Midnight Plus One

Harvey ran a finger down the wall and said thoughtfully: 'Would have been a wonderful war.' Then he looked at me. 'You think the rest of it, up front, is like this?'

'Yes.'

'I'd been thinking of just holes in the ground, trenches. Like that.' He turned away. 'Would have been a wonderful war.'

After that, the fortifications came thicker and faster. An occasional pillbox in among a clump of trees; concrete platforms for guns; mortar pits gaping like open graves. The track got rougher, became just two ruts with small bushes and four-year-old trees sticking up between. The Rolls swept over them and scraped them to pieces on its underside.

I could have wished it any other colour but the one it was. In the drifts of moonlight the polished aluminium seemed to shine like a neon light.

The track flattened out on the valley floor. Half a mile away, up on our right, headlights flickered silently along the frontier road and stopped… Your papers please… just a routine check… Thank you very much, a good journey to you. A different world.

The car slowed. Harvey asked quietly: 'Is this it?'

I looked ahead – and it was.

It was a bank, about seven feet high, right across the valley. It had an even, unnatural look, like the slope at the end of a lawn. Then a flare of moonlight showed me more. It wasn't a bank, but a small plateau. The generals had decided that the higher the ground, the better fighting country it was – so they'd made it higher. The whole battle zone was set on a raised platform like a well-laid-out bowling green. It was all very logical, and all a little creepy.

The girl lifted her foot and the car stopped gently at the foot of the bank. An extra advantage of the platform was that it made the land just behind it dead ground – out of sight of an enemy in front. Or anyone waiting in the battle zone itself. That must have been planned, too.

Harvey and I stepped down and walked carefully up the slope and looked out across the battle zone.

At first all I could see was an unnaturally flat plain covered with a dark sea of short bushes, waving stiffly in the wind. Then I began to see the hard, square shapes underneath – blockhouses, pillboxes, command posts, mortar pits, and the zigzag of communication trenches.

It didn't look like a battle zone. It still had a squared-off neatness that was only slightly worn by thirty years of wind and rain and creeping grass. It looked like an old, lost city, abandoned and gradually sunk seven feet into the earth. But you could never wonder what sort of people had lived here. Nobody had lived.

But nobody had died, either. The clerks had typed out their little lists of Casualties to be expected – and the war had never come, nobody had fought, no casualties. Only the ghosts of men who had never died except on the clerks' typewriters.

Moonlight rippled over the zone and the concrete shapes turned a dim bluey-white like fresh damp bones.

Harvey said: 'It doesn't look good.'

I looked at him, wondering if he'd been thinking the same things. Then I realised what he meant. And it didn't look good. Out in the zone, you could hide an army. It had been built to do precisely that.

I said carefully: 'They'll be near the path. In this light, that means less than ten yards. So we get ourselves into the trench system and kind of creep up on them.'

He thought about it for what seemed like a long time. Then he shook his head. 'Sorry, Cane. If there's shooting coming, I've got to be with him.' He nodded at the car.

'You'll be doing a better job if you and me get the shooting done with before he gets near it.'

'Or maybe they jump us and he's sitting back here, naked. I can't do it, Cane.'

I said: 'We were hired to get him through. I'm going to do that.'

He shook his head again. 'No. You were hired to get him through; I was hired to keep him, alive. If I don't think he'll make it alive, my advice is he don't try.' He stared at me. 'Itold you at the beginning, Cane, this could happen. We'd end up wanting different things.'

'Maganhard'll want to try.'

'You could be surprised how people don't want to try things when I tell them it'll get them killed.'

I looked at him carefully. 'D'you want to call the whole thing off?'

He said quietly: 'Yes. I want to call it off.'

And then I knew. He was being honest – in the long, looping way that is the only way for a man like him to be honest about such things.

I said: 'Let's see what Maganhard says,' and turned back to the car.

Maganhard was already leaning out of the window. I couldn't see his expression, but I could guess. 'Well?' he crackled. 'What's the delay now?'

Harvey said carefully and tonelessly: 'The battle zone is very difficult ground, Mr Maganhard. It's built for exactly the job the other side's trying to do. I can't guarantee your safety if you go on. I advise you not to go.'

Maganhard's spectacles glinted dully as he turned to me: 'What d'you say, Cane?'

'I don't guarantee anything, either,' I said smoothly. 'I never did. But I'm ready to go. And in this light they're as likely to hit me as you.'

The flat metallic voice said: 'That sounds reasonable.' The spectacles glinted back at Harvey.

Harvey said doggedly: 'Cane and I are trying to do different jobs. He's trying-'

'He seems to be doing the job I want done,' Maganhard snapped. 'Why aren't you?'

There was a long, slow silence, with just the tickover of the Rolls like a tired heartbeat.

Then Harvey said: 'I've drunk too much, Mr Maganhard. There's no point in saying I'm sorry. But I'm slowed up. I'm not as good as I should be.'

It must have cost him blood to say that. No alcoholic ever admits it, and no gunman ever admits he might be beaten. And he had.

Maganhard looked at me again. I shrugged. 'I still think we can do it.'

The front door opened and the girl stepped down beside us.

'If Harvey says he shouldn't go, then you can't make him-'

'I'm not asking Harvey to go. I'm going myself. It's what I was hired for.'

Harvey said dully: 'You know who's up there? Alain.'

'Alain?'

Then I thought about it, and he was right. Alain and Bernard – the two top gunmen, the men I'd first asked for. They always worked together. Only they hadn't been together in the Auvergne – and Bernard had got killed. Yes: Alain would most certainly be here now. I should have thought of that.

Harvey said: 'You know Alain. You think you can beat him?'

'Yes.' I nodded. 'I know him. I can beat him.'

'You're crazy.'

'No – Alain didn't set this thing up -I did. I put him out there. And he's still thinking we'll come walking down not expecting trouble. No – this is going to happen my way, not his. I can beat him.'

Miss Jarman said viciously: 'You must reallywant your money.'

'No.' Harvey shook his head wearily. 'It's not that, honey. He wants to be Caneton. And nobody ever beat Caneton. Yet.'

I said quickly: 'Bring the car through in fifteen minutes. Unless you hear shooting. Then you can decide for yourself.'

I walked away down the bank to the right, looking for the entrance to the communication trench. I found it and turned in.

THIRTY

I took several fast steps, turned the first corner, and the close concrete walls shut in on me. After that, I moved more carefully, testing the walls at my side, the floor beneath.

The trench was no more than an unroofed concrete tunnel, working its way forward in zigzags so that an invader couldn't shoot down the length of it. The concrete had the samégritty-soft dampness of the blockhouse farther back, and mud had dribbled down the sides into heaps that were growing tufts of grass. The floor had once had a drainage channel down the middle, but now it was a series of slimy puddles where things moved and gurgled, but never seemed to break the thick surface.

And where are you waiting, Alain? I should know. I worked with you, on your side, in the old days. I remember you: fast, cool, and ruthless. And since then, you've been practising, I hear.