Rules of Engagement

by Hurley, Graham

  He paused here and looked around. There were, he said, exceptions to this rule, a handful of key cities where accidents of geography and the requirements of the military dictated a rather harsher line.

  Davidson hesitated again, and took a mouthful of water. Then he looked up.

  ‘Certain cities, to be frank, are easier to isolate than others,’ he said. ‘Yours, gentlemen, happens to be an island. And it happens also to house the country’s biggest naval port.’ He smiled. ‘It’s no secret that there are sensitive military installations on the mainland, and certain other assets that we need to keep from … ah … unnecessary contamination.’ He hesitated again. ‘There are nearly a hundred and fifty thousand people in this city, and we feel that the national interest will best be served by … ah … everybody staying put.’

  There was total silence. Then a voice from the far end of the room. The obvious question. The thought in everybody’s mind.

  ‘You mean seal the city off?’

  Davidson looked down at the meeting, the rows of faces turned towards him, the pens frozen over the newly issued foolscap pads, the shock turning to incredulity.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

  Three

  In a small, windowless office of the Soviet Naval Ministry on the Oktober Prospeckt in Murmansk, a meeting took place that afternoon between two men. One of them was the personal assistant to Admiral Bilyanin, the high-flying Georgian with effective command of Russia’s Northern Fleet. The other was one of the key scientists from Moscow’s Lom Institute, a newly established laboratory complex on the south-west fringes of the University Campus. The Institute had been one of the Soviet Union’s many responses to the Chernobyl disaster, and had been set up to explore the short and long term implications of airborne radiation.

  The scientist, a young man in his early thirties, had flown up from the capital that morning, disturbed by what he saw on the way to Sheremtyevo Airport. Longer than usual queues outside the neighbourhood bread shops. An absence of kids in the suburban playgrounds. And dozens of engineers from the Home Defence Ministry, hurrying in and out of the street corner entrances to the city’s many bomb shelters. Some of them carried boxes of foodstuffs. Others, piles of blankets. One, near the metro station at Borovitskaya Square, an armful of gas masks.

  Now, at the table, the two men bent over a map. The map covered the area from Jan Meyen Island to Novaya Zemlya, thousands of square miles of chill grey ocean that held the key to the heartlands of Northern Russia. Territorial waters, under international treaty, stretched twenty-four miles offshore. But beyond that, Bilyanin’s powerful Northern Fleet had extended the Soviet writ until only the bravest and boldest of Western submarines, embodying the very latest technology, dared penetrate. One of these had been the George F. Kennan. And now she was in deep trouble.

  The man in uniform drew the scientist’s attention to a set of arrows that had been added to the map several hours earlier. They were the work of Northern Command’s senior meteorologist, and indicated the strength and direction of the wind and ocean currents that would affect the American submarine over the next forty-eight hours. One of a sequence of frontal depressions was passing through the area that very morning, and strengthening winds in its wake would push the huge hull eastwards at a rate, the meteorologist had calculated, of approximately one and a half knots. Currents in the area were pressing south-east, deep-flowing streams of ice-cold water, and the combined effect of wind and current would give the crippled Trident submarine a heading of 104° magnetic. If these calculations were correct, the Kennan would enter Soviet territorial waters at approximately four o’clock in the afternoon on the day after next.

  The man in the uniform looked up, but the scientist from Moscow had anticipated his question and was already at work with a calculator and a sheaf of figures he’d pulled from the battered briefcase by his side. The figures had come from seawater samples taken at four-hourly intervals from the waters around the Kennan. The samples had been collected by fast Krivak class destroyers, working under the suspicious gaze of the Kennan’s crew, and flown by helicopter to naval air bases on the Kola Peninsula. The latest of the sample data had been radioed to the scientist when he was still airborne between Moscow and Murmansk.

  The scientist keyed a last sum into his calculator and looked up. There was a hint of resignation in the slow shake of his head.

  ‘They’ve had thirty hours’ exposure already,’ he said. ‘And if these figures are correct, the radiation leak is getting worse.’

