Wings of the Morning (52 page)

King spent a long night in deep contemplation, looking out over the peaceful Millennium Ocean, which greeted the view from his balcony. The task in hand was not that hard for him and he should
have finished by midnight, but he kept getting distracted by memory. It was all about just one day a long time back, but it had been significant and it had combined jungle action with bullshit
diplomacy — just the mixture he was wrestling with now. So he took his time and sipped at his rye and water as the memories marched through the night hours.

As a new day dawned, King assembled the pages of notes which he had been compiling in his spare, neat hand. He took them to the shredder which stood in the corner of the kitchen. All that
remained of his labours was the single sheet entitled ‘Analysis and Action Plan’. The concise summary read:

AA) Millennium is established, but not accepted.

BB) There is evidence, drawn from published facts and informed speculation, that the prominent governments of the European Union are preparing a political intervention with military support. The
British, the French, the Germans and the Portuguese are all in favour. The Dutch and the Spanish are against.

CC) The thesis advanced is that Millennium has resulted from an illegal act of aggression. The world, led by the former colonial powers, should take steps to dissolve the unelected government in
Century and simultaneously appoint the former President’s son, who is in exile in Estonia.

DD) The Organisation of African Unity (OAU) endorses the principle, but will commit neither funds nor forces, professing greater priorities. South Africa likewise. Russia has ‘no comment
to make’. The USA believes that ‘this is a matter for Africa, those living there and those who formed her as she is today’. Shorthand saying that Bill Clinton has no wish to get
involved during the last months of his Presidency.

EE) The British are leading the charge. Prime Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook are making a rare common cause, Blair being flushed with success in Sierra Leone and Cook
seeing an opportunity to practice his ethical dimension. Civil Servants are, however, very sceptical and the Whitehall mandarins seek to cool the passions of their political masters.

FF) This background serves to justify the advice I gave you at our dinner in October 1998. We need to influence a delay. A quick punch on the nose to encourage more reflection before action.

King read this over and drove himself to Founder’s Hill for breakfast with David Heaven. Their accompanying conversation was brief. David was in full agreement.

‘We need more time, King, more breathing space. Can you give us that — even a few months more?’

King then described his plan which David heard with a grunt of admiration. Short, sharp and simple. But also sweet and sour. They would get in two separate and very different blows. Neither
would be very wounding except perhaps to pride, but taken together they might well do enough to bring that bit of respite.

‘Go for it,’ David said, ‘and don’t worry about the money. It’s really not much and God knows, we’ve got enough. You’ve done well with this King, I
wonder where you get the ideas.’

King departed in deep and rich reflection. Africa had left its scars on him. The pain of this dark cruel continent made him wonder how there could be found a better way, which influenced his
support for David’s Zero from the moment he heard of it. He’d won his victory in Liberia through a mixture of thump and thought. By clobbering the guard, he’d diverted
Andrade’s attention and conned him into accepting half price and the loss of his own life, a fate richly deserved. It was the combination punch which worked, sweet and sour as David said. It
was time to try that again.

David was also pondering as he went to his office. It really did frustrate him. Things were going better than he had dared hope. The infrastructure of the city had improved dramatically and they
had pushed out into the provinces with all possible speed, so that the reports which he received daily from Felix Maas were telling the tale of people now choosing to leave Century to resettle in
their home towns and villages. The newly constituted National police force was making flying progress under the Inspector General who had come to them from Ethiopia, the healthcare benefits to all
were spectacularly apparent and they had built and/or renovated no less than forty-three schools — all in less than five months. Best of all, a mere five per cent of the artisans and experts
who had arrived on the ‘Angel’ had chosen to leave. Why did the bloody Europeans have to be so blind and mealy mouthed?

King lost no time in getting on with it. He returned straight to his apartment and called Bill Evans at The Mansion House. It was a simple conversation because he’d been through the detail
with Bill before leaving London. They talked for an evening in a quiet pub and King had been impressed by the range of Bill Evans’ contacts. As his final word to conclude this phone call,
King said to Bill ‘housemartin’, this being the prearranged code that he should now go to Martin Kirchoff to access the £50,000 in cash which he would need to deliver the
goods.

