kids full of the
enthusiasm of youth made him feel life was worth living. One reason he felt so
low was that he missed Consuela, not only for the sex and the high life but
also for the companionship she provided. He remembered how one of the rich
women he
had met in the course of his relationship
with Consuela had said once you get used to the high life
,
it is impossible to renounce
it, even when the money runs out.
He could well
believe it.

On returning to his flat,
he had a simple meal literally washed down with what was really a very decent
£8 bottle of rioja but that could never measure up to the £100-plus bottles he
had shared with Consuela, her presence making them even more enjoyable.
Nevertheless, the always-honest rioja sufficed to relax him enough to drop off
to sleep quite easily.

On his way to Sackville
Street on the Monday, Holt dropped into his office at Farringdon to find it now
had a camp bed so that he could sleep there during crises. He also found that
by virtue of his new security clearance, he had access to the sophisticated
technical facilities, in addition to certain encrypted material in the
computers.

These included video
and data links not only to police operations rooms (and their CCTV cameras) but
also a special booth for sensitive links with the CIA at Langley in the States
and to their satellites, which could cover London, as well as any other place
on earth. The links with the CIA were set up so that GCHQ could not decrypt
them. If someone, even from security, should gain entry, the link with the US
would automatically be broken, and the screens filled with innocuous material.

H
olt
arrived at Sackville Street
with
plenty of time to talk to Sir
Charles before the OwlPhone
would ring
.
They discussed the various possibilities as they saw them.

 At precisely
2
p.m
., there was a ping indicating an incoming
text message. Although it could be read on the screen, they copied it to a
computer as instructed and printed it out. It was very much along the lines of
the suggestions made to Holt at the end of his interrogation.

LONDON ALERT

A series of disrupting events in London and England are
imminent. They are to remind you to take the Owl’s recommendations to improve
the country seriously.

These alerts, together with the measures we wish to see
imposed, will be sent to news organizations, the media, and tweeted to prevent
the government withholding them from the public. All will be copied to this
OwlPhone.

Let the games begin.

The Owl

Within minutes, the
media and the internet were being bombarded with warnings citing the Owl’s
agenda for putting the country to rights. He told them to expect happenings to
ensure the government paid attention and started taking action.

Strangely, though GCHQ had managed to link
the Owl with people engaged in financial speculation against the pound before
Holt’s undercover mission, they were no longer coming up with anything. This
suggested the Owl had learnt about GCHQ previously having found a link – perhaps
from Holt during his interrogation.

A week and a half went
by, and with nothing having happened there were suggestions that the whole
thing had been a hoax. Sir Charles’s enemies began bad-mouthing him in the hope
that they could pounce and get Giraffe closed down and Sir Charles taken down a
peg.

‘Without Giraffe, he will
be a eunuch,’ said a senior general who in an argument six months earlier with
a third party present had been accused by Sir Charles of being an incompetent
buffoon.

The
first sign that something was brewing came from the air
.
T
he first officer of an airliner arriving much earlier than
scheduled from the Far East
was
requesting a priority landing
,
as some of the passengers and the captain were acting
crazily. Ten minut
es later
,
another aircraft called air
-
traffic control with a similar story, except that this time
it was the Muslim copilot who was off his rocker
,
and a
n
elderly
rabbi
had put his hand up a flight
attendant’s skirt.

Air-traffic control
called the first aircraft to ask whether their captain was a Muslim, and was
told he was Jewish. This added to the confusion. Was the common factor that
none of the zanies had eaten the pork option for their meal?

Within minutes, dozens
of aircraft were calling in with similar stories. All demanding priority, with
several even having declared a fuel emergency, which meant they had to be given
absolute priority, thus further delaying other arrivals.

Nearby countries were
refusing to allow London-bound aircraft low on fuel to divert to their
airports after receiving warnings that there were individuals on those flights
infected with viruses developed for biological warfare.

With Holt already at
his post in the special ops room at Farringdon, Sir Charles set off by special
car to the Cobra room, somewhere below Whitehall. There were all sorts of ways
to access this secret location, via tunnels from the prime minister’s residence
at Downing Street, the Foreign Office, and the Ministry of Defence, not to
mention the Cabinet Office, at 70 Whitehall, which was the way Sir Charles
chose. Using his swipe card, he went through the blast-proof doors to find the
prime minister and the heads of MI6, MI5, the Metropolitan Police, and the
military, and other officials such as the mayor of London, already there.

Some of those present were
standing, others were already seated at the 30 ft polished burr-walnut
table. Most of the far wall was taken up by a giant eight-panel video screen, on
the right of which was a lectern for the chairman – in this case the PM. The
side walls had four flat-panel screens high above the participants’ heads for
teleconferencing and TV feeds from the BBC, CNN, and so on. Each position at
the table had its own microphone.

 The term
‘
Cobra’, suggesting something
menacing that the government was taking very seriously, was not the brainchild
of some consultancy but had been arrived at by pure chance in that it was simply
an abbreviation for ‘Cabinet Office Briefing Room A’ – one of a number of rooms
in the Cabinet Office used for meetings of the CCC (Civil Contingencies Committee).

