Carver

50

The choppers were just making their final approach to the refinery, barely five hundred metres from their destination. Their crews’ attentions were entirely concentrated on the landing ground that had been marked out for them in a field directly opposite the main gates. A reception committee of officials and media representatives had formed up there in a ragged semicircle. From her window seat, Nikki Wilkins could see the cameramen jostling for the best position and raising their lenses to the sky. As the helicopter swung round to come into land, she spotted a sudden, dazzling flash of light from the ground, away to her left. She turned her head towards it, and had just enough time to register the billowing plume of flame and smoke before something punched into the side of the helicopter and sent it staggering off course like a dazed boxer stumbling across the ring. The next thing Wilkins knew, the cabin was spinning round and round and she was screaming out in terror as the air all around her was filled with scorching flame and red-hot shards of metal.

The explosive-filled steel gas-cylinder that hit the Power Elite was bigger than the shell from a Challenger 2 battle tank. It obliterated the cockpit window, decapitated the pilot, missed the co-pilot by a whisker, and exited the far side of the helicopter, taking a mass of glass, metal, plastic and electrical wiring with it, like a through-and-through bullet tearing the flesh from its victim’s back. It did not, however, explode. There was still a tiny fraction of the fuse left unburnt, and until it triggered the detonator, the sugar/fertilizer mix would remain inert.

Its momentum somewhat slowed by its impact with the helicopter, the cylinder veered off course, flattened the arc of its trajectory, and hit the second helicopter amidships.

Now it exploded.

A millisecond later, the United Kingdom’s special forces had been left without a commanding officer, and MI5 had lost its deputy director. The fireball that consumed them had been captured live on television. But this was just the start of the catastrophe.

As the cluster of people by the landing site ran for cover from the shrapnel that fell like red-hot hail from the sky, the co-pilot of the first helicopter desperately fought for control of his craft.

And then the whole world seemed to go up in flames, as the other eleven cylinders hit their targets.

The pipes, towers and storage tanks of an oil refinery are double-skinned to prevent any leaks. But even two thin sheets of steel are no protection against an explosive shell impacting at close to the speed of sound. The tanks that each hold millions of gallons of oil and petrol are clustered in twos and threes within brick and concrete berms, designed according to safety regulations that demand they can safely contain a hundred and ten per cent of the capacity of the biggest tank. But those regulations do not account for what happens when all the tanks are breached at once, and a torrent of flaming liquid overflows those concrete defences like lava escaping a volcano. Refinery staff are trained to evacuate their workplaces quickly and safely in the event of an emergency, and await the arrival of local fire brigades. But evacuation attempts are futile when there is no place of safety; when death waits at every turn, and any attempt at rescue will be far too little, too late.

Armageddon had come to Rosconway. The air was torn asunder by a terrifying conflagration of thunderous noise, light, heat — and blasts of explosive pressure that picked up cars and trucks, sent people flying, and obliterated the mighty structures of the refinery in a series of explosions that seemed to go on and on in a never-ending wave of destruction.

The explosive shells were damaging enough in themselves. But their greater purpose was to set free the pent-up power that was locked in the refinery itself. The giant storage tanks, the distillation towers, the miles of pipes that carried a multitude of petrochemical substances around the complex: all now became locked in a deadly chain reaction as the fires of hell engulfed them.