Sean’s anger knew no bounds. He wanted to act as soon as he heard the news and it was all I could do to stop him from walking out of the door, looking for someone to shoot. He talked about kidnapping, about bombs under cars. He’d always been volatile, but since the debacle of the bank raid, his anger had grown uncontrollable, bitter. He kept talking about how he’d failed to “save” Ferdy, how he should have fired. With Anna away there was no one to counterbalance his self-disgust. He barely listened to the rest of us, even Claire, who could sometimes talk him down. Strangely, for someone who seemed to have trouble concentrating and whose consumption of amphetamines meant that he sometimes went several nights without sleep, he’d taken to reading. He attacked books; after he’d been at one it would look as if it had been through a storm, brutally battered, whole pages underlined in thick pen strokes. To everyone’s annoyance he’d scrawled a quote from Mao on the wall of the room where he was sleeping. We are advocates of the abolition of war. We do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun, it is necessary to take up the gun. It was Sean’s old favorite line; I didn’t like to think of it running round his head when he was wired, late at night.
The problem was that there was very little we could do. We’d almost used up the explosives we’d stolen from the demolition contractor. The rest of our arsenal consisted of three pistols and
an old Sten gun, which was so rusty I doubted it could be fired.
Thankfully, the plan we came up with was simple, if risky, and the only casualty had been dead for three hundred years. Late at night, with Sean behind him, Leo drove a motorbike into Parliament Square. While he pretended to break down, Sean ran into the darkness and planted a bomb on a short fuse beneath the statue of Oliver Cromwell that stood outside the Palace of Westminster. As they accelerated away down the Embankment, the explosion blew the old butcher into little pieces there is no point trying to explain right and wrong to cowards and crooks and part-timers we are sick of justifying ourselves to you our so-called masters or to you liberal dilettante scum who wring your hands and say oh no not this way not now not yet not ever if it was up to you not while british troops are setting up concentration camps in ireland three hundred years after cromwells army raped and pillaged across Two days later the inspector from the bomb squad came on the TV to announce he’d made arrests in connection with the so-called “14 August” group. We saw blurry photographs of people we’d never heard of, who were described as dangerous seditionaries. The policeman was confident their “dangerous antics” had now been brought to an end we are talking to those of you who get it already who are sick of the endless talk which never brings anything into reality we are talking to those of you who know we are all in prison and want to break out go and explain to the people it is time to put an end to the pig state they have looked their whole lives into the lying eyes of judges and social workers and managers and teachers and foremen and doctors and local councillors and still the only ones they fear are the police WE ARE EVERYWHERE we are the man standing next to you on the station platform the woman cleaning your kitchen floor. I tried to speak to Anna. I had
to leave a coded message with a contact in Paris, who called back several days later asking me to wait beside a telephone at a certain time. Since I was staying in a flat with no phone, I’d persuaded a friend to let me use hers. This friend, a girl I knew from Notting Hill, had no idea I was involved in anything illegal. When Anna’s call came through she was in her living room, drinking and playing records with some friends. I sat on her bedroom floor in a tangle of tights and paperbacks and ashtrays and listened to the party on the other side of the door and the crackle on the line and an operator’s voice speaking in a language I thought must be Arabic and then came Anna’s voice, cosmically distant, saying, “Hello.” Our conversation was stilted and telegraphic. I didn’t want to risk discussing Sean. I asked how she was and she said she was fine. There was a long pause, then she asked if Grandma was all right, our code for an emergency. I didn’t dare say that my main reason for calling was to hear her voice. I pretended to have a logistical question, a query about a vehicle we’d left in the long-term parking lot at Heathrow airport. I didn’t ask where she was. I knew it wasn’t France.
Three weeks later. An indeterminate landscape, neither land nor sea; the light a uniform gray dazzle. I drove a brand new VW camper van over endless mudflats, the only sign of my passing a pair of tire tracks, abstract lines in the rearview mirror. It was impossible to tell where the sky began.
I was still on the German side of the border. Up the coast a mile or two was Denmark. The Holstein marshes appeared primeval, almost empty of human life. Up ahead the mudflats folded themselves into low dunes crested with gray-green sea grass. Huge flocks of migratory birds wheeled overhead.
There it was, the place I was looking for — a boathouse with a red roof. I drew up, parked beside it on a patch of broken concrete, listened into the wind. A series of muffled stuttering reports. Silence, then the same sound again. Short bursts of automatic-weapon fire, coming from some distance away. I got out and walked round the boathouse, rattling the big double doors, trying to see in through the smeared glass of the windows. Muffled as it was,
the sound put me on edge. An animal reaction. Fight or flight. As I looked round, someone grabbed me from behind, pinning my arms to my sides. I struggled and found myself face to face with Sean, who seemed to find my violent thrashing very funny. When I shook him off, he raised his hands in pretend surrender.
“Hold on there, cowboy. I saw you drive up. I came to find you.”
“Get off. Get the fuck away from me.”
“Calm down, amigo. Bad journey?”
“It was OK.”
“We’re over in the dunes, shooting targets.”
I’d followed Anna’s instructions. A Middle Eastern man in a café on Edgware Road. An envelope of money. I’d bought the van, taken it to be modified. Now there were secret compartments behind the door panels and between the front and rear axles, ready to transport the equipment back to the U.K. We’d all made our way to the marshes in ones and twos, disguised as tourists exploring the national park. As money was no longer a problem I’d bought myself new camping equipment, an expensive tent and sleeping bag. I told Sean I’d follow on and pitched it some distance away from the boathouse. I wanted to wake up in the morning and see the horizon. I wanted to watch the flight of the birds.
For that week we knew each other only by single names. The instructors were Khaled and Johnny. There were the Germans, Jochen, Conny, Frank, and Julia. Paul, I think, was French. Some had been in southern Lebanon, training in a PFLP camp. For others, like me, this was the first contact with what Khaled called “the organization.” I watched Anna skillfully stripping and rebuilding a 7.65 mm Skorpion machine pistol. She demonstrated how to reduce the rate of fire, how the stock folded so it could be carried under a jacket or a coat. Khaled stood beside her, nodding approvingly, his eyes fading from view behind his Polaroid sunglasses whenever the sun emerged from behind a cloud.
A gun, an animal weight in my hands, warm and snakily alive. Anna repeating Arabic words from a phrasebook. Johnny picking
his way over the dunes, the sand filling his city shoes. No one disturbed us. No one came. In the evenings, after the light had failed and we’d eaten a tasteless meal of canned soup and bread, discussions were held in the dank boathouse. Ideas were debated in a patchwork of languages. Plans were formed. People spoke of a strategy for victory. They spoke about the end of Imperialism. They could have been talking about anything. Road resurfacing, waste disposal. Out in the marshes, I thought. We’re out in the marshes at the edge of the sea, miles from the nearest other human beings, talking about who we’re going to kill to demonstrate our organic connection to the masses. I’d light my way back to my tent with a little pocket flashlight, a bright speck in the enormous darkness.