Revenger

34

The people milling around Netherton Street were like any other lawless crowd: a very small quantity of hardcore agitators and organizers at the top; a larger number of committed followers; and then an overwhelming majority of incidental hangers-on. Donny Bakunin’s first task was therefore to get the leaders onside. If he could only do that, the rest of the herd would follow like iron filings after magnets.

It wasn’t easy. The dozen or so gang-members and career criminals who formed the hard core of the rioters had no interest whatever in the political implications of their actions. They simply wanted to loot as much as they could, as quickly and efficiently as possible. Their status with their underlings came from their ability, in the most literal possible sense, to deliver the goods. They had no objection whatever to violence, provided that they were dishing it out — beating and knifing restaurant waiters and pub customers was fine. But being shot and even killed by armed men who knew what they were doing was another matter altogether.

Bakunin listened to the sociopathic thugs and self-professed hard men make their excuses for accepting defeat. And then he said, ‘I understand. I get it. You’re all a bunch of gutless cunts and you don’t mind who knows it.’

While the shock was in their eyes and before any of them could retaliate, he stepped up his attack. ‘Because if you walk away from here, with your tails between your legs, people are going to know you didn’t have the balls to beat a bunch of fucking shopkeepers. And they’re going to start thinking they don’t have to worry about you, because you’re just a bunch of bitches. You’ll be a fucking laughing stock. You might as well cut your own balls off right now.’

Bakunin looked around the assembled gaggle of shaved heads, thick necks, mad eyes and tattooed skin that surrounded him and asked, ‘Is that what you want?’

He was met with a sort of sulky, wordless grumble of dissatisfaction.

‘I said, is that what you want?’ Bakunin repeated, blithely unaware that he was echoing the way that Mark Adams, the politician he hated above all others, had wound up a hesitant crowd at the O2 Arena.

‘’Course it fuckin’ ain’t,’ a voice replied.

‘Then do what I say and we’ll overrun these shopkeepers like a steamroller crushing ants. We’ll smash into their precious little shop, and we’ll fuck it up and fuck them up, and by the time we’ve finished and they’re all dead and ripped to pieces then everyone will know that that is what you get for trying to defy us. And then they won’t laugh at you. They’ll be on their knees, sucking your cocks and begging for your mercy.’

At any other time, a man like Donny Bakunin might not have got away with talking like that. But the blood and matter drying on his skin, leaving drip marks all over his hair, his skull-like face and his scrawny neck, had given him the look of an ancient witch doctor, painted in gore. The sight of him struck some primitive chord in the men surrounding him, and they came over to his way of thinking. They then took the message back to their people. The word spread through the bigger groups milling listlessly around the fringes of Netherton Road or picking their way through looted shops, searching for one last overlooked item to steal. And then they were all back, his battalions of the ignorant, the unemployed and the dispossessed. Bakunin felt almost paternal towards them, as though he were a political Dr Frankenstein and these the monsters he — and others like him — had created in the educational laboratories of a thousand failed schools.

Aptly enough, they were going into battle behind a garbage truck. By ordering one end of the street to be blocked with cars, trash cans and anything else that came to hand, Bakunin had been able to move the lumbering machine from its original post. Its presence had encouraged his people to come out of the shadows and start massing on the streets. That was what Chrystal had seen. That was when Carver had turned on the microwave. Another half minute or so had passed as final preparations were made. Now the truck was rumbling slowly down the street, offering cover to the hundred-plus rioters trotting along in its wake like infantrymen behind a tank.

The truck stopped opposite the Lion Market, executed a slow, ponderous three-point turn and then accelerated towards the metal shutters. A roar went up from the people behind it. There was a crackle of gunfire as shots were blasted into the night sky, and then they began their charge towards the perforated metal shutters of the helpless supermarket — a sociopathic tsunami about to crash down upon the little store and wash it and its occupants clean away.