A Trip To Harrods - Forever

Welcome to my new blog - "Bona Fide Truths by Ron Clark Ball." I won't necessarily ask you to hold these truths to being "self evident," or for that matter considered pure gospel - just think of them as coming from a less visible burning bush. Our first topic - shopping at Harrods in dreary old London. The exception being that the shopping excursion described turns out to be something much, much more. Think about 24-year-old Najibullah Zazi and what can be done with hydrogen peroxide as you read this excerpt. Enjoy, and think about it. Really think about it.

MAY 26, 2008

LONDON, ENGLAND

 

"LOVE, HOLD MUMMY’S HAND,” Julie Perkins said as she tried to simultaneously keep her four-year old son in tow, balance a tray of food, and tote three full shopping bags. She adjusted the rope handholds of the bags to make room for the pint size hand.

 “Mummy needs to find a table dear,” she said under her breath as she alertly scanned the Food Hall inside Harrods. She knew when her target was spotted the window of opportunity would be very small; she wouldn’t have a moment to lose.

“Brilliant, I see one love. O’er there, near the big funny bear.” With shopping bags and her son’s tiny fingers firmly in the grasp of one hand and tray in the other, she began briskly moving toward her target. “Right away, let’s go Danny. Hold tight to Mummy.”

Her intended destination was fifty feet and a mob of afternoon shoppers away. The only vacant table in the entire Food Hall was directly below a seven-foot wooden bear located at the far opposite end from where they were. The bear was her mark.

Julie negotiated the crowd with the agility of an Olympic slalom skier. She’d honed her skills on the sidewalks of the city where she grew up, London. Toting shopping bags and darting through crowds in high heels and tight jeans was not a virtue but a necessity, otherwise “one could forget about ever getting a table or taxi,” she’d say.

She’d almost reached her goal when the mother of three toddlers spied the same free table and began her own rush, tray, bags, and all, to get there first. The race was on. Julie danced right and left, literally lifting Danny off the ground in the process. At the last second, she pivoted and blocked, putting her body and the shopping bags between the table and the competition.

“Brilliant. Here’s our table Danny, just perfect for the two of us,” Julie said loudly while setting her tray down on the prize. She affected a victorious smile at her opponent, who Julie tagged right away as a typical American tourist that could afford to go on holiday and shop at Harrods. Unable to frown or express any emotion by a face frozen from Botox, the loser simply waved her jeweled hand at Julie in disgust.

“Sit here Danny,” she said lifting her oversized white sunshades to rest on the top of her blond hair. She looked at her watch to check the time. It was just before six. There was barely enough time for a quick bite before they would have to get a move on, she reasoned. She began cutting the slice of pizza into smaller pieces with the flimsy plastic utensils. Smaller pieces would be easier for Danny, meaning a speedier exit. When they finished, she’d get her new, freshly washed and waxed Range Rover from valet and make the short drive to the salon in Chelsea for her appointment.

Fanatical when it came to her appearance, she loathed even the slightest hint of dark roots to show. So it seemed the salon, rather than the gym, had become her second home, and Donna, the salon’s owner, was doing her a big favor by coming in late at the last minute. Thank God she’d good friends that she could depend on.

 “Perfect timing,” she thought confidently.

It had been a wonderful day for Julie and Danny. She relished times just like these, when she could enjoy the benefits of a very fortunate life. She shopped with out a care in the world, spoiling herself and the love of her life, her son.

“Simply marvelous,” she thought, tickled over their station. Frankly, Julie had been overjoyed when they’d chosen Knightsbridge as their home. It suited her. A perfect place to raise a family, and London was an ideal spot for a talented surgeon as her husband. Famous people and those of means, though not so famous, lived in Knightsbridge, home to some of the most expensive real estate in the world. And those who lived there made it a point to ensure its safety and security beyond that of the remainder of London. He hung his shingle. They started a family.

“Dear lord, it’s the rest of the world that’s violent,” she’d say at cocktail parties.

