‘Oh for Chrissake,’ said the Colonel, and came to a sudden decision. ‘We’re taking this bastard out. Now.’
But Wilt was on his feet. He had watched too many American movies not to have ambivalent feelings about being ‘taken out’. ‘Oh, no you’re not,’ he said backing up against the wall. ‘And you can cut the bastard abuse too. I didn’t do anything to start this fucking madhouse and I’ve got my family to think about.’
Colonel Urwin looked at the sporting print hopelessly. He’d been right to suspect the British of having hidden depths he would never understand. No wonder the French spoke of ‘perfidious Albion’. The bastards would always behave in ways one least expected. In the meantime he had to produce some explanation that would satisfy the General. ‘Just say we’ve got a purely domestic problem on our hands,’ he told the Captain, ‘and rout Glaushof out. Base security is his baby.’
But before the Captain could leave the room Wilt had reacted again. ‘You let that maniac anywhere near my kids and someone’s going to get hurt,’ he shouted, ‘I’m not having them gassed like I was.’
‘In that case you better exercise some parental control yourself,’ said the Colonel grimly, and headed for the door.
23
By the time they reached the parking lot by the gates it was clear that the situation had deteriorated. In an entirely unnecessary effort to rescue their mother from the sentries – Eva had already felled one of the men with a knee-jerk to the groin she had learnt at a Rape Resistance Evening Class – the quads had abandoned the Wilts’ car and, by dusting the second sentry with pepper, had put him out of action. After that they had occupied the gatehouse itself and were now holding the Lieutenant hostage inside. Since he had torn off his uniform to escape the ammonia fumes and the quads had armed themselves with his revolver and that of the sentry writhing on the ground outside, they had been able to isolate the guardhouse even more effectively by threatening the driver of an oil tanker which had made the mistake of arriving at the barrier and forcing him to offload several hundred gallons of fuel oil on to the roadway before driving tentatively into the base.
Even Eva had been appalled at the result. As the stuff swilled across the tarmac Lieutenant Harah had driven up rather too hurriedly in a jeep and had tried to brake. The jeep was now enmeshed in the perimeter fence and Lieutenant Harah, having crawled from it, was calling for reinforcements. ‘We have a real penetration situation here,’ he bawled into his walkie-talkie. ‘A bunch of leftist terrorists have taken over the guardhouse.’
‘They’re not terrorists, they’re just little girls,’ Eva shouted from inside, only to have her words drowned by the Alert siren which Samantha had activated.
Outside in the roadway Mavis Mottram’s busload of Mothers Against The Bomb had gathered in a line and had handcuffed themselves together before padlocking the ends of the line to the fence on either side of the gateway and were dancing something approximate to the can-can and chanting ‘End the arms race, save the human’ in full view of three TV cameras and a dozen photographers. Above their heads an enormous and remarkable balloon, shaped and veined like an erect penis, swung slowly in the breeze exposing the rather confusing messages, ‘Wombs Not Tombs’ and ‘Screw Cruise Not Us’ painted on opposite sides. As Wilt and Colonel Urwin watched, the balloon, evidently force-fed by a hydrogen cylinder, shed its few human pretensions in the shape of an enormous plastic foreskin and turned itself into a gigantic rocket.
‘This is going to kill old B52,’ muttered the Colonel who had until then been enjoying the spectacle of Lieutenant Harah covered in oil and trying to get to his feet. ‘And I can’t see the President liking it too much either. That fucking phallus has got to hit prime time with all those cameras.’
A fire truck shot round the corner past them and in a jeep behind it came Major Glaushof, his right arm in a sling and his face the colour of putty.
‘Jesus,’ said Captain Fortune, ‘if that fire truck hits the oil we’re going to have a body count of thirty of the Mothers.’
But the truck had stopped and men were deploying hoses. Behind them and the human chain Inspector Hodge and Sergeant Runk had driven up and were staring wildly about them. In front the women still kicked up their legs and chanted, the firemen had begun to spray foam on to the oil and Lieutenant Harah, and Glaushof was gesticulating with one hand to a troop of Anti Perimeter Penetration Squad men who had formed up as near the Mothers Against The Bomb as they could get and were preparing to discharge canisters of Agent Incapacitating at them.
