It was just as I remembered that it was on that road the previous night where we had heard a voice directing the gold car after us, that we heard an engine. Our playing field trick no use in daytime, and our target building tantalisingly close but still that bit too far away; we had no choice but to duck into the depot itself, finding the largest and thickest pieces of roof-lead to scramble behind. The place was roofed but leaky, the stone floor damp with the previous night’s rain.
The truck that pulled up in view of the building’s open end was not the returning tanker – which, along with its crew, we weren’t to see again – but a flatbed truck, presumably the one that had brought the metalwork there in the first place. As the men getting down from the cab walked into view, we saw first the young agriculturally-attired lad we had seen at the forest, and with him the older, hot-headed one who got off on shooting trees.
‘Come on,’ urged the latter. ‘He wants it all on the harbour wall by sundown.’
But the younger one’s mind was still on other things,
‘Perhaps they’ll bring her back, the Dutch?’ he asked.
‘Don’t be soft, lad,’ the older one started; before softening himself, ‘You know she’s gone, she’s not coming back.’
Other, unarmed men soon joined them, the first load taking maybe twenty minutes and the largest pieces taking the efforts of all four of them just to roll up the lorry’s rear ramp. It was going to be a hard day’s work. Behind the din they made we scrambled quietly to the very far end of the depot space. Doing so, I caught my shin on one piece of metal that rang like a church bell, but which caused no response from men making enough noise of their own.
As they worked they chattered:
‘He could have told us we were on first thing – I wouldn’t have had that last pint.’
‘Well, we haven’t slept at all, we’ve been on guard all night.’
‘This delivery had better be worth it. We’d better be getting some steaks or champagne, or something.’
‘You know we don’t get anything like that, or we don’t anyway. That’s for Ashe and Dahla. We only get the stuff in sacks: flour and grain and all that mush.’
‘Well, after those fellows we saw last week, I’m glad of anything. Imagine it, eating the flesh off your own arms…’
‘Or trying to. He didn’t get more than a couple of bites out of it.’ The speaker laughed at this.
‘Poor sods.’
‘Did you get the roof off though?’
‘Yeah, that’s it over there. Hell of a job, took all day. We had to smash up through the ceiling to get at it.’
‘Anyway, come on. He wants this lot up on the harbour.’
‘But there won’t be room for it all up there.’
‘Then we’ll have to leave it on the beach.’
It wasn’t cowardice that made us hide, only the knowledge that we had no back up, no way of completing the mission if either suffered further injury; nor any way then of getting a message back of success or failure. Had some act of derring-do got either of us hurt or killed, then that would most likely have been that – we were not worried for ourselves.
We were there for four hours. Throughout that time we cast our dark-adjusted eyes about us. Wareing I knew was looking past the architectural horrorshow to find some piece to use as a weapon – yet what use could a flimsy blade or club be against machine gun fire? I wondered if there weren’t pieces heavy enough that one could be rigged as a falling trap? But there seemed no way of moving them without causing enough noise to give us away, before the men came our way to bring the arranged metalware down upon their heads.
Tucked away in our far corner, we could though talk very quietly,
‘Sparse country,’ began Wareing, ‘and the other towns must be in a rare state. I bet these men see less people than us, bovvering about in their trucks toting machine guns.’
‘Must be every church in fifty miles,’ I repeated. ‘Every one wrecked, their interiors rained on and rotting.’
He answered calmly,
‘There’s a lot of places that are going to rot these next few years: large and small, anywhere where there’s no one there to heat them or fix leaks or patch broken windows. These buildings,’ he gestured with his arm, as if the ruins themselves were in the room, ‘will just get there a little sooner. Don’t get maudlin.’ He placed his gesturing hand on my shoulder.
Around midday we had a break. As the sun moved around the building, so a sudden strip of light emerged at our dark end of the interior. Shuffling to find the source, we found the tiniest hole through a missing panel of a stable-style door, we immediately shuffling through that broken bottom-half.
Between the back wall of the depot and the houses that filled the rest of that block was a narrow no-man’s-land of untended grass: damp, soon again cast in shadow, and strewn with tossed away cans and months-old binbags – the detritus of another age. It was there that we threw ourselves down, hidden by the buildings and the weeds. From around the corner we could hear the men’s clamorous work, dragging the pieces of metal over the pavement onto the lorry.
