Revenger (13 page)

‘Now what?’ Schultz asked.

‘Over there!’ Carver said, pointing down the road.

Carver was about to say more when he heard the whipcrack sound of a bullet passing by him, going faster than the speed of sound, followed a fraction of a second later by the blast of the gunfire itself.

‘Suppressing fire!’ he shouted at Schultz, who stopped and fired two more quick shots at the pursuing horde – aiming to scare rather than kill this time – before chasing Carver again.

‘I need another couple there,’ said Carver, pointing at another, smaller group of rioters ahead of them. ‘Above their heads!’

‘You sure?’ Schultz asked.

‘They’re just kids,’ Carver replied.

Like that makes any fucking difference, Schultz thought to himself, bringing his gun to bear as another fusillade of bullets crackled behind them, ricocheting off paving stones and lamp posts, blasting holes in the brickwork of nearby houses, and smashing a couple of windows – but somehow missing their fleeing figures.

Schultz fired and saw the people ahead of them scatter: job done.

Then he felt a sickening shock of pain in his left arm and heard a sharp crack of gunfire, and that was when he shouted, ‘I’m hit!’

30

AS BATTLE RAGED
on Netherton Street, Mark Adams was outlining his own vision of a country slipping out of control.

The bizarre assassination attempt had left the crowd edgy and ill at ease. It had taken Adams a while to calm them down, talking almost conversationally, and avoiding controversy or even passion. Now, though, he felt that they were ready to get back to the tough, no-nonsense speech that they’d all come to hear.

‘I am not a racist,’ he began. In the press boxes and TV studios the media people, many of whom had only just finished filing their copy on the shooting, sensed the start of the real political story of the night. In the box where Adams’s inner circle were sitting, Alix saw the men in suits lean forward as if sniffing the air for the mysterious aura of public approval or rejection. She felt fierce pressure on her hand as Nicki Adams squeezed it again, quite unconsciously, unaware of this physical expression of her tension and excitement.

Adams waited, letting the words sink in before he continued, ‘More than fifty years ago the great equal-rights campaigner Dr
Martin
Luther King said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” That’ll do me . . .’

In the press box a
Guardian
blogger and columnist called Dan Brix muttered loud enough for those around him to hear, ‘He’s got a nerve. A right-wing racist quoting Dr King . . . it’s like Hitler quoting Rabbi Blue.’

‘But I cannot escape the simple truth that the population of this country is undergoing a massive demographic shift,’ Adams continued. ‘This is the result of an entirely deliberate strategy, planned by your political leaders without your consent or even your knowledge. For years they have told you lies about trying to control immigration. They never had any intention of doing that.

‘So now I’m going to tell you the facts, based on the government’s own figures, and I’ll leave you to decide what you think when you’ve heard them.’

Dan Brix tweeted: ‘Adams moving on to immigration. About to scare us with “official” numbers #justlikethenationalfront.’

Up on the screens, the shots of Adams’s face had given way to an outline map of the United Kingdom as he said, ‘In February 2012, the government published its official National Population Projections, showing the potential effect of immigration on the population of Great Britain over a twenty-five-year period between 2010 and 2035.’

Adams was talking with calmness and clarity, reassuring his audience that even if the facts and numbers seemed complicated, he’d make them all easy enough to understand.

‘They wanted to know how much difference it would make if there was a lot of immigration, a bit of immigration, or none at all. They started out with the population in 2010, which was a little over sixty-two million. At this point, England was already the sixth most crowded country in the world.’

The map suddenly filled with little graphic figures, most of them concentrated in England, packed so tightly that there was hardly
any
room between them, while the wide open spaces of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland remained almost empty. Then, superimposed on the map, appeared the number: 62 MILLION.

Adams let the image sink in, then said: ‘Now, imagine there is no net immigration at all – that the number of people coming into the country is no greater than the number leaving – well, in that case the population rises from 62.3 million to very nearly 66 million by 2035. That’s an increase of 3.7 million.’

