by Jack Spain
‘That sounds about right.’
‘What would that be in dynamite terms?’
‘About a megaton.’
‘A megaton? That’s as much as a nuclear bomb. Why didn’t you work this out before we left the hill?’
‘It didn’t seem a priority. It’s probably less than a megaton, give or take. It may not go off like a nuclear bomb. It seems to slow burn first.’
‘When it’s in water. I’m not setting the fuse. It would have to be a mile and a half long.’ Moriarty argued before holding up the fuse they brought. ‘This one is only ten feet!’
They both looked down at the bag and then felt a sudden urge to move away from it. Even Chopper seemed to sense the danger and moved to one side. Balor peered back through the hedge and then looked back at the bag. ‘If I could get my hands on the idiot that called these nutters in I’d wring it for a week. You’re right. We’ll have to carry out some tests.’ He said. ‘Grab the bag and we’ll head back to the hill.’
Moriarty looked at him very sternly. ‘What do you mean, grab the bag? You grab the bag.’
The two little men looked at each other for a moment, and then almost simultaneously, at Chopper.
McManus, looking resigned to the situation, sat on the bonnet of his black Jaguar with his arms crossed, trying to work out what the protestors were up to, but at the same time he wasn’t really bothered. There was a lot of commotion going on around the engineering hut. The workmen were all in the canteen hut and none of the machines were moving. A Garda car pulled up beside McManus’s car and the Garda got out. He took his hat off and walked up to McManus.
‘Did any reporters turn up?’ he asked.
‘Jack Randal was here at 8.30 this morning. We had a few calls from a radio station about protestors but nothing else,’ McManus said.
‘These are the protestors,’ the policeman said, pointing up at the five small groups of people in the distance. ‘They called us this morning and we told them that they should start at 10.30. I figured it would give us enough time to get rid of the press.’
‘Thanks,’ McManus said, appreciative of the gesture.
‘No thanks required,’ the Garda replied. ‘We didn’t do it for you. I reckon they wanted some pictures of police brutality. Not that we would hit them or anything but in case they started fighting with us. It’s hard to tell in a photograph who hit who first. I figured that if the press wasn’t here, they wouldn’t cause any trouble. They’d just get bored and go home when they get hungry.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘What’s going on here?’ the Garda asked.
‘Insurance inspectors. Someone in the Health and Safety Executive tipped off our insurers. I had been covering claims by the workers out of my own pocket to head it off. Without insurance for this site, we cannot work. The council are here as well. All this sabotage has put us so far behind that they’re thinking of cancelling the contract.’
‘Is that bad?’ the Garda asked. McManus looked momentarily at him with an expression that revealed he thought it was a stupid question.
‘Well, the site has been shut down pending a Health and Safety report that the insurers are demanding. If it doesn’t start up soon, everyone will be out of work. That includes your brother-in-law who owns the canteen.’
‘I see. It’s serious then,’ the Garda replied. ‘I’d better go and sort out those protestors, and find out who this mysterious Ms Ninja Eco-Warrior is’
With that, the Garda climbed back into his car and drove up the muddy surface of roadworks to tackle the protestors.
McManus turned back to look at the engineering hut. Two men emerged. Declan, his head engineer, and a small fat man with a bald head, carrying a briefcase. The man appeared to be giving Declan a long list of instructions. When he was finished, he walked off in the direction of the toilet hut. Declan watched him go and then went over to McManus.
‘Did the security guards check the toilets for sabotage this morning? McManus asked.
‘No, I never thought of that. I’d better warn him,’ Declan replied without actually doing anything. ‘Who is he?’
‘George Delaney. A local councillor. I won the bid for this job against a company he owns. It was down to the two of us and I almost had to go to court to beat him. He’s had it in for me ever since. I had suspected him of sabotage but the person or persons sabotaging us, is or are, very clever, and George Delaney is not.’
