Rules of Engagement

by Hurley, Graham

  He rewound the film, and took it out of the camera. Then he stooped quickly to the flower bed. There were rose bushes in the thin soil. The roses looked black under the artificial light. He twisted a single rose off the stem, pricking his finger as he did so. Then he knelt by her body, and placed the rose gently on her cheek, close to the soft tender area beneath the ear. Her flesh was already cold, but except for a bruise around her temples, and those strange marks around her neck and throat, her face was barely touched. Poor cow, he thought again. Poor bloody cow.

  Goodman was back in the Bunker by midnight. He’d let his wife wash him, sponging the blood from his forehead, drying him gently with a towel she’d warmed specially on the bathroom radiator. He’d refused to answer any of her questions, shaking his head, not wanting to listen, and when she’d suggested he stay, get a good night’s rest, be fresh in the morning, he’d dismissed the suggestion with a gruff shake of the head. She’d helped him back to the door, disturbed and bewildered by what she’d seen, telling him to take care, to relax, to think of himself for a change. Come back soon, she’d said quietly, closing the front door, and hearing the big Rover crunching away across the gravel.

  Now, back in the Bunker, Goodman sank into his chair behind the big desk and gazed at it. There was a note from the engineer about the air-conditioning. Evidently, it might soon fail completely. He shook his head and looked away. The gas mask was still there, sitting in the wire basket, malevolent as ever, the eyes uppermost. He reached for it, touched it, recoiled. Then he picked it up, and hung it dead centre over the waste-paper basket. He looked at it for a moment or two, his choice, his call. Then he let it go, plop, into the basket.

  There was a polite cough behind him. He turned round very slowly in the chair, a movement of his whole body. Davidson was standing by the door. He looked almost apologetic, the intruder. He gestured at the latest roll of telex.

  ‘There’s a war on,’ he said, ‘if you’re interested.’

  Gillespie drove to Sandra’s house from the flats on the seafront. En route, he saw no one. No cars. No shadows on the streets. He tried to rid his mind of the image of the dead girl, to tell himself it was none of his business, but he couldn’t. At Sandra’s, the lights were on behind the curtains in the front room. Sean heard Gillespie coming up the path and intercepted him in the hall. He nodded at the front room. The door was shut.

  ‘She’s in there,’ he said, ‘she’s changed her mind. She wants to come.’

  Gillespie frowned, surprised. The last conversation he’d had with his ex-wife had been far from amicable. He’d been a failure. He’d let her down. She had another life to lead. He stepped into the front room. Sandra was sitting in an armchair, reading a magazine. She looked up.

  ‘I’m ready,’ she said briefly, ‘packed.’

  Gillespie looked at her for a moment, wondering whether to ask why.

  ‘OK,’ he said instead, ‘let’s go.’

  They drove away from the house in total silence. Sean didn’t bother to ask about the new VW, and Gillespie didn’t bother to explain. They all knew about the curfew. They all guessed the consequences of being caught.

  At the eastern edge of the island, Gillespie turned north, bumping up the narrow dirt track that skirted the harbour. There was marshland on either side, tall banks of reeds, and he had to use dipped headlights to keep the car on track. Sean sat beside him, tense, body bent forward, trying to penetrate the darkness around them, trying to outguess whoever might be there, trying to give them all a better chance. In the back, Sandra was shivering even with her coat pulled around her. Gillespie watched her face in the mirror, dimly lit from the glare reflected back from the reeds. He was glad she’d decided to come. Their last conversation had depressed him more than he cared to admit.

  A mile down the path, he slowed the car and then stopped. He switched off the engine, then the lights, winding down the window and listening carefully for a full half minute. Far away, he could hear the chink-chink of halyards against metal masts. Closer, the sigh of the wind in the reeds, and the mournful hoot of a night owl somewhere up ahead. He opened the door. A voice from the back. Sandra.

  ‘Now what?’ she said.

  Gillespie hesitated.

  ‘I need to take a look. Make sure the boat’s OK.’

  Sandra laughed, a short mirthless grunt of laughter.

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘Wait here. I’ll be gone about half an hour.’

