Like most of his recent essays (such as the “Black Country Blues” series) the piece below by El Inglés is a follow-up to the series “Crown, Crescent, Pitchfork”. This latest work is also speculative fiction, and explores a series of isolated events that come to pass in the UK in the not-so-distant future.

As usual, we should note that the scenarios outlined below are descriptive, rather than normative. That is: if current trends continue, events similar to these will almost certainly take place in major cities of Modern Multicultural England.

Some of the slang and acronyms used in this essay may be unfamiliar to American readers. To help them make sense of the text, a glossary of selected terms is provided at the bottom of this post.

This is the concluding installment of the series. Previously: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV

Expect Delays

by El Inglés

With apologies to A. E. Housman

V.

Say lad, have you time to spare?
There’s a job, a job for two,
For patriot bold, wind in his hair,
Fair keen to do what patriots do

We may not make it home to mother,
This job, in truth, may be our last,
But smile now, man, for there’s no other
Way to leave with such a blast

I’ll loose a flow, you strike a spark,
And if the fiery wind does carry
Us both away to yawning dark,
Why, there we’ll wait for those who tarry

MI5 Linguistic Analysis Desk, Observations —

This one’s actually quite good. Much though I condemn the underlying motivation, I might have to break out my copy of A Shropshire Lad to get the creative juices flowing again. If terrorist-sympathisers can write Housman parodies, I should be able to as well. Three years at Oxford, a wonderful dissertation on Auden, a first-class honours degree — I’m wasted here! What am I doing with my life?!

13) The Mother of All Targets

Time: 14:25, February 12, 2029
Location: Chain Bar Roundabout, leading off the M62 onto the M606 into Bradford

Bill had always hated Bradford, hated the thought of it. Once upon a time, it had been a proper town, with strong manufacturing, a proud population, the Peaks and Dales nearby, and the beautiful architectural legacy of its industrial might in the town itself. But what was it now? Just a holding pen for a Pakistani population imported to work in the mills, then allowed to import an endless string of cousins to procreate with. It made him want to weep. He concentrated on the songs emanating from his radio and tried not to think about it.

He had driven in from Leeds that morning and was just coming into Bradford now. The lights went green and Bill propelled the fuel tanker away round the roundabout and turned off onto the M606, the short stretch of motorway that connected the M62 to his destination. Accelerating gently up the inside lane, he thought of his wife, Cathy, who had promised she’d cook his favorite tonight — shepherd’s pie and peas. That would help him forget about Bradford. Think of the shepherd’s pie, he told himself, and try not to look at the people around you.

Heading up now through the industrial estate a couple of kilometres south of the Bradford ring road, Bill was singing along to Everybody Wants to Rule the World on the radio, when he noticed something that dragged his brain abruptly away from the song. Emerging from the trees just off the hard shoulder to the left of the motorway, he saw a pair of men dressed in dark boiler suits and decked out with tactical webbing, both of them in balaclavas. They were jogging across the hard shoulder, out into the inside lane, fifty yards ahead of him. One of the men raised his right hand aloft, signalling for Bill to stop, before letting his hand fall back down to the long object he held in his left hand.

Brain moving as though through a fog, Bill harrumphed and took his foot off the gas, sounding his horn in frustration. The man didn’t yield, and a sense of unease stirred in Bill’s brain, spurred on by the nagging question ‘Why is that bloke wearing a balaclava?’ Belatedly, Bill realised that the long object in the man’s hands was probably a shotgun, and that it seemed to be pointed directly at him. The man was no more than fifteen yards away. Bill, heart racing, still wasn’t ready for the report of the gun, nor for the sudden sound and shock of his windscreen cracking into a massive spiderweb of fractured glass, a hole blasted right through the centre. Acting purely on instinct, he braked hard, and the truck ground to a halt.

His view of the shooter obscured by the cracked windscreen, Bill’s mind went blank, only for a huge bang a split second later, off to his left, to rattle his brain far worse. The passenger window shattered into a thousand pieces, and a shotgun butt smashed the remaining glass out. The second man, standing on the cab step on the left-hand side, screamed at him, sawn-off shotgun in his hand pointed directly at Bill.

‘Get the f*** out! Get the f*** out now!’

Shocked and stunned, Bill opened and jumped out of the driver’s door, down perilously close to the middle lane of traffic, where cars, their view of the unfolding drama obscured by the tanker itself, drove by, some of them honking wildly. The first shooter, the one who had put the buckshot through the windscreen, marched towards Bill. ‘Get the f*** out of here! Move! F*** off!’ Bill didn’t need any more prompting. Scrambling back along the motorway, hugging the side of the tanker to stay out of the traffic, he made his way around the back of it onto the hard shoulder and ran thirty yards or so up the road.

