The Last Bike Ride

By Mark Timlett

Steve Martin attempts to cycle home to his family after surviving a motorway pile-up as he and fellow panicking drivers witness a distant atomic explosion over London.
Some sort of terrorist attack had been expected for the last month since Pakistan had fired a small nuclear device over the border to wipe out massed Indian troops.
Who was behind the attack? Is this how the world ends?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Timlett
• Release date: Dec 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301701872

Mark Timlett

I get inspired by, and mentally write during long night-time drives on, the motorways in England. One day I will probably cause an accident, but in the meantime, I hope you enjoy my efforts!

Book preview

The Last Bike Ride

by

Mark Timlett

Copyright 2012 Mark Timlett

Smashwords Edition

ISBN 9781301701872

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THE LAST BIKE RIDE

Prologue

"Howzat?!" rang around the Kingsmead ground as the Indian team appealed for the catch behind. The umpire, Rashid Butt, a former Pakistan bowler, slowly raised his finger, and the fielders rushed towards their wicket-keeper at the start of a wild celebration. The hushed Durban home crowd contemplated a crushing defeat that would put South Africa two down in the series.

The only Indian in the ground not celebrating, in fact, looking worryingly unwell, was the bowler, who had now taken his sixth wicket, after having the previous two balls ruled out as No-Balls.

The least of bowler Gopal Dev’s problems was wondering why the umpire hadn’t gone to a TV replay to check for another No-Ball. If he had it would have shown Dev’s foot way over the line. And that was what Dev had meant to do.

This Test match had seen an unusually large amount of betting action, even by Asian standards, and an enormous amount of money was lost following Rashid Butt’s blatantly wrong decision.

Of those who had lost the most was Ajit Mehra, now fuming five thousand miles away in Delhi. Mehra, one of the most powerful industrialists in India and a key player in his country’s arms industry, was someone not to get on the wrong side of. He had close links with the top echelons of the Indian government as well as within the criminal community. He made sure that his loss would make the top of the media agenda.

Mehra had created a vast multi-layered network of contacts who all laid off large bets on his behalf, but each not large enough to create any concern amongst bookmakers. Each contact was well rewarded for his or her part in the easily manipulated spot-fixing operation and could therefore be trusted by Mehra to ensure that his own connection with the action could not be traced.

What was normally in Mehra’s control was the willingness of the match umpires and players to play their part in the scams in return for a hefty fee.

The umpire who should have played his part in this particular piece of match-fixing was taken ill just before the start, after being paid his additional ‘match fee’ from Mehra’s people.

The bets were made for there to be three consecutive No-Balls in a specific over. The over had been arranged to be bowled by Gopal Dev, a player who regularly received Mehra’s money.

Dev knew that he could hardly appeal against himself.  Instead he stood alone at the bowler’s end, the colour draining from his face as he contemplated his fate.

The match caused huge embarrassment for the Pakistani government and a particular headache for the Sports Minister, Zohair Kahn. His headache was soon cured by an assassin’s bomb underneath his car. It was assumed that Ajit Mehra had organised this latest bombing across the border. He had been involved in many other attacks on Pakistan to try and ramp up tension and so boost his arms sales. This time it was unclear if he was behind it, but it quickly escalated, much to his delight.

Not many others were happy though, as the situation deteriorated very quickly. The Indian troops who had been encamped near the border came under intense bombardment and hundreds of troops were killed. The retaliation was devastating as Indian strike planes were sent in to bomb huge sections of the Pakistani forces. To make matters worse, and with dire consequences, the US had sent in drones to attack military bases near to Islamabad, the Pakistan capital, but had also caused massive civilian casualties.

What followed was something the world had been fearing for years. Pakistan’s president, General Hassan, ordered the launch of two tactical nuclear devices that obliterated the Indian army troops near the border.

Most of the world had been on, or very close to, maximum-security alert levels for years, since 9/11, as the Americans called it, when the Twin Towers in New York were destroyed by terrorist attacks.

A new age of celebrity-obsessed politicians had began a few years earlier, but one thing the new millennium did bring was an idiot to the world stage in the shape of George W. Bush, elected as US President after a dubious election, rigged with the help of his brother. The world was now in the hands of pygmies, the real statesmen and leaders having left the stage years before.

Why anyone was surprised that the USA was attacked in 2001 is odd given George Bush’s illogical foreign policy. What, of course, was a surprise was the form the attack took, with the terrorists hijacking, and then flying two planes into and destroying the Twin Towers, another into the Pentagon in Washington, with another only prevented by passenger heroics from probably hitting the White House.

George Bush was quickly whisked away to safety in the Presidential plane, while all other non-military flights were grounded, apart from the Bin Laden family plane that was allowed safe passage out of America back to the Middle East. Given that Osama Bin Laden was the chief suspect, and had been a security target for many years after a previous attack on New York’s World Trade Centre, that was an odd decision for the US government to have taken and remained a mystery.

Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair, flew out to America as soon as he could to ‘stand shoulder-to-shoulder’ with the American people, in particular President Bush. The pair soon sent their armed forces into Afghanistan to find Bin Laden, but let him escape to the mountains, and safety, leaving the troops there to be targeted by the enemy in a ‘War on Terror’, a war which, by definition, could never be won. Each British soldier killed there in the ensuing years was honoured in Parliament as having died bravely keeping the streets safe in Britain, a platitude regularly employed by the party leaders in Westminster.

