Silent Weapon Read online

  Okwute smiled slightly, maybe sensing his alarm. ‘It is no secret that the British Army are in Nigeria to train our own against Boko Haram.’

  ‘Well.’ Sean shrugged. ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘As are you, fighting our common enemy. They are an insult to Islam. They murder innocents and force children to join their army. At least you had a choice about joining yours. Do you believe in your cause?’

  Sean had his pillow. He wedged it between his head and the aircraft hull, and wriggled himself into position against it. If Okwute had any basic brain, he would take the hint.

  ‘I don’t really have a cause,’ Sean said, and closed his eyes.

  ‘Then why do you fight?’

  Sean kept his eyes shut. Somehow he sensed that Okwute was still looking at him, waiting for an answer, and he was never going to get to sleep until the man looked away.

  Eventually he opened his eyes and saw that he was right. ‘I try not to,’ he said.

  Okwute nodded as though Sean had passed some kind of test. ‘Were you training our army to try not to fight too?’

  ‘No.’ Sean pushed his head more firmly against the pillow. ‘I guess we jumped straight to the bit after the trying stops. Look, no offence—’

  ‘It is a worthy cause, trying to end conflict peaceably,’ Okwute said. ‘But if they are prepared to take a human life, a right that belongs only to Allah, and that is wrong, then how are you different in claiming that right for yourself?’

  Sean looked away. ‘I was—’

  He clamped his jaw shut. Fucking hell, he had to be more careful than that! He had been on the verge of blabbing about something that was still marked top secret. The one and only time he had fired a gun to kill someone. That bastard hard man Malcolm. Back in London.

  Sean had had him at gunpoint and had told him to stay down. Any sane person would have obeyed. But then the guy had charged him with a knife, and Sean hadn’t even thought about firing. At the age of seventeen, Sean Harker had taken his first life. For a moment it all came back to him … Fuck!

  And Okwute saw it, even though he couldn’t know the details. His eyes widened by a millimetre. ‘You have claimed that right!’ He didn’t seem shocked.

  ‘Look,’ Sean told him, ‘I just know that if someone’s coming at you, or going to kill you, you’re justified in fighting back. No one says you started it. You’re just the one who ends it.’

  He remembered the shots. The gun going off. The body falling … But it had been pure self-defence, and if he hadn’t done it, then many more people would have been killed. That knowledge pushed him to keep talking, though a small voice at the back of his head said it would be best to shut up now.

  ‘And the same goes if they’re planning on hurting someone else. I see a guy back home beating up a little kid, I step in and stop him. Same thing here, just on a bigger scale.’

  ‘Ah.’ Okwute nodded. ‘The Just War Hypothesis.’

  ‘No idea what you’re talking about, mate,’ Sean snapped. God, he wished he was back on the Globemaster. The conversation there had involved rating the shaggability of various soap actresses. That had been about his level.

  Okwute went on. ‘I have a theory that religion is what scientists would call a force multiplier. The good that is put into it comes out better, the bad comes out worse.’

  Sean thought of the imam who had cared for the Muslim inmates at Burnleigh Young Offender Institution where he’d done time. He had walked the talk – a decent, straight-up, honest guy, never pushing his beliefs down people’s throats, just living up to his calling by caring for people with company and chat and good advice. Or the Salvation Army couple who had lived on Littern Mills where he grew up. They had always been there for his mum whenever she wanted a shoulder to cry on – usually because of her latest boyfriend, or because Sean had done something to upset her. They weren’t out for converts and they didn’t try to make you follow the rules in their little book. Even the Guyz – Sean’s old gang – had left them alone.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, half expecting a catch. ‘I’ll go with that.’

  ‘And we can all agree that it is a duty to defend the defenceless.’

  Sean wasn’t sure if that was a question or a statement. ‘S’pose.’