‘For fuck’s sake hold it,’ yelled Glaushof but his words were drowned out by the Alert Siren. As the canisters dropped into the roadway at the feet of the human chain Colonel Urwin shut his eyes. He knew now that Glaushof was a doomed man, but his own career was in jeopardy. ‘We’ve got to get those fucking kids out of there before the cameras start playing on them,’ he bawled at Captain Fortune. ‘Go in and get them.’
The Captain looked at the foam, the oil and the drifting gas. Already a number of MABs had dropped to the ground and Samantha had added to the hazards of approaching the guardhouse by accidentally-on-purpose firing a revolver through one of the windows, an action which had drawn answering fire from Glaushof’s APP Squad.
‘You think I’m risking my life …’ the Captain began but it was Wilt who took the initiative. Wading through the oil and foam he made it to the guardhouse and presently four small girls and a large woman came out with him. Hodge didn’t see them. Like the cameramen his attention was elsewhere, but unlike them he was no longer interested in the disaster taking place at the gates. A canister of AI had persuaded him to leave the scene as quickly as possible. It had also made it difficult to drive. As the police van backed into the bus and then shot forward and ricocheted off a cameraman’s car before sliding off the road and onto its side, he had a moment of understanding. Inspector Flint hadn’t been such an old fool after all. Anyone who tangled with the Wilt family had to come off worst.
Colonel Urwin shared his feelings. ‘We’re going to get you out of here in a chopper,’ he told Wilt as more women slumped across the gateway.
‘And what about my car?’ said Wilt. ‘If you think I’m leaving …’
But his protest was shouted down by the quads. And Eva.
‘We want to go up in a helicopter,’ they squealed in unision.
‘Just take me away from all this,’ said Eva.
*
Ten minutes later Wilt looked down from a thousand feet at the pattern of runways and roads, buildings and bunkers and at the tiny group of women being carried from the gate to waiting ambulances. For the first time he felt some sympathy for Mavis Mottram. For all her faults she had been right to pit herself against the banal enormity of the airbase. The place had all the characteristics of a potential extermination camp. True, nobody was being herded into gas chambers and there was no smoke rising from crematoria. But the blind obedience to orders was there, instilled in Glaushof and even in Colonel Urwin. Everyone in fact, except Mavis Mottram and the human chain of women at the gate. The others would all obey orders if the time came and the real holocaust would begin. And this time there would be no liberators, no successive generations to erect memorials to the dead or learn lessons from past horrors. There would be only silence. The wind and the sea the only voices left. And it was the same in Russia and the occupied countries of Eastern Europe. Worse. There Mavis Mottram was already silenced, confined to a prison or a psychiatric ward because she was idiosyncratically sane. No TV cameras or photographers depicted the new death camps. And twenty million Russians had died to make their country safe from genocide, only to have Stalin’s successors too afraid of their own people to allow them to discuss the alternatives to building more machines to wipe life off the face of the earth.
It was all insane, childish and bestial. But above all it was banal. As banal as the Tech and Dr Mayfield’s empire-building and the Principal’s concern to keep his own job and avoid unfavourable publicity
, never mind what the staff thought or the students would have preferred to learn. Which was what he was going back to. In fact nothing had changed. Eva would go on with her wild enthusiasms; the quads might even grow up to be civilized human beings. Wilt rather doubted it. Civilized human beings were a myth, legendary creatures who existed only in writers’ imaginations, their foibles and faults expurgated and their occasional self-sacrifices magnified. With the quads that was impossible. The best that could be hoped was that they would remain as independent and uncomfortably non-conforming as they were now. And at least they were enjoying the flight.
Five miles outside the base the helicopter set down beside an empty road.
‘You can drop off here,’ said the Colonel, ‘I’ll try and get a car out to you.’
