Into the unlikely evac vehicle goes the matron, hooting with laughter now at this scandalous chivalry, and a brief glimpse of the interior tells me that the car has an independent air supply. Once the hermetic door shuts, the passengers are safe and sound, and the vizier, who apparently doubles as driver, bundles himself aboard. With one last look to be sure the evacuation is complete, the bearded geezer glances at us and raises his hand to sign okay and possibly thank you, and dives into his car, which waits a heartbeat for the juiced-up Saab in front to make some space and then there’s a noise like the old bull shaking his head at the young one (“No, son, we’re not gonna run down and fuck one of those cows, we’re gonna walk and fuck ’em all”) and the Roller disappears from view in a cloud of its own dust. The convoy is moving like a gazelle herd, each individual weaving around the others, evasive, chaotic, purposive. Those immensely well-dressed personages have done Ronnie Cheung’s tactical automotive course, or rather they have done one very like it. An advanced one for people who are intending to spend serious time in cars getting into trouble.
Gonzo stares after the Rolls-Royce. He has heroismus interruptus. He was ready, right then, to coordinate four or five hundred terrified civvies, lay down his life, kill for them, make a legend of disinterested soldiering. It’s not that he resents what has happened, but he’s having trouble changing gear. He was expecting to take charge. Instead he is struggling to keep up with a sexagenarian Mystery Man with an Errol Flynn grin who commands a legion of pirate-monk rally drivers and sweeps formidable older women from their feet in a cloud of cologne and Asian-Monarchic style. Deep in Gonzo’s medula oblongata, the lizardy brainstem which manages the most basic functions of living, part of him knows that this technique would work with equal facility on younger and more charming women, and knows this because Eagle Sally Culpepper has caught her breath and even Annie the Ox, utterly uninterested in men per se, has not stopped looking after the departing machines. Leah, forever blessed, is grinning, but her hand has not slackened in my grip and her delight is for the impish theatre of it all. Gonzo’s inner reptile recognises a competitor. But, more important, he is now playing an unfamiliar game—follow-the-leader.
We rush headlong after the pirate convoy, and then—no doubt in obedience to some order from the enormous Rolls-Royce—the driver ahead of us makes a dogleg right across an area marked on our map as non-traversable. The whole cavalcade is streaming out into a snarl of underbrush and rubble and impassable ravines, the brightly coloured cars vanishing rapidly amid the crags. Their dust cloud whips away in the wind, the last Civic ducks down into a dip and they have disappeared entirely. I glance at the map. In that direction a few months ago lay a muddle of buildings, stony outcroppings and forest, a region part sparse conurbation and part mountain (“conruration?”), now riven through with burned, bombed-flat land and dried-out stream beds and air-dropped anti-personnel mines. If the road still exists, or the riverbed is solid, they might reach the mountains, or loop around to Lake Addeh and its islands. But whether that is what they will do, and whether we would be welcome if we tried to follow, we do not find out. Gonzo growls to Jim Hepsobah, and we let them go, following the road we know towards the uncertain safety of Command HQ.
PLASTIC HANDCUFF STRIPS and “Fall in two men, left right left right!” It is not quite the hero’s welcome, but nor is it an actual firing squad, and since I arrived in the Elective Theatre I have learned that very few people share our perceptions of when they should be grateful to us. Gonzo’s guys do not officially exist at all and therefore cannot be tried in a court martial without compromising national security. Leah is a civilian nurse, leaving only me for Carsville’s wrath, which is fine by him anyway because I’m the one who messed up his arm. The fact that I was right to do so, that a lethal gas attack was in fact taking place, probably makes it worse. And thus my tickertape parade takes the form of two large military policemen with sidearms and blank faces. But Carsville too must be feeling the bite of disappointment, because there’s a lack of enthusiasm about the MPs and they don’t mock me or rough me up; they just clap me in irons in a mildly apologetic way, and manage not to pat me on the back or give me a hug.