‘He’s halted work on this site anyway pending the review of safety here, as have the insurers,’ Declan told him. Just then, there was a scream from the toilet block.
‘He’s either been electrocuted or glued to the toilet seat, or else the cistern has blown water up his backside,’ McManus said. ‘Which do you reckon?’
‘Hard to tell,’ Declan replied dismissively. They looked back and saw George Delaney emerge from the toilets. His trousers were soaking wet. Declan and McManus looked at each other.
‘Cistern,’ they said almost simultaneously, as they began to stroll slowly up the site.
‘What do we do now?’ Declan asked.
‘I wish I knew,’ McManus answered. ‘If I can’t get something sorted in the next few days then I’ll be bankrupt. I’ll send you a postcard from America. I don’t want to go bankrupt in this Godforsaken country.’
‘That bad, eh?’
‘That bad,’ McManus replied quietly.
‘It’s a long shot, but can we open a second site a bit further up, using one of the subcontractors?’
McManus stopped and looked up and down the site.
‘No,’ he said. ‘A subcontractor would work but there are problems. We have a subcontractor to build a bridge three or four miles up, and another to cut through that hill. The problem is that we have no access. The bridge is four hundred yards from a main road and we have no permission to cut through to it. We need to cross the bridge to get to the hill.’
‘Surely we could pay for access?’
‘I’ve called every nearly farmer who owns land along this way. Delaney has got to them first. Every single one of them refused.’
‘What do you want me to tell the workers?’
‘Nothing. It’s my problem. I’ll tell them myself when I have got my head around it.’
McManus stood looking up and down the site with his hands resting on his hips. He looked up at Declan.
‘I’ll come up with something,’ he told him and walked back to his car. He opened the door and turned around.
‘Delaney’s car is going to get stuck in mud. He won’t be able to leave without digging it out. Tell the men that I’ll fire anyone who helps him,’ he said. Declan was clearly very bemused by this.
McManus climbed in, closed the door, started the car and did a three-point turn, stopping beside Declan. He rolled down the window.
‘How do you know?’ Declan asked.
‘I left a water hose running under it,’ McManus told him before driving off at speed down the site to the exit.
Thanks to the surveillance by the King’s Guard, the news didn’t take long to get back to the hill and a massive celebration ensued. Balor was the hero of the day and most people were surprised that he had managed to do it without actually killing anyone. The news was that it could take several months to get the site up and running again, and, with environmentalist protestors pledging to stop the road to save the peat bog, it might never reach the hill.
Loud cheers of ‘Balor! Moriarty!’ filled the cavern, and a procession of grateful people made their way towards his humble stone hut where they found Chopper sitting guard and sharpening his claws, at which point the crowd stopped and decided that it would be better to wait.
Balor was not there though, and neither was Moriarty. When they had first heard the commotion, they had assumed that, like every other time that they had caused a commotion, they had done something wrong. They were hiding in a crevice high in the cavern, looking down at the crowds.
‘Are you sure that you didn’t
tell them?’ Balor asked Moriarty.
‘I said nothing, to anybody,’ Moriarty replied defensively. They looked down at a large knapsack on the ground between them.
‘They must have discovered that all of the concentrate is missing,’ said Balor.
‘I think that it was a bad idea,’ replied Moriarty after a while.
‘To blow up the entire building site?’ Balor retorted. ‘Excellent plan if you ask me. Besides, we weren’t planning to do it when anyone was there. The King said he wanted the building work stopped before anyone turned up for work.’
‘Yeah, but a megaton explosion? The King asked us not to terrorise people, and I reckon he worked out what we were going to do.’ Moriarty commented.
Balor agreed. ‘Who do you think told them?’ he asked.
‘There you two are,’ said a female voice behind them. The two men spun around in shock, but were relieved to see Betty Black.
‘You nearly gave me a heart attack,’ Balor remarked catching his breath. ‘I thought you weren’t talking to us anyway?’
