It was dark where they stood but the horizon right around was lit with ambient light from roads, factories and human settlements. They had all been in such situations before and knew the drill: pause plenty long enough for the eyes to get used to the dark, set off single file, keep a close formation, no talking once they started until Barklice stopped or one of them signalled with a touch for all to stop.
‘Right,’ said Barklice while their eyes adjusted to the dark, ‘the great big glow in the sky behind us is Coventry. Straight ahead, across this busy road, is Binley Wood. We’ll head one o’clock because that’ll stop us floundering into the wood and giving warning of our approach. There’s no way we’ll find the bunker at night without a little help. That’ll come in the form of the narrow-gauge railway line that leads straight to it, probably in a slight cutting. That’s our way in. Jack takes over from there because somewhere along it we’ll likely meet Fyrd . . . Ready?’
It was the first time that Backhaus and Recker had followed Barklice in the dark. They soon found out why he was so renowned for his route-finding skills: he moved fast, confidently, was not afraid to stop and consider, appraised everything from wind direction and the stars to vegetation under foot to the hooting of owls as he went. He moved silently, so much so that Backhaus had to use sight, not sound, to make sure he kept the right distance behind.
He diverted from his bearing regularly, usually because a wheel-track offered easier passage through the tilled earth, or to avoid scrunchy vegetation. It was quick, professional and unremitting.
The night was warm, the cloud cover seventy or eighty per cent, but the sliver of the moon gave just enough light to add a silver edge to their silhouettes against the horizon.
On the far side of the field they came to a stile, though how Barklice found it so precisely the two military had no idea. He was up and over and on through a plantation of small trees at once, the ground sloping down, the route less straight, the dark around them deeper.
Barklice slowed, stopped, reached a hand behind him to Backhaus. The others clustered round.
‘We’re near the cutting,’ he said. ‘Likely there’ll be wire, possibly a short steep drop, maybe the going will get loose, stony and therefore noisy. I’ll get you to the track and you can take it from there, Jack.’
He set off again, more slowly now, reaching behind frequently to check Backhaus was close.
The ground steepened and he stopped.
Below was a void, out of which silver rails snaked away to their right.
‘Listen!’ he whispered.
At first they heard nothing but gradually they could make out a murmured hushing, a deep whisper, coming and going.
‘Binley Wood,’ he said, reading the landscape they were about to enter by sound and common sense. ‘The cutting falls away and the ground flattens, so we must hope the cloud cover stays as it is . . . Now . . . be cautious: cuttings have a way of tripping folk up and causing noise.’
But they made it to the track without incident and squatted a little way off it for a break and to listen to Jack’s orders.
‘Right, I lead, Barklice to the rear, Backhaus and Recker in the middle. If we come across Fyrd, leave me to make a move with Backhaus in support. You other two watch our backs. There should be guards but they’ll not be expecting us. Four maybe six. Arthur’s seventy and not that agile but he’s strong. I’m assuming he’s alone, maybe he’s been forgotten, alone and trapped, his single message didn’t say. By now he might have got out or . . .’
The last alternative he did not explore.
The notion of Arthur not being alive did not bear thinking about.
‘Come on,’ he urged them, ‘let’s get him out safely and back to Brum.’
The arrival point Barklice had found was well judged. It took no more than half an hour of careful trekking along the track before they reached the wood. Its trees rose on either side of them, whispering in the slight breeze, hiding the moon and most of the stars.
Ten minutes later the track began to sink and the cutting to rise high on either side.
Jack stopped at once.
‘This feels like the drop down to the main entrance. It’ll be guarded. We’ll circle round through the wood and lie low from a good vantage point until first light . . . Take refreshments here and if necessary relieve yourselves too because once we’re in position, watching, we’ll need to be silent.’
They were wise precautions.
They found a spot that looked down on the entrance, though it was too dark to make anything out. There was no light, no movement, no sign of life at all, but they stayed still and silent all the same.
A hedgehog bustled past them at midnight; a fox barked soon after. The clouds grew thicker, their drift across the sky slower, so that there were long periods of no stars or moon at all.
At two in the morning there was the pull of bolts below them, a heavy door opened and dim light spilled out.
A single hydden appeared, walked a few paces, breathed the air deeply and relieved himself noisily. Then he went back inside.
‘Could have had him with a bolt in moments,’ said Backhaus, ‘but . . .’
There was no need for an explanation.
They needed to find out how many others there were and what the layout of the bunker was and whether there were other entrances in the wood.
‘It gives me hope that Arthur’s still alive in there,’ said Jack, ‘otherwise, what are they guarding?’
31
QUATREMAYNE
That same night General Quatremayne was enjoying himself.
During the previous evening and into the small hours he had had some ‘business’ to attend to of a personal nature.
Now he was wide awake and had very deliberately decided to hold some hearings in the small hours concerning members of his staff and units who had infringed rules in some way. It pleased him to have them hauled from their iron bunks and brought before two fellow officers and himself.
