RAT RUN GERALD SEYMOUR

by Gerald Seymour

  'You are taking a hell of a chance, Dad. A chance with me in the dinghy, with my boy, with the boat, with yourself. You know that, Dad. And now you're saying they've no light. Going in with that dinghy, it's going to be six shades of hell. I reckon it's one run, that's all. I can't be stooging there, not in that surf.

  They'll have to be out in the water, deep enough so I don't snag the outboard, and have to be ready. How am I going to find them if there's no light? Is the money that good? Have you thought, Dad, of just turning round and getting on home?'

  What Harry Rogers knew, as he listened to the carp of his son, was that he required two fathoms minimum of draught under the keel of the Anneliese Royal, and twelve feet of water would put him a minimum of four hundred yards from the beach. The dinghy would need three feet of water and it would not come closer than a hundred yards from the beach

  . . . The trawler and the dinghy would both be bucking in swell. The low clouds and the rain's mist would screw his view of the TG15 buoy and the Accumer Ee light and he needed both to get in near. He reckoned he was three hours from getting far enough to the island to launch the dinghy, and the chart in the wheelhouse showed him sunken wrecks, sunken

  obstructions, and supposedly cleared areas of dumped explosives. There were gas pipes and telephone lines under them, and if they snagged one of those bastards by going off course, they were screwed.

  They were on the northern edge of a section marked as Submarine Exercise Area, not that - in these sea conditions - a periscope would be slotting up. The boat yawed, fell into troughs and climbed waves, and his grandson was again retching at the bucket.

  Harry said, 'I thought about it, yes, ditching them -

  but that's not my way. I'll use my light, keep it on you while you're taking the dinghy in, and they'll have to shift themselves and come to you . . . That's what I told them. Can't do better . . . You want to hear me say it? I'll say it - I would not dare to ditch Ricky Capel, and that's more important than the fact that I gave my word.'

  He was close enough to hear them.

  Malachy thought it the perfect battleground.

  He had been drawn to the right place, alone, to stand and fight, unseen by any witness. He felt a great calm, and peace, and he thought a road ended here and that he was within sight of a pyramid's summit.

  He rested his fingers on the dog-tags at his throat.

  Chapter Twenty

  He saw the light. Riddled with cramp in his stomach, pain in his hips and knees, sand in his throat that he had to endure and not cough out, Malachy saw the light's blast out to sea. Not a brilliant light but one that was misted and confused by cloud and rain, but a clear enough beacon to those watching for it.

  It was not aimed at the shore but was directed upwards and bounced back from the cloudbanks and rolled, cavorted, rocked as if its platform were unstable. He thought the trawler on which it was mounted was shaken by the violence of the swell. He realized, from the light on the cloud ceiling, that the boat edged towards the shore where the surf ran.

  Near to him, separated from him by the blunt sand summit of a dune, he heard a little yell of excitement

  - the voice of Ricky Capel. He had felt, lying twenty paces from him, the fear of the man. The fear had been on Capel's tongue, in the whine of his voice, and it had grown because he had sensed that he was

  watched. As the hours had passed, Malachy had felt the man's fear tighten. He had known his own fear when he had walked, without a weapon and without a helmet or flak-jacket, down a narrow street in a village with the sun low and scorching his eyes. It had been the fear of the man that had sustained him as he had lain in the sand, among the dune's grasses. He heard, now, a sharp hiss for quiet and the excitement was stifled.

  The other man had shown Malachy no sign of fear.

  He heard low grunts, from them both, and sensed they stood.

  Far away to his left, if he raised his head, Malachy could see the scattered lights of the village, and in the near sea - if he strained and peered between the bent grasses - there were two marker buoys. In the hours he had been in place, he had learned to recognize the sequences of their flashes, one red and one green. But the light further towards the horizon, beyond the surf bursts, had greater strength. There were the lights of the village, the lights of the buoys, the light from the trawler, but the rest of the scope of Malachy's vision showed him nothing more than black darkness. He had thought the world had emptied, that only he and two men existed, and one was beyond the area of his interest.

