Bomb God

Chris Page

Description

This is the sixth book in the modern thriller series featuring Albie Cork, former soldier and single leg amputee and now London counter-terrorist officer.A mentally unstable young chemical genius called Jefferson Morgan invents a new explosive that is 10/7 times more powerful than C4, the military Semtex. He names it Morganite. Three years ago Morgan was incarcerated in the high security mental institution of Broadmoor for removing the O2 building from the London skyline. He almost succeeded in doing the same to the Palace of Westminster. Through an unscrupulous mental health consultant, Morgan reveals the secret Morganite formula into the eager hands of an Argentine spymaster and Falkland's revengenik . Soon after a British oilrig with 48 workers on board disappears in the rough seas of the Falkland Basin. Satellite tracking reveals how it was done.Under the guise of being a groom for a visiting Polo team Cork arrives in Buenos Aires. In return the Argentine sends an attractive woman to London and arms her with enough Morganite to destroy the entire West End.As Albie is forced to forgo the sexual companionship of an Earl's beautiful daughter because of the danger it would expose her to, a desperate chase around London takes place. And as always with Albie, people will die. The question is who and how many?

Sujets

• Adventure (Guyana)
• Adventure

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 18 octobre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785385971
• Langue: English

Extrait

BOMB GOD
Book Six of the Albie Cork Thriller Series
Chris Page





First published in 2016 by
AG Books
www.agbooks.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© Copyright 2016 Chris Page
The right of Chris Page to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.




‘You can sometimes talk a bullet out of hitting home, but a bomb won’t listen.’
‘I live in my own skin. Where those that seek to detonate bombs in my beloved country are concerned, it’s a shark’s skin... or maybe a crocodile’s. Meaning I’ll happily eat them alive if I can.’
Albie Cork, counter-terrorist officer, SO13, London



Albie Cork - The Life So Far
Name: Albert Cork. It would have been Albert Finney Cork because his mother liked the actor but his father was jealous and they had a row in the maternity hospital and compromised on plain Albert. He didn’t mind. Nobody called him that anyway, apart from his mum when she was mad at him, which was all the time before his parents moved to Australia where eventually they were executed by Japanese assassins looking to get at him.
Born: 31 October 1973. A Halloween baby and a Scorpio.
Education: Left school at sixteen a frustrated virgin with bugger-all qualifications and a love of football.
Family: One younger sister, Debbie, and his now dead parents, all of whom moved to Australia when he was seventeen. He stayed in a bedsit in Tottenham, chased girls and drank a lot of beer. Now lives in a temporary Met Police-owned flat in Central London because his was destroyed by a bomb. Will be moving into his own place again soon.
Work record: From age sixteen to twenty-three many menial jobs, all poorly paid. Then he joined the army.
Married: Twice, aged twenty-three and thirty-nine. No kids. The first one was a disaster, divorced after two years. His second wife was killed by an assassin’s bomb meant for him.
Military career: A disposal bombhead with fourteen years in an EODC (Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company). Double row of pips and associated gongs including the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross gained in Iraq. Was a WO1 (Warrant Officer Class 1) when he was invalided out. Turned down two further promotions. Holder of high status Russian medal presented by Vladimir Putin.
Income: Meagre army pension, and monthly salary from current job with SO13 in bomb-based counter-terrorism.
Languages spoken: Epithet-laden laconic English laced with military banality.
Hobbies: Sex, Tottenham Hotspur FC, sex, Tottenham Hotspur FC, more sex.
Pet hates: Sexual abstinence after long periods without any female contact.
Physical disability: Only has one leg ‒ a distinct disadvantage with his main hobby.
Height: 5ft 11in/1.83m.
Weight: 176lb/80kg (without prosthetic).
Profile
If it takes losing a leg above the knee to an IED in Afghanistan, having no luck with long-term girlfriends and being hunted by sinister, unknown professional killers to become a modern hero, then Albert ‘Albie’ Cork is one. If it doesn’t, then he’s just another flawed ex-soldier in counter-terrorism with a vigilante approach and an over-abundance of lustful genes who attracts a great deal of unwanted attention from the bad guys.
And he certainly doesn’t consider himself disabled; embarrassed maybe, and inconvenienced perhaps at having to remove his prosthetic for sex with a new lover for the first time...
But that never stopped him.
You choose ‒ he’s too intent on getting his good leg over, seeking those who would place bombs in and around his beloved London and staying alive to waste any time thinking about it.