‘Oh, well,’ Betty began. ‘You two are the heroes of the day at the moment.’
‘Why?’ asked Moriarty. ‘What have we done?’
‘Haven’t you heard?’
‘Heard what?’ Balor asked.
‘The roadworks have been shut down. It’s all over twitter. Not only that, there are a couple of dozen friends of the bog camping at the site to prevent it starting up again.’
Moriarty and Balor looked at each other and then at the knapsack on the ground between them, and then at Betty, completely perplexed.
‘There are?’ Balor asked, clearly perplexed. ‘Who called them?’
‘It didn’t say on the net,’ she said. ‘But apparently there is a local eco-warrior who shall remain nameless that has convinced an international ecological defence group to take up residence.’
‘Did it say who it was?’ asked Moriarty.
‘Not a mention, other than to say it was a she, and she is local, and she is also very effective. Donal told us this morning when he heard it at the site,’ she continued. ‘It looks like all the sabotage paid off. Combined with the campaign by the eco-warrior, it attracted the protestors and the publicity also meant that the contractor lost his insurance for the site so the council closed him down. You know I wish I knew who that eco-warrior woman was.’
Balor and Moriarty looked at each other and then down at the bag of Comither concentrate on the ground between them, and then back at each other.
‘We forgot about the king’s guard at the site,’ said Moriarty, a cold sweat forming on his forehead when he thought about the potential for the explosion.
‘Never mind,’ she continued. ‘The protestors have pledged that the road will go no further, and with all Michael McManus’s other troubles, it looks like you beat him, Balor,’
‘Then, why is everyone hunting us down?’ Moriarty asked.
Betty giggled. ‘They’re not hunting you down. They’re trying to find you for the big celebration party! You wouldn’t know who that brave and persistent eco-warrior was too would you?’
Moriarty and Balor looked at each other, shrugged and looked indifferent.
‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘I suppose that makes you two the heroes of the day.’
Balor and Moriarty looked back down into the cavern. It seemed strange to them, being looked for by a mob that didn’t want to have them strung up. After a long pause, they suddenly stood up began to dance around each other, locking arms. They even danced with Betty. Balor went so far as to give Moriarty a high five.
She decided to leave them to it and walked back down the pathway to her stone hut on the far side of the cavern. She slammed the door and went over to her phone and kicked it on. After slapping in her pin number it came up with her blog page, for The Ninja EcoWarrior.
Contrary to the celebrations in the hill, Michael McManus worked silently in his study until very late into the night. His desk was completely covered in documents, all of which had numbers on them, written in red. He was desperately trying to work out a way to finish the road and save his company. He took a stack of documents and a calculator and started to work out his financial situation. The more numbers he entered into the calculator, the more annoyed he got, until finally he grabbed an empty mug and held it up to strike the calculator. He looked at the calculator with its pink and blue buttons and its little red and purple flowers in raised plastic around the edges. It was Emily’s. He lowered the mug onto the desk and relaxed a little before burying his face in his hands and letting out a great sigh.
Looking up, he glanced around his desk for some other accounts that he had to look through, and noticed a drawing under some papers. He picked up the picture and looked at it. It was one of Emily’s. It looked like a soldier in modern clothes with a sword on his back. It was very good for a six-year-old, especially in the detail, right down to his bootlaces and three black spiral markings on the handle of the sword. McManus always thought that when his daughter grew up she would be either a crack commando, which was her ambition, or a brilliant artist, which is what she was good at.
He knew that his company was now in very deep trouble. He also knew that many families depended on his company for an income, and he pondered what they would do if he had to let a number of his workers go. Many had mortgages to pay and lots of other bills. Some of them could lose their homes. He thought about this for a whole ten seconds before he decided that he didn’t really care. He had enough of his own problems to solve.
He worked late into the night, long after both Emily and Sally had gone to bed. His only other company was Fang who would occasionally pop into the study during his rounds. On one occasion, McManus saw him.
