Toploader Read online

  TOP LOADER

  ED O’LOUGHLIN

  New York • London

  © 2016 by Ed O’Loughlin

  First published in Great Britain in 2011

  Cover design by mecob.org

  Cover photo © Ed Darack / Getty Images; Matt Carr / Getty Images

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to [email protected].

  e-ISBN 978-1-68144-119-1

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  DEDICATION

  To Gabrielle

  Hong Kong is up for grabs

  London is full of those Arabs

  We could be in Palestine

  Overrun by a Chinese line

  With the boys from the Mersey and

  the Thames and the Tyne

  from “Oliver’s Army,” by Elvis Costello

  Contents

  Author's Note

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  All this will really have happened, more or less, by the time this account reaches you. For ease of comprehension, standard English orthography and translations are employed for all proper names. The exact location of these events has been redacted to protect the identities of the individuals involved.

  PROLOGUE

  A very wise old lady—her name was Martha Gellhorn—look her up—once told me that you can only ever really love one war. Well, of all the conflict zones that I have covered, “the Easy” holds a special place in my heart. I was there myself, all those years ago, when it came into being, the very first of the autonomous terrorist entities; I rode out on one of the last armored vehicles to pass through the newly built wall. And I have returned to the Easy many times since then, to stand on that wall, and to walk among the brave young soldiers, police, and contractors who guard it; who protect all our freedoms; and who soberly deliver their commanders’ responses, mindful of the purity of arms, to each new provocation. And I will keep going back to the Easy, year after year, as long as terror abides there, to remind those who waver of the vigil that must be kept, by all good men and women, lest hatred and evil prevail.

  Extract from the essay “Why I Still Go to the Easy,” by Flint Driscoll. Reproduced here by kind permission of Dr. Flint Driscoll and blow-back.net

  CHAPTER ONE

  The contact was first picked up by the radar girls, shortly before dawn, when it was still too dark and foggy to see anything much from the wall. Alerted by the beeping in their earphones, they watched as the contact appeared on the fringe of the free-fire zone, a ghostly green blob on their ground radar, condensed from the shimmering haze of the trees.

  It was midwinter, and the night was beginning to fade into day. Yet the exact time at which the target was acquired is, curiously, not recorded. Afterward, when technicians checked the logs for that watch, they found that key data streams were unaccountably missing. This caused quite a stir in certain rarefied circles—the tactical computer is supposed to record everything, every contact, every fire order. The question was thus left forever unanswered: Why was this contact allowed to get so far?

  Deep in their bunker, the radar girls watched the blob move into the free-fire zone. It acquired confirmed mass there, tripping seismic sensors beneath the bulldozed ground, which in turn alerted the drone control room just down the corridor from the radar girls. A small piston engine grumbled slowly up the sky, unseen, as the first armed drone moved into position overhead. A shepherd’s dog barked somewhere off to the south, a half mile or so into the misty Embargoed Zone.

  The first visual sighting of the target was made at or around 06:25. Notified of the threat by the tactical computer network, the sentries in watchtower Lilac Three glimpsed movement out in the free-fire zone. Through their night goggles they were able to make a visual identification, which they duly fed back to the computer: barnyard animal, medium-size, probably a donkey.

  The animal advanced a few paces more—head up, sniffing the air—toward the tower Lilac Three, observed by its sentries through blastproof glass windows. The donkey was gray, as is usual, and two straw panniers were slung across its back. The panniers jogged heavily whenever it moved.

  A proximity alarm jangled in the tower. The two young soldiers looked into each other’s faces, then fumbled open their firing ports. They readied their weapons—the click of a rifle bolt, the clack-clack of a machine gun’s cocking handle—and waited for the order to fire: the contact was already well inside the minimum distance at which the tactical computer is automandated to initiate lethal force against all suspect individuals or objects. Hunched over their weapons, the sentries shook their heads and flexed their shoulders, working to steady their breathing, leaning into their aim. Yet still the fire order did not come.

  The donkey moved forward again until it was only twenty yards from the wall. It lowered its head, nosed the dirt, then raised its head again. A stubby butt of carrot protruded from its jaws. For the first time now it seemed to notice the wall, eight yards of concrete looming bleakly above it. Grass and weeds grew thick and long in a narrow strip along the wall’s foot that the bulldozers could not plow, watered by the dew that trickled down the concrete. Still chewing, the donkey considered this unexpected feast, then moved toward it: it was now so close that the sentries could hear its teeth crunch on the carrot.

