Toploader Read online

  Colonel White looked sad. “I can’t help thinking about that washing machine, Smith. Do you think it’s down there somewhere in all of that?”

  “Most likely. This West fellow must have been working an angle all along—him, his niece, and his mate Tony, the one you killed yesterday. The Iranian must have hired them to help him, perhaps because of their access to motor transport. But then they decided to double-cross him and sell the washing machine to us instead. So they brought it here in their jeep yesterday and stashed it close by their office. Probably in one of those lockups down there. We can send Cobra to look for what’s left of it later. Enough of the chip might survive . . . ” He shook his head. “It was a pretty smart play from their point of view: if only they hadn’t decided to drag 24/7 into it and forced us to do this.”

  “But we’d have had to kill them anyway to shut them up.”

  “Yes, but we’d have done it neatly. Professionally. Not like this.” Smith gestured sadly at the shellbursts on the screen.

  With each impact it felt as if all the air were being sucked from the room, then allowed to smack home again. The concussions slammed into Moon’s skull, pounding his chest and abdomen. Jagged holes appeared in the walls of the garage, and smoke flashed mauve with each new shell burst. The car rocked and danced on its ancient suspension, and shrapnel scuttled around the walls of the garage like rats frantically seeking escape. The girl was lying on top of Moon, her weight jamming his face against the pedals. He put an arm around her as if to protect her, and she turned her face to him. They were inches apart, but he had to shout at the top of his voice to overcome the thunder of the shell fire and the ringing in his ears.

  “We need to get out!” he bawled. “I know how this works: they’ll keep firing until they’ve flattened the whole area!”

  “That would be suicide! Our only hope is to lie here.”

  Moon tried to wriggle out from underneath her. “We can’t stay here! Even if we survive the shellfire, as soon as it stops, they’ll send people to look for us! What about the car? Can’t we use that to escape?”

  Joseph had shoved his head forward between the seats. “Don’t be stupid: the drones would destroy the car in seconds! Besides, it doesn’t work.”

  “But you said that it did!”

  “That was just something cool to say. In real life it was always junk. We had to tow it in here after my dad bought it.”

  The Falcon bucked as if stung by the revelation, and shrapnel ticked through a body panel.

  “We can’t just stay here and wait to die!” shouted Moon. He opened the driver’s door, then wormed out from under the girl. She tried to stop him, but he pulled himself free and staggered to the roller door.

  “Come back!” she shouted, “You can’t go out there!”

  Moon turned at the door and showed her the phone he had stolen from her pocket. “I can try and draw their fire!” he shouted. Then he pulled up the door and vanished from her sight.

  The alley was full of smoke and dust so thick that Moon could barely see his hands. A shock wave hurled him to the ground, and he cowered there gratefully, face pressed into the rubble, head covered by his arms. His lungs were seared by brick dust and the hot reeking fumes of explosives. He had hoped that he might find some pattern to the shellfire, something he could work with, to move in leaps and bounds the way they did in the movies, but the explosions, every four or five seconds now, hammered their point home to him: there was no way of cheating this game; he’d just have to play it. Blindly—his eyes burned, or clogged, or simply shut; he didn’t know which anymore—he crept and crawled. Rubble bruised and snagged him, and shell fragments seared his hands and knees. He vomited. Blast waves battered him, and he knew that at some point he must, having had no say in the matter, have fouled himself.

  He was crawling again. A shell blasted him sideways, and his shoulder struck metal, which swung away from him: he had somehow found a door. He wriggled his body around it. Another shell sucked the door shut just as he pulled his foot clear of it. He was inside.

  Moon lay still for a while, waiting for his eyes to clear. There was a heavy, almost stinging smell of must and ammonia. Beneath him was a concrete floor scattered with a fragrant substance that scratched his cheek. Another salvo of shells crumped into the alley outside, and Moon, surfeited with terror, was merely puzzled to hear screams and bellows erupt all around him, with a frenzied drumming sound and the splintering of wood.

