by Gwynn White
“—talking about the big picture—”
“—but I’m afraid I am rather pressed for time this afternoon.” Oswald started to rise.
Doller rocked back in his chair, raising both hands, palms out in a gesture that was half a stop! sign and half surrender. “Why’d you ask me to come here, Oswald? Why tell me what you’re going to do, when I already know you’re going to do it?” He suddenly grinned, not a pleasant sight. “My God, I know! You’re being chivalrous!”
Oswald rested splayed fingers on the table. Looking down at Doller, he said, “The British-German alliance is the anchor of peace in Europe. And yet you’ve no compunction about undermining the British Crown for political reasons. Remember the Ende affair? An German operator was caught approaching Alyx O’Braonain, the IRA’s pretender to the throne. His confession proved that he was working with BASI and the IMF. Why d’you think you’re still walking around London with your head on your shoulders, Gladfrid? Chivalry. The heritage we share. The only bulwark between civilization and chaos.”
Doller played nervously with his beer bottle. “I admire you guys, I really do.” A moment later he said, “I didn’t even know about that operation until you told us you had Ende.”
That was a significant confession, if true. Oswald sat back down.
“The Abwehr had nothing to do with that. It was the Bismarcks acting on their own. Archduke Rainer v d B is a great man, a living saint for sure. But his kids …” Doller shuddered.
“I had Rainer’s eldest daughter for a mother-in-law,” Oswild observed. “So I do know what you mean.”
Tristan’s late queen, Adolfina, had been a whimsical and cruel woman, as well as being very beautiful. She’d died at forty. The wags said that it had literally killed her to lose her looks.
“Well, I can’t speak for the younger Bismarcks,” Doller said. “But I do know that BASI has no interest in regime change in Great Britain. We would see that as highly destabilizing.”
“So I have your support.”
“We see this as being in our national interest, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Oswald had wanted much more. He saw that he was not going to get it. “Does that go for the IMF as well?”
Doller leaned forward. “The IMF’s forgotten its place,” he hissed. “It was supposed to take the place of the the Church, but you want to know what’s worse than a church? An unappointed ethics committee. Think they know what’s best for everyone. Fuck ‘em.”
“Indeed,” Oswald said. Their eyes met, and Oswald felt a wave of self-disgust.
“We won’t stop you,” Doller said. “We can’t do more. I am sorry. But we won’t stop you.”
Oswald got up to leave. This time, Doller stood as well. They parted in the hall outside the cell. The Abwehr man would leave by the unmarked entrance on Mylkside Street. He was a familiar face at Rocky’s but it was as well to be careful.
Oswald went down the front stairs. He used the telephone to contact NatChiv, where Alec Northumberland was in charge of the ops center in his absence.
“Launch TAILSPIN,” he said.
Twenty Minutes Later. National Chivalry Headquarters, London
Half a dozen phones were ringing as Oswald walked into the ops center.
Buried deep underground, the ops center occupied what had been the largest vault of the London Trust Bank, the previous tenant of the building that was now NatChiv HQ. The everyday radio setup had been massively expanded to enable realtime monitoring of Operation PREDATOR. At one long desk MI5 savants hunched in front of radio and screen consoles, skimming through the feeds from microphones and cameras. Another set of operators monitored the comms in use by Intelligence Company surveillance teams, as well as the police frequencies. Overflowing ashtrays and cups of cold coffee crowded every surface that was not occupied by electronics. Even the antique teleprinter had been recalled to service and was chattering out encoded sitreps from the B Teams, mostly in the north of the country, who had been instructed to eschew the telephone and use their field radios only. On the wall, a giant map was constantly being updated to show the locations of the Class A targets. A marker board bore fake orders. Everything looked exactly as it should. The sheer number of MI5 personnel in the room could be attributed to the fact that NatChiv, in its short history, had never mounted an operation on this scale before.
“Sir Malcolm Stuart on line two for you, Knight Commander.”