Not in the best of shape and suffering a severe adrenaline rush, Bill stooped to regain his breath. Realising, belatedly, that he had blood on his face and blood on his hands, Bill twisted back round to look, edging to the right, back out into the road, to get a better field of view. One of the men, on the right-hand side of the tanker, seemed to be administering some sort of power tool to the tank itself, ignoring the cars that still buzzed by, horns blaring at him. Whatever he was doing, the sound of the tool against the metal flank of the tanker quickly escalated to a frightful, grinding screech.

What with Bill standing in the inner lane and the spectacle of the man and his power tool, the traffic was starting to back up properly now. Queues were forming in all three lanes, the leftmost queue starting round about where Bill was on the hard shoulder. Bill, his mind not working properly, was dimly aware that a pool of liquid seemed to be rapidly spreading out across the motorway from the tanker, though, absurdly, his brain couldn’t yet see how that could possibly be. The man wielding the tool against the tank moved gradually backwards along its length as he worked, attacking it repeatedly. ‘Now that’s a man on a mission’, thought Bill, as he kept an eye on the other one, who was keeping guard with his sawn-off, his companion’s shotgun in his other hand.

Belatedly, Bill’s brain managed to figure out what the pool of liquid spilling out over the floor must be. ‘Got a mind like a steel trap, you have,’ he said to himself as he started backing further away from the tanker, fumbling as he did for the phone in his pocket. Hands shaking, he had to stop to wipe blood off the screen onto his trousers before he managed to dial 999.

‘Hi, yeah, police, I need the police right now, my name’s Bill Constable, I’m a tanker driver for Shell, I’m on the M606 into Bradford, northbound, I’ve just been hijacked, well, not hijacked, a couple of guys with guns are doing something to the tanker, I think they’re going to torch it, they’ve got an angle grinder or something, you need to get here right now…’

Bill looked up for a split second, to see the two men at the back of the tanker together. A second later, a smoking red signal flare sailed through the air close to the back of the tanker, impossible but real, and a tongue of orange flame dashed out from where the flare hit the ground, in all directions. Within seconds, the entire pool was alight, and the right-hand side of the tanker was wreathed in flame. The jets of fuel gushing out of the right hand side of the tanker ignited and turned into blazing spouts of liquid.

The cars at the front of the three queues started reversing desperately back up the motorway, only to reverse shunt the cars behind them. Panicking people scrambled out and struggled through the stationary vehicles to get over to the hard shoulder. Meanwhile, the two men were disappearing into the trees to the left of the motorway. How long had passed since his windscreen had been shotgunned? A minute? Two? Bill wasn’t sure.

‘Get away from it! Leave your f***ing cars and get back from it!’ he bellowed at the mainly Pakistani crowd. Traffic on the other side of the motorway, heading south towards the M62, had also largely stopped now. On the other side of the fire and the smoke increasingly obscuring Bill’s vision, he could see only the odd vehicle, driven by the odd foolhardy driver, coming through now. Amazing that people kept driving past a blazing tanker, just incredible.

Bill could hear the first sirens, though through the general hubbub, it was difficult to tell where they were coming in from. It occurred to him that he should get off the hard shoulder, as the emergency vehicles already on their way would surely need to use it to access the site. He also realised that he should call Shell too, so he started fumbling again for his phone.

The fire was spreading further out across the motorway, the fuel spilling out faster than it could burn itself up. ‘Surely it can’t blow, surely not,’ said Bill trying to calm himself down. As a tanker driver, he had a decent background in the health and safety considerations a driver needed to know. He must have missed the training session that explained the implications of two arseholes with shotguns, power tools, and flares torching the entire thing and legging it.

He only managed to get through to the 24/7 emergency operations line at Shell because he had it on speed dial — he’d never have been able to dial the number himself, the way his heart was hammering. Inwardly, Bill groaned as a sickening realisation swept over him — he’d never get home in time for his shepherd’s pie now. Those bastards in balaclavas had a lot to answer for.

Twenty minutes later, the site was crawling with police, the fire brigade, other people Bill couldn’t identify, police cars, and fire engines as a helicopter and what appeared to be a couple of drones buzzed overhead. Only the fire brigade and firemen were allowed near the tanker, where they sprayed water and foam in from a distance with high pressure hoses — everyone else was herded back at least 150m. The Euroway Industrial Estate to either side of the motorway, its two halves connected by a road that ran underneath it, was rapidly being evacuated by the police.

