Three Weeks in September Read online

  “Aye, it stinks.” It was the Scotsman McGrath who had spoken next. “The next question hangs over what occurred at Rayleigh. Almost on your doorstep, Artem. Who killed Tommy O’Riordan, and the others?”

  “Now, that’s something that’s bugged me ever since it happened,” said Colleen. “I even wondered if it had been my own brother, Sean. There were several reasons Hugo had to die. He had Sean killed, and I wondered whether it was him who had got rid of Tommy too.”

  “I never heard what Shah had to say,” said Rooney. “It might have helped if he’d shared those thoughts with the rest of us when Klimenko said what he did. Hanigan brushed it under the carpet as you said.”

  “What happened last week in Sheffield, Frank?” asked Colleen.

  “At that B&B do you mean?” replied Frank Rooney, “Tariq Malik was seen holding his gut. Witnesses reckoned he’d been shot. Nobody has seen him since. Why, what are you saying, that there’s a connection between these incidents? Are you serious?”

  “The men sat around the table with Shabbir Shah thought he was crazy,” said Colleen, “but when you join the dots, you get a picture. When we’ve finished talking, I want you to go back to your people and see if anyone else, apart from Malik, has gone missing. Anywhere in the north of England.”

  “OK, I’ll put the word out. It’s crazy though. How could there be an outfit big enough to do this without us having heard of it? We’ve got people on the inside of most levels of the authorities. Any new initiative the police come up with has been planned for before it hits the streets, so its impact is minimised. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Call me back when you’ve done your homework, Frank, there’s a good boy. Leave me to do the thinking. I’ll make sense of it; then we will do something. Think of it like Tim Hancock. A minor irritation that needs eliminating so the Grid can achieve total control of every criminal activity across the country. Nothing can stand in our way.”

  Frank Rooney ended the call. He would get onto those checks at once. He had learned a lot in the past hour; the most important thing was Colleen O’Riordan would be a formidable enemy. He had to make sure he was counted among her friends. He didn’t want to think of what the alternative might bring.

  “That went to plan,” said Tyrone, “Frank knows where he stands now. He’ll pass the message along the line to the others. With his help, you won’t need to ask me to remove any more Grid leaders, and you’ll gain the respect of the main spokesmen. That’s key.”

  “Exactly,” replied Colleen, “if we get Frank Rooney on our side then the rest will follow like sheep.”

  “I made a note of a few numbers while you two were flirting with one another,” said Tyrone. “Frank mentioned numbers when he ridiculed Shabbir Shah’s suggestion of a clandestine force in the UK. Does he have a point though? The armed forces are being cut back, but they still have one hundred and sixty thousand personnel. There are twenty-five per cent more than that attached to the police in one guise or another.”

  “Maybe, but you can discount a helluva lot of those because that number includes community support officers, traffic cops and wardens, and the desk jockeys. When was the last time you saw a proper copper on the beat?”

  “I try to avoid them as much as I can, Mum,” replied Tyrone.

  Colleen thought over what her son had said regarding the numbers for a moment.

  “I see where you’re going with this, Tyrone. If you take smaller organisations, things that everyone has heard of such as Border Force, and MI5. They have only got around twelve thousand people between them. If this organisation was twelve thousand strong, it would have been noticed.”

  “Not if Shabbir Shah was right,” said Tyrone. “They appear from nowhere and vanish like smoke. The only way they could do that is by being a small unit. A highly organised group with extraordinary levels of intelligence and highly developed surveillance skills. Where would these people have originated? How do we find them?”

  “Remember what they say about Chuck Norris?” said Colleen, “You don’t find him, he finds you. When I learn how strong they are in numbers, and I’m confident we can defeat them, we will draw them out of hiding. I’ll find a way.”

  *****

  Wednesday, 10th September 2014

  Ahmed Mansouri and Omar Harrack arrived from Liverpool Lime Street at Birmingham New Street station at one o’clock in the afternoon. After spending an hour mingling with the crowds of Sunday shoppers on Princes Street they had returned alone to Waverley to catch a bus south.

  The two terrorists had then travelled to Liverpool. A taxi took them from the bus station out to Walton, a residential area to the north of the city. They were welcomed to a terraced house near the centre by a fifty-eight-year-old ISIS sympathiser named Bakar al-Hamady. The basic timetable for the third attack was drawn up on Tuesday.

  On Wednesday morning, the Syrian-born al-Hamady drove them to Lime Street station. The West Midlands Trains service to New Street ran every thirty minutes. It came south via Crewe, the major junction on the West Coast Main Line. The Syrian didn’t accompany them. Their fellow terrorists were already lying in wait, scattered around the Midlands.

  The third attack was to be the most audacious, and most devastating - so far.

  Mansouri wasn’t finished yet. The disruption caused by the bombings at Canary Wharf and Edinburgh had been substantial, but the effects would be relatively short-lived. The real aim was to raise the level of disruption to crippling. He wanted rail services cancelled indefinitely. People stranded in their homes, unable to get to school, or to work. He wanted them stuck in the major cities; unable to get home. Vital equipment for industry, and medical supplies to be stuck in limbo while the authorities made the area safe before removing any goods in transit. Mansouri wanted the British public too terrified to travel by train.