Prologue
There are two substances named Morganite in the world today. One is a rare, light pink to rose-coloured gem-quality variety of a mineral called beryl. The other is the most powerful chemical explosive known to man.
The former does not concern us here.
In 2011 a Cambridge-educated chemistry doctor, a sexually inadequate twenty-five-year-old genius by the name of Jefferson Morgan, invented an entirely new plastic explosive which he patented and named after himself. Morganite was, gram for gram, ten-to-the-power-of-seven times more powerful than the most potent plastique then available ‒ C4, the military-strength Semtex. Not only was Morganite several orders of magnitude more powerful than any other explosive compound or process known to man except nuclear fission, it delivered that power from minute quantities. A small pinch weighing no more than 200 picograms - a single picogram is a millionth of a gram - was sufficient to atomise a fridge, and its immediate surroundings.
Morgan and his assistant, a heavily made-up former rock chick called Amanda Smee, had proved the plastique’s prowess in a demonstration to a group of top government and military brass on Salisbury Plain. In a large tent they’d chatted with the assembled leaders and handed out coffee and homemade biscuits prior to the demonstration, then taken them outside to a covered tank-tracked testing ground.
The flawed genius and inventor held up and then placed a minute quantity of Morganite inside a sturdy but clearly empty fridge placed there for the purpose, closed the door and retired with the sceptical guests a few hundred metres away. Once they were all crouched down behind a sturdy earthen explosives barrier, Morgan held up and then pressed a button on the remote control. After the huge bang they emerged to find that the appliance had completely disappeared. They all strolled over to the six-foot smoking crater where the fridge had stood and looked on in wonder. Morgan then pointed out that unlike all other known plastic explosives, with Morganite there was no afterburn or smell around the site. Having sniffed and peered down into the crater and tried in vain to discover a trick, the assembled guests trooped back to the tent dumbstruck by what they had seen.
It was then that the young genius waved his remote control at them and told them that a similar amount of Morganite had been cooked into each biscuit Amanda had insisted they all eat prior to the demonstration, and also that each of those amounts was uniquely programmed into his remote control.
‘If I press certain pre-coded speed numbers on this control,’ Morgan had said quietly to his stunned audience, ‘individually or simultaneously you will all instantly disappear from the face of this earth like that fridge, rendered into an odourless pink froth.’
It certainly got their attention. Some of them even dived to the floor, as if that would make a difference; others, specifically an SAS Colonel and a Marine Lieutenant Commander, prepared to rush him. In the event Morgan held up his hand to stay them, smiled and told them not to worry because he had no intention of pressing any more buttons and the biscuits with the tasteless cooked-in Morganite would probably be expelled from their bodies together with all other natural waste in the normal way in the next twenty-four hours.
The word ‘probably’ stuck in all their minds.
In the meantime, the chemical genius added, they would just have to trust him because he alone knew the numbers, and he had several more remotes that were programmed in the same manner tucked away... just in case.
Like the ‘probably’, the ‘just in case’ also took up a permanent position in their confused minds.
Just in case what?
Baked beans and other well-known laxative consumables were swallowed wholesale by all concerned over the next couple of days until they’d had a few good-sized dumps and felt safe - everyone, that is, except for a cross-dressing Admiral and Second Sea Lord who locked himself in his home toilet and refused to eat or come out for seventy-two hours.
That demonstration went down in military folklore as the most effective ever seen on land of a new product, though not quite up there with the dropping of the atom bombs known as Little Boy and Fat Boy on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Less than a year later Jefferson Morgan and several of the military chiefs who had been present at the demonstration, including the Army Head of Land Command, the SAS Colonel, the cross-dressing Admiral and an RAF Air Marshal, were jailed for life for the complete destruction of the O2 building in London and the planting of five orange-sized balls of Morganite around the Palace of Westminster with intention to detonate during the Opening of Parliament. Amanda Smee would have joined them had she not gone back to her former rock star boyfriend and, just before the case came to court, died in an alleyway of an overdose behind the venue where he was performing.
Had Morgan not been stopped just in time, the Palace of Westminster and all in its august embrace, including the monarch, her husband and all the MPs, bishops and officials of both houses, not to mention the iconic Big Ben, would have been vaporised, 408 years after Guy Fawkes and his merry band had tried to do the same thing with thirty-six barrels of gunpowder.
From thirty-six barrels to five orange-sized bal