Their Darkest Hour

Chapter Seventeen

London

United Kingdom, Day 15

“They’re doing it on purpose,” Aashif proclaimed, loudly. The small gathering of young men around him murmured in agreement. “They are showing no respect for our religion at all!”

Seated halfway across the room, with the women and young children, Fatima could still hear him voicing his anger. Aashif was twenty-one years old, born to a family and community that was largely excluded from the mainstream population. A stronger person might have broken down the barriers or carved out a career for themselves, but Aashif — like so many others — had chosen to fall back into his community and wrap himself in a tissue of imaginary grievances. She’d heard it all before; the world was against him, no one liked or trusted him because of his religion, and he had rights. It never seemed to have occurred to him that his failures were a result of his personality, or that he could have made something of himself if he tried. He found it so much easier to blame others for his failings.

She rolled her eyes. Men like Aashif were a persistent pain in the posterior. Deprived of the sort of wealth and power they thought the world owed them by rights, they turned upon the women in their lives. Aashif’s sister was terrified to talk to strangers for fear that her brother would hear of it and beat her; his mother was a pale shadow of a woman, scared of the boy she’d brought into the world. Only his grandfather had ever been able to exercise any kind of restraint on the young man, and he’d passed away two years ago. She listened to his bragging and shuddered, inwardly. There was a new conviction in his voice that had been missing several months ago.

Not that she could really blame him. The aliens had taken over every building large enough to hold their oversized forms — and that included a number of London’s mosques. Even the police had been reluctant to just barge into the mosques, fearing the effect such provocative acts would have on the Muslim community. But the aliens had just taken the buildings and evicted everyone who complained. They’d done the same to a number of churches, yet they seemed to have targeted mosques deliberately. Given the rumours coming from the Middle East — and spread over the internet, along with far too much outright nonsense — it seemed as though they were attacking Islam directly. From what she’d seen herself, Fatima suspected that the aliens simply didn’t care. Humans were their property now — and property didn’t get a vote, or the right to complain.

“We’re going to do something about it,” Aashif continued. Bragging about his connections to the underground Jihad movement wasn’t new either, but she’d always known that he was just a poser, someone who would probably faint dead away at the thought of being asked to blow himself and a great many innocent civilians up. There were too many girls out there who were prepared to allow such claims to overpower their common sense. “I’m going to see to it personally.”

Unseen, Fatima rolled her eyes. Of course he would — and while he was at it, he’d create the perfect Islamic State… never mind that such a state only existed in the deluded rants sprouted by preachers with nothing better to do. There were times when she was tempted to believe that suicide bombers were God’s way of weeding out the unworthy from the Muslim community. The young fools who died for a dream rarely got to spread their seed.

She shook her head, and then helped her stepmother and the rest of the girls clear away the dishes and wash up. They knew their place, all right — and the fact that she was a doctor cut no ice with the men. Men like Aashif wanted women to stay in their place. It was the only way they could convince themselves that they were in charge. She smiled, in a moment of dark humour. The world could hardly be worse if women were in charge.

Sergeant Abdul Al-Hasid was feeling dirty. Not the feeling he’d had when he’d first discovered pornographic magazines, despite knowing that his God-fearing father would thrash him to within an inch of his life if he’d been caught looking at naked sluts. And not the feeling he’d had when Salma — his first girlfriend — had allowed him to touch her bare breast. It was the feeling of knowing that he was doing something utterly wrong — and the fact that the people he was helping to do it wanted him to help them didn’t make him feel any better. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he would be called upon to answer to God and that no answer he could give, nothing he could offer in his own defence, would help his case.

He’d grown up in a strictly Islamic environment — so of course he’d rebelled. School hadn’t given him much in the way of qualifications, so the Army had seemed a logical choice. And it had been the making of him. He’d knuckled down at it and worked hard for the first time in his life, deploying to Iraq and then Afghanistan with the Green Jackets. Along the way, he’d seen just what living under Islamic Law really meant — the only people who wanted Taliban-style rule were the people who had never had to live under it. He’d seen enough to convince him that the rulers, for all their dedication to making others follow the rules, enjoyed breaking them every chance they got. Walking through a Taliban-run whorehouse had been enough to convince him that they had to be stopped. They’d killed the girls rather than risk having them freed by the British Army.

