The Last Bike Ride - Chapter 9/15

Chapter 9

Steve was now on the Spur Road, the dual-carriageway leading to Bournemouth, and just a few miles from home. He thought briefly about moving back to the left-hand, correct side of the road but there were still too many cars blasting towards the town with those inside hoping they weren’t going to be late for the party. But time had stopped in the clubs and bars – there were no ‘last orders’ tonight.
So he stayed on the wrong side and was soon passing his regular landmarks, but at about 60 mph slower than usual. The first, and one that had caused yet more embarrassment for local Councillors, was a fence alongside the road to help keep lizards in their habitat when the road was improved, but what the authorities had forgotten to do was to ensure that there was any money in the kitty for the actual road works. There wasn’t, and so the lizards were safe for a while until the flimsy fence started to break up with neglect and they were free once more to slither under passing vehicles.
The orange glow from the airport lights started to appear as Steve got nearer but, as it was back at Fleet services, it seemed brighter than usual and was accompanied by a burning smell that was getting stronger the closer he got.
‘How many had flown away tonight?’ he wondered.
In fact, there had not been that many, as two small planes had crashed as they raced to get away after their pilots had ignored traffic control, leaving them smashed to pieces and blocking the runway. Another pilot had attempted to use what little runway there was left, but succeeded only in adding to the airport carnage by crashing into the fuel depot. The resulting inferno was what had illuminated the sky, and that fire would last for several hours more.
Steve cycled on and stopped on the bridge over the third of his favourite local rivers, the Dorset Stour. He looked down into the dark water which, just a few minutes ago, had been flowing through the Throop, a stretch of river well known to many anglers all over the country. This section of the river had produced many specimen barbel and chub, with some even given nicknames after being recognised by fin and scale damage. Names such as ‘The Wanderer’, ‘Polaris’, ‘White Spot’, ‘the Lookout’, and ‘Graham’s’ were just a few. No doubt, to many non-anglers, the naming of wild fish just added to their perceptions of anglers being not quite of this world.
Recently though, the Environment Agency, charged with protecting freshwater fishing had decided, against advice from better experts, that it would be a good idea to introduce cuddly otters, reared in captivity, into this part of the Stour. Within months, otters were seen everywhere, much to the delight of everyone apart from the anglers. What were not being seen were the old favourites from Throop; at least, not all of them. Instead, were the sad remains left on the banks where the delightful otters had just ripped out the throats and gills of these once-loved fish.
Steve was on his bike again after contemplating the loss of these fish when the smell of the sewage works hit him.
‘It must be full tonight,’ he surmised, given the panic that was gripping the country and loosening its bowels at the same time.
Driving past was bad enough some times, but cycling past was worse, taking six times as long.
The ‘Welcome to Bournemouth’ sign was just after the sewage works, what a welcome!
As he cycled over the Cooper Dean fly-over he could see across to the ‘Greenhouse’, the headquarters of the bank from where tonight’s journey had started, and what seemed a lifetime ago now. It was still expensively lit-up despite this American company’s drive to introduce petty savings.
‘Surely there’s no one left in there tonight?’ he wondered, ‘but these bankers would no doubt be looking at making a killing from the positions left by their banking colleagues killed tonight in the City.’
‘That’s a bit too cynical,’ he thought, ‘perhaps.’
As Steve crossed the Station roundabout he decided to take a chance and move over to the correct side of the road and stopped on the bridge above Horseshoe Common and leant across the barrier wall to take a look through the bare trees across to the heart of Bournemouth’s club-land.
He could see the entrance to For Your Eyes Only. ‘Perhaps they’ll waive the ‘No Touching’ rule tonight!’ he joked to himself.
The sight around the area even shocked him, despite all he had seen earlier that night. There were drunken bodies, maybe even actual bodies, littering the ground below. Fighting and fornication were in abundance, and probably, so was fieving, the third part of the F trilogy which seemed to be more popular in some schools than the three R’s. Dance music was pounding from outdoor speakers linked to the clubs’ DJs inside. But if the world was about to end, then who can blame anyone going out with a bang like this.
He hoped the girls were all at home with Juliette now, and not involved in town. Florence and Nikki would have liked to be down there, no doubt.
‘Why did they have to drink so much?’ he pondered.
