‘Fuck off,’ Dylan tells him. ‘If they nick you, you can’t just vanish without trace, even under the TerrorCrime laws.’
‘There’s all kinds of jangle flying around,’ rebuts Pacer. ‘That the CPA have got secret detention centres on American bases down south, in little shady places off the coast and that. They can do what the fuck they want cos they’re on American soil. D’you get me?’
‘Fuck off. It’s bollocks. Those PMCs, lad, they’re just like security guards. No different from the beauts who stand on the door in Asda and can’t do fuck all except stop smackheads robbing shower gels. Handy lads, mind you, but they ain’t got no special powers.’
‘Mate, the CPA are more powerful than the army, the bizzies, the Government, the lot. And they’ve got their own camps, like those mickey-mouse prisons owned by Group 4. It’s covered by anti-terror laws and no one can say fuck all.’
Dylan phones the Devil, puts him on loudspeaker on a robbed iPhone, Apprentice-style.
The Devil tells him, ‘There’s rumours that the CPA have set up a detention centre on the Isle of Man for people arrested in Gang Exclusion Zones all over the country, cos it’s not covered by the same laws as the mainland.’
‘Well, have you asked them if they’re holding Jay?’ asks Dylan.
‘Yes. And they deny it. They’re giving everyone a standard reply. “Rumours that community combatants have been secretly detained at CPA facilities and tortured are false. These rumours are just part of the asymmetric warfare that anti-social elements are waging against the CPA.”’
‘Asymmetric warfare?’
‘Like guerrilla warfare. What they’re saying is this: that you’re fighting an unconventional war against them and this is your propaganda to try and smear them – saying that they’ve detained two of your mates.’
‘Mad, aren’t they?’
Nogger chips in, ‘Listen, you fucking bell-end, I’m not interested in your fucking warfare. You’re being paid enough, you slimy little cunt, to represent us. So find Jay and get him out of whichever jug he’s in.’ The Devil LLB swallows hard in his office. Nogger presses his message home: ‘If you can’t find Jay, we will. And if those CPA pricks want a fucking war, lad, we’ll show what some proper soljas can do, not some fucking part-time army pricks.’
Phone down. Nogger’s on the warpath, gets a cheer of approval off the lads for taking a hard line on protecting their own. But Dylan tells him, ‘Those PMCs are not weekend warriors, mate. They’re fucking ex-US Navy SEALs. Fucking Rambo types. They’re not soft.’
‘Fuck the SAS, Dylan. That’s all telly talk and filmies, just to put the shits up us. The SAS? Fuck ’em. Mugs, mate, telling you. Action Men, wearing those snorkels and that, taking orders off posh lads. What kind of a fucking prick would do what someone tells them?’
‘If you’re saying we should have some beef with them, then I’m telling you, they’ll fucking annihilate us. They’ve got fucking tanks and choppers.’
‘Let’s go and see those American niggers on that checkpoint. They’ll know where Jay is. Odds are they’ll have nicked him. Fucking coons coming into Nogzy and intimidating us, getting a fucking 1,000 dollars a day wages while we can’t graft cos there’s fucking Little Birds up our arses every day.’
Clegsy’s with Dylan: ‘Nogger, lad, it’s suicide. Every one of them’s carrying an M4A1 carbine with an RIS-mounted M203 grenade launcher with a fucking telescopic sight perched on top of it. D’you know what that means, Nogger? That everything that gets within an effective range of 360 metres is purely shredded.’
Nogger knows the score. He’s even done a sketch of the M4A1 carbine in his bedroom, straight onto the wall, as well as an AK, a Mac-10 and a few other bits. All the lads did gun sketching to relax. Still, he’s a bit taken aback by Clegsy’s backchat. ‘Doesn’t matter what kit they’ve got. What matters is, have they got the arse to use it?’
‘All’s I’m saying, Nogger, is that one of them has got more firepower in his hands than all of us put together – between 700 and 950 rounds a minute. Face it, Nogger. We’re fucked. We’ve got blunderbusses. All of our decent kit has been taken away by the bizzies, or it’s buried fuck knows where. Fucking shameful, lad. Call ourselves a crew?’
Nogger’s facing a revolt. Dylan says, ‘Nogger, listen to him lad. If we attack the CPA now, we’ll get walloped all over the place. Use your head. Gorilla warfare, or whatever, is all about not fighting your enemy head-on. It’s about being a bit spicy. It’s about ambushing them, using the element of surprise. Bide your time. Use your head.’
