The Air Chief Marshal spoke to the fighter pilot, who had received the grid reference for the property.
‘Can you identify the terrorist’s position?’
‘Yes, sir,’ came the reply.
‘Is the building occupied or unoccupied?’
‘Hard to tell sir – it looks vacant.’
‘If you have him on visual, take him out before he fires another missile.’
The terrorist looked across at the burning train wreckage from the top of his scaffolding tower. Radiation would soon be all around him. He launched himself over the side and abseiled from view.
You could have heard a pin drop. That was what they were after – London – the business capital of Europe and the venue of the 2012 Olympics.
It was a disaster.
Having foiled the other attacks, Rafi found it hard to take on board the impact of this terrorist success. He had known that the stakes were high and the consequences would be grave if a nuclear catastrophe occurred, but the reality was numbing.
Emma looked at Kate and Rafi. ‘Sweet Jesus help us! There’s around two tonnes of spent nuclear fuel in the air,’ said Emma, with a lump in her throat, ‘which is something like 20 kg of plutonium and 40 kg of other radioactive particles on the loose.’
The service chiefs had been trained to work under pressure and they were already making plans to deal with the calamity. The Air Chief Marshal spoke via the video links to the Army HQ at Wilton and then to the colonel standing next to him.
‘Activate Operation Counterpane. I repeat, activate Operation Counterpane. Brigadier, advise the Royal Netherlands Air Force that we need every helicopter they can spare, pronto.’
Colonel Gray spoke to the Prime Minister, who had turned a whiter shade of pale.
‘Sir, I suggest that you activate LESLP – London Emergency Services Liaison Panel – immediately. The Metropolitan police are on standby. Although control rests with you and your colleagues at COBRA in the first instance, sir, I suggest that you ask us to coordinate the military element required to contain the disaster, and to oversee the evacuation and the decontamination process for the time being.’
‘Carry on,’ replied the PM. ‘I have two nuclear experts with me who will advise you on the size of the exclusion zone.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ The video link camera at COBRA was swung round and two middle-aged professors came on to the Wood Street Ops Room screen. They spoke to the Air Chief Marshal and explained what data they would require.
En route to the nuclear train, from Colchester Barracks, was a helicopter equipped with radioactivity-sensing devices. Like many others, it had been placed on standby by the brigadier in the early hours of the morning as part of Operation Counterpane. The helicopter pilot radioed through that he would be over the train in seventeen minutes.
‘For the time being, gentlemen,’ said the professors, ‘we recommend an exclusion zone of one mile upwind and four miles downwind. We will give you the precise figures shortly after we have the data in from the helicopter.’
The Ops Room was like a hornets’ nest. The scale of the task dwarfed anything that had ever been attempted in peacetime.
At last, the helicopter flying at 1,000 feet started to collect and send the data on the radioactivity levels through to COBRA. The professors fed the data, in real time, into the impressive-looking laptops in front of them. As the helicopter flew over the smouldering train, the operator of the radioactivity-sensing equipment let out an expletive and advised the pilot to give the train a wide berth next time. The pilot carried on with a predetermined series of flyovers and sweeps of the vicinity on a grid basis. As the volume of data fed back to the professors increased, it became obvious from their faces that the news was far from good – they had turned an ashen colour.
After what seemed like an age, but in reality was only a matter of minutes, the younger of the two professors started speaking. ‘We need to know, Prime Minister, what acceptable mortality rate to put into our models. The scale of the radioactive leak is very large. What level of increased cancer mortality is acceptable? Should we take one additional death per 100,000 people every ten years, or what?’
There was a discussion amongst the COBRA team; a number was agreed on and keyed into the computer model. The other professor spoke up hesitantly. ‘I hope you’re all sitting down. On the basis of the data, gentlemen, the exclusion zone is: two miles upwind of the train, ten miles downwind and the ellipse at its widest point is six miles wide.’
Rafi looked at the map. A vast swathe of London, from Enfield to West Ham and from Stoke Newington across to Woodford, was now destined for dereliction in perpetuity. It seemed completely unreal – like something out of a disaster movie.
‘Air Chief Marshal, we have emailed you the perimeter line of the exclusion zone. It can be superimposed on your maps.’
A hush fell over the two rooms. The second professor spoke solemnly. ‘The exclusion zone has an area of fifty-seven square miles and the length of the perimeter is close to thirty miles.’
Rafi looked at Kate. ‘I’ve had enough,’ he felt gutted. All his attempts had proved to be inadequate. The terrorists had won through. Tears welled up in his eyes. They’d pulled off the big one. Over fifty square miles of one of the most densely populated parts of Europe would have to be totally abandoned and many people would face horrible deaths.
Haunting thoughts flooded through Rafi’s mind. If they had told the junior minister to: Get lost!, they could have got the information on the last property to the Ops Room minutes earlier. Valuable time had been squandered. If the nuclear train had been stopped just a few hundred metres sooner the terrorist would not have had a clear line of sight. The knot in his stomach tightened. He turned, walked down the corridor, to break the bad news to Aidan’s team.
In a monotone Rafi told them of the missile attack at Stratford, and that one of their team should liaise with the Ops Room to be briefed on the scale of the radiation contamination. The ball was now in their court. He left their room and noticed Kate still standing by the door to the Ops Room.
Rafi walked over to her and took hold of her hand. She turned and looked at him with tears in her eyes. ‘Come on, let’s go; there isn’t much we can do here.’ But she didn’t move. She stood mesmerised by the screens, like a rabbit caught in the headlights.
‘In a few minutes, please,’ she replied. ‘I would like to see what happens next…’
Plugging the gaping holes in what was left of the two spent fuel containers was the immediate task. Access by air was the quickest and safest way to get materials in to cover the ruptured containers. The imperative was to stop further hazardous and highly toxic radioactive waste escaping by entombing the train in concrete.
Operation Counterpane was under way. The army’s HQ Land Command based at Wilton, near Salisbury, had been in a state of full readiness and within minutes of the train being hit by the first missile it was already coordinating troop movements, working closely with those in the Ops Room.
Colonel Turner had passed across a long list of all the available UK civilian helicopters. These were now under the command of the Royal Air Force.
All helicopters within 250 miles and powerful enough to lift a concrete hopper were en route to Stratford. The workhorse Chinook helicopters would be the best at transporting the concrete, but as at 10.45 a.m. the nearest was still forty minutes flying time away. The demands of the armed intervention in the Middle East had seriously depleted the modest size of the services’ ageing helicopter fleet. On paper, the number of helicopters remaining in the UK looked significant, but in practice the majority were out of action, undergoing repairs or modifications. Thankfully, the helicopter squadron from the Netherlands was now only fifty-five minutes away.
Colonel Turner’s team had identified seventeen large building sites with cranes and concrete hoppers. There was a local property development boom going on thanks to the impending 2012 Olympics. Each helicopter was directed to a property development site, where they could pick up a concrete hopper and a crane driver.