Hostage (3 page)

Her hatred of our society stems from experience of physical starvation in the Third World rather than the spiritual starvation of our own. As a medical student in her fourth year she joined a relief expedition to the southern edge of the Sahara. There was little relief they could give but revive the almost dead for a few short weeks until they were truly dead and desiccated. She once told me how, when she returned, it was the advertisements, the costly, lying, snob advertisements of the affluent society, which convinced her that there was no possible building on such a culture until it was utterly destroyed.

Elise tried to pump me. She, too, while waiting for us had talked to the wispy haired stranger and noticed that he fidgeted and chirped to himself. Her impression was that the crate contained something live. Biological warfare? But even allowing for the international strength of Magma we are not ready for direct confrontation with the State till we have aroused in the public a burning sense of its futility, and resentment followed by violent hatred.

My instinct that it would be as well to keep a very private record of events turned out to be right. Libya, Paxos, Exmoor, this whole caper for the sake of nothing but detonators or infected fleas to be planted on politicians – if anyone can tell the difference – simply does not make sense.

Clotilde and two partisans have been arrested. My own cell was not engaged, so I know nothing about their attack on the Telephone Exchange. It looks as if the reconnaissance of the exchange was careless or else Special Branch have cleverly made security guards so inconspicuous that even Post Office supervisors do not know who they are. The urban guerrilla has still a lot to learn from freedom fighters in open country.

It was an ambitious job which would have interrupted communications all over the south-east, and evidently considered too big for a cell leader to direct alone. But what a risk to involve Clotilde! However, if it had to be taken there could be no better choice. She’ll refuse to talk and tell them to go to hell. The papers give me her real name which of course I never knew: Alexandra Baratov; secretary; British mother, Russian father. The Russian father is useful, implying Communist or Trotskyist intrigue.

The three of them will have thrown suspicion on the extreme left without a mention of Magma, probably claiming to be members of the Workers Revolutionary Party. I suspect that Special Branch know next to nothing of our existence, though they must be puzzled by an organising ability and a command of funds far beyond those of such incompetents as the International Marxists.

A long sentence is inevitable, for they were caught redhanded when concealing the charges. The only comfort is that we will get her out eventually. If escape and change of identity could be arranged for me, it can be for her. The taking of hostages for her release is out, now that no country, even Algeria, will receive prisoners rescued.

I have been appointed Group Commander in Clotilde’s place and am responsible for eight cells. I am surprised to find that in London there are only three, the others being in the Midlands with the primary objective of disrupting production lines. Security at cell level turns out to be as faultless as I had thought. My cell leaders only know that the cover name of their Group Commander is Gil and how he will identify himself. All communication is person to person. I visit the cell leaders as Clotilde used to visit me. No addresses. No telephone numbers. The result is that a partisan in the hands of the police is unable to give anything away but the names of his cell members and its leader. The leader can only reveal the nom de guerre of his Group Commander – which is no more use than saying he occasionally descends from heaven.

As a critic of society I must confess a tendency to criticise. Speed of communication is sacrificed for the sake of security; as cell leader I could not contact Clotilde. When the time comes for us to challenge and disrupt the State instead of well-timed stabs in the back I believe we could adopt for the cells, without much loss of security, the link between Group Commander and Action Committee. I know by sight the four members of the Committee who interviewed and approved me. I know where the meeting took place but not where the next one will be. I do not know where the International Headquarters are. I do not know the true name of Rex who is to give me my orders, but I can in an emergency get in touch with him. That loose-limbed tiger of a man whom I saw at Blackmoor Gate was at the meeting. ‘Bearded like the pard’ comes to mind. I suspect that he is our delegate to the International Committee.