‘Fucking shitehouse talk,’ says Nogger. ‘What are we, soljas or scaredy cats? Let’s do what we used to do when we’d go down to Crocky, let some buck off. These fucking contractors are worse shithouses than Crocky. They’ll run, lad. Telling you.’
The lads vote for an immediate attack.
They all meet in Nogzy Park, around 40 of them. Loads are pissed and stoned already cos it’s Friday night. They meet in an old walled garden in the middle because the stonework gives some protection from surveillance. Everyone’s given one petrol bomb. Nogger’s got access to the two Mac-10s. They’re still stashed in a hole near a sewer just outside the Exclusion Zone. But it’s too risky to bring them back on just yet. ‘Redcaps get hold of them, lad,’ says Dylan, ‘and it’s 40 years each in jail. Leave them where they are.’
Nogger makes the battle plan. Clegsy and a few of the lads have gone round the estate digging up their bits and bobs, getting the schoolies to retrieve guns that they’ve stashed in their lofts and gardens. Clegsy comes back with a green canvas army-surplus holdall and a heavy-duty plastic masonry sack full of their guns. There are only nine weapons between them. Everything else has been seized or lost for ever under the rubble of The Boot. Dylan picks up a silver-handled Czech converted replica pistol, three shitty bullets in the clip. Dylan widens his eyes in protest, almost laughing at the thought of using this in an exchange. Clegsy laughs. ‘It looks like a toy.’
‘Get you a little cowboy holster, Dylan,’ says Lupus. ‘One of those little brown plastic ones. You’ll look sound then.’
Dylan bursts out laughing at the madness of it. Nogger throws them a moody stare. Doesn’t like back-of-the class banter while he’s generalissimo-ing. He’s wearing his Rommel desert-storm goggles, drawing plans in the soil with an NHS walking stick. Nogger tells Lupus that he’ll be smashing a robbed car into the checkpoint at the top of Stalisbrook Avenue. Lupus looks unsure, half sinkered.
Nogger stiffens up. ‘Don’t worry, lad. Be just like a ramraid. Chose you cos you’re a better jockey.’ Lupus is half beaming with pride now, at being praised in front of the lads. He’s like a kamikaze before a mission. New Loon gets his phone out to make the martyrdom vid.
Dylan steps in. ‘But, Nogger, the CPA guards’ll fire back. Close air support and all sorts. Lupus’ll get walloped at the wheel before he even has a chance.’ Clegsy and Pacer nod in agreement.
‘But we’ve got surprise on our side. We can steal it on them.’ Nogger tries to steel the lads with an eve of battle soliloquy: ‘Shock and awe, innit? Won’t know what’s hit them, will they? And while their heads are turned that way, looking at Lupus driving through their office, we’ll come at them at the flanks.’
Dylan narrows his eyes, gives him a stare and half a smile, as if to say, ‘The flanks? Who the fuck do you think you are, lad?’
Nogger, not waiting for Dylan to spell out what he’s thinking, throws him a green paperback: British Army Field Manual: FIBUA – Fighting in a Built-up Area. Dylan flicks through the pages: ‘Updated to include tactics used by coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan’. There’s a section called ‘Main Principles’. Dylan reads the first chapter: ‘Keep Equipment Light’.
Nogger, pointing at the manual, says, ‘See? You don’t need loads of mad guns. Keep it loose and light, that’s what they’re saying. And these are the cunts who make the rules.’
Dylan reads more: ‘Attack rapidly
, in depth, to dominate killing areas. Use masking smoke.’
‘See? What that means is just lash a few petrol bombs before we bail in. Laughing, we are. Laughing. Over the back gardens, from the sides. Bang! Bang! Bang! Innit?’
Dylan shakes his head, waving the book: ‘These are just words, Nogger. It won’t work out like that for us. Telling you.’
Nogger rips the book out of Dylan’s hand and reads from it: ‘Employ shock-producing weapons to reduce enemy strongpoints.’ He’s made up with himself. ‘That,’ he’s saying, pointing at the page, ‘is exactly what we’re doing. The strongpoint is their little hut. Lupus in the car is the shocker. It’ll freak them out. Niggers’ll be all over the place.’
All the lads are buzzing now, up for this. Dylan knows it. ‘Where d’you get this book from?’ he asks. Nogger tells him he robbed it from the Central Library in town. Dylan stares at him and thinks of Elizabeth.