  ‘So, what if the defenceless are your brothers and sisters who are prevented by their own government from living out their faith, when their only crime is to point out how their government fails in Allah’s eyes? How, to curry favour with powerful Western allies, that government makes itself more and more Western, and then betrays those very Western values by oppressing its own people? Does not sheer hypocrisy fire your blood? Is it not good to fight against that? And if it is, what would give them the right to fight back?’

  No one had ever put it quite like that to Sean before – and he wasn’t going to let Okwute start now. Maybe he could see where Okwute was coming from. Sort of. But he wasn’t going to reach any kind of answer in the middle of the night when his brain was sluggish and he just wanted to go to sleep. Why wouldn’t Okwute just shut up?

  Then, suddenly, he became aware of a close, angry presence hanging over them. Sean looked up into Shitey Bright’s angry face.

  ‘Bollocks!’ Bright spat. ‘Total bollocks!’

  Chapter 6

  Wednesday 2 August, 02:15 GMT+1

  ‘Salaam,’ Okwute began.

  ‘Don’t you salami me, mate!’ Bright was standing up so that he could speak over the back of his seat. ‘I’ve been listening to you gobbing at my mate here. The fuck are you on about? “Just war”? I’ll tell you what’s just, mate. It’s blokes like me and Harker here putting our lives on the line to stop the nasty people getting at you, so you’re safe and secure behind us to come up with crap theories about how horrible we all are.’

  ‘I would call that very unjust,’ Okwute said.

  ‘Oi, keep it down!’ someone called.

  Bright swung round. ‘You keep it down!’ Back to Okwute. ‘You swan around in your poncy bedsheet’ – he had just insulted the culture and dress style of half the cabin, but he seemed past caring – ‘bleating about your poor defenceless brothers and sisters—’

  ‘Shitey—’ Sean began.

  ‘Stenders, mate, let me handle this …’

  The arguments began to spread. Electronic pings sounded up and down the cabin as call buttons were pressed.

  The core of the argument was still Bright vs Okwute. As Bright grew angrier, Okwute just became calmer. Arguing with Okwute was like wrestling with a pillow. If you got a grip on one bit of him, three or four other bits just bulged out.

  And suddenly Wolston was there, standing in the aisle, finger outstretched in Bright’s face. ‘Shut up and sit down.’

  ‘But this guy—’

  Wolston snapped his fingers, loud, half an inch from Bright’s nose, and pointed again. ‘Live with it. Sit. Down.’

  In any civilian situation this would have earned Wolston an immediate decking.

  But this wasn’t a civilian situation. An order was an order, and that was all there was to it. Bright’s eyes burned with fury and his face was red, but he slowly subsided.

  Wolston returned to his seat, his gaze sweeping around the cabin from lad to lad to reinforce the point. In seconds the noise level had returned to a background murmur. But Sean suddenly realized that the whole thing had neatly identified all the service personnel on the flight. Had that been Okwute’s aim all along?

  Sean shot his neighbour a sideways look, but the man was now quietly reading a book under his overhead light like nothing had happened. Sean couldn’t bring himself to look back at Bright. He’d been a complete plonker.

  The best thing would be to revert to plan A and grab some kip. Sean reluctantly closed his eyes again, feeling the vibration of the plane’s engines through the foam padding.

  But all his other senses had no intention of shutting down. The sneaking suspicion that they had all just made some kind of carefully orchestrated mista
ke wouldn’t go away. He kept going over it all in his mind. He couldn’t get over the way Okwute, without raising his voice or asking one leading question, had managed to establish that Sean was in the army, had a low opinion of religious fundamentalists, had killed in the line of duty, believed violence to be acceptable at the right time … and had identified every fucking soldier on the plane. Looking back, Sean felt like he’d somehow been played, and he didn’t like that one bit …

  Sean woke up with a sudden jolt, and the feeling of tumbling. The plane was shaking. He sat up abruptly and clutched his seat. Shit, they were falling out of the sky!

  Except that they weren’t. But creaks and groans ran the length of the fuselage, and passed through his body en route. He had been woken up by the ping of the seat-belt sign. He hadn’t realized he’d dropped off.