His command headquarters for the invasion of Brum were located in a small area of scrubland beneath the Warwick Road Bridge in Coventry.
The spot had been carefully chosen for its advantages in directing a railway-based campaign. It was adjacent to the London–Birmingham railway line, with the north–south Tamworth line joining from the north to form a junction a few yards in one direction, while a fourth main line, coming up from Warwick to the south, formed another junction not far the other way.
In addition, sitting very conveniently between these major junctions to the east was Coventry’s mainline railway station.
It would be very hard to find anywhere in Englalond which offered such a complex of lines, junctions and routine stopping points as the Warwick Road Bridge. It was not overlooked, and security fences above and to the sides to stop vandalism also prevented interference with the Fyrd operation from humans.
Little wonder that on moving forward from the bunker in Binley Wood, Quatremayne felt a growing sense of relief. His new quarters were noisy with trains back and forth and road traffic above but he could see what was going on and breathe fresh air.
There was something else.
Quatremayne’s whole life had been a professional service to the Empire founded by Slaeke Sinistral. He had regretted Sinistral’s abdication, though there were few in Bochum who had not found the Emperor’s long-term ‘sleeps’ ultimately unacceptable, but he was used to him. He also respected him.
Blut was a different matter.
There was something about the way he looked, his spectacles, his austere neatness and the complete impossibility of unsettling him from his calm, logical approach to things that got under Quatremayne’s skin. He had no apparent leadership skills and at a time of war the Empire needed an Emperor who had experience of battle, which Blut did not have.
‘The nearest that damn little runt has ever got to killing anything is kicking a filing cabinet and I doubt very much he’s done that!’ Quatremayne had said very recently to hi
s coterie of senior officers.
Naturally they laughed, whatever else they might have privately thought. It was unwise not to laugh at the General’s little jokes.
Now that he had left Blut in Binley Wood under guard of one of his best units, Quatremayne was beginning to think of a future without him, which meant of his own future as Emperor. It was going to be much easier to give the discreet order to have Blut disposed of when Brum was taken.
Quatremayne had done that kind of thing before, though never at the ultimate level.
So the move was a welcome one marked by his change into a new uniform, a shade more regal than his previous one: it was black and grey with the usual flashes of red but with additional gold here and there which, he fancied, looked impressive.
He was of spare build, but tall and patrician with silver hair. He was disinclined to friendliness, only smiling with his closest and most trusted colleagues who smirked with glee as they shared some moment of mirth, almost always at the expense of their inferiors. There was a strain of self-serving and immature cruelty in them all and its fountainhead was Quatremayne. Some joke that excluded others, some ‘uproarious’ quip, some idiocy committed by a junior: these were the things that made Quatremayne smile.
Then, too, the matter of wyfkin. One might think that the General, being so cold, did not have feelings of what his circle called a ‘base’ kind. It was not true. But his feelings found vile and brutal expression which his minions could neither quite ignore nor quite acknowledge. Females were found for him. They left at dawn bruised, battered and frightened, feeling that the money paid them was no recompense for the secret humiliations they had suffered.
The trouble was that Quatremayne’s power in his own domain was absolute. If he said, with that little snort of an awkward laugh, ‘I . . . appreciate . . . that one . . .’, then whether she be wyf, sister, daughter or even a bilgesnipe girl, his need better be satisfied, or else.
His smirks and nasty laughter were of the victor over the vanquished. He felt the same contempt for life that he did for Blut. There was no compassion.
Such perversity had been his evening’s important ‘business’.
Now, washed and changed, the military machine under his command in hand and in control, he found time and mood for less important matters: courts martial and hearings in which the unfortunates beneath him who had offended the Imperial or military code were tried, sentenced and summarily punished.
That night there were two court martials of ranking officers and the trials of various civilians who had been unlucky or foolish enough to displease the Fyrd since their arrival in Englalond. In addition there were one or two personal scores to settle.
Quatremayne used such occasions to instil fear and respect and did not hesitate to impose and carry through the harshest sentences. Punishments, from beatings to executions, were under the direction and personal hand of the head of his security, the unpleasant and diminutive Gritt Grolte, who was also the individual who most often found the General his females.
The General occasionally carried out executions himself; and sometimes, quite unpredictably, he enjoyed granting a pardon. It made him seem merciful. It made him feel powerful. It ensured that he had people about the place who owed their lives directly to him.
The hearings took place in a small compound near the Warwick Road Bridge consisting of tables and chairs and a place for the accused. This time, as so often in the past, at night. His victims’ fears were greater then.
As the first of the accused – a senior officer charged with weak command because intoxicated – was brought before him through the cold night, Quatremayne continued with other minor business, in particular hearing verbal reports. This had always been his habit. So it could easily be that a Fyrd private or officer might be having his fate decided by a commanding officer who simultaneously was listening to a verbal report about latrines. Worse: if the report pleased or irritated him, that spilled over into Quatremayne’s attitude to the accused, for better or for worse.