  He crawled a couple more feet into the room, pushing his face along the prickly mass on the floor. He could recognize the smells now: urine, animal shit and straw. Opening his eyes, he saw that he was in a stable that was warmly lit by two overhead lightbulbs and lined on either side with wooden stalls. Four of the stalls were occupied by panicking beasts of some kind, blurs of bloodstained drumming hooves and foam-flecked teeth, frantic to escape this hideous storm. A fifth animal had already kicked its way free of its stall, and Moon saw it cowering against another door in the farther wall, a thick steel door mounted on heavy-duty sliding rails and painted an oddly familiar shade of gunmetal gray. The beast was a donkey. Another shell fell, and the donkey reared on its hind legs and clawed with its front hooves at the unyielding metal door, lips curled back from teeth bloodied and broken. The donkey saw him and wheeled around to face him, braying hysterically. Moon, still sitting, scooted slowly back against the door he had come through. You don’t want to get killed by a donkey, he told himself. That would be taking the joke too far. He fished the phone and battery out of his pocket, fumbled them together, switched on the phone, and pressed 1. And as he did so, something occurred to him: From where, he idly wondered, did those lightbulbs get their current?

  Colonel White was lighting another cigarette when Captain Smith’s cell phone, face up on the console, started to buzz. The two men looked at it, and then an alarm beeped in the drone console and a flickering pink disk appeared on the lower left-hand corner of the video screen, on the edge of the bombarded zone. The phone rang again, once, then twice more, and as it did so, the circle on the screen slowly contracted and adjusted its center until it formed a hard red dot overlaying what looked like a two-story warehouse.

  “It’s them, on the phone, in that building!” White crowed. “They’re trying to cut another deal with us. And now we know exactly where they are!” The phone rang again. “Aren’t you going to answer it?”

  Captain Smith picked it up. “Hello? Yes? . . . Moon, you say? How nice to hear from you—one moment please.” He pressed the hold button. “It’s the Iranian.”

  ‘Great! What shall we say to him?”

  ‘Nothing. Let’s just get this over with. Can you please direct an antiradiation missile onto that signal?”

  ‘With pleasure!” The colonel made some adjustments to his controls, flicked a couple of switch covers to the “on” position, and then thumbed a large red button on the end of his joystick. The two men watched the screen until a white blur streaked across it and the warehouse vanished in a burst of white light and a ball of swirling darkness. A single pale pressure wave pinged across the screen.

  ‘That ought to give them something to think about!” exulted the colonel. He glanced at Smith, his face flushed. “I have to admit, in some ways this is actually more fun than flying a real aircraft. You can really see what’s going on!” He checked the screen again. “The cell phone signal has disappeared. We got them! Now, what shall I try next to confirm the kill? Maybe I’ll bring up a second drone, one that’s packing a little white phosphorus—cook them nice and slow, eh?”

  Captain Smith stared blankly back at him until the colonel, unabashed, returned to his video game. Then Smith picked up the desk phone. “Hello, Sixth Regiment CP? Please have all guns adjust fire onto these new coordinates.” He mouse-clicked on the warehouse. “Target is a two-story building, terrorist base. Ten rounds HE per gun, delayed fuse, fire for effect. Then you can stand down your detachments.”

  The first shells fell a few second
s later, pulverizing what was left of the building. Colonel White swore, then flung down his joystick.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Flora and Joseph lay in the old car, curled up like sleeping runaways. The barrage swelled to a ground-heaving drumroll, spattering the car with falling masonry, and then it seemed to shift away from them, even more intense now, and then the shells stopped falling. The only sound was the whine of tinnitus. Painfully, Flora extricated herself from the pedals and gear stick and climbed back onto the passenger seat. It was covered in little chunks of windshield glass that were too small and blunt to cut her. Joseph shifted on the backseat. It was too dark for them to see each other, and they were still too deafened to talk. They sat there together for a few minutes, resuming their identities, and then they both pushed open their doors, straining against the debris piled outside. Joseph peeled back the remains of the roller door and peered out into the alley.

  “We should go,” he said, shouting against the hum in his ears. “Before they send someone.”