  He checked his watch – he had been out for a couple of hours. It must be close on dawn, but the view out of the windows was pitch black. The plane felt like it was rolling sideways into the dark.

  A flight attendant saw him looking around in confusion. ‘Just turbulence,’ she told him as she went past. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

  Then a flash of light at the window caught his attention. He stared in disbelief as light rippled across the sky below them. Huge columns and layers of cloud, miles across and miles high, were picked out in a white snapshot blaze. Black claws of cloud reached up for them, then suddenly were swallowed by night as the light died away. And then another flash, from a different angle, showing different shapes.

  They were flying above a thunderstorm – and a massive one.

  Awesome. And terrifying.

  That was the moment the cabin lights came back on.

  ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.’ The voice over the PA was calm. ‘As you can see, we’re encountering some turbulence and so I have put the seat-belt sign back on. The plane may experience some rocking, but I can assure you it’s built to take it. However, I am also sorry to have to inform you that we are no longer landing at London Heathrow.’

  What the fuck? Suddenly everyone was paying attention.

  ‘I can’t give you any details other than to say that there are security alerts at various London airports.’

  The tension in the cabin was electric.

  ‘We have, however, been cleared to land at London Southend in approximately two hours’ time. The turbulence should pass soon, and once it does the cabin crew will be serving breakfast. I will let you have more information as it comes in. Thank you.’

  Sean felt a claw gripping him inside. It was the same claw that twisted the guts just before you leaped out of the back of a Warrior, or as you waited in ambush and the enemy drew near … Only this time there was no leaping anywhere. No way of getting out. It occurred to him that here on this plane they were not in any sort of control.

  Next to him, Okwute had been listening to the announcement without any visible reaction. He pulled his book out of his seat pocket and glanced at Sean.

  ‘We are all in the hands of Allah,’ he said with a smile.

  It didn’t help at all …

  Chapter 7

  Wednesday 2 August, 06:00 BST

  ‘OK, guys, listen up. Here’s the deal,’ Wolston said. ‘We were all supposed to be going home, and going on leave. Now it looks as if we are flying into a bit of an unknown situation. Either in this aircraft, or on the ground.’

  Via a mixture of sweet talking, persuasion and the nicest bullying Sean had ever seen, the corporal had managed to get half a dozen civilian passengers to swap seats. Now the whole section were grouped together in a block of centre seats.

  ‘At the moment there’s no point trying to guess what’s going on. Guessing won’t do anyone any good. Just be grateful that we’re not diverting further north – or, for that matter, somewhere in Europe. If this was a 9/11 situation they’d just be dropping planes onto the first flat bit of ground they could find.’

  ‘Yeah, but Southend?’ Bright said. ‘Where the fuck is that anyway?’

  ‘End of the Thames,’ Sean told him.

  ‘Oh, right. Your part of the world.’

  Sean stared at him. ‘Huh?’

  ‘Well, you’re from London and that’s on the Thames, isn’t it?’

  Sean took a breath. ‘Mate, there is a world of difference—’

  ‘Cut it out,’ Wolston said without raising his voice.

  ‘I didn’t even know there was an airport at Southend,’ said Mitra.

  ‘Well … technically …’ Lance Corporal Marshall was flicking through the airport maps at the back of the in-flight magazine. He held up a page that showed a very simple outline of a single runway and a few buildings. ‘I mean, it’s got a runway – but it’s half the length of the ones at Heathrow.’

  This sank in with everyone for a few seconds. Sean didn’t know how much runway a 777 needed, but he knew they didn’t land vertically, and presumably the runways at Heathrow were that length for a reason.

  ‘Well’ – Mitra put a little too much effort into appearing cheerful – ‘I hope they checked the brakes before we took off.’

  The plane started to shake again as it began its descent and passed deeper into cloud. Wisps of vapour whipped by, and raindrops smeared against the windows. Everyone had been told to stow their tables away and put their seats up, and it seemed to Sean that the people he could see were all sitting a bit straighter than they had to. Only Okwute was still deep in his book.

