With both urgency and renewed vigour, we dragged our battered frames and mottled belongings back over to the coast in record time; only this time aiming for the beaches to the north of the seaside strip, rather than the low cliffs of the south. To travel further north from the point we arrived at would bring us to the pick-up point with the ruined tower (to be met at dawn the next morning). Looking southward, we saw the town. Here was flatter land, no cliffs in which to watch from, and so leaving us more exposed as we walked through green fields and over stiled fences toward the town’s northernmost strip of caravan parks.
There was a road that led below us along this stretch of coast, and running all the way into the north of the town (there was no similar road south of the town, the cliffs forcing anyone travelling in that direction inland along the wooded lane we had been camping near). This was the kind of road that would make a good film location: you might imagine a visitor arriving at daybreak or sunset, the view from the car’s windows of beach and sea and sky on one side and of open flat fields on the other. Here the cinematic visitor would see the sign, ‘Welcome to The Pearl of the East’, as they rode into town, the little bay and curving beach laid out before them… or that would have been the effect in previous times; for what we saw as we arrived was the legend ‘NO FOOD FOR OUTSIDERS STAY AWAY’ smeared over the old sign, the original writing still readable beneath it. That message in itself was rather pathetic, and would not even have been enough to stop us in our tracks, were it not punctuated by the giant exclamation mark of a body strung by the neck and hanging along the sign’s right edge. A corpse crumpled at the opposite foot suggested that this other benighted soul had hung on the opposite side before becoming detached.
No care had attended the fallen body since hitting the ground: arms still bound behind it, legs facing at crazy angles, face an eyeless mask of paper skin and Francis Bacon yowl. Both were male I noticed, one young, one elder. They were dressed not dissimilarly to the gunmen we had seen in the woods. Their clothes were as tattered as their faces though, no clue or sign to be found on either in identification.
From my experience and from the stories I had heard in Army life, I knew that for a soldier or a medic in a warzone bodies can eventually become just that, it hard to imagine a soul inhabiting them, or that they were ever someone’s child. This effect was what left some veterans feeling so confused and guilty just from having witnessed such scenes. Once home they were back amongst the living, the loving: children playing, old folk being helped across the road. And they wondered: how can the two worlds co-exist? How can we live among such death, however brushed up with church and ceremony?
‘More bodies,’ was all Wareing said, we only pausing there a moment. It was nearing ten o’clock by now, the day fully arrived.
And then it occurred to me, and I had to ask,
‘Do we need to do this?’
I didn’t ask Do we need to risk our lives? But that was how I heard it and how Wareing answered it,
‘This is our mission, and we don’t get out of here until it’s completed. I know, we drew a short straw on this last one, we couldn’t have planned for an armed gang. But here we are, it’s what we have to do.’
‘But just to find some old concrete shed and blow it down?’
‘Is that how you see our mission?’ But before I could answer, he continued, ‘I know, I feel the same way too sometimes, working through the collapsed hardware of an ancient war; when so much that is vital needs doing right now. Our nation is soon to be in ruins, and we are scurrying about ruining even more of it, bits of it people don’t even know are there! Don’t misunderstand me, Crofts, I respect the Major, and know how much we all owe such men who gave their careers in service; but I do wonder: was this risk the greatest, these buried rooms the deepest threat? We haven’t found a live one yet!’ He said this with a despair he didn’t try to hide and which I couldn’t help but notice, before wrapping up his short speech thus,
‘No doubt after this I’ll be set some other chore, assigned another part of infrastructure needing guarding or destroying. There’s an almost endless list, I suppose. But just our luck, eh? An armed gang,’ he repeated, ‘set up not three hundred yards from our final target. Who could have made it up? We’re saboteurs, not special forces; we haven’t even weapons, bar a knife that might be useful, but not against machine guns.’
‘Our coats might be.’
‘They might be, and we might be left for dogfood wrapped up inside them. Anyway, come on, they might not even have got to bed till daybreak, this is still the best time.’
But I couldn’t go just yet,
‘Look, Wareing! Hold up a minute… I just want to say, that… if this goes bad… or if we don’t get a chance to speak again… well, I wouldn’t want us to end…’
‘On a bad note? With distrust?’
I couldn’t breathe, till he continued,
‘Look, Crofts. I’ve had all these nights marching to think about this; and it occurs to me that there has been absolutely nothing in your training or experience of being a soldier to prepare you for a situation like this we find ourselves in, living as refugees in our own country; nor specifically for the situation we found at that Council House. Whatever happened that night, I know it wasn’t at your doing. Is that all right?’
I smiled with genuine relief, ‘Yes, yes, that’s all right.’
‘Then let’s get on.’
And then I remembered,
‘And there was a live one!’
‘A live what?’
‘A live bunker, one with the phone working! It was on my solo mission.’
‘In the park?’
‘Yes!’
‘And someone answered?’
‘This is London Station,’ I repeated in impersonation.
He was stunned,
‘What did you do?’
‘I blew it into the earth, beneath a mess of fallen trees.’
‘Well, I’ll be damned. Good job, good job!’
