Waking Caliban

by Mike Cartlidge

  “The will’s interesting,” I told him.

  “I have read the will before.”

  “It contains no mention whatsoever of Shakespeare’s plays and poems.”

  “I was well aware of that. The question of what happened to the originals of Shakespeare’s works has always been a tantalizing mystery for scholars.” He continued to scrutinize the papers but, after struggling with them for a few seconds, turned back to me, holding up the ‘testament’. “Do you have a translation for this document?”

  “I know enough of what it says. Look at the sketch at the back.”

  He turned to the last page and peered closely at the map.

  “That’s the area around what used to be Hamnet Sadler’s cottage,” I told him. “As long as we can find out where that is…”

  “I already know where it is,” he drawled. “I have done my research.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. So, if you look at the map, you should be able to work out approximately where his well was located.”

  “And the significance of the well is?”

  “That’s where the main body of papers was hidden.”

  He muttered under his breath and then, reaching to the pouch in the back of the car’s front seat, pulled out a collection of maps. He selected one of these – I could see it was a modern-day Ordnance Survey map of Stratford and its surrounds – and spread it over his knees. Holding the printout in his left hand, he bent forward, trying to find some match between it and the modern map.

  I looked back at Ablett. He was concentrating on the dense traffic as he steered us away from the center of Oxford but, yet again, I caught the flash of his eyes in the mirror and wondered about his personal agenda. I didn’t trust Bakst one inch but it was Ablett who was the bigger threat. Still, the fact that they hadn’t killed me so far had to be taken as an encouraging sign. I leaned back and watched as Bakst pulled more maps and books onto his knee and pored over them, tracing lines with his podgy fingertips.

  In another twenty minutes, we were on the outskirts of Stratford. Bakst pushed the maps to the seat between us, stretching cramps out of his back.

  “Puzzle solved?” I asked.

  He flashed me a smile similar to that on the face of a rogue hippo as it stomps on another Great White Hunter. “There is, of course, no trace of the well on modern maps. However, I am quite positive that I can find the general area where the well was located. I believe it is in a meadow not two fields away from where the Sadler cottage used to be.”

  “Wouldn’t a well have been close to the house?”

  “An astute observation, sir, and, indeed, there was such a source in the Sadlers’ back yard. Another well, however, was dug next to the farm’s principal barn. It would have been used for purposes of watering the family’s cattle and sheep. I must say I am filled with admiration for the old farmer. Who would have thought to look for buried manuscripts in a cow-paddock?”

  “So. What do we do now?”

  His small eyes narrowed, almost losing themselves in the expanse of fleshy cheek. “Our course of action depends on whether Salim and his people have reached the field by the time we get there. If I’m correct in my assumption that they’ll be waiting until nightfall before commencing their labors, we may be yet able to turn the tables and offer them a small surprise.”

  Chapter 32

  The late afternoon sun shone more firmly through the clouds as we passed the tourist buses streaming in and out of the car parks just outside Stratford. Instead of turning across the old stone bridge into the town, Bakst instructed Ablett to drive on and then gave him directions that soon had us navigating a series of narrow country lanes. Much of this time, Bakst’s head was again bent over his maps: he would follow the line of a road or track with his finger, glancing up occasionally as if to work out where we were, then return to his pondering. We were still not far from the town and, for a few minutes, I suspected that we were going round in circles.

  Eventually, Bakst ordered Ablett to turn onto a farm track that looked as though it was only ever used by tractors. The BMW bounced along the ruts to each side of the track, its muffler dragging along the weed-covered ridge in the center. Within a minute, we were surrounded by high, impenetrably-thick hedges. Bakst pointed to a gap in the hedgerow where gates opened on either side onto fields. Ablett pulled the car over and, flicking a switch under the dashboard, opened the trunk.

