To be honest, I can’t remember getting out of the Espace. All I could think of was this single image, the hideous mutilation that had once been my best mate’s face. I could hear shouting from the Bubs. They were rising from cover and a couple had set off down the road.
I took one look and began to run. I’ve never run faster in my life. I ran back round the corner, spotted a track up through the loose scree beside the road, and went for it. I pumped and pumped, forcing the cold mountain air deep into my lungs, and by the time I’d made the treeline there was still no sign of the Bubs. They must have stopped at the Espace, I thought. They must be seeing what I just saw. My fault, bastard.
I still had the map, thank God. I eased deeper into the trees, keeping an eye on the road below, and then set off at a fast jog, telling myself there was nothing I could have done to save Rob’s life. The best thing now was to find Jeff Bullen. His house was called Ty-Groes. On the map I’d recognised a feature of that name in a remote corner of the Conway Valley. A tiny road ran down to a property beside a river. By my calculations, it was about twenty five miles away. I was there by eleven o’ clock.
Once again, I had the advantage of cover. I lay full length on the warm carpet of pine needles on the flank of the valley, scoping the farmhouse below. There was a Range Rover parked in front and a couple of horses in the paddock at the back of the property. If you were looking for somewhere idyllic to hide yourself away, then this had to be it.
I was still wondering if this place really belonged to Jeff Bullen when I caught the distant growl of a diesel. Moments later, I was looking at a black 4x4 pick-up as it swung in through the gate below. Two men got out. Bubs. They knocked on the front door and were admitted. One of them emerged after a couple of minutes, escorting a bulky figure in jeans and a plaid shirt. They both got into the 4 x 4 and drove away. One Bub left, I thought. Plus whoever else might be inside the house.
My only option, I knew, was to wait. The sun edged steadily westwards and the shadows began to lengthen on the wooded slopes of the mountain beyond the river. Then, around five’o’clock, a door opened and a woman stepped out, accompanied by a couple of dogs. Behind her was the Bub. He looked up towards the trees where I was still hiding, checked his watch, then went back inside. The woman whistled to the dogs and began to climb towards me.
It was the biggest of the two labradors which found me first. I’d retreated deeper into the trees, nervous about the gamble I was about to take. This woman, whoever she was, might easily betray me. On the other hand, given my lack of options, I had no choice but to trust my luck.
The dog, at least, seemed pleased to see me. It barked to begin with, then nuzzled my knee, demanding affection. I gave it a pat or two, aware of the woman standing over me.
“Who on earth are you?” she said. Refined voice. Posh.
I gave her my name. I seemed to strike a chord.
“You’re the runner.” She said. “You’re the one who’s making the stand. I read your thing on the internet. Extremely brave, if I may say so.”
I thanked her. She was staring down at me.
“What on earth happened to your face?”
I told her everything. Anna. Rob. The Bubs down the road. The lot.
“Ghastly.” She shook her head. “The times we live in, just awful.”
This sounded hopeful.
“Is your husband’s name Bullen?”
“Yes. They’ve just taken him away.”
“Why?”
“I wish I knew.” She frowned. “One has one’s suspicions, of course, but…” She bent to slip a lead on the dog. …“God knows”
She seemed to understand that I was on the run and I sensed she had a lot more to say but the Bub had given her fifteen minutes to walk the dogs and any minute now he’d come looking for her. At this, she turned to go back down the hill. Then she changed her mind and led the way to a thicket of trees totally screened from the farmhouse below.
“Jeff’s in the RAF,” she began. “Has been all his working life. The last couple of years he’s been C/O at an airbase up in Scotland. They’ve got reconnaissance jets, plus a squadron of big transport aircraft. At first, before the take over, he couldn’t have been happier. It was his last posting before retirement. He loved it. The scenery, the people, everything.” She looked at me, expecting a reaction. I gestured for her to carry on. “Then the generals took over and everything changed. Don’t ask me what happened up there because Jeff’s never told me but I just know it’s something awful. He’s changed. He’s become a different man. I can see it. He comes home every couple of months for spells of leave. He can’t sleep properly. He drinks too much. And when I ask what’s going on, he just shakes his head. If you want the truth, I think he’s living in denial.”
“About what?”
“I’ve no idea. And that just makes it worse. Then those horrible Bub people turned up this morning and just took him away. No explanation. Barely time to say goodbye.”
“So what happens now? With your husband?”
She looked at me for a long moment, then shrugged.
“I haven’t the faintest.” She said. “All I know is that part of the base has been taken over by that big private security firm, the same lot that employ all the Bubs. Jeff seems to think they’re American. Maybe that’s got something to do with it. You tell me…”
It was the dogs who heard the footsteps. They went tearing off down the hill, barking like mad. I took a couple of steps after them, then stopped. The Bub was fifty metres away. Mrs Bullen had seen him too.
“Run.” She said.
The helicoptors found me at dawn next morning. They’d been airborne all night, criss-crossing the valley, using infra-red and searchlights. Infra-red can detect body heat. No matter how hard I ran, I had no chance.