  The other man nodded, impatient. His next meeting had already started, and there were three others after that. Northern Command had been on a full war footing since dawn.

  ‘So?’ he said.

  The scientist paused, refusing to be hurried.

  ‘It’s difficult to be exact,’ he said, ‘but I’d estimate their chances of survival at less than 50 per cent.’

  ‘And the ocean? The environment?’ He paused. ‘Us?’ The scientist consulted his figures once again, then glanced over the map. In two days time, the Kennan would be less than thirty miles from the Kola Peninsula, a nuclear boil oozing radioactivity. Worse still, if his theories about the exact nature of the accident were correct, there was a real possibility that the Kennan might blow up, an event which would dwarf the consequences of Chernobyl. He looked at the man in uniform and shook his head.

  ‘Katactpopa,’ he said. ‘Catastrophe.’

  Gillespie and Sean returned to the anchorage in mid-afternoon. At midday, a sea fog had rolled in from the Channel, closing around them while they swung at anchor in the lee of one of the old sea forts, spooning for flatfish on the shoal banks fifteen feet below. The fishing had been moderate – a couple of nice plaice, a handful of dabs, and a stray pollock that should have known better – but by two o’clock they were both cold, the thermos of black coffee emptied, and the clammy chill beginning to penetrate the three layers of T-shirt and pullover they always took to sea.

  Now, back on dry land, Gillespie drove the three miles from the anchorage to his ex-wife’s house, a small red-brick semi with a tiny apron of front garden and a carefully tended privet hedge. He got out of the car and retrieved the fish from the back. He’d already divided the fish into two polythene bags. He carried the bigger of the bags towards the house. Sandra opened the door, and stood to one side, inviting him in. Gillespie gave her a nod as he passed, an all-purpose greeting that spared him the chore of actually saying anything. It was a gesture they’d both lived with for nearly twenty years, and she would have been alarmed at anything else.

  She closed the door and followed them into the kitchen. She was a tall woman, two years younger than Gillespie with a strong open face, deep green eyes and a mouth that smiled easily. She kept herself fit, aerobics twice weekly, and it showed in her figure. She wore jeans most of the time, and went to some trouble to buy the perfect fit.

  She and Gillespie had met in Belfast, 1972, Gillespie’s first tour of duty. It was the height of the Troubles, buses burning on the streets in Andersonstown, and the women of the Falls cursing the squaddies as they stepped carefully down the streets, back to back, scanning the rooftops, hugging the pitted brick walls.

  One night, in Turf Lodge, Gillespie had pulled up a youth suspected of joyriding. The youth had been barely fourteen, tousle-haired and visibly scared behind the constant protestations of innocence. The RUC were sure he’d taken an old Vauxhall from a street beside a park near the city centre. Intelligence suspected the car was earmarked for a bombing. Whatever happened, the boy was in for a painful night at the Interrogation Centre at Ballykelly.

  As Gillespie and his Sergeant walked the youth to a waiting APC, Sandra emerged from the council house which was her home. She was seventeen years old, but already a woman. Gillespie had braced himself for another earful of the richly inventive abuse no briefing could ever describe, but she’d simply touched him lightly on the arm, and made him falter for a moment, hes
itating, one foot in the road.

  ‘Be careful, soldier,’ she’d said. ‘Because the wee boy didn’t do it.’

  She’d looked at him, squarely in the eyes, one of those moments that restored a brief sense of reality, of real people, working-class people, his own sort of people, trying to make a life for themselves. Except that here he was, a foreigner on her streets, a helmet and a snarl, part of the occupation force that simply compounded the problems they were battling to solve. Lousy housing. No jobs. And the incessant, implacable hostility of the surrounding Proddies.

  The moment had come and gone, the big steel doors slamming shut on the armoured car, the boy calling out for his mother. Gillespie had watched through a slit in the side of the wagon, watched the girl stepping back towards the house, watched her glance over her shoulder, seen the expression on her face. She’d been stoical even then, her own person, but she was contemptuous too, and it showed.