London and suburbs such as Knightsbridge certainly weren’t immune to violence. She knew that all too well; the news kept her informed more than enough. In fact who could forget the London subway and bus bombings; and of course there was the crime associated with any large metropolitan area. Even in Knightsbridge, there were at times some random acts of crime such as a pickpocket here and there or a rare burglary, but generally she felt very safe. Knightsbridge residents were an eclectic mix of the wealthy that could well afford the security necessary for their enclave. The violence of Israel and Iraq was inconceivable in a community such as Knightsbridge. And security was everywhere it seemed, not just in Knightsbridge.

Alert levels and color codes that Americans seemed to live by were meaningless to her, as were the problems of the rest of the world. She didn’t believe that it was a matter of ignorant bliss, she was after all aware of terms such as “sectarian violence,” and “insurgency.” And she truly felt sorry for soldiers that had lost their lives to “IEDs” the acronym that anyone who turned on a television now knew. But that was a world away, and really not very relevant to her life here. It was real but distant reality.

“We’ve the ring of steel,” she concluded.

The “Ring of Steel,” a surveillance belt cinched around London, strategically placed to thwart terrorists or perhaps at the very least discourage them somewhat. Highways and roads providing entrée into the city had been narrowed, chicanes carved into them, forcing traffic to slow to a crawl, each vehicle and driver captured on one of the four million closed circuit television cameras throughout the UK. London had also set up roadblocks of concrete as well as closed off some streets entirely. A true steel curtain designed to protect. Provide security. There was very little to worry about, she thought.

Content in those thoughts she cut another small piece of cheese pizza from the slice on her paper plate and put it on Danny’s napkin. He grabbed the piece with his left hand and stuffed it in his mouth, all the while maneuvering a thirty-second scale model F-16 fighter jet on the tabletop with his right.

 “Oh Danny, behave and please be careful dear. You’ll drop that on your trousers,” Julie said as she reached for the messy hand holding his toy. He raced his jet across the edge of the tray and onto the remnants of pizza. She checked her watch again. It was 6:00 PM on the nose.

“Danny dear, do you think we should give Donna a quick ring an’ let her know that we’re running late?” She asked rhetorically.

“Dunno mummy,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders. 

Julie looked under Danny’s chair for her handbag. The cellular was in there somewhere, she thought. Picking up the designer bag and putting it in her lap, she fumbled blindly with her left hand, careful not to break a nail in the process. She soon felt the thin, now familiar shape of her new phone. Handling the gadget with the dexterity of a card shark, in spite of her long fingernails, she opened the face with her left thumb and punched “contacts” to search for Donna’s number. She looked at her son. “You’re a handsome devil, my dear sweet thing,” she told him.

“Huh?” Danny answered without really hearing her. He’d been transfixed by a young man in Hip-Hop clothing, passing by their table. The man was holding his head down, hiding under his ball cap.

“Danny, hurry now an’ finish. We shouldn’t keep Donna waiting love,” Julie cajoled her son, while she punched in the letter “D,” jumping to Donna’s number. It seemed she was finally getting the hang of her new phone but her nails still caused a bit of a problem now and then. “It’s the keypad – it’s so bloody tiny,” She thought. She pushed the center button to start the call.

“Bloody hell, did it again,” Julie said to herself, realizing after several seconds, the call had failed. She had a good signal though, so she tried once again.

Still holding the phone near her face, she noticed the tall young man directly in her line of sight. She peered at him over the top of her phone. She considered the man. “Something unusual about him,” she thought.

Standing just a few feet in back of Danny’s chair, he was wearing a large coat that draped to his knees. She reasoned the young man’s clothes as nothing out of the ordinary; she was savvy to fashion statements and Hip-Hop was a trend that seemed to live on. Kids loved the oversized, layered look.  A walking advertisement, he had “the look from head to toe; ball-cap, and “high water” pant legs hemmed at the calves,” she thought.

