Revenger (16 page)

‘So I ask you: do we really hate ourselves so much that we won’t do anything to ensure our self-preservation? Is it racist now to care about oneself, one’s children and one’s grandchildren? I do not deny anyone else the right to maintain their nation, their race and their culture. All I ask is the right to maintain my own.

‘Once again: I have no hostility whatsoever towards anyone, of any colour or religion, who wants to commit himself or herself to this country, work hard, make a contribution and share in our culture. All I’m saying is that if we don’t wake up and start dealing with our self-preservation now, then it’s going to be too late.’

36

AS MARK ADAMS
would happily have pointed out, given the opportunity, British soldiers spent hundreds of years standing and waiting for their enemy – from the thin lines of archers charged by French knights in armour at Crécy and Agincourt, to the small band of men confronting thousands of Zulu warriors at Rorke’s Drift. They stood and waited . . . and waited some more . . . waited until the absolutely final possible second before unleashing their arrows and bullets. Now Carver stood in a corner of the Lion Market, close by the storeroom door, with one of the shelves for shelter. And he waited.

From where he stood, he had no view through the shutters, but he did not need it. He could hear the garbage truck’s engine revving, and the shouts of the crowd. He sensed the noise coming closer and the vibrations of the truck’s tyres and engine through the floor. Louder and louder the noise became as he told himself to stay calm, breathe steadily and maintain control of his pounding heart and the rush of blood and adrenalin through his body.

Closer . . . louder . . . his guts and throat tightening . . .

And then the truck hit the shutters with a crashing, clanging scream of metal, and smashed through the flimsy perforated steel like a charging rhino through a mud hut. Carver screwed up his eyes as the truck’s headlights cut through the darkness of the shop, and the first rioters appeared on either side of the great steel beast, silhouetted against the blinding white glare as they picked their way through the debris.

There were angry shouts as the charging mass behind barged into the backs of the more slowly moving people at the front, and a couple of cries of pain as rioters cut themselves against the jagged edges of the smashed shutters.

A few more seconds passed. The red digital readout of the microwave timer kept counting down towards zero. More light, fine flour pumped out into the air around the air-conditioner.

Then the wave of people broke upon the shore of the supermarket and suddenly the rioters were coming in by the handful, then tens of them, filling up the aisles, pressing towards the corner where Carver stood concealed behind his shelf.

They thought the shop was empty. They thought it was theirs for the taking. Now they were whooping and cheering, and the only thoughts they had of fighting came from the desire to barge one another out of the way as they raced for the shelves where the alcohol was kept.

Someone fired another gun, glass shattered and an angry voice shouted, ‘Not now! Kill the shopkeepers first!’

The skirmishing around the booze racks broke up as the mood in the shop changed once more. ‘Kill them!’ the voice shouted again.

In his ears Carver could hear the sound of Schultz, breathing heavily, swearing in pain and fighting fury as he and Ajay Panu fought to hold back the human tide by the back door.

Still Carver waited.

Finally, when the rioters were almost close enough to touch, when he could not only see and hear them but smell them, too . . . finally Carver stepped out from behind the shelf and fired three more times. Each explosive impact of hammer on cartridge was
followed
by the sound of another round being pumped into the breech in a smooth, relentless sequence. His targets were all male, none more than ten feet from where he stood, and this time he shot to maim, rather than kill instantly.

A twelve-bore cartridge, fired at a distance of less than five metres, can rip an arm right off. And when that happens, the sight of a man with blood spurting from his raw, tattered stump doesn’t look half as funny as it might do on a video game, or in a scene from Monty Python’s
Holy Grail
. Nor does even the most hardened, psychologically damaged street kid react well to being hit in the face by a severed limb.

The screams of a man whose stomach has just been blown away and whose entrails are unravelling in slimy coils across a linoleum floor strike fear into any heart. And when there are two of them lying howling in front of their mates, and a third is running around, screaming, like the human answer to a headless chicken, and people are shouting out in alarm because there’s blood all over their face, or they’re slipping on the intestines underfoot, then even the biggest, angriest crowd can be seized by confusion, chaos and panic.

