Fifty-First State (26 page)

Leaving the house she said to Zulfeikar, ‘This is very bad news. If there are Muslims involved it won't help us here.'

He replied, ‘Julia – I don't know what will help us.'

16 Hamscott Crescent, Hamscott Common, Kent. January 25th, 2016. 8 p.m.

When the phone rang in the Aliens' house at Hamscott Common, Rob Allen was watching floodlit football from Prague while his wife, flowered cotton pooling round her feet, pushed material through her whizzing sewing machine. ‘Answer it, Lilian,' said Rob. His wife, concentrating on a seam, muttered, ‘Rosie?' Rosie, who had protested in the pub a few months before, was at the dining room table, painting the corner of her slightly misshapen thumbnail a lighter colour, to disguise the flaw and replied, ‘Can't somebody else?' But no one moved and the phone in the hall went on ringing so Rosie got up and walked slowly from the room, waving her hand about to dry her nail varnish.

‘Hello,' she said without enthusiasm, knowing that it would not be her boyfriend, Kevin.

‘Rosie – it's Uncle Don,' came an urgent voice. ‘Get your father, will you? It's important.'

‘He's watching the football, Uncle Don,' she told him.

‘Never mind the football. This can't wait,' he said.

Rosie went back into the living room and said to her father, ‘Uncle Don. He says it can't wait.'

Her father groaned and rose reluctantly from the chair. The match went on. Lilian Allen's sewing machine continued to whirr and Rosie uncapped the nail varnish again; both women heard Rob's voice rising. Lilian pulled the fabric from the sewing machine and turned it off. Rosie put the cap back on the bottle of nail varnish. By the time they reached the hall Rob had put the phone down.

‘Some nutters have taken over the base,' he told them. ‘Apparently they've taken the troops there hostage. They're armed.'

Lilian, who had paled, said, ‘They have nuclear weapons there.'

‘Don's piling the whole family in the car and going to his brother's in Dorset,' her father reported.

‘He's what?' said Rosie. Uncle Don was not her uncle, just an old friend of her parents, whom she had known all her life. Don never did anything on impulse. It could take him a month to decide on a family holiday in exactly the same place they'd visited for the past three years.

Her mother was less taken aback. ‘It's because of the nuclear weapons,'
she said clearly, then put her back to the wall and slid down, slowly, to the carpet.

This, and the sound of police cars suddenly screaming past the house, made Rosie understand, suddenly, that something very frightening was taking place. Her father went quickly to his wife and pulled her to her feet. ‘Come and sit down, love. Rosie, put the kettle on and make your mum a cup of tea.'

Standing in the kitchen, Rosie waited for the kettle to boil. She heard the sound of a helicopter overhead. A beam raked the garden, as if looking for something on the lawn, or, perhaps, behind the garden shed. What was going on at the base – the base she had secretly detested since Kim had died?

If a nuclear weapon went off at the base, would they live? Probably not. And what about Kevin? And why, for God's sake, was she standing here, making tea? Leaving the kettle to itself she ran upstairs quietly and got her mobile phone. Back in the kitchen she pressed Kevin's number.

‘Tea!' her father called as she listened to the phone ringing. Rosie put some tea bags in the cups and waited for Kevin to answer.

When he did, he looked anxious. He tried to sound normal. ‘It's probably nothing – probably all over by now. All I know is what's on the radio and they don't seem to know much either. If they did they'd probably be stopped from telling. The story is, a gang of about twenty men took over the base a couple of hours ago. Some of them may be ex-army. They've killed a Yank and wounded another one. They put them down by the gates and opened up for them to get taken away. How the fuck could they do that – that place is guarded up to the back teeth. And guess what – my mum's hysterical. She wants me to pick her up and take her to London. She's already packed.'

‘Are you going?' asked Rosie.

‘Not without you, Rosie. What do you take me for? Anyway, I'm literally at a standstill here – oh, shit. Just a minute Rosie – roadblock.' He had a shouted conversation through his car window, then said hurriedly, ‘Rosie – there's soldiers here checking everybody's ID. I'll ring you back.'

‘Where's that tea?' called Rosie's father.

