• 6 Waterloo Surprise

  Even as the American nation, the New Yorkers and the survivors in Brooklyn were reeling under the effects of such devastation, Londoners and all of England were in sympathy.

  The world was in shock and horror as it sympathised with the US in its awful hour of sorrow. The British had had their terrorist strike several years before when bombers took out a subway and buses across London. The deaths of fifty-two innocents had shocked the nation and galvanised the world.

  On this spring night, 28 April, Julie Anderson had just finished putting out the rubbish bin for collection. The meal of prawns they had enjoyed four days earlier had been reminding them each day with their maturing fragrance every time she lifted the lid that she should put out the rubbish bin.

  Julie Anderson and her husband Alfred with their cat Muggles and budgerigar Wilson had lived in Lower Marsh Street, about ninety metres from the corner of Lancelot Street just behind Waterloo Station, for thirteen years and loved the place. It was handy to get to almost anywhere from their place, whether it was into the city or to the country with underground and mainline stations nearby.

  She smiled as she turned away from the bin and looked down the street at the row of nine other bins from the other eight units in the block where she lived. She stopped and continued looking at the bins, half unconsciously and with a growing sense of puzzlement.

  ‘That’s funny,’ she thought. ‘There are nine other bins. I wonder who’s put another bin out.’

  She stepped into the street and checked the numbers on the bins, her flat number six and next door’s number five and number four’s then downstairs, three, two and one then the upper floor nine, eight and seven. And there was another one that looked newer.

  She walked over to it and looked at it then went to move it to see if it had much in it. It didn’t move at all. It was as if it was cemented to the pavement or full of something heavy.

  She remembered that just before tea as she looked through the net curtains of her first floor flat window, a dark-coloured van had stopped nearby on the street and three men had got out, lifted something out of the back and wheeled what looked to be a large box on a trolley away out of sight.

  ‘Those bloody foreigners!’ she had muttered to herself. ‘Coming in and taking over the country!’

  Julie had grown up in post-war England and had seen the spread of non–Anglo Saxon people flood into London and the rest of England. At first it had just been the Jamaicans from the Caribbean recruited for London Transport, but then came the Africans, Indians and Pakistanis (after East and West Pakistan separated from India) and a whole host of others. Foreigners flooded the country bringing their own religion with them. Not only had the British passport holders come, but whole extended families as well.

  Everywhere she went, she saw ‘foreigners’ and could smell strange cooking smells and hear ‘foreign lingo’ about her. She had been amazed once on a trip through Wolverhampton high street in 1973 and not a white face to be seen amongst all the people there.

  English folk had gotten used to the coloured immigrants and the Indians and Pakistanis to some extent, but now all these foreigners from Africa and Middle Eastern areas had flooded in. It felt like the country was being overrun. Whole areas of England had majority populations of non-English people: Bradford, Brixton, Stockwell, Dundee, so many towns and cities were perceived by the locals as being taken over by ‘foreigners’.

  Even the police often had to stop pursuing immigrant criminals at the perimeter of hostile ‘foreign’ suburbs for fear of attack. And this was in their own country of England!

  Outspoken minority groups were becoming more and more vocal, demanding that changes be made to make the place they were living in more like the country they had come from.

  Julie’s brother Arthur who lived in Dundee, Scotland, had phoned her the week before to tell her how The Islamic Community Action Group had petitioned for the council swimming pool to be ‘Women’ only every Wednesday.

  ‘Now I can’t take little Jessica swimming anymore. She’s only seven—I can’t leave her unattended.’ Arthur had said about his daughter. ‘There’s only three or four Islamic females use the pool anyway! Talk about dog in the manger!’ he’d complained bitterly.

  They even wanted the local laws changed and Sharia law introduced. That didn’t make sense. If their country was so great, why didn’t they stay there and improve it? And if this country was so appealing, why try to stuff it up like the country they’d escaped from!

  ‘Gawd! It’s like we won the war and then lost our country by stealth,’ Julie said to herself. She really thought her nation was being overrun by outside forces intent on changing the country to suit their ways and religion. ‘Whatever happened to “Great” Britain?’ she thought.