Wareing crept uncomfortably across the grass to the cornerstone of the building (for hours squashed up on a damp floor had not been good for his injuries), only to creep back just as uncomfortably to confirm that from there we had no view of the target building. At this point I still hadn’t seen it in daylight, and knew not what it looked like or what it was.
‘Worse luck, worse luck,’ muttered Wareing, as he thought what to do. And we really couldn’t have had worse luck: night hunters in a town about to have its busiest night; now trapped there after relying on their keeping late hours on the one morning they were forced to start work early; our target a building not a hundred feet away, but sited beside the biggest open space in town (the football field) and opposite a criminal gang’s horde. The busy men would be coming and going from the depot all day to shift that ironmongery to the pier. I would have laughed if it hadn’t been so pathetic, our lightning raid making it all the way to our cowering like criminals on this damp patch of land. I would have laughed my laughter openly while fighting these men hand to hand, if they hadn’t had the guns. And then I thought,
‘Let’s just take them anyway. We’ve done the two in the tanker, let’s do these.’
Wareing remained silent, staring at me.
‘Only two of them have guns,’ I continued in urgent whisper, heavy sounds resounding from next door. ‘They’d be caught off guard. If we can catch them before they’ve time to fire, then that leaves the unarmed ones…’
‘No,’ he answered. But this was not the “No” I was expecting. He continuing,
‘No shooting, just pointing. We don’t want to draw anyone else over here with gunfire – we’ll just have them tie each other up. The target isn’t anywhere near the Palais, nor the seafront where they’ll be preparing for the Dutch to come. I only need a quiet five minutes with that bunker, then we’re out of here to hide further north along the coast till morning. Who knows, if there’s no need for explosions then we could even get in and out of this part of town unnoticed.’
‘Could it work?’
‘Just…’
‘But…’
‘But… what about helping the townsfolk? Trust me, Crofts, our first task once on our boat out of here tomorrow morning is to radio in to their naval commander to get a task force out along this coast double-quick. Why, they’ll have Ashe out of his throne before the day is over with; and men in Holland snatching the metal out of these Dutchman’s hands before it’s even unloaded from their boat.’
I just about buying this, we set our plan in action, leaving it to blessed adrenalin to handle our various achings. Moving over hunks of old cement and more binbags, we got to the end of the gully by the depot’s side, and looked toward the men who at their nearest point were only twenty feet away. From there we saw the older armed man straining with one of those unarmed to get an arcing modernist sculpture of a copper roofplate onto the flatbed; w
hile the younger armed man was stood with a cup of tea some distance away by the houses. He seemed to have temporarily absolved himself of any obligation to assist, and was instead looking over in the direction of the coast. The fourth man, lost among the shapes and shadows on the building’s interior, we had to take a punt on.
‘This is it,’ urged Wareing. ‘Both his hands are full! Go, go, go…’
‘Little help here?’ asked the senior gunman – the tree shooter himself – the second before I rugby tackled him to the floor. Wareing, right behind me, jumped back in agony, his ankle giving way; but this held him back just enough to keep him out of the way as the sheet of twisted metal the two men had been holding now fell back on top of the second lifter.
The big man I had landed on may have had some bulk and had the gun, but I was a soldier, and in close quarters, even with my injured rib and hand screaming, he proved no match; he was soon face down on the ground and strangled into stillness with his own rifle strap.
I turned to find Wareing, instead seeing the unarmed man pinned beneath the metal.
‘Saved us the trouble,’ I quipped flush with hot blood, before realising I was seeing the man’s head nearly sheared off by the copper’s jagged edge. And then I saw my partner, crouching in discomfort some feet short of his target. Well, that was that for him as a fighting or even a moving force. To be honest, after the state he’d been in at the London base, I was surprised he’d made it that far.
‘Fellas?’
The lad drinking tea by the houses had noticed something was up and was calling over. Quickly, I tried to free the machinegun from its unconscious owner and have it raised; and managed it the moment the younger gunman was stood over me pointing his identical rifle back at me.
Yet as he looked at me down the barrels of our guns, the muzzles nearly meeting, I saw not anger or fury or even concern for his fallen buddies; instead only an odd expression, as though, if only he were able, that there was something he so wanted to say. But then the fourth guy appeared to stand at his shoulder, which, with Wareing down, left it two against one. And anyway, something in that lad’s expression before his mate arrived made me think that surrendering wasn’t the very worst option.
Chapter 27 – The Palais