The Dead Can Wait (46 page)

Then, over the space of perhaps a hundred yards, the infantry fell away. The white tapes also came to end. That was no man’s land ahead, Halford was certain. He instructed Sergeant Yates to speed up and the machine gave an eager lurch. For a tank, anyway. Halford indicated that all visors, doors and escape hatches should be closed and they sealed themselves in. Now he was looking at the red guide light through a glass prism.

Which meant he had to peer hard when the beacon wobbled and then moved wildly from side to side. He pressed his face forward, just in time to see Tench stagger and slump to the ground. He’d been hit.

‘Stop!’ Halford yelled, banging the spanner as hard as he could.
G for Glory
groaned, juddered to a halt and slipped into neutral.

Halford pushed up the visor. Ahead was indeed the no man’s land he had heard so much about, as featureless as a black lake. He doubted whether there would be many more landmarks out there, even when dawn did put in an appearance.

He could make out the prone shape of poor Tench, lying motionless a few feet from the track that would have squashed him into the ground. Another figure, an officer, was crouching over him, removing the still glowing guide light.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Follow me!’ the man cried, looping the lamp through his own belt before dragging Tench to one side.

Brave chap
, Halford thought. He wouldn’t want to be out there, exposed to sniper fire with a glowing red light that almost invited ‘Shoot me’.

Halford leaned back in his seat, pulled the visor hatch shut, gave the order to engage gears and they crept forward again. Over the engine he could hear the crump of the occasional shell, and there was a whiff of gas a few moments later. But the clumsy gas masks with their fogged eyepieces meant viewing through the prisms or periscopes would be almost impossible. He could see the officer ahead of them slipping on his respirator, though. The tankmen would just have to try to power through without.

A ping. Then another ping, as if they were being fired at by a boy’s peashooter. Then a louder bang and a shout. Halford turned in his seat. One of the gunners was clutching his arm. A round had come through the thinner metal of the sponson.

‘You all right?’ he mouthed over the relentless clattering of the Daimler.

The gunner nodded. ‘Don’t worry about me, sir.’

Christ,
Halford thought. The side sponsons weren’t bullet proof after all.

It was then the tank lurched onto its side, slithering out of the horizontal, throwing half the men against hot pipes and metal surfaces. The engine gave a strangled screech and stalled. A strange ticking silence came over the interior as each man, stunned, tried to reorient themselves. They had toppled into a crater.

‘Fuck,’ someone said. ‘How did that happen?’

Both Yates, the driver, and Halford, peered through the prisms to see how the guiding officer had brought them to this pickle. There was the crack of shattering glass and Yates was pushed back, his face full of splinters from the prism and a messy hole punched into the bridge of his nose.

‘We have to get her out of here,’ said Halford, as more rounds screeched off the frontal armour. ‘Get the boards under the tracks.’

‘But Ralph—’ said a shaken Phibbs, pointing to the slumped shape of the driver.

‘I can bloody well drive,’ snapped Halford, heaving the dead man from his position.

Phibbs tried the port sponson door, but it was wedged against the mud of the crater and would move only an inch. He staggered up the slanting floor, grabbing at handholds as he went, and managed to push open the starboard sponson’s hatch. There were strange noises rending the rain-sodden night now – snaps, crackles, whistles, whooshes and booms – preliminary, probing attacks from both sides until the dawn onslaught proper.

Four of the men had already de-tanked when another figure came inside. Halford recognized him as Levass. It had been he who had picked up Tench’s red light. He had led them to the edge of this deep shell crater and marooned them. He who had . . . had he shot Yates through the observation slit? And killed poor Tench in the bargain? But that would mean this man was a traitor at best, a deranged monster at worst.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Halford asked.

‘Abandon tank,’ Levass instructed.

‘Certainly not. We have a machine-gun position to knock out.’

‘You will never make it across in this machine.’

‘Not with you in front of us. Get out of my car.’

The sound of the gunshot filled the tank, snapping at their eardrums. It took a long time for the ringing to die away, about the same as for each of the three remaining tankmen to realize they hadn’t been shot. Levass had put a bullet from his pistol through the engine.