  The alley was filled with broken blocks and splintered wood and torn plastic. Flames licked the tumbled buildings, their smoke sheltering the two fugitives from the sky. They had to pick their way over heaps of rubble barbed with twisted steel and torn roofing, pulling their shirts over their faces to gasp the poisoned air. An unexploded howitzer shell ticked as it cooled, half buried in the rubble; they tiptoed around it and found their way blocked by the remains of a much larger building that had been plowed and harrowed and sifted by the shells. The rubble flooded the mouth of the alley, spilling into the street beyond. A bright metal sign lay on top of the ruins.

  “‘Donkey Sanctuary,’” Joseph read, disbelieving. “‘Wanted: war donkeys. Reward paid.’”

  Flora ignored him. “I don’t suppose he survived all that,” she said.

  They walked on a few more yards, and then Joseph spoke again.

  “He’s underneath all of this somewhere. You do understand, Flora, that we can’t ever mention him again? If anybody here finds out we tried to help him, we’ll be killed as collaborators. So forget you ever heard his name.”

  “I never did hear his name. I never told him mine, either.”

  “Really? Well, I suppose he’s not worth mourning—he did run out on us in the end.”

  “I wonder.”

  They came to the edge of the beaten zone, where the last flames guttered on the wreckage. Before them, a street gaped black and perilous beneath the open sky, a river to be crossed.

  Joseph stopped, considering. “So we’re back where we started. You and Gabriel are stuck here in the Easy, on somebody’s hit list for God knows what reason. And I’m still going to lose my job and whatever privileges I have left: my bosses will fire me if I don’t hand over all the footage that I shot yesterday. And they’ll do worse than fire me if I do give them the disk and they see all the stuff that I didn’t send.”

  Flora shook her head impatiently. “Honestly, Uncle Joseph. Do you have the disk on you now?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can I see it, please?”

  Doubtfully, he took a plastic cartridge from his pocket and handed it to her. With a flick of her wrist she tossed it into the heart of the fire. Joseph leaped after it. “For God’s sake, Flora, what are you doing?” He tried to reach for it, but the flames were too hot, and already the plastic was blackened and melting.

  “That disk was in your Land Rover, Uncle Joseph,” Flora explained slowly and carefully, as if speaking to a child. “It was destroyed yesterday when the drones killed Tony and Dad. Do you understand what I’m saying?” She glanced at the humming sky, steeled herself, then sprinted off across the road. Joseph stared after her, then roused himself and followed.

  “That’s pretty clever,” he admitted, joining her in the shadows on the other side of the street. They were almost at the media center now. “But what will you do now?”

  She made an effort to smile. “I’ll just have to hope that they leave us alone.”

  Captain Smith watched the two glowing figures as they stood conversing in the shadow of a wall. He clicked a menu option and slid his finger along a scale, and the camera zoomed in, the image brightening and sharpening as the camera switched from infrared to intensified starlight. One of the figures looked up for a moment, as if suddenly aware of him. Smith saw her face and smiled. Colonel White looked up suspiciously from his controls.

  “Look! Those terrorists down there are breaching the curfew! Let’s kill them! They’re breaking the law!”

  Smith yawned and rubbed his eyes, then pushed his chair back and stood. “It’s not worth it, Colonel. They’re just some wretched survivors from the bombardment, I expect.”

  Smith switched the camera back to infrared. The girl darted off across the road, a shining aurora in the heat-sensing image, and a moment later her companion followed her. Together again, they vanished down an alleyway.

  Smith stretched, flung both his arms back, then reached for his cell phone. “We have more serious business to worry about,” he told White, and dialed. The phone rang for a long time before it was answered.

  “Hello, Daddy Jesus? . . . Yes, sorry: we were delayed—something came up. Tell me, this prisoner of yours—what does he look like? . . . I see . . . . And has he told you who he is yet? . . . Right . . . right . . . Oh, dear . . . . I see. The thing is, Daddy Jesus, he may not be lying about that . . . . No, you weren’t to know, not having met him. It could make our situation a bit ticklish, all right. But tell me, has he seen your face at all? . . . Really? So he’s been blindfolded the whole time except for when you had your favorite mask on? And he has no idea who you are or which side of the wall he’s on? . . . Well, good. That does give us something to work with. Let me think for a minute.”

