Oz head-butted the contractor, the edge of his helmet flattening the man’s nose and the neat, orderly ranks, dissolved as the seventy two members of the battalion went for the two hundred private security contractors.
Danyella gaped and took a step backwards as the contractors at the rear wisely turned and ran.
The press of course were not running, they were not going anywhere. This was good copy.
“Make them stop!” she shouted at her protection officers, who appeared not to hear.
“Make them stop!” she yelled again, at her PR officer this time.
The girl first looked at the fighting men meting out barrack room justice to the contractors, and then back at her employer as if she were crazy.
“No, you idiot!” Danyella shrieked, pointing at the photographers and TV news crew “Them!”
If she could not regain control of what the media were going to report then she would be finished.
The Defence Minister turned, intending to leave the rostrum and smash a few cameras if that is what it took, but blocking her way was Annabelle Reed, eyes bloodshot and puffy from crying, the notification of her son’s death only broken to her a few hours before by Sarah Osgood and Captain Deacon. Annabelle’s fist did not quite render the same level of damage as an Osgood head-butt; however the result was impressive nonetheless.
Five minutes later and a dozen contractors lay unconscious on the parade ground, discarded T5S uniform hats and riot batons lay littered about where their owners had abandoned them and fled.
Simon Manson was still standing before his battalion, not quite believing what he had seen.
“Fall out and mount up!” Pat Reed commanded, his voice carrying easily across the square, and with an awful start Lt Col Manson realised that the order had been directed at the 2nd Battalion as well as Reed’s own men. To his complete horror his men were obeying.
“Sarn’t Major Tessler!” he shouted. “Control those men!”
“Go fuck yer self.” Ray replied and joined the 2 i/c of the 2nd Battalion in his Warrior.
Pat Reed led his sobbing wife gently away and the fighting vehicles departed with a purpose, separating at the road and making for different objectives. Simon Manson stood alone in the middle of the square, and Danyelle Foxten-Billings was sat on the dais, bleeding from the broken nose.
And the Press?
Well they were just loving it.
The Defence Minister had left an all-night meeting of the Cabinet at 10 Downing Street to preside over her media event on Horse Guards, just a couple of hundred yards away. The meeting continued without her, a junior minister making notes of all that transpired in her absence. The post-war retention of some of the laws contained within the wartime special powers act, the encompassing of MP’s expenditure under the official secrets act and the permanent replacement of many public services with private contractors. The pressing issue however, was whether or not to end the war effort now that the immediate danger was gone? The PM already knew his Defence Ministers view on that, so the shaking heads around the table when the question was voiced negated the need to call for a vote.
A creaking sound could suddenly be heard from the doorway. All heads turned in that direction. The door and frame had been replaced and reinforced following the arrest of a certain PM just prior to the wars commencement. Despite this measure they could see the doorframes visibly bow away from the door. A loud bang then followed and the door crashed open.
A host of uniformed policemen stood behind Sir Richard Tennant, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who entered and dropped a red painted door ram onto the carpet in the room with a 'thud'. He grimaced and reached behind to knead his back.
“To be quite honest.” He addressed the assembled Ministers. “If I have to keep doing this, I’m going to put my back out one of these days.”
Amongst other areas, T5S (Custodial) had taken over the running of Wandsworth Prison from HM Prisons, a service for which they received payment from public funds in accordance with the size of the prison population and the status of individual inmates. Overcrowding had become the norm.
A panicky telephone call to the Senior Contractor resulted in a hurried assembly of some of their most lucrative prisoners, the ones who had been kept incommunicado on remand. They were subject to a subsequent bundling into prison vans for dispersal to other prisons, those also run by T5S (Custodial), not HMP of course. There were more of these prisoners than there was room in the two vehicles that were available at the time. With the vans full the gates were opened and the vehicles departed, each in a different direction along Heathfield Road. The northbound prison van was negotiating the narrow bridge across the railway lines beside which the prison was situated and the southbound van jumping hooded red lights at road works by Alma Terrace. Something caught the eye of the van driver on the bridge, something traversing at speed the tidy suburban back gardens lining the railway cutting. A Warrior infantry fighting vehicle appeared, emerging through a garden fence with much accompanying splintered wood flying willy-nilly. It rocked to a sudden halt astride the road, blocking the exit off the bridge. The vehicle commander grinned maliciously at the driver of the van. Engaging reverse gear and backing away as fast as he could manage, the van driver attempted to escape them, however Major Mark Venables had also taken a short cut.
The Serious Crime Group’s surveillance teams had been keeping tabs on the whereabouts of certain remand prisoners for several weeks. O.Ps covered all entrances to the prison, the telephones, landline and mobile alike, were all tapped, and thanks to the efforts of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment’s late night visit a month before, they could also see and hear what transpired in key areas without the contractors being aware. When preparations to emergency evacuate those same remand inmates were detected, the operation went into high gear, as did the approaching would-be liberators who were still on the South Circular Road.
The vehicles left the highway at the first opportunity to race directly across Wandsworth Common to the Victorian built prison. The surface of the Common was torn up, flying high, churned up by the caterpillar tracks of a dozen armoured vehicles and spat out behind, a turf and earth wake behind the speeding tanks and IFVs. Early morning traffic on Trinity Road skidded to a halt, with a resulting fender bender at the sight. A Challenger II left the Common and tore across the road without stopping, smashing through a hedge and into the prison’s staff car park. It flattened several contractors’ private cars to then emerge at the bridges other exit, bursting through a second hedge and skidding to a halt, boxing the prison van in.
The southbound van fared no better, and all of this took place as the Senior Contractor watched from his office window. Despite this experience, entry to the prison was refused, its doors firmly locked and barred.
Mark Venables employed his special key to change that, the one weighing 62.5 tonnes.