(2005) Rat Run (62 page)

'It's out there, the light. I can't be exact, it's dark as hell, and I don't know the sea, but I estimate it about a mile offshore. Damn, damn, they've killed the light

. . . It was there, was coming in. I suppose it was on long enough to alert the target group, b u t . . . '

There was criticism. She should not 'estimate' or

'suppose'. Facts were required of her. She swore under her breath, soundless. She could not estimate why Gaunt had done it to her, could not suppose why he had quit on her.

'There was a light offshore, on for eight minutes. At the moment it was switched off, the light was one nautical mile from the tideline.'

They wanted bullshit, they would get it. She did not know whether the light had been visible for six minutes or nine minutes; neither did she know the length of a nautical mile nor see the tideline. She imagined them round a table crowded with phones, consoles and screens, with maps dominating their room's walls, and . . . She was asked for the location of Kitchen.

'Don't know, and that is neither an estimate nor a supposition. I have not the faintest idea where he is.

So as you understand, it is pitch bloody black out here, and it is peeing with rain and blowing a gale. He could be a mile away or ten yards away, and that is a fact. It is also a fact that I have not been issued with night-vision equipment.'

The cold cut through Polly, but they would not have been interested in that. She was asked what were Kitchen's intentions when he left her.

'Can't estimate and can't suppose - not a clue. I will call you on further developments. Out.'

A career gone down the drain? Perhaps. Her teeth rattled as she shivered. Perhaps . . . Did she give a damn if a career was lost? Maybe . . . She pocketed the phone. Polly wondered if she now had the status of being a flagged pin on a wall map. She scrambled down off the dune and tumbled to the start of the loose sand that the sea never reached. She was perplexed that she had not seen an answering light from away to her right on a point of high ground, did not understand that, could not reckon how the trawler would be guided in - or the men to be picked up would be floundering in water, would be battered by the surf - and was confused. She went, slowly and carefully, below the dunes and above the beach, stopped to listen, then went on, stopped again . . . It hurt so bloody much that Freddie Gaunt had quit on her.

'Makes you think, doesn't it? The last chap here - his feet where we are. Wagons out at the front with everything he and his family own, and he's looking around at all that's familiar, then he's going to the door, and going to nail it shut after him, and then he'll be joining his neighbours in flight. And the enemy is over the hill - not quite literally, but the barbarians are at the gates . . . and this is where he stood for the last time.'

It no longer rained and the wind had slackened.

Frederick Gaunt knelt in the pit and the high lights glistened the mud and he scraped with his trowel at the edge of the small patch of uncovered mosaic. He did not know the man beside him, had not dug with him before. In a few minutes they would break for tea from an urn and that would be welcome for warmth and would be respite from the monologue in his ear

. . . The man was young, lean-faced and lean-bodied, and scraped and talked with matching intensity.

'I suppose he knew it was coming - yes, he'd have realized that his time was up. Must have wounded him to think that civilization, all of the comforts of a building like this, was going to be tossed over, and that the day of the hordes - Goths, Visigoths, Picts, you name them - had come, and the start of a Dark Age with them. He wouldn't have known it, but I think it's a law of history that new forces will inevitably overwhelm an old order.'

The site was in Wiltshire, south of Keysley Down and to the west of Berwick St Leonard. It was approached by a rutted farm track, and was lit - at fifteen minutes to midnight - by a row of generator-powered arc-lights. Negotiations with the landowner had given the diggers a clear seven days and seven nights to work on the villa, and after that the excavated ground would be covered with thick plastic sheeting, which would in turn be covered with the moved soil and sods of the field. It was the third night

. . . Until that afternoon, before his meeting and his butchery at VBX, Gaunt had not thought he had the vaguest chance of joining these enthusiasts. They were mostly students, recruited from a south-coast university, but he had been allocated to the team leader, who talked.