More figures filled the English section of the UK. Now they were packed even more tightly. Then the graphic image changed to a close-up of the West Midlands, with the outline of Birmingham like a great black ink-spot in the middle, as Adams said, ‘Now to give you some idea of what that means, the second biggest city in England is Birmingham, and it has a population of almost exactly one million. So that’s the equivalent of more than three new cities, each the size of Birmingham, we’ve got to find room for . . . in one of the most crowded nations in the entire world.’

Splat! Splat! Splat! Three more Birmingham-sized black ink-spots splashed on to the screen, obliterating the rest of the West Midlands.

‘But actually, we’re not going to need three Birminghams. We’re going to need much, much more than that,’ said Adams.

The screens switched back to the map of the UK, and great arrows started moving towards England, and the numbers of little people began multiplying out of control, so that they merged into one great seething mass.

‘You see, the idea of no net immigration is a total fantasy,’ said Adams while all this was going on. ‘By the government’s own admission, the actual net migration figure is closer to a quarter of a million extra newcomers to this country every year . . . And if we carry on at that rate, the population in twenty years’ time will be more than seventy-six million people, and living in this country will be like living on the platform at Piccadilly tube station in the middle of the rush hour . . . everywhere . . . all the time.’

The figure ‘76 MILLION’ up on the screen was bigger and
more
menacing than any other had been. But Adams was still in documentary-presenter mode: ‘So let’s just sum this all up. If there is no additional immigration, this country’s population goes up by 3.7 million . . . But in fact there are two hundred and fifty thousand extra immigrants every year and the population is going to rise by 13 million . . . So that’s almost 10 million extra people who are all immigrants or the children of immigrants.

‘Meanwhile, the people who are already here . . . particularly the average, white, middle-income men and women who think of themselves as the backbone of this country . . . well, they’re not having very many children at all.’

Adams’s forehead creased with a frown that looked almost apologetic. ‘In fact, you could say that if they’re not careful . . . if we’re not careful . . . those average Englishmen and women are going to become extinct.

‘So forget the polar bear . . . forget the panda . . . forget the whales and the creatures of the Brazilian rainforest . . . if you want to see an endangered species, just go and look in the mirror, Middle England . . . because it’s you.’

31

THE LION MARKET’S
security shutters were made of powder-coated perforated steel. The tiny holes punched in their surface allowed a certain amount of visibility. Not long after the first attacks had begun, Ajay Panu had yelled at Maninder to turn out the lights in the store. Now the interior of the shop was darker than the street outside, making it easier for the Panus to see out and harder for anyone on the street to see in. For the past few minutes Maninder Panu had watched in terrified fascination as Ajay had initiated a bizarre form of gopher-bashing, hitting out at the young rioters as they’d come in under the barrier. Initially they’d crawled in one at a time, but after a while they’d taken to attacking in twos and threes, so that Ajay had to race from one side of the shop to the other while the kids shouted and laughed as though this was just some kind of game.

Maninder could tell that they knew Ajay was too decent a man to do them any serious damage. If he’d ever used his full strength he could easily have killed someone. Instead he held back a fraction, hurting them, often quite badly, but never seriously. But
now
Ajay was getting tired. His chest was heaving as he struggled for breath, and he no longer had the strength even to shout at Maninder for help. Both cousins knew it was a waste of oxygen.

Maninder also knew that for all the paralysing fear that had overwhelmed him, things could have been a lot worse, and might yet become so. The rioters had descended like locusts on the electronics store, which stood directly opposite the supermarket, and looted it so thoroughly that it was now an empty shell. He’d seen the way the Dutchman’s Head had been overwhelmed. It was now completely ablaze, as was the Khyber Star, the Indian restaurant across the way. Two of the Bangladeshi waiters had been dragged out on to the street and hacked to pieces. Maninder could not bring himself even to think about what must have happened to the cooks and managers. The local businessmen’s attempts to defend themselves had been totally overwhelmed, and what had really kept Maninder so rooted to his spot behind the counter was not the attacks that had already taken place upon his shop, but an awful premonition of what would happen when the full force of the criminal storm descended upon him.