After the aliens had invaded, he’d volunteered to return to London with several other Londoners. They’d known that it would be dangerous — no one could describe the military as a safe job in the best of times — but he’d known people who might be able to help them fight the aliens. Wearing civilian clothes, he’d wandered through the communities with his ears wide open, listening carefully. Finding the would-be suicide bombers had been depressingly easy. Like so many others, they had bad intentions — and no contacts with the underground world. Obtaining explosives on the black market wasn’t exactly easy. He’d lost count of how many idiots seeking a quick death had tried to buy weapons and explosives off police informers.

He glanced around the garage, rolling his eyes. Like many other business in the area, as much of the business as possible was done off the books — just to keep the taxman from taking an undue interest in their profits. He found it hard to blame the struggling small businessmen for trying to keep their profits for themselves, but the garage had clearly been involved in preparing stolen cars to be released back onto the market. The tools to rig up a small van with enough explosive to really ruin someone’s day had been easy to find. God alone knew what had happened to the owner and his family. They hadn’t returned to work in the days since the invasion.

A tap at the door brought him to full alertness. He half-drew his pistol with one hand as he padded over to the door and peered through the one-way glass that the previous owner had installed. The young fool was standing there, waiting for him. Abdul rolled his eyes, silently grateful that he wouldn’t have to rely on such fools forever, knowing that the man wouldn’t have bothered to walk in a manner that might deter a shadow. His confidence that God would protect him was grossly misplaced. In Abdul’s experience, God helped those who helped themselves — although He probably wouldn’t want to help suicide bombers. Part of him wanted to tell the young fool to go home and enjoy the rest of his life, but there was no real alternative. They had to remind the aliens that they existed before the aliens broke their determination to resist.

He opened the door and waved the young man into the garage. The young fool had dressed for the job, all right. He’d washed, cut his beard and then dressed in his finest white robes. If he’d paid as much attention to his schoolwork as he had to his appearance, he might have made something of himself without slipping into bitterness and paranoid conspiracy theories. Abdul shook hands with him firmly, and then nodded towards the white van. It was ready to leave the building.

“I’ve been watching the alien guards,” he said. Quite why the aliens had bothered to take over a technical college in London was beyond him, but it was clearly important to them. They weren’t using their tame policemen to guard it. Instead, there were upwards of thirty aliens on guard duty and they weren’t shy about urging human onlookers away from the scene. “You should be able to get into the parking lot if you leave in twenty minutes.”

One thing that had been hammered into his head time and time again during the dreaded Combat Infantryman’s Course at Catterick Garrison had been that they should never be predicable. Any routine was dangerous because a watching enemy could pick the best moment to launch an attack, catching the defenders by surprise. But the aliens didn’t seem to have realised that. Their guards patrolled in regular, easily predicable patterns, changing every hour. He could almost set his watch by their movements. It had taken him two days of observation to be reasonably sure that it wasn’t a trap of some kind, although they were definitely going to get more than they bargained for if he was wrong. The van carried enough explosive to be fairly sure of totalling the college when it exploded.

He walked over to the van and opened the door. “When you turn the corner onto the road, push down on the switch there,” he said. “That arms the bomb. When you want it to detonate, take your hand off the switch and it’ll explode. Don’t try to brake once you’re around the corner — just drive for the gate as fast as you can.”

The young man nodded. He looked confident, at least. Abdul silently pitied him — and his family. It was rare to see a suicide bomber blessed by his family, at least in Britain. Their deaths tended to come as a shock to their friends and relatives, giving them the grief of losing someone while dealing with increasingly pointed questions from the security services. Part of his mind pointed out that such a young fool would find a way to harm himself sooner or later, perhaps lashing out at a member of his family. At least this way his death would count for something. He told himself that, time and time again, but the dirty feeling refused to fade from his mind.

He reached out and touched the young man’s sleeve. “You don’t have to go through with this,” he said, flatly. “If you want to back out…”

“I know what I’m doing,” the young man said. Abdul sighed inwardly at his tone. He’d heard it before from young recruits, the kind who needed to be broken down before they could be built up again. But that required dedication and determination — and the young would-be bomber had neither. “It needs to be done, for what they did to us. You have the video?”

Abdul nodded. He’d used a simple civilian camcorder to record a brief statement, a message to be uploaded onto the internet after the bomb exploded. The young fool would explain why he’d bombed the college, stating that it was in response to the occupied mosques. He seemed to believe that the aliens had meant to insult and degrade Islam. Abdul suspected that they simply didn’t care. Given their size, they needed larger buildings — and mosque prayer halls were wide open, easy for them to use. A church would need to have the pews removed before it would suit the aliens.