  The three of us climbed out of the car. The surrounding trees and hedges made it difficult for us to see far in any direction and there were no signs of other people. The isolation made me suspicious – if Bakst and Ablett’s intentions were really to get rid of me, this would be the ideal spot – and I watched them warily, ready to take action at the first sign of treachery. It seemed my companions intended to keep me around, though. Bakst walked to the rear of the car and beckoned to me and Ablett.

  Peering into the car’s trunk, I saw a collection of equipment that wouldn’t have look out of place in the Quartermaster’s stores at Aldershot. The gear included Army-style DPM combat jackets and bergens – military back packs – plus berets, helmets, Kevlar vests, boots and webbing belts with pouches for ammunition and water bottles. There was even a stock of field rations, chocolate bars and cans of dried food next to a small tin-sided personal cooker.

  I looked up at Bakst. “How nice. Are we going on a little hike?”

  He snorted and, reaching down, pulled aside a blanket at the rear of the trunk. A series of plastic racks held two rifles, both AR-15s, older guns once favored by the SAS, and a couple of silencer-fitted Sterling sub-machine guns. The Sterlings were also older equipment but had a reputation for being solid and reliable. Next to them, I saw a fat SS20 sniper’s lens, a couple of night scopes and a solitary .45 Colt Gunsite automatic. There was an empty clip next to the Colt but I didn’t need to guess where its twin was. I’d already seen Ablett use it.

  “What are you planning to do?” I asked Bakst. “Subdue Stratford and then invade Wales?”

  He waved a meaty hand over the assembled munitions. “Mr. Ablett and I believe in being ready for all contingencies, do we not, Mr. Ablett?”

  “I selected the equipment,” Ablett said quietly. “Think you can handle it?”

  “I could if I wanted to, but starting a war in a quiet English meadow doesn’t figure high on my list of personal ambitions.”

  “I have promised you riches if you share our enterprise,” Bakst told me. “Surely you realized, sir, that you would have to do something more to earn it than print off a few documents from a computer?”

  Ablett grinned at me. “Planning to send Salim a postcard, were you? D’you reckon that’s what your mate Thorpe would have done?”

  Before I could respond, Bakst moved closer to me. “I can assure you that the weaponry is a precautionary measure only. I must point out that we are dependant upon your services for this operation, Mr. Hastings. I alas, am no soldier and Salim has too many men for even the excellent Mr. Ablett to contain on his own. If we cannot count upon your services for this operation, we shall have no choice but to rethink our plans. So, before we go any further, you need to decide, if you’ll pardon my being blunt, whether you are in or out.”

  I took a moment and then nodded, my nose almost touching his.

  He reached into the trunk of the car and handed me the Colt and a button-down shoulder holster. “May I suggest you strap this to your person. Purely as a precaution.”

  I took it from him and, removing my jacket, fastened the holster around my shoulder and chest, ignoring the residual protests from my injured arm. Then I flicked the switch that released the Colt’s magazine and checked that it was fully loaded and that the rounds were real, not blanks. Bakst smiled and walked off down the track. I waited until Ablett pushed past me and then followed behind.

  ***

  Three hundred yards from where we’d left the BMW, Bakst held a finger to his lips and we knelt and peered through another gate. The field in front of us w
as part of a shallow, and apparently unpopulated, valley that stretched off for a few hundred meters in every direction. The meadow looked just the same as those around it but its center, Bakst told us, was where Shakespeare’s old friend had built his cattle barn and dug his well. I looked for signs of more recent digging on the field’s smooth surface but the plush grass was undisturbed. A few modern-day cows sheltered under trees from the evening sun, a few yards from a metal water trough that surely dated from the twentieth, rather than the sixteenth, century. Apart from the cows and the odd sparrow, there were no signs of life. If Salim’s people had been here, they must have left the scene, intending, as Bakst had predicted, to return after dark.

