“Six,” Schlager says. “Only six?” Williams asks. “The rest will follow once we eliminate High Command,” Schlager says. “I suppose that’ll have to do,” Williams says, before turning back to look out over the warehouse’s floor. He doesn’t sip on his drink, but tilts the glass around a little to hear the clinking of the ice cubes. At this particular warehouse, only one of many Williams owns, the product shipped is ammunition, bullets for small arms used by the army. Factories elsewhere produce the ammunition, then ship it here where it’s sorted and forwarded to the army’s own supply chain. War can be profitable business, but with so few workers still reporting for work it’s becoming harder and harder every day for men like Williams to fill their quotas and make good on their deliveries. But this is by design. As the workers from one shift make way for those of the next, the warehouse floor quiets, leaving Williams and Schlager to stand in a momentarily awkward silence, this budding alliance between wealth and power now almost ready to coalesce around these men. These men have a knowledge that comes from an open secret; though Britain is consumed by war, at home and on the continent, they see the neutral Chinese, on the other side of the world, as the real enemy. They’re at least half right.
“I assure you,” Schlager says, “six is more than enough for us to carry out the plan.”
“I hope so,” Williams says. “If you’ve never served then you can’t know what even one man is capable of,” Schlager says, an edge in his voice. “I see what men are capable of all the time,” Williams says, turning back and looking Schlager right in the eye, “I see the screens filled with news from the front of our army’s latest humiliation. I see troops on the street who’ve become afraid to confront a small number of untrained and poorly armed malcontents. It was not always this way.”
“Our troops may be humiliated but it’s not their fault,” Schlager says. Williams raises an eyebrow and says, “is it yours?” A moment passes, then Williams turns back to the floor. He raises his glass of scotch to take another sip, and looks out at the workers from the next shift making their way in. But Williams does not own only the warehouses across the country that feed munitions to the army; he owns the factories that produce those very munitions. And he sells to all sides, through his own complex network of intermediaries and subsidiaries held at arms’ length selling even to the armies of the countries his is at war with. He didn’t start this war; men like him don’t start wars through conspiracies whether elaborate or simple. In fact, Williams personally would prefer this war to end. War is only profitable for men like him if this country merely watches from the sidelines while he quietly ships his armaments to all countries involved in the fighting. With an embargo in place and with much of the country a shambles, Williams can only watch as his once-bustling factories, warehouses, and rail yards languish in a state of near-total disuse. Although Williams is already a man of some importance, he’s about to become a man so much more. But he is only a man, and history is not made by men. It’s not who Williams is or what he’s about to do that’s important. If not him, then someone else would be there to take the steps he’s in the midst of taking.
“You politicians are all alike,” Schlager says. “Oh?” Williams asks, eyeing the colonel’s reflection in the office’s window. “You all love to talk about yourselves,” Schlager says, “you all think you have all the answers.”
“Doug, I would think we’d have known each other better than that by now,” Williams said, giving the workers one last look before turning and walking past Schlager to sit in his chair behind his desk. “This isn’t about me,” Williams says, “nor is it about you. Once we take control of the provisional government, we’ll restore order, and we’ll marshal the nation’s strength against our enemies. Is this not what you want?” Schlager doesn’t answer right away, instead standing firm. Then, he asks, “And then you will have your profits higher than ever?” Williams chuckles, for even he, on some level, knows there can never be altruism in his heart. Although they’ve known each other for years, theirs has never been a relationship quite amicable. Nevertheless, they need each other, now, for theirs is a conspiracy born out of the greed, whether greed for power or greed for prestige. Williams is not only the chief executive of the nation’s largest supplier of munitions to the army, but a former Armaments Minister in government. And Schlager was his attaché in the army, the man to whom he submitted his requests for briefings with the generals, production estimates, and, perhaps most important of all, bills for his goods and services. Then Williams left politics to head this armaments conglomerate while Schlager requested and promptly received a return to duty in a command position. A few years later this war began. Williams saw his conglomerates worldwide operations disrupted by this war while years of oversupplying the army meant no more business to be had in this country. Schlager lived through his troops humiliated on the battlefield by lesser enemies while politicians at home bickered over seats in parliament and cabinet posts, only to be returned home after an enemy air raid put shrapnel in his leg. Still nobody remembers the specific chain of events that set off this war, nor those that set off the disorder in the streets, but it’s never been important what specific events led us all into this crisis. If not these, then others, the pressures of so many decades, centuries of worship at the altar of greed having inevitably set us along the path to this ruin. This fact remains true even as we follow this thread in our descent into madness. But even as these men are but pawns of history, as we all are, this fact does not diminish their responsibility for the crimes they are to commit in their quest to advance their own vision of what’s to come. As our history advances, the fight to advance necessarily provokes the rising of the fight to regress, the act of fusing the two into a single experience the next step in reaching out to our future’s end. But it’s not over yet. The cruiser Borealis has made it almost out to sea, just past the docks at Tilbury, and still Dmitri looks through the darkness of the early-morning light with a mounting anticipation. Suddenly, there’s action. “To the cruiser Borealis,” squawks the radio, “this is the army. I order you to stop and heave to. I have vessels underway and I intend to board you. This is your only warning.” Dmitri snaps into action. “Fly the banner! All ahead full! Raise the main batteries! Open fire!”
From the warehouse’s little office, the past can’t be seen for all the future’s troubles looming in the distance like a mountain towering over a highway reaching straight out to the horizon. From this little office, men like Williams and Schlager plot to unseat the new provisional government and institute a regime of terror against the workers and the rebels in the streets of the nation’s cities, but while they so plot they can’t but keep their mouths from watering at the prospect of satiating their deepest, darkest desires. Theirs is a lust for power and prestige unleashed by the working man’s quest for justice and dignity, an evil’s rising necessarily provoked by the emergence of the virtues of decency and modesty in the physical act of the working man’s rising. But now is the time of our history’s future, when the rising of evil must be confronted by the rising of good. But not everyone sees things this way. It’s not only a few persons who come from the wealthy class or from the army’s privileged officer corps who will conspire to oppose the working man’s war of liberation or who will take to the cause of fighting against it, of trying to beat back they who would seek to free themselves from this current regime of injustice and indignity. There are others under the sway of these forces of evil. We’ve spent the bulk of this account of the revolution focusing on the actions of a few residents fighting for the right to live in their own homes, but in truth there’s a vast array of forces fighting for one thing or another, the common thread uniting them all the inexorable advance of our history towards is end. The decks of the Borealis heave as her engines struggle up to full power. Searchlights blind the bridge crew. “Shoot them!” Dmitri orders. Gunfire thunders out. The enemy responds in kind. The cruiser shudders and shakes as rounds fall in the water all around her, while her own guns shoot back, nobody seeming to aim at anything, the whole action immediately degenerating into a confused mess. “Evasive manoeuvres!” Dmitri shouts at the helm, the crewman turning hard to port, then hard to starboard, the Borealis tracking a zigzag path down around the last bend in the river Thames. But then she takes a hit, a round crashing aft, knocking out one engine, the cruiser lurching, shuddering to a crawl. It seems she’s done for.