Revenger (15 page)

‘Listen carefully,’ he said. ‘Take that tub and fill it with the soap flakes till you’re about an inch from the top. Got that?’

Maninder nodded eagerly.

‘Good,’ said Carver. ‘Now pour the lighter fluid on top and stick it in the microwave, full power, for two minutes.’

As Maninder got to work, Carver called out, ‘How are we doing at the front, Chrystal?’

‘Nothing yet. It’s like everyone’s vanished or something. Maybe they’ve all gone.’

‘Don’t count on it.’

Ajay arrived with the ladder. Carver took it from him, along with the screwdriver. He placed the ladder beneath the air-conditioning vent, climbed up and unscrewed the grille. Then he called down to Ajay, ‘Hand me that flour. Thanks.’

Carver opened the flour and poured it all into the front of the air-con unit. The fan began wafting it towards him and Carver coughed as the fine flour got into his nostrils and throat. He quickly screwed the grille back on and came down the ladder as a dusty miasma of flour began seeping from the grille into the air all around it. Ajay looked on with the look of a man who was desperate to know what the hell was going on but hardly dared to ask. Before he could say anything, Carver had another question: ‘Is the fan on this thing adjustable?’

‘Yeah. Those buttons on the front, at the bottom. Low power to the left. Full power on the right. You should be able to reach them all right.’

The unit was on low power. Carver pressed the medium button and the flow of flour into the atmosphere became a little stronger.

The microwave pinged. The two minutes were up.

‘Take the tub out,’ said Carver to Maninder Panu. ‘What does it look like?’

‘Like a sort of jelly,’ Panu replied.

‘Perfect. Give it a stir, then put it back in the microwave and stick the can of deodorant into the tub.’

‘I am sorry, but could you please explain the point of all this?’ Maninder asked.

‘There isn’t time. Just trust me. And when you’ve done it, close the microwave, but do not, repeat, do not turn it on.’

Maninder got to work. He was just closing the door of the microwave when there was a stifled cry of alarm from the window. ‘Hey, tough guy . . .’ Chrystal said nervously. ‘I think you’d better come here.’

‘Turn out the lights,’ Carver said to Panu. Then he made his way to the window. It only took one look to see that his worst fears had been confirmed. The other side knew exactly what they were doing. They were massing for their attack, and as he saw them take up their positions Carver had to admit that he couldn’t have done it any better himself.

He turned to face the others, not letting any of his worries cross his face. In a firm, confident tone of voice he told Ajay Panu, ‘Why don’t you take your baseball bat and go and give Schultz a hand at the back of the building?’

‘Understood.’

Carver gave him a quick, appreciative nod. Panu and Schultz were going to take some beating, even allowing for Schultz’s wrecked left arm. And he didn’t need them to hold out for long – even a minute might be enough. Now he focused on Chrystal and Maninder. ‘You two, take Paula and get down to the basement, quick.’

They propped the shocked, semi-conscious woman between them and carried her off towards the storeroom, Maninder lighting the way with a black rubber torch he’d retrieved from beneath the counter. These days, with power cuts a regular occurrence, everyone kept camping lanterns handy for when the electricity went off.
The Panus were no exception, and Maninder gave Chrystal one to carry in her spare hand, too. As soon as they were gone, Carver set the air-conditioning to full blast and turned on the microwave. Through the window he could see the bizarre combination of a plastic tub filled with grey jelly, with a can of spray deodorant sticking out of it, turning round and round. In his earpiece he heard Schultz giving Ajay Panu some instructions and then a crash as something heavy and metallic was heaved over in an attempt to block the door into the yard outside.

Then Carver heard Schultz, very calm, very professional, saying, ‘They’re coming over the fences into the yard, boss. Fuck me, there’s a lot of the bastards, an’ all.’

‘Same this side,’ said Carver. ‘Good luck, mate.’ Then he took up a position behind a shelf, close to the storeroom door, and waited for all hell to break loose.

