Rules of Engagement

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘There’ll be three Emergency Powers Acts,’ he said. ‘The first goes through tonight. The others are imminent. Once they’re on the Statute Book, the machinery will be in place. After that, it simply remains for you to use it.’ He paused for a moment, then swung abruptly into the coned-off lane. A police motorcyclist from the rear of the convoy was beside him in seconds, waving him to halt. Without slowing, Davidson reached inside his jacket and produced a pass. The policeman glanced at it through the window, nodded, and snapped a quick salute. They were still doing 50 mph. Davidson resumed the conversation. The same soft voice. The same hard facts.

  ‘I think you’ll find you have all the authority you need,’ he said. ‘You’ll be able to do more or less anything you want. Except sleep.’

  Goodman smiled, a bid to warm the atmosphere between them.

  ‘What do you mean,’ he said, ‘exactly?’

  Davidson turned into the roundabout and acknowledged the police motorcyclist’s farewell wave with a curt nod.

  ‘Well …’ he said, ‘take requisitioning. Your authority will be virtually limitless. You can requisition anything you like. Food. Fuel. Transport. Even people. You can take them off the streets. Out of their homes. You can put them to work. You can put them into uniform. Behind bars. You can even have them shot’ – he glanced across – ‘if that seems appropriate.’ He slowed briefly for a pair of cyclists. ‘I’ll let you have the briefing paper on that one. We revised it last month. Provision for Emergency Judicial Sanctions.’

  ‘Thanks very much,’ Goodman said drily.

  Davidson ignored the irony, easing the big Rover past the cyclists and then filtering left to take advantage of a short cut to the Civic Centre where Goodman worked. Goodman glanced across at him, impressed.

  ‘Know this city well?’

  Davidson nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Been down a lot?’

  ‘Never.’

  Goodman gazed at him, looking for some ghost of sense in it all, some glint of light between the clipped, curt responses, some hint that the man was, at the very least, human. To his surprise, Davidson obliged. He pulled to a halt at the traffic lights at the entrance to the Central Square, his gloved fingertips tapping out some rhythm on the pommel of the gear stick. The tone of his voice had turned lightly conversational. He even appeared to be smiling.

  ‘Your friend Clive,’ he began, ‘the one you were staying with last night.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Davidson looked across at him. The smile, if anything, widened.

  ‘He’s in Greece for a month,’ he said. ‘Patmos.’

  Goodman gazed at him for a moment or two, then turned his head and looked out of the window. A girl of about eighteen was trying to settle a baby in a pram. A man with a briefcase was looking at the sky. That feeling again. Events out of control. The world gone mad.

  ‘I know,’ he said flatly.

  Gillespie sat in his armchair in the long, narrow sitting room. Behind the glare of the two powerful TV lights, he could just make out the cameraman humped over his tripod, and the shape of the sound recordist, bending over his dials. Annie sat directly in front of him, cross-legged on the carpet. She was bent towards him, forward over the carpet, a pose he recognized, intense, sympathetic, trying to nudge, or tease, or shame him into parting with his tiny fragment of the Falklands War.

  There was a brief silence. Gillespie could hear the cat scratching at the kitchen door. Annie leant forward again, the softest of prompts.

  ‘OK …’ she said for the third time, ‘you were a Troop Sergeant.’

  Gillespie nodded but said nothing. Annie gazed at him.

  ‘Would you mind saying that?’ she said. ‘For the camera?’

  Gillespie smiled. The interview had been like this from the off, a succession of false starts, punctuated by half-whispered instructions from Annie. For the life of him, he couldn’t understand why they were bothering to go on. It was a game he’d consented to play. For nearly half an hour he’d said nothing of any consequence. Now it was surely time to stop.

  ‘I was a Sergeant …’ he said wearily.

  ‘In the Marines …’

  ‘In the Marines …’ He paused again. This time she said nothing. He sucked his teeth a moment. ‘43 Commando,’ he said, ‘B Company.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And we were in the Falklands.’

  There was a long silence. Gillespie could hear the purr of the camera. Abruptly, Annie rocked back on her heels and cleared her throat. Her voice was firmer, less patient. Film stock obviously wasn’t as cheap as he’d thought.

