Christopher Nuttall - Their Darkest Hour

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…