  ‘Half an hour. Jesus Christ, Dave …’

  He glanced back at her, and reached out, patting her on the cheek, encouragement. She muttered something incomprehensible, and curled herself even more tightly into the corner of the seat. Gillespie stepped round to the back of the car, and opened the boot. The can of diesel was still there, transferred from the Cortina. He took it out. He began to walk away, following the line of the dirt track, then he paused. Back, beside the car, he opened the front passenger door.

  ‘Here,’ he said to Sean, ‘look after these. Keep them safe. And your mum, too.’

  He gave the boy the rolls of exposed film from the dock, and patted him on the shoulder. Then he set off down the path again, into the darkness.

  Ten minutes later, he was out of the reeds, and into the marshland at the water’s edge. He could hear the lap of the rising tide against the mudbanks, taste the salt in the air.

  He picked his way carefully through the tussock, trying to keep his feet dry. By now, he could make out the shape of his boat, still tied up beside the remains of the tiny landing stage. It was about fifty metres away, the sturdy, familiar swell of the hull, the small cuddy forward. He paused for a moment, getting his bearings, tracing the line of the channel, out into the harbour, out towards the open sea. For once in his life, he regretted not having a sail. The diesel would be noisy, attracting attention. Sail would be better. Or even a canoe. He smiled to himself, thinking of Sandra. Fifteen miles in a canoe. The final straw.

  He began to move again, hauling the heavy can through the grass, hearing the slosh of diesel inside. He stumbled for a moment, and nearly fell, and as he did so he saw the first lick of flame curling up from the boat ahead, and then the fireball taking shape, climbing and swelling, and the huge roar of the explosion, the heat gusting and bubbling in his face, timber everywhere, falling around him, splintered wood. There were more lights suddenly, and voices, sharp barks of command. He stood quite still, pinioned by the lights. Part of him wanted to run, to give battle, anything. But he knew it was hopeless. He knew they’d shoot him dead.

  A shape appeared from the darkness. A big man. Long hair. Flat face. Civvies. He held out his hand.

  ‘Gillespie …’ he said, ‘our pleasure …’

  Nine

  It was ten minutes past midnight, GMT, when the squadron took off. Two of the Jaguars were unserviceable – a bird strike on one aircraft, and an avionics problem with the other – but the remaining nine eased off the runway at Bruggen, roared low over the guarded perimeter fence, and wheeled east at five hundred feet on yet another of the cat-and-mouse low-level runs along the line of the reconstituted Inner German Border.

  Craddock was flying number two in the second flight of aircraft, and the concentration required was enormous. One eye for the head-up display, key items of data projected onto the windscreen, soft yellow lines against the black of the night, ordering the jet up or down in response to the folds of the landscape; another eye for the presence of the nearby lead aircraft, a shadow slightly thicker than the night, a spreading cone of turbulent air, felt rather than seen; and yet a third eye, somewhere deep in the very middle of his head, for what the Squadron Leader sometimes referred to as ‘the overall’, the bigger picture, where they were in relation to Bruggen, and other NATO airfields, and to hostile airspace the other side of the IGB. The latter extended east towards Magdeburg and Berlin, screened by radar, picketed by dense fields of SAM-7s, and patrolled by the hawklike MiG-29s Craddock had admired only the previous year. Farnbor
ough. A glorious afternoon in September. His wife beside him on the roof of the car. Ice creams and laughter. Fizzy drinks, and world-class aerobatics, and his baby daughter learning for the first time to put her hands over her ears.

  The Squadron Leader broke radio silence, the simplest of orders, his voice quiet, almost conversational.

  ‘Break right,’ he said, ‘one-one-five.’

  Craddock pulled his aircraft into a tight right-hand turn, increasing power as he did so, preserving his precious height, feeling the bladders on the G-suit tighten around his arms and legs. He watched the compass spinning in front of him, the plane taking up the new heading, one-one-five, a little south of due east. He remembered the chinagraphed attack lines on the big map in the briefing room, the lines that snaked out towards the IGB, weaving a carefully plotted path through the weaker points in the radar net, looking for the gate that would creak open in the night, and let them into the East, the enemy’s pantry, amply stocked with big fat targets.