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘OK, let’s take it on, then. You’re in the Falklands, and the war’s well under way, and you’ve trekked across —’

  ‘Yomped.’ Gillespie smiled his nicest smile. Annie acknowledged his correction with the briefest of nods.

  ‘OK, you’ve yomped across the island, and you’re at the bottom of Mount Harriet, and it’s coming on dark, and you’re in a firefight with the Argies, and you’ve lost half a dozen men, and —’

  ‘Seven,’ said Gillespie. The smile had gone.

  ‘Seven men.’ She paused. ‘So what happened then?’

  Gillespie looked at her, refusing to accept the proffered invitation. Her voice softened, and her hands began to move, shaping a way forward through the story.

  ‘You saw white flags, didn’t you? And you went forward to take the surrender?’ She paused. Gillespie said nothing. ‘The officer was shot by an Argie sniper …’ Another pause. Gillespie looking at her, confirming nothing, denying nothing, giving nothing away. ‘So the battle started all over again. Until they surrendered properly …’ She smiled, a gleam of white in the half-darkness beneath the lights. ‘So what happened then?’ She paused. ‘Dave …?’ Gillespie shook his head, closed his eyes, very still. Annie leant forward again, her voice no more than a whisper. ‘You said they looked really young … afterwards … lying there.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes. And you said it was raining.’

  Gillespie opened his eyes, looking beyond Annie, beyond the camera, at the dim oblong of daylight sectioned by his venetian blinds. He remembered the curtains of rain trailing across the sodden moorland. And the padre on his knees in the wet tussock. And the way the wind kept lifting the corners of the ponchos draping the neat line of dead bodies. They’d buried them near by. Three hours of solid digging. In the room there was a long silence. Then another voice. The cameraman’s.

  ‘Fifty feet,’ he said.

  Annie nodded, the mood broken, the moment gone. She tried to keep the frustration out of her voice but it didn’t work.

  ‘OK, OK,’ she said briskly, ‘let me ask one more question, then we’re through.’ She paused, turning back to Gillespie. ‘The war’s over. We’ve won. It’s three years later …’ She hesitated for barely an instant. ‘You’re in Northern Ireland. It’s 1985 …’ Gillespie was watching her closely now, alert, wary. She smiled at him. ‘A man gets himself killed. A man called Dessie McMullen …’ She paused again, letting the two words sink in. ‘Name mean anything to you?’

  Gillespie began to say something, a query, a question, then stopped. His face hardened. He nodded towards the door.

  ‘Out,’ he said, ‘all of you.’

  Annie looked at him a moment before getting up. He knew at once he’d over-reacted.

  ‘Well, well …’ she said softly. ‘So it is true.’

  Two

  Mid morning, in London, video news pictures arrived down the line in the Gray’s Inn Road studios of ITN. They came from Scottish Television, in Glasgow, and the footage had been shot at dawn that morning by an enterprising amateur cameraman at Machrihanish, a NATO airbase at the southern tip of the Mull of Kintyre.

  In dim light, at extreme distance, the pictures showed RAF service personnel loading long cylinders aboard four-engined aircraft with American Navy markings. The cylinders had the suggestion of fins at one end. It took two me
n and a small wheeled hoist to carry them. They looked heavy.

  The pictures were viewed by the ITN defence correspondent. He recognized the planes at once. They were Lockheed Orions, flown by the US Navy on anti-submarine patrols. About the cylinders, though, he wasn’t so sure. He ran the pictures three more times before lifting a phone and dialling a London number from memory. Thirty minutes later, a cab deposited a small, neat man in a black suit outside the ITN studios. The defence correspondent met the visitor at the kerbside. They shook hands, old friends, and took the lift to the editing suites on the first floor.

  The man in the black suit viewed the Scottish footage twice before stopping the replay machine on a freeze frame. The frame showed two sets of RAF technicians, both attending the mystery cylinders. One of the cylinders was in perfect profile, a blur of black letters stencilled around one end. The man in the black suit hesitated for a moment or two, peered closely at the screen, then confirmed that the cylinders were American robot underwater mines, known as CAPTORS. These mines could recognize the underwater noise signatures of Soviet submarines and surface vessels. They could release automatically and home on the target noise. They had a range of 1000 metres, and were nuclear-capable. Seeded in sufficient numbers on the seabed across the Greenland – Iceland – UK Gap, they could effectively fence off the North Atlantic to marauding Soviet hunter-killer submarines. With elements of the US Sixth Fleet racing north to retrieve the helpless Trident submarine, it was – said the man in black – an obvious, if provocative, move.