Sure, Steve had liked a drink or several at their age, but now they all wanted to be drunk before they went out. The girls’ bedrooms were no different from those of their friends, some better stocked than their parents’ drinks cabinets. Juliette was keen to encourage it, as she had for every fad while they were growing up, every time saying, “Because they all do it.”
Was it any wonder that employers found it hard to spot talent or potential when parents were producing a production line of piss-heads, unwilling to offer any originality for fear of not looking cool amongst their equally dim-witted peers? If any of them survive, will they have the faintest clue about leadership or the ability to think straight, let alone laterally, which is what will be needed if there is to be a future?
This was the generation expected to live to 100. It didn’t seem as if any would live much longer than tonight, but if any did survive, the only way they would make the century was if the government scrapped all speed-limits to create a good supply of donor livers and kidneys.
His meditating over these questions was suddenly brought to an end by an “Oi, mate!” from someone behind. This was definitely not an “Oi, mate! How do you do?”
Steve turned to see someone, completely out of his head, lurch towards him, swinging a bottle. Steve stepped aside, and the bottle went over the barrier and fell to the ground below, still attached to his attacker. The sickening sound of his landing brought Steve alert again, and he found he was shaking, just as he was when he started this journey – this time from the close call of the attack, and again from the cold after stopping to watch the debauched scene below.
‘What has everybody got against cyclists tonight?’ he wondered as he got back on his bike after his second close encounter of the night.
‘If the Echo gets printed again the Letters page will probably include two or three blaming cyclists for nuking London!’ he mused, ‘they usually get the blame for most things in that local rag.’
Up the hill was St Michael’s primary school where all their girls had gone. While the secondary schools give most school memories later in life, it’s the primary schools that mean more to the parents, and this school had left many memories, good and not so good, with Steve and Juliette.
There was one Chinese girl at school, only seven years old, who wasn’t as lucky as Michelle had been to survive. Her funeral, with an open coffin, left a lasting memory, as it had done with the Head Teacher, coming in the first few weeks of him being in charge.
The Sports Days had been fun though, not for the girls so much, who cringed with fear – not of having to do something sporty, they quite enjoyed that, but at the thought of there being a parent’s race. It must have been his just desserts for sticking the Egg to the Spoon with chewing-gum and sprinting to the line yards ahead of anyone else, that Steve caused such hilarity in the following wheeled tea-tray race. He remained convinced that his tray had been nobbled, despite it being used successfully in the following races with no mishaps. How else could he explain being stuck on the start-line, and then tipping it over before driving it into a group of frightened first-years.
He thought back to 2001. The Junior Sports Day had been enlivened with the news that one of the country’s leading liars and story-tellers, Jeffrey Archer, was to start a prison sentence for perjury. The Infants Sports Day, postponed by the weather, was re-scheduled for September 11th, and calling in to the Post Office on the way back from the playing fields, Steve heard that there had been a plane crash in New York. Not just a plane crash, of course. They got home and turned the TV on just before the South Tower collapsed.
Within hours, Bush and Blair were declaring their enigmatically-titled ‘War on Terror’.
‘And this is where it ends’, thought Steve.
The two leaders declared that history would decide whether they were right or not.
‘It should have been the International War Crimes court that decided’ as Steve continued thinking about that time. He had taken Nikki on the big anti-War march in London just before the Iraq invasion.
‘What do they matter?’ he wondered both Blair and Bush saying of the millions who had marched in each of their countries, much as their political predecessors had said, a generation earlier, of the CND marchers.
Saddam Hussein was just another from a long line of Middle-Eastern, African and Asian dictators that the West had happily sold arms to before demonising them and bringing them down, behind a screen of democracy when they became inconvenient.
In Parliament, Tony Blair had claimed that the UK could come under attack from Iraq within 45 minutes, and had got one of his more supportive and sycophantic newspapers to splash the nonsense over its red-topped front page. What the intelligence report had actually warned about was that UK interests in Cyprus could have been a 45-minute-range potential target for Iraqi conventional weapons.
Consequently, Saddam’s Iraq was attacked by the allied Coalition after the credulous inmates in Westminster’s House of Commons believed Blair’s spin on the report, and had therefore voted for the invasion, as did the spineless politicians on Capitol Hill in Washington.
Steve wondered if, after the vote in the House of Commons, Tony Blair had called Bush to say,
“They’ve fallen for it, George, we’re good to go!” probably panting and shaking like an excited poodle waiting for a bone from his master.
