Dr Victor Ashrafian pressed his ample frame against the helicopter’s window and stared straight down at the ruins of Parliament thirty feet below. The bomb had ripped the heart from the building, weakening the ancient structure and sending the roof crashing into the chambers below. Fifty-two learned men had died instantly; Prime Minister Ashrafian, bedridden with flu at the time of the attack, would have been amongst them – it was a small mercy.
    When did it begin?
    Was it really thirty years since the World Trade Center attack? Thirty years since the American President, hell bent on a vengeful war against an innocent country, had brushed aside calls for restraint and ignored the real reason his people had come under attack? Revenge! Revenge for generations of encroachment upon the lives of ordinary people whose weapons and soldiers could never be powerful enough to withstand such a giant. Revenge that set in motion a war that lasted thirty years - thirty years of madness?
    Ashrafian closed his eyes and the pilot said, ‘Sir, if you look to your left you can see the damage to the bridge and the shattered pods on the Eye.’
    Ashrafian nodded but kept his eyes closed, it was easier that way.
    The pilot droned on describing the devastation like a coach driver on a pleasure trip, pointing out Westminster Bridge (closed due to severe damage) and Big Ben (shattered and frozen at 9:44am). On and on he went, throwing in the odd comment and observation until the Prime Minister stopped him.
    ‘What was that?’ he asked.
    ‘Sir?’
    ‘You said something about common sense.’
    ‘Sorry sir,’ the pilot said. ‘I was generalising.’
    Generalising? ‘What did you say?’
    The pilot cleared his throat. It sounded like crumpled paper through the headset. ‘With respect, sir,’ he began tentatively, ‘I was just making a comment about the lack of common sense in government.’
    Ashrafian turned the phrase over in his mind. ‘Common sense,’ he said. He wanted to laugh but the scene below the helicopter prevented the humour from surfacing.
    ‘It’s just something that seems to be missing from a lot of decisions made down there, sir,’ the pilot continued, tilting his head towards the smouldering ruins.     
    ‘Nobody ever seemed to stop and think long enough to look at the bigger picture.’
    ‘Afghanistan,’ Ashrafian murmured, his mind turning back the pages of history to the moment it all went wrong. What if they’d waited? What if they’d negotiated? What if they’d asked why and reacted correctly instead of dropping bombs on a country with no proven connection to the hijackers? Would it have changed anything?
    ‘It’s like the laws, sir,’ the pilot went on, his confidence growing. ‘It’s getting so people don’t want to go out anymore in case they get arrested by the ATU or caught on camera and mistaken for someone else. Everybody’s spooked.’
    ‘Are you saying we should abolish the Anti Terrorist Unit?’
    ‘No sir. It’s just a shame we have to have them at all.’
    ‘A shame?’  Ashrafian snapped. ‘You’d sooner have terrorists running wild on the streets commissioning more attacks like this one?’ He stabbed a finger at the Plexiglas window for emphasis.
    The pilot decided to hold his tongue and let the PM brood on the mess spread out thirty feet below.
    Ashrafian sighed. He was angry with himself, angry at the attackers, angry at the world and its self-destructive path to nowhere.
    When did it begin?
    The Twin Towers? No, no it was before that. Flight 655? The Gulf of Sidra? Liberia? Rwanda? Bosnia? Mogadishu? Or was it Desert Storm, ten years before 9/11. American boots on Islamic soil; bin Laden spurned by his own people; Muslim brothers killed by Coke swilling GI’s; tanks, bombs, depleted uranium, permanent American bases. Saudi Arabia? Why didn’t they talk? Why didn’t they negotiate, exchange trade, help them instead of killing them?
    Who gave the orders and what did those orders lead too?
    ‘Yesterday,’ Ashrafian said, answering his own thoughts with a word. ‘The orders lead to yesterday and to all of the other attacks on this city, countless attacks, each more sophisticated than the last. That’s where the orders lead.’
    ‘Sir?’ the pilot asked. ‘I didn’t quite catch that.’
    ‘The explosives… Damn it, what’s your name?’
    ‘Captain Hicks…’
    ‘Your first name, Captain.’
    ‘James, sir.’