  Training took over. I climbed over the gate and took a longer look at the terrain. It was a pretty good spot for some quiet nocturnal digging. The shape of the valley meant that, even if someone had low-level lights in the field, they wouldn’t be seen from any distance. And the site was just remote enough to make it unlikely that anyone would come walking this way after dark. Maybe this was one reason why Hamnet Sadler had selected this location as a hiding place. He would, after all, have needed to work undisturbed in order to deposit his secret cache of papers in the well.

  I switched my attention to the problems involved in recovering the documents. If I’d been planning the operation, I decided, I’d leave things until the early hours of the morning, maybe 2 or 3 A.M.

  Besides its suitability for nefarious night-time activities, of course, this was also a great place for an ambush. I’d been trained, long ago, to always seek out the best place for a hide. Looking to my left, I picked the most likely spot, a copse of elm and elder trees that had probably been there since Elizabethan times. If this had been a military operation, that would have been the place I’d have stationed my troops. It offered good cover and an uninterrupted line of fire over the field.

  I glanced across at Ablett and saw that he was looking at the exact same spot. I figured I knew exactly what was in his mind and hoped that, like me, he was thinking about lines of fire in a purely academic sense.

  Chapter 33

  Ablett and I thought the same way about other things. For a start, we both rejected suggestions from Bakst that we find ourselves a restaurant for a nice evening meal. We needed to get into position as soon as possible, we told him, and he’d have to survive a night on the field rations he’d so thoughtfully stashed in the car. He held his hands over his expansive stomach and looked unhappy but eventually acceded.

  By the time it was getting dark, we’d moved the BMW a mile away from the field and jogged back into position, Ablett and I pulling Bakst behind us. We’d then settled him down in the middle of the copse, where he couldn’t do too much damage if he moved around, laying him on a ground sheet with a camouflaged groundsheet around him.

  Ablett and I worked out the best location for our hide and embarked on the next stage of preparation. Quartering the countryside around the meadow, we split up and started to scout the surrounding fields. Ablett took the area to the east and I watched in the bright moonlight as he moved stealthily along the hedgerow to my right. Seconds later, I took off in the opposite direction.

  We were looking for two things. The first was some sign that Salim or his people had had the same idea as us and hidden somewhere near the central field. The last thing we needed, should any action start, was to find ourselves outflanked. We were also checking for the presence of other people. If any sort of rumble did start, we needed to know if there was any possibility of innocent bystanders becoming curious and popping over to join in the fun.

  Like Ablett, I’d kitted myself out from the materiel in the back of Bakst’s car. I wore camouflaged battledress, including a beret and canvas boots: fortunately, the extra boots Bakst had brought were Ablett’s size and, once I put on an extra pair of socks, they fitted me comfortably enough. I rejected Bakst’s offer of a Kevlar vest. Although these things look good on TV programs, they’re heavy and, at best, only effective against handgun bullets: a round from a high-powered rifle will go straight through. I did put on some lightweight cotton gloves which, in addition to stopping you leaving fingerprints all over the place, are useful for soaking up sweat so that your hands don’t slip on gun butts. I still had the Colt strapped into its holster and I’d slipped a night vision scope into my tunic pocket.

  Properly kitted up, I made my way through the copse, heading westwards. The good news was that the woods gave me cover and seemed to go on for some miles. The downside was that moving through the undergrowth slowed me down and increased the risk that I’d make enough noise to tip off anyone else who was around. I proceeded cautiously, stopping every twenty meters and listening for signs of life. At one point, I saw a small fox trot across one of the fields in front of me, oblivious to my presence, but there were no other signs of life until I made my way past the first field and along the edge of the second.

  At first, I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. I edged my way along the hedgerow until the sound of voices was clearer. I dropped down and crawled forward. I smelled wood smoke and then saw the glow of lights. I crept another hundred meters, through another stand of trees, until I could see them clearly. It was a few moments before I understood who they were and why they were here. There were eight of them, five men and three women, all sitting around a campfire in the center of a rough circle of tents.