He was wondering what on earth he or Ajay could do to escape, or maybe bargain their way out of trouble – exchange every single item in the store for their safe passage, perhaps? – when he heard the sound of gunshots: three quick, distinct rounds, followed not long afterwards by apparently random outbreaks of firing. And then there were more shots, much closer at hand, and the kids in front of the Lion Market scattered and ran.

Maninder’s spirits soared. Help had arrived!

Then he looked through the mesh shutters and saw what was really happening. Two men and a woman were dashing towards the store. A second woman was draped, apparently unconscious, over one of the men’s shoulders. Maninder frowned. He knew the man’s face, he was sure of it, but he couldn’t place him. And then it came to him. This was the customer from earlier in the evening, not long before the violence began, who’d watched Ajay resupplying the bowls outside the shop. He’d come in and bought some chocolate,
Maninder
remembered. And then he recalled what he’d thought about him: that he’d looked like a man who could handle himself.

The other man held a gun in his right hand. His left was hanging limply at his side, flapping uselessly. Blood was pouring from a hole just above the elbow. He’d been shot.

‘Help us, please!’ the first man gasped. He eased the woman off his shoulder and held her just above the ground. It was obvious he wanted to pass her under the shutters, through the empty space where the window had been. Ajay went over and grabbed the woman’s motionless body under the arms and started pulling her head first into the store. The other woman was already clambering in under her own steam.

Then Maninder saw what the four of them were running from. There was a huge crowd of rioters coming after them. Maninder watched one of the rioters lift a gun and fire on the run, and then he shrieked in fear at the clang of the bullet hitting the steel shutters.

‘No!’ he screamed. ‘You can’t come in here! Ajay, don’t let them in! We’ll all be killed!’

Ajay said nothing. He had dragged Paula Miklosko over towards the counter and propped her up so that she was sitting with her back against it. She started shaking and making incoherent, whimpering noises. Behind him, Carver was helping Schultz to get into the shop. Maninder watched as the wounded man gasped in agony with every movement of his broken arm. Carver was the last in. Ajay ignored what was happening by the window. He simply looked Maninder in the eye with an expression of pity and contempt that filled his older cousin with a shame so deep that he knew it would never leave him. And then Ajay slapped his face, a single fierce blow with the flat of his hand.

‘You are supposed to be a Sikh,’ he said. ‘A man of honour. A warrior. A lion. But you are nothing but a pathetic, screaming old woman.’

Ajay Panu turned back to the four new arrivals. ‘Can you fight?’

‘I’ve got two rounds left,’ said Schultz. ‘After that . . .’ He
nodded
at his wounded arm, grimacing as another jolt of pain stabbed through him.

‘Do you have any more weapons?’ asked Carver. ‘Another bat would do.’

‘Do you know how to use a gun?’ asked Ajay.

‘Yes.’

The simple, direct certainty of the answer told Ajay all he needed to know. He called out, ‘Maninder, give us the gun!’ but there was no need. His cousin was already reaching under the counter and unclipping a weapon. He held it out, and in the flickering light from the street Carver saw the matt black silhouette of a Mossberg 590 pump-action shotgun. This was the armed forces derivative of the standard Mossberg 500 hunter’s shotgun, chosen by criminals the world over for the same reasons as soldiers and police officers: it was tough, dependable and perfectly engineered to deliver lethal doses of twelve-bore buckshot. God only knew how these shopkeepers had come by it, but Carver was extremely glad that they had.

Chrystal screamed in alarm. The mob was massing outside the store. Bricks started hammering against the steel shutters, immediately followed by a bottle-bomb that bounced off and ignited on the pavement outside, right in front of the rioters. The front ranks of the crowd pushed backwards to get away from the flame.

Carver took charge. ‘We need to get the shutters back down. I’m going to buy us some time. You two,’ he said, pointing at the Panus, ‘get ready. I need you to get that table out of the way. Chrystal, get Paula behind the counter, under cover. Then see if you can find something to bandage Schultz’s arm.’