    ‘A strong name.’ Ashrafian leaned forward, brushing his thoughts aside and adjusting the chin-mike attached to his flight helmet as if that small move gave him some purpose. ‘The MIR, James,’ he asked, laying a hand on the pilots shoulder. ‘What did it say about the explosives?’
    ‘There hasn’t been a Major Incident Report issued yet, sir, but initial forensics have identified most of the ingredients but not their quantities. Something new again, sir, probably mixed in the House somewhere by insurgents.’
    ‘No doubt the ingredients will be all over the tabloids tomorrow for every home-grown terrorist to copy down.’
    ‘Press injunction’s already been issued.’
    ‘It’ll leak. It always does.’
    Everything leaks eventually, he thought; the affair, the drinking, the drugs, the NHS closures, the lack of action on the environment and the poor education standards. And then, as sure as night follows day, the patches would go on and the carefully, artistically spun success stories would obliterate the sleaze like a governmental mantra broadcasting to a nation of helpless idiots. The bigger the sleaze the bigger the disguise, and it didn’t get much bigger than the Factory of Life. 
   Ah the Factory of Life, everyone thought that was a good idea; after all, if you wanted to get the gangs off the streets but didn’t want to commit yourself to the vote-losing resurrection of National Service, the FOL was a true stroke of PR genius. It was so simple. Take the kids straight from school and draft them into specially constructed munitions factories where they could be taught tolerance, manners, attitude control, interaction and how to become a robot on an assembly line. Keep them there for five years, mark them, grade them, stamp their cards and call it a term. And then, at the end of the term have them graduate into the civilian sector (the useful clever ones) and give them well-paid jobs in privately owned factories (where the rules are a lot easier to live with) or let them study to join one of the police forces. The unlucky ones on the other hand, the non-conformists and the incurable psychotics - could be drafted straight into the military where they would meet the illiterates and dyslexics who never made the FOL in the first place. The press, always eager to find a euphemism for those less fortunate than themselves, dubbed the ones who failed the system the Downers.
    For the Downers the military training program ran for six months (shorter if the need arose) during which time the new recruits were taught the art of legalised murder and the finer points of staying alive under hostile conditions. At the end of the training period each new recruit signed a will and pledged allegiance to the King before accepting his or her posting to the war zone. They were now soldiers in the fight against the radical extremist freedom fighters whose armies fought under so many different banners that no one had been able to find a suitable noun to describe them. The failed apprentices were food for what the soldiers euphemistically called The Grinder and The Grinder was the domain of the Arab.
    ‘Are you a career man, James?’ Ashrafian asked suddenly.
    ‘No sir,’ the pilot said.
    ‘Surely not FOL.’
    ‘Yes sir, Factory of Life graduate.’
    ‘Army flight school?’
    ‘Yes sir.’ The pilot chuckled.
    ‘Did I say something funny, James?’ Ashrafian asked.
    ‘No sir, not at all, but whenever I think of myself as a pilot it makes me laugh. I’m afraid of heights, sir.’
    Ashrafian laughed.
    ‘I know what you’re thinking, sir,’ the pilot went on, ‘but it’s true, I don’t like heights.’
    ‘So why on earth did you volunteer for pilot training?’
     ‘It seemed like a safer option, sir. When I came out of the FOL as a Downer I knew I was headed for the infantry and I’d already lost a sister and a lot of friends out in the desert. Flying above the action looked like better odds for survival.’
    ‘And were they better odds?’
    ‘Not really sir. I got shot down twice.’
    ‘But you survived.’
    ‘Yes sir, I did.’
    ‘I’m sorry about your sister,’ Ashrafian said quietly.
    ‘So am I sir.’
    Victor Ashrafian looked again at the chaos and destruction beneath the helicopter. Something in the river caught his attention and it took him a few seconds to realize he was looking at a bench from the House of Commons balancing on the bow of a partially sunken barge. He stared but his eyes lost their focus as the rotors formed graceful circles in the black waters of the Thames below.