  As he watched the lights, Malachy did not recognize Polly Wilkins's big picture. Neither did he listen, any longer, to the contempt of a host of soldiers and a psychiatrist, and his wife, and a man who ran a business for buying and selling houses . . . He involved no one, was owned by no one. He flexed his muscles and readied himself. When they moved, he would follow.

  He heard, above the wind, the whine, 'Don't we get moving? I knew he'd come. He's a good boy, my Harry is. Shouldn't we shift down there?'

  He heard, over the rain's beat, the response: 'Not yet, too early.'

  'They won't hang about for us, you know.'

  'It is too soon.'

  Malachy realized the authority of the second man. He was Polly Wilkins's target. The second man governed the big picture. Malachy heard the authority, spoken softly. Men, he knew it, who had authority rarely found it necessary to raise a voice, never shouted, did not whine. He thought the man, joined at the hip to Ricky Capel, was burdened.

  He watched the light, its beam on the clouds, approach the beach.

  He was silent, did not dare to speak. Ricky stood in the force of the wind and saw the light come closer . . .

  Then he shuddered, shook. He was Ricky Capel. He ran a part of south-east London. He was the big man and guys backed off from him. He was above grief, too big a man to be given disrespect. He did not snivel, did not cower.

  'Yes, I hear you, Dean, and I'm saying it as well - it's not yet, it's too early to move, too soon.'

  Watching the light, he shed from his mind the source of the fear that had nagged, eaten at him all the hours they had waited. A man stalked him. A man followed him. Straining into the darkness and seeing the roll of the light up and against the cloud, the thought of the man was wiped from his mind.

  Squinting, he saw the light beyond the dim beach expanse, and the cresting lines of the surf . . . He'd be wading into it, into the force of the waves - that was what Harry had said - into that bloody sea, in bloody darkness . . . but he was Ricky Capel, and he was a big man. The wind hammered against him and would have pitched him back if he had not held, tight, to the arm beside him.

  'Should stay patient - I don't reckon we should move too soon, that's my opinion.'

  The light shone out ahead of her, and was away to her right, and she made her calculation on the point of the beach it approached.

  Methodically, Polly rolled the sleeping-bag and the sand in it, filled the rucksack and wriggled its straps over her shoulders.

  Then she hit the combination of buttons on her mobile for a secure call, and dialled. She heard it ring out twice before an automated voice - not Freddie Gaunt's - informed her that she was being diverted. It was answered. Crisply, without preamble, she was asked to speak.

  'It's out there, the light. I can't be exact, it's dark as hell, and I don't know the sea, but I estimate it about a mile offshore. Damn, damn, they've killed the light

  . . . It was there, was coming in. I suppose it was on long enough to alert the target group, b u t . . . '

  There was criticism. She should not 'estimate' or

  'suppose'. Facts were required of her. She swore under her breath, soundless. She could not estimate why Gaunt had done it to her, could not suppose why he had quit on her.

  'There was a light offshore, on for eight minutes. At the moment it was switched off, the light was one nautical mile from the tideline.'

  They wanted bullshit, they would get it. She did not know whether the
light had been visible for six minutes or nine minutes; neither did she know the length of a nautical mile nor see the tideline. She imagined them round a table crowded with phones, consoles and screens, with maps dominating their room's walls, and . . . She was asked for the location of Kitchen.

  'Don't know, and that is neither an estimate nor a supposition. I have not the faintest idea where he is.

  So as you understand, it is pitch bloody black out here, and it is peeing with rain and blowing a gale. He could be a mile away or ten yards away, and that is a fact. It is also a fact that I have not been issued with night-vision equipment.'

  The cold cut through Polly, but they would not have been interested in that. She was asked what were Kitchen's intentions when he left her.

  'Can't estimate and can't suppose - not a clue. I will call you on further developments. Out.'

