Author Topic: Bomber part seven of a novella  (Read 416 times)

Michael Rolls

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Bomber part seven of a novella
« on: Sep 22, 2019, 01:42:26 PM »

 
 
Chapter Four
With O’Connell on the loose and possibly looking to find me to complete what he failed to achieve back in  
two thousand and one, I had decided that discretion was the better part of valour and had booked into the Airport Hotel. About five miles from the city centre, it was reasonably priced and as basically an hotel catering to people in transit to all parts of the globe, it was not an obvious choice for someone needing a potentially lengthy stay, so hopefully O’Connell would not think of looking for me there. Its distance from the city centre was also a boon – very little chance of an accidental encounter.
I had advised Jim Alison of my new location, but nobody else. My neighbours had deliberately been left in the dark – what they didn’t know, they couldn’t reveal.
It was now nearly two weeks since I had gone to ground and I was beginning to develop stir fever. I had no need to leave the hotel itself, and for the first couple of days I hadn’t, but I was effectively in a self-imposed solitary confinement and it irked me more every day.
I kept in constant touch with Jim, but he was as frustrated as I was at the failure to find O’Connell.
 
***********************
The man himself was working hard at his deadly trade. He had all that he needed – the raw ingredients of the bomb – the fertiliser to provide the saltpetre, the sulphur and the charcoal– as he had expected, it had proved easy to source an adequate amount of charcoal without arousing suspicions, although the sulphur had proved rather more difficult – and the items that he needed to create the detonators which would trigger the explosions. These, again were an improvision – but an effective and well-proven one. They comprised nothing more sophisticated than three dozen photo flash bulbs – now a rarity in modern photography, but still available, three nine volt batteries, and four untraceable pay-as-you-go mobile phones. The bit that required his expertise – anyone could have done the rest of the work - was turning three of the mobile phones into triggers for the detonators. By the time that he had finished, when one of the modified phones received an incoming call the circuitry which would normally sound the ring tone to announce the call would instead now trip a small switch which in turn would complete the circuit between the nine volt battery and the flashbulbs. Taped together – fifteen each for the big bombs, six for the little one, the heat that they would generate would be enough to ignite the gunpowder. The fourth mobile phone had the numbers of the other three on speed dial so they could be activated from anywhere that there was a mobile phone coverage. It meant that the bombs could be activated without any danger to Murphy – who had claimed the ‘honour’ of setting off the explosions – nor to any of the others involved.
The most time consuming element of O’Connell’s work was actually making the gunpowder. Just pouring the constituents into the barrels wasn’t enough. To do so would be a replication of the very earliest days of the explosive – the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Oh, it would off alright, but with very little power. No, the three elements had to be blended together, which would produce a far more powerful ordnance. This took time as he had use a mortar and pestle to grind small quantities of the ingredients at a time together with a little water until he had a ‘cake’ of about two pounds which he then laid out to dry, but at last all the explosive had been prepared and the many cakes had dried out and were packed into the two oil drums, into each of which he also put several dozen of the large nuts that Murphy had acquired – steel nuts which would form lethal shrapnel. He didn’t bother with the nuts for the small bomb, which he had created by packing explosive into into a fibreglass suitcase – its sole purpose was to scare people into running into the killing zones of the big bombs – any injuries it inflicted would be a bonus. He phoned Murphy.
“Hello”
“It’s me – they’re ready.”
“I’ll come round.”
Twenty minutes later Murphy arrived at the lock-up. The previous day the transport for the bombs had been delivered, so for the last twenty-four hours O’Connell had been sharing his living and working accommodation with a Ford Mondeo estate – the transport for the small bomb - whilst each of the other two lock-ups now held a Ford Transit van.
O’Connell briefed Murphy on the workings of the remote trigger – something which only took a minute or two and included the very important advice to keep the trigger phone switched off until the very last minute.
“Now,” he said, “I’ve done my bit – so where’s my sub-machine gun?”
“Never worry, Liam old son – I’ve sourced an UZI for you – it’ll be here the day after tomorrow.”
O’Connell nodded his head in satisfaction, The fact that it would arrive the day before the bombs were due to be set off didn’t seem of any relevance, just so long as the weapon arrived safely and he could track down that sod Lamb and use it on him.
 