All the lads are bang into the attack now.
Pacer seems cagier, asks, ‘But having the checkpoint off won’t tell us where Jay is though, will it?’
‘We’ll have the computers off, grab the paperwork,’ Nogger tells him. ‘We’ll find out everything they’ve got on us, where they’re up to with Chalina. Everything, lad, innit? Mission Accomplished.’
Everyone gets in position, crouched down in the privet hedges and gardens near the checkpoint. Most of the tenants are gone now from the houses, decamped, but the few pensioners who’re left are told to fuck off back inside. Dylan, Nogger and Clegsy with ten other lads are on one side of the road. Fifteen others are back-up on the other side, including the younger ones like Clone and Onion. They form the reserve second wave, led by Pacer. A few of the younger lads, with their pitbulls in harnesses, are pretending to be ordinary pedestrians, walking along the street towards the queue for the checkpoint with the usual ragtag of mas and kids passing through the border control.
Lupus, in a robbed old summer-yellow Cavalier from the 1980s – no tax, nothing, with a green sunstrip across the top of the windscreen – joins the traffic jam of back-logged cars waiting to be searched and let through at the checkpoint. When nothing’s coming the other way, he suddenly wheelspins out of the queue, floors it and bombs towards the checkpoint.
All the lads in the bushes are going, ‘Yeah, Lupus, lad. Putting on a show,’ whispering. Dylan’s watching it through his field glasses, through a hole in the fence, adrenalin pumping for Lupus the Hero, Lupus the Top Jockey. He just sees flashes of pale yellow and plastic see-through green, sometimes makes out Lupus’s black hood in the driver’s seat. He’s accelerating too fast for Dylan to watch him through the binoculars now. Dylan keeps track of Lupus’s progress by the unnatural screech of the robbed car’s revs and the smell of burning rubber that’s floating over to where the lads are hiding, like a gas attack.
Dylan puts the binoculars up to his eyes again. For a microsecond, he catches the heavy, rusting, yellow bonnet buckling slightly and two wisps of white smoke coming up out of the engine block, almost imperceptible. Lupus’s revs go into super-high-pitched overdrive for a second, then there’s a rattle of spinning-off parts, an exploding fan belt, before suddenly the engine cuts out and the car rolls to a halt.
Dylan knows what the CPA guards have done without having to look. They’ve put two rounds into the engine block. He knows it from the two little impacts he saw on the front of the car. Defensive vehicle immobilisation. Standard operating procedure. Force protection.
But Lupus is still alive. Dylan watches him panic, trying to unbuckle the old seatbelt and untangle himself. The driver-side door opens. Bang! The third CPA round blows a chunk out of Lupus’s neck, like a butcher slicing out a cut of raw meat. He drops to the ground, holding his neck with his right hand and gurgling.
Nogger stands up, going-over-the-top-style, rallies his troops, making a big ‘c’mon’ gesture with his arm, like an officer. Clegsy, a few feet away, stands up, carrying the long shotgun awkwardly with both hands. Suddenly, he whooshes up in a big ball of flames. Gone. Blinding orange. Everyone has to look away.
And that’s it. Everyone scatters. Guards are pouring rounds into the garden fences and hedges, disintegrating the wood and privet, shattering the front doors of the houses.
Dylan goes to help Clegsy, but his whole body is cooked, smoke and steam coming off it. Like Anakin Skywalker before he becomes Darth Vader. Star Wars on Earth. His skin and fingers are crusty and black, his teeth even blacker than usual and pointy. The skin on his cheeks is smooth and bloated. Dylan touches it. Broiled jaw muscle slides off. It’s like a chicken fillet. ‘Fuck’s sake.’ Dylan recoils in fright, wincing, his face tight. He spews a bit on the clean grass behind him.
Then he remembers Lupus. Civilians are scattering out of their cars now, kids screaming, bags of shopping spilling dark liquids over the pavement. Dylan pepper-pots over the road, crouching behind the yellow car for cover. He can hear Lupus trying to call for his mum. There he is. Convulsing violently on the floor, crawling sideways on the ground to try to get away from the pain, rotating in a circle like a breakdancer.