I have appointed Mick to take over the cell, chiefly because I am fond of him. Blind obedience is not his forte, but so long as he resists the temptation to show too much independence he may do better on his own than under me. He came to the New Revolution by way of the National Students’ Union, seeing them as the natural leaders of the proletariat – a mistake the French made – and found that in fact he could lead but not as a self-confessed student. The man is by nature an actor and quick to learn, so he studied two regional accents for his part. He can do you a fiery speech in almost unintelligible Newcastle or hideous Birmingham. Magma made use of him and took him on when sheer disillusion was beginning to affect his oratory. I have trained him in urban tactics, night movement and concealment so far as can be done with just the pair of us. Elise, so passionately militant, has not enough respect for him because he does not know one end of a detonator from the other – or didn’t until I taught him. I remember explaining to her that Mick could do more long-lasting damage to the consumer society than a ton of gelignite.

The police have withdrawn the case against Clotilde and her two partisans on the grounds of mistaken identity. I cannot understand it at all, for the evidence against them must have been overwhelming. The press does not know what to make of it either. Some of the papers attack the police for too precipitate action, as if a store detective had arrested an absent-minded duchess for shoplifting. Two of the Establishment papers play the whole thing down – a paragraph in a back page. Editors must have been given a tactful hint of something the public is not allowed to know. We can’t possibly have been able to blackmail the Home Office.

Perhaps the Government believes that the criminals belong to some bunch of right-wing rats all smeared with fascist sewage who have crept out of a friendly bourgeois state to which we are heavily in debt. In that case the Home Office might hush it all up and the Foreign Office deal with the inexplicable lunacy through diplomatic channels.

The regular rendezvous with Rex changes every week. This time it was an art gallery in Belgravia where one may walk around with feigned interest and get into casual conversation with the man or woman who happens to be appreciating the same picture at the same moment.

Rex could pass as almost anything he pleases according to his style of dress. In the art gallery he might have just strolled by from one of the Belgravia embassies. When I first met him he looked informal enough for an off-duty football manager. He has a full, craggy face framed in an untidy mane and plays, I think, the daily game of a respectable left-wing social democrat. It wouldn’t surprise me if next time he turns up as a convincing builder’s foreman. But I may be romanticising. The strength of Magma is that one is what one is and above suspicion.

We strolled into Green Park and sat down. I will try to reconstruct the conversation.

‘Any questions, Gil?’ he asked with a smile.

‘Only if it’s advisable for me to know the answers.’

‘It may be.’

‘Then how the hell did you get Clotilde off?’

‘The Government found it too – well, embarrassing to hold her.’

‘She said something to me about partisans being free from arrest.’

‘Yes. For the moment they are. The Committee want to know how much you have guessed. You were in it nearly from the start, you see.’

I replied that I hadn’t any reasonable guess at all and was naturally curious. I hoped some day to know how the Blackmoor Gate operation had been planned and why. Then I asked him whether Clotilde was safe, for it was certain that every step of hers must have been followed by Special Branch after she left the court.

‘Quite safe, but not in circulation. Outside the court was a crowd of reporters howling for her comments. One of them was a Magma partisan. A woman. Her paper had authorised her to offer ten thousand for Clotilde’s exclusive story. She took Clotilde along to Fleet Street and into a private office. Clotilde went to the loo – very natural after all that excitement. It was the men’s loo. That took very careful timing with all those sots rushing in and out for a pee. She came out as quite an imposing young man, hat on the back of her head and hair under it, and cleared off at the back of the building. Our girl raised hell very convincingly and was not suspected. I myself disliked having to risk her, for she’s too valuable. The disappearance of Clotilde need not have been so hurried.’

‘You were there?’

‘I sometimes have the run of the place.’

No wonder our inside information is so good! Rex cannot of course be a well-known figure, but he might be a leader writer or columnist. He has a slight provincial accent which suggests that he started on a local paper and made his way up to Fleet Street.

I waited for him to tell me the facts of Clotilde’s inexplicable acquittal, but evidently he was not yet ready or authorised to put me in the whole picture. So I asked him what orders he had for me.

‘A few draft manifestos. Imagine that the State is trying to claw itself out of the grave and explain what must be done to push it back! All your old philosophy, Gil, and at the top of your form. Out of chaos will come Justice and Humanity. Keep it simple for the simple!’

