‘ I bloody will.’ She pushed past him furiously, strode the few paces to her car, halted abruptly and spun round, shaking her head. ‘You’ve gone really odd, Henry. I don’t know what’s got into you.’
‘ No,’ he said, ‘you don’t know, do you?’
‘ Fuck you,’ she rasped and continued to her car, fumbling for her keys, tears having formed in her eyes.
‘ Your pitiful security has been breached,’ the husky voice on the telephone informed the switchboard operator at Headquarters Control Room. ‘There is a bomb in your building and it will explode within fifteen minutes. This is not a hoax call.’
Speechless for the briefest of moments, the telephonist said, ‘Can you be more specific, please?’
‘ Sure — you’ve got a bomb under your arse, bitch.’ Click. Phone dead.
The woman swivelled in her chair and called urgently across to the Duty Inspector. He went a whiter shade of pale at the news.
This was one of those ‘Do we, don’t we?’ dilemmas. It played itself out in his mind only momentarily. Although he was certain the security procedures of getting into the Control Room building were tight, he equally knew that no security system was perfect. Anyone determined enough could breach any system — and even if there was the faintest possibility of losing lives, there could only be one course of action.
‘ Right — let’s get out of here,’ he announced smartly, acutely mindful that the whole network of communication across the county would be severely compromised. He prayed nothing big was about to happen.
Two hundred and fifty yards away from the Control Room, on the other side of the rugby pitch by the tennis courts, Danny Furness slammed the door of her car and sat there shaking, about to erupt in a torrent of tears.
Henry sagged against the outer fence of the tennis courts, curling his fingers tightly around the wire, his head bowed between his arms as he endeavoured to get a grip on himself, mentally thrashing himself for having spoken to Danny like that. He ground his teeth and lifted his chin to look across at Headquarters.
His vision was blurred with tears of self-pity, shame, anger, fear
… a bitter brew of all these things, bubbling and boiling from within like he was being eaten away by acid. He saw a lone figure cross the rugby pitch and trot confidently towards the helicopter. It meant nothing to him at that moment. His mind was elsewhere, in turmoil, in disarray.
Danny’s car started up. She put it in gear.
Henry drew himself up to his full height and stumbled towards her, waving with his hands, hoping to prevent her leaving.
Danny flicked the gear lever back into neutral and yanked on the handbrake.
Henry fell against the car, leaning against the edge of the roof with both hands. He squatted down on to his haunches and looked at Danny through the window, which she slowly opened.
The face she saw was one wrecked by grief, torn apart by something dreadful inside. She was deeply shocked.
‘ Henry!’ she cried. ‘What’s wrong? What’s going on?’
‘ Get ready, get ready,’ Smith uttered into his radio. ‘He’s here, he’s here. Security van just pulling on to the slip road. He’ll be with you very shortly. Get ready.’
‘ Crane received.’
‘ Hawker and Price received.’
‘ Drozdov and Thompson received.’
At that exact moment a bomb threat was received in the Communications Room at Lancaster police station, the Divisional Headquarters for Northern Division in which Lancaster motorway services was situated.
Once again the call was taken seriously.
Evacuation procedures were put immediately into place.
‘ Danny, I’m sorry,’ Henry babbled through his tears, but before he could say anything further, everything was cut short by a huge blast less than seventy yards away when the Force helicopter exploded in a massive fireball of blue and orange flame and black smoke.
Henry was battered flat on to his back by the shockwaves. A huge, dangerous slab of rotor-blade sliced through the air with a whistling sound and skidded across the bonnet of Danny’s car, thudding into the ground like a red-hot sabre only a matter of inches from Henry’s head. Other pieces of sharp, deadly flying metal smacked into the ground like strafe from a fighter plane, sizzling and burning. One crashed against the windscreen of Danny’s car, making her cower in abject terror. The windows of buildings nearby were smashed by the mini-hurricane effect of the explosion, sending shards of glass scything into offices.
Henry rolled up on to his hands and knees, shaking his head incomprehensibly, but with one wary eye on the axe-shaped piece of rotor-blade in the ground which had nearly decapitated him. His whole word imploded and then came rushing back in a tidal wave of consciousness.
Danny threw her door open, leapt out of the car, went to Henry’s side, placing an arm around his shoulders. They stood up together, both unsteady, and turned.
The flames were now only a flicker, but plumes of thick black smoke circled up from the helicopter wreckage — a tangled, charred array of metal and glass.
People swarmed out of buildings to look.
For a moment, Henry was too stunned to say anything coherent. Then his mind cleared of all debris and the instinct of a cop came back into gear. He said urgently, ‘Get into the car, quick, Danny — let me drive.’
He jumped in through the open driver’s door and Danny, without question, ran around and got into the passenger seat.
‘ I saw someone cross to the helicopter only seconds before it blew,’ Henry said hurriedly. ‘Could’ve been one of ours, I suppose, but he didn’t really seem to fit in. Unless he blew himself up, my commonsense tells me he’ll be running away from the place, not towards it.’
Henry accelerated away, the surge of engine power equal to the rush of adrenaline in his body. ‘Gotcha,’ she said.
On reaching the service area south of Lancaster, Colin Hodge slowed right down and scanned for the parking space he had been instructed to pull into. He had argued that it didn’t actually matter a toss where he put the van — after all, this was just a quick RV, a situation report — and then he would be on his way within minutes. But Smith had insisted he park specifically between the two HGVs. It would mean that fewer people would see and remember the security van on the service area; it was also an indication to the team that all was going well. If he didn’t park there, it would mean that the job would have to be put off. Hodge accepted the reasoning.
He spotted the two HGVs, having been told there would be a Sherpa van already parked between them, flashing hazard warning lights. As he lined up to park between the HGVs, the Sherpa drew away. Hodge drove into the tight vacant slot and stopped.
‘ Fucking long way to the bogs from here,’ one of his mates observed, ‘especially if you’ve got the shits.’
‘ I know. It’ll be all right. Just don’t like leaving the van out in the open — don’t want to become a target for a passing opportunist, do we? Out of sight, out of mind.’
It was sound logic, easily accepted by his two rather dim mates upfront with him and the one in the armoured hold behind, the one surrounded by millions of pounds.
‘ Won’t be a minute.’ Hodge opened his door, briefly catching the reflection of the Sherpa in his wing mirror, reversing up behind. The reason why it might be doing so escaped him. He dropped to the ground only to meet the masked figure of Billy Crane appearing from underneath the rear wheels of the ERF Curtainside. He was holding a big black pistol in his hand.
Crane stepped smartly up to Hodge before he could react and rammed the muzzle of the gun under the chin strap of his helmet and pulled the trigger twice in quick succession. The soft-nosed bullets destroyed Hodge’s brain and he died instantly. Crane hurled him to one side before he fell, into the waiting arms of Hawker and Price who immediately began to haul him up on to the ERF trailer, behind the side curtain.
