LONDON ALERT (25 page)

Like
the end of a Hollywood film where calamity is averted at the very last minute,
officials were patting each other on the back and congratulating themselves
that the damage had been limited, all the while makin
g
out they themselves had played key roles in thwarting the Owl’s plan
when that had been largely
thanks to Sir Charles and Holt.

There had been no loss
of life, as the fourteen-year-old girl was out of intensive care and making a
rapid recovery. The police were thanking their lucky stars that she and the
other children had not been riddled with bullets like the innocent Brazilian at
the time of the 7/7 London bombings. In his case, it had been a matter of
mistaken identity, due to an officer watching his building taking a pee when
the man left for work.

The long-term cost did
not seem to be too great either. The airlines would have to go to considerable
expense removing seats and galley equipment to allow those airliners forced to
land at small airfields to take off, but it seemed only five airliners – a
Boeing 747, three Boeing 777s, and an Airbus A340 – would actually have to be
taken to pieces and carted away by lorry. A superjumbo A380 had landed at a
small airfield with just enough runway to take off when lightened, with local
people there very excited at the prospect of watching it take off.

Looking like the cat that got the cream, the prime minister
was giving interviews to journalists avid for hard news, of which there was
little. Many officials had already set off for home to celebrate with wives or partners.

Sir Charles had invited
Holt back to Sackville Street to take stock over drinks.

‘Reviewing the
situation before anyone else is the key to keeping ahead of the pack and being
able to steer it in the direction we want.’

Having made that pronouncement,
Sir Charles was pouring Holt his third drink when the OwlPhone sounded, with the
computer-generated voice on the line:

We must congratulate Captain Holt
for having worked out our intentions.

We recognize that the changes sought
will take time to realize, so we will give you time, even several years’ time,
before repeating the exercise. Key people in the country will perhaps need to
be ready to take over, should you fail to implement the changes. In addition,
we recognize that it will take two or more generations for the policies to
result in material changes in the make-up of society.

However, our imbecile prime
minister’s declaration that the government has achieved a great victory over us
suggests he might renege on his assurances and fail to endeavour to introduce the
measures right-thinking people believe are needed to better the country. I have
therefore arranged a final nudge. Call it a booster jab.

The target has been selected to
highlight the sad fact that while Air Chief Marshal Dowding and Air Vice
Marshal Park saved Britain during the Battle of Britain in World War II, Bomber
Harris and Leigh Mallory and their cohorts at the Air Ministry subsequently not
only killed many civilians in France as well as Germany but sacrificed
thousands of our pilots and aircrew for little gain other than their egos.

Finally, you must remember that the
equipment we have at our disposal thanks to our financial clout and supporters
in the armed services is second to none. This includes antimissile devices that
will not only foil any attempts to use them against us but also render the said
missiles uncontrollable, at least by you. Firing missiles at us could cause
great collateral damage and loss of life, especially in a city such as London.

The OwlPhone switched to
stand-by without any intervention on Holt’s part.

Sir Charles called the prime
minister on the scrambler but could not persuade him to take the warning
seriously. The PM reiterated the lie that the British government had never
dealt with terrorists and said he was sure the Owl was bluffing. He would call
his bluff – ‘teach the bugger a lesson
’.
 

‘These are no ordinary
terrorists, Prime Minister,’ remarked Sir Charles before replacing the receiver
in despair.

To cover his backside,
and fearing what might happen if the PM had his way, Sir Charles sent an
official memo to all concerned, and that included the service chiefs, the Cobra
intelligence committee, and the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police,
warning of the dangers of attacking any perpetrators or preventing their escape
without due thought as to the possible consequences.

He even mentioned the
possibility that while the Owl had up until then used simple techniques, he
might not be bluffing regarding the technology at his disposal, and notably
antimissile technology, which could result in any missiles fired at his people running
wild. As the Owl had said, there was no knowing the magnitude of the disaster
that could befall London.

The television Sir
Charles had left on in the background to keep up with the latest news, consisting
mainly of a recap of events earlier in the day, had switched to a BBC reporter waiting
with a cameraman on the river embankment outside London’s City Hall to
interview the mayor.

‘I am not sure,’ the
newscaster was saying, ‘what is happening here. HMS
Belfast
, the decommissioned World War II cruiser
moored to my left above Tower Bridge as a tourist attraction, is on the move. I
cannot see how it can serve any useful function in the fight against the
terrorists, for although its guns are trained so that any shells fired would
theoretically hit a motorway service station some twelve miles merely to show
schoolchildren the elevation required to hit such a target during a battle at
sea. As far as I know, there are no munitions of any kind onboard, apart perhaps
for a few fireworks.’

What the TV commentator
did not know was that half an hour earlier a group of the Owl’s men who had
been eating at the riverside terrace of the Côte restaurant one hundred yards
upstream from Belfast, had synchronized their watches before getting up in ones
and twos, and walked casually towards the cruiser’s ticket office. Once onboard,
they had meandered around, looking like typical tourists, until ending up at their
designated positions.

 One of those positions
was the cabin controlling the ship’s public address system, where a couple of
them were hovering around, pretending to be tourists interested in some detail,
asking each other questions. At precisely 17
.
58, the two then moved into
the empty cabin, with one guarding the door and the other seating himself in
front of the microphone. At
18.00
, the man at the microphone
pressed the fire alarm, which started sounding throughout the ship and made the
following announcement: ‘Everyone onboard, including all Royal Navy personnel,
must vacate the ship immediately. This is not a drill and applies to everyone.
This is not a drill. I repeat this is not a drill.’