We passed the bay’s small harbour, its wall keeping pleasure boats snug within its outstretched arm. I supposed that this would be where the Dutch boats would turn after being led into the bay by the Palais lights. Within its tranquil pool small vessels bobbed and masts clanked, the smell of salt and seaweed washed up on the launching ramps evoking a hundred holiday memories.
We found our first street of Bed & Breakfasts, and ran the whole length of their back alley; before pushing open the end garden’s back gate to catch our breath before tackling the open street ahead. Facing us behind the gate was an Alsatian, my hand already reaching for my belt holster as I heard,
‘Come away, Rex.’
Rex’s owner had arrived at the kitchen door, standing there in slippers and bathrobe, and was soon holding the big dog by its collar. She was a welcome sight of normality in this town that, for all its undercurrents, was the closest to the old reality that we had come across by a mile.
She asked us, ‘You’re not..?’
‘Guests?’ I guessed stupidly. ‘No, we’re not.’
‘Guests!’ she laughed. ‘We haven’t had any of those since… I mean you’re not..?’
‘Ashe’s men?’ Wareing wagered, and won.
‘You don’t have guns for a start,’ she answer.
‘No, we’re not. Please don’t shout out, we don’t want any…’
‘Are you here to kill him?’
I don’t think a declared wish for another’s death had ever filled me with such calm, her question making her no less than our first ally in the town. She went on,
‘He killed Corey, lovely man, just because he didn’t want to do business with that gang when they sailed in. His wife lives three houses down. She’d hug the pair of you if you went to her and told her what you’re here for.’
Whether Wareing had just changed our mission objectives on the spot, or was judiciously lying, I didn’t yet know; when he answered,
‘For now though we just need you not to tell anyone that you’ve see
n us. Okay?’
She nodded, asking as we left,
‘Who’d take over if he went?’
‘We’d take over…’ I blurted, and which seemed good enough for her. ‘...and we’ll tell people you’re here, you’ll get Army support in days.’
‘What are you doing?’ asked Wareing, as we left her garden and rounded the corner into the street.
‘But when she asked if we’d kill Ashe, you said…’
‘You know it’s only what she wanted to hear.’
I’d let myself get carried away by the moment.
‘Our job’s to blow that bunker, not to stage a coup,’ continued Wareing. ‘Still, I’m beginning to think we won’t get the one thing done without the other.’
‘I knew you weren’t all bad, Wareing.’
‘Shush, come on.’
This exchange had cheered me, reaffirming my belief that even on this mission we were still the good guys, and that there was no way we’d leave a man like Ashe in charge; before remembering that we had left Tommy on his farm after killing a good part of ‘his’ village’s population.
We moved into the open street walking as casually as possible. The still-wet roads were deserted, as over back-garden fences and around street corners wafted the occasional sounds of children playing or women talking. We skipped past terrace ends, and then along another alley which I could tell Wareing hoped would bring us out by the target building and our playing fields.
‘Remember,’ he cautioned, ‘someone dobbed us in last night, so don’t trust anyone.’
With no businesses or shops now open, and never very much industry it seemed, there was probably little reason to be up too early around those parts; but the fact remained that they were getting fed by what was being dropped off by those boats, and so what was being dropped off was being managed by someone somewhere nearby. And there was still the matter of…
‘So, this is what they’re offering the Dutch gang in return?’
We’d found ourselves again at the end of the road we’d run down the night before, the one lined along one side by the unlit factory; which in daylight we could see for what it was: not a works but a kind of old warehouse or depot, perhaps for buses or milkfloats or whatever vehicles once offered seafront rides; only now it was filled with several tons of heavy metals: fifteen-yard curls of grey lead; twisted leaves of greening copper; strips of black flashing running up the wall like patterned snakes.
‘Look at that,’ I said agog. ‘That’s every church roof in fifty miles.’
‘Was.’
‘That one’s still got the weathercock attached!’ I noticed.
‘There’s a stone gargoyle over there,’ my partner pointed out, the poor little demon obviously having got snagged by the lead being torn off the roof around it, and ending up face down and scuffed on the depot floor.
‘They’re the demons, Ashe’s men. And so cocky,’ I remarked of the open warehouse, ‘not even guarding their treasure.’
‘No more than we could guard it from them.’
As our eyes adjusted to the building’s inner gloom, so out of it emerged further vast grotesqueries, shapes as if taken from some twisted corner of creation; the sublime made hideous, and all left open in this shady building not a minute from the seafront.
And it wasn’t only our civic heritage ravaged, scandalised and scrapped in this holding pen: for in the corners and along the walls of the building were heaps of railway line, and hoops of roughly bound-up copper cable – here also then was Britain’s infrastructure, torn up for a profit before an international effort could begin to get it working again.
The roofs couldn’t all have been from churches, for there were too many of them and some it seemed were shaped for more mundane large buildings; but it was the obviously old and sacred that got us – I not even a churchgoer – in the throat; Wareing muttering,
‘This would be the chapter of the Bible where the morons inherit the earth.’
Chapter 26 – Among the Locals