  He’d met her next a week later. The boy had been released from detention. Gillespie was part of a four-man patrol, on foot, back in Turf Lodge. He’d been standing by a hedge, across from the Post Office. He had a loaded SLR, and a short-wave radio, and a section leader who was convinced they’d been set up for an ambush.

  The girl had crossed the road to talk to him, direct, quite fearless, oblivious of the knot of women watching from the boarded-up supermarket opposite. Gillespie had watched her narrowly, only too aware that his section leader might, for once, be right. Only when she was standing on the pavement in front of him, did he recognize who she was.

  ‘Soldier,’ she said.

  Gillespie scanned the houses across the street. The gunmen preferred upstairs bedrooms, end-of-terrace houses. There’d be a car out back for the getaway. Someone to grab the Armalite. A couple of screaming women in the parlour to make things even more awkward. Gillespie eased his own SLR up, his index finger sliding inside the trigger guard. The girl looked at him.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said simply. ‘Thank you for what you did.’

  Gillespie frowned. For some reason, the girl seemed to think that he had been instrumental in the boy’s release. Sure, he’d dissuaded a particularly zealous RUC man from opening the interrogation in the back of the wagon. And sure, he’d had a quiet word with the receiving Sergeant at the barracks at Ballykelly. But that had been all. Nothing else. He eyed the girl. Nodded.

  ‘Pleasure,’ he said drily, still watching the windows across the street.

  The girl had gone. Not a smile. Not another word. But two years later, when he was back on those same streets, and the tensions had eased a little, they’d met again. The meeting had been by accident, a chance encounter, a smile of recognition, a word or two at a street comer. But after that, they’d met socially, at considerable risk, knowing that any real relationship would have to be conducted on the mainland, a hundred miles and a century or two away from the community she called home.

  Gillespie’s tour had ended in November that year. Three weeks before Christmas, Sandra had packed her bags, and hugged her mother, and kissed the framed photo of her father on the mantelpiece, and taken the ferry from Larne. Gillespie had met her on the quayside at Stranraer, two coach tickets in his pocket for the journey south. They’d spent a night in London, blowing twenty quid on two tickets for a Queen concert, and then travelled south again, camping out in his step-father’s council flat. He’d been as happy as he could ever remember, happier than he’d thought possible, and when the nurse at the Health Centre confirmed that Sandra was five months pregnant, he went out and bought her a ring. They were married on New Year’s Day. Sean arrived in time for Easter.

  In truth, deep down, Sandra had known that life with Gillespie would never be easy. Already, she’d sensed how alone he was. He had no brothers, no sisters, and his father had been killed at Suez when he was still a kid. Nevertheless, juggling her life between her new husband and her new son, she did her best, trying to enfold him into the kind of warm, noisy chaos she knew so well from the tiny front parlour on the Andersonstown Road.

  For a while, just, it had worked. But as the years passed, and Sean began to grow up, she realized that Gillespie was immutable, that there were parts of him that were simply beyond reach. He was never hostile towards her. He never hit her, or cursed her. They seldom even rowed. Instead, he’d simply withdraw, and if he showed any kind of emotion towards her at all then it was a hint of faint resentment that he’d ever let her get that close in the first place.

  The divorce had come as no surprise. He’d been away for a while. An exercise in Norway. He’d returned with a head cold and a bag full of washing. The following evening, she’d left Sean with a friend and they’d gone to a pub and they’d sat for an hour without saying a word, and then agreed that it would be best to split up. The actual suggestion had been hers. He’d simply shrugged his agreement, and swallowed the remains of his pint, and headed for the door. It was six months before she saw him again, and by that time they were formally divorced, the papers returned to her by post, his signature scrawled at the bottom of the last form. The marriage over, they’d become friends again, and since then – oddly – she’d had more real support from him than she could ever remember.

  Now, she put the kettle on and cleared a space amongst the pile of shopping which still cluttered the small kitchen table. Gillespie looked at it all. Bags of sugar. Loaves of bread. A dozen or so packets of soup. Two cartons of salt. And a small mountain of tins: sardines, pilchards, peaches, and the small mandarin oranges Sean still liked in jelly for treats. No doubt about it. Sandra was stocking up for something serious.