  The defence correspondent got up from his chair and switched on the light. A pile of video cassettes lay on the windowsill. News stories already a day old. American arms convoys arriving in Southampton. Royal Marines digging in above the Arctic circle. Old ladies in Streatham queueing for flour and sugar. Where did this latest footage figure in the crisis? The man in the black suit smiled at the question but didn’t take his eyes off the screen. He had a curious accent, Home Counties English with a hint of New York.

  ‘We’re way down the line,’ he said finally, ‘way down.’

  Albie Curtis had been in the traffic jam for nearly half an hour before the car phone began to trill. He sat in the big BMW, chewing the remains of his third roll-up, glowering balefully at the back of an ancient brown Allegro. Normally, at this time in the morning, he’d be at the garage within minutes. The city’s business rush hour would be over, the roads would be clear, one of the lads would have a brew on, and he’d be settling into his first coffee of the day. Instead of which, he was locked into a mile or so of stationary cars, listening to Mick’s trash tapes, and wondering what on earth had given him a taste for Verdi. He turned the volume down on the cassette player and picked up the phone, recognizing at once the voice on the other end.

  ‘Mick,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Yeah, me …’ there was the briefest pause, ‘so where the fuck are you?’

  Albie glanced out of the window. A youth of about twelve was selling an old lady a bunch of bananas.

  ‘Commercial Road,’ he said, ‘by the market.’

  ‘What are you doing there?’

  ‘Waiting for the traffic.’

  ‘At this time of day?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He paused, picking his teeth. ‘What of it?’

  ‘You’re supposed to be at the garage, that’s what.’ Albie heard Mick sniff, and pulled a face. Another night on the white powder. Another fifty quid up his nose. Mick cleared his throat.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘Harry wants a word. Both of us. Bring the books round. We’re due at eleven.’

  The phone went dead and the Allegro, at last, began to move. Albie eased the clutch out, and the BMW purred forward. Harry Cartwright was Mick’s posh accountant, the man who had taken Mick aside, and groomed him, and flattered him, and funded him, and had given him the kind of fancy ideas that had turned Mick’s head. Without Harry, there’d have been no nightclub, no mail order business, no BMW, and no funny games with the razor blade and the Woolies mirror. They’d be back in the building trade, doing what they knew best: toshing up old properties and selling them on. Good steady money. The odd nonsense with a stubborn tenant. The odd visit with the dog. The odd run-in with the greedier estate agents. But nothing complicated or risky. Nothing they couldn’t handle.

  Recently, though, Mick had begun to change. He’d thrown out his jeans and graduated to Armani suits and an Afro perm. A big mortgage from Harry had bought him a flat-fronted three-storey period house in one of the city’s new conservation areas. He’d acquired carriage lamps for the front, and gold taps for the bathroom, and a tall skinny bird called Angie who cooked weird meals and read books in French and patently regarded Albie as a relic from Mick’s past. Something faintly Neanderthal. Something better discarded.

  At first, Albie had viewed it all as an aberration, as temporary as a cold in the head. After all, he knew Mick backwards. They’d been at school together, got pissed together, pulled birds together, fought as a team. Mick, sure, had always been the flashier of the two, preoccupied with appearances, quick on his feet, brilliant with the chat. But when the situation got especially dodgy, on the street, or in a pub, or when they got shafted on a deal, it had always been Albie who’d sorted it out, with his small, hard stare, and his talent for real violence. The bond between them had been tight as a drum. Best friends in childhood. Mates in adolescence. But everything, unaccountably, had changed.