*********************
Jim Alison was a worried man – a very worried man. The more that he thought about it, the more sure he became that Liam O’Connell, probably with help from members of the local Irish community who still held Republican sympathies, was planning to set off a bomb, or bombs, on the twentieth anniversary of the Corporation Street bombings – and that anniversary was now only three days away and there was still no sign of the man.
He wondered desperately if there was any avenues that he might have left unexplored, and he could think of nothing obvious. There were, of course, many avenues that were impossible to explore- for example, interviewing everyone in Manchester who had an Irish connection, but being realistic, there seemed to be nothing left.
Then he had an idea. He remembered – how could he ever forget? – that day in nineteen ninety-six when Manchester had been rocked by the IRA bomb. But for Larry Lamb’s decisive action, people fleeing the scene of the first bomb would have been cut down by the explosion of the second. The Bomb Squad officer to whom he had spoken had been of the opinion that given the original, only partially successful, IRA plot, it was highly likely that a similar plan would be employed this time – and the amount of fertiliser stolen would easily run to two substantial bombs, even two substantial bombs and one considerably smaller.
“Suppose,” the Army man had hypothesized, “the bugger sets off a fairly small device in Corporation Street, aimed at making people run away from the immediate vicinity of the explosion, and they run into the killing zone of another device, perhaps even two more devices?”
The policeman and the soldier had then pored over a Manchester street map, concentrating on the logical escape routes of people fleeing for their very lives from Corporation Street. The soldier, Lieutenant Colonel James Harris, stabbed his forefinger down on the map.
“If I was placing a bomb and wanted to inflict as much death and injury as possible, I’d want folk to run down Hanover Street. It’s narrow with high walled buildings on both sides – ideal to contain the explosion and maximise the effect of any shrapnel I’d packed into the bloody thing.”
Alison nodded in agreement.
“So, with that in mind, the logical place to put the first bomb has to be here.”
Like the Lieutenant Colonel, he stabbed down with his finger, but this time indicating a point about fifty yards north of where Hanover Street joined Corporation Street. The soldier nodded in agreement.
“Absolutely. Most people are likely to be south of that point, so Hanover Street looks like a safe refuge. Anyone further away,” he shrugged his shoulders, “well, they’ll go further south along Corporation Street down towards the football museum and Withy Grove – so to catch those people – if indeed there is as second bomb waiting - the logical place is a bit north of the museum.”
Alison gazed thoughtfully at the map once more.
“Yes, and to make things worse, there are parking spaces down there – elsewhere, it’s all yellow lines, so leaving a vehicle is going to stick out like a sore thumb.”
“Can’t you enforce a temporary ‘No Parking’ area around there?”
“Oh yes, and we will do just that that, don’t you worry.”
He paused as he turned the various scenarios over in his mind.
“OK, now if it was me, I would want a vehicle in Corporation Street where we thought. I’d have to overcome the yellow line restrictions – so how? Two options. Either drive into my chosen location, stop the car, get out and leg it as quickly as my feet would take me and then set off explosion number one as soon as I was sure that I was a reasonable distance away, or alternatively fake a breakdown, lift the bonnet, look helpless, take out a mobile and appear to be phoning the AA or RAC or whatever. First option would make me look suspicious right away, so I’d probably go for number two.”
The soldier nodded his head in agreement.
“Seems the most logical way to set about it.”
“There’s another thing to think about – if I am pretending to call out a breakdown service I would be expected to stay near the vehicle, so I am going to look to a pretty minor explosion for number one – just enough to get people running away, but not enough to blow me to Kingdom Come.”
Alison had already briefed his superior officers on the likelihood of another IRA bomb outrage in Manchester and it had been agreed that on the anniversary of the nineteen ninety-six attack there would be strict ‘no parking’ regulations enforced in the general area, and a strong armed police presence, but everyone was only too aware that the result was most likely to be an attack elsewhere in the city or on another day; it was too much to hope for that the bombers would simply give up.
The only real hope was to catch O’Connell and anybody helping him before the attack happened – and time was running out and there was still no sign of the man. The previous day Alison had given much thought to the logistical problems facing the bombers – for he was convinced that more than one person would have to be involved. From the amount of fertiliser stolen and the assumption that the bombers would be looking to create as much carnage as possible, the most likely scenario was two major bombs and they would be big enough to have to be contained in something like a forty-five gallon oil drum, something that the IRA had often used in the past – and such an item was too big to be transported in an ordinary car without being clearly visible to anyone seeing the vehicle. No, they would need a couple of vans of at least Transit size and Alison had ordered that he should be informed of any vans stolen anywhere in the Manchester area over the last three weeks – the period since O’Connell had gone off the radar. To his surprise, not a single van had been reported stolen in his time frame, so he put in motion a check of all companies hiring small vans – and at last there was a breakthrough.
It was Detective Constable ‘Shirley’ MacLaine – she had been christened Jane Elena, but given her red hair the nickname was inevitable – who brought him the news.
“Something a bit odd, sir,” she had offered, “I’ve found two Transit vans hired out – hired by the same man but from different companies and on the same day last week. I thought that looked a bit odd, so I checked again using his name – and he also hired a Mondeo estate, again on the same day, from yet a third company. The man doing the hiring is one Donal Murphy. I’ve checked him out and apart from a couple of speeding convictions he’s clean. Here’s his address and here’s his picture – got it from his licence application to the DVLA.”
 Alison was intrigued – and puzzled.  This man Murphy clearly existed, and whilst just having a name that seemed Irish was no crime, his odd behaviour over the hiring of the vehicles made him a person of interest.
“So,” he mused to himself, “who are you, Mr. Murphy and what are you up to?”
He made up his mind.
“Good work, Shirley. I want him picked up – but if he is connected to what we are after he could be dangerous – so uniforms and armed officers to get him.”
Murphy was at home when the knock on the door came and, totally unsuspecting, answered it and within minutes found himself in the back seat of a police patrol car whisking him to the police station.  
The news of Murphy’s arrest was kept as quiet as possible. O’Connell, expecting the man to appear to finalise matters, was left in limbo and growing increasingly uneasy, wondering if he had been betrayed – but if that were the case, why was he still secreted in the lock-up with the mobile bombs? If, for whatever reason, Murphy wanted to play him false, this seemed an odd way of going about it.
The more he thought about it, the unhappier he became. He truly doubted that Murphy was trying to betray him – it made no sense. That meant that, for one reason or another, he had been prevented from appearing when agreed. Could he have somehow fallen foul of the police? If that were the case, and he was persuaded to talk, no matter how unlikely that might be, the lock-up he was currently sharing with one car bomb, whilst two more were in the adjacent lock-ups, was no place to be. He needed to move, and quickly – but where to?
 
 
Thank you for the days, the days you gave me.
The older I get, the better I was!