34

THE PEOPLE MILLING
around Netherton Street were like any other lawless crowd: a very small quantity of hardcore agitators and organizers at the top; a larger number of committed followers; and then an overwhelming majority of incidental hangers-on. Donny Bakunin’s first task was therefore to get the leaders onside. If he could only do that, the rest of the herd would follow like iron filings after magnets.

It wasn’t easy. The dozen or so gang-members and career criminals who formed the hard core of the rioters had no interest whatever in the political implications of their actions. They simply wanted to loot as much as they could, as quickly and efficiently as possible. Their status with their underlings came from their ability, in the most literal possible sense, to deliver the goods. They had no objection whatever to violence, provided that they were dishing it out – beating and knifing restaurant waiters and pub customers was fine. But being shot and even killed by armed men who knew what they were doing was another matter altogether.

Bakunin listened to the sociopathic thugs and self-professed
hard
men make their excuses for accepting defeat. And then he said, ‘I understand. I get it. You’re all a bunch of gutless cunts and you don’t mind who knows it.’

While the shock was in their eyes and before any of them could retaliate, he stepped up his attack. ‘Because if you walk away from here, with your tails between your legs, people are going to know you didn’t have the balls to beat a bunch of fucking shopkeepers. And they’re going to start thinking they don’t have to worry about you, because you’re just a bunch of bitches. You’ll be a fucking laughing stock. You might as well cut your own balls off right now.’

Bakunin looked around the assembled gaggle of shaved heads, thick necks, mad eyes and tattooed skin that surrounded him and asked, ‘Is that what you want?’

He was met with a sort of sulky, wordless grumble of dissatisfaction.

‘I said, is that what you want?’ Bakunin repeated, blithely unaware that he was echoing the way that Mark Adams, the politician he hated above all others, had wound up a hesitant crowd at the O2 Arena.

‘’Course it fuckin’ ain’t,’ a voice replied.

‘Then do what I say and we’ll overrun these shopkeepers like a steamroller crushing ants. We’ll smash into their precious little shop, and we’ll fuck it up and fuck them up, and by the time we’ve finished and they’re all dead and ripped to pieces then everyone will know that that is what you get for trying to defy us. And then they won’t laugh at you. They’ll be on their knees, sucking your cocks and begging for your mercy.’

At any other time, a man like Donny Bakunin might not have got away with talking like that. But the blood and matter drying on his skin, leaving drip marks all over his hair, his skull-like face and his scrawny neck, had given him the look of an ancient witch doctor, painted in gore. The sight of him struck some primitive chord in the men surrounding him, and they came over to his way of thinking. They then took the message back to their people. The word spread through the bigger groups milling listlessly around
the
fringes of Netherton Road or picking their way through looted shops, searching for one last overlooked item to steal. And then they were all back, his battalions of the ignorant, the unemployed and the dispossessed. Bakunin felt almost paternal towards them, as though he were a political Dr Frankenstein and these the monsters he – and others like him – had created in the educational laboratories of a thousand failed schools.

Aptly enough, they were going into battle behind a garbage truck. By ordering one end of the street to be blocked with cars, trash cans and anything else that came to hand, Bakunin had been able to move the lumbering machine from its original post. Its presence had encouraged his people to come out of the shadows and start massing on the streets. That was what Chrystal had seen. That was when Carver had turned on the microwave. Another half minute or so had passed as final preparations were made. Now the truck was rumbling slowly down the street, offering cover to the hundred-plus rioters trotting along in its wake like infantrymen behind a tank.

The truck stopped opposite the Lion Market, executed a slow, ponderous three-point turn and then accelerated towards the metal shutters. A roar went up from the people behind it. There was a crackle of gunfire as shots were blasted into the night sky, and then they began their charge towards the perforated metal shutters of the helpless supermarket – a sociopathic tsunami about to crash down upon the little store and wash it and its occupants clean away.

35

THE MAPS AND
numbers had vanished from the screens beside the O2 stage and Mark Adams’s face had taken their place again: ‘For fourteen straight years from 1996 to 2009 the most popular boy’s name in this country was Jack,’ he said. ‘Then in 2010 a new name hit the top, and it’s stayed there ever since. It wasn’t William or Harry or Charlie or Jim . . . It certainly wasn’t Mark . . . no, the most common new boy’s name in Britain for the past five years has been . . . Mohammed.’

