Carver ran towards the two prone bodies, ignoring the terrible, roasting heat and the poisonous rasp of the chemicals in the air. He found Schultz apparently unconscious on the ground. A woman was lying beside him, her face bloodied, her leg broken. Carver knew that he would be able to carry her away to safety, but Schultz was another matter. He weighed sixteen or seventeen stone: too much for Carver to drag with one arm if he was holding the woman with the other. Desperately, Carver grabbed Schultz’s chest and shook him. Then he gave his face three or four stinging slaps. Schultz blinked, groaned and tried to focus his eyes on Carver.
‘Get up!’ Carver shouted, his throat burning with the effort, still so deafened by the earlier explosion that he could barely hear his own words.
Schultz just looked at him uncomprehendingly.
‘Get up, Sergeant Major!’ Carver repeated. ‘That’s an order!’
The air was getting even hotter, if such a thing were possible, and Carver could barely breathe. He felt dizzy, there was a rushing sound in his ears, and his vision was blurring.
He could just make out the blurred outline of Schultz’s body as the SBS man tried to get up. Carver got down on one knee, reached for the woman and lifted her over his shoulder. It took every ounce of strength and concentration he still had to be able to push up with his legs and get to his feet again. Then he reached out for Schultz.
‘Grab my hand!’ he croaked, his parched vocal chords now barely able to summon the means to speak.
Carver felt Schultz’s hand grip his wrist. Somewhere in the distance he heard the tortured scream of failing metal, and the remnants of a distillation tower appeared out of the flame, loomed over the three stranded humans, and toppled towards them with the slow, stately, but crushing inexorability of a felled redwood tree.
Carver wrapped his fingers round Schultz’s arm and pulled him upright. The two men broke into a ragged, shambling run as the top of the distillation tower crashed down, smashing into the road at exactly the point where they had been huddled less than ten seconds before.
Carver kept moving, driving himself forward, one desperate step after another. In the near delirium of overpowering heat and oxygen starvation, he felt as though he had been transported back a quarter of a century to the beastings he’d endured as he fought for selection to the SBS: forced marches with full packs in which every man had to complete the course, even if his mates had to drag him over the line. Back then his enemies had been the cold, the rain and the biting wind of the Brecon Beacons, the very opposite of the forces tormenting him here. But the principle was the same. You kept going when every fibre of your body was screaming at you to stop. You kept going when you thought you would die if you took a single step more. You kept going until you got to the end.
And suddenly Carver was aware that the air was a fraction cooler, and that the smoke had cleared away. He came back to reality to find himself back out on the road beside the refinery. Schultz was standing next to him, coughing and dry-retching. There was a small patch of cool, green grass a few metres away, so Carver walked over to it and laid the woman down. He took off his tie and wound it around the woman’s broken leg to give the shattered bone some small degree of support. He noticed she still had her name badge pinned to her jacket. It read, ‘Nicola Wilkins, Cabinet Office.’ Carver put his finger to her throat, just below the jawbone, and felt a faint, fluttering pulse.
‘Congratulations,’ he murmured. ‘You survived.’
53
Wentworth
The British Prime Minister had wanted a television spectacular. To Malachi Zorn’s delight, what he got was a live horror show.
It had all been caught on camera: one helicopter exploding in mid-air; the other in its death-spiral to the ground; the flaming debris raining down upon spectators; the slaughter on the ground; the screams of reporters as they realized that they, too, were as vulnerable as anyone else; the roar of the flames, the volcanic thunder of the explosions, and then the darkness as one by one the TV crews were added to the casualties, their equipment was destroyed and their broadcasts died. For a minute there was nothing but blackness from Rosconway, and panic in the studios of TV channels whose presenters were realizing that they had just witnessed the deaths of old friends and colleagues along with all the other casualties.
Then the lost BBC van arrived, and a single feed from Rosconway supplied footage that was sent around the world — footage that sent global financial markets into a frenzy as traders tried to digest the implications of a major US oil corporation suffering a terrorist attack on supposedly friendly soil. It showed an attack that had killed three members of the British government, an EU minister, a senior US diplomat, Nicholas Orwell, and, if rumours already surfacing on the internet were to be believed, the Director of British Special Forces.
Just as on 9/11, the financial implications were immediate, and felt throughout the global economy. Oil prices spiked. So did gold, as investors sought a safe haven. The pound plummeted. Investors started dumping UK government bonds. The Bank of England had not yet raised interest rates, but it could only be a matter of minutes, and that would add further downward pressure to the UK economy. The FTSE index in London plunged almost eight per cent as energy stocks, already softened by recent comments made by Malachi Zorn, collapsed. Insurance companies were hit as the multi-billion cost of rebuilding the refinery became evident. The shares of airlines, airport operators, hotel corporations and online travel agencies on both sides of the Atlantic fell as the markets decided that US travellers, nervous of threats to their safety, would stay away from Britain. Defence stocks, however, rose. It was reasonable to assume that the British government’s savage defence cuts might now be reversed. And since, as Zorn had also pointed out in his BBC interview, Britain’s energy supplies were dominated by foreign-owned corporations, the knock-on effects were felt on the bourses of Europe. And with the New York Stock Exchange due to open at two thirty in the afternoon, UK time, they would hit Wall Street like a tsunami rolling across the Atlantic.
There was an atmosphere of stunned, speechless despair at 10 Downing Street. There was frenzy in financial institutions. But at Zorn’s hired mansion on the Wentworth estate there was only the exultant laughter of a man for whom Christmas Day has come earlier, and more joyously, than he could have dreamed possible. This was the single biggest financial coup of all time. He had made tens of billions of dollars, pounds, euros, yen and Chinese yuan. Now all he had to do was collect it. If 9/11 was anything to go by, the markets would soon be shut down. He had just a few minutes, maybe less, to get out of all his positions, collecting his winnings on the way. There wasn’t a second to lose.
54
Kensington Park Gardens
Alix could see Dmytryk Azarov’s lips move. She could hear the words he was saying. She knew — because he’d made a point of emphasizing this fact, as if to prove her importance to him — that he’d cancelled an important business meeting to be with her. But he was wasting his breath, because she felt so totally disconnected from him that none of it made any difference. He was as distant from her, and as unimportant, as the reporter on the screen of the television that was on, but ignored, in the far corner of the sitting room.