  Sandra turned from the gas stove and followed Gillespie’s eyeline to the table.

  ‘You think it’s funny?’

  There was still a hint of Belfast in her voice, vowel sounds that fifteen years on the mainland had failed to flatten.

  ‘You hate sardines.’ He tossed the bag of fresh fish onto the table. ‘Stick to the real thing.’

  She looked at the white polythene bag. Something brown was oozing from one corner.

  ‘That’s disgusting.’ she said. ‘They gutted?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Yuk.’ She pulled a face. ‘Thanks Dave.’

  ‘Pleasure,’ he said.

  There was a silence. Sean slid out of the room. Used to quite separate relationships with each parent, he rarely hung around when they were together. Gillespie heard his footsteps on the stairs, the sound of his bedroom door shutting. Then music. Sandra decanted boiling water into the teapot.

  ‘There’s an old boy across the road,’ she said, ‘been sticking strips of paper on his windows. Shocking job he’s made of it, too.’

  Gillespie nodded. He’d seen the house as he stepped out of the car, each window clumsily latticed with brown paper tape.

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘But why’s that’? Sandra asked. ‘Why’s he doing it?’

  Gillespie didn’t answer for a moment, looking again at the pile of food on the table.

  ‘Same reason you’ve been shopping,’ he said at last.

  ‘I went shopping because they’re running out,’ she said. ‘That’s why I went shopping.’

  ‘Ah …’ Gillespie nodded. ‘I see.’

  He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. From the wallet he removed a twenty-pound note. He leaned forward and left it on the table, next to the bag of fish. Sandra gazed at it.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘The shopping.’

  ‘You can’t afford twenty quid.’

  ‘Can’t I?’

  ‘No.’

  She picked up the note and tried to give it back. Gillespie waved it away.

  ‘I’m seeing Jenner later,’ he said. ‘He’s bound to have something for me. Time like this.’

  ‘Think so?’

  ‘Bound to.’

  Sandra shrugged and left the note on the table.

  ‘You still haven’t told me about the old boy across the r
oad,’ she said. ‘What he’s doing with all that tape.’

  Gillespie nodded. Upstairs, for a moment, the music had stopped.

  ‘Same reason the shops are empty,’ he said. ‘There’s a war on the way.’

  Sandra paused, the old smile, amused, slightly sardonic, rich with her knowledge of the man.

  ‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘Just what you’ve been waiting for.’

  It wasn’t until Mick Rendall ordered his third pint of Stella that the idea began to acquire real shape in his mind. For over an hour, he’d been pushing around the various bits and pieces of evidence, Cartwright lecturing him about States of Emergency, the scene at the petrol station, the little vignette they’d driven past en route to the pub: a middle-aged man in a suit jig-sawing suitcases into the back of a Granada Estate while a woman fussed around him, trying to make room for a budgerigar in a cage. Albie had given them both a sour look, and a derisive blast on the two-tone, but there was little ambiguity about the scene. It meant they were going. Leaving town. Today. Because times had evidently become too dodgy to stay.

  From the pub, Mick had phoned the number about his garage. He’d asked for Mr Prior. Mr Prior had evidently been busy, but when he explained who he was, the voice in his ear confirmed that his garage had been demolished under Section VII of the Emergency Powers Act. There was a polite expression of regret that there’d been no time for consultation and an assurance that compensation would be discussed ‘in due course’, but when Mick began to hassle about the figures, and protest his rights as a taxpayer, the phone went dead.

  Back at the bar, Mick shared the bad news with Albie, gazing morosely into his lager, and trying to calculate exactly where they’d lay hands on the fifty thousand pounds it would take to keep the bailiffs out of his house. Although he had his doubts about Cartwright in other respects, he knew enough about the man to recognize that his threat was probably kosher. Cartwright had some powerful friends. And some of these friends, he knew, rarely took prisoners.