She put the mugs on a tray and went into the sitting room, looking only at the TV. There were views taken from a helicopter, showing the darkened base encircled by soldiers and military vehicles. Inside the ring there were floodlit ambulances and police vehicles. Figures reminding Rosie of her cousin's old Star Wars figures stood about in white protective suits and helmets. Then the picture changed and there were three men in the studio discussing the implications of the base seizure.

‘The ring road's got a roadblock. Soldiers are looking at all the drivers' ID,' Rosie reported.

‘I wouldn't have thought anybody outside the base was worth worrying about,' said Rob Allen. ‘They sent a note out on the dead Yank. They're a group who doesn't want the bases handed over to Americans. It was signed by a gang called the Jihad, and some British blokes, with their old regiment's name. The Prime Minister's calling them terrorists trying to hold the government to ransom. They might send the Army in.'

‘That's obvious,' said Rosie's mother, and ignoring her tea left the room. They heard her going upstairs. From the bottom of the staircase Rosie called out, ‘What are you doing, Mum?'

‘Shutting the curtains, in case the windows get broken,' called Lilian.

‘I think I'll get the cat in for the night,' Rob said. Rosie sat still on the couch, watching the flickering TV and holding her mobile phone. In the distance she heard the howl of emergency vehicles; from the garden she heard her father calling the cat, over the sound of circling helicopters.

The War Rooms, The Mall, London SW1. January 25th, 2016. 9.30 p.m.

The Emergency Council met in the extensive underground bunkers stretching from Admiralty Arch, under the Mall, to Buckingham Palace. The installation contained bedrooms, computer rooms, dining rooms, a radio station – even an operating theatre in case of need. Twenty men and women sat round the polished table, waiting for the Prime Minister.

John Stafford leaned forward and in a low voice asked Field Marshall Roger Burns, ‘Orders?'

Burns said to his trusty lieutenant, ‘General, in fact no change. Two regiments ready to deploy. No orders.'

General Stafford frowned.

Burns dropped his voice even lower and said, ‘Sorry about Carter and Reid, John.' Bob Carter and Splash Reid had served under the young Lieutenant Stafford long ago, at the start of his career, in the Falklands War. Afterwards, Stafford had said that Carter had saved his life; Carter had countered by saying that Stafford saved his. A soldier's joke. Fifteen years later, with Lieutenant Stafford now a colonel, Carter and Reid, their time up, had left and taken themselves off to a security firm specializing in sending hand-picked military advisers – or, in old-fashioned language, mercenaries – to anyone, anywhere, who wanted them and was prepared to pay. Now they'd signed the note sent out from Hamscott Common on the body of a US sergeant. Burns muttered, ‘Why'd they get mixed up in something like this?'

‘Money, probably,' said Stafford. ‘They're terrorists now. It's official.'

‘I have word they've broken open the silo containing the nuclear weapons,' Burns said steadily, in a low voice.

Stafford breathed out, hard, then put his hand to his brow and did not realize he had done so. ‘Satellite surveillance?' he asked. Burns nodded. ‘The question's still, how did they get through the perimeter?'

‘From the back, where the perimeter fences run hard up against the woods. Apparently it's been a hot topic for years – the proximity of the rear of the base to Hamscott Common. But they had motion sensors in the ground, closed-circuit camera surveillance, a patrol. They can't work out how they disabled the patrol. And not one motion sensor was disturbed, setting off all the bells and whistles—'

‘Swung through the trees,' Stafford said glumly. ‘Dropped down on the patrol then swung back up again.'

Burns looked at him sharply. ‘Your guys?'

Stafford lowered his voice further, ‘The first ones over rig a rope to bring the others across. I saw Reid do it in Armagh, before he parted company with the army.' Burns' gaze went to Ian Noakes, the Minister of Defence, sitting opposite with two of his staff behind him. Noakes' bespectacled eyes met his, then moved away. ‘Reid looked like a giant ape,' Stafford reported.

‘I spoke to the Chief of General Staff before this meeting,' said Burns. ‘He wasn't a happy man. He'd had a word with our friend Noakes earlier. All Noakes said was, “It's up to the PM; wait for the results of the meeting.”'

‘I think we're all beginning to see where we're going with this one,' Stafford said.

‘Sky high, if we don't do something.'

