Free Gray Vengeance by Alan McDermott

four accidents before the overhead signs ordered all traffic in the opposite lanes to a halt.
    He wouldn’t be causing any more crashes on the motorway that day, but every now and then he hit the trigger in three-second bursts, immobilising the already-stationary cars and adding to the nightmare. It would take days to clear that stretch of the motorway, and he knew Houtman and Conran would be doing the same thing on the northern sections of the London Orbital.
    He arrived at the turnoff for Heathrow and pulled onto the hard shoulder, turning his hazard lights on. The exact spot had been chosen weeks earlier, and he climbed into the back to look through the letterbox-sized glass panel built into the side of the van. It gave him a view to the west, where the aircraft heading for the airport would make their final approach. Just over a kilometre away, parked in a street next to a couple of bungalows, another van waited for his command.
    Roberts picked up a remote control device and turned it on. The built-in screen showed darkness, but when he pressed the first button, a panel on the van’s roof opened to give him a view of the clouds. He hit another button, arming the heat-seeking surface-to-air missile that was pointing to the sky, and waited until the fish-ey e lens first indicated the presence of the latest arrival.
    A two-tone siren filled the small space as the indicator showed the missile had a lock on the plane, and Roberts let it loose. Through his van’s glass panel, he could make out the oncoming aircraft, and a streak of smoke rising from the ground quickly converged on the right wing. As soon as the hit was confirmed, Roberts climbed back into the driver’s seat and gunned the engine.
    From the side window of his van, he saw the British Airways Boeing 747 yaw to the right as flames danced from the damaged engines, and he wondered whether the pilot could keep it together long enough to make the runway; the purpose of the exercise wasn’t to claim lives, but to reduce the airport’s capabilities.
    He lost sight of the plane through the side window, but his side mirrors showed the aircraft limping over the motorway, the belly beginning to show as the plane rolled to the left, and he knew he’d achieved his aim, or as close to it as he could have hoped for.
    Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that hundreds of people were currently screaming as the ground rushed towards them, but he didn’t have time to reflect on the damage he’d done. There was still a lot to do before he could afford himself tha t luxury.
    He continued along the M25, and at the next exit he followed the M4 towards the centre of London. Once he hit the capital, he pulled into a side street and removed the plastic licence plates that covered the real ones. He would need the van over the coming days, and no doubt the security services would use CCTV cover age t o determine what had happened. Once the vehicle was pictured at the scenes of the crashes, the security services would put two and two together. Somewhere in Middlesex, an unwitting Transit van owner was in for a big shock when they ran the fake plates.
    With the vehicle’s identity changed, he drove to a café and ordered a couple of bacon sandwiches to go, before parking up in a nearby supermarket car park. To the passersby, he was just another workman taking a late breakfast while surfing the internet, but Roberts wasn’t interested in anything other than the GPS signal he was getting, and the list of phone numbers in his contacts log. The dot on the screen told him that the toilet and sink were already aboard the Eurostar train, and would reach the Channel Tunnel within ten minutes.
    That left time to make a few important phone calls.
    One by one, he selected each number, waiting for the response to go to voicemail before ending the call and deleting the entry.
    Each time he hit the Connect button, another device took out a significant piece of infrastructure: a giant metal