  The traffic began to move faster. Mick’s garage lay in a cluster of old buildings in the shadow of the dockyard wall. Mick had bought it on Harry’s advice eighteen months earlier, scenting a windfall profit if and when a London-based property company bought up the land for redevelopment. Until that moment came, he was happy to keep the place turning over: cut-price servicing, bent MOTs, retread tyres, and the kind of glass-fibre and jollop repair jobs that most garages wouldn’t touch. Albie had been installed to keep an eye on it all, a job he’d resented at first, but he’d pulled the place together, and got hold of a couple of lads on the YOP scheme, and now the garage was the one element in Mick’s infant business empire that actually turned a profit. Without the garage, Mick had recently admitted, they’d be struggling.

  The traffic queue rounded a corner and stopped again. An Army bulldozer was backing across the road, its metal tracks scoring the black tarmac. On the pavement, two squaddies kept pedestrians back while the bulldozer stopped and the engineer at the controls shifted gear. Then it lurched forward, over the pavement, the metal scoop lowering as it approached a chest-high brick wall. The wall disintegrated in a cloud of dust and rubble, and the bulldozer paused for barely a moment before clattering forward again, and slewing hard left, disappearing behind the remains of an old warehouse.

  Albie gazed after it, the dust still thick in the air, then pulled the BMW out of the traffic queue and accelerated hard down the middle of the road. Seventy yards away was a small turning on the right which led to the garage. There was a line of oil drums across the mouth of the road, and coils of barbed wire behind. Beside the drums stood a policeman. With the policeman was another squaddie. He was wearing a combat helmet, and cradled a small, squat rifle. Albie pulled the car to a halt, and lowered the electric window. The policeman bent towards the window. Albie nodded at the bulldozer, now visible again through the gap between two buildings. Another wall had fallen. More rubble. More dust.

  ‘What’s this, then?’

  The policeman looked bored.

  ‘Emergency regulations, sir. Sorry. No entry.’

  ‘I work here.’

  Albie indicated the garage, two faded blue fold-back doors in a row of industrial units. The policeman frowned for a moment, running his finger down a list of names on a clipboard. The finger stopped.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Mr Rendall.’

  ‘Curtis. Rendall owns it. I run it.’

  ‘I’ll give you a telephone number, Mr Curtis.’

  ‘I don’t want a telephone number. I want to go to work. OK?’
>
  He engaged gear, and eased the BMW towards the line of oil drums. The policeman and the squaddie exchanged glances. The squaddie took half a step forward, bringing the tip of the gun up as he did so. The policeman bent to the window again. He scribbled down a number on a pad.

  ‘It’s 674556,’ he said, without looking up.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The phone number.’ He tore the sheet of paper from the pad, and offered it through the window. Albie ignored it. The policeman let it flutter onto his lap. ‘Ask for Mr Prior,’ he said, ‘and he’ll tell you what to do.’ Albie gazed down at the number in his lap. Then up again. Behind the bulldozer were a couple of yellow JCBs clawing at the remains of the warehouse. There were soldiers everywhere, rolls of barbed wire, piles of timber posts, a small mountain of sandbags. Albie shook his head. It looked like a film set.

  ‘I’m not with you,’ he said, ‘I don’t understand. What is all this?’

  The policeman shrugged and invited the squaddie into the conversation with a jerk of his head. The squaddie bent to the window. His breath smelled of chewing gum. He had a thick Scots accent.

  ‘GDA,’ he said.

  ‘Yer what?’

  ‘Ground Defence Area. Priority installations. Key points. Like your dockyard here.’

  ‘Oh.’ Albie looked genuinely blank. ‘So who are you defending it against?’ He paused. ‘Me?’

  The squaddie smiled a thin, mirthless smile, revolving the gum in his mouth. Then he nodded at the number on Albie’s lap.

  ‘I’d hurry along if I were you,’ he said. ‘Your wee garage is next.’

  *

  Martin Goodman poured the last of the coffees and handed it to the Brigadier at his elbow. The little ante-room was full now, perhaps two dozen men, some in uniform, some in suits. In a couple of minutes it would be time to shepherd everyone through to the big conference room next door. There, he’d call the meeting to order, offer a few modest remarks of his own, and invite Davidson to share his insider’s view of the international situation. Quite where that might lead, he didn’t know, but as the meeting developed it would be his job to trade one civic interest against another in the strange, totally unreal business of putting the city onto a war footing.