  The media was giving high visibility to reports on the Edinburgh attack. The front pages of the daily newspapers and the headlines of news bulletins continued to cover the effects of the bombings in full. Canary Wharf, however, was fading from memory. The pressure must be maintained. The next attack would not fade from memory so quickly.

  The old Victorian station was undergoing a long-overdue refurbishment. Half of the modern grand concourse had been opened in April last year. In the remaining half redevelopment was ongoing, and those areas were closed to the public. As Mansouri and Harrack strolled from platform to platform, they noted the pressure points. They would make their task easier.

  Large numbers of passengers were funnelled through tighter channels while work progressed around them. Birmingham New Street is a central hub of the national railway system. New Street is the sixth busiest railway station in the UK and the busiest outside London, with forty million passenger entries and exits. It is also the busiest interchange station outside London, with over five million passengers changing trains at the station annually.

  Mansouri and al-Hamady had been attracted to New Street when they discussed potential targets online earlier in the year. Trains from every corner of the UK visited New Street. Since the Industrial Revolution in the middle of the nineteenth century, Birmingham had also formed well-established transport links with dozens of towns and cities scattered around it. Those links included road, rail, and canal.

  Smaller branch lines disappeared in the 60s, but the major ones were still intact. New Street was a major hub for local and suburban services. The mayhem caused by a series of well-orchestrated strikes would be catastrophic.

  Mansouri and Harrack carried typical tourist cameras while they covered every accessible inch of the station throughout that Wednesday afternoon. Individual pictures of specific places of interest were taken on their burner phones and sent to al-Hamady up in Walton.

  For operational reasons trains departing New Street are dispatched by Right Away (RA) indicators. These display a signal informing the train driver it is safe to start the train, instead of using the traditional bell or hand signals. All signalling is con
trolled by New Street power signal box at the Wolverhampton end of the station.

  Harrack captured the images of the RA system and of that signal box. He made a note to secure a second angle from Navigation Street as they left the station to walk to their hotel. The box was visible from there and was another important element in the plan.

  While Harrack was at one end of the station, Mansouri was gathering data at the other. All trains arriving and departing had to use one of the several tunnels. New Street North Tunnel heads westwards towards Wolverhampton and passes under the National Indoor Arena. This tunnel is seven hundred metres long and holds two tracks. The Syrian was keen to learn what effect a bomb blast in the North Tunnel would produce.

  New Street South Tunnel although only two hundred and forty metres long, heads eastbound, and passes under the Bullring. heading towards Tamworth. This tunnel opened in 1854, originally holding two tracks; it was widened in 1896 to hold four tracks, with two double-track parallel bores. The Bullring is the major commercial area for the centre of the city.

  It was minutes before six in the evening when the two terrorists met on Navigation Street. Harrack took the final photo, and without discussion over what they had seen or heard, they walked the half a mile to the budget hotel where they planned to stay.

  There was plenty of time to complete the preparation stage. The Syrian was to provide an outline plan within forty-eight hours. Mansouri and Harrack would then return to New Street station to double-check every step. Over the weekend the other cell members would receive their tasks.

  These men would never meet Mansouri and Harrack or their colleagues face to face. Indeed, the London and Edinburgh bombers’ identities would never be revealed to the rest of the cell. Sleeper operatives know someone will call to issue instructions. They don’t know when that call will come; nor do they need to know who placed the call. If the authorities had suspicions about an extremist in the Midlands and arrested him; the integrity of the cell would not be compromised.

  Once the sequence of steps in this dance of death had been verified and al-Hamady gave the green light, then buildings in the city centre would collapse like a set of dominos.

  CHAPTER 10

  Thursday 11th September 2014

  The agenda for morning meetings at Larcombe followed a familiar routine. The intelligence section was always the first to report. Much would have happened in the twenty hours that passed since they last met. National emergencies were the only thing to cause Athena to call a second meeting.

  Since Tuesday morning, Phoenix believed they had been playing catch-up. When they started proceedings two days ago Athena called on the ice-house personnel for an update on their overnight hunting expedition for the bombers.

  Giles told her there had been unconfirmed sightings of the pair in Leeds, Cardiff, and London from agents on the ground. He continued to receive news from those examining hours of CCTV images from the four railway stations they believed could be involved.

  “I wish I could give you good news,” he said, “but we’ve got nothing concrete, so far.”

  “Did we make a mistake limiting the search? Might they still be in Scotland?” asked Henry Case.

  “No, Henry, we agreed once an area has been targeted, Mansouri and Harrack move on,” said Athena.

  “We should ignore where they’ve been,” Rusty agreed, “they won’t hit the same place twice; and don’t forget, Edinburgh was different to London. They used a suicide bomber to achieve an additional publicity coup. My fear is this campaign will escalate. The next attack could involve half a dozen bombers, or even more. They wouldn’t carry out an attack of that scale on a smaller target in the provinces. They’ll want it to mean something to the outside world. So, it must be Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, or Bristol. Places with less than a half a million population won’t cut it.”