Oswald took Malcolm’s call in the inner office, an annex vault with a connecting window that allowed him to watch the operators at work. “Day.”
“It’s me.” Just those two little words transmitted nervous panic. Malcolm was Oswald’s man on the spot at Castle Arundel, the one place where Oswald had felt fairly confident nothing could go wrong, because nothing of any importance was to happen there. Now he thought: The khaki lackeys will always find a way to cock up.
“I called—”
“I know, sorry. I was at lunch. What’s happened?”
“Our sovereign has decided to join us,” Malcolm said. They didn’t have a code phrase for this eventuality because it had not been thought a possibility.
It made no sense.
“Where are you calling from?”
“Incident Control. What do you want me to do? He’s here!”
Oswald’s mind raced. Was the whole operation blown?
Why else would Tristan suddenly have decided to show up at the rehearsal?
Fear raged through his mind, scarcely controlled, but it was like the fear you felt right before a parachute jump, as you prepared to entrust your life to your own careful preparations and the quality of your equipment. His instinct was always to calculate every possibility and control for it. But sometimes you just had to jump.
“Sit tight, Malcolm.”
“I can do it. Let me do it.”
“No.”
TAILSPIN, only just authorized, would have to be cancelled. Or, no: he could redeploy the TAILSPIN team to Castle Arundel. It would mean a delay but probably not a fatal one.
“Do nothing, do you hear me? I’m sending Alec and his team to you.”
26
Leonie
An Hour Later. Castle Arundel
Leonie ran to the gap in the quadrangle wall, sweating inside her waterproof cape. One of the barbican towers still stood, roofless. The gate was gone and the other tower was a pile of rubble embedded in weeds. The first driver inched his face out, then pulled back to let his mate have a look, and then it was Leonie’s turn.
She peered around the rubble. A few trees dotted the outer ward but the cows had kept the grass down. She scrutinized the potholed route she would have to drive on the run-up to the motte. A quarter of a mile away in the rain, perched on its own manmade hill, the motte looked forbidding. Like a dead-drunk squaddie who might hit you if you touched him. She glimpsed something moving on the gray granite parapets at the same time as one of the ROCK snipers shouted on the net, “Acre, Gift One, that’s movement on White Three.”
Leonie jerked back behind the rubble. A distant crack! sounded from the motte. Of course it would just be a blank, and she felt silly for taking cover—but this was the life, all right! She’d a thousand times rather be here than holed up on the hillside with bracken down her jumper and the damp coming through her groundsheet.
She jogged back behind the other two drivers to their Rovers, which were parked with their engines running on the rough ground, out of sight from the castle. Two of the off-road vehicles had the assault team clinging on all over their roofs. These were ROCK knights bulked up by body armor, all in black, fearsome great knives and axes strapped to their webbing, pistols holstered on their thighs and PX-80 short machine guns slung on their chests. The other Rover—hers—had only two men sitting on its roof. They too looked comically musclebound due to the bulletproof hauberks they wore under their waterproofs, but their only weapons were pistols in arms belts, and their heads, like hers, were protected only by hoods.
&nb
sp; One of them was a lordling, Sir Philip Lancashire.
The other was King Tristan.
Too nervous to look at the king, she jumped into the Rover. In the passenger seat sat a plump man in full crimson-and-black livery, his cottony locks pulled back from a receding hairline. This was Sir Kent, an uncle by marriage of the king, and Knight Commander of the Wessex livery. He did not glance at Leonie but stared out the windscreen, which was half blocked by the king’s legs. He’s dying of nerves, she thought—berk.
Leonie had benefited from the rivalry between the Crown Army and the Wessex livery. General Stuart could hardly stop the king from observing the rehearsal if he wanted to. But he had stood up to Knight Commander Kent, refusing point blank to incorporate his men into his command structure. The resulting compromise put the king on a Rover driven by a soldier under General Stuart’s command—Leonie—and gave him ‘permission’ to tag along with the assault team. HM had accepted this gracefully, all jokes at his own expense.
