He’d grown up in a strictly Islamic environment — so of course he’d rebelled. School hadn’t given him much in the way of qualifications, so the Army had seemed a logical choice. And it had been the making of him. He’d knuckled down at it and worked hard for the first time in his life, deploying to Iraq and then Afghanistan with the Green Jackets. Along the way, he’d seen just what living under Islamic Law really meant — the only people who wanted Taliban-style rule were the people who had never had to live under it. He’d seen enough to convince him that the rulers, for all their dedication to making others follow the rules, enjoyed breaking them every chance they got. Walking through a Taliban-run whorehouse had been enough to convince him that they had to be stopped. They’d killed the girls rather than risk having them freed by the British Army.
After the aliens had invaded, he’d volunteered to return to London with several other Londoners. They’d known that it would be dangerous — no one could describe the military as a safe job in the best of times — but he’d known people who might be able to help them fight the aliens. Wearing civilian clothes, he’d wandered through the communities with his ears wide open, listening carefully. Finding the would-be suicide bombers had been depressingly easy. Like so many others, they had bad intentions — and no contacts with the underground world. Obtaining explosives on the black market wasn’t exactly easy. He’d lost count of how many idiots seeking a quick death had tried to buy weapons and explosives off police informers.
He glanced around the garage, rolling his eyes. Like many other business in the area, as much of the business as possible was done off the books — just to keep the taxman from taking an undue interest in their profits. He found it hard to blame the struggling small businessmen for trying to keep their profits for themselves, but the garage had clearly been involved in preparing stolen cars to be released back onto the market. The tools to rig up a small van with enough explosive to really ruin someone’s day had been easy to find. God alone knew what had happened to the owner and his family. They hadn’t returned to work in the days since the invasion.
A tap at the door brought him to full alertness. He half-drew his pistol with one hand as he padded over to the door and peered through the one-way glass that the previous owner had installed. The young fool was standing there, waiting for him. Abdul rolled his eyes, silently grateful that he wouldn’t have to rely on such fools forever, knowing that the man wouldn’t have bothered to walk in a manner that might deter a shadow. His confidence that God would protect him was grossly misplaced. In Abdul’s experience, God helped those who helped themselves — although He probably wouldn’t want to help suicide bombers. Part of him wanted to tell the young fool to go home and enjoy the rest of his life, but there was no real alternative. They had to remind the aliens that they existed before the aliens broke their determination to resist.
He opened the door and waved the young man into the garage. The young fool had dressed for the job, all right. He’d washed, cut his beard and then dressed in his finest white robes. If he’d paid as much attention to his schoolwork as he had to his appearance, he might have made something of himself without slipping into bitterness and paranoid conspiracy theories. Abdul shook hands with him firmly, and then nodded towards the white van. It was ready to leave the building.
“I’ve been watching the alien guards,” he said. Quite why the aliens had bothered to take over a technical college in London was beyond him, but it was clearly important to them. They weren’t using their tame policemen to guard it. Instead, there were upwards of thirty aliens on guard duty and they weren’t shy about urging human onlookers away from the scene. “You should be able to get into the parking lot if you leave in twenty minutes.”
One thing that had been hammered into his head time and time again during the dreaded Combat Infantryman’s Course at Catterick Garrison had been that they should never be predicable. Any routine was dangerous because a watching enemy could pick the best moment to launch an attack, catching the defenders by surprise. But the aliens didn’t seem to have realised that. Their guards patrolled in regular, easily predicable patterns, changing every hour. He could almost set his watch by their movements. It had taken him two days of observation to be reasonably sure that it wasn’t a trap of some kind, although they were definitely going to get more than they bargained for if he was wrong. The van carried enough explosive to be fairly sure of totalling the college when it exploded.
He walked over to the van and opened the door. “When you turn the corner onto the road, push down on the switch there,” he said. “That arms the bomb. When you want it to detonate, take your hand off the switch and it’ll explode. Don’t try to brake once you’re around the corner — just drive for the gate as fast as you can.”
The young man nodded. He looked confident, at least. Abdul silently pitied him — and his family. It was rare to see a suicide bomber blessed by his family, at least in Britain. Their deaths tended to come as a shock to their friends and relatives, giving them the grief of losing someone while dealing with increasingly pointed questions from the security services. Part of his mind pointed out that such a young fool would find a way to harm himself sooner or later, perhaps lashing out at a member of his family. At least this way his death would count for something. He told himself that, time and time again, but the dirty feeling refused to fade from his mind.
He reached out and touched the young man’s sleeve. “You don’t have to go through with this,” he said, flatly. “If you want to back out…”
“I know what I’m doing,” the young man said. Abdul sighed inwardly at his tone. He’d heard it before from young recruits, the kind who needed to be broken down before they could be built up again. But that required dedication and determination — and the young would-be bomber had neither. “It needs to be done, for what they did to us. You have the video?”
Abdul nodded. He’d used a simple civilian camcorder to record a brief statement, a message to be uploaded onto the internet after the bomb exploded. The young fool would explain why he’d bombed the college, stating that it was in response to the occupied mosques. He seemed to believe that the aliens had meant to insult and degrade Islam. Abdul suspected that they simply didn’t care. Given their size, they needed larger buildings — and mosque prayer halls were wide open, easy for them to use. A church would need to have the pews removed before it would suit the aliens.
“It’s ready for uploading,” he said. Actually, he’d moved the uploading laptop somewhere else. He had no way of knowing what surveillance capabilities the aliens had in place, which meant that they might be able to trace the van back to the garage. And if they caught him… he was sure that there were other soldiers operating within London, apart from his small cell, but he hadn’t been given any details. He had to assume that their death meant the end of resistance within London. “Remember; push down on the switch once you turn the corner, and then keep your hand on the switch! You let go of it early…”
“Understood,” the young man said. He turned the key and the engine rumbled to life. It was lucky that the garage owner had kept a small reservoir of petrol under the building, or they wouldn’t have been able to fuel the van. Civilians had almost no petrol in London these days. The air was cleaner already. “And thank you.”
Abdul watched him go, silently wondering if God would hear his prayers in the future.
He’d just sent a young man to hell.