  ‘Cabin crew, prepare for landing.’

  The plane began to make new sounds – whines and whirs as bits of it expanded or contracted. Sean jumped as a particularly loud mechanical drone started up, and kept going.

  ‘Just putting out the flaps,’ Mitra said next to him. ‘So we can fly slow.’

  Sean was no expert, but as the noise went on it felt like they must be sticking a hell of a lot of flap out. Even up in the air, he could feel something tugging his body forward as the plane lost speed. They weren’t slowing, they were coming to a fucking standstill! Was that normal?

  Why couldn’t he be doing something easy and relaxing, like wading through swamps and blowing up IEDs? At least you knew where you were with that.

  And then they descended below cloud level, and it was like they were underwater. Sean could see the rain driving against the windows. Distant lights were distorted by the drops on the pane. The captain had said they would be coming in over Canvey Island and the estuary, so that had to be London on the left. He couldn’t see any billowing clouds of smoke, any explosions, any obvious signs of emergency … but from up here, that meant squat. There had been no further update on the situation on the ground, apart from the captain saying he didn’t have any further info.

  They had to be within range of a signal now, but no one had got their phones out to check the news. No one wanted to put the airline’s no-calls rule to the test at this particular moment.

  There was the strange sensation of air whistling inside his head as a slightly blocked ear took longer than usual to equalize pressure. And then a massive thud made the entire fuselage shake. Sean gripped the arms of his seat so hard that his knuckles went white.

  ‘That was the wheels,’ Mitra said. He seemed to have adopted the role of Sean’s official plane nanny, though Sean suspected he was just gobbing out to steady his own nerves. Once again Sean wished he’d kept his mouth shut about never having flown in a civvy plane before.

  Lights moved past the windows – and Sean realized they were streetlights. Which meant that the plane was really low—

  It hit the runway with the sound of machinery pushed right to its limits. Immediately the engine noise doubled, trebled, as they reversed with all the thrust the captain could give them. The deceleration pushed Sean forward in his seat so that the belt tightened around his hips and he had to brace himself against the forward pressure. Behind him he could hear someone throwing up. The plane shook and shuddered. Some loose object, something like a tin can, went rattling down t
he length of the cabin. Shit, I hope that wasn’t something important. Rain crashed against the windows, blocking out what little light there was outside.

  Sean told himself that it could have been so much worse: the massive plane hurtling down the titchy runway. Not enough room to stop, even with the pilot standing on the brakes. He saw it smashing into whatever was at the end. The fuselage ripped open, fuel splashing out, the plane and everyone in it gripped by an inferno …

  Oh shit, no. Not fire. Please, not fire. Just let me die instantly.

  Sean’s personal Room 101 was fire. Always had been, since he was a kid. The gut-twisting, bladder-loosening terror had first struck him when an old guy had accidentally started a fire in a neighbouring flat, and they had had to evacuate …

  And then the noise was dropping and Sean could feel his butt sliding back into his seat again. The raindrops on the windows were trickling down vertically, no longer blown back by slipstream. And the captain sounded happier than anyone ever had before in announcing:

  ‘Welcome to Southend, ladies and gentlemen.’

  Wolston had his phone out the moment they touched down.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Sean heard him say. ‘This is Corporal Wolston, just landed at Southend with my section en route back from Lagos … Uh, yes, sir, I confirm Southend … No, sir, nor did I …’

  Sean was waiting for his phone to warm up and the bars to appear.

  ‘Fuck,’ he heard Mitra mutter, staring at his own screen. The good news slowly crept onto Sean’s phone.

  Major security alert affects Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton.

  Thousands of passengers delayed.

  Threat ‘to be taken seriously’ in light of Summit, says Home Secretary.

  ‘What Summit?’ he asked.

  Mitra tapped a link and squinted at the screen. ‘Only every head of every Commonwealth government, all in London for a big circle jerk. So, yeah, OK, they’re not going to piss around.’