  I’d already guessed what lay beyond the camp but I pulled out my night scope and examined it anyway. There wasn’t much to see, just a pile of recently-dug earth and the bricks of a ruined wall. I refocused the scope and took a closer look at the campers sitting round the campsite. One of the men looked to be in his late fifties but his companions were much younger.

  Sliding the scope back into my jacket pocket, I backed carefully out of the clump of trees and circled round the camp to check out the remaining fields. At one point, I saw the lights of a farmhouse but it was at least another third of a mile from where I was and I saw no need to investigate further. I made my way back to the hide, moving more quickly now. Ablett had already returned and was talking in a low voice to Bakst. I decided to keep quiet about the campers I’d seen: they were some way away from us and it didn’t seem likely that they’d come visiting in the middle of the night. More to the point, I wouldn’t have put it past Ablett to nip over there and spray them with machine gun fire. I had enough on my conscience without adding the murder of more innocents.

  ***

  An hour later, Ablett and I were dug into a loose pile of leaves, about five feet apart, with camouflage-patterned groundsheets laid under and around our bodies. Besides the Colts, we’d equipped ourselves with the silenced Sterling sub-machine guns, from the collection in Bakst’s car. Ablett also had one of the AR-15 rifles, to which he’d attached the massive sniper’s scope. I wondered irrelevantly what we’d say if someone happened on us by chance: I guessed it would be hard to convince them that we were an emergency SWAT team from the local badger-spotting club. I just hoped we wouldn’t have cause to use our impressive array of firepower. Unless, I thought, I had Thorpe’s killer in my sites…

  The moon was a half-crescent, casting a tentative glow through the intermittent clouds. I lifted my night scope and did a careful sweep of the field, even though I knew Ablett had done the same thing not five minutes earlier. I could see no signs of movement apart from the occasional black and white blur as one of the cows lay down for the night. I risked movement and broke open one of the chocolate bars. Ablett looked at me as I chewed and I passed the remainder of the bar across to him.

  “You know what I said earlier,” he whispered, “about the Paras being a bunch of pansies?”

  “I remember.”

  I could sense as much as see his wolf-like smile. “I’ve been thinking that I might have been a bit harsh. But I’ve decided I meant every fuckin’ word.”

  ***

  My watch had a back-light feature and, every now and then, I pushed my head under the groundsheet a
nd checked the time. Eleven-thirty came and went and the next time I looked it was midnight. Ablett and I continued our sweeps with the night scopes but there were no signs of life other than the occasional stirring of the cattle, the rustles of nocturnal animals in the bush around us and the hoots of owls as they flew over the darkened fields. By 1A.M., I was wondering whether all our assumptions – that Salim had the map and that he’d show up here sometime after midnight – were right. I told myself that it all made perfect sense and that, if we were wrong, there wasn’t much else we could do anyway.

  Boredom set in and my mind wandered to memories that I’d rather have left buried. That cold, miserable night in the Balkans, we’d only taken the prisoners through a stroke of luck when the electrics in their ancient Land Rover had failed in the rain and one of our patrols had overwhelmed them and brought them in. We’d been looking for them, of course, ever since we’d found the member’s of Browning’s squad that they themselves had captured and tortured to death earlier that evening.

  Browning arrived hours later. He’d been at K-For headquarters, receiving his annual performance appraisal, when he’d heard the news. By the time he reached the ruined farmhouse we were using as a makeshift headquarters, rage burnt within him like a fire in a coal mine.

  I was concerned enough to order him to leave his weapon outside the room where we were holding our captives. He argued vehemently and I eventually pulled rank on him – he was still only a captain – which did nothing to improve his mood. When he went inside and stood over the two men and one woman who had sliced the skin from his soldiers’ living bodies, I could see the veins standing out in his neck.

  I still had no idea how far his inner demons would drive him, though, not until he knocked me back and grabbed my M16 rifle from my shoulder. I sprawled against the wall and, while I scrambled to regain my feet, he clicked off the gun’s safety and worked its action.