What Steve had always found strange about the Coalition invasion was why, given that Saddam was claimed to have had chemical weapons amongst a great arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, which had been proven to have not existed, were the first battalions sent in without chemical weapon protective uniforms?
‘Maybe this is the end we deserve,’ continued Steve’s thoughts, ‘for making them our leaders.’
Steve wondered what schools would be like in the future if anyone were to survive.
‘Surely there must be a better system than this’, he thought, ‘if we had a fairer way of educating we wouldn’t have to be fighting wars all the time. Let’s hope they learn from this. I doubt it, though.’
“Come on, Steve!” he shouted out, to try and clear his head of the million things spinning around inside it, “you’re nearly there!”
Amongst those spinning things were, ‘would he get a hug from any of them at home, would any of them make him a hot chocolate, or pour him a stiff drink, which he really needed? Or would any of them even look up from the TV?’

***
He turned off the main road to start the last climb before home and, as he did so, some 2000 miles away in Kalinovskaya, Vasily had driven the mini-bus that the Vympel team would need to meet them at the agreed rendezvous at the town’s football ground.
Captain Dimitrov, the Vympel team leader, spoke to Potemkin.
“Vasily, my friend, were their any experts involved with this?”
Potemkin felt uneasy, not with the question, but with the friendly way Dimitrov had asked it. Vympel members weren’t renowned for their affability and this Captain looked about the last person he would have wanted to be mates with.
Earlier, in the Kremlin, President Krakov’s chief scientist had agreed with Krakov that anyone who was able to maintain an ICBM for all those years would be very valuable to Russia. Krakov had ordered the Vympel team to spare any scientists if they could be identified.
“Yes, Captain, there were two. Professor Yusupov and Doctor Daudova.”
“Do you have their numbers?” asked Dimitrov.
“I have Larissa Daudova’s number. Why?”
“I need you to get in touch with her and lure them away from Akhmadov. Don’t phone, the ringing might cause suspicion, just text her.”
“OK, I understand,” answered Potemkin.
Potemkin was feeling good with himself that he was able to do something more for the Kremlin. He texted Dr Daudova, telling her to go with the Professor and meet him in the launch silo. They would not be missed by Akhmadov’s party which was now in full swing in the control room. Neither of them would be drinking and both would be glad to get away from the debauchery going on around them. They would have preferred to have been back at their homes reading their scientific journals.
“OK, they’ll be waiting for us,” Potemkin told Captain Dimitrov.
“Thanks, Vasily,” replied Dimitrov, still too friendly for Potemkin’s comfort, “let’s go!”
Potemkin drove the Vympel team through the back streets of the town, which would be soon be alive with people on their way to work, and out towards the silo. The Vympel team secured the two scientists. Inside, there was clear evidence of a recent launch. They carried on to the bunker of the control room where the party was still in full swing. Vasily entered the party on his own, as planned.
“Hey, Vasily, my friend, we did it! Where have you been, watching TV again?” boomed Akhmadov, “come on, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do!”, and passed him a bottle of cold champagne.
Vasily had, in fact, been with the same two female friends he was with when Akhmadov had called earlier.
“Usman, you know, Yana has a very sexy mouth and she doesn’t just use it to laugh, and you know something else? She has taught your Maya the same tricks. They’re a great pair!”
Vasily took a long draught from the bottle, taking in everyone in the stunned room as he did so, and then, as Akhmadov got up and drunkenly approached, he smashed the bottle on a table and rammed the jagged rim deep into Akhmadov’s throat, taking his jugular with it.
“You bastard! You could have got away with this if you had looked after your friends.”
Whether Akhmadov heard any of that was doubtful.
The Kremlin checked with the White House and with Captain Mortimer that they were happy with the evidence. The White House War Room had, just minutes earlier, received a message from Major Krunt in the Pentagon that Vladimir Petrov, Crimson 161, had confirmed the launch had been from Kalinovskaya. This would have been a very important message at any other time, but it was almost irrelevant now. Everyone in the War Room was standing, speechless, staring at their screens, as the video of the silo and all the equipment in it, and then were aghast at seeing Akhmadov celebrating.
“How did we miss that? I thought we had him under surveillance?” asked the President.