  Smith lowered the phone, frowning. He tapped his left temple for a few seconds, and then he put the phone to his ear again.

  “Right: take a shower, put some civilian clothes on, then go over to the armory and draw two submachine guns, a hundred rounds of blank nine-millimeter, and half a dozen stun grenades. I’ll pop around to the office and pick up some balaclavas, then I’ll meet you back outside the lockup.”

  He put the phone down and turned to the puzzled colonel. “Sorry, sir, but it seems that Flint Driscoll went into the Easy by himself today and was abducted by terrorists and treated rather horridly. We’re going to have to stage a rescue.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  The winter dawn climbed a clear eastern sky over the flat, monotonous fields of the farming co-ops, the moaning highway, the sleeping army base. It did not stop at the wall but extended its blessing over the Embargoed Zone, which sent pillars of smoke up to greet it. The dawn shone in the fighter-bombers’ contrails, blazed on the hulls of patrol boats, glinted on the ever-wheeling drones.

  Only one of our friends saw that dawn: not Captain Smith or Colonel White or Daddy Jesus, who slept deeply in their quarters; not Flora and Joseph, who were sprawled, oblivious, on couches in the office of the Xinhua news agency; not Cobra, who was digging angrily in a smoking pile of bricks and donkey shit; not Flint Driscoll, who lay heavily sedated in his bombproof little room; not our soldier boys, David and Johnny, and Lenny and Harry, who were on a weekend pass, at home with their loving families. But little Gabriel, wide awake, impatient, gazed out the window of his ward, watching the day take form around the hospital, the first kites swaying up from the earth, and wondering why his sister hadn’t come for him yet and what the hospital might give him for breakfast.

  Captain Smith came into his office rather late that morning with a takeaway coffee and an Egg McMuffin. He placed the coffee and the McMuffin in the center of his desk, stared at them for a while, and then yawned and used his knee to nudge a drawer open. The forged receipts he had swept into it two days before, when the colonel had burst in on him, demanded his attention. He extracted a fistful, took a sip of coffee and a bite of his McMuffin, and looked at the receipts glassily for a while. Giving up,
he took a key from his pocket and opened a locked drawer on the other side of his desk. It was empty apart from a green nylon zip bag. He picked up the bag and tested its weight: it was heavy. Unzipping it, he extracted a large bundle of high-denomination dollar notes, then tested the weight of the bag again: it felt hardly any lighter. Captain Smith grinned broadly, replaced the money in the bag, put the bag in the drawer, and relocked it. He swept the blank receipts back into the other drawer, slammed it shut, and sat back in his chair, whistled a few notes, then took another sip of coffee.

  There was a knock at the door, and Colonel White shuffled in. He was wearing his number one uniform, gorgeous with ribbons and braid.

  “Good morning, sir!” said Smith, not rising from his chair. “I trust you got some sleep in the end. I’d offer you a coffee”—his face became apologetic—“but I’m afraid I’ve only got this one here.”

  The colonel dropped into the chair across the desk, picked up Smith’s coffee, and took a gulp. His eyes were bruised. He took a form from his pocket and flung it on the desk.

  “I need another officer from the Slob to countersign that,” he said. “You’ll do.”

  “What is it?”

  “A discharge for some little shit who’s gone AWOL. If I send the military police after him, it’ll create more paperwork than he’s worth—he’s due to be discharged in a month anyway. He’s a nonentity. No one will miss him.”

  Smith signed the form, then smiled at the colonel.

  “If you don’t mind me saying, sir, you are dressed smartly today.”

  The colonel looked miserable. “I’ve been summoned back to headquarters,” he confessed, and fumbled a cigarette from his jacket. “They called me this morning. 24/7 is alleging that we attacked their jeep in order to cover up the truth about that air strike a couple of days ago. They say their footage was destroyed with the jeep to prevent them from refuting Flint Driscoll’s allegations. It’s making him look pretty bad, too.”