That particular night the General was in a bad mood, made angry by a slight division in his own ranks concerning transports that were not yet fully ready. These were in Walsall to the north of the city and Kidderminster to the south, where a combination of minor Earth movements, of the kind that had bedevilled Englalond in recent months, and irritating human unpredictability meant that nobody could be sure when the transports would arrive. It was, he knew, the kind of upset that could seriously undermine matters when it came to the invasion of Brum.
He waved away this latest report and gave his full attention to the hearing. His former comrade in arms and quartermaster, Stoll, was the one charged with inebriation. Not for the first time.
A token trial for a token offence, demanding a token punishment.
The overweight Stoll certainly seemed to think so as he stood before Quatremayne, who listened to charge and counter-charge with furrowed brow that did not appreciate Stoll’s evident complacency.
‘Guilty,’ said Quatremayne looking either side to the other two officer-judges, ‘I think we can agree on that.’
Naturally they agreed. The court waited idly for the sentence, all in good humour, Stoll included. This was just a warm-up, that was why he was first.
But Quatremayne pursed his thin lips.
The issue of the inefficient transports had worried him. Such things should not be happening so close to the coming major advances. Time for an example to be set.
‘Garrotte,’ he said quietly, ‘now.’
Gritt Grolte rose, two hefty Fyrd at his side. His eyes were black holes, his face pallid, his hair greasy and dark.
‘But . . .’ began Stoll, the realization slow to dawn, ‘but . . .’
But he was stood up, turned, marched away barely able to struggle against Grolte’s painful grip.
‘Do it where we can see,’ commanded Quatremayne. ‘Next?’
Nothing subdues a crowd more than harsh sentences instantly carried out there and then. One after another.
‘Garrotte.’
Again, ‘Garrotte.’
Short-drop hanging.
Fire.
Bolts.
All in quick succession, the accused were hauled away and they saw and heard the slow and terrible squeezing out of a sequence of lives by Grolte. As the verdicts came one after another, the court had to listen to guttural hisses of terror and pain against the background of the noisy shunting of trains and carriages.
32
POLITICAL ASYLUM
For Jack and the others in Binley Wood, the last hour of their vigil outside the bunker felt the longest.
Only when the dark turned to grey-black and then to grey dawn, and the nearby trees became visible, did they begin to stretch, warm themselves, sip water, prepare.
‘Barklice, I want you to make a circuit of the area . . . see if there are any other entrances or guards.’
Backhaus offered to go with him but Jack shook his head.
‘Mister Barklice works best alone on these occasions. You will hardly know he’s gone and you’ll certainly not hear him return.’
It was true. Barklice had already melted away into the lightening dark, from tree to bush, from bush to fallen branch, and on around, silent as the dead.
He was gone half an hour and he reappeared as silently as he had gone, up some steps from the cutting below.
‘There is no other entrance like the one below,’ he reported. ‘There are air vents above, but heavily cowled and overgrown. There are also vents in the forest floor, covered in steel doors. I found three, there’s probably a fourth. The doors have been weighted down with stones, recently. One shows signs of having been forced from beneath, before the stones were put on it. That’s one to watch.
‘Not sure how many guards, but I’d guess six. Their patrol routes are easy enough to find, they’re trampled and obvious. They’re not expecting visitors. The patrol uses four stopping points, all at the edge of the wood . . .’
‘And the routes all start from the entrance down there?’ queried Jack.
‘I can’t see any other way in or out.’
‘How near are the roof air vents from where we are now?’ asked Recker.
‘Thirty yards. Through those shrubs.’
‘Can you draw me a plan of the structure?’ asked Recker.
Barklice took a twig from the wood floor, cleared the humus, and quickly did so on the bare earth beneath, marking in the roof vents and the doors in the forest floor.
‘What are you thinking?’ Jack asked Recker.
‘Diversion,’ he replied. ‘A small charge in the cowlings will serve to open them up and it’ll be heard throughout the structure. Unless there’s someone directly below, no one will get hurt. It might draw out the guards . . .’
Jack stiffened and whispered, ‘No need for that right now!’
The great doors at the entrance were opening.
Two Fyrd came out, both armed, two more stood at the entrance covering them. They looked about, saw the coast was clear, nodded at the ones inside and the doors closed.
The two talked briefly and set off round the bunker in different directions, one away from where they watched, the other up the steps Barklice had used a short time before.
Jack smiled grimly.
‘I’ll take him down,’ he said.
‘I’ll cuff him,’ said Backhaus.
The Fyrd came up slowly, breathing heavily. Not very fit, it seemed. Jack took a place behind a tree, stave in hand.
Backhaus behind another.
The other two retreated out of sight.
‘Good morning,’ said Backhaus, stepping from behind his tree.
The Fyrd froze, not sure if he was facing friend or enemy since Backhaus looked like a Fyrd himself. Jack stepped up behind and felled him with his stave.
‘Cuff and gag him,’ he said, ‘while I go and meet the other one before he realizes that his friend has not come to meet him. Barklice, show me the way.’