‘Come here, Fang,’ he told him. Fang promptly responded and McManus petted him tenderly to take his mind off his predicament.
The sound of shooting and explosions woke him up with a start. He had been at his desk all night. Emily was watching a Japanese cartoon that was pretending to be suitable children’s television. McManus rubbed his eyes and was surprised to find a bowl of cereal and a glass of milk in front of him. Emily had placed them there as part of a secret pact they had to avoid cornflakes tikka masala for breakfast. Sally’s cooking was now in dire trouble, although McManus was now looking a lot thinner and fitter.
He glanced down at the plans for the roadworks and his eyes traced up to Grogan’s house and the low hill he had to cut through. Then it struck him. The hill did have good access. It was beside a back road, and Grogan’s driveway led right into it. The drawing was out of date. It had been done in 1947 and didn’t have all of the roads but it seemed unlikely that anything would have changed. He already had permission from the council to use the driveway. It was his only chance to save his company.
Filled with a new enthusiasm, he bolted into the garage and jumped into his car. Emily watched from the garage door as he waved and drove off in what appeared to be a deliriously happy mood. She walked into the study and looked at his desk. There was the glass of milk, untouched, but the mound of cereal in the bowl beside it wasn’t. There was a deep channel cut right through it.
The Crisis Deepens
Grogan was sitting in the kitchen, listening to his favourite early-morning show in his favourite chair. The air in the house was a little chilly, although it was early summer, and he thought about starting a fire but decided instead to make himself a nice hot cup of tea. Grogan sighed as he stood up and, lamenting his late wife Kathleen who had always had the tea ready for him in the morning, he walked over to the kitchen sink. He took the electric kettle from the bench beside the sink and began to fill it. Looking out his kitchen window, he was surprised to see two men emerge from the top of the bushes and walk up the hill. They were too far away to see who they were although one of them was wearing a fluorescent workman’s coat and the other appeared to be dressed completely in black.
The hill didn’t belong to Grogan but nonetheless he decide
d to investigate. He put the kettle to one side and went out. He was surprised to find himself nearly tripping over Balor who was standing on his back doorstep.
‘What on earth are you doing here?’ he whispered to the little man.
‘More to the point, what is Michael McManus doing here with his engineers?’ Balor replied.
‘Is that who it is?’
‘Aye,’ replied Balor. ‘They’ve been here nearly an hour. They’ve made a lot of calls on their phones but I haven’t been able to get close enough to hear what they’re up to.’
‘Do you want me to go and ask?’
‘If you don’t mind,’ Balor replied sarcastically. Grogan grunted something under his breath, closing the door behind him, and began to walk across the yard towards the gate to the hill. Balor called out after him.
‘Patrick!’
‘What?’ Grogan replied scornfully.
‘I’m sorry,’ Balor said in what appeared to be a genuinely apologetic tone, although Grogan could never tell.
Grogan didn’t reply other than to nod, and then continued on his way to the hill. He realised only too well the amount of pressure that Balor was under. It was as if he had sole responsibility for the salvation of the hill and it had taken its toll on him, making him look haggard with dark rings under his eyes.
Balor paced back and forth impatiently as he watched Grogan walk up the hill and greet Michael McManus and the engineer. Although Grogan spent less than ten minutes talking to the two men, it seemed like ten hours to Balor. Eventually Grogan began to walk back down the hill. As he got closer, Balor could tell from the look on his face that it was going to be bad news.
When Grogan reached Balor, he opened the kitchen door, ushered him inside and closed the door behind them, making sure that nobody else was in the vicinity. Then Grogan just blurted it all out.
‘The work on the main site has been halted by his insurers. They’ve ordered an investigation into all the things that have gone wrong. The road is so far behind that they have no choice other than to start a new site here with another subcontractor. He has even called in a special security firm to protect the site as he thinks that it was green activists at the other site.’