‘But we want to go all the way home by helicopter,’ shouted Samantha above the roar of the rotors, and was joined by Penelope who insisted she wanted to parachute on to Oakhurst Avenue. It was too much for Eva. Grabbing the quads in turn she bundled them out on to the beaten grass and jumped down beside them. Wilt followed. For a moment the air around him was thick with the downblast and then the helicopter had lifted off and was swinging away. By the time it had disappeared Eva had found her voice.
‘Now look what you’ve been and done,’ she said. Wilt stared round at the empty landscape. After the interrogation he had been through he was in no mood for Eva’s whingeing.
‘Let’s start walking,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s coming out to pick us up and we’d better find a bus stop.’
He climbed the bank onto the road and set off along it. In the distance there was a sudden flash and a small ball of flame. Major Glaushof had fired a tracer round into Mavis Mottram’s inflated penis. The fireball and the little mushroom cloud of smoke above it would be on the evening TV news in full colour. Perhaps something had been achieved after all.
24
It was the end of term at the Tech and the staff were seated in the auditorium, as evidently bored as the students they themselves had previously lectured there. Now it was the Principal’s turn. He had spent ten excruciating minutes doing his best to disguise his true feelings for Mr Spirey of the Building Department who was finally retiring, and another twenty trying to explain why financial cuts had ended any hope of rebuilding the engineering block at the very time when the College had been granted the staggering sum of a quarter of a million pounds by an anonymous donor for the purchase of textbooks. In the front row Wilt sat poker-faced among the other Heads of Departments and feigned indifference. Only he and the Principal knew the source of the donation and neither of them could ever tell. The Official Secrets Act had seen to that. The money was the price of Wilt’s silence. The deal had been negotiated by two nervous officials from the United States Embassy and in the presence of two rather more menacing individuals ostensibly from the legal division of the Home Office. Not that Wilt had been worried by their attitude. Throughout the discussion he had basked in the sense of his own innocence and even Eva had been overawed and then impressed by the offer of a new car. But Wilt had turned that down. It was enough to know that the Principal, while never understanding why, would always be unhappily aware that the Fenland College of Arts and Technology was once again indebted to a man he would have liked to fire. Now he was lumbered with Wilt until he retired himself.
*
Only the quads had been difficult to silence. They had enjoyed pumping ammonia over the Lieutenant and disabling sentries with pepper too much not to want to make their exploits known.
‘We were only rescuing Daddy from that sexy woman,’ said Samantha when Eva rather unwisely asked them to promise never to talk about what had happened.
‘And you’ll have to rescue your Mother and me from Dartmoor if you don’t keep your damned traps shut,’ Wilt had snapped. ‘And you know what that means.’
‘What?’ asked Emmeline, who seemed to be looking forward to the prospect of a prison break.
‘It means you’ll be taken into care by horrible foster parents and not as a bloody group either. You’ll be split up and you won’t be allowed to visit one another and …’ Wilt had launched into a positively Dickensian description of foster homes and the horrors of child abuse. By the time he’d finished the quads were cowed and Eva had been in tears. Which was the first time that had happened and was another minor triumph. It wouldn’t last, of course, but by the time they spilled the beans the immediate dangers would be over and nobody would believe them anyway.
But the argument had aroused Eva’s suspicions again. ‘I still want to know why you lied to me all those months about teaching at the prison,’ she said as they undressed that night.
Wilt had an answer for that one too. ‘You heard what those men from MI5 said about the Official Secrets Act.’
‘MI5?’ said Eva. ‘They were from the Home Office. What’s MI5 got to do with it?’
‘Home Office, my foot, Military Intelligence,’ said Wilt. ‘And if you choose to send the quads to the most expensive school for pseudo-prodigies and expect us not to starve …’
The argument had rumbled on into the night but Eva hadn’t needed much convincing. The officials from the Embassy had impressed her too much with their apologies and there had been no talk of women. Besides, she had her Henry home again and it was obviously best to forget that anything had happened at Baconheath.