They were now two hours into an episode involving twenty fighter planes and an as-yet-unspecified number of nuclear warheads designed to be carried and dropped by those planes. They still had no plan of action.

The Chief of General Staff, Sir Hugo Lake, had seen the PM immediately after the taking of the base and urged him to use the emergency plan formulated to cover such a contingency. It was crude enough. Special forces would be put into the area by land or air, or both, while the perimeter of the battleground was secured by regular troops. It was a strategy that might fail for any number of reasons, but it had the merit of speed. The plan had been designed to take the occupying force by surprise.

However, the PM had refused to authorize a counter-attack, calling it overhasty and risky. He and the Defence Minister had, he told Lake, decided that the strategy stood little chance of success and could endanger the lives of the civilian and military hostages. Lake had argued; Petherbridge had been immovable. Now, it seemed, the invaders had accessed the nuclear warheads. Whether the occupiers were capable of arming them, mounting them in planes and then flying the planes was uncertain. What was certain was that, if they could arm and fly the weapons, nowhere within a 3,000 mile radius from Hamscott was safe from nuclear attack.

Twenty men and women waited for Alan Petherbridge, who was now five minutes late. Which, Burns thought, meant that he was probably on the phone to the White House or the Pentagon, or on his knees, praying.

The silence in the room was profound, as if everyone there was waiting for the
boom
and tremble of a massive above-ground explosion. The missile ore a three kiloton, a seventh of the size of the bomb which struck
Hiroshima, was capable of killing 30,000 people immediately and 50,000 later. Dropped in a city, there would be more immediate casualties at ground zero, tens of thousands, perhaps. Wherever the missile detonated, though, there would be the residual casualties caused by fallout. In a city area it would be easier to muster radiation suits and decontamination units and to provide hospital space, but harder to control a fleeing population blocking the roads. In a country area there would be fewer casualties but it would take longer to bring in help. Judith Woodward, the Health Minister, quantified what she could quantify, organized her own statement, her own arguments, and then, being human, thought of the loss of her career when the provisional plans for such an event went wrong. And then of her impending divorce and her son and daughter, who were living temporarily with her parents in St Albans. After that, like everyone else in the room, she wondered – where was the Prime Minister?

Adam Simcox, from the British Nuclear Agency, mechanically answered a question from a senior civil servant at the Department of Defence. In return he asked if the military were being held back from making an assault on the base and was told they were not. He looked at Field Marshal Burns and at Sir Hugo Lake, and wondered if he was hearing the truth.

Sir John Smythe, the Met Commissioner, gave a note to the officer behind him. His mood was grim. It had been Petherbridge who had tried to persuade the then Prime Minister, Muldoon, not to use the Army to clear the base when it had been harmlessly occupied by demonstrators in June. On that occasion the PM had allowed, or yielded to pressure to allow, the landing by US marines and that had resulted in the death of Kim Durham, in front of her seven-year-old son. On that occasion, Petherbridge, then Home Secretary, had shown restraint and sanity. But now, only six months later, Petherbridge was Prime Minister and the base occupied by more aggressive forces. Smythe already knew that the military plan in place to deal with events like this had been rejected. For himself, he had never been a big supporter of the plan, which, he thought, basically involved no more than sending in the Special Forces fast and hoping they'd pull it off. A gamble, but not taking it meant that the terrorists had now opened the nuclear silo. It looked as if it might have been wiser to send in the commandos. It was too late now. But Petherbridge had refused to use the British Army, just as his predecessor had apparently refused to involve the British police force. So what, or who, were they waiting for? There could not have been a man or woman in the room who did not suspect they were waiting for US Special Forces, US Marines, the 101st Airborne.

So, Smythe thought, they were all sitting here now waiting for the
Seventh Cavalry or for the kamikaze buggers on the base to let off a nuclear device and blow themselves, the cops, the army, the firemen the paramedics and half the county of Kent into kingdom come.

The PM's PPS, was sitting there like a stuffed dummy at the head of the table, standing in for his master and disguising his discomfort about the delay almost well enough, when, thank God, Sir Hugo Lake, six foot four and with a chest solid with medals, got to his feet and asked him, ‘Mr Gordon-Garnett – might I ask how long the PM is to be delayed? If the delay is to be a long one, perhaps we could continue with our work while we wait?'