  “Which alternative transport options from Edinburgh to those four cities have we considered?” Alastor asked.

  At last, they stumbled on a possible clue. By early Tuesday afternoon, the ice-house team found the bombers arriving in Liverpool late on Sunday night. They knew for sure now that they had travelled south by bus. The taxi rank from where Mansouri and Harrack drove to Walton wasn’t covered by CCTV; so most of Tuesday night into Wednesday morning had been spent on a fruitless search across Liverpool, with an emphasis on its three railway stations.

  With Liverpool appearing to be the target for the next bombing, they needed boots on the ground. There were no sightings of the bombers on Monday, or Tuesday on any CCTV camera they accessed. The Larcombe team were unaware that the men were tucked away on the outskirts of the city with Bakar al-Hamady. Nor could they have known they would soon be on the move again.

  Phoenix had raised the subject of the Irregulars at the Tuesday meeting. The news that extra pairs of eyes and ears would be available so soon gave everyone a boost. They agreed to station six people at Liverpool Lime Street and four people at each of the other selected major stations. Minos confirmed the accommodation was in place. Hugh Fraser assured Phoenix the ex-servicemen were fit and raring to go.

  The Irregulars had been watching and waiting in Liverpool since Wednesday at noon.

  Nothing had been reported to date. Sometimes, you need a lucky break.

  As he waited for Athena to ask Giles for his report, Phoenix prayed that they heard something positive, at last.

  “What do you have for us, Giles?” asked Athena.

  “At one time, Birmingham was called the CCTV capital of Europe,” said Giles, “but they’ve reduced the numbers in recent years. The upside is the quality of the image on the ones that survived is far better. Here we have our two men taking photos on Navigation Street, near the Bullring.”

  “At what time?” asked Athena.

  “Last evening, at six o’clock,” Giles replied.

  “We can put the Irregulars at Liverpool and the rest on standby,” said Rusty. “We need more people in and around Birmingham New Street.”

  “How did we miss them at Lime Street? Maybe they used the bus again?” said Henry Case.

  “Trains run to Birmingham very often,” said Artemis, “we didn’t have people on the ground until noon. As for New Street, that team arrived mid-afternoon, and were outside the station, watching for people coming or going. The terrorists could have arrived hours earlier. The fact that several hours later they popped up on a camera outside the station suggests they stayed inside for a purpose.”

  “Surveillance,” said Rusty, “I would love to see what’s on that camera he’s using on Navigation Street. What could they see from there, anyway?”

  “A signal box,” said Artemis.

  Phoenix felt his mobile phone vibrate in his pocket.

  “Sorry,” he said, “I’d better take this,”

  He left the room and returned two minutes later. Giles and Artemis explained the significance of the signal box.

  “Right, that was Hugh Fraser,” said Phoenix, “we need to get the Irregulars patched straight to you in the ice-house in the future, Giles. Hugh’s heard this morning from one of his team. They thought they saw Harrack in a tunnel leading out of New Street yesterday evening, but they were too far away to see where he went.”

  Henry tutted.

  “Let’s not be too critical, Henry,” said Athena, “this initiative is in its early stages. We would have preferred to give these people specific training and instructions on what to do given various sets of circumstances. We were desperate to find these two bombers and threw the Irregulars in at the deep end. Hugh Fraser will whip them into shape in time.”

  “We know they’re in Birmingham now,” said Artemis, “and we can keep up the search for the next occasion they surface. The more bodies we have at New Street station the better. Can we allocate Olympus agents to supplement the Irregulars?”

  “I’ll see to that,” said Athena.

  “I think Rusty should draw up the operating procedures for both sets,” said Phoenix. “We n
eed a decision to follow, intercept, or eliminate to be automatic, depending on certain criteria. Those actions mustn’t be delayed for a referral to Larcombe for an answer. Lives will be lost in any delay.”

  “Will you be going to Birmingham yourself, Phoenix,” asked Giles.

  Phoenix looked at his wife. She was still fragile. Grace’s funeral was on Monday.

  “Rusty and I will go there if the situation demands,” he replied.

  “We have enough teams of agents in the Midlands to cope with matters,” said Rusty, “I’ll work on the rules of engagement straight after this meeting. They will be with the Irregulars and our team leaders by tonight.”

  “We haven’t a clue when these devils plan to strike,” said Alastor, “we may already be too late.”

  “If Canary Wharf and Waverley have taught us anything,” said Phoenix, “it’s that every stage has been thought out in detail. Try to put yourself in their position. How would you tackle a mission such as this? Why did they stay in Liverpool for two days? Why not come south to Birmingham straight away? Where did they stay for three nights?”

  “We may be looking for a fellow extremist who either just gave them shelter or waited to help them plan this next stage in the campaign,” said Henry.

  “That’s another search to add to my list,” said Artemis.

  “We will have the surveillance ramped-up to cover the access and exit points within hours,” said Phoenix. “My next move would be to check that my plan would go without a hitch. When they re-surface next, it will be to do a final dry run. The actual strike will happen within twenty-four hours of that. We must follow them back to their hideout, uncover any additional contacts they have established that might join them in this attack, and then eliminate the threat.