There was a pause to
let the order sink in, before it was repeated, followed by the usual words of
reassurance: ‘Please proceed calmly. There is no need to panic.’

One veteran officer did
try to make his way to the cabin with the PA system microphone but found the
watertight doors leading to it were impossible to open. Apart from a party of
schoolchildren, there were hardly any visitors onboard and the ship was ‘clear’
in as little as five minutes.

The visitors and six crew
members gathered on the bank, wondering what was happening. The schoolchildren
were larking around, much to the annoyance of their teachers.

Meanwhile, Sir Charles
and Holt back at Sackville Street were also wondering what it signified when another
message came in on the OwlPhone:

REPEATED WARNING!

As you can perhaps see on the television, we are now going
into action again. If you try to attack us, we will attack the launching
platforms. We will also render uncontrollable any missiles fired, with the
result there is no knowing where they might end up.

Any loss of life will be your responsibility, or rather
that of our demented PM.

Sir Charles immediately
communicated this to the prime minister, who got wound up by the Owl’s final remark
about him being demented and shouted, ‘They are bluffing. They have all along been
trying to make us look fools.’

‘Prime Minister,’ Sir
Charles insisted, ‘don’t you think he is trying to provoke you into doing
something unwise? You should take them at their word. I must put it on the
official record that I have advised you that any action you might take, and in
particular one involving the firing of missiles, could result in a tragedy. The
fact that I am advising you thus has been emailed to your office and the relevant
departments, including the service chiefs, and I shall be following that up
with a second warning in the light of the repeated warning from the Owl.’

Officials, some on their
commuter trains halfway home, were called back to the Cobra operations room and
to their offices. From Sackville Street, Sir Charles did not have far to go to
the Cobra room, where he found key people, including the prime minister, already
gathered and discussing what the threat might be.

Holt, with no time to
return to Farringdon, stayed behind at Sackville Street with the OwlPhone.

Sir Charles again repeated
to those assembled in the Cobra room the warning from the Owl.

‘You do realize,’ he
said, ‘the Owl may, as I have said before, be with us here in this room. We
assume the Owl is a man, but it is not necessarily so. One thing I do know is
that it cannot be the PM, as the only moment we are sure the Owl was addressing
Captain Holt in real time, the PM was never alone, except for when he was busy in
the toilet or bath.’

This remark about the
PM being in the toilet only increased the PM’s anger, as all those present
looked at him, imagining him doing his business.

Meanwhile, below decks
on HMS
Belfast
other members of the Owl team were releasing the mooring
chains, starting with those at the bow. An Owl diver who had been hiding
underwater surfaced and clambered aboard a speedboat moored nearby that had
been ignored by the police in their checks precisely because no one was onboard.
The diver started the engine and eased the throttle forward, whereupon a hitherto
unseen cable from the bow of
Belfast
to the launch rose out of the water as it took the strain.

As the cable tautened,
the prow of the massive ship, initially pointing ten degrees leftwards towards
the bank, was pulled to the right. At first, resistance was considerable, due
to the strong current pushing the bow towards the bank, but once the bow reached
the tipping point the effect was reversed, and the current pushed it out faster
and faster towards the middle of the river. A couple of the Owl’s men at the
stern of the
Belfast
began
releasing the cables attaching her to the mooring there.

The diver gunned his extremely
powerful engine to haul the cruiser into midstream and hold it against the tide,
and once it had straightened up in alignment with the centre of Tower Bridge, he
released the cable. The fast tide was carrying
Belfast
stern-first towards
the two centre bascules, which open and shut to allow ships with high superstructures
or tall masts to pass through.

Meanwhile, a recording
was being played over and over again on the public address system on HMS
Belfast
: ‘Danger! Danger! Anyone
remaining onboard should proceed to the bow and be two decks down, as the stern
is about to collide with Tower Bridge, and much of the superstructure will be
ripped off. This is not a drill. I repeat…’

This warning was not in
vain, for a boy and girl some fourteen or fifteen years old had been smooching in
one of the cabins, oblivious to the fact that the rest of their school party
had left the ship. Looking out of a porthole, they could see it was no joke and
quickly made their way to the bow and went one deck further down.

The diver on the
powerful high-speed launch moved in to pick up the Owl’s men, who had escaped
from the
Belfast
in a rubber dinghy, and after they had clambered aboard,
gunned the engine so that it shot off downstream at high speed. As all eyes
were on HMS
Belfast
, not
much attention was being paid to it, especially since the men onboard had
peeled off covers on the sides to reveal
police
written in large letters.

Nevertheless, the video
feed from the BBC reporter at City Hall was being watched attentively by the PM
and officials in the Cobra room. The PM had seen the launch making its escape and
ordered that the two RAF Tornado fighter-bombers on standby over the Thames
Estuary be sent to the scene.

‘Prime Minister, I must
strongly object. I think attacking the launch from the air with a missile would
be a great mistake and would have possibly disastrous consequences,’
interjected Sir Charles.

‘You are not PM. I am,
and I have had enough.’

The PM then gave orders
that the Tornadoes were to engage the launch regardless.

Having guessed the
perpetrators’ intention to make
Belfast
collide with his bridge, the bridge controller tried to raise the bascules in
the hope the giant ship would pass through, leaving the bridge unscathed.
However, with insufficient time, he made matters worse, as the bridge would be even
more vulnerable with the bascules slightly raised. Furthermore, in doing so he was
blocking the path of the vehicles crossing it.