  The Squadron Leader again.

  ‘Zero-eight-five magnetic. In five … four … three …’

  Craddock frowned. They were adjusting north, conforming exactly with the Attack Plan. He fingered the throttles, down in the left of the cockpit, his thin, leather gloves waiting for ‘Zero’, the Squadron Leader’s cue, another step towards the unthinkable.

  ‘Zero.’

  Craddock eased the aircraft left. In forty seconds’ time, according to the Doomsday brief, they’d route south again, a 34° turn that would put them on track for the tank parks north of Brandenburg, the squadron bellying out at one hundred feet, racing across the gentle foothills of the Harz Mountains, the screening F-16s up above, shadowing their every move, waiting to pick off the first of the big Fulcrums, blasting out of the forward airfields, eager to flame them.

  Craddock tried to control his breathing, knowing that barely twenty seconds now stood between the squadron and that critical line on the map, thick red chinagraph, beyond which the exercises would be over. Normally, here, the Squadron Leader would wheel the aircraft in a tight 180° degree turn, pulling them back with barely kilometres to spare.

  Ten seconds. Craddock swallowed hard. The bomb release levers were down on the right-hand side. The tank parks were nine minutes’ flying time east of the border. Nine minutes at 95 per cent power. Nine minutes at one hundred feet. Nine minutes before he pulled the Jaguar into a steep climb, lobbing the two freefall bombs the last few kilometres to the target. The bombs were groundburst, deep penetration. A five-G turn and full afterburner would give him the fifteen precious miles he’d need to survive the fireball.

  Craddock blinked. He was sweating. He could no longer sense the lead aircraft ahead. His compass was a blur. His left hand came up to his mask, adjusting the tight rubber mouthpiece. He needed air. He must breathe properly. Something horrible was happening to him.

  There was a crackle of static, then the Squadron Leader’s voice in his ear, indistinct. Craddock began to thumb the switch on his joy stick, the switch that opened communications. He needed clarification, he wanted a repeat, but then his brain caught up with his hands, and he told himself there was no argument, no way back.

  ‘One-two-seven,’ the Squadron Leader had said, ‘one-two-seven.’

  Craddock banked east, suddenly cool, the tension quite gone. End game, he thought curiously. What a shame.

  Martin Goodman sat alone at his desk in the Bunker. By the clock on the wall it was 12.57. Through the thick plate-glass window, he could see the long line of desks, the figures bent over telephones and maps, shrouded in the thick green NBC suits. Someone, for reasons he couldn’t possibly understand, was already wearing a face mask. It looked grotesque, a cartoon figure in three dimensions, and he had to guess an identity by working out who he couldn’t see, who wasn’t there. It was a game, and he played it with a mild curiosity born of total exhaustion. The last three hours had stretched him to breaking point and beyond. He had total recall. He knew exactly what had happened, what he’d done, cause and effect, that long remorseless chain of events that had ended so abruptly up there, out there, on her balcony.

  He knew she must be dead, but he knew as well that it had been inevitable. He’d loved her like he’d never loved anyone in his life, but the fairy-tale had come to an end, and they’d collided head on with real life, and gravity, and cold concrete. Once or twice in the last hour he’d fought the temptation to try and imagine what it must have been like. What would she have been thinking? Those last thirty feet? That last split second? Would her face be intact? Her smile? Would she forgive him? Did she still love him? Would she ever understand?

  The questions lodged in his brain, birds in a tree, ceaseless chatter, the babble of madness. His face hurt from the deep scratches she’d gouged in his cheek. His forehead had swollen around the gash from the ashtray, and his head throbbed inside, a dull, metronomic, empty pain. His wife had given him some balls of cotton wool, and a small bottle of TCP, and he dabbed at his forehead from time to time, looking curiously at his own blood on the damp cotton wool. There was more blood on the thick green fabric of the NBC suit, dark blobs of the stuff, already dry. His blood. Her blood. Their blood. He looked at it, fascinated.