The British government had
again moved tanks, armoured vehicles, and troops to London’s Heathrow Airport and
other airports to try and show that they were in control, but there was not much
that they could do, other than raise the fear level amongst the population.

Heathrow, with only two
runways and operating close to its limit in terms of the number of flights it could
handle, was in deep trouble, as prioritizing aircraft having declared a fuel emergency
meant others were being delayed and circling overhead, burning up fuel, and themselves
about to declare fuel emergencies. Soon the airport got to the point where it
could no longer cope. The usual alternative airports were in a similar predicament.

Airliners were having
to land at airfields with runways so short that the seats and everything else
removable would have to be taken out to enable them to take off again, and then
only with difficulty. Then, when it seemed the situation in the air could get
no worse, mortars spewed spikes coated with adhesive onto the two runways at Heathrow
and the single runway at Gatwick, making them unusable.

The pound sterling’s value
was continuing to drop.

Hoax calls were also
coming in from people trying to exploit the situation.

Exasperated, the police
at first dismissed a call from a woman saying she had seen a duck with machine-guns
coming out of the River Thames. The official taking the call called out to a
colleague, saying some crazy cow had reported seeing ducks with guns, only to
be told the woman probably had her head screwed on the right way as she must
have meant the amphibious motorized ‘ducks’ used to take families with kids
around London, the excitement being that they could ride both on land and on
the river.

Since the phone system
had recorded the woman’s number, the official was able to call back, apologise,
and ask for further details.

In fact, the ducks-with-guns
story was not daft at all, for a little earlier a woman with a revealing lace
blouse had distracted the drivers of a couple of these motorized ducks parked
at their usual pick-up point near the London Eye. While the drivers were occupied
ogling her twin assets, a kindly man had been giving the children onboard their
vehicles some
toy
Glock semiautomatic pistols, a couple of
toy
surface-to-air-missile
launchers, and other
toy
weaponry. He also gave them masks, which made their faces look adult-like.

‘You kids,’ the kindly
man had said, ‘are lucky to have been chosen to take part in a game to be
televised. When attacked by pretend policemen either on the ground or in helicopters,
return the fire with your toy weaponry. Even though it’s only a game, you will
be famous.’

What the children did
not know was that though they had not been given the real thing, what they had
been given were not innocent toys either.

Holt later learnt from the
Owl that he had come up with the idea after hearing from a woman at a reception
of an incident in which she had been on one of those ducks with her two
children when it was waylaid by fearsome-looking police toting machine-guns
telling then them to lie flat on the ground. Only later did she learn that the
police had been looking for armed robbers allegedly making their getaway on one
of the ducks, following a hold-up in central London.

SWAT teams began stopping the motorized ducks taking
tourists – mostly children – around central London. The two with the masked kids
brandishing the ‘weapons’ they had been given were following each other up
Regent Street when they were stopped. As instructed, and believing they were
taking part in a TV programme, the children immediately ‘opened fire’, forcing
the police to withdraw and call in helicopters with marksmen able to get a
better angle of fire.

In the Cobra operations
room, some officials, including Sir Charles, were urging caution, pointing out
the danger of firing on armed terrorists in central London.

‘Have we any better idea
now as to who the Owl might be?’ asked an admiral, feeling the senior service
was being left out of things and wanting to make some contribution.

‘Only that he, or she,
could even be one of us,’ replied Sir Charles. Those present began looking at
each other suspiciously.

As
the helicopter
s
moved in
close to the two ducks
,
they came under
‘
heavy
fire
’
,
 
with
noisy
rounds exploding near them with puffs of smoke
,
just like flak in
World War II. As the pilot
s
hesitat
ed
and hovered
some distance away
,
rocket
s
whizzed up from
the duck
s
.
S
tr
iking
the helicopter
s
on the
ir
windscreen
s
,
they spewed out a paint-like
substance
,
producing a mist
covering not on
ly the windscreen
s
but
also the sights of the marksm
e
n’s weapon
s
.
O
ne
marksman
di
d ge
t a shot in but could not see
wh
o
m
he had hit.

Ironically, at that very
moment the Metropolitan Police commissioner, adorned with insignia to denote
his great importance, was reassuring the public on television.

‘We have the situation fully
under control,’ he was saying. ‘One of our marksmen on a helicopter has taken
out one of the terrorists, and our SWAT teams are courageously exchanging fire.
Our dedicated men and, I must add, women will overcome them in the end. That’s
all I can say for the moment. There’s no need to panic. Thank you.’

Ten minutes later, TV
footage revealed that the ‘terrorist’ they had ‘taken out’ – a fourteen-year-old
girl – was being carried from the duck by some young boys, themselves no older
than twelve. Believing the terrorists were, as President Bush used to say,
‘hunkered down’ amongst the children, the SWAT teams were caught in a tricky
situation and ordered to pull back even further.

