The door burst open. “Sir,” Sergeant Harold Page snapped, “that was a fucking missile.”
Briggs was already jumping out of the vehicle, service pistol in hand. “Get the engine started,” he snapped, as he looked towards Westminster. He could see it now, towers of smoke reaching into the sky… and then a second string of explosions echoed out over the city. Everywhere he looked, every direction of the compass, he could see smoke and flames billowing up into the sky. The missiles…
His mind refused to grasp it. Were they at war? The last time London had been attacked by missiles had been during the Second World War; that had been nearly eighty years ago. There had been no mistaking it; there had been a missile… and there were flames coming from the direction of Ten Downing Street.
“Get us moving,” he snapped. Scotland Yard hadn’t responded to his signals, nor had the Disaster Recovery Centre; the implications of that didn’t bear thinking about. Briggs had never considered himself a military man, but he knew something about how terrorists thought; one of their prime objectives was to cause casualties among emergency workers. If they had knocked out…
A squeal of static blasted out of one of the speakers. “I can’t make any contact at all with the dispatcher,” Page said. His face was very pale; his hands clutched his pistol as if it was a life-saver. Briggs remembered that Page had been courting Christine in Dispatches and silently prayed that she was all right. They had made such a cute couple. “What do we do?”
“Drive us to Whitehall,” Briggs snapped. The streets were coming alive with panicking people; the driver hit the siren to help move them out the way. Cars had been barred from the centre of London — except emergency vehicles — for years, but it hadn’t helped the remainder of the congestion problem. Buckingham Palace was all right, he realised, but Whitehall itself was burning brightly. People — policemen, guards and soldiers from the barracks, which looked to have been hit as well — were milling around; no one seemed to be in charge.
Ten Downing Street was gone… and, somehow, he had to gain control of the situation. It all seemed so futile.
Chapter Eleven: Cry Havoc, and Let Slip the Dogs of War, Take Two
It takes two sides to make war. It only takes one side to make a massacre.
Edinburgh, Scotland
“There’s definitely no sign of pursuit,” Lieutenant Sergey Ossetia said, as the white van drove off the bypass and into Sighthill. It wasn’t Edinburgh’s most attractive area; drab oppressive housing blocks, unimaginative smaller houses and industrial estates dominated the landscape. There were few shops in the area; the owners had discovered the joys of being regularly looted and, in some cases, physically assaulted. The economic downturn had had its effects right in the heart of Scotland’s capital city; half of the buildings were boarded up and apparently closed for good. “I think we’re clear.”
Captain Rashid Ustinov nodded once. They had hired the white van from one of the companies that tended to the needs of immigrant workers, such as themselves. It was an old van, outdated; it said something about the state of the economy that there were plenty more like it, all utterly anonymous, on the streets. As far as the tracking device was concerned — it appeared that immigrants and the others who hired such vehicles were not trusted by the owners — they were somewhere on the other side of the city, Portobello. It made him smile; if he had been designing a car or a van that was intended to be impossible to steal, he would have made sure that the tracker was impossible to remove. A blind child could have removed the tracker that he had carefully removed and left the day before in a dustbin. It might well be found, or be destroyed by the refuse department, but by then it would be too late.
“Good,” he said. He had also taken the precaution of replacing the number plates and adding a design to the side of the van, but there was always the danger that the Police would notice something suspicious and pull them over. Both men were armed, of course, but a shootout with the local police wouldn’t serve the interests of Russia. If the Police saw the weapon they were transporting in the rear of the van, there was no way that they would believe that they were innocent immigrants. “Time to move on.”
They had scouted the entire city, looking for the ideal spot; it was amazing just how much information was on the Internet, waiting for them to access it and confirm it over the years. Moscow would have had a fit and sent anyone who committed such vast breaches of security to the Gulags, assuming that they weren’t just shot in the head to improve the breeding stock of the human race. It was harder to mount a serious terrorist operation than most people understood, but Ustinov was confident that Ossetia and himself could carry out the task. If they were lucky, they would even be able to escape before anyone realised what was happening.
An aircraft thundered overhead as they pulled into the small warehouse’s parking lot. They had checked it out carefully before ever setting foot near the place; it helped that the person who had designed the area had had no imagination. People were always getting lost, even with the most up-to-date SATNAV units; naturally, the van they had hired didn’t have one. They had prepared a cover story, but no one had questioned them; the warehouse had been abandoned, left open, and looted. No one had cared.
“Check out the area,” he muttered. Ossetia nodded and slipped off into the darkness of the warehouse; he had half-expected to see squatters within the warehouse, desperately hunting for a roof over their heads. He glanced back at the rear of the van, and then slipped out himself, stretching to indicate that it had been a long drive. They were both in the peak of heath, exercising regularly, but he was uncomfortably aware that they hadn’t been able to do anything more than limited practice runs. Another aircraft thundered overhead, heading further over the city, as Ossetia returned; judging from its flight path, it was in a holding pattern before coming in to land.
“It’s clear,” Ossetia said. His voice was starting to become a little excited. “Shall we proceed?”
Ustinov climbed back into the driver’s seat and drove the van up closer to the main entrance. It was locked and barricaded, but some looters had damaged the locks enough to allow them to enter, carrying the weapon under a white cloth. They were committed now; they had no choice, but to proceed with their mission. The warehouse was drab and empty inside; the only decoration was some graffiti of the anarchy symbol on the ground and a calendar from 2017. The images in it were banned in Russia; hardcore porn. Ustinov shrugged; the decadence of Europe had played midwife to radical Islam, the religion that had caused his mother such woe. They would pay for that.
The ladder up to the roof was half-broken, but he had been through worse in Spetsnaz training, some of which had involved building a ladder in sub-zero temperatures. That had been… well, he wouldn’t have called it fun, but it had certainly made life exciting. It was easy to scramble up the ladder onto the roof; Ossetia passed him the weapon quickly and followed him up, remaining low on the roof. They would probably be seen, but it would be too late by now. Something streaked across the sky from the east and headed into the centre of the city. He knew what that was.
Ossetia put it into words. “That was a missile,” he said. “Sir…”
“Move,” Ustinov snapped. The weapon in his hands had a long and complicated designation, but terrorists everywhere called it the Yank, because it was the bane of American existence. The weapon had been designed by the Russians, sold to the Iranians, reverse-engineered, duplicated, and sent everywhere; it was one of the most dangerous antiaircraft missiles in existence. The Americans had countermeasures, of course, but they were almost useless on helicopters, particularly if the missile was fired at very short range. For a civilian aircraft…