Into the street roll armoured personnel carriers, trundling slowly. The streets are devoid of life, with every shop shuttered and every patch of sidewalk bare. Along the moment’s right flank there passes the black-clad figure, striking out at all who would dare to press him to show his faith. An explosion, then some minutes later another. Shattered bodies scatter across the street. In the darkness of the night, a powerful searchlight sweeps up and down the face of a tower while the chattering of gunfire rips holes in the sky. A column of smoke rises, its blackness barely distinguishable from the night. Days pass, then pass back, looping around in a curvature that seems at once to encompass all that’s happened, compressing events vast and dissimilar into a single point that defies measurement.
Young men are led at gunpoint out into the street, then made to kneel with their hands behind their backs. These, the working man’s colleagues, his brothers in spirit are not the first casualties in a war gone wrong, and they will not be the last. Overhead, a black figure sweeps through the darkness, from within his mass loosing bolts of flame on the street, new fires bursting into existence. Despite all that’s happened, the wealthy man still sees himself as fully in control of the crisis playing itself out before him, still confident of the vast wealth he’s hoarded, still self-assured of the righteousness of his own cause. The wealthy man continues to plot his next moves, hurriedly scurrying the last of his ill-gotten wealth in whatever safe haven he can think of, through accounts held under pseudonym upon pseudonym around the world in banks no one’s ever heard of. But he makes a mistake. He always makes a mistake. Little does the wealthy man realize that his vast wealth will mean nothing when, in the future, he finds himself wearing a black hood over his head and a noose around his neck, taking his last breaths before the inevitable justice is visited upon him. In the meanwhile, his mistake isn’t his frantic efforts to store his theft somewhere it can’t be found. In fact, the exact moment he made his critical mistake can never be found, not by you or me, not by the show trials to be set up to press the wealthy man’s guilt and deliver unto him the ultimate justice.
In a flash, fires break out across London, across every city, from the base of towers smoke rising. The sound of glass breaking rings out along the pounding of feet against the pavement and the crying out of anguished voices. The rebel lies in wait, deliberately avoiding the action, watching as the enemy steps over himself to make every possible mistake. Screens across the world flash with images of troopers pointing rifles at angry mothers, unarmed, venting rage at them. Screens across the world flash with images of searchlights sweeping across buildings in the middle of the night, of loose rounds of gunfire ringing in the darkness, of sirens wailing and of passions inflaming as the consequences of a lifetime and a half of passions so suppressed erupt in an orgy of violence. It never ends. It can never end.
After unleashing a pent-up rage onto the streets, there can be no turning back. In the midst of this rapid collapse of the old order, the rebel takes care to consolidate his forces, pausing only to mount the lightest of attacks. His gunmen open fire on the troopers, only to withdraw before these troopers can respond. He takes no life, not yet, succeeding only in his as-yet limited aim. Disappearing into the city, he evades pursuit, blending in with his surroundings, in his plain clothes indistinguishable from the working man, the student, and the parishioner once he discards his weapons. Still the storm troopers fire at anything that moves, at shadows and at flickers of light glinting off scattered shards of glass in the street.
Then, a crashing sound, the ground shaking slightly as a bomb goes off somewhere down the street, hurting no one but rattling nerves. Moments later, another, somewhere across the city. It’s a staggering moment, one of many strewn across the collective consciousness like so much useless confetti. Still there are few injuries and no deaths, the rebel’s plot to strain resources and to fray nerves unfolding slowly over weeks, months. Soon, barricades go up around every public office, every port whether air or sea, across the streets in every city across Britain, around the stock exchange downtown and around the network centres where the wealthy man’s propaganda continues to stream forth with ever increasing intensity. Not protected, not yet, are the targets of value to the rebel, those targets which his enemies would never suspect and those who would never blame him for his own crimes. As the rebel preserves his forces and consolidates his gains, he prepares for a decisive attack.
18. In the Cards
It comes suddenly, in the middle of the night, an unusual time for such men to be up. “Valeri!” shouts Hannah, calling him over to her screen, “Valeri you have to see this!” The powers that be have convened an emergency session for their self-important government, but they cannot sort out the way forward. “It’s happening,” Valeri says. There’s hatred and recrimination, as there is among the workers who surround them every minute of every day, but this hatred and recrimination is different. “At last we will have our revenge,” Valeri says. “I hope you’re right,” says Hannah, “roommate.” She puts her hand over his and gives a firm but slight squeeze. But Valeri has already made in with the rebels of the popular front, in the weeks since the massacre working under the guidance of Murray and others to avenge every last drop of blood his brothers and sisters have been made to shed in the streets. Night falls.
On board the cruiser Borealis, Captain Abramovich addresses the men on a daily basis, through the ship’s loudspeakers urging the same discipline and calm every time. When Dmitri and the others first hear of the collapse in parliament, though, it’s not from the captain but from one enterprising young sailor who’d kept a screen he’d smuggled on board. “The criminals will be brought to justice,” says one sailor. “Maybe the new government will put them on trial,” says another. But Dmitri remains skeptical, saying, “they’re all a pack of jackals. It doesn’t matter who forms the next government, they’ll all keep on killing our own people in the streets.” This exchange is had in the mess hall, and most of the sailors around them agree with Dmitri. This is not a happy crew. For many years the Navy has squandered much money on expensive boondoggles, on new aircraft carriers with no aircraft, on submarines that can’t submerge for all the leaks in their hulls, on missiles guided by software with so many bugs they might as well be great rocks. Meanwhile, their pay has been cut repeatedly, leaving these men to make less than a common street whore. If news of parliament’s collapse is meant to assuage them, it fails.