“Be my guest.”
He reached slowly into a webbed pocket, took out a kit and began the rollup ritual. As he did so he considered me.
“How old are you, son?”
“Old enough.”
“Fourteen, fifteen? What you doing running around playing soldiers, eh?”
I was not in the mood to be interrogated.
“I want you to very slowly take out the handguns and toss them over to me. Slowly.”
He put the ciggie in his mouth, lit it, and then casually tossed me two shiny new Browning L9A1 sidearms.
“Here, have the ammo as well. Call it a gift. Plenty more where that came from.” He threw me four clips of 13 rounds. I stashed the guns and ammunition in the big pockets on my trousers. No need for anyone else to know I had them. Insurance.
“What’s that you’ve got, old .303? Where d’you get that then?”
I didn’t answer.
“Let me guess. CCF, right? You’re from one of those posh schools where the kids play dress up. Listen son, I dunno who’s giving you orders but they’re fucked in the head if they think that storming a military facility is a job for teenagers. You should be holed up somewhere learning to rub sticks together to make fire, not creeping around the countryside shooting at adults.”
“Maybe. But adults keep shooting at us and I feel a lot safer knowing I can shoot back.”
He thought about this for a moment and then nodded. “Fair enough, I s’pose.”
“And anyway, I’m the one holding the gun and it sounded to me like your pillbox got blown to pieces, so I wouldn’t underestimate us, mate. We’re not playing games here.”
He grinned. “Again, fair point.”
“So what’s Operation Motherland when it’s at home?” I asked.
“Exactly what I want to fucking know,” said Mac.
THE ARMOURY WAS a room in the main building’s basement, one end of which housed a huge vault door. The sniper and two other men were tied to chairs in front of the door. One of the captives from the pillbox had a nasty head wound and was only partially conscious. The other was covered in brick dust but looked fine.
Mac himself was also covered in dust and had a large purple bruise on his forehead. He’d been knocked out by a piece of brick sent sky high by the explosion, but he’d come round first and pulled these two from the wreckage.
“Pillboxes are fucking solid, right,” he’d explained. “So I had to use a lot of geli. I managed to lay the charge without them spotting me, but they clocked me as I was crawling away and I had to hit the detonator before I was fully clear otherwise they’d have killed me.”
The rest of us were gathered around the door too, sitting on chairs or lounging on the cellar steps. Wolf-Barry was dressing Green’s wound, Zayn was seeing to mine. Bates, Zayn and Wolf-Barry’s faces were all covered in tiny cuts where the glass from the window had shrapnelled into them, but none had serious injuries. Apparently they’d still been sitting up there trying to formulate a plan when Mac blew the pillbox and all the shooting happened. Nice one Batesy, leading from the front.
“Dave, I’m sorry about this,” said Bates, addressing the conscious man from the pillbox. “But we’ve got a situation and I need those weapons. Didn’t think there’d be anyone defending the place. Not my intention to have any shooting, but you shot first and my boys have a right to defend themselves. All you need to do is tell us how to open the vault and no-one else needs to get hurt.”
The man didn’t even try to hide his contempt.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Bates? I mean, you always were a jumped up little tosser who thought he was a soldier, but seriously, what the fuck is this? Colonel? You’re a Colonel? Don’t make me laugh. All those times we let you come down the boozer with us after manoeuvres so you could tell us all about the SAS stories you used to read. We were laughing at you, you moron, not with you. Do you really, seriously think that…”
He trailed off as a loud, sickening gurgle came from the semi-conscious man tied up next to him. All heads turned in time to see Mac pull his knife out of the man’s neck. Blood gushed out over his hands, and down the man’s jacket. We all sat there in stunned silence as the man shook and jerked in his bonds as he frothed, spluttered and wheezed. It took him a horribly long time to die, and none of us said a word.
Again, the hollowness in my stomach and the deep, sick sense that everything was spiralling out of control. But I was weak from blood loss, light-headed and mildly in shock. My reactions were muted. I could do nothing but watch.
“You’re next,” said Mac, simply. He then wiped the knife blade on his sleeve and sat back down, staring straight into Dave’s terrified eyes with something that looked awfully like lust.
Zayn ran up the stairs. The sounds of him retching echoed back down to us.
Bates was white as a sheet. He hadn’t ordered Mac to do that. Even through layers of shock I realised that if he let it go unremarked then Bates’ authority would be gone forever and it would only be a matter of time before Mac made his move. I willed Bates to shout at him, to demand his weapon, to dress him down and seize control. But he didn’t have it in him. Bates so desperately wanted to be a strong military leader but he was weak, indecisive and vulnerable. And with his next words he doomed all of us.
“Well, Dave?” he whispered, unable to conceal his shock but trying to play along and follow Mac’s lead. “What’s it to be?”
Dave held Mac’s gaze, his eyes full of disbelief and horror. And, I noticed with surprise, tears. He told us the combination.
Mac smiled. “Thanks, mate,” he said. He looked up at Bates. “Want to do the honours, sir?”
Bates seemed to be looking right through Mac at something terrible in the distance, but he nodded and mumbled “Yes, thank you Major.” Now he was thanking his subordinate for giving him permission to open a door.
He stepped forward and entered the combination, swung the huge lever handle and pulled the heavy door open to reveal racks upon racks of armaments and stacked boxes of ammunition. Mac gave a low whistle of appreciation.
“Lovely jubbly,” he said.
WE BROUGHT THE minibuses up to the front door and started loading the weapons into the back. Green and I sat in the front seats watching the others do all the heavy lifting. There were about fifty SA80 Light Machine Guns, ten boxes of grenades, three more Browning sidearms and four 7.62mm General Purpose Machine Guns, the kind you would mount on a jeep or in a pillbox. There was also more ammunition than we could carry, so there would have to be a second trip. With this amount of firepower, properly used, we’d be a pretty formidable opposition.
“We could even go on the offensive,” said Wolf-Barry. “Take the fight to those Hildenborough fuckers. Mac’ll see us right, he’ll make sure we do what’s necessary to protect ourselves.”
In his mind Mac had replaced Bates already. I wondered how many of the others felt the same way. And I wondered how long it would be before Mac’s assumption of power became official. What would that would mean for poor usurped Mr Bates?
When the buses were loaded Patel opened the driver’s door, excited. “You’re going to want to see this,” he said. “Mac’s doing an interrogation.”
In fact this was pretty much the last thing I wanted to see, but somehow I felt I should. I was responsible for capturing the sniper, whatever happened to him would be, to some degree, on my conscience. I hopped out of the bus and continued hopping ’til I was back at the vault door.
Mac had the two surviving TA men sitting facing each other, with himself circling around them.