Leonie smiled to herself. She thought HM had something up his sleeve.
For the rest of the men-at-arms the king brought with him had vanished. So had the scowling, barefoot geezer who’d talked to HM as if they were mates, and who ponged like a tramp. Leonie had overheard one of the ROCK knights telling another: “That’s HM’s spairjack maester.”
She folded her arms on the wheel and rested her forehead on them so she wouldn’t have to look at Sir Kent.
If only HM would do something. The Crown Army needed to be shown up for the joke they were. It was long past time for them to stop coasting on a forty-year-old reputation that no longer had a nodding acquaintance with reality. The shiny-arses needed to stop pocketing the funds that were supposed to buy the men’s kit. They needed to court-martial the officers who ran protection rackets in Ireland, pissing off the populace … and maybe then Dave would have a better-than-even chance of coming out of Belfast alive.
The engine was running, the windscreen fogging up, and still the snipers were yelling on the net.
“Acre, Gift Two, I can see smoke coming out of Red Four. Wait … yes, that is a thin trickle of black smoke.”
“Acre, acknowledged. Gift One?”
“Gift One, I can’t see anything. Wait … wait … there is a face at the window on White Four. I cannot identify it. More shouting. Wait! I just heard a shot,” the sniper said, and Leonie heard it at the same time, through her earpiece and her free ear.
Whilst all this was going on, the siege negotiators at Incident Control would be bargaining with the defenders in the castle, trying to bash out surrender terms. If this were real life they might succeed, but as it was they wouldn’t, or what would be the point of the exercise?
Hearing something behind the Rover, Leonie turned in her seat. Back at the bend in the road, the rain sparkled on bayonets and faces painted the cobalt and black of the British flag. The row of squaddies stretched across the road and into the trees on either side. Stuart had brought the main body of the siege party up.
It was just a gesture. By the time the khaki lackeys got to the motte, the ROCK assault team would have stormed it and secured it. They wouldn’t pass up this chance to impress the king in person.
“No helicopters,” Sir Kent said.
He was talking to her. “Sir?”
“No helicopters on this exercise, is that correct?”
“Yes, I mean no, sir. No helicopters.”
“Why not? With helicopters, a second assault team could fast-rope down onto the roof.”
He was questioning the verisimilitude of the exercise. Fair cop. “I don’t know, sir.”
“Acre, Frog One! The doors of the motte are opening, boots are coming out, the defenders are exiting!”
Leonie’s eyes opened wide. That was Mase up on the hill with his binos, actually being useful.
“Acre. Frog One, how many defenders in the bailey of the motte?”
“Bloody hundreds of them!” Sims came on the net, forgetting to announce his call sign. “They’re moving toward the gate. They’re going to open it!”
On the roofs of the other two Rovers, the assault team sat up, alert.
“The negotiators win,” Leonie said aloud. “They must be surrendering! What a bleeding let-down. Sorry, sir.”
There was a knock on Leonie’s window. The king smiled at her upside-down. She hastily rolled down the window.
“Grant, isn’t it?”
“Sire!”
“I hope you’re as good at driving as they told me. I want you to reverse back down that road so I can address the troops. Then we will advance on my word. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Sire!”
Clear as mud. She threw the Rover into gear. The assault team stared at her and someone yelled, “Halt!” She ignored them and backed onto the road. A bang on the roof signaled her to brake five yards from the first rank of bayonets.
“They’re coming out,” Sims babbled on the net. “They’re all coming out! Now they’re spreading out, they’re lining up! Where’s the sodding attackers?”
“Gift One, that is confirmed, they’re advancing towards me. No visible weapons.”
“And who’s that old geezer up on the parapet?” Sims said. “He looks like a bloody hedge wizard or something. Got a staff and all!”
“Acre. That is His Majesty’s spairjack maester,” the Haymaker radio control officer said, his tone barely controlled. “He should not be in the motte. “What is he doing?”
“Gift One. He has gone back in again.”
