His gaze swept the area again as he marvelled at how all his planning had successfully brought this to fruition. Littering the ground in front of him were dozens and dozens of prostrate bodies, some immobile, many struggling to their feet, most bloodied. Voices carried up to him on the breeze as people called out in pain. Just as many were lying silently.

The adrenalin coursing through his body made it an almost impossible feat to simply stand and observe. The mass casualties would require medical attention and there were fatalities, too, requiring a response of a different sort. He mentally checked off the list of things that needed to happen, including the task of overseeing the rollout of all the emergency response teams, a role that would normally be his since his skills in this area were second to none. Today, his expertise was exactly the reason why he wasn’t down there, taking control. He was needed for another task. But that didn’t mean he was finding it easy, sitting here, excluded from the action, prevented from taking control and restoring order, watching someone else do his job.

In the midst of the chaos was a fifty-seater bus, now containing considerably fewer than fifty seats, and this drew his focus. The bus’s left-hand side had been ripped open by the force of the explosion, the metal casing peeled back like a tin can, its interior exposed. Above the back wheels, where there should have been a row of seats, was a gaping hole. Luggage was strewn on the ground around the bus and lying amongst the bags were the injured passengers.

In the time Ned had taken to process the scene a few passengers had gathered their wits and were now moving between the prone figures. It wasn’t clear if they were trying to offer assistance, staggering about in shock or simply searching for people lost in the confusion.

To his right, a second bomb had detonated inside the bus terminal and more people were pouring out of the building, further congesting the space around the damaged bus. Visibility was compromised by smoke, a fact that would create another set of problems for the emergency teams.

The noise was increasing now as people realised what had happened. Voices rang out, yelling over the top of one another in an effort to be heard, growing louder and more desperate as the seconds ticked on.

Ned took a deep breath, anticipation of the imminent arrival of the emergency service vehicles sending more adrenalin through his system. He rubbed his hands over his head, leaving his short hair sticking up at all angles, as he cast his gaze across the scene once more.

And then he heard sirens. The bomb victims heard them too and ceased their yelling momentarily as they listened to confirm the sound.

The emergency personnel were on their way.

The first crews to arrive would be from the fire department. He glanced at the stopwatch in his hand, timing the response. Getting here quickly was the easy part—the real tests were all in front of the men and women hurtling towards the racecourse, with scant knowledge as to what they’d be facing on arrival.

But from where he was standing, having to watch was a hundred times harder than dealing with disaster hands on.

Sarah stood a couple of rows behind the others. She needed the extra height and it was the only way to get it since stiletto heels weren’t an option in her line of work. If ever she was keen for a view, it was today, to watch the planned event unfold. With her clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other, she stood rocking on her heels on the top step, clicking the pen on and off as she watched the scene below. Most of the bomb victims were milling around in a dazed manner. It wasn’t easy for her as a trained emergency doctor to sit back and observe but today that’s what her job was. As part of the team who’d put this training exercise together, it was her role to instruct the medical members of the first responder unit, those men and women who were the first emergency personnel on the scene at any disasters classed as CBR—chemical, biological or radiological—incidents.

And there was no use pretending she wasn’t just as aware of Ned Kellaway. It didn’t escape her notice that he, like her, had tilted his head a touch to the side as the sirens became audible. It didn’t escape her notice that he was as focused, professional and in control as she’d have expected from the man she’d come to know a little over these last weeks as they’d worked together to bring today to fruition. And it didn’t escape her notice that, despite all this, he was as breathtakingly charismatic as ever. If anything, these surroundings only added to his many attractions. It must be the whole men-in-uniform thing, she told herself, so as not to be too badly distracted from the training simulation.

It was what they were here for, after all. The moment of truth. After weeks of planning, they were about to see how the teams performed. The sense of excitement was mixed with tense anxiety in case any of them fell below standard, a guaranteed result of the day. Which team would prove to be the weakest link? Glancing along the rows below her at the people she’d worked with intensively she saw Lucas, from the police force, and Neill, from the State Emergency Services, were deep in discussion. Angie, the liaison officer for the ambulance service, was standing slightly apart, seemingly focused on scanning the arena below. They all had to be taut with expectation but she could see no outward signs. Hopefully her own tumult of feelings was similarly veiled.

A few policemen were already on site but larger numbers of police and paramedics would follow the fire department. If the disaster was on a large enough scale doctors would be called to the scene from the city hospitals’ emergency departments. That would happen here. Soon.

Today’s disaster was large-scale. It had been planned that way.

The fire department would be responsible for controlling the situation and her team would be under their command.

Thinking of the fire department inevitably bought her attention back to the man who, in a real-life situation, would most likely be the incident controller.