The country was running
out of airfields, let alone airports where airliners low on fuel could land. Holt
was telling Sir Charles over the video link that the Owl seemed to be
attempting to provoke the government into overreacting.

‘Not everyone here
agrees, Captain,’ replied a frustrated Sir Charles. ‘Your job is to try and
work out what the big one, if anything, is going to be.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ Holt
assured him.

‘Remember we have put a
lot of faith in you. Keep in mind what I told you about how giraffes should look
down from a great height. I’m counting on you! That’s all for now.’

Though it had not been
Sir Charles’s intention, the idea of looking down from a great height had given
Holt an idea – he could try using the CIA’s satellites to do just that!

He thought back over the
things the Owl and his interrogators had focused on in the interrogation and
the places he had visited during his time with Consuela. The only common
thread, the only common line of questioning, had been the River Thames and the
precautions the government might have taken to prevent Mumbai-style incidents
with terrorists arriving by waterborne transport. He seemed to remember being constantly
asked about the Thames when under the truth drug.

Was the Owl planning
some Mumbai style of attack, with team members arriving by river? The
authorities were sure they already had that angle covered, with police checking
the occupants and crew of every boat and now even every motorized duck on the river.

He checked the tide for
the Thames at London and found that it was just before high tide and that it
was to be one of the highest predicted tides of the year. Perhaps the time and
height of the tide were significant.

Holt pressed the key to open the link to the CIA liaison officer at
Langley. He knew that although it was early in the morning over there, Sir
Charles’s ‘pal’ was already in his office because of the situation developing
in London.

 ‘Do you have a spy
satellite over London?’

‘Please do not refer to
it thus,’ replied the operative at Langley testily. ‘Yes, we did move an asset
into place, more to follow the action rather than anything else. A kind of
voyeurism; just like people watched the Twin Towers in real time on CNN. By the
way, we can see people sunbathing half-naked in their gardens – it’s a nice day
on your side of the pond. Our satellite is so good we can see the women’s
navels and sometimes more than that.’

‘No need to go into
detail right now, perhaps later. Can you wait a moment?’ replied Holt.

He quickly noted the
coordinates of the River Thames from the Thames Barrier in the estuary up to
the bridge upriver at Windsor, where the Queen has a castle. He then spoke
again to the CIA man in the US.

‘Can you obtain a
series of images of the River Thames, starting from an overall view between
coordinates
x
and
y
, then then give me a series of very detailed images
section by section between them, and repeat the process every ten minutes?’

The man at Langley agreed
and said he would have them put up on the system so that Holt could download.

Holt and the two other
members of Giraffe authorized to see the special CIA material studied the
images as they came through. The amount of detail was unbelievable. No wonder
they did not want other countries to know how much could be seen.

Small boats and
especially speedboats were being checked by the river police, helped by the
military, so the chance of a Mumbai-type attack seemed remote. The three of
them at Farringdon could not see anything out of the ordinary. They must have
missed something, and they examined the various boats on the river ever more
closely.

‘Let’s reassess the
overall picture again,’ suggested Holt.

They looked at the
large print-outs showing whole stretches of the river.

‘Hey, there’s a
pattern!’ exclaimed one of Holt’s colleagues.

 Holt saw that downstream
of a number of bridges were tugs towing barges, all equidistant from the bridge
in question. On examining detailed images, they noted that each train of barges
had one with a peculiar hydraulic contraption on it.

‘That’s it,’ shouted
the colleague standing beside Holt. ‘It would be statistically impossible for
several bridges to have barges equidistant from them.’

Holt looked again at
the CIA close-ups and zoomed in again on the barges with those strange contraptions.
He then called Sir Charles on the video link.

‘I think we’re onto
something, Sir Charles.’

‘What have you got for
us, Captain Holt?’

 ‘Barges towed by tugs
are going to do something to some key bridges over the Thames. To damage them mechanically
in some way at this time, when the tide is exceptionally high. It can’t be to
blow them up, as all those barges have been searched repeatedly and nothing
found. They have some form of innocuous-looking contraption – hydraulic, I expect
– that they intend to raise under the bridge spans to unseat them from their
underpinnings.’

Holt then listed seven
bridges, saying they might not all be involved, as some normal barges might be
there by chance. Orders were immediately issued from the Cobra room for the
barges to be intercepted and prevented from reaching the bridges with care
taken, as some might be quite innocent. There was more time than appeared to
thwart attacks, as the barges had not only to reach the bridges but also needed
time to raise the devices to a point where they would exert significant upwards
pressure, bearing in mind that they would be floating and not on solid ground.

As police and security
people were already engaged in searching boats on the river, the seven lines of
barges were quickly intercepted. In five cases, a barge had a contraption that
when raised under a bridge would heave up a section the roadway, making the
whole bridge unusable until the span was replaced.

Had the centre spans of
those bridges been unseated, vehicles and even trains in the London area would
have been unable to cross the river at those places, causing incredible traffic
congestion. North London would have been half-isolated from South London and
the short-term financial consequences considerable.