A black 4x4 took me to Liverpool. I sat in the back between two Bubs. When I asked for something to drink, one of them gave me a bottle of water. We sped through the city until we got to the docks. They stretch north for miles, stacks and stacks of containers beside the huge cranes. At the far end, a high chain link fence, topped with razor wire, surrounded a complex that extended from the main road to the quayside. Once again, there was a sandbagged entrance and more Bubs demanding ID. I seemed to be back with the internees, except that this place definitely had a more sinister feel. For once, my question sparked a response.
“What’s all this?” I’d asked.
One of the Bubs threw me a look. He was smiling.
“We call it the Removals Centre.” He said. “You must have been a very bad boy.”
The Removals Centre came as a shock. This was no trading estate superstore hastily adapted for hundreds of internees. For one thing, there seemed to be far fewer inmates. And for another, we were banged up in individual cells. Someone had thought hard about this place, designed it properly, invested a bit of money. From the start I realised that getting out wouldn’t be a simple proposition.
Induction came in the form of a printed, much-thumbed booklet, waiting for me in my windowless cell. I was to receive three meals a day, served through the hatch in my cell door. There would be an exercise period of fifteen minutes every afternoon but any form of conversation with other prisoners was strictly forbidden. Before lock-up in the evening, I was allowed a five-minute visit to the showers at the end of my cell block. Otherwise I’d have to use the bucket beside my bedroll.
Days went by without any sign of the promised exercise period. After pushing myself so hard for years on end, this began to mess with my head. I remembered the stand-up comic, Marcus, in Wall Fixings. He’d called captivity “limboland” and he was right.
The eery silence outside my cell door was also getting on my nerves. I started to wonder whether there was anyone else in the place. Plus I thought too hard about Anna, and about Rob. My best mate had probably died because I’d been stupid enough t
o buy a map. My fault, bastard.
When the meals arrived, thrust through the hatch, I started to ask questions. What was going on? Why wasn’t I allowed out for exercise? I was a world-class athlete, for God’s sake. I deserved the chance to stretch my limbs. But there never seemed to be a body or a voice on the end of the hand that held the tray. Only more silence, more frustration. And the first prickles of something else. Fear.
Then came the afternoon when a key scraped in the lock and I was led out into the blinding sunshine. My minder, it turned out, was only too happy to answer my list of questions.
“You want a spot of exercise? No problem, son. You want me to find you something to read? I’ll do my best. Anything else, you just ask…”
I nodded, still gazing round. The exercise yard looked like a playground, enclosed on all four sides by a high chain-link fence. Expecting to see other prisoners, I was surprised to find it empty. It was a decent size though, and given fifteen minutes exercise time I set myself a target of four thousand metres.
I counted every one of them, sprinting alternate laps. In the hot sunshine, it felt good to be sweating again. At the end of the session, my minder threw me a towel. I’d noticed a low brick-built structure nearby without windows. It seemed to go on forever and I wanted to know what it was. As promised, my minder was only too happy to oblige.
“It’s a meat safe…” he said, “…a huge deep freeze. All the beef from Argentina used to come in here for storage.”
“And now?”
“Now?” He shot me his Scouse smile. “Now’s different.”
Just how different, I was shortly to find out. It happened like this. The following day, in the morning, my minder was back again. He gave me a pair of wellington boots, thick socks, a pair of sheepskin gloves, and a bulky winter anorak with a hood. Once I’d got dressed, he led me out again. We went round the exercise yard to a back entrance in the same meat safe building I’d noticed the previous afternoon. This entrance was sealed by a roll-up metal door. Just now the entrance was open, plenty wide and high enough for the white articulated truck that had just backed in.
The minder walked me along the side of the lorry. Already I could feel the cold breath of the meat store beyond the back of the truck. A separate set of heavy doors to the store itself yawned open and beyond was nothing but a thin grey mist as the freezing air condensed inside.
The minder suggested I put up the hood on my anorak. The cold, he said, could be nippy on the ears. I nodded, wondering why I’d been brought here. When I asked, he gestured up at the rails suspended from the ceiling. These rails connected to a similar set in the back of the artic. He nudged me gently towards the meat safe.
“You’ll find a couple of dozen inside.” He said. “Just drag them out, one after the other, and push them into the truck, yeah?”
“A couple of dozen what?” I was still gazing up at the rails. When no answer came I looked round but the minder had gone.
Already chilled to the bone, I stepped into the meat safe. The freezing mist made it impossible to get an idea of the scale of the place. Without being able to see the surrounding walls, it felt huge, never-ending. Following the rails on the ceiling, I kept going. Then, very faintly, I made out shapes ahead. The closer I got, the more solid the shapes became. They were hanging by meathooks from the rails. They were about my size. They were bound, hand and foot by plastic cable ties. Upside down, I realised they had faces.