He stops when he sees Dylan, but he’s still gurgling blood. He stretches his hand out, fingers beckoning, pointing upwards. Dylan looks to the sky. The downdraught blows his hood down and bloats his jacket up. There’s an OH6 whirlybird right on top of him, a Greyrock sniper hanging out the side Hollywood-style, a low-slung psy-ops loudhailer underneath. ‘Drop your weapon. Move away from the casualty. Armed authorised personnel. Stand still. Do not attempt to move. You will be immobilised.’
Fuck. He’s been nicked. Right out in the open. Nowhere to go. He lashes the gun and puts his hands on his head.
He’s blinded by pepper spray, the hooks of a Taser ragging at his nipple then blasting him all up with electrification. He’s slammed onto the ground by a guard squashing him with a riot shield. Behind him, a five-man squad wearing full padded riot gear, with the words ‘Extreme Reaction Force’ stencilled in fresh white paint on the chestplates of their bulletproof vests, their boots stomping on the ground as they get closer. ‘Comply. Comply. Do not resist. Do not resist. Comply. Comply.’
Dylan is hooded, gloved and shackled, sweat pouring into his eyes. He comes round in the back of a moving refrigerator truck, kneeling, hands behind his back, wrists pinioned and cuffed to a belt, head on the floor – a stress position. For what seems like ages, it gets intolerably hot. He can’t breathe, sweating in the hood, lips blistering, eyes stinging. Then it gets freezing cold. His lips are blue, he’s shivering, pissing. The cycles of extreme temperatures go on for hours.
Blasts of super-loud techno come through speakers. Then it changes to country music: ‘Okie from Muskogee’ then ‘Mystery Train’ by Elvis, dead loud. Then it’s the sound of dogs barking non-stop.
There’s no daylight. The outside world seems very distant now. Dylan’s mind starts to eat itself. After many hours, the van stops. Dylan’s dragged out the back, over some crunchy gravel. There are real dogs barking and growling, snapping at his bare feet. They bite through the hood, but the thick hessian stops the fangs causing too much damage. American guards are kidney-punching him, calling him a white nigger and a child abuser.
He’s lashed to a sloping board, tilted downwards slightly, so his head is lower than his body. Three layers of towels are put over his face, on top of the hood. He’s in total darkness. Dylan feels the coolness of the water first, is glad of it. Then he holds his breath, determined to resist. Eventually, he has to inhale through the damp cloth, close against his nose. A cascade of water floods into his nostrils. Sheer panic. Dylan is drowning.
The interrogator barks questions. ‘What is your role in TerrorCrime?’
‘Comply. Do not resist. Comply,’ other guards are shouting in the background.
Dylan can hear the artificial shutter noises of their camera phones, then one of them saying, ‘Video it from this side. You can see the motherfucker’s head going wild here.’
Another s
ays, ‘Keep it tight. Don’t fucking ID nothing, not even my patches, motherfucker.’
The waterboarding goes on. Dylan’s gag reflex keeps triggering every few seconds until it’s overwhelmed.
‘What is your status as a community combatant?’
‘Which gang are you a member of?’
‘What are the names of the principal members of your organisation?’
The water’s stopped and the towels are lifted away from his face so that he can answer. When he says nothing, it starts again.
Water and adrenalin are coursing round his body now, life fighting to the last. But he’s crushed now, giving way to a wave of nausea and terror. Just at the onset of unconsciousness, the torturers stop.
‘What was your involvement in the execution of Chalina Murphy?’ Dylan feels a finger hard on his solar plexus. The interrogator prodding him, putting pressure on him, trying to wind him, get the air out before they pour water into him again. Then the sickly sensation up his nose once more, like his adenoids freezing and contracting. Then he passes out.
Dylan wakes up in a box, in cramped confinement. His hood has been taken off but he’s wearing large, blacked-out goggles now. Learned helplessness is setting in now. He’s left in isolation for hours. Then the torture starts again, this time psychological. The guards threaten to put stinging insects and snakes into the box. He hears the box open and something’s dropped in. He feels large insects falling on his hair, crawling around his nose. At first, Dylan jumps violently in the two inches of wriggle room, smashes his coccyx on the top of the box, presses and strains his arms and legs against the sides trying to get away from them. He spits, clearing one from the edge of his bottom lip. Then he tries to calm down. He’s dealt with the claustrophobia. Now tries to reason away the insects, tells himself that they would have stung him by now if they were dangerous. They’re just trying to fuck with his head, he tells himself. It’s no worse than what those pricks on I’m a Celebrity put up with. Then he laughs out loud.
Gang War Page 18
