At last, a scared but still orderly crowd disintegrated about her into a mass of panicked individuals, all willing to tear each other apart if it meant getting to safety. Hitting out right and left with his cosh, Michael pressed on with her through the suddenly looser, though less predictable, mass of humanity. There was another explosion far behind them, and more screams of pain and horror, and then another explosion, and another. Then, just as it had emerged, chaos turned back to order. People who’d been running in no particular direction turned as one and began to hurry away from the junction. No longer able to push forward, Michael got with Jennifer behind another crash barrier. She saw how he gripped it with his free hand, his knuckles white in the glow from the spreading fires.
Motorbike engines roared from the direction of Portland Place. “Allah al-Akbar!” the first of the leather-clad maniacs called into his megaphone. He screeched to a halt in the middle of the junction and unzipped his jacket. “Get down!” Jennifer yelled at Michael, pulling him to the ground. The blast went far above where they crouched. The close rungs of the barrier protected them from the detached wheel that was blown across the road.
“What is going on?” Michael groaned in her ear. Jennifer didn’t answer. She didn’t know how to answer. More to the point, she no longer knew what to answer. She pulled him harder against the pavement as she heard another biker surge forward along Oxford Street. He went off with a bang muffled by the crowd about him and by the shrieking of the crowd. One of the others got off right in the middle of the junction, and began a frothing speech in one of the Eastern languages. She heard another “Allah al-Akbar!” from Regent Street, and another explosion.
It was now that one of the helicopters swooped low into the wide street and let fire with its machine gun. There were more explosions and screams—preceded by more cries in Arabic. But the helicopter also seemed to be firing indiscriminately. Just beside her, Jennifer saw a man throw up his arms and fall against someone else. The helicopter changed direction, now making north along Regent Street. Everywhere it passed, it left a trail of explosions. Taking charge, Jennifer pulled Michael up from where they’d been crouching. She looked at the helicopter’s swift progress towards Portland Place. Directly beneath it, people were going down, one after the other, as if they’d been dominoes. She turned and looked back along Oxford Street. Though the lights on the military vehicles were dazzling, there was enough other light from the burning shops to see the row after row of armed and uniformed men, coming on in formation. They were already past Harewood Place. She saw the glitter of flames on fixed bayonets. If there was danger from the overhead gunfire and from the suicide bombers, it didn’t seem to worry those grim veterans of the Iranian War.
There were at least three helicopters overhead as Jennifer and Michael pushed south along Regent Street. All were shouting different instructions, and she got nothing from their echoing, staccato rage beyond a sense that everything had gone totally out of control. After a hundred yards, the crowd suddenly thinned, and it was possible to break into a run. She wondered if it might be worth trying for Charing Cross Road. She hardly needed to see the lights, though, far down the street, of the patrol that blocked the way into Piccadilly Circus. She got Michael to a stop and turned to look at the junction with Oxford Street. Another wave of suicide bombings was under way. She heard the gathering wail of terror from a crowd that accepts it has nowhere to go.
From somewhere in or close by the junction, a single shot rang out. Still noisy, the crowd there stopped moving. She heard another shot, and then another. Was it the police? She wondered. Was it another helicopter? Was it the Moslems—this time with guns? Or was it more soldiers, coming from the other end of Oxford Street? Were the jaws of the trap also about to close at each end of Regent Street? Michael pulled her closer and tried to shout in her ear. If she couldn’t make out what he said, she could feel, with an icy chill that began in her chest, that he was giving way to outright panic.
They hadn’t moved, but were somehow in the middle of a crowd that hit them from behind and was surging back towards the death trap of the junction. Someone pushed her in the back, and she went down. Straightaway, someone tripped over her, and someone else stepped on her left wrist. She was sure she’d be killed. Before the words could form in her mind, Michael had her up by the scruff of her neck, and was hurrying her to yet another crash barrier. The web of streets that led east from here included Carnaby Street, she thought—death instantly forgotten. She thought again. These also must be sealed. Perhaps the best option was to get into another doorway, and hope the soldiers wouldn’t go as completely mad as the police probably would.
She heard more gunfire. It came this time from a few yards to her right, though she couldn’t see who was firing. Three careful shots sounded. Was that the gunman on top of a pillar box? Was he taking aim with a rifle? Some in the crowd were cheering. Others were trying to get away. Jennifer put both arms about Michael. Keeping on their feet, they moved with the crowd. Directly above them, one of the helicopters was making a different noise. Its engines were roaring and coughing as it reared upward, until its searchlight shone from far above the rooftops. There was one more shot, and the searchlight went out. Jennifer briefly saw the reflection of burning shops on the bubble of glass and steel as the machine fell stuttering towards the middle of the junction of Oxford Street and Regent Street. Because it landed on the thickest part of the crowd, there was no crash as it came to earth. She might have heard the rising and extinguishing of horror, and might have felt the shockwave of human panic that spread out from the point of impact. But she and Michael had, in some manner she couldn’t recall, got themselves half way along Regent Street, and the road was almost clear. Ignoring them, another helicopter flew overhead towards the junction.
Jennifer made her mind up. Or perhaps it was made up for her by the circumstances. She began pulling Michael in the only direction she could now think represented any safety. Because this involved going back towards the chaos of the junction, he stopped her and shouted something she didn’t hear.
“The Underground!” she shouted back in English. She could think of no Latin equivalent, but shouted the word again. She pulled harder and pointed at the junction. They ran until they were deep again within the surging mass of humanity. Jennifer was already thinking, with rising despair, that they’d simply crash into locked security gates.
Now they were in the pool of light from another helicopter. “Do not go into the Underground!” someone raged maniacally down at them. “The Underground is a forbidden zone!” As Jennifer realised they’d managed to join a stampede, the machine gun above began a stuttering fire. She heard a bullet whizz past her left ear and ricochet from a kerbstone. A whole row of people who’d been running just feet in front of her went down without a sound, and she and Michael were stumbling over their bodies and piles of other bodies. They stumbled. They climbed. They ran. She found herself looking once into the face of a woman who’d gone down but wasn’t yet dead. She looked away and pressed over more of the fallen. All the time, the helicopter above screamed its warnings and wheeled round and about, raining death with every renewed burst of machine gun fire.
They had to squeeze sideways through a mound of the dead before they came in sight of the blue and white sign above Oxford Circus Underground Station. They were pushed at once into the doorway by the pressure of those others lucky enough to make it through the hail of death. The gates had been pulled into strands of twisted steel, and there was a blast of damp air from the labyrinth of tunnels that the authorities might not yet have blocked.