Khadijah couldn’t face it. “Help me move the books,” she screamed at him. There were copies of the Qur’an there; cheap ones, but still the holy words of Allah. They could not be destroyed. They must not be destroyed. Her rage gave her strength; she pulled at a bookcase and felt it shift, moving backwards and bringing the fire with it. She screamed again, in rage and hatred, as the fires danced towards her; the smell was making her faint and confused. She was trying to take books off the shelves, tearing off her scarf to carry them in; she expected to wake up any moment and discover that she had been studying too hard. Her eyes were starting to tear up as the heat rose still higher; she was finding it harder and harder to think…
A hand pulled at her and she went down. “Stay down,” the librarian hissed. She realised with a shock, almost with a giggle, that his beard was on fire. She reached out, greatly daring, and swatted at it; he snorted and pulled her forward on her hands and knees towards the door, forcing it open through sheer force of will. “Khadijah; you’re burning!”
She felt it then, just at the same time; a wave of burning pain on her thighs. Her eyes were still stinging, but she could see it now; her dress had caught on fire. She had once wanted to wear tight jeans; for the first time in her life, she thanked Allah for the Mosque’s strict dress code. Jeans would have had her own body ablaze instead of her dress; she tore at it, forgetting modesty, only to be surprised when the librarian grabbed her and forced her to roll on the ground, putting out the fires. The remainder of the fire was still blazing; it struck her suddenly that she couldn’t hear the fire alarm. She should have been able to hear it.
No one had come to help them, she realised; the librarian was puffing and gasping for air. It wouldn’t be long before the fire brought down the Mosque and they were still trapped inside the Mosque; they had to get out and the side doors were bound to be blocked. She pulled the librarian to his feet — she realised, for the first time, that he was an old man — and they staggered off towards the men’s section of the Mosque. It was the only way out… and it was locked. She banged at it, too tired and weak to scream again… and it opened, a worried dark face peering at her. Strong arms took her and the librarian and carefully carried her out of the Mosque; she wanted, desperately, to save the rest of the books. A pair of hands passed her a cup of water and she sipped it gratefully; she felt like collapsing as she stared at the Mosque.
It had been built by the resources of the community, trying to escape the flow of poison money from the Middle East. More and more people were boiling out of the houses… men only, she noticed; some of them were carrying makeshift weapons. They were all staring at the Mosque as the flames grew higher… and then the dome caved in, crashing down on the prayer rooms, crashing down on the washing rooms… and crashing down on the library, where she had enjoyed so many days.
A young man came over to her. She saw his eyes and his beard and just knew that he was going to be trouble. She almost mouthed his words along with him. It would be something insanely ridiculous in the face of the disaster that had just overtaken the community, something so banal as to almost be foolish.
She was right. “Where’s your headscarf?”
The librarian cut loose with a hideous torrent of Arabic, mixed with coughs and gasps for breath, including several words that her father would have beaten her brother for using. The young man, clearly an Arab himself, paled, muttered apologies too softly for her to hear most of the words, and fled to one of the groups of young men who had gathered with weapons. She could hear some of their conversation, calling for Jihad, calling for war… and reminding everyone that neither the Police nor the Fire Brigade had come to help them. Everyone knew some of the attackers, people known for hating them… and they had to pay.
“Khadijah,” a voice called. It was her father, coming running from their house, sweat running down his face. It was almost worth the pain in her chest to see the fear on his face at what had nearly happened to his daughter. The young man protested to him and he quelled him with a glare, all of his attention on Khadijah. “Are you all right?”
The young men were marching off now, heading towards one of the poorer parts of Manchester, carrying their weapons in hand. They would attack the whites themselves, or perhaps they would just attack a church or a Hindu Temple or something that would only make the violence worse. Khadijah had read enough extremist propaganda, even the fearsome Turner Diaries-like Aisha of Arabia, to know what would happen and what would result. People would die…
Lots of people would die.
Khadijah put her head in her hands and wept.
Chapter Thirteen: Cry Havoc, and Let Slip the Dogs of War, Take Four
The curious fact about British preparations for total war is that the British Government has never seen fit to share any such information with the people who voted it into power. Such attempts as there have been in informing the public have always been of the ‘there, there, it won’t be that bad’ category, rather than the facts. The blunt truth is that the problem was insolvable.
London, United Kingdom
Major-General Charles Langford tossed aside a Police report on the spread of illegal copies of Aisha of Arabia and threw himself to the ground, away from the windows, before his thinking mind quite caught up with what was going on. He hit the ground hard enough to hurt, cursing himself before the noise of the first explosion echoed out over the area. More explosions, fainter, followed; he realised dimly that he had heard the noise of a cruise missile passing overhead. It was absurd… and it had happened; instincts that had kept him alive in Iraq were warning him that something was very badly wrong.
“It’s not bloody likely that I personally am the target,” he growled, as the lights failed. There was a major transformer station nearby, something to do with the power supplies for the city; it was quite possible that it had been the target nearby, or one of the barracks, or the TA base, or… his mind caught up with his thoughts and realised, with horror, that London was under attack. The building shook violently as another explosion, far too close for comfort, echoed out in the distance. “What the hell is going on?”
Soldiers were trained to seize the initiative; it had been the goal of NATO, before NATO had passed away into the ashcan of history, to overcome Warsaw Pact numerical superiority with better trained and better equipped soldiers. Langford knew that his leave had just been cancelled; even if he was wrong and it was just — just — an unusually dangerous terrorist attack, he would have duties. He snatched at his military-issue mobile phone as he came up to the window, looking south towards the London skyline. It was like something out of a nightmare; he could see flames and smoke rising up into the distance, some of them alarmingly large. He did a quick mental comparison; unless he was very much mistaken, some of the missiles had come down in Whitehall, where the…
The Prime Minister! He realised. The thought was almost impossible to grasp; only one major world leader had been assassinated since 2009, when the leader of the French National Front had been shot down in the streets by a rogue Algerian. A single cruise missile might have been a terrorist attack, but so many meant only one thing; they were at war.
Britain was at war.
Training asserted itself and he tapped a command into the mobile phone. It took him a second to realise that there was no signal; the phone had power, but there seemed to be no signal at all. Sheer disbelief held him for a heartbeat — he had overseen the improvements to the military communications network himself and knew how robust it was — and then training swept it away. He switched to a civilian network, and then another, and then another. Nothing.