First Response

LAMBETH CENTRAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMAND CENTRE (12.51 p.m.)

Kamran walked over to the SCO19 pod, carrying two coffees. ‘How’s it going, Marty?’ he asked, as he handed him a mug.

Marty Windle smiled his thanks and sighed. ‘We’re stretched tight, Mo. Bloody tight. We get another one and we’re buggered, frankly.’

‘How many SAS men do you have now?’

‘Eight more have arrived and they’re on the way to support the ARVs. I do worry that we’ve got so many of them. I mean, we need as many guns as we can get but there’s a danger that they’ll take over. I’m not sure how well trained they are for hostage situations like this. They prefer to go in with guns blazing. As you know, we like to resolve our situations without firing a single round.’

‘They know it’s a Met operation,’ said Kamran. ‘They’re here in a support role.’

‘Yeah, so far,’ said Windle. ‘But that could well change as the deadline gets closer.’ He groaned. ‘I’m getting a bad feeling about this, Mo.’ He stood up and looked at the large screen on the wall that mapped out all the hostage locations. ‘Seven,’ he said, ‘and nothing linking them. Do you think they’ve been chosen at random?’

‘I can’t see how that can be because everything else has been so well planned,’ said Kamran.

‘But look at the range of places,’ said Windle. ‘A church in Brixton, a shopping centre in Wandsworth, a post office in Fulham, a childcare centre in Kensington, a coffee shop in Marble Arch, a pub in Marylebone, a bus in Bloomsbury. There’s no pattern at all.’

‘The geographical location is the pattern,’ said Kamran. He sipped his coffee. ‘They dropped the first one off at Brixton, then headed clockwise around the city. One every fifteen minutes or so.’

‘Which means one vehicle, obviously. But why do that? Why limit yourself? Why not have seven vehicles? Why not have the bombers all strike simultaneously like they did on Seven/Seven?’

‘This way is more efficient, maybe.’

Windle shook his head. ‘This way is more risky. Suppose something had gone wrong at the start. They’d all have been caught. Seriously, why put all your eggs in one basket?’

Kamran nodded thoughtfully. What Windle was saying made sense. A simple road traffic accident could have derailed the entire plan. If one of the vests had malfunctioned and detonated prematurely, all the bombers would have died. It would have made far more sense for them to travel separately. And there wasn’t much sense to the locations. The bus in Tavistock Square was perhaps a reference to the Seven/Seven attacks on London, and a church made religious sense. But a childcare centre? And a coffee shop just down the road from Paddington Green, one of the most secure police stations in the country? A post office? Yes, they were soft targets, but if this was an attack on Britain then why not pick targets that reflected that? There was nothing political about the locations that had been chosen and they did seem to be random. But, again, Windle was right — why go to all the trouble of planning a multiple suicide-bomber attack, then choose targets at random?

Sergeant Lumley hurried over, looking worried. ‘There’s another one, sir. An MP’s surgery in Camberwell. A couple of people managed to get out before he locked the door but the bomber’s holding the MP hostage.’

For the third time that day, Kamran swore.