  A career gone down the drain? Perhaps. Her teeth rattled as she shivered. Perhaps . . . Did she give a damn if a career was lost? Maybe . . . She pocketed the phone. Polly wondered if she now had the status of being a flagged pin on a wall map. She scrambled down off the dune and tumbled to the start of the loose sand that the sea never reached. She was perplexed that she had not seen an answering light from away to her right on a point of high ground, did not understand that, could not reckon how the trawler would be guided in - or the men to be picked up would be floundering in water, would be battered by the surf - and was confused. She went, slowly and carefully, below the dunes and above the beach, stopped to listen, then went on, stopped again . . . It hurt so bloody much that Freddie Gaunt had quit on her.

  'Makes you think, doesn't it? The last chap here - his feet where we are. Wagons out at the front with everything he and his family own, and he's looking around at all that's familiar, then he's going to the door, and going to nail it shut after him, and then he'll be joining his neighbours in flight. And the enemy is over the hill - not quite literally, but the barbarians are at the gates . . . and this is where he stood for the last time.'

  It no longer rained and the wind had slackened.

  Frederick Gaunt knelt in the pit and the high lights glistened the mud and he scraped with his trowel at the edge of the small patch of uncovered mosaic. He did not know the man beside him, had not dug with him before. In a few minutes they would break for tea from an urn and that would be welcome for warmth and would be respite from the monologue in his ear

  . . . The man was young, lean-faced and lean-bodied, and scraped and talked with matching intensity.

  'I suppose he knew it was coming - yes, he'd have realized that his time was up. Must have wounded him to think that civilization, all of the comforts of a building like this, was going to be tossed over, and that the day of the hordes - Goths, Visigoths, Picts, you name them - had come, and the start of a Dark Age with them. He wouldn't have known it, but I think it's a law of history that new forces will inevitably overwhelm an old order.'

  The site was in Wiltshire, south of Keysley Down and to the west of Berwick St Leonard. It was approached by a rutted farm track, and was lit - at fifteen minutes to midnight - by a row of generator-powered arc-lights. Negotiations with the landowner had given the diggers a clear seven days and seven nights to work on the villa, and after that the excavated ground would be covered with thick plastic sheeting, which would in turn be covered with the moved soil and sods of the field. It was the third night

  . . . Until that afternoon, before his meeting and his butchery at VBX, Gaunt had not thought he had the vaguest chance of joining these enthusiasts. They were mostly students, recruited from a south-coast university, but he had been allocated to the team leader, who talked.

  'Inevitable that it'll all come crashing down once the decadence sets in. Our chap, who stood here in his sandals, he'd become too comfortable - had too much wealth and too much privilege - and he'd lost the hardness to fight. That's it, isn't it? His civilization, morally corrupt, could not compete with the simple brutality of the barbarian - so he ran and left his home to sixteen hundred years of ruin and pillage, then the stones of the walls were taken, soil was washed by the rain over what was left, then it was buried and eventually we pitched up. Comfort and decadence, they're killers for any society confronted by an enemy that's hungry, ruthless.'

  At the extremity of the mosaic there were stone slabs and then the first signs of the praefurnium, the stoke nole, and in the mud that he lifted on his trowel Gaunt found a small piece of compressed black material. With near reverence he placed it in the bucket by his elbow. When they took tea he would show it to the site surveyor: a piece of charcoal that could be radio-carbon-dated, that could tell them when, to the year, a fire had been lit before the arrival of the forces of that day's axis of evil. He found the man's thesis not irritating but marginally amusing.

  'What I believe frightening is that corruption is at our gates now and tonight... Trust me, I'm a general practitioner - know what I mean? You should see what crosses my surgery five days a week, nine hours a day . . . I promise you, I'm not a doom merchant, but we're busy losing our way. Drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, child abuse and paedophilia, debt entrapment, obesity, alcoholism, benefit dependency, ignorance and illiteracy, and every symptom of yobbery.

  I see it, and I practise in a little backwater, in Devizes.

  It's the drugs culture that's the worst - and so few seem to care... What seems to me to be so wretchedly stupid is that we are preaching for our failing lifestyle to be adopted by Islamic states. Such conceit.'

  He stiffened. The trowel slipped from his hand.