I stopped, and looked over my shoulder. I could see nothing but the chill grey curtains of mist. I shut my eyes, tried to steady my pulse, tried to tell myself that this wasn’t happening. It had to be a dream, a nightmare, some trippy drug they’d slipped me in the lunchtime stew. Anything but the frozen naked corpses hanging by their ankles from the meathooks in front of me, fingers and toes blackened with frostbite.
I opened my eyes again, took another couple of steps forward, cocked my head to get a better view. Then, as they must have planned, it hit me. Not any old body. Not some stranger who’d overstepped the line and paid the price. But the one person in the world who could have brought me to this vile place.
Anna.
I reached out to touch her. Her flesh had the texture of cold marble. For a long moment I just stood there, staring at her, shamed by her nakedness, her icyness, her deadness. I should have done more. I should have come looking earlier, before she was ghosted away. I should have burst out of my pathetic little bubble, forgotten all about lap times and gold medals, tracked her down, protected her, kept her safe. Being Anna, she’d have enlisted me in her cause, taught me how to protest, how to organise, how to hurt the Regime in countless little ways, how to run when the going got tough. In the end, they’d probably have caught us both. But that way, at least, we might have died together.
That night, and over the days to come, the feel of Anna beneath my fingertips stayed with me. She seemed to have sustained no damage. Apart from frostbite, I couldn’t see any marks or bruises on her body. The expression on the chilled mask of her face might even have been a smile. But the blueness of her eyes and that curl of the lips haunted me. Had the cold killed her? Had she hung there upside down and slowly frozen to death?
The more I thought about it, the longer the list of questions. Where did the truck take these corpses? And what happened at journey’s end? There had to be a connection to the RAF base up in Scotland and when I remembered Mrs Bullen’s description of her husband’s growing sense of torment, things became clearer. Maybe he’d had to become part of this grotesque production line. Maybe these trucks were driven onto some big grey anonymous transport aircraft and flown west, way out over the Atlantic Ocean. Dropped out of the back, the bodies would sustain the kind of damage the journo had discovered in western Ireland. Plus they’d be showing signs of frostbite.
I lay in my cell, staring up at the ceiling, trying to imagine what it must be like. You’d hear the clunk as the pilot lowered the loading ramp at the back of the aircraft. Then would come the roar of the engines as he increased power and pulled the huge plane into a steep climb. The back doors of the truck would already be open. I knew how easily the bodies moved on the overhead rails. One by one, stiff as boards, they’d drop from the truck, bounce towards the lowered ramp, and then roll into oblivion. No one had touched them. Only gravity was to blame. And the next consignment was liable to include me.
Elite athletes have total self-belief. It wouldn’t happen, I told myself. Somehow I’d get through.
Or maybe not.
It’s the 18th of August, 2012. Apart from my minder, I haven’t talked to another human being for weeks. Then, after an earlier lunch than usual, that same minder appears.
He takes me outside and we end up in some kind of social club that must have been used by the staff. There’s a bar at one end and a TV on the wall at the other. Half a dozen other prisoners are already seated in a semi-circle of chairs, staring up at the big plasma screen. I recognise the Olympic stadium in East London, and the pattern of the hurdles on the running track. The stadium is full to bursting. It’s the final of the 3000 metres steeplechase.
I know every one of these runners. I know their best times, what music they like, where they last went on vacation. In the absence of the favourite, me, I also know who’ll probably win. His name is Abaka. He runs for Kenya.
The gun goes and they set off fast. Really fast. By the end of the third lap, the field has thinned and Abaka has tucked himself behind the pacemaker’s shoulder. The pacemaker is an American, Drew Sheridan. Last time I saw him, we talked motorbikes.
Drew is pushing it on. By now, he should be knackered but somehow he seems to be running even faster. I look hard at his leg movement as he goes over the water jump but there’s no sign of fatigue. At the start of the final lap, unbelievably, he begins to open a lead over Abaka. If anything, it’s the Kenyan who’s beginning to tire.
The crowd are on their feet.
In close-up, Abaka is reaching deep inside himself to summon that final surge of energy, that last handful of raw courage to close the gap and take Drew on the home straight.
It doesn’t work. He’s out of gas. And it’s the American, arms raised, who crosses the line.
I look at the time. 7.57.63. It’s an Olympic record but I’ve run faster. No question about it. I could have won gold.
The other prisoners are looking at each other. Like me, they’ve no idea what we’re doing here, why we’ve been allowed this glimpse of the outside world. On screen, Drew Sheridan is climbing onto the winner’s plinth. He bends to receive the medal. The Stars and Stripes flutter on the tallest flagpole. And then the band plays the American national anthem.
Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed, at the twilight’s last gleaming?
The music ends. The screen fades to black. There’s a moment of total silence. Then a door opens on the other side of the room and three men walk in. They’re wearing wellington boots and thick winter anoraks. Their hands are gloved with sheepskin mittens. They study us for a moment, then one of them nods towards the still-open door.
“Well, gentlemen?” He says quietly, “Are you ready?”
***
The Ghosts of 2012 Page 4