Ben Carsville is not well liked, and his attempt to force his unit to commit gas seppuku has not improved his position with the men. Also, while I was out of line, my rank status is blurry and Carsville was wrong. Thus, Copsen’s office not the stockade. General Copsen looks tense and distracted. There is a red phone on his desk and he has moved it to a convenient position, and this I take to mean that our considered response is right now being reconsidered. George Copsen is a man with a lot of other things to do, and this whole subplot involving one of his picked guys and some Ride of the Valkyries wannabe is ticking him off. There’s serious things happening. For any number of years, the doctrine has been the same: we answer weapons of mass destruction with payment in kind, and ours are bigger than yours, so watch it. To do this now could change the face of the world, because General George didn’t bother to bring any of the staples of unconventional war to this front. He left the deniable biologicals and the mislabelled chemicals and the acknowledged-but-downplayed nuclear deterrents at home, and brought his newest and his best: Professor Derek’s baby. But when he uses it, people are definitely going to go apeshit and get nervous, and activate missile defences all around the world, because making the bad guys vanish entirely is going to put the wind up our friends and enemies alike. The world will change, just as it did on 6th August 1945. It’s good to know he and his bosses are taking a couple of hours to chew it over, maybe even wondering whether it’s a good idea.
Copsen waves at me to sit. He waves at Carsville to sit. He does not need this right now. He does not want us here. He has nothing to do until the phone rings, but by the same token he needs to be composed. He is in a very big, very lofty, very cold chair.
“Tell me,” George Copsen says tiredly, “what you thought you were doing?”
I have no idea. I do not say anything. I stare back at him, voiceless. Gonzo would know what to say. Gonzo would be forthright. Gonzo would explain in manly tones and make it all okay with General George.
“I exercised my discretion as area commander,” says Ben Carsville in manly tones. George Copsen’s face goes quite opaque. He was not talking to Carsville. His anger was directed at me—at least for the moment. I have been irresponsible, and having shanghaied me and trained me and godfathered my admittance to the general staff, he is feeling betrayed and let down. He had it in mind to give me a paternal chewing-out before letting me go back to my tent to consider my faults. His game plan for this meeting was to let off some steam dressing me down and then accept Carsville’s apology for bad judgement and parlay that into a let-off for me. Carsville would have done better to stay shut up. The notion that he might actually be unrepentant had clearly not occurred to General George, and it does not sit well with him.
“I understand that you . . . elected to disregard a gas alert?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That seems like a curious decision, Captain Carsville.”
“I considered it probably a ruse, sir.”
George Copsen clambers to his feet and walks around his desk to get a clear view.
“A ruse.”
“Yes, sir.”
George Copsen has a certain look about him. It starts at his epicanthic folds and whispers down around his mouth. It invites clarification. It is familiar to me from a certain room with a particular piece of furniture. It is not a look you want to ignore or trifle with. But Ben Carsville, even now, does not explain. He lets his honesty shine through, and his earnestness and his loyalty. He has taken a decision as the man on the ground. His decision—and his reasoning—need no explanation. He is Ben Carsville. He is still wearing a silk dressing gown.
“You,” says George Copsen, with some emphasis, “are a fucking liability. Lieutenant.” And as Carsville boggles at him, General George makes a little flicking gesture, so to say “I
’m done with you.”
Lieutenant Carsville departs, pursued by bears.
George Copsen collapses into his chair and broods, and ignores me. He is staring at the red phone, daring it to ring. Finally he looks over at me and sighs.
“Screw-up,” says George Copsen. I am uncertain whether he means the situation or me personally. It had not crossed my mind until this moment that I gave a damn for his opinion. It appears that I do. I feel wretched for ten seconds, which is how long it takes me to stand, shakily, and make my best salute. I stand there, offering my apology in the only way which is permitted. My arm aches, and while I am apologising to the man, I cannot actually think of anything I am sorry for. George Copsen looks into my eyes, measuring, and unlike Master Wu, unlike the Evangelist, he does not seem convinced by what he sees there. On the other hand, what he is looking for may not be a thing I wish him to find. We are standing like this, assessing one another and trying to figure out what we want from one another, when a shrill, old-fashioned bleating fills the room. George Copsen beckons me sharply, because being pissed off with me is a thing which belongs in the time before the phone rang, before the crisis went live again. He lifts the red telephone and says:
“Copsen.”