  The donkey swallowed its treat, eyes half closed in pleasure, then stooped to sniff at the fresh weeds along the base of the wall, its tail swishing
at the first flies of day. Curling its lips to bare its teeth, it stripped the leaves from a stem of bindweed and then chewed and swallowed. It swished its tail again and snorted contentedly, then made a half turn to the east, spread its front hooves, extended its neck, and brayed in thanks and praise to the rising sun.

  And then it exploded, vanishing in a splash of violet light and a gut-heaving shock wave. Sand and gravel lashed the watchtower, pitting the blast panes and jetting through the firing ports, scouring the night goggles of the two stunned sentries.

  Sirens went off in guardrooms and watchtowers all along the wall. Boots thundered on metal catwalks, fireports creaked open. Grenade launchers boomed, and trees fragmented. Unmanned machine gun turrets controlled by the computer swiveled peevishly on their servo mounts, chattering like monkeys. A tank bumbled up onto a dirt ramp set back behind the wall, traversed its main gun, and destroyed one of the few intact water tanks left in the northern Embargoed Zone. The sentries in Lilac Three picked themselves off the floor, trembling, temporarily blinded, ears ringing, unable to hear the “open fire” alarm that now blared from their computer terminal. And off to the south, as if on cue, the first terrorist rocket of the day rose up from the ground. Most probably on cue.

  The rocket’s exhaust fumes marked its trajectory, upward and over, a white question mark in the pale morning sky. It soared over the long snaking wall and its canine-tooth watchtowers, over the rat-shack sprawl of the army base beyond the wall, over the straggling lines of the tank park. The rocket flew on over the highway, the agricultural fields, the outskirts of the quiet little town whose peaceful citizens were still in their beds, and then its engine cut and its nose turned decisively downward again, into the blare of the one-minute warning, gravity reeling it homeward, plunging ahead of its sound wave. It fell onto a school’s soccer field, ten feet from the corner flag, and exploded there, showering clods of smoking earth as far as the penalty box.

  Machine guns stammered the length of the wall, harrowing the scrub on the edge of the free-fire zone. Overhead, the loitering drone changed course toward the orchard from which the rocket had been launched. Ten miles to the east, six artillery pieces barked in succession, firing on the rocket’s radar trace, and seconds later the orchard vanished beneath a chorus line of dancing light and earth and splinters. Fighter-bombers thundered in from the sea, and rapid response teams piled into tanks and armored personnel carriers, starting their engines, waiting for orders. And back where it had all started, in the base of watchtower Lilac Three, a small metal door creaked timidly open.

  The door was made of six-inch-thick steel plate painted gunmetal gray. It wavered on its hinges, and then a rifle barrel appeared around it, followed by a helmet.

  From underneath the helmet, worried eyes considered the fruit trees three hundred yards away across the track-churned dirt of the free-fire zone. Then they turned to look at the Rorschach blot of blood and crushed bone and offal that glistened on the otherwise unmarked surface of the wall. Beneath that viscous stain, mirroring it, was a crater full of gore and pulverized tissue, marking the spot where the donkey had dematerialized. It looked as if someone had folded the wall and the ground together, pressing the donkey between them like an insect in a book. Flies were buzzing loudly. There was a churning stench of blood and stomach contents, burned meat and half-burned chemicals.

  The eyes’ owner made a retching sound. “I think I’m going to be sick,” he told someone behind him. “This is horrible.”

  He pushed his helmet back to wipe the sweat from his eyes, then winced as his chinstrap bit a rash of angry pimples, relics of a shave two days before. Raising his rifle, the young soldier squinted at the tree line through its optical sight.

  “Hey, David,” he called. “Aren’t you going to cover me?”

  A machine gun barrel emerged from the top of the tower. The barrel wavered back and forth a few times on its bipod and then tipped toward the sky, which was crisscrossed now with the contrails of jet fighters.

  “I am covering you!” said a voice from the firing port behind the barrel. “Now stop wasting time, Johnny! Get out there and inspect the scene of the atrocity!”

  Still braced in the shelter of the doorway, Johnny glared up inside the tower. “Why don’t you go?”

  “Because I’m senior. I have to stay here at the post.”

  “But we’re both the same rank!”

  David sighed. “I’m still senior to you. Besides, that Daddy Jesus guy put me in charge when he posted us here last night. Remember him, Johnny? Do you want me to call Daddy Jesus and get him to explain it to you again?”

  Johnny thought of the leering monster that had materialized in their billet in the dead hours, reaching under their blankets with huge lingering paws. He shuddered, took a step toward the mangled remains of the donkey, then ducked back inside as two huge explosions shook the ground to the south. The air force was engaging the Embargoed Zone from 20,000 feet.