'Inevitable that it'll all come crashing down once the decadence sets in. Our chap, who stood here in his sandals, he'd become too comfortable - had too much wealth and too much privilege - and he'd lost the hardness to fight. That's it, isn't it? His civilization, morally corrupt, could not compete with the simple brutality of the barbarian - so he ran and left his home to sixteen hundred years of ruin and pillage, then the stones of the walls were taken, soil was washed by the rain over what was left, then it was buried and eventually we pitched up. Comfort and decadence, they're killers for any society confronted by an enemy that's hungry, ruthless.'

At the extremity of the mosaic there were stone slabs and then the first signs of the
praefurnium,
the stoke nole, and in the mud that he lifted on his trowel Gaunt found a small piece of compressed black material. With near reverence he placed it in the bucket by his elbow. When they took tea he would show it to the site surveyor: a piece of charcoal that could be radio-carbon-dated, that could tell them when, to the year, a fire had been lit before the arrival of the forces of that day's axis of evil. He found the man's thesis not irritating but marginally amusing.

'What I believe frightening is that corruption is at our gates now and tonight... Trust me, I'm a general practitioner - know what I mean? You should see what crosses my surgery five days a week, nine hours a day . . . I promise you, I'm not a doom merchant, but we're busy losing our way. Drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, child abuse and paedophilia, debt entrapment, obesity, alcoholism, benefit dependency, ignorance and illiteracy, and every symptom of yobbery.

I see it, and I practise in a little backwater, in Devizes.

It's the drugs culture that's the worst - and so few seem to care... What seems to me to be so wretchedly stupid is that we are preaching for our failing lifestyle to be adopted by Islamic states. Such conceit.'

He stiffened. The trowel slipped from his hand.

Gaunt, working at the dig site with the voices - and sometimes the laughter - of young people around him, had felt rare tranquillity. He no longer scraped for charcoal pieces or for bone scraps that had been thrown away, centuries before, on to the cut wood and open-cast coal in the praefurnium . . . He had believed he had escaped, and had not. What now was relevant?

As if a nerve in him was pinched, he saw himself as an old warrior too tired for combat when the barbarians swarmed at the gates. A man who spoke of a society, decadent and doomed, in the corridors of Vauxhall Bridge Cross, would - Gaunt thought - be taken to the stake and burned alive as a heretic. Did a doctor from Devizes tell a truth that none dared name? It was a mandatory-death-sentence offence, in the offices of VBX, to suggest that victory was not assured.

'I hope you don't mind me prattling on . . . Do you think our time's up, like this chap's was? I wonder about it. Is all this we hear of the new fundamentalist enemy just modern-speak for barbarians at the gates?

Are we now as decadent as our chap, standing here for the last time? Quite a rum thought: in sixteen hundred years, folk will be scratching at the foundations of my home and getting all excited when they've found the sewer pipe and can tell what I ate, and have a chuckle and say, "Yes, he'd have known his time was up." Sorry . . . sorry, talking too much, my wife says I always do . . . What's this?'

Bare fingers wiped mud smears off a length of bone, and the arc-lights pierced sufficiently into the hole to show the minute working of the decoration at the head of what had been a hairpin - consigned to the fire rather than be an ornament in the tresses of a barbarian's woman. Gaunt, with all the warmth he could muster, congratulated the doctor on his significant find. They were called for tea. He levered himself out of the pit and carried his bucket to the tent where the urn was and sandwiches. He had thought, in a Wiltshire field, he would find sanctuary, but his mind was trapped by thoughts of Polly, and the man she had believed in, and the bright but deep eyes in the photograph of an enemy . .. and the casualties of war, then and now.

It was a supreme effort to drag himself to his feet. He was so nearly there, so close to his Grail. Oskar Netzer pulled himself up, off his stomach, off his knees and elbows, and the gate rocked on his weight and his fingers clutched at the catch holding it shut. Weakness consumed him, but the pain was long gone. When the gate swung open, a little more of his feeble strength left him and he lost his hold on the ironwork. He fell forward on to the cemetery path. He staggered over the loose gravel towards the stone and his wife's grave. He saw nothing ahead of him in the blackness but knew where he must go . . . and he believed he had made expiation for the wrong done by his uncle.