  But this night Julie was busy getting dinner and hadn’t stayed looking out the window.

  She remembered that the garage along the street and flat above it had been rented by another new family of ‘foreigners’ and that they had many visitors at all hours of the night and day. Lots of vans dropped goods and boxes off: some were large and apparently heavy.

  She began to wonder if they had put out the extra bin with something nasty in it. Her immediate thought was that they had been a gang of ruthless gangsters who had dumped a body. Ugh! The thought of it made her cringe, but the irresistible impulse to peek inside the bin was strong.

  She hummed and hawed and went to lift the lid—then stopped and turned away. Then she turned back and with ever-mounting courage she put her hand on the handle of the lid, ever so gently, and lifted it up a bit. The night was darkening and the streetlights didn’t quite give enough light so she lifted the lid some more.

  All she could see was what looked like an old LPG gas cylinder thing with protruding pipes and wires, and a box sort of to one side of the top of the thing that had a dull red display of numbers. At first she saw the number 00:00:54 then it changed to 00:00:53, 00:00:52, then 00:00:51 and it suddenly dawned on her that this thing was counting down and might be a bomb!

  Quickly and scared out of her wits, Julie ran back towards her flat building. It took her ten seconds to reach the lobby, another thirty-odd seconds to get to her door, which faced the street, and another seven or eight seconds to pick up the phone to call the police.

  She was stunned by the sudden appearance of a blinding light all around her and then there was nothing left of her except a pile of ash amidst the dust and rubble of her building.

  The atomic bomb in the bin had gone off—on time at 5:35pm—and London was about to feel the same as New York had done seventeen days earlier. 28 April was going down in the annals of British History as the day a nuclear device was detonated on English soil, in the capital, London.

  This was not like the bus bombings of 7 July 2005 when terrorists had detonated conventional explosives in three underground stations and on a bus killing fifty-two people and injuring over a hundred more. There wasn’t just body parts strewn everywhere, with vehicle and building damage that was repairable. This wasn’t something that could be investigated and cleaned up in a week or two.

  The difference this time was that destruction was on a huge scale. Unlike the New York backpack lightweight battlefield warhead of 0.4 megaton strength, this device was larger and had at least a 0.9 kiloton blast capacity and it was above ground and not shielded by twenty metres of earth and roadway.

  The hole it put in London’s sensitive inner city was bigger. The blocks of flats and buildings were completely flattened on either side of the rubbish bins, right along Lower Marsh Street. It now had a crater approximately ninety metres long by forty-five metres wide, and some thirteen metres deep.

  Tanswell Street, Johanna Street and Lancelot Street were all piles of rubble. The blast heat and shockwaves demolished buildings in the adjacent streets. Six hundred metres outwards, roofs on buildings and the upper stories of lightly built houses had been destroyed.

  Tiles and roofing metal had been torn from other buildings, walls broken, doors smashed in, windows obliterated for hundreds of metres in every direction. Up to 1.6 kilometres away windows had been broken. The explosion was heard five kilometres away and throughout the inner city of London.

  Those victims at ground zero were vaporised by the proximity of the blast. Those further away had limbs and heads blown off, their skin and tissue burnt and melted by the intense heat. Charred and burnt bodies and body parts littered the scene. The number of less mutilated victims who were injured by flying broken glass and brick rubble, heat blast and radiation was enormous.

  Waterloo station was devastated. The blast wave had been deflected upwards by the density of the building between the bomb and the station so that the roof had been torn away and parts of the structure had collapsed onto the waiting passengers and trains on the platforms below.

  The 5:34 to Portsmouth had just started to leave the platform—late as usual—with a fair load of passengers when the earth shook, the train derailed and the roof collapsed on top of it crushing carriages and their occupants. Five other trains standing at platforms full of passengers on them were engulfed by falling debris.

  The number 59 bus was just going north along Westminster Bridge Road past the end of Lower Marsh Street at the time of the blast, which melted the entire right hand side of the bus. Knocked onto its side, the momentum caused it to slide along the road and crash into parked cars.