“Gift Three. The defenders are coming this way in single file. They are moving around to the back of the castle.”
Leonie heard the king standing up on the roof of the Rover.
“Haymakers! I am taking command of this unit as of now. Sling … rifles! At ease! Very good. When I give the word you will march towards the motte. Any questions?”
“When’s scoff, Your Majesty?” someone shouted cheekily.
Tristan laughed along with the men. “Haymakers … advance!”
Sir Lancashire slapped the roof. Leonie drove forward at a walking pace. Instead of chauffeuring the king into action, she was leading a bloody parade. She would definitely get back-squadded for this.
They passed the other two Rovers and jolted towards the rubble of the gate.
Lord Stuart himself came on the net. “Acre One. Chimera Three, what the hell are you doing?”
“Chimera Three! I am following orders from His Majesty!” Leonie said woodenly.
“Acre One, what orders?”
Sir Kent fumbled for his own pressel. “This is Knight Commander Kent! The king has now taken command of this exercise. The previously existing command structure should consider itself stood down, stood down! Acknowledge, please!”
The Haymakers clumped up to get through the gap in the wall. Leonie drove ahead of them through the ruined quadrangle, feeling exposed. The other two Rovers trailed after them.
She could see the defenders now. Weaponless, looking as dispirited as she felt, they formed a cordon halfway around the little hill which the motte sat on top of. What was the king up to? This didn’t feel like a military exercise anymore. It felt … scary.
HM jumped to the ground, as lean and lithe as a man half his age. “Come on,” he said to Leonie. “Join in.”
Leonie plodded after him through the wiry brown tangles of grass. She could not see any smoke, black or otherwise, from the south face of the motte. But the—the atmosphere, the aura—of the castle had changed. It no longer looked as if it were telling them to go away. It looked like a huge shaped charge all wired up and ready to detonate.
The king produced a loudhailer. “Move in! Form a circle around the hill!”
Leonie ended up between two Haymakers.
“Sod me, it’s a girlie. What are you doing after this, love?”
“Probably having a stroll down to the unemployment office,” Leonie snarled.
The other two assault teams sat on their Rovers, o
bviously stumped, not knowing what to do.
The king jogged around the outside of the circle. His hood was down. The rain furred his grey-and-brown-streaked hairknot. “Join hands!” he ordered them through his loudhailer. “Don’t be shy!”
“’E’s round the twist.”
“Give us a paw, may as well keep him happy.”
“Ooh, you haven’t half got calluses. Not like a girlie at all.”
“I don’t like this,” Leonie said. “Can’t you see something’s wrong? Can’t you feel it?”
“I’d rather have a feel of you.”
But the other man said, “I’m all over gooseflesh. Now that you mention it. I thought it was just me.”
“Circle, step to your right! Good! And we do the happy clappy,” the king intoned, raising a laugh. “But no clapping! Keep holding hands. Keep moving to your right!”
Leonie shuffled to her right. Anti-clockwise. Widdershins. There was a strange pressure building up in the back of her throat. She didn’t know if she wanted to laugh or sob. As they left the Rover further behind, she looked back and saw the other two assault teams spreading out warily.
On the net, the observers were trying to locate Colonel Roebuck, the officer who should have been in charge of the defenders.
Mase squawked, “Frog One, someone’s coming out on the parapet! Might be him!”
Leonie looked up. She saw someone standing behind the battlements of the motte but it was not Colonel Roebuck. The robe identified the figure as HM’s spairjack maester. He did look like a hedge wizard. He raised his arms. Faintly, she heard snatches of singsong drifting down from the battlements, and all the little hairs on the back of her neck stood up.
“Look at that.”
“That’s a heat mirage.”
“It ain’t sodding hot, if you noticed.”
The air above the motte had gone wobbly. The sky shimmered—strobed. One second it was grey rainclouds, the next second it was black as night, or maybe the effect was in their eyes. Leonie’s throat felt like she’d got something stuck in it. The air was heavy with static electricity.