*
And so Wilt sat on beside Dr Board with a slight sense of accomplishment. If he was fated to fall foul of other people’s stupidity and misunderstanding he had the satisfaction of knowing that he was no one’s victim. Or only temporarily. In the end he beat them and circumstances. It was better than being a successful bore like Dr Mayfield – or worse still, a resentful failure.
‘Wonders never cease,’ said Dr Board when the Principal finally sat down and they began to file out of the auditorium, ‘A quarter of a million in actual textbooks? It must be a unique event in British education. Millionaires who give donations usually provide better buildings for worse students. This one seems to be a genius.’
Wilt said nothing. Perhaps having some commonsense was a form of genius.
*
At Ipford Police Station ex-Inspector Hodge, now merely Sergeant Hodge, sat at a computer terminal in Traffic Control and tried to confine his thoughts to problems connected with flow-patterns and off-peak parking systems. It wasn’t easy. He still hadn’t recovered from the effects of Agent Incapacitating or, worse still, from the enquiry into his actions the Superintendent had started and the Chief Constable had headed.
And Sergeant Runk hadn’t been exactly helpful. ‘Inspector Hodge gave me to understand the Superintendent had authorized the bugging of Mr Wilt’s car,’ he said in evidence. ‘I was acting on his orders. It was the same with their house.’
‘Their house? You mean to say their house was bugged too?’
‘Yes, sir. It still is for all I know,’ said Runk, ‘we had the collaboration of the neighbours, Mr Gamer and his wife.’
‘Dear God,’ muttered the Chief Constable, ‘if this ever gets to the gutter press …’
‘I don’t think it will, sir,’ said Runk, ‘Mr Gamer has moved out and his missus has put the house up for sale.’
‘Then get those bloody devices out of there before someone has the place surveyed,’ snarled the Chief Constable before dealing with Hodge. By the time he had finished the Inspector was on the verge of a breakdown himself and had been demoted to Sergeant in the Traffic Section with the threat of being transferred to the police dog training school as a target if he put his foot wrong just once again.
To add insult to injury he had seen Flint promoted to Head of the Drug Squad.
‘The chap seems to have a natural talent for that kind of work,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘He’s done a remarkable job.’
The Superintendent had his reservations but he kept them to himself. ‘I think it runs in the family,’ he said judiciously.
And for a fortnight during the trial
Flint’s name had appeared almost daily in the Ipford Chronicle and even in some of the national dailies. The police canteen too had buzzed with his praises. Flint the Drug Buster. Almost Flint the Terror of the Courtroom. In spite of all the efforts the defence counsel had made, with every justification, to question the legality of his methods, Flint had countered with facts and figures, times, dates, places and with exhibits, all of which were authentic. He had stepped down from the witness box still retaining the image of the old-fashioned copper with his integrity actually enhanced by the innuendoes. It was enough for the public to look from him to the row of sleazy defendants in the dock to see where the interests of justice lay. Certainly the Judge and jury had been convinced. The accused had gone down with sentences that ranged from nine years to twelve and Flint had gone up to Superintendent.
But Flint’s achievement led beyond the courtroom to areas where discretion still prevailed.
‘She brought the stuff back from her cousins in California?’ spluttered Lord Lynchknowle when the Chief Constable visited him. ‘I don’t believe a word of it. Downright lie.’
‘Afraid not, old chap. Absolutely definite. Smuggled the muck back in a bottle of duty-free whisky.’
‘Good God. I thought she’d got it at that rotten Tech. Never did agree with her going there. All her mother’s fault.’ He paused and stared vacuously out across the rolling meadows. ‘What did you say the stuff was called?’
‘Embalming Fluid,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘Or Angel Dust. They usually smoke it.’
‘Don’t see how you can smoke embalming fluid,’ said Lord Lynchknowle. ‘Mind you, there’s no understanding women, is there?’
‘None at all,’ said the Chief Constable and with the assurance that the coroner’s verdict would be one of accidental death he left to deal with other women whose behaviour was beyond his comprehension.