‘And no action?’

It was long since I had been limited to the intellectual side of the movement. I did not want to return to theory and a typewriter.

‘We may have that for you too. Tomorrow. Same hour. At Watts’ statue of Physical Energy in Kensington Gardens. The Committee’s judgment of you is that you should know as much as Clotilde did.’

This morning I met him by Watts’ rampaging horse. Too healthy and too openly powerful for a horse of the apocalypse. A concept of the last century. What would our own emblem be? An abstract unintelligible to the conservative masses. An abstract which might represent the pressure of one continent upon another till the silent Magma surges up between the tectonic plates and the cities steam, ready for us to rebuild mercy and justice on the rubble.

There was a summer drizzle of warm rain, so we could not take chairs without drawing attention to two eccentrics. We walked briskly east, worthy citizens not to be done out of their daily exercise by weather.

‘Did you notice,’ he asked, ‘that the theft of arms in Libya was published at once to the foreign press, the embassies, Interpol, the lot?’

I replied that I did and could not understand it. In any case nobody would put much trust in any Libyan statement.

‘Without strong confirmation, no.’

‘Where did it come from? Magma?’

‘Confirmation came direct from Paris.’

I asked what Paris had to do with it.

‘La Gloire, Gil. Always la gloire. Military glory; commercial glory – without them we should find so many objectives out of reach. You are aware of the motives which induced the French to offer a Nuclear Reactor to Libya?’

Vaguely I was, I said, and it seemed to me a useful step on the way to Nuclear Warfare and chaos. But I could not see why the French should be so obliging.

Rex replied that it was a very simple bargain. Australia and New Zealand were raising so much hell about Pacific tests of nuclear weapons that the French wanted a new testing ground. They asked for a desert site in the empty south of Libya. The Libyans agreed, on condition that they be given a Nuclear Reactor.

‘Why, Gil? Why do the Libyans with all that oil to provide electricity want a prestige luxury which they cannot possibly handle without foreign technicians? To score off Israel and possibly Egypt. Where there is nuclear power there is also the possibility of a weapon. And from the French point of view a reactor in Libya is a bait to attract still more contracts from the Third World which has no oil. Do you know anything about nuclear fission?’

‘A lot less than any student of physics and a little more than general knowledge.’

‘That’s about enough. The Libyans insisted that the fuel rods for their reactor should be manufactured in Libya, thus alarming their neighbours and reinforcing the bluff. The French didn’t think much of that and had to refuse. Fuel rods are right at the limit of technical knowledge. You can’t run them up in a shed with a team of half-educated colonels from the Ministry of Science, even allowing for all the enthusiasm of awakening Islam.

‘So then it was the Libyans’ turn to have an attack of glorious nationalism. They demanded that all materials for Nuclear Reactor and Test Bomb must be documented and pass through Customs, though the inspectors wouldn’t know a fuel rod from a stick of Brighton Rock with a coat of paint on it. Very understandable. Customs officials have families to support. Men are enviably happy with the simplicities of Islam, Gil, especially when reinforced by bribes which make the simplicities no longer necessary.

‘So the French had no objection. They needed good will all round and were experienced in the ways of North African officials. Imports to prepare the foundations and start the erection of the reactor were quite straightforward – specialised building materials together with tons of explosives. But some of the imports for the test bomb were of course very tricky.’

Rex broke off to tell me that the International Committee of Magma had often debated the theft of fissionable substances. They had planned on paper the hijacking of a transporter carrying irradiated fuel to the reprocessing plant, but decided that the threat of the stuff was limited. Let it loose, and you would have a few unpleasant deaths in a few years’ time. Nothing dramatic. No public panic. Plutonium might also be obtained, but to manufacture an H bomb from it – though there was a myth that any advanced student of nuclear physics could succeed – required deuterium, lithium, an extensive, shielded establishment and a considerable staff. When, however, they heard of U235 going begging …