Bill, about 200m to the south of the blazing tanker, was being questioned on the hard shoulder by two professional but somewhat agitated detectives about the attack, the attackers, and whether they’d said anything to him that wasn’t just an expletive. Having regained his composure, he answered quickly and concisely. The police had closed both sides of the motorway, as irregular gouts of spurting flame erupted from the side of the tanker. Combining their energies with the blazing pool of burning fuel that covered most of the truck’s side of the motorway and part of the other side too, they presented a terrifying, ghastly, spectacle even in the heat and light of the day.

The two detectives strode off to talk to someone else for a moment. Putting together what he had seen, what he was hearing from the Shell representatives on-site, and what he heard the police muttering to each other, it was clear that the situation around the tanker was extremely perilous. The attacker with the angle grinder, had gone at the tanker hard. A big, strong, fellow, he had systematically worked his way back along the tanker to open more than one breach, though Bill wasn’t sure how many in total. ‘My God, they must have drilled that, practiced it and all,’ Bill thought to himself. ‘You wouldn’t just wing it, you’d have to know it was going to work.’

Even from 200m away, the bright pillars of flame from the tanker’s emergency vents were clearly visible. All fuel tankers were fitted with mechanical emergency vents at the top of the tank that released vapour to keep internal pressure down. As the fire heated the fuel inside the tanker, the emergency vents were the only thing keeping the internal pressure under control. As the mixture of petrol and diesel vapour pushed out into the atmosphere, it instantly ignited, turning the tanker into a set of flamethrowers blowing jets of flame up, up, ten metres into the air. ‘God in heaven,’ thought Bill, ‘surely it’s not going to…’

Bill noticed Shell’s representative for the area, Jason Butterworth, striding over to him like a man with a purpose. They had known each other for all of four minutes, Jason, purely by coincidence, having been in Bradford on business when the attack took place. ‘Bill, listen, the decision’s been made, the police are evacuating the entire area, the industrial parks, everything, out to 500 metres. Get moving. They’re concerned it’s going to blevvy. They need a 500-metre perimeter, get out of here. Nothing you could’ve done, time to get moving now, all right?’

At the same time, the radio of a nearby police officer crackled with the same order. ‘All units, be advised, we are evacuating the area out to 500m due to explosion hazard, repeat, we are evacuating the area out to 500m due to explosion hazard.’ Bill turned and, along with everyone else in the vicinity, started moving with haste back south along the logjammed motorway, round the abandoned cars and trucks.

Nearer the tanker, the fire crews who had been spraying in foam and water from a distance were now packing up, and driving either north along the now empty stretch of motorway to the north of the tanker, or back south along the hard shoulder, hemmed in by the multitude of abandoned cars. A knowledgeable observer would have understood how rare it was for the fire brigade to turn their backs on such an inferno and let it take its course. Only immediate threat to life would induce them to take that sort of step.

Thirty or forty seconds after Bill and those around him had started walking further south, away from the tanker, Bill overheard a conversation between the two detectives who had been interviewing him earlier. A few yards behind him, one of them, by the name of Waterhouse, was complaining to his partner about the irrational response. Bill looked back over his shoulder as he walked.

‘Surely it can’t really blow up?’ queried Waterhouse. ‘I thought that only happened in stupid films.’

‘Keep your head down and keep walking,’ came the reply from his partner. Still looking back down towards the tanker, over the tops of the intervening sea of cars, Bill noticed that the flames shooting upwards from the emergency vents were constant now, the blaze quite infernal even from 250 metres away, a huge column of black smoke reaching up into the sky like a black claw erupting malevolently from the stricken vehicle. Small wonder the fire brigade had decided to —

Out of nowhere, a colossal flash of light and heat radiated out from the tanker, as the right-hand side of the tank itself disintegrated outwards in the flash of an eye. A huge boom rolled out down along the motorway and up it too, into and over Bradford and the surrounding area, as an enormous orange fireball bloomed, bloomed, kept on blooming for fifteen or twenty seconds, a hundred metres into the air, before gradually subsiding back down to a smaller blaze centred on the eviscerated skeleton of the tanker. All of the vehicles within about fifty metres of the tanker seemed to be on fire, and pieces of debris of all different shapes and sizes rained down throughout a radius of a couple of hundred metres. A fire engine, itself on fire at its rear, accelerated desperately southwards along the hard shoulder, like a chastened dog fleeing a fight that had gone against it.

Bill and his fellow evacuees found themselves on the ground without quite knowing why. Sitting there in a daze, Bill enjoyed a moment of great epiphany. For the first time in his life, the true nature of the cosmos impressed itself upon his mind — all things were known to him, all was transparent, his very field of vision glittered with comprehension. He’d always known Bradford was a f***ing dump. But now he realised that it was a serious f***ing dump.

17) And What, Precisely, Was That?

Time: 15:00, February 13, 2029
Location: A forensic tent, cordoned-off stretch off the M606 near the Euroway Estate

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