There was a wordless murmur in the crowd, a sense of bodies shifting, a palpable unease.

‘If you want to know how Britain has changed, and will continue to change unless something is done, then Jack giving way to Mohammed is all you need to be told,’ said Adams.

‘The change began about twenty-five years ago. In the 1990s the British population rose by about 2.2 million. According to official National Census figures, some six hundred thousand of those 2.2 million new Britons were white. And 1.6 million – almost three-quarters of the entire new growth – belonged to ethnic minorities.’

He paused for a while to let the facts sink in. Assuming that they were facts, which many in the media covering the event seriously doubted.

‘That can’t be right . . . can it?’ asked one.

‘No, it’s Far Right,’ another replied. ‘Just listen to him. He might as well be reading an editorial from
Der Stürmer
. . .’

Yet if Adams really was the Hitler he was accused of being, he wasn’t screaming at his audience, or shaking his fist as the original version had done. He was sticking to his tone of reasonable, factual, logical analysis.

‘Over the first decade of the new century the population kept growing, and the growth was overwhelmingly among the ethnic population. In London, for example, roughly three out of ten people are immigrants. But six out of ten children have at least one parent who was born outside this country. So thirty per cent of the people are having sixty per cent of the children . . . and the people who were born here aren’t having many children at all.

‘You can see the same pattern all over the country. For several years, the majority of schoolkids in cities including Leicester, Birmingham and great swathes of London have been from ethnic communities. Now that applies to grown-ups as well. Leicester recently became the first city in Britain in which whites are officially the minority of the population. Others will follow very soon.

‘Now, let’s not forget that these islands have always been a destination for immigrants. We’ve always had a mixture of Celtic, Viking, Roman and Saxon blood. But even allowing for that, there is such a thing as the British people. And until very recently it was possible to say who they were and what they were like.

‘They were white. They were overwhelmingly Christian. They were united by the world’s most magnificent language, by the kings and queens who ruled over them and the parliament that gave them their voice. They were courageous in battle, extraordinarily inventive in industry and science, and creative in the arts. They had a profound belief in fairness, free speech and
the
rule of law. They fought for what they believed in, even when the cause seemed lost.

‘But what’s happening to the British now?’ Adams asked. ‘Just by seeing the massive change in school populations, it’s clear that they are reproducing much less quickly than the rest of the population. In fact, one hundred average native British produce just eighty babies between them.’

New graphics appeared on the screen: a cluster of white figures like the male and female symbols on toilet doors, set against a dark-grey background, with the number 100 next to it. Beneath that cluster was a vertical white line down to a second, slightly smaller group of figures and another number: 80.

‘Now that next generation reproduces at the same rate, and they produce sixty-four babies,’ Adams said.

Now there was a third cluster, somewhat smaller than the one directly above it, but appreciably diminished from the very first.

Adams picked up on that difference. ‘So you started with one hundred adults, and now you’ve got just sixty-four grandchildren. That’s down by more than a third. And if they keep reproducing just like their parents and grandparents, well, they’ll produce just fifty-one great-grandchildren. So the native British population has halved in three generations.’

Up on the screen, a fourth, much smaller cluster of little white figures made the point impossible to miss or ignore. And more clusters, each smaller than the last appeared as Adams intoned, ‘And forty-one great-great-grandchildren . . . And thirty-three great-great-great-grandchildren: just a third as many native English people as we started out with . . . And there’s just a quarter left by the next generation: twenty-six descendants of the one hundred British we started out with. That is what is going to happen to the British race unless something is done to reverse the trend before it’s too late.

‘Now there will be people watching this who will say that I am being racist, just by mentioning this fact. But how on earth is it racist to be concerned about the future of one’s own people? No
other
nation feels this shame. Russians, Japanese, Jews, Italians – they all talk about the crisis in their own populations, and what can be done to reverse it. But not the British.