Someone on the other end speaks, firmly and simply. General George either grows older or grows colder; it happens to him from within like a tall building being demolished or flowers growing in fast motion, and I realise that he is making himself into the cog, rather than the man. The saving grace of hierarchy—of the Government Machine—is this: George Copsen will execute the orders of his country, and in doing so he will kill thousands, maybe more. But it will not be his choice. It will be the action of a nation, a huge complex animal of which he is the tiniest part, albeit at this moment a significant part. George Copsen retreats and General Copsen emerges to take his place and keep him from going mad given what he will now do. This is a good thing for George. It may also be a good thing for the general, to be unhampered by his civilian self. Whether it is a good thing for anyone else is less clear.
The general squares his shoulders and begins running through his checklist. He activates my commission. I am now an officer in this war—and, as of a few moments ago, it is incontestably a war—with all the duties, rights and privileges pertaining thereunto. I will do what I have been trained to do. That is a little bit scary. I am assigned to Operations, which means that right now I am to go to the bank of screens on the far wall, and observe, and target, and relay my information to General Copsen (who moves from his desk to a command chair in the middle of the room) and to Colonel Tench and Brevet-Major Purvis, thus improving and refining our firing solutions, so that our use of weapons of mass destruction is accurate and irreproachable.
Together, we will make the enemy Go Away.
Chapter Six
Wheels, horror and flapjacks;
the End of the World;
Zaher Bey, at last.
THE ONLY PROBLEM concerns wheels. I was barely even aware of it, but Go Away Bombs have wheels on them. This is because each one is the size of a smallish car. We don’t fire them as much as drop them, out of cargo planes. The wheels have been sitting in a crate in an airfield somewhere west of here for two months. They have gotten hot, and cold, and sandy, and dry, and then hot again. They are no longer the proud wheels we once knew. They are wonky. The technicians fit them to the bombs, and the bombs sit askew on them and don’t roll in the smooth, oiled fashion the deployment crews were led to expect. They have to winch the bombs up into position. Fortunately, when the time comes to drop them, gravity will be to our advantage. The most advanced weapons in the history of warfare will be bobbled into the sky over the target like a bunch of elderly shopping trolleys being tossed into a river.
That’s the one thing which slows down the attack. It slows it down by about a half hour. A little while later the first plane signals “Payload delivered” and our forward spotters relay the hit back to us via a digital feed. It is rather dull. The enemy outpost is situated in a shattered township. The bomb drops out of the sky and activates. There is no explosion, no ripple of pressure through the earth. A sort of viscous absence blooms. The enemy emplacements are erased, and air flows into the space, bringing dust. A perfect, smooth crater replaces the main square and the south-western quarter of the town, and two or three hourglass buildings which were leaning on each other are suddenly deprived of support and fall over. They do this slowly and without fuss. And that’s it. It’s a bit unsatisfying. In Blue Sector there’s a mild tremor because the excision there runs deep and releases a little tectonic pressure. Five hundred kilometres away we create a waterfall and a lake where a bubble of Professor Derek’s genius transects a river, taking out at the same time a bridge and two enemy special operations units proficient in torture (just like ours).
We sit back and wait for the next round of orders and the proud consequences of our strength. We have flexed big bold political muscles. We have stripped off on the international beach and showed pumped legs and crushing arms. We are totally the Big Dog. And all around the world, right now, people are saying “What the hell?” Analysts are being asked questions and speculating and talking hogwash. In Jarndice the news will break from the Junior Library outward in a circular wave, and then it will spread through mobile telephones and email and each of these individual missives will produce ripples of its own, so that shortly the courtyards will be filled with bothered, jubilant, appalled students thronging and wondering. Only we know what has happened.