‘I think you had better go,’ said Levass. ‘This tank must not fall into enemy hands. Now!’

He waved the pistol around and Halford and the others all came to the same conclusion at once. That Levass was utterly insane. Without a word they filed out into the drizzle, heading back to their own lines and the infantry who had been deprived of their precious cover by this madman.

As he bolted the door after them, Claude Levass was well aware they would all think him crazy at best, a deranged traitor at worst. But this was no more insane than pitching your best weapon at the Germans only to have its secrets discovered. The corrupted fuel had been intended to stop them dead in their tracks, before they engaged the Germans. But someone had discovered it far too soon. In fact, the poor quality of the machines had almost done his job for him in many cases. Of the forty-nine landships scheduled to attack, only about half were free of problems. And, he reckoned, if this one was seen to have failed on the opening gambit of the offensive, then perhaps the strategists might think again and pull the machines back to Yvranch, saving the march of the tanks for another day. The burning of
G for Glory
would be visible for miles, a visual signal that the landships had been unleashed too soon.

Of course, he was finished. But at the very least, Levass would have his day in court to tell the top brass how pig-headed and shortsighted they had been. And Cardew? Well, Cardew could take the blame for what happened at Elveden and the men in that tank. He was in no position to argue. The tiny quantities of the drug he had given the engineer to make him suggestible and pliant – the Mexicans called the Datura extract
Esclavo de los Dioses
, ‘Slave of the Gods’ – had been used in larger doses by the Aztecs to convince their human sacrifices that they were dying for a good cause. But even in the smaller dose, it must have disturbed the balance of Cardew’s mind. Why else would he have killed himself in such a melodramatic way?

Which reminded him. Levass took one of the sachets of powder he always carried with him from his top pocket and emptied the contents onto his tongue. It was bitter, but as soon as he swallowed he felt the rush of warmth around his body, the glow of inner strength from the drug. He did the same with two further packets, far more than he usually ingested.
But this is an unusual day
, he thought, as he opened the hatch to let the two carrier pigeons fly free.

Levass had unscrewed the cap of the first can of petrol and sloshed it over the front of the interior and was working on pouring the second over the engine when he heard the clanging noise. Several bullets had hit the tank – it was evidently becoming visible in the strengthening light – so he thought it must be a particularly large calibre round. Then it came again, a rhythmic rat-tat-tat. Someone was hammering at the sponson door.

Levass put down the half-empty can and drew his pistol once more. He turned the metal lever and pushed open the door, straining against gravity. The tank was at such an angle that he could just see the head and shoulders of the new arrival. It was Major Watson, a metal bar in his hand.

‘A word, Levass?’ he asked, as casually as if they had met in the bar at his club.

A machine gun chattered. There was answering rifle fire. The attack on the German position had started, without the benefit of
G for Glory
.

‘I’m going to burn this,’ Levass said. ‘You might want to get away.’

‘That’s as maybe, but I am feeling rather exposed out here. Can I climb up?’

‘Are you armed?’

‘My pistol is holstered.’ He made a show of tossing the bar away.

Levass grunted and stepped back, leaving the major to struggle with the mass of the door and the tricky ascent unaided. Levass was more intent on keeping his own pistol trained on him.

‘You are alone?’ the Frenchman asked.

‘Very alone,’ said Watson, as he clambered inelegantly inside. ‘I’d hoped never to see the inside of one of these monsters again. In fact, I had hoped never to see no man’s land again.’ He caught his breath. The petrol fumes stung his eyes and he rubbed at them. ‘Yet here I am.’

The access door clanged shut under its own weight. Watson was reminded of the ‘special’ cells at Wandsworth Hospital, the horrible finality of the crash of metal on metal, closing in the deranged and damaged occupants for yet another endless night.

‘What do you want, Watson?’ demanded Levass.

Watson gasped his breath back before he answered. He was getting too old for this. ‘You have led me a merry dance since I arrived in France, you know. Been searching for you up and down the line. Luckily, one of the engineers spotted you following the tapes behind this tank.’