But what really got her attention were his gestures. His hands moving inside the coat, he was violently pulling or perhaps tugging on something. Another thing struck her as being odd about the man; Julie thought she could hear him saying something, repeating some phrase. She strained her ears to isolate his words over the loud racket of the Food Hall.

“What’s he bloody saying?” She wondered. “That can’t be right,” she thought. “Something like ‘Allah - something or other.’”

His eyes suddenly caught hers and for a split second the two were locked in each other’s gaze. Despair and contentment met and were linked for but a brief moment in time. She freed her stare from the young man’s to mind Danny. He was pulling cheese and pizza sauce off the wheels of the toy jet, stuffing the tasty mess in his mouth with small fingers. The sight made her laugh. And then she smiled one last loving time at her son. Without warning, a blinding flash instantly propelled them into eternity.

 

 

                                                                        *  *  *  *  *

 

 

The bomb was actually two bombs in one. The first part being the “Shaheed Belt,” or Martyr Belt, which looked more like a small flak jacket and was filled with acetone peroxide, a favorite of Hamas and Hezbollah suicide bombers. The ingredients could easily be purchased from drug stores without raising the slightest suspicion.

The concoction consisted of hydrogen peroxide, a common ingredient used for bleaching hair, plus acetone as the necessary electrolyte, found in most nail polish. Once cooked and cooled, the result was a volatile gel-like explosive. Unlike C4 and other plastic explosives, acetone peroxide couldn’t be detected by bomb sniffing dogs. Making the explosive was an extremely dangerous process, one that had resulted in the accidental death of many inexperienced bomb makers.

The expert bomb maker in this case though, had not stopped at the belt. The second part to the lethal device was the “Shaheed Coat.” The bomber’s overcoat was literally plated with fifteen pounds of much more powerful ammonal, or common ammonia nitrate mixed with coal and aluminum powder, which could easily be detonated by the acetone peroxide in the belt.

With at least twenty pounds of highly explosive material surrounding the body of the suicide bomber, maximum lethal damage was guaranteed up to twenty-five feet from detonation. Yet most of the carnage would result from the shrapnel that sprayed throughout the fragmentation zone, impacting shoppers two hundred feet away.

Inside the oversized coat, the bomb maker had placed an additional ten pounds of ball bearings, screws, nuts, washers, and small pieces of wire that would be fired throughout the entire Food Hall in all directions. Literally hundreds and hundreds of deadly projectiles, as if blasted from a dozen shotguns, at unsuspecting, innocent women and children. He’d completed his guise by dressing in Hip-Hop attire. He applied makeup to cover a severe rash that’d spread across his face, pulling a ball cap to further hide the malady. He went to Harrods.

When in place, the bomber reached into the left hand pocket of his coat and depressed the red trigger. The detonator button, powered by a single AA battery, lit a small light bulb hidden in the “fragmentation jacket,” instantly heating a tiny wire coated with the acetone peroxide, detonating the belt. That took hundredths of a second. One hundredth of a second later the coat exploded. The shrapnel, plus the martyr’s flesh and bone hurdled in all directions, his blood a microscopic aerosol mist.

Within fifteen feet of detonation epicenter, the air was immediately heated to three thousand degrees Fahrenheit, obliterating all within that radius. Everything else within fifty feet of the blast that was not nailed or bolted down; tables, chairs, food trays, people, was picked up and either ripped to shreds or sent flying down the main hall, where hundreds of shoppers, mostly mothers and children were dining. The crowd was delivered a thousand pieces of molten shrapnel at better than the speed of sound. What had been a gleeful shopping atmosphere became a fiery hell.

Then, what could only be described as macabre irony, heat from the intensity of the blast set off all sprinkler heads high above in on the ceiling. Even though the after-blast had left little remnants of fire, gallons upon gallons of water now showered down upon the carnage below, where pieces of furniture, body parts, blood, shopping bags, clothing, and personal electronic devices were strewn everywhere. The scene was a grotesque red soup of death and destruction.