The Becket Approval by Falconer Duncan (best big ereader .TXT) 📗

‘But any time could also mean any time of convenience,’ Bethan said.

‘Any day,’ Gunnymede said, pulling on his shoes.

‘Any time of day,’ Bethan added. ‘But how do you get the Thames into the underground?’

‘Make a hole,’ Gunnymede said. ‘In the embankment.’

‘You couldn’t do it without explosives,’ Neve said. ‘Could you?’

Gunnymede went to the worktop computer and pulled up a map of the London Underground system. He searched along the river looking for underground tunnels. ‘Blackfriars. Victoria embankment. It’s the closest the underground gets to the river.’

‘How close?’

‘I don’t know. There’s an underground operations room at Charing Cross,’ Gunnymede said taking a step towards the door and pausing to see if the others were coming. ‘We should go check it out.’

‘Would anyone like a coffee?’ Bethan asked.

Gunnymede and Neve glanced at each other, both still very much off balance.

‘I’ll have one,’ Neve said. ‘White, no sugar.’

‘Me too,’ Gunnymede said.

‘Help yourself,’ Bethan said, heading for the door. ‘I’ll see you in the car park.’ Bethan paused as she opened the door and looked at Gunnymede.

He held her gaze, his eyes filled with schoolboy guilt.

‘Your flies undone,’ she said and let the door close behind her.

Gunnymede did up his fly as he glanced at Neve who couldn’t hold his gaze.

Bethan walked to the elevator and pushed the call button. Her eyes began to water. The elevator doors opened. She wiped a tear and stepped inside.

Gunnymede, Neve and Bethan were escorted to the control room of Charing Cross underground station and introduced to the two men running it early that morning, Bob and Tyrone. The room was surrounded by half a dozen monitors of various sizes attached to wall brackets above a worktop tailored to fit inside the angular walls. The top sections were glass providing a view of the main station access to the ticket machines, barriers and escalators that led down to the trains.

They stepped inside, closing the door behind them and with it shutting out the noise from a floor washing machine making its rounds.

‘How can we help?’ Tyrone asked with a welcoming smile.

Gunnymede looked to Neve who invited him to take the lead. ‘I’ll get straight to the point. Our department deals with anti-terrorism and today we’re looking at theoretical attacks on the underground system.’

‘This sort of thing’s not new to us,’ Tyrone said. ‘We often work with the police on their terrorist exercises.’

‘We had one two weeks ago in fact,’ Bob remembered. ‘Do you work much with the met police?’

‘Sometimes,’ Gunnymede said, anxious to get on with it.

‘This a bombing, shooting or stabbing?’ Bob asked.

‘We had a nerve gas exercise two years ago,’ Tyrone reminded Bob.

‘Oh, yes. Based on that Japanese attack,’ Bob said.

‘None of those,’ Gunnymede said. ‘My first question. Where does the train line run closest to the river bank?’

Bob and Tyrone looked at each other with questioning frowns and returned their gazes to Gunnymede. ‘What do you mean exactly?’ Bob asked.

‘The TFL accurate tube map shows the circle and district line running along the Victoria Embankment to Blackfriars. It’s the closest point a train tunnel gets to the river that I can see.’

‘I see what you mean,’ Tyrone said, reaching for a long map roll which he unrolled on the table. ‘That’s right. The closest point that any underground rail tunnel gets to the river is here, near the Blackfriars underpass.’

Gunnymede, Neve and Bethan closed on the map. ‘How close does the tunnel get to the riverbank wall?’ Neve asked.

Bob exhaled through pursed lips as he considered the question. ‘About ten metres I’d say.’

‘Ten?’ Gunnymede asked. ‘How accurate is that?’

Tyrone took a ruler and placed it on the map, measuring the gap between the wall and the tunnel. ‘You’ve got about a metre of stone wall and then about nine metres of earth. Another metre of tunnel wall. Ten or eleven metres.’

Gunnymede, Bethan and Neve looked at each other.

‘How do you get through ten metres of that?’ Bethan asked.

‘Without explosives,’ Neve added.

Bob and Tyrone glanced at each other, a little confused. ‘I don’t follow,’ Tyrone said.

‘We’re looking at ways a terrorist might breach the riverbank and flood the tunnels,’ Gunnymede said. ‘I’d like to explore the possibilities a boat could ram a hole through the embankment.’

‘You’d need a bloody big boat to do that,’ Bob said.

‘How big?’ Neve asked.

‘Christ. Two thousand tons going at twenty knots maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe more.’

‘Never make the turn though,’ Tyrone said.

‘It’d take up the width of the river standing still,’ Bob said with a chuckle.

‘I don’t know too much about boats,’ Tyrone added. ‘But I know something about heavy objects going at speed and ramming into things, such as trains hitting barriers. Half a dozen carriages would run at two hundred and fifty tons. At thirty miles an hour it would only make a dent in a ten metre thick wall of soil. A boat at ten or twelve knots, not a chance. Anyway, the biggest boat you’re going to get coming up the Thames might be a hundred tons. Two at the most. And it wouldn’t be able to make the turn at top speed to line up to the embankment anyway. The river’s only two hundred and fifty metres wide at that point.’

Gunnymede sat back in thought.

‘How much explosive would you need?’ Neve asked.

‘Don’t know anything about explosives,’ Tyrone said.

‘Ten thousand pounds of ampho might do it,’ Gunnymede said.

‘As far as the non-explosives theory goes this looks like a non-starter then,’ Bethan said.

‘It would seem so,’ Gunnymede said, taking a last look at the map before leaving. Something caught his attention and he took a closer look. ‘What’s that? The circle. There’s another one here and here.’

Tyrone examined the map.

Bob