Not that he was a bigot, or anything like that. As a major employer, he saw the evil waste and stupidity of racism. He didn’t care much about drugs either way. He was just innocently right wing in that he believed in the power of the will, the greatness of America, and the ability of a man to rise on the stepping-stones of his dead self to higher things. When Cameron was a little girl he would take her roaring out in his T-bird, a car on which he doted until one day he forgot to fill her with oil. Every year, on her birthday, he promised he would take her up in one of the Lockheed jets he was commanding in ever greater numbers, and every year she would look at him with shining eyes, secretly wish she could marry him, and yearn for the moment when she could be his co-pilot.
If Buster MacLean were to be portrayed by modern Hollywood, it would be considered theatrically indispensable to expose him, in the final reel, as a cross-dresser, a bra-fetishist, an alcoholic or an abuser of animals. He was none of these things. He simply had the right stuff exploding hormonally from every orifice. In fact his machismo was so intense that he was sometimes considered a danger to himself and the exorbitantly expensive technology he was paid to fly, and every time Cameron’s mom heard him make his promise to her daughter, she would cross her fingers and hope, when the day came, for clear weather.
Nobody blamed Buster when his right-hand jet engine inhaled a turkey buzzard and forced him to eject at 5,000 feet. Nobody thought any the less of him when he was involved in a near miss with a Japanese Air Lines 747 approaching Baltimore Airport, forcing the commercial pilot to take such violent evasive action that upon landing a Matsushita executive was discovered in an overhead locker. But when he contrived to eject both his co-pilot and himself, without a cloud in the sky, leaving $60 million worth of taxpayer-funded fighter-bomber to fly on alone for almost 600 miles until it crashed into a convenience store in Nevada, it was decided there was only one thing to be done with Buster MacLean.
He was promoted to a position of real responsibility. By the time Cameron was twenty-one, and legally allowed to sit in an F1 SE Strike Eagle, capable of flying at twice the speed of sound while posting a bomb through the letterbox of Saddam Hussein, there was nothing and no one who could stop her father from taking her aloft. She remembered the day in delicious, lingering detail. She had just an apple and water for breakfast. There was no point in eating birthday cake if you were going to put your stomach through six Gs.
She remembered the fire engines and the ambulances nosing surreptitiously on to the tarmac (Buster’s reputation as a prangmeister was still green). She remembered the pride in her father’s voice as he said, ‘Hang on, babe’, and took off vertically, shooting up into the bright blue American sky like a firework. There was the awful pressure on her groin and legs from the G-suit, and then there was the joy, the ethereal unrepeatable joy, of being allowed by her father to co-pilot the plane. She simply held the joystick hard to the right, and the plane corkscrewed over and down magically at supersonic speed in an aileron roll towards the indigo sea. It was like a dream of death, or the animal exhilaration of some huge marine bird as it falls like a stone on some fish below; and so they might indeed have ganneted into the deep, had Buster not said to his daughter, ‘OK, babe, I’ll take back the plane, now,’ and they flew back in contented silence as the afternoon sun gave its dying benediction on rural America, the little red barns, the cylindrical grain silos, the churches and the schoolhouses. Whatever man Cameron settled on, that was the intensity of experience he would have to replicate. Which was why she was so stunned by Adam.
Now she was making faster time than her new boyfriend as they both marched towards Westminster Hall, mainly because she knew the route, and he was momentarily lost in the ground-floor corridors of Norman Shaw South.
‘You don’t mind if I use the phone,’ said Colonel Bluett to Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.
Purnell indicated, again, that the entire Ops Room was at the Colonel’s disposal.
‘I’m jes gonna tell Ricasoli about this here ambulance,’ said the Colonel.
‘Ricasoli?’ said Purnell.
‘Captain Ricasoli, up there in the Black Hawk.’
Purnell looked at Grover, and Grover looked wordlessly back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
0938 HRS
In the police booth that governs the entrance to Norman Shaw North car park, they were having an argument about multicultural Britain.
‘It’s all part of the diversity regulations, innit. You’ve got to treat all religions the same.’
‘I don’t know, mate,’ said the other policeman. ‘I’ve never heard of that one.’
“Course you do. You’ve got to have a Koran in every ambulance these days, in case you have to administer the last rites to a Muslim.’
‘And you’re sure it said it was the Koran?’
“Course I’m sure. It was right there on the dashboard, with a load of used tissues. Al Qur’an. That means the Koran in Arabian.’
The two coppers considered the implications.
‘It’s a different world, mate.’
‘You can say that again.’
The second policeman’s attention was briefly diverted to the
‘I ‘spect so.’
‘What if it’s a Hindu accident victim? Do they have to carry the Bhagavad-Gita?’
‘I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘What about the Book of Mormon?’
The two coppers brooded again. ‘Tell you what,’ said the first policeman, ‘I reckon we just go and have a squint at that ambulance.’
‘Right you are.’
They shut the door of the booth behind them and wandered slowly over; with the result that they just missed the all points alert phone call, inviting them to keep an eye out for a stolen Wolverhampton ambulance, licence plate L64896P.
Inside that fatal machine Jones allowed himself to reflect, for one second, that so far they had been incredibly lucky. It could only be the will of Allah, blessings be upon his name, that they had not yet been detected.
Much of their plotting was amateurish. He thought with a shudder of the scene in the motel last night. But there was one detail which was both brilliant and revolutionary, and which would be copied by other terrorist cells. It was due entirely to him, the man whose passport said he was called Jones.
He was not called Jones, of course, but that was the name in which he enrolled at Llangollen, and which his fellow-students smirkingly accepted.
High above that North Welsh town, not far from the ruins of Dinas Bran and looking out over the foaming ale-coloured River Dee, are the delightful premises of a former mental home. Under the Learning and Skills Council it had been turned into a teacher training centre, where Welsh was dinned into the skulls of graduates, with a view to passing on this weird creole to the listless children of Denbighshire. The institution was then promoted into an Adult Education Centre, funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and Wales. Finally, in the great Stalinist push to expand the numbers in tertiary education, the place was rebaptized ‘Llangollen University’.
Here Jones had arrived two years ago, and spurned the useless courses that occupied most of the students. He did not do Media Studies or Gender Awareness in Film. He did that proper old-fashioned twenty-first-century British university course. He majored in hairdressing, and was known to his sniggering fellow-students as Jones the Hair.
But his main interest seemed to be in the thick, sweet, colourless, odourless liquid which is applied to hair in pomades and unguents. ft is called glycerin, C3H5(OH)3, and when treated with nitric acid (HNO3) and sulphuric acid (H2SO4) it produces something very remarkable.
One night there was a noise from Jones’s room. Some drunken Media Studies louts had been out at the Wild