  Traffic, blasted by the explosion and shaken by the shockwave, skidded out of control. Vehicles, their drivers blinded by the light, careered into people, other cars and buildings. Fires erupted.

  Petrol from a ruptured fuel tank quickly spilled onto the road and a spark from the damaged battery ignited it. Within seconds, the bus and its dead and injured passengers were being roasted. The deadly mixture of burning petrol and diesel from the bus ran down the street, setting fire to parked cars.

  The petrol tank of a burning car exploded like a napalm bomb and sprayed fire all over the street, and two pedestrians knocked flat by the blast. Their clothes ignited and they gained conscientiousness screaming as the agony of the flames enveloped them. Their screams were quickly silenced as super hot gases and flames scorched their throat and lungs and they died within seconds.

  Cars in adjacent streets had been pulverised, flattened, scorched and tossed like toys by the blast, their occupants dead or fatally injured.

  Not even the icons of London escaped: all the glass on the north and east clock faces of Big Ben was shattered; the Houses of Parliament had all its upper windows blown in; and St Thomas’s Hospital was severely damaged and not able to handle any casualties.

  Passengers emerging from the underground at Lambeth North 350 metres away were knocked flat: several were killed, many were injured.

  The smoke that rose over the scene had that broiling, upwards rising mushroom shape: the most feared thing a man could possible see. The hell created in the suburb of Waterloo was just beginning to be realised.

  Everybody within a few kilometres of Waterloo heard and felt the explosion, and had seen the light, the blast flash and the flames, the smoke and the rain of debris that started to fall all over London.

  At first people thought maybe an LPG tanker or petrol station or maybe a bomb had exploded but when they looked skyward and saw the cloud, they cringed and realised this might be what they had least expected and most feared.

  After the New York bombing, intelligence and police authorities had been on high alert for potential incidents. The emergency services were on alert and more prepared for this event after the New York bomb—but not on this scale.

  The Home Secretary, the Police Commissioner, the Mayor of London, Army chiefs, the Prime Minister and all the essential service chiefs and ministers convened as soon as possible and tried to take in what had happened.

  They declared a state of emergency throughout London. They called in the army, cancelled all police leave, recalled all officers on leave, and enacted emergency powers to give soldiers and police the power to shoot looters on sight.

  They dusted off and implemented contingency plans and sent orders down the ranks to all service personnel involved in the recovery and clean up. It would be days before any clue would emerge of what exactly had happened and who was responsible. It began to dawn on the minds of the intelligence service and police personnel that only a highly organised group with advanced nuclear knowledge and resources would be able to construct a bomb with the capacity to do the damage it had.

  By the following morning, Lambeth, Westminster, Hungerford, Waterloo, Blackfriars and Southwark bridges were closed due to blast damage near them or to the fallout.

  The army cordoned off the affected zone and assisted the emergency services evacuate residents from Lambeth, Westminster, St James and the City. Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park were now becoming makeshift villages of tents and caravans. Every caravan that could be commandeered, every army tent and every tent from manufacturers stocks was now needed to provide some shelter to those made homeless. Schools, churches, any available large building were all being commandeered to provide emergency accommodation, washing and decontamination facilities, and makeshift emergency hospitals for less seriously wounded victims.

  It would be two days until the authorities were able to identify the exact centre of the blast and check the records of the buildings around there. They discovered that an Ibrahim Al-Hazred had been operating a small parcel delivery service from a garage workshop he had been renting for the past six months.

  Further checks on the CCTV footage and vehicle numberplate identification record gave more information. The following week they knew that this bomb had been the work of seven men who they now were searching for. Airport records showed that these men had left the country for France, Turkey and Italy and that further flights connected them to Iran.

  Information was cross-checked with the NSA, CIA and FBI and it was now evident the source of the terrorist attacks had been Iran. Somewhere in a Pentagon office a map of Iran was spread out and a red pin placed in the suburb of Towhid in the city of Tehran.

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