Right now, though, she wished she were an octopus.
She was doing her best to herd the VIPs on to the two helicopters. She would be in the first craft along with the British government ministers, Nicholas Orwell and the EU politician; the members of the group, in other words, who had the strongest desire to be seen by the TV cameras. Those who were happier to remain anonymous would travel in the second helicopter, attracting far less attention at the rear of the VIP party.
As the choppers fired up their engines the noise was so deafening that she was forced to direct everyone by hand gestures. Unfortunately, Wilkins’s right hand was occupied holding her phone close to her ear as she talked to her increasingly frantic colleagues already at their destination. But she could not hear a word that was spoken to her without clamping her hand over her other ear. Frantically, she tried to alternate increasingly desperate waves at the milling VIPs with five-second bursts of telephone conversation, with the result that no one, least of all Nikki Wilkins herself, had any clue at all about what the hell was going on.
Her situation was a microcosm of the whole operation. It was as if an orchestra was trying to improvise an entire symphony without a proper score, let alone a single rehearsal. At the site of the meeting itself, local police had only just arrived to set up a security perimeter. A couple of the TV vans, one from the BBC and the other from Channel Four News, had become detached from the convoy of vehicles making its way west, and were now hopelessly lost. No one seemed to know what was more important: maintaining security, in which case the TV people could not be told where to go, or gaining maximum publicity, in which case they had to know.
Calls bounced back and forth between Whitehall and the officials who were already in position at the site of the energy security meeting. Finally someone, somewhere made a decision. ‘Rosconway… Just tell them to put the word Rosconway into their satnavs and take it from there.’
41
Rosconway
Carver, Tyrrell and Schultz arrived at the refinery a few minutes after the helicopters had left Northolt. Along the way Carver had learned a bit more about Major Rod Tyrrell, to give him his full rank and name, or ‘Rodders’, as he was known to his men. He and Schultz had served together in Iraq, Afghanistan and a smattering of other trouble spots. They were two tough, experienced fighting men and they talked to one another with an ease that downplayed, but never entirely ignored, the difference in their ranks. It was obvious to Carver that Tyrrell had earned Schultz’s complete respect. The battle-hardened sergeant major was well over six feet tall, with biceps like boiled hams and the gnarled, bulldog features of a rugby front-row forward. He had precisely zero patience for weakness, incompetence or bullshit of any kind. So if he was impressed by a la-di-da ‘Rupert’ — as the men referred to their officers — that was all Carver needed to know.
‘What a shambles,’ Schultz said disgustedly, as they drove past a minimal, painfully inadequate security check into a car park filled with randomly placed vehicles. People were milling around in various stages of aimlessness, confusion and phone-clutching panic, while security men wearing high-visibility yellow tabards over their black uniform jackets tried desperately to impose some kind of order.
‘An absolute clusterfuck,’ Tyrrell agreed. ‘But look on the bright side. If the good guys haven’t had enough time to get organized, then neither have the bad guys.’
Schultz laughed. ‘You always were a logical bastard, boss.’
‘Hmm,’ Tyrrell murmured, casting a sharp, narrow-eyed look at the pandemonium. ‘Let’s just hope that I’m also right.’
42
Willie Holloway needed this like a hole in the head. It was tough enough being the operations manager at the National Petroleum refinery on any normal day, let alone this one. He ran an in stallation that was supplied by gigantic supertankers that had to be guided up the waters of Milford Haven without running down any of the scores of yachts and pleasure craft that flitted to and fro throughout the summer months, apparently oblivious to the leviathans passing between them like elephants through ants. The massive ships were filled with cargoes of crude oil that were an environmental disaster just waiting to happen. Virtually every stage of every process undertaken at the refinery itself produced substances that were capable of poisoning human beings, blowing them to smithereens or both. The finished products were then stored in giant tanks that were potentially some of the biggest Molotov cocktails in the world.
Now this had been dumped on him. Barely sixteen hours had passed since head office had called Holloway to say that his refinery had been given the huge honour of hosting an instant conference on the risks of terrorist attacks. That meant he had to cope with more than a hundred people arriving on some magical bloody mystery tour. He knew what they’d be like — a bunch of puffed-up ponces, all convinced that they should be allowed to go wherever they wanted and do whatever they wished — none of them with any experience at all of the oil industry. It was his responsibility to get them all through the day without compromising their safety, or the refinery’s. And just to make matters worse, everything he did would be noted and judged by the senior executives from UK headquarters, who would be National Petroleum’s official corporate representatives at the event.
At least he’d finally been given some outside help. Three casually dressed men had introduced themselves to him as envoys from the Ministry of Defence. Two carried military identity cards that gave their names as Sergeant Tom Croft and Major Hugh Gould, without specifying the unit to which they belonged. The third introduced himself as Andy Jenkins and said he was a civilian advisor.
Willie Holloway had no doubt at all that all three names were false. He had spent enough years working in oil-rich parts of the world that were a lot less pleasant than this corner of the Pembrokeshire coastline to know special forces when he saw them. And he wasn’t going to turn down their offer of help.
‘Delighted to be of assistance,’ said Rod Tyrrell after Holloway had shaken his hand. ‘Let’s take a look at a plan of this place. See how we can get through this without too much risk of total disaster.’
Carver said nothing. Until further notice he planned to keep his eyes and ears open and his mouth very firmly closed.
43
Carn Drum Farm
In London, the Metropolitan Police have a dedicated Counter Terrorism Command, designated SO15, which deals with threats to the capital city. The Dyfed-Powys police, however, are not so well-equipped to fight the forces of terror. Why should they be? Their patch, which covers a great swathe of south-western and central Wales, has one of the lowest crime-rates in the entire UK. Back in the seventies, outraged Welsh nationalists set fire to the occasional English-owned holiday cottage, but since then, the area has been notable for its lack of antisocial behaviour. So the slaughter at Carn Drum Farm was totally outside the experience of any of the officers who first attended the scene of the crime. They searched the entire property for bodies, but once it was clear that these were all confined to the farmhouse and its immediate surroundings, little attention was paid to the outbuildings, so no one initially realized what the inhabitants of the farm had been up to during their stay in the country. In any event, there was no one whose training or professional experience would have equipped them to detect an improvised bomb factory.
To make matters worse, the force, which includes Pembrokeshire, was already stretched to the limit providing officers to police the unscheduled, unplanned event at the Rosconway refinery. The Chief Constable and a number of senior officers had also decided to attend the event. So when reports of the terrible events at this isolated hill farm first started arriving at the force HQ in Carmarthen, their significance was by no means clear. Were the deaths the result of a burglary that had spiralled into deadly violence? Was this some kind of cult mass