“It’s ready for uploading,” he said. Actually, he’d moved the uploading laptop somewhere else. He had no way of knowing what surveillance capabilities the aliens had in place, which meant that they might be able to trace the van back to the garage. And if they caught him… he was sure that there were other soldiers operating within London, apart from his small cell, but he hadn’t been given any details. He had to assume that their death meant the end of resistance within London. “Remember; push down on the switch once you turn the corner, and then keep your hand on the switch! You let go of it early…”

“Understood,” the young man said. He turned the key and the engine rumbled to life. It was lucky that the garage owner had kept a small reservoir of petrol under the building, or they wouldn’t have been able to fuel the van. Civilians had almost no petrol in London these days. The air was cleaner already. “And thank you.”

Abdul watched him go, silently wondering if God would hear his prayers in the future.

He’d just sent a young man to hell.

Aashif knew how to drive, but he’d never taken the formal test and he had never tried to drive a van before. It felt heavy and unwieldy compared to his father’s car and if the roads hadn’t been almost empty, he was sure that he would have crashed — or at least scraped off some of the paint — by now. His sweaty hands felt slippery against the wheel, forcing him to keep a tight grip. He could hear his heartbeat pounding inside his skull. A collaborator’s car pulled out ahead of him and he had to push down on the brakes to avoid a collision. He’d been warned that if he did crash, for any reason, he had to abandon the van and run. The moment they saw the explosives, the police would know what he had in mind…

His breath was coming in patches, leaving him feeling unwell as he turned the corner carefully. There were no traffic lights in London these days either. He’d been told that he would feel calm, that the peace of God would overwhelm him, but instead he just felt frantic, almost terrified. It would be easy to park the van and just run… he could walk away from his own death. But there was nowhere to go. The people he knew were the ones he had bragged to about his role in the Jihad. It had seemed so easy at the start to use his inflated claims to gain power and influence — God knew that the younger Muslims had had enough of older clerics telling them what to do. Pakistan was on the other side of the world — gone, if some of the more alarming reports on the internet were true — and it wasn’t right that they should be controlled by village elders who couldn’t even protect them from racists or the police…

And then there were the temptations of the West. Women leaving the homes and working for a living, instead of doing their duty as mothers, daughters and wives. Music, drugs… everything that polluted the mind and wore away at faith. And homosexuality… how could anyone tolerate a world where men could love men? It was disgusting how the West prided itself on its own tolerance. Even though it provided a shield for the faithful, for those determined to turn back the clock… how could anyone stand to live like that?

And then there were those who suffered while he lived in luxury…

It had been easy to pretend, until his dream had become a nightmare. And yet he couldn’t back out. He’d recorded the video, the one where he’d damned the aliens and their collaborators for what they’d done to Islam. If he left the van and ran, he knew what would happen. The video would be released and everyone would laugh at him. He’d know that they were laughing, even as they pretended to be sympathetic. How could he ever show his face in their company again?

His heart beat faster as he turned the corner. The college was just up ahead, a place for smarter kids who didn’t want to spend the rest of their lives flipping burgers at McDonalds, or claiming benefits. He reached for the switch and hesitated. It wasn’t too late. He could park and run away and maybe find a new home somewhere else. There were always possibilities for those with the determination… but he’d lacked it. In a rare moment of self-assessment, he realised that he’d never had the determination to make something of himself. Instead, someone else had made something out of him. He wanted to run and yet he didn’t quite dare…

He pushed down on the switch, hearing an ominous click. His hand felt as if it were drenched in sweat as he gunned the engine, sending the van forward faster. The aliens hadn’t bothered to put up a gate, merely a pair of guards. He saw their ugly forms and pointed the van right at them, wondering if they had the sense to jump out of the way. It wouldn’t save them, though. There was enough explosives in the van to reduce the entire building to rubble… or so he’d been told. Maybe they’d lied to him…

There was a popping sound. It took him a moment to realise that they were shooting at him. A burst of pain spread over his chest, sending him flopping backwards against the seat. It was suddenly very hard to think. His chest was warm… blood was pouring from a hole… he slumped forward, his hand falling off the switch. He had a second to realise that he’d released the switch… and then the world went away in a flash of white-hot flame.