And in that chaos Samuel Carver slipped through the door behind him and into the second battle that was going on inside the storeroom.

37

SCHULTZ AND AJAY
Panu were desperately pushing against the metal shelving they’d leaned against the back door. The top half of the door itself had long since been obliterated by a combination of gunfire, iron pipes and even an axe that one giant, Viking-like rioter had smashed against the wood until Schultz had stood up, aimed through the hole the man had made and blown him away with one of his two precious bullets. He and Panu were both powerful, heavily built men, but they were tiring badly, and even a man of Schultz’s fighting pedigree – a Marine commando who had spent most of his career in the SBS – could not for ever overcome the handicap of a shattered arm, nor ignore the pain and blood-loss that came with it.

Panu was leaning his left shoulder against the shelf to prevent the invaders from pushing it over, and using his right arm to swing his baseball bat at anyone who clambered up over the top. But he, too, was now wounded. The full force of the shotgun blasts from the other side of the door had missed him, deflected by the shelves and the boxes filled with packets of rice and sugar that had been
piled
on them. But still he was peppered with bits of shot and splinters of wood, and the dark pinpricks on his shirt were slowly seeping together until more and more of his upper body was slick with seeping blood.

Now another attacker was clambering over the shelves. Ignoring Panu’s attempts to bat him away, he crouched at the top and then sprung down, straight on to Panu. The attacker’s momentum caught Panu by surprise and knocked him off his feet. The big Sikh hit the concrete floor with an impact that drove the air from his lungs and as he lay helplessly pinned to the ground, the attacker lifted a carving knife into the air, held in both his hands, pointing directly down at Panu’s throat. He arched his back, brought his arms up to the top of the killing stroke, and then launched all his strength through his shoulders and arms to bring the blade plunging down.

Schultz fired his final bullet, a shot to the attacker’s temple from point-blank range that killed him instantly.

But the action of turning to shoot took Schultz’s attention away from the men climbing up the shelves and exposed his shattered left arm at the precise moment that another man jumped down from the top of the metal and hit him almost precisely at the point of the wound. The pain was more excruciating than any Schultz had ever experienced. It left him sickened and paralysed with agony. He was barely even conscious of the machete swinging down towards his throat. With Panu still struggling to free himself from the weight of the corpse now lying on top of him there was no one to save Schultz as the blade sliced deep into his abdomen, just below the ribcage.

At that precise moment Carver came through the door from the supermarket. He blew away the man standing over Schultz, then pumped the gun and hit another shadowy figure looming over the shelving. Carver raced across to Schultz, who was lying in the middle of a rapidly expanding pool of blood. It was obvious that there was no saving him, but he seemed to be trying to say something. Carver bent down and caught the words, ‘. . . meant to
be
like this’, before the flickering life in his old comrade died.

Carver wasted no time in mourning: leave that for the funeral. He switched his attention to Panu, pulled the body off him, lashed out with the butt of his gun, cracking it into a grimacing, tattooed face that had suddenly appeared out of the darkness, and shouted, ‘Run for the basement. Go! Go!’

Panu scrambled away on all fours until he found his feet for the last few paces that took him to the door to the basement steps. Carver followed him, stepping backwards, keeping his gun still pointed towards the shelves.

He had two cartridges left.

A hand clutching a gun appeared over the top of the metalwork and fired blindly downwards.

Carver ignored it. His attention had suddenly swung one hundred and eighty degrees to the sudden sound of hammering on another door – the one into the supermarket. With an explosion of dust and wood, the lock was blown away and the door swung open.

Carver fired another round straight into the exposed doorway, hitting at least one, possibly two targets. Then, as the bodies were thrown out of the way and the first rioters from the supermarket ran in, just as the invaders from the back yard began to climb en masse over Schultz and Panu’s abandoned barricade, Carver ran for the basement door, yanked it open, dashed through, pulled it close behind him and turned the key in the lock.