    It should never have been necessary to invent a system that was inevitably conscription, he thought, drifting again, but the education system and the human-rights-for-kids-brigade had unleashed a tidal wave of youthful resentment onto the streets that no police force could ever hope to cope with. Granted the resentment came about because of the lack of employment, the massed immigration and the continuous war on terror; but as the politician in him always said: Forget the flak, take the money. The votes will come later. Had the government used their common sense thirty years earlier, had they listened to the experts, had they opened their eyes to the domestic problems instead of concentrating every last effort in combating self-inflicted terrorism… Who knows?
    In the beginning, with its initial teething troubles and an “escalating blip” of street arrests, it was generally observed by politicians and the all-important media - who were unaware at this time of their own culpability - that government’s policy and the FOL worked. Attitudes were not changed overnight - as the PM had warned - and resistance to the strategy was high to begin with, but eventually the middle classes of the United Kingdom saw the benefits of safe streets and safer homes and embraced the new policy with alarming enthusiasm. Despite growing unease within the media, the FOL would not be recognized as a "backdoor draft" for many years to come, and by then it would be too late.
    ‘We should return to Downing Street, sir,’ the pilot said, interrupting Ahrafian’s thoughts. ‘There’s a press conference in half an hour.’
    ‘James. What was the name of the activist who campaigned for new apprenticeships? He had something to do with the anti-FOL demonstrations a few years back.’
    ‘Meron, sir.’
    ‘Charles Meron, that’s him.’
    ‘I believe he’s doing fifteen years for terrorist offences.’
    Ashrafian wasn’t listening; he’d slipped back into his memories.
Meron had campaigned for the re-introduction of apprenticeships. He’d written a paper entitled Britain’s Failing Society in which he’d argued that the lack of discipline in British schools combined with 24 hour TV, junk food, easily obtainable drugs, anti-terrorism oppression, the failing environment and the glamorization of capitalism would inevitably lead to a totally lawless society in which respect for your fellow citizen would disappear from the English lexicon. A particularly scathing attack on the Factory of Life had formed the centerpiece of the paper earning him a sizeable company of enemies within government. People read it and some agreed with it, but it was already too late to act upon its findings.
    ‘Too many rules written by too many advocates of nonsensical human rights regulations.’ Ashrafian said. ‘Why on earth did nobody think to take a tip from the animal kingdom, a kingdom where the lioness gives the orders and the cubs obey.’
    ‘You lost me again, sir. Must be the headset.’
    ‘We’re all blind, James.’
    ‘We are?’
    ‘Or perhaps we’re just blinkered. My God, we need to talk to these people; find out what they want, offer to help them under their terms.  We have to initiate a global peace process. We have to withdraw every single soldier from every foreign country on the planet – unless they want us to stay, wouldn’t want to go upsetting them all over again.’
    ‘Are you alright, sir?’
    ‘I don’t know, James,’ Ashrafian said leaning back into the seat. ‘I was thirty years old in 2001. I had my own practice in Sheffield, I was making a very good living and I was already planning for an early retirement; and then 9/11 happened, don’t you just hate that expression? I didn’t understand why those men killed themselves to attack America so I began to read up on US foreign policy and do you know what I found?’
    ‘Interventionalism,’ the pilot said.
    ‘Exactly. They stuck their noses into the politics of any country they didn’t see eye to eye with and if they didn’t like what they found they tried to change them by using illegal and underhanded methods, and if those didn’t work, they resorted to the military. And did we, the British Government do anything to stop them or question their motives? Of course we didn’t, and neither did the UN.
    I could hardly believe what I was reading, James, but it compelled me, lit a fire within me. That’s why I turned my back on medicine, that’s why I ran for office, and like all of my predecessors I lost my way. The lobbyists and the special relationships and the religious idiots whispering Armageddon in my ear blinded me. Damn it, I lied to myself and I lied to my country.’ Ashrafian drew breath and closed his eyes again.
    The pilot repeated his question. ‘Are you alright, sir?’
    ‘I’m not sure,’ Ashrafian replied. ‘I’ve either gone mad or become the sanest Prime Minister in history.’
    The pilots face broke into a spontaneous smile. Here he was, thirty feet above the ground, listening to words of wisdom from a man he greatly admired. ‘The press conference, sir?’ he asked brightly.
    Ashrafian grinned and clapped his hands together. ‘Take the scenic route, James,’ he said. ‘I have a speech to write. It’s time to make a few changes.’

END