LONDON—An action-packed chase through the subway tunnels beneath London’s famed Victoria Station, culminating in a climactic, pulse-pounding fight sequence atop a speeding double-decker bus, did not occur Monday, when a terrorist bomb exploded on a crowded downtown bus after not being defused at the very last moment.
The bombing, which killed 22 and seriously injured at least 30 more, ranks among the worst incidents of terrorism to hit London in years and was not presented in THX digital Surroundsound.
“That’s it, scum—now it’s time to take out the trash,” a grim-faced CIA agent, who had been working closely with a team of Britain’s top anti-terrorism experts, did not say moments before defeating the leader of a mysterious terrorist organization in a deadly, desperate encounter atop the speeding bus.
“It was horrible, just horrible,” said a visibly shaken Edith Nesbitt, 38, a London homemaker whose 12-year-old daughter Annalee was badly injured in the explosion. “Everywhere you turned, there was smoke and death. So much senseless pain and suffering. How could anybody do something like this?”
Annalee is currently listed in critical condition at a local hospital after not being pulled out of harm’s way by a man who lost his own family to a terrorist attack years before and swore never to let another child suffer again, no matter what the cost.
London police officials do not yet know whether the deadly attack—which was not accompanied by selections from today’s hottest acts, including hits by The Chemical Brothers, Foo Fighters and Method Man—was the work of a militant faction of the IRA, Palestinian extremists, or an individual not affiliated with a terrorist organization. However, evil criminal masterminds bent on destroying the world from their top-secret, high-tech undersea headquarters have been “definitely ruled out” as suspects.
In addition, no psychopathic former FBI demolitions experts who went insane after the deaths of their wives, which to this day they blame on the government agents who originally trained them to be killers, have stepped forward to claim responsibility for the tragedy. And no streamlined black helicopters, dangling rope ladders from which trained SWAT teams dropped onto the bus at high speeds, arrived on the scene just in time to freeze the bomb’s homemade timer casing with liquid nitrogen, saving the lives of the dozens of innocent people on board.
“Out of nowhere, nobody suddenly leapt onto the bus from the roof of a nearby building, tackling the foul villain behind this unthinkable act,” said shopkeeper Thomas Kent, who lost most of his right arm in the blast. “Then, after stopping the mad bomber’s plan, nobody got the girl, grabbing her roughly about the waist and kissing her slightly smudged face as the credits rolled.”
Added Kent: “The doctors say my wife may not survive the night.”
Though top Scotland Yard officials have assigned a special team to investigate the crime, they currently have no leads regarding the identity of the culprits or a possible motive. The officials also have not surprised any onlookers by swimming alive to the surface of the Thames River after driving any speeding sportscars into the river in slow motion, momentarily causing people to think they’d been killed before emerging unharmed.
“We are slowly sifting through the forensic evidence, but it is still far too early to draw any definitive conclusions about this bombing,” Scotland Yard spokesman Winston Crawford told reporters at a Monday press conference, not held in a room in which any special supercomputer swivels out from behind a giant antique bookcase. “At this point, all we really know is that none of us have recently slept with any stunning, exotic-looking foreign women who may or may not be working for the Russians, and that there may be as many as a dozen more bodies still underneath the rubble that rescue workers have yet to locate and identify.”
When asked if police have come across any secret satellite photos, coded messages, or double-dealing informants who have revealed a way to track the deadly bombers to their lair, surround them with an elite assault team, and somehow, against all odds, stop them before they kill again, Crawford replied, “No.”