After a few short steps, he collapsed on to the sharp stones - but he hoped to reach her resting-place and to sleep there and be with her, to tell her of his ducks, and of the men who had intruded on his paradise, and that he had loosed the evil's hold on him . . . He crawled off the path and over sodden grass, reached out and found the glass jar, the stems of flowers that had been stripped by the wind.

He clasped the stone and did not know what he had achieved - did not know who would bury him - and sleep took him.

A clock chimed. A car, with lights flashing, and with an escort in front and behind, brought Timo Rahman to the prison in the north of Hamburg at Fuhlsbuttel.

He was led from it to a desk where the details of his life, and the charges he faced, would be processed.

The gaol's landings awoke. Word had passed. Spoons beat against metal mugs. Plates rattled against doors.

His name was shouted and echoed down the block's iron staircases. He was ordered to strip for medical inspection.

He was in hurtful ignorance of the reason for the collapse of his rule, and of who was responsible.

'I can't go in any further.'

'It's bloody dangerous out there, Dad.'

'Myself, I'd do it if I could,' Harry shouted at the wheel-house door, at his son. 'I can't . . . What I'm promising, it's never again.'

'Just get her stern on, Dad, and keep her there.'

He should have been down on the deck to help his boy but dared not leave the wheel and the diesel engine's controls to young Paul, his grandson, who had retched again and was now too frail to hold the wheel steady and did not know the working of the engine. The door slammed behind him, but he yelled and did not know if he was heard.

'Don't hang about. You get there, you ground, you pick them up if they're there, but you don't wait. Their problem if they're not in place in the water - my conscience is clear that my word was kept.'

Harry reached up, worked the lever that

manoeuvred the light on the wheel-house roof and hit the switch. In the flood of the beam, he could see his son and grandson heaving the dinghy off the bucking deck and on to the gunwale, resting it on the trawler's side, then - as a spray surge swamped them - pushing it over. On a wave, the dinghy - held by a straining rope - climbed higher than the gunwale, higher than them, then fell like the trough had no bottom to it. He had given his word to Ricky Capel, and his word was all the honour left to him. His son seemed to punch the shoulder of his grandson, as if to reassure the kid, who was destroyed by sickness, then launched himself over the side. Harry lost sight of him in the next pit, then saw him lifted in the dinghy, and the kid loosed hold of the rope.

He kept the light on the dinghy. He watched its progress, pathetically slow, and smoke fumes spat from the outboard. It rose and it fell. It was hard, one-handed, to hold the light on the dinghy and to keep the steering on the
Anneliese Royal
steady, to control the engine and bring the forward speed down from three knots forward to two knots. To his starboard side was the roll of the buoy light, the Accumer Ee on the chart, and to port were dulled blips of colour from the island's homes.

A prayer slipped on Harry's lips.

He held the wheel-house roof light on the dinghy and saw it shaken among the whitecaps and go towards the surf . . . Whatever it cost him, he swore that he would never again be Ricky Capel's slave.

He heard, 'About bloody time. You ready? We go, yes?

We don't hang about, not now.'

The world of Malachy Kitchen was now a tiny, confined space. His whole world was a dune with blown grass and soft sand, a beach, riffling surf and a light that wavered on the leaping progress of a dinghy. He felt cleansed, as if old baggage were dropped, and no one here would label him a coward. He coiled his body and made ready to run.

They were gone.

They went in a sliding chase down loose banks of sand. Little yelps of elation from Ricky Capel, like a child at play and happy, nothing from the man who led him.

The light on the boat at sea, perhaps because she was hurled up, wafted away and beyond the dinghy, and then raked over the surf and came on to the beach from which the tide ran, and Malachy saw them, saw that Capel had the box that was the radio, and that the second man carried a machine pistol that trailed loose in his hand. Malachy stood, but the light's beam did not reach him. It swung low, searched for the dinghy and found the breaking waves, then its target. They were off the loose sand, on the beach, and they ran away to his left towards a point that the dinghy headed for.

He had the tags in his hand, and he lifted the strap over his head: they were his name, his service number, his religion and his blood group, and they were his history. In his fist, fiercely clenched, Malachy held them.