Bill Evans went to work. At 0233 in the morning of Wednesday 10th May, a large Scania truck with a 40 foot box trailer made its quiet way around London’s Embankment past the Tate Gallery,
heading for the Houses of Parliament. It bore Dutch registration plates and was identified by graphics and logo as an intercontinental transporter. One of the leviathan travellers which operate at
all times of the clock, it carried a full load, but with a single occupant of the cab. He was English, a character and a bit of a rogue with a record of making mischief. He answered to the
sobriquet of Shorty Driver, but he was born with neither name. He was ‘Shorty’ because he stood only just over 5’2” and ‘Driver’ because he was outstandingly
good at that function.

Shorty was well known to Bill Evans who had felt his collar more than once during his policing years. Bill had no difficulty in recruiting Shorty for this mission. The whole idea appealed to the
little man’s sense of fun and then there was the reward — £10,000 paid in cash and up front. Shorty had wondered about the end objective but he knew better then to ask and much
better than to take the money and run. Nobody risked that with Bill Evans. Shorty had good contacts in the international trucking community and quickly found his mark in a Turk who drove for a
haulage company in Rotterdam which carried machined goods between the UK and the Balkans. For some serious money, the Turk had agreed to be sandbagged in a layby outside Ramsgate on the Monday
evening and he was still lodged in a dingy B&B making reports to his employers and the Kent Police. Meanwhile, Shorty had taken over the vehicle and made his untroubled way to a warehouse in
the London suburb of Mitcham where the trailer was repacked and he had time to ensure that the Scania was set up to his liking. Shorty seemed childlike in his stature beside the towering cab of the
vehicle, but once inside it and behind the wheel, his legs helpfully stretched by his Cuban heeled boots, Shorty was in his element and a virtuoso with the controls of any truck, whether they be
set to the left or to the right.

He didn’t need to check his watch to know that he was bang on time as he slipped idly around Parliament Square and turned left into Whitehall, heading towards Trafalgar Square. There was
no one around at that hour to confirm that his vehicle was authorised to be in the heart of London, and he drew scarcely a glance from the duty police officers watching over the closed gates from
Whitehall into Downing Street, from within which the lights of the Prime Minister’s Office at Number 10 burned constantly. Shorty let the huge Scania potter past on low revs and with minimum
engine noise. The whole rig felt balanced and poised, precisely to his exacting standards. He slid closer to the kerb and stopped. He released his seat belt, lit a cigarette and let it dangle from
the corner of his mouth.

A few minutes later, at 0246, the policemen at the Downing Street Gate heard the throaty bellow of a heavy engine powering up. By then, Shorty had engaged reverse and was on the move. His hands
on the steering wheel and his right foot on the accelerator were moving in a coordinated blur, his head remained fixed forward but his eyes flicked constantly from mirror to mirror. He built up his
speed as he moved his vehicle much further out into the middle of this prime London thoroughfare, dominated by the Cenotaph. Shorty was changing his lock, changing his direction, maintaining his
engine revs and further increasing his speed.

The astonished guardians at the gates could do more than shout a warning to each other as the massive trailer back swung in at them and Shorty gave himself a snort of satisfaction at the
precision of his manoeuvre. With tyres screaming their protest, the tail of his trailer, so far behind his seat in the cab, was only a degree or so off square as it met the low pedestrian railing
across the entrance to Downing Street and it punched straight through. Immediately behind the railing, shut firm and bolted, stood the infinitely stronger construction of heavy, wrought iron gates.
Shorty Driver was as prepared for them as he could be. A last glance in his mirrors told him that he was on target. He whipped his steering back from full lock to dead centre. He lifted himself
slightly from his seat back as the shock of collision travelled up the length of his trailer and through the fifth wheel coupling into his cab. The noise of the impact was shocking in the still of
the summer night. His entire rig was brought to an instant halt but he kept his foot to the floor for a final couple more seconds and swung the steering wheel from one extreme lock to the other.
There was renewed crunching as the trailer skewed a further inch or so through the gates to stick finally and firm.

