The harsh crack of the disrupter reverberated along the tunnel walls.
It was followed immediately by the explosion. The entire tunnel quaked, lit for one split second in an awesome blinding pulse of white light before the ear-splitting sound and the maelstrom of displaced air overtook him. And the lights went out. i
Oh, Jesus fucking Christ! He’d got it wrong!
He heard the debris falling all around him in the darkness. Shards of hot metal lanced into his back as he pressed down on the baby, feeling it struggle against his belly. Waited for the tumultuous impact of the water as the tunnel caved in under the almighty onslaught of the Thames above.
Forgive me, Archie, Pippa. Casey, I love you. I’m sorry, so sorry…
He lifted his head. His deafness was stunning. The tunnel lights flickered on. Emergency generator, he thought.
Twisted round. There was the dumper, unmoved. Only its cab was all but demolished, the passenger door blown to smithereens and the seats ablaze.
He closed his eyes. He’d done it. After all, he had bloody well done it. The baby began to bawl.
Fifteen minutes later, after he and Midge made the final inspection, they took a calculated risk in allowing volunteer fire crew and paramedics in to cut the Mercedes’ occupants free. The driver was dead, but the baby’s mother was given a better than even chance of survival, although it was doubted she would ever walk again.
Midge pulled the melted wire from the passenger seat of the dumper cab. ‘Not much left of the pressure mat. Separate eight ounce charge of Semtex, I reckon.’
Harrison felt sick. How close had he come to kneeling on the passenger seat, rather than the driver’s? If he’d had more time to think and plan, that’s exactly what he would have done.
‘I guess the Pigstick set it off. Smashed the TPU then ricocheted around the cab, hit the seat… who knows?’
Another Range-Rover pulled up and Al Pritchard climbed out. His face was impassive. ‘Had to go out on a high note, didn’t you, Tom?’
Harrison glared. He didn’t need this.
The Senior Expo smiled. ‘Thanks, Tom. I owe you. Now that was more exciting than an episode of Coronation Street.’
Harrison shook the offered hand.
After the experience with the Haymarket car and its hidden exhaust-pipe bomb, the dumper was towed to an open field in Leyton where it was left isolated and guarded overnight. At six in the morning it exploded. A separate extended timer and detonator had been secreted within the main explosive charge itself.
No one was hurt.
But of the four car bombs on the main river bridges of London, two exploded before they could be defused, resulting in the need for extensive engineering repairs and massive disruption of traffic for several months.
17
Senator Abe Powers heard the news bulletin on the radio at two in the morning. He had just retired to his suite in i Trafalgar House, having spent a long evening socialising with the delegates followed by two exhaustive hours going over revisions of the day’s minutes and agreements with the secretarial staff. They would be working through the night to produce the documents for the next day.
As he poured a bourbon nightcap and switched on the radio, he had felt quietly satisfied with the progress. There was a good chance there’d be signatures on the dotted line tomorrow or the day after. No, that was too optimistic. Time for a little more brinkmanship from one side or the other. Threatening a walkout, demanding a small gain here or there. But he was ready for that. Tomorrow, the end of next week, what did it matter?
What mattered was peace in Northern Ireland. More importantly a peace that he, Abe Powers, had achieved. Virtually single-handed. No one in the outside world knew it yet, but when they did he would be heralded as the greatest American statesman since Kissinger. He would be the! toast in every Irish bar from the East Coast to California. His name would be on the lips of every New York cop, every Boston taxi driver. The entire Irish political lobby and the forty million who claimed Irish ancestry would be in his pocket. If he played his cards right — and he intended to — then it was almost a foregone conclusion that he would be Vice President in the next Democrat administration. And after that…
‘A massive IRA bomb has been defused by experts in the Blackwall Tunnel in east London. If it had exploded and the tunnel had collapsed, the costs of reconstruction and resultant chaos to the city’s transport system would have run into countless billions of pounds…’
He listened intently to the full details. Imagined the magnitude of the immediate damage and years of inconvenience and financial loss that would follow had the Provisional IRA been successful as clearly they so nearly had been. Could visualise the effect on New York had a similar device been exploded in one of the tunnels there.
And what next time? More bridges? Another tunnel bomb, maybe in another British city? On the tube line? Next time there might not even be a warning; he could understand that, what with the run of bad luck the freedom fighters had been having.
‘Freedom fighters?’ He’d thought in those terms quite unconsciously, he realised suddenly, but then he always had. Today’s freedom fighters were tomorrow’s politicians. How true that had proved in recent years.
How long, he wondered, would the British Cabinet stubbornly stick to their precondition of these talks? Insisting that the very people at the centre of the Irish problem in recent years be excluded from a voice in their own destiny. Unless they first renounced violence? And he knew they couldn’t do that, as did the British Government. Because violence was the only way the terrorists would ever win the concessions they wanted.
He’d always thought it wrong to exclude the Provisional IRA, but had managed to assuage his conscience with the usual pragmatism of the seasoned politician. Press ahead anyway and hopefully the freedom fighters would be satisfied with the result. But could they ever be satisfied with something in which they had played no part? Now that agreement was so, so close, it seemed foolish to deny them still.
And how many innocent civilians in London and elsewhere would have to die, how many millions of dollars of damage squandered until the Brits relented? Next time PIRA might get lucky. Real lucky. Next time, next time… Maybe that would be tomorrow.
And the blood and the ultimate injustice would be on his hands. Because he alone — Abe Powers, future Vice President of the United States — was the only man in the world with the political power to change the rules.
It was now two thirty. Nine thirty in the evening in Washington. Early enough. He made his decision and reached for the telephone with its special scrambler unit.
Seconds later he was through to the White House, the President interrupted at the banquet he was attending.
They spoke together for an hour, the President relaxed and in no mood to rush back, happy to enjoy a cigar in the privacy of his office. Aides were hurriedly summoned in from State, sat around drinking coffee, answering the President’s occasional questions and giving their advice.
Abe Powers III was a powerful and eloquent persuader and he knew how to add just the right historical slant that appealed to a romantic sense of justice against colonial repression. It could have been his own grandmother talking. When he hung up the telephone, his recommended plan of action had been sanctioned by the most powerful leader in the world.
Yet the senator could not sleep. To any fly on the wall he would have appeared a strangely vulnerable sight. The huge frame in striped pyjamas padding the suite, his mind and thoughts in turmoil. Waiting for the first dawn light to shed its quicksilver gleam across the running water meadows of the Avon.