We are still telling ourselves this, feeling a bit superior and waiting for the order to do some more demonstrative world-editing, when our very own Green Sector vanishes from the map. Our men just aren’t there any more. The satellite image shows our emplacements wobbling and vanishing like a sandcastle being washed away by the tide. On channel seven (this is our channel seven, not the news channel) there is a nightmare. The spotter above that doomed little town where Tobemory Trent tourniqueted my arm and stopped me from bleeding out is now half a spotter, or possibly two thirds of one. His face is almost all there, but when he falls forward, you can see that he has been deprived of his left ear and the outermost inch of his head, and also his arm and hip. It’s impossible to tell from looking at the screen whether he is still alive, or whether his body is just juddering by way of spooky reflex. Next to him is his partner, the sniper, who is most definitely alive, although that seems to be a temporary situation. The enemy has vanished the man’s lower limbs but not the rest of him, and he is bleeding out. It does not look painless and humane, which I had somehow assumed it might be. It sounds a lot like every other kind of dying I have observed since coming here. Finally, because no one objects, I switch off the screen. The silence is almost worse than the noise.
George Copsen droops in his chair. When Richard P. Purvis goes to help him, General Copsen shrugs him off, then resumes his hunched position. From behind, I can see his shoulders clench and shudder, as if he has a fever.
A few moments later we learn that the same thing is happening everywhere. Not just in the Elective Theatre: everywhere. In cities. In countries far away and countries just around the corner. Somehow, without warning (although surely quite a lot of people somewhere knew this was possible, they just didn’t see fit to share or were too proud to credit it) this nice little bush war has gone global. People are deploying weapons (weapons like ours) at the strategic level, which means missiles with intercontinental reach. The upside is that no one is using nukes or germs. The downside is that our supersecret weapon turns out to be absolutely the best beloved new toy of just about every advanced nation on Earth. Major cities are getting to look like Swiss cheeses, and the Swiss have developed a sort of ray gun based on the same principle and zapped everything they can reach to the east so the Russians know not to come at them. For reasons I have never understood, the Swiss still think the Russians are going to sweep down on the European fold and devour their babies. On this basis they have erased a co
rridor of populous farmland and a few lakes, just to show they really mean it. The Russians have responded by removing a piece of China they never much cared for, and everyone is now perforating the map so that it is getting to be a bit like a sheet of stamps. Serious commentators (people with no vested interest in war) are going on air live asking that this stop, right now, because there seems to be some danger of the world flying apart or falling in, so much of it has been vanished in the rush to show that everyone is the Big Dog.
George Copsen’s command chair is dark grey, and it rests on a little raised platform. It has a remote control for all the TV screens built into the arm. It is the precise focus of every image in the room. The man sitting in it can turn his head, even shake it, and still see what is happening in stereoscopic widescreen. The speakers are set up for him too, so when he shuts his eyes, as he is doing now, it doesn’t make it much better. We watch Trinidad sparkle and fold away into nothing. It is unclear why anyone has a beef with Trinidad, but the beef is well and truly settled. George Copsen murmurs something like “oh” although it might be “no.”
We wait for orders, and it takes us a while to realise that we have been forgotten. The Elective Theatre has been closed down. There’s absolutely no point fighting a proxy war when you’re fighting a real one. This whole area was selected as a battleground because it was absolutely pointless. It just had people in it. The only reasons to fight here were social and political, nebulous things which for the moment do not matter. We are an army in the wrong place. No one cares to talk to us. They are busy fighting a real war with unreal weapons and wiping one another from the face of the Earth. It’s a dream of power. Point, speak, and the thing which vexes you is unmade. It must be intoxicating; certainly, the men and women in houses of government around the world are hooked on it and reeling like drunkards.