Shorty was instantly on the move. Like a whippet, he was out of his cab, door left open, engine running, lights on. He slithered down the handholds, hitting the tarmac of Whitehall and
scuttering across to the shadows of the far pavement, his little boots ringing as he ran. And ran. Shorty was clean away up Whitehall before anyone could see him, much less lay hands on him. He
skipped across Trafalgar Square, running up past St Martin in the Fields and on eventually to a safe burrow somewhere in Soho.

He left pandemonium behind him. To supplement the police on duty, night workers from buildings in Whitehall and Downing Street started to gather on either side of the cork, stuck in its bottle.
The few residents of the locality, amongst them the most influential in the land, were startled from their sleep by the noise and the shouting which followed. Successively senior national security
figures were alerted and summoned by urgent call. There was one concern on the minds of all.

Bomb.

By 0330 an avalanche of emergency vehicles had descended on Whitehall — fire engines, ambulances, innumerable police cars and vans, one or two with dogs and handlers. Leading them all was
a bomb disposal team which left their colleagues to clear the area, evacuate the buildings and close the roads while they went methodically to work on Shorty’s Scania and trailer.

It took them until midday to find what was not there. The commander of the team had started with the truck, suspicious that engine shut down would trigger whatever lay in the box container
behind. But they could find nothing, and after an hour of painstaking investigation, the vehicle lay silent. By then, they had daylight to help them as they moved to the trailer, the team still
convinced that they were to be challenged by an explosive device of some sort. Why else would someone perpetrate this outrage?

In nearby Police Headquarters at Scotland Yard, significant figures had gathered, The Commissioner, Head of Counter Terrorism, senior heads from both MI5 and MI6, scientists from Aldershot,
communications experts from GCHQ Cheltenham: all powerless to act without further information.

Then came the news that the disposal team had the trailer loading doors open and were confronted by a solid wall of breeze blocks, neatly arranged from side to side and from top to bottom. It
was 9 am before they had removed them all without incident, to find a second wall of the same behind. And then another. And another.

As the morning wore on and the waiting became more irksome, the mystery was intensified by the absolute absence of demand or threat or communication of any sort. And the pile of discarded breeze
blocks on Downing Street grew ever larger.

At 12 noon precisely, the disposal team commander had worked his way to the very front of the trailer and there at last, he found something different. He checked it over with infinite care
before he decided. This might be a message of some sort, but it was not going to explode. He removed his protective headgear and studied the plain square clock, set into a wooden frame which was
secured dead centre in the final wall of blocks. The hands now stood at 1232 and ticked over to 1233 beneath his gaze. The face of the clock was plain and unmarked by numerals or symbols. Its
colour was the azure blue of a cloudless sky, overlaid with the thin white outline of a rising crescent moon.

Since the early hours, there had been a media frenzy which went on mounting during the day. Parliament Square and all Whitehall was cordoned off behind police barricades, Westminster Bridge was
accessible only from the Embankment. There were endless radio interviews with the informed and the less so, television crews demonstrated their ingenuity in finding even a remote vantage point from
which they could present the scene. Such pictures were immediately beamed around the world, and King Offenbach enjoyed seeing them in his Century apartment. He sent a one word text to Bill Evans,
but Bill was too busy to read it, being at the time engaged in passing another hefty sized briefcase stuffed with cash to his second contractor.

The first Millennium message and flag was delivered by buffalo. The second was as subtle as silk. Since it was a Wednesday, Prime Minister’s Questions were to take place in the House of
Commons, and the PM was not prepared to cry off this commitment. He and his family had been spirited out of Downing Street into St James’s Park and he had gone from there to his office in the
House. He had no comment for the Press on what was happening in Whitehall. That would follow when the Security Services had completed their work and their assessment. For himself, he wanted
somebody, somewhere to have the gumption to explain what the hell as going on. All he knew so far was that an audacious and irritating effort had been made to wave the National flag of this tin pot
regime right under his nose. The buggers down there deserved to get poleaxed if only for that effrontery, but London definitely needed to keep this quiet. It would not make them look too clever to
the moaners in Europe who were dragging their feet over setting up the task force to go in there. Quite how they were going to make a public explanation of the truck was something else. That would
take vivid imagination and some lively work with the Press, but they were well equipped to do that.