Blair again joined forces with Bush to invade Iraq, a country with no history of terrorism, or any links to Al-Qaeda. Its dictator Saddam Hussein made sure of that with his iron rule, and was indulged by the West for doing so. But he was hunted down and eventually hanged for a TV audience to show that the Coalition had ‘prevailed’. Far from prevailing, they had only succeeded in creating a hornet’s nest of warring factions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in other parts of the world where potential terrorists were being groomed, fuelled by an increasing anti-Western mentality.

***

But now every country on the globe was on full alert, expecting an Indian response. Washington was hoping for India’s Prime Minister, Nishant Nair, to take his time, and the red phones between the US capital and Delhi were overheating. The world had managed to avoid all-out war, but now it was on the brink, thanks to cricket.

Part 1

Chapter 1

Steve Martin checked his rucksack yet again in the kitchen, slung it over his shoulder, called out Bye! to everyone at home, received the usual grunts from those indoors, got into his van, and drove away as usual. But it was not usual, this period was far from usual; it was day thirty-four of the world crisis.He set off to work to collect his mail-load from JDG, the American bank in Bournemouth, just a few minutes from home, before heading off with it to JDG’s City office in London.

Before long Steve was on the road through the New Forest leading to the M27 with just the radio for company. Another two hundred and forty miles of his evening journey lay ahead.

In the summertime, he could look out at the green Hampshire countryside, the view dependent on the position of the sun and the clouds. But in the winter, drivers could only see the steady lines of red lights stretching to the horizon, the white lights approaching from it as they headed south, and the ‘cats eyes’, reflecting white in the middle of the road, red and green along the edges, that went unnoticed during the daytime, as they slumbered like a real cat, but coming alive again each evening as darkness fell.

There was a time, when he first started doing this trip, that one or other of the girls would join him, as it had been exciting to be going off to London with Dad. But the novelty wore off, seeing the same sights each time, and getting bored with BBC Radio 4.

For Steve, though, that station made the journey a lot less boring, offering him the news, some comment on current affairs on its PM programme, and then the regular 6.30pm comedy slot, only turning it off when the Archers ‘dumty-dumty-dumty-dum’ music signalled the start of the Ambridge soap. By that time he was in London and so he turned on to one or other of the London radio stations.

Tonight he was looking forward to listening to Radio London’s coverage of a big European fixture between his team, Tottenham Hotspur, and Barcelona. Their coverage would fade out around Winchester on his return journey and he would then struggle to listen to the rest, and normally the most exciting part, of the match on Radio 5 on medium-wave.

‘We can listen to signals from millions of miles away in space, yet we can’t hear a football match broadcast from White Hart Lane. Why?’ he wondered, as he always did when there was a match on.

Each night, throughout his trip, the travel news interrupted the programmes, firstly from Radio Solent, then from Radio Berkshire, and then Radio London.

Traffic news had been light just lately, as people had stopped going to London unless they had to. Everyone was fearful of a terrorist attack since the latest crisis had begun.

On this night the London-bound traffic was very patchy, but the six lines of southbound white headlights were as solid as ever.

There was one big problem reported tonight with two lorries crashing and blocking the entry slip to the M3 at junction 4 Southbound. Steve knew that junction well, and he was surprised that there weren’t more accidents there – it had one of the tightest bends of any junction slip-road in the motorway network.

He saw the blue emergency lights up ahead on the other side as he approached that junction, and he turned to look at the two big lorries which seemed to be mating, blocking the junction, probably, he imagined, for quite some time to come.

As he turned back to look at his own side of the road there was a huge flash in the distance over the horizon.

‘If that’s lightning the weather must be a lot different up there,’ Steve thought to himself.

The weather forecast for a sustained period of south-west winds couldn’t have been more wrong. Up to then, his journey had been under a clear sky and a full moon was shining brightly.

The PM programme had just finished and the 6 o’clock pips were due.

‘They’re taking their time,’ Steve thought, waiting for the classic time signal, ‘maybe they’ve lost them again.’

The BBC had been having problems with the pips for a couple of weeks and they had been lost completely one evening a couple of weeks earlier.

There was just a crackling sound coming from the radio, so Steve pressed one of the pre-set buttons for Radio London, but again, just the same crackling noise, and the same for his other favourite stations.

‘That’s odd,’ he thought, wondering if the aerial had been damaged, but knowing that he would have heard anything hitting the roof-mounted aerial hard enough to damage it. Just a stone hitting the metal panel above the windscreen sounded like a rock being dropped on the van.

Coming up to junction 3, the road crested a rise, started downhill to the left, and as it turned to the right, where in the summer it would reveal the horizon directly in line with central London, instead tonight revealed the reason why the BBC pips had been lost, along with everything else the BBC had in London - a sight people would only see once, the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion, rising above the distant sky-line.

Panic broke out. Steve and those drivers around him were the first to see it from there, and they all slammed on the brakes. He saw a gap appear between the barrier and the hard shoulder and aimed for it, knowing that there was going to be an impact but hopefully lighter than others were going to have to his right. He hit the barrier hard with the left side of the van and caught the car on his right less heavily and came to a stop. That first group of cars and vans came to a halt, some escaping with little damage, some very badly damaged, and Steve was able to get the passenger door open and scramble out and over the barrier to safety, a relative term considering what was happening 30 miles ahead.

As he did so, a huge articulated lorry, whose driver must have been transfixed with the sight in the distance, without slowing down, piled into the already crashed cars, crushing some before veering over the barrier, through the shrubbery in the central reservation, and into the path of an oncoming lorry of equal size. There