The Lords' Day (retail) by Michael Dobbs

Author:Michael Dobbs [Dobbs, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849839082
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2012-01-11T23:00:00+00:00

Seven

12.00 midnight.

FROM SOMEWHERE NEARBY A CHURCH clock struck the hour.

‘I really should go home,’ Melanie said.

‘Why?’

She didn’t answer.

‘The husband?’

She considered the question before shaking her head. ‘I gave him one last chance – a chance he’d asked for. And he blew it.’ She shivered, even though the room was warm. ‘Left me like a gooseberry. At the Ivy, of all places. I felt such a fool.’

‘Where did he get to?’

‘Who knows?’ Almost as an afterthought she’d scanned the list of names in the Standard of those caught up in the siege, but he wasn’t there. It left her both relieved and intensely irritated. ‘He’s always off doing things for other people and I seem to come way down his list. I’m just an afterthought.’

‘Sounds serious.’

‘Sounds over.’ There, she’d said it, not just to herself but to someone else. Somehow it made it more real.

‘You mean that?’

Once more she considered the question, before whispering: ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

‘In which case . . .’

‘What?’

‘There’s not a lot of reason for you to go home.’

Suddenly he was laying siege to her nipple once more.

‘What, again?’ she laughed.

‘Oh, yes, please. Again . . .’

12.32 a.m.

If Melanie hadn’t been on her back but instead standing by the window of the hotel overlooking Hyde Park, she might have noticed the arrival of two USAF MH53Js. These helicopters, the largest and most powerful in the world, had twin turbo-shaft engines which kicked out more than four thousand shaft horsepower each and drove rotor blades that were seventy-two-foot long. The downdraft these monsters created was immense, hurling leaves, twigs and all sorts of ungathered rubbish high into the night air across the park. Long before the rotors had stopped turning, the men of Delta Force’s A Squadron were fanning out across the low grass, establishing a perimeter while others began unloading their vehicles and heavier equipment. They’d brought a variety of weapons with them, an assortment of Armalites with Heckler & Kochs, and even a few grenade launchers – they hadn’t known what to expect, but neither had the British. There was no opposition, no one to contest their right to use the banks of the Serpentine as a marshalling area. The nearby park police station had long since closed for the evening, and the troops in the Wellington Barracks overlooking the southern aspect of the park were mostly engaged elsewhere. After all, the attention of the British was still focused on Heathrow; they were only slowly beginning to realise that the military plane, obstinately stuck at the far side of the airfield and refusing to respond to instructions, was a decoy, a little game played almost for the sake of it, to distract attention from the other C-130 that had flown on what was listed as a training exercise to the USAF base at Mildenhall in Suffolk. That was where Delta Force had switched to the helicopters before heading straight to Hyde Park.

Inevitably there was a no-fly zone in force above the capital but for the last

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