  “I really don’t think I should be exposed out here alone like this, David,” he complained. “I’m pretty sure I read something about that in the standing orders, or somewhere. There could be snipers, or something, in that tree line.”

  Steel brackets set into the concrete formed a ladder up the inner wall of the tower’s tubular stem. Leaning backward, Johnny peered up through the hatch that gave access to the firing platform twenty feet above. He could just make out David’s left buttock, braced against the wall above the hatch. A black leather prayer book protruded from its pocket. “Grow up, Johnny,” said David. “Just do the job, okay?”

  Johnny stepped clear of the door again, squinting at the scrubby tree line through his sights. Moving sideways in a half crouch, he made his way quickly to the edge of the gore pool, then lowered his weapon and studied it.

  “Poor little donkey,” he muttered, and shook his head. A thought struck him, and he turned to the tower and shouted: “Hey, David. Did we do this?”

  David’s face popped out through the firing port. It was round and freckled, with angry red eyebrows subverted by anxious blue eyes. “I don’t think so. I think the donkey just exploded.”

  Johnny pushed his helmet back, slowly this time, so as not to trouble his pimples again. “Really? . . . Wow. Whoever heard of an exploding donkey?”

  “Are you serious? Everybody has, Johnny. This is something like the third bomb-donkey attack from the Embargoed Zone this month! Don’t you read the terror alerts?”

  Johnny slung his rifle and stepped closer to the curdled soup of blood and organs. His stomach was steadier now. It occurred to him that he was standing with his boots on the ground, exposed to a hostile tree line, on a genuine combat mission inside the Embargoed Zone. He felt himself grow taller. With the toe of one boot, with elaborate unconcern, he nudged a gelatinous blob that might once have been a hoof.

  “Hey, Johnny,” David called again. “Can you see any sign of the mechanism?”

  Johnny didn’t bother to look around. “What mechanism?”

  “You know, for detonating the bomb. I saw this documentary on Discovery about how they always try to find the bomb’s mechanism. That way they can work out who made it.”

  Johnny chuckled. “David, I think we already know who made this bomb. I think we’re definitely looking at the work of terrorists here.”

  He turned away from the wall and stared back toward the tree line. “Wait a minute, though—there is a wire! Leading back into those trees!”

  David stuck his head all the way out of the tower. “A wire? That doesn’t make sense. They’re supposed to use cell phones to set off bombs. That’s what it said on Discovery.”

  Johnny shook his head pityingly. “This isn’t TV or the Internet, Davy boy. This is for real. This is war.”

  And as if to underline his point another salvo of shells slammed into the shattered orchard, making the earth tremble beneath Johnny’s feet. David’s head jerked back inside the watchtower. He said nothing for a few moments, and then his machin
e gun yammered into life.

  Johnny hurled himself facedown as steel-clad slugs zipped over his head and thumped into the free-fire zone. He was still trying to squirm into the dirt when the firing stopped. Slowly, carefully, he lifted his head to see a cloud of dust hanging in the air thirty yards beyond him, where David’s bullets had chewed up the soil.

  “You bastard!” Johnny screamed. “What the hell were you shooting at?”

  The smoking barrel disappeared from the firing port and was replaced by David’s face. “Uh, sorry about that. It just occurred to me that all the other towers have been shooting off their weapons ever since that donkey blew up. If we don’t fire off some ammo ourselves, people will think we chickened out just because we were the closest ones to the attack.”

  Johnny rose to his feet and unslung his rifle. He put it to his shoulder, switched the selector to full automatic, aimed at the pool of gore in front of him, and emptied the magazine. Blood and dirt and gristle spouted into the air until the bolt locked to the rear of an empty receiver.

  There was a moment of ringing silence, and then David spoke again. “You’re sick,” he declared flatly.

  Johnny changed his magazine, watching a large blob of fat and nodules slide down the wall. “Hey. You know what would be really funny?” he said, brightening. “I should put my tag on this!”

  “No!”David yelped, but Johnny was already rummaging in a webbing pouch. He took out a small can of spray paint.

  “Don’t do it!” David protested as Johnny stepped up to the wall and uncapped the aerosol. “Remember what happened when they caught you spraying C and TS onto the doors of those UN jeeps?”

  “They let me off with a warning. The old man thought it was funny.”

  “But defacing the wall is a really serious offense. They’ll send us both to the military prison!”

  Johnny shrugged him off. “Don’t panic. I’m not going to put my name on it, just some kind of cool enigmatic emblem.”