  Gaunt, working at the dig site with the voices - and sometimes the laughter - of young people around him, had felt rare tranquillity. He no longer scraped for charcoal pieces or for bone scraps that had been thrown away, centuries before, on to the cut wood and open-cast coal in the praefurnium . . . He had believed he had escaped, and had not. What now was relevant?

  As if a nerve in him was pinched, he saw himself as an old warrior too tired for combat when the barbarians swarmed at the gates. A man who spoke of a society, decadent and doomed, in the corridors of Vauxhall Bridge Cross, would - Gaunt thought - be taken to the stake and burned alive as a heretic. Did a doctor from Devizes tell a truth that none dared name? It was a mandatory-death-sentence offence, in the offices of VBX, to suggest that victory was not assured.

  'I hope you don't mind me prattling on . . . Do you think our time's up, like this chap's was? I wonder about it. Is all this we hear of the new fundamentalist enemy just modern-speak for barbarians at the gates?

  Are we now as decadent as our chap, standing here for the last time? Quite a rum thought: in sixteen hundred years, folk will be scratching at the foundations of my home and getting all excited when they've found the sewer pipe and can tell what I ate, and have a chuckle and say, "Yes, he'd have known his time was up." Sorry . . . sorry, talking too much, my wife says I always do . . . What's this?'

  Bare fingers wiped mud smears off a length of bone, and the arc-lights pierced sufficiently into the hole to show the minute working of the decoration at the head of what had been a hairpin - consigned to the fire rather than be an ornament in the tresses of a barbarian's woman. Gaunt, with all the warmth he could muster, congratulated the doctor on his significant find. They were called for tea. He levered himself out of the pit and carried his bucket to the tent where the urn was and sandwiches. He had thought, in a Wiltshire field, he would find sanctuary, but his mind was trapped by thoughts of Polly, and the man she had believed in, and the bright but deep eyes in the photograph of an enemy . .. and the casualties of war, then and now.

  It was a supreme effort to drag himself to his feet. He was so nearly there, so close to his Grail. Oskar Netzer pulled himself up, off his stomach, off his knees and elbows, and the gate rocked on his weight and his fingers clutched at the catch holding it shut. Weakness consumed him, but the pain was long gone. When the gate swung open, a little more of his feeble strength left him and he lost his hold on the iro
nwork. He fell forward on to the cemetery path. He staggered over the loose gravel towards the stone and his wife's grave. He saw nothing ahead of him in the blackness but knew where he must go . . . and he believed he had made expiation for the wrong done by his uncle.

  After a few short steps, he collapsed on to the sharp stones - but he hoped to reach her resting-place and to sleep there and be with her, to tell her of his ducks, and of the men who had intruded on his paradise, and that he had loosed the evil's hold on him . . . He crawled off the path and over sodden grass, reached out and found the glass jar, the stems of flowers that had been stripped by the wind.

  He clasped the stone and did not know what he had achieved - did not know who would bury him - and sleep took him.

  A clock chimed. A car, with lights flashing, and with an escort in front and behind, brought Timo Rahman to the prison in the north of Hamburg at Fuhlsbuttel.

  He was led from it to a desk where the details of his life, and the charges he faced, would be processed.

  The gaol's landings awoke. Word had passed. Spoons beat against metal mugs. Plates rattled against doors.

  His name was shouted and echoed down the block's iron staircases. He was ordered to strip for medical inspection.

  He was in hurtful ignorance of the reason for the collapse of his rule, and of who was responsible.

  'I can't go in any further.'

  'It's bloody dangerous out there, Dad.'

  'Myself, I'd do it if I could,' Harry shouted at the wheel-house door, at his son. 'I can't . . . What I'm promising, it's never again.'

  'Just get her stern on, Dad, and keep her there.'

  He should have been down on the deck to help his boy but dared not leave the wheel and the diesel engine's controls to young Paul, his grandson, who had retched again and was now too frail to hold the wheel steady and did not know the working of the engine. The door slammed behind him, but he yelled and did not know if he was heard.