‘And you didn’t bring the police? Someone to arrest me?’

Watson pointed to the rear of the tank. ‘Oh, they are out there. Not the police, military or otherwise, but some officers to deliver you to the provost marshal. They let me come in ahead, just to save any . . . unpleasantness.’ There were those who wanted to shoot Levass on sight and have done with it. Watson thought it should all be done with due legal process.

‘I want a French court martial,’ Levass said.

Even in the dim light, Watson could see the Frenchman’s pin-pricked pupils. The man was on some kind of narcotic. He had to be careful. Reasonable. ‘This is a British tank. Let it be and we’ll see.’

‘It has to burn,’ Levass said. There was strange, metallic quality his the voice.

‘Burn this, and I’m afraid they’ll take you straight to the Tower. And I want to know what other tricks you have been up to with the other tanks. Lives are going to be lost—’

‘Thousands of lives are going to be lost in future because this great invention will be thrown away.’

Watson sighed. ‘It is not your decision.’

‘No, it is the decision of the blunderers and the . . .’ Levass lapsed into rapid French, not all of which Watson could follow.

‘Levass. It’s over. I—’

The tank bucked like an angry stallion. The ground shook beneath their feet and the metal walls began to resonate. The Allied barrage had started. The noise of the guns was amplified by the vibrating steel hull into a continuous, oppressive thundering. The air thickened and it seemed as if someone was trying to crush Watson’s chest.

‘Levass. I don’t know how’ – he struggled for support as the tank slid into the crater a little more – ‘how accurate the guns are. We could be blown to pieces where we stand.’

Levass was thrown backwards as a shockwave punched into
G for Glory.
The petrol can overturned and gurgled away its contents, pooling at the lower side of the stricken machine. Now the air was thick with its vapour.

‘Look, you can convince them to call off the tanks when you get out.’ Watson knew this was a desperate invention, but he was sweating now and not from the residual heat of the engine. The shells were falling so thick and fast there were no individual explosions.

‘They won’t listen.’

‘They won’t be able to hear you at all if you are dead. You might still make a difference. What you say isn’t entirely nonsense. Your method of saying it, however . . .’

Levass holstered the pistol. ‘Perhaps you are right.’ The machine-gun fusillade hit the exposed front of
G for Glory
like a furious drum roll. The rounds could not penetrate the armour, but the hot metal and sparks they sent buzzing around the interior like manic fireflies ignited the spilled petrol. Watson looked on in horror as the fuel at Levass’s feet made a whoosing sound and a wall of flame engulfed him. Soon the rest of the petrol caught, almost masking the burning man’s screams, as the inside of the tank crackled into a lethal inferno.

FIFTY

Sherlock Holmes was sleeping. He looked, in repose, like any other patient, his face relaxed, freed from the struggle of his day-to-day existence and some of the ravages of time. He was in a private room at St Bart’s, the place where, many, many years before, he had met a lath-thin and nut-brown ex-army officer, and they had decided to share rooms. The start of a great adventure that, Mrs Gregson suspected, only the death of one or the other would curtail for good.

She reached over and dabbed at a line of spittle that had formed at the corner of his mouth, and the former detective stirred slightly. It was almost dawn on Friday 15 September 1916, and she had been there all night, snoozing in the chair. It was a way of keeping the faith for Watson. She had not been able to go with him to France – there had been no room in the aeroplane, for a start – so she had set about making sure his old friend received the best possible care.

She was worried about Watson, of course, but knew better than to try to stop him going. He had wanted this finished off. After requisitioning the motor cycle with a wave of the pistol, the pair had driven to London, contacting MI5 en route to make sure that Langdale Pike – a gossip columnist and skilled double agent – rolled up all the known German contacts and agents in London. If Ilse Brandt had made it to the capital, she would find the channels to Germany had been closed down.

That still left her at large, of course, and dangerous, but apparently her knowledge of Thetford and its machines would soon be redundant.

‘How is he?’

Mrs Gregson jumped to her feet, startled by the voice. It was Winston Churchill.