General Cleaver had sunk in his chair, realising that under his watch a rebel group had been able to do this. He knew he was now finished.
On board the Victorius there was equal incredulity at the way this group was partying.
President Krakov had been just as shocked at the realisation that the Kremlin had been deceived for all these years by this bunch of rebels. He gave the go-ahead to the Vympel team who stormed in and eliminated everyone in the room.
Captain Dimitrov turned to Vasily and said,
“Vasily, I have a present for you from your friend Nikolay Zheldak.”
Before Potemkin realised he had been betrayed, a line of lead bullets from his heart down to his groin had almost torn him in half.
Nikolay Zheldak had his own plans for Yana.

***
The Victorius was the scene of a more reserved, and deserved, celebration. The crew’s support for Captain Mortimer had been vindicated. For the first time in military history the Lions had dictated over the Donkeys, and soon Jerome Walker-Gray’s plans would be shattered. Sure, he would be leaving the Navy, but in disgrace, and his JWG would be exposed for what it was.
The world had stepped away from the brink. The nuclear deterrent had worked, but not in the way it was always expected to. It had taken the loss of the greatest city in the world.
The news wouldn’t be broadcast for a few hours yet, and therefore, unbeknown to Steve as he cycled up the hill, Juliette and the girls were going to be OK. At the top of the hill the bells of St Michael’s church were ringing out for 3am – the significance of those three peals being lost on Steve and most of the rest of the world – it was that close.
At the top of the hill, Steve came to St. Michael’s roundabout. To the left was the start of the town centre with a couple of clubs here as outposts of the town’s club-land further down the hill. He looked to see if the debauchery was the same as he had seen just earlier. It was.
But as he looked back he saw a car speeding towards the roundabout from his right and he was directly in its expected path. He froze and waited to get wiped out. The car, a Ford hatchback, instead went straight over the roundabout and took off into the air, its wheels level with Steve’s eyes. He could hear the screams of fear or delight coming from the open car windows just above. As it landed, the driver lost control and the car veered off to the left and smashed into a shop doorway, where someone, having his last wee, was squashed into the shop, penis-in-hand, and immolated with everyone in the car, now buried deep inside the shop. Death and cremation separated by a fraction of a second. The only thing which escaped was the head of a girl, from inside the car, which was thrown through the air before rolling to a stop outside a club, Bumbles, for years advertised as ‘catering for the more mature clientele’, i.e., ‘grab a granny’.
No one took any notice of the disfigured head, apart from one very drunk lad who tried to kick it across the road, but fell over with his first attempt, as he did with his second and third efforts, but made contact with the next swing, sending it flying once again, for the third time in less than five minutes. He broke his foot with this kick, but he didn’t feel it, and wouldn’t feel anything for several hours.
Steve had been glued to the spot after this near miss, but got going again and cleared the roundabout, and his head, just as another car tried the same manoeuvre. If he had been standing near the roundabout earlier he would have seen several other drivers trying the same, as would many more through the rest of the night. The flower-bed in the middle of the roundabout, pristine just hours before, was now a muddy circle with the tyre prints of those cars not going fast enough to take off.
“Come on, concentrate, don’t lose it now”, he shouted to himself, as he regained control of himself and his bike.
But he was shaking now, from the close shave he had just had, and with the thought of his target almost within reach.
The adrenalin kicked in as he headed towards the last roundabout before home, which was now just a few hundred yards away. It was just like the adrenalin rush he had felt when he approached the finish of the London to Brighton bike ride all those years ago, when Florence was just a few months old in Juliette’s arms as they waited for him at the finish. Then, he had joined up with a bunch of about eight other riders a couple of miles out and they found the energy together, after 60 miles of riding, to race each other onto the Brighton Marina to the finish line.
Steve swept round the roundabout and down the hill to take the left-hander he had done so many times before, but this time his foot slipped out of the toe-clip and clipped the kerb. It’s doubtful if he was that grateful that the steel toe-cap had saved his toe, because he was more concerned with whether his beanie cap would protect his head which was uncontrollably heading towards a more solid lamppost than the one which had broken his glasses over four decades earlier.
Who knows if his life flashed before him for the third time, or what else was going through his mind. Perhaps the thought of Florence as a baby and her now not surviving to make her own family?
Whatever was in his mind was now floating in the ether, because his brain, smashed from his skull on impact, was lying steaming on the cold pavement.