He threw himself down the steps as the first bullets ripped into the door.

The door crashed open. A rioter burst through and stood at the top of the stairs. He was a wiry little hoodie with a hunting knife in his hand. Carver had one round of ammunition left. He could use it to take out a rioter, or he could give one of the women an instant, painless death instead of the gang-raped mutilation to which the rioters would subject her.

He was just about to make his choice.

And then the timer in the microwave went, ‘Ping!’

38

A COMBINATION OF
soap flakes and lighting fluid makes a substance that is both highly combustible and very sticky. It is, in effect, a domestic form of napalm.

An aerosol can of deodorant contains chemicals that react under intense heat to create a violent explosion.

Fine-grade flour is, like icing sugar, a surprisingly explosive substance when suspended in air, which is why history is littered with examples of fatal explosions in flour mills. The principle is very simple. Explosions are intense chemical reactions that require an energy source and a supply of oxygen. Flour and sugar are both powerful fuels, which is why we eat them, and air, of course, contains oxygen. A full packet of tightly packed flour has relatively little contact with the air around it and is thus quite safe. But when every single particle in that bag is individually suspended in air, then the proportions of fuel and oxygen are potentially far more dangerous.

But there is still one more element to add to the mix before anything goes bang: a detonator. And that was provided by the contents of the microwave.

The heating of the aerosol deodorant in the Lion Market microwave set off one explosion that blew open the oven and projected a blazing hot spatter of napalm into the air inside the Lion Market. This in turn detonated a secondary, even more powerful explosion of the flour suspended in the atmosphere.

A deafening blast of white-hot flame ripped through the packed shop. It set light to any flammable materials. Much of the napalm was vaporized immediately by the blast, but the rest stuck to people’s clothes, skin and hair, turning them into human torches. The shock wave from the explosion, travelling at supersonic speeds, tore through the rioters’ bodies, inflicting catastrophic soft-tissue damage. Most critically it induced severe pulmonary contusions, bursting blood vessels and causing a condition known as blast lung, in which victims drown in their own blood as fluids build up in their shattered lungs until breathing becomes impossible. As ways of dying go, it is almost as horrible as being burnt alive.

The blast ripped through the open door into the storeroom, and though its effects were far less devastating than they had been in the shop itself, the deafening sound of the explosion, the flames, the screams and the terrible sight of people tearing at their clothes and their own flesh, desperately trying to pull away the napalm, which stuck to them like burning coal superglued to their bodies, were enough to end any further thoughts of combat or robbery. All that anyone who was lucky enough to be alive and more or less in one piece – temporarily deafened, perhaps, but flame-free and still able to breathe – wanted to do was to get the hell out as quickly as they possibly could.

They scrambled back over the shelves, out into the yard, and retraced the steps that had got them into this earthly hell in the first place. And meanwhile, in the shop, all that could be heard were crackles of flame from a few small fires, moans of pain from those burn-victims who were still able to breathe, and the gurgles, wheezes and desperate, futile gasps of dying looters being killed by their own blood.

39

DOWN IN THE
cellar Carver heard the explosion, the screams, the shouts of panic and the scurrying feet desperately rushing to get away. In the cold light of the camping lantern he could see Chrystal sitting weeping with Ajay Panu’s bear-like arm around her shoulder. Paula Miklosko was looking a little more conscious of what was going on around her, though she was still a long way from being fully alert. Maninder Panu was sitting alone, staring into the darkness of the basement, as if his circuits had simply overloaded under the strain of what had happened since the riot first began. Barely fifteen minutes had gone by, but it might as well have been a lifetime.

Carver crouched on his haunches beside him. ‘Where’s the control-box for the CCTV?’ he asked.

Maninder said nothing. Carver repeated the question. Still no response.