Christopher Nuttall: Their Darkest Hour

He pushed the thought aside as he helped a pair of constables manhandle a wounded civilian down towards a waiting van. A team of doctors were at least trying to separate the minor wounded from those who needed a hospital immediately, but it was a terrifying nightmare. Hardly any of the civilians were used to violence and anarchy on such a scale and many of them seemed to be on the verge of coming apart. Robin might have joined them if he hadn’t felt responsible for managing the crisis. It was certain that no one senior to him had made it to Buckingham Palace. He remembered the explosions all over London and shivered. The invaders, whoever they were, might have taken out Scotland Yard. And if they’d done that, they would have fragmented the entire network.

“Sergeant,” a voice bellowed. He turned to see the officer he’d spoken to before, looking grim. “How quickly can you get the rest of the civilians out of here?”

Robin blanched, reading the bad news in the officer’s face. “Too long,” he said. They’d managed to get most of the people on the move, but the traffic wasn’t taking the hint and heading away from Central London. Entire streams of people were being pointed away from the Houses of Parliament and being told to run. It was all a horrible ghastly mess. “How long do we have?”

“Maybe five minutes, maybe less,” the officer said. “Radar has picked up enemy craft heading towards London. The chances are that they’re coming here. You have to get the civilians out of the line of fire.”

Robin nodded and blew hard on his whistle. “Everyone away, now,” he bellowed. The other policemen took up the cry. “Move… now !”

He looked up at the officer, who had one hand on his pistol. “I’m qualified to fire in the line of duty,” he said, quietly. “I could stay…”

“You’re needed elsewhere,” the officer said. The sound of thunder — no, it wasn’t thunder — echoed in the air. “Go!”

Fatima had never felt so pressured in her life. She’d been on duty at the hospital when the police had sounded the alert and had been rounded up to go to the remains of Buckingham Palace. Seeing the rubble had shocked her, but there hadn’t been any time to sit down and cry — not when there was work to be done. Hundreds of people had been wounded and there weren’t anything like enough medical supplies to treat them all. From what she’d overhead, the emergency teams that should have been first responders to any crisis had been caught in traffic, as had most of the ambulances in London. Her mobile phone was useless and the pager she’d been given as they ran out the door had gone blank. She had been forced to improvise splints and bandages for half of her patients.

“Lie still,” she said, sharply. The wounded man in front of her had been one of the guards in front of Buckingham Palace when the bomb — or whatever — had blown it into a pile of rubble. His leg was clearly broken in two places and it was quite possible, judging from the bruises, that he had internal injuries as well. She’d bandaged him up as best as she could, but he really needed an operation. It didn’t look as if he was going to get one any time soon. “I said, lie still!”

“They need me,” the man insisted. He sounded delirious, or perhaps he was going into shock. Fatima put her hand firmly on his chest and held him down gently. “I need to…”

“You need to get better,” Fatima said. She’d heard stories of what happened in Pakistan and other less-developed countries when bombs exploded without warning, but she’d never expected to see it in Britain. Someone should have taken control at once and started coordinating all of the emergency response teams. Instead, everything was chaotic and the only people who were trying to establish order were a handful of policemen, who looked as frightened and helpless as the rest. “You can’t go back to your unit with a broken leg.”

She wanted to give him something for the pain, but there were no painkillers left. A pair of civilians pressed into service as stretcher-bearers appeared and gently lifted the wounded man onto a makeshift stretcher. Fatima checked his leg carefully, warned them to ensure that their charge didn’t try to sit up, and then waved for them to go. There was no time to rest — she had to deal with the next wounded person. It seemed that there was no end to the wounded; men, women and children, half of them looking as if they didn’t quite believe what had happened to them. This was Britain, not some Third World country where the natives killed each other at the drop of a hat. Disasters weren’t supposed to strike the British mainland.

A hand fell on her shoulder and she jumped. “You need to get on your way,” a policeman said. He looked about as worried as Fatima felt, but he seemed to have it under control. “You need to escort the patients back to the hospital. This place isn’t going to be safe much longer.”

Fatima looked up. All over the area, policemen and soldiers were shouting at civilians to move. The wounded were being carried off, followed by those who could walk on their own and the remaining medical staff. She started to follow them automatically, and then stopped dead. This was London. What the hell was going on that meant they had to risk moving so many wounded people at once?

“All I know is that this place is about to get very unsafe,” the policeman warned. He was holding something back. Fatima had done a course in reading people back when she’d been studying to be a doctor. “I think you’d better start moving — now.”

He sounded so earnest that Fatima picked up her bag before quite realising what she was doing. She could hear the sound of thunder in the distance and see plumes of smoke rising up into the sky. Something was clearly badly wrong… shaking her head, she started to follow the wounded. They’d need her when they reached their destination, wherever that might be. It seemed as if the police and soldiers were closing off all of Central London…

“I think that’s most everyone out,” Constable McEwen reported, grimly. The sound of thunder was growing closer. Robin hadn’t been able to stop himself from scanning the horizon, looking for incoming aircraft. God alone knew what was heading their way. “Sergeant…”

“Time for us to leave, then,” Robin said. The armed policemen might be a help, but it was far more likely that they’d just get in the way. It wasn’t as if they’d trained with the soldiers — hell, all the plans to hold major exercises had been curtailed by the shortage of cash. He remembered his wife, suddenly, and shivered. At least Helene was out of London, safely away from the chaos that had gripped the city. God alone knew how long it would be before the more rowdy element of the city’s population decided that it was a great opportunity for looting, raping and burning. “Get everyone back to the cordon and keep moving the civilians further away…”

He covered his ears as something screeched by overhead. A tiny black dot, seemingly flying as low as it could over London, flashed by and headed into the distance. No missiles arose to challenge it, although Robin had no way of knowing if the soldiers had held their fire or if they didn’t have enough antiaircraft missiles to spend them freely. Given how much it cost to produce equipment for the Met, he suspected the latter.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered, as he started to run. He’d hoped that it was nothing more than a terrorist bombing, even though the officer he’d spoken to had seemed certain. “It’s really happening.”

Trooper Chris Drake perched on the roof of the Ministry of Defence’s Old Admiralty Building and peered down towards Green Park. Smoke was rising up from all over London, suggesting that the enemy — and he still found it hard to believe that the brass took the stories of little green men seriously — hadn’t concentrated their attentions on Buckingham Palace. From what he’d heard before the CO had dispatched him and a handful of others to vantage points where they could see for some distance without being seen, the enemy had bombarded the railway stations and several junctions. The result of one attack away from the Palace was easy to see. Westminster Bridge had been hit by… something that had knocked it effortlessly into the water. Chris didn’t need to be a CO to know that that ensured that it would be harder for any reinforcements to reach Whitehall. Of course, if some of the other stories he’d heard were true, there was little left to reach Whitehall.