Boris Johnson - Seventy-Two Virgins

‘So I say in conclusion,’ perorated the Frenchman, ‘that to hate America is in a way to hate ourselves. It is a fact of human psychology that all our most vehement opinions, all our most passionate prejudices, are but the result of some internal argument, some unresolved tension in our own souls. If I may borrow the words of a great Anglo-Saxon writer, the rage of those who despise America is the rage of Caliban, staring at his face in the glass. It may seem odd to some of my countrymen that I should end my speech with the same slogan that you might hear from the lips of the President, if he were still with us. But I say these words with the utmost sincerity and respect. God Bless America, ladies and gentlemen, messieurs, mesdames, and I say it again—’

As Haroun finally disentangled himself from the towel, he was filled with that infantile ballistic joy that comes in the last second before the weapon is discharged. I am a missile, a sidewinder, a tank, he thought. I will shoot them all, he thought as he aimed at the sign saying ‘Shanks’. I will tear their bodies into little pieces and cause them more pain than they will ever know.

‘God…’

High over the Atlantic warm Gulf winds were pushing the Stealth bombers faster than they had ever flown before.

Parliament Square was now a parade ground of crack troops: the Paras, the SAS. Men with blackened faces were running on rubber soles to take up positions all over Pugin and Barry’s palace. They scoped the gryphons in their sights. They primed the stun grenades. They checked the rope ladders.

In the Ops Room of Scotland Yard the Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolis was twitching like a palsied ant. These lunatics could blow themselves up any moment, and yet Bluett the Yank seemed paralysed.

‘I really think we should give the command, Colonel,’ he said. ‘Of course the odds are not particularly bright, but we’ve got to give it a go.’

Colonel Bluett was staring at the cornflake-packet and Lego model of Westminster Hall. He could see the conflagration in his mind’s eye, the flesh charred and shrivelled like something left on a barbecue.

‘Waco,’ he said. ‘Waco had nothing on this.’

‘…bless …’

And I tell you what, thought Roger Barlow, as he cast around for other undertakings he could offer the Almighty, I really promise that I’ll put a lot more into my marriage, ‘cos I know that you only get out what you put in. Tell you what, God old bean, I’ll clean up the puddles on the bathroom floor, and I’ll even remember to put the sodding electric toothbrush on the charger … And oh all right (he winced), I’ll make stuff to eat, fish pie and whatnot, and perhaps I’ll roll up my sleeves and wear some gay pinafore like little Chester here.

‘…America!’

‘Goodbye, Dean, my child,’ said Jones. He pressed the button marked Yes on the Nokia. The number came up in the blue square on the screen. DIALLING, said the machine, and began to count the seconds.

‘No, I certainly wasn’t in on it,’ said Adam to Cameron, and for the first time in their relationship, it seemed, she noticed the odd little lentil-shaped convexity, the relic of a trapped follicle, perhaps, on his cheek. Was her love dying? She couldn’t believe it could; and perhaps, indeed, it was not. ‘Don’t be angry. The only thing I can assume is that Benedicte took us all for a ride.’

CONNECTING, said the machine. Somewhere in the ether one gang of chirruping electrons was introduced to another gang. They snuffled round each other; they started to speak each other’s language. They seriously clicked and began electronic intercourse. The corresponding mobile phone vibrated once.

The explosion could be heard all over the Palace, and in the square outside. It wasn’t a car backfiring, or a firework, or someone inadvertently putting a match to the intestinal vapours of a cow. It was an aggressive, percussive noise, the rattling of demons on the gates of Hell.

‘You morons!’ screamed Raimondo Charles, who was being made to kneel on the ground in Whitehall, not far from the Cenotaph, with his hands cuffed behind his back. ‘You hear that? Now they’re sending in the freaking Swat guys like this is Raid on Entebbe. Frigging idiotic cowboy shit-for-brains!’

‘Hey, knock it off, man,’ said a British captive.

‘Yeah,’ said another captive, a gloomy-looking pony-tailed fellow with a Motorhead T-shirt. ‘Whose side are you on, anyway?’

Adam threw his arm around Cameron, but she hunched her shoulders and pulled away from him. ‘No,’ she said in a small voice. ‘Don’t.’

The President hurled himself to the floor; not out of any particular cowardice, but simply in deference to the many lessons he had been given in protecting POTUS in the event of a bomb. It is a measure of the violence with which he hurled himself that Jones the Bomb, still handcuffed to his captive, came too.

Benedicte spun round to see where the explosion had come from. So did Habib, and 1,600 eyes bugged from their sockets as the audience prepared to surrender to a full-blown Gadarene hysteria, kicking over the little gilt chairs and thinking, at last, of making a break for it.

Silver Stick dropped his silver stick, and then caught it again, like a conjurer, before raising it in the en garde position.

Dean jumped out of his skin, but only metaphorically. His skin remained attached to his body. He turned round, and rushed back down the corridor to room W6.

Pickel barely moved. Frig me dead, he thought.

And it was Haroun, of course, who Jackson Pollocked the walls and ceiling of the Gentlemen Members’ conveniences with his blood and brains. Perhaps it was because his circumstances were so confined, but the 5-kilo bomb did remarkably little damage to anything else. A light bulb was lost to his levitating brain-pan, and his teeth chipped the tiles. Various parts of him were trapped in the U-bend of the lavatory, but they presented no real problems to the forensic plumbers.

Did he attain Paradise, beyond that final orgastic delivery of urine? Was he transported on wings of angels to the soft bowers that await the martyrs in the islands of the blessed?

Does Haroun now live in a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine and rubies, a sunny pleasure-dome as wide as the distance between al-Jabiyyah, a suburb of Damascus, and the Yemeni capital of Sana’a? Is he attended by 80,000 servants?

Does he eat of honeydew and drink the milk of Paradise? And finally, is this menu brought to him by seventy-two black-eyed virgins, so decorous and submissive as to assuage all the sexual indignities of this earth?

Or has he by now eaten his pitiful ration of raisins?

My friends, I have not the faintest idea. There, as they say in German, I am over-questioned. No narrator, whatever omniscience he may claim, can give you the answer to that one.

But I have my suspicions.

Barry White had seen enough war zones to know when it was time to be gone. ‘Let’s make like hockey players,’ he said to Chester de Peverill, ‘and get the puck out of here.’ They rose to their feet. Across the hall, people were doing the same.

Their faces were pale and their ears were singing; but tongues that had cloven to the roofs of mouths were suddenly able to speak. It briefly occurred to those members of the British cabinet, who had sat for more than an hour in tapioca-like terror, that this was it: this was the moment for self-preservation.

Behind the black-painted rail at the top of the hall, Silver Stick and Black Rod and the Earl Marshal exchanged meaningful glances, like an escape committee at Colditz. They knew that the authority of the terrorists had been momentarily dissipated; and that if the whole crowd went amok together, they might yet prevail.