  Ironic, he thought. After all the letters, the phone calls, the times they’d shared, the memories they’d warmed with trinkets and keepsakes, the plans and the promises they’d made. Ironic that his last souvenir should be this: half a dozen balls of damp cotton wool, pinked with blood, smelling faintly of the bathroom cabinet. He poked one of the balls with his finger. It rolled across the desk. He blew on them, budding his mouth. They lifted in the current of air, drifting slowly towards the edge of the desk. One of them fell on the floor. He didn’t bother to pick it up.

  A door opened at the other end of the Bunker, and Davidson emerged from the telex room. There was yet another sheet of paper in his hand, more dispatches, but he moved slowly now, the urgency quite gone, threading his way past the desks, a smile here, a nod there. Quinn looked up at him, some unvoiced question, but he simply shook his head and passed on, a wholly neutral gesture, devoid of meaning.

  Goodman heard his footsteps outside, watched the door open as he came in. In the space of an hour, the man seemed to have aged. His skin looked grey, the eyes dead, the movements leaden. He sat down without an invitation, and let the telex fall on the desk beside him. There was total silence between the two men. Goodman eyed the telex. He had little interest in the contents. He reached forward and rearranged the desk slightly, making better sense of the big bare spaces around his blotter. Then he looked out of the window, down the length of the Bunker. The figure in the gas mask still confounded him. Same instinct. Same passion for neatness and uniformity.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he said.

  Davidson followed his pointing finger.

  ‘One of the secretaries.’

  ‘Why’s she wearing that thing?’

  Davidson smiled wanly. ‘She’s crying,’ he said, ‘and she doesn’t want anyone to know.’

  Goodman nodded, the answer suddenly self-evident. The Bunker was a public place. It left you nowhere to hide. Tears were contagious. They might spread, cause undue alarm, even panic. Better, therefore, to contain them. He frowned, spotting the flaw in the argument.

  ‘How do you know she’s crying?’ he said. ‘How can you tell?’

  Davidson said nothing for a moment or two, gazing out at the girl behind the desk. Then he looked at Goodman.

  ‘You can hear her,’ he said quietly, ‘the length of the room.’

  Goodman nodded again.

  ‘Funny …’ he said, ‘you think they’d do some kind of psychological test. Make sure people can cope.’

  Davidson eyed the balls of cotton wool on the desk, and the bottle of TCP, open beside them.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Is there such a thing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then perhaps there should be.’

  Goodman reached
forward, uninvited, and unrolled the latest telex. Davidson watched him. The bulk of Goodman’s paperwork he’d already re-routed to Quinn. Since midnight the policeman had been Deputy Controller, his workload more than doubled. Soon, should the need arise, he’d take over from Goodman completely. Quinn had accepted the extra responsibility without comment. He’d never trusted Goodman, never liked him, and as events unrolled, he’d taken a dour satisfaction in the way the younger man was beginning to fold up under pressure. Some of this antagonism, Davidson was careful to discount. He recognized that the two men were very different. But the last couple of hours, he’d watched Goodman retreat almost entirely into a world of his own making, and when Evans had finally got through to him on the special 101 number, he knew that something had to be done.

  Evans had apologized for making the call. He simply wanted to tell Davidson that his Controller was gone, a spent round. Davidson had pressed him for details – why the blood? The injuries on his face? – but the Marine had said no more. The circumstances were nobody else’s business, his silence implied. Only the conclusion mattered. ‘He’s completely out of it,’ he’d said, ‘completely shot. You want to get rid of him.’ Davidson had thanked him for his time and his information, courteous to a fault, and the Marine had put the phone down with a grunt.

  Now, Davidson watched Goodman pick up the Telex, a perfunctory movement, chance curiousity. He scanned the three paragraphs of text. The telex was barely thirty minutes old. It featured a report from NATO HQ that an RAF Jaguar had been posted missing on a night sortie over the IGB. The plane had evidently strayed into Soviet airspace. MiG-29s had been scrambled from three airbases around Magdeburg. Radar Controllers aboard one of the big Boeing AWACS had reported an interception twenty-five kilometres east of Salzgitter. They’d watched the tell-tale smears of the air-to-air missiles. The Jaguar had disappeared from the radar screens seconds later. The rest of the squadron were safely back at Bruggen.