by Frank Tayell
“There is no action we can take short of a trial,” she said. “Do you really want another of those? Then better we don’t find anything that would force us to commence one. There is other news, too. Better news. The New World has reached Labrador. They haven’t gone ashore yet, but they can see the North American mainland.”
“Let’s hope it’s more hospitable than Iceland and Greenland,” I said.
“And France,” she said.
“Is there word from the Courageous?”
“They will make the assault tomorrow, at dawn,” the admiral said.
So, once again, we are back to waiting.
Day 280, 18th December
Chapter 11 - The Cost of Safety
Calais, France
Starlight cast a shadowy promise of daytime across Calais’s pre-dawn shore. Tuck reached across the small inflatable and tugged on Locke’s arm. A rising northerly wind had scattered the clouds squatting over the harbour, making the conditions perfect for the satellites to collect proper, and useful, intelligence, but it was too late. The mission was well underway, and since they were underequipped with sat-phones, they had no means of communication with one another until the operation was complete.
This was not Locke’s plan, and it certainly wasn’t Tuck’s. It wasn’t the plan of a committee, but the result of a wardroom war between soldier and sailor, submariner and Special Forces, between English and French. And that was just two men; the colonel and the captain, battling over who would take the greatest risk and so gain the most glory.
Locke wondered if she’d been wise telling the career soldier and lifetime sailor they were carrying on like children. Probably not. She dug her paddle into the sea, mistiming the tide so a wave lapped over her arms.
The Courageous had cut engines far offshore, at midnight. The Special Forces had departed first, taking the best pick of the least worst fishing boats north towards Les Hemmes Du Marck. They planned to go ashore there and head south, arriving in Calais before dawn. They would neutralise any sentries guarding the inland approaches before securing the high ground: the towering office blocks that the cartel snipers had used before. Mills, meanwhile, would take his eight submariners in a direct assault on the harbour. That left Locke and Tuck to bring the fixed-hull inflatable onto Plage du Calais’s sandy shores, there to collect the assault team afterward.
It was a hasty plan. A terrible plan. She’d argued. She’d objected. She’d been told she could stay on the Courageous if she preferred. Fuming, she’d said nothing more, but had gathered her gear, the spare fuel for the motor they’d use during the escape, and joined Tuck sharpening their spears until it was time to depart.
An hour later, they were only a few yards from the softly crashing waves breaking on the sandy beach.
Tuck gave Locke’s arm another tap, then swung herself over the side, sinking knee deep into the shallow water. Bracing herself against the cold, Locke slipped over the other side. While the toes of her soft shoes sank into sand, her heels hit something hard and metallic. As she waded ashore, the ground remained uneven, strewn with debris from countless and uncounted shipwrecks. The beach was the same. Starlight glinted off broken glass and fresh-metal scratches on storm-wrecked hulls. As the frigid breeze rose and fell, tattered sails flapped, rotting ropes knocked against broken masts, while the waves washed over the abandoned hulks of ships once belonging to desperate refugees. Above it all, unseen metal clinked and clacked, scraping against sand in what sounded too much like lurching footsteps.
From behind came a rhythmic rat-a-tat as Tuck drummed the stock of her rifle. The soldier grabbed her pack from the bottom of their boat. Locke did the same, and they trudged a little further up the beach into the lee of an upturned fishing trawler that had come to rest parallel to the shore.
Locke didn’t need Tuck’s prompting to change out of her damp clothes. The handful of wetsuits had been distributed among the submariners who might have to linger for hours in the near-zero waters if the seawall was patrolled. She and Tuck had to make do with a change of clothes and a towel. At least they had one each.
Changed, Tuck hung a hooded torch on a salt-encrusted spar jutting from the upturned ship’s cockpit.
“So far, so good,” the soldier signed.
“Third time is the charm,” Locke whispered.
“Say again?” Tuck signed.
“Just that this is my third time back to Calais,” Locke said. Again, the soldier shook her head. “Never mind.”
“Check your gear,” Tuck signed, then began to do just that.
They had one suppressed rifle between them, again because most of the ammunition had gone with the submariners, with the French taking most of what remained. Locke did have a nine-millimetre, but only four rounds for it. She had a bayonet, a First World War relic, a gift from Tuck, and a spear, which was a loan. Both had come from the Tower. The spear, from a royal collection, was a trophy of war. Onto its tapered blade, lines from a jingoistic poem had been etched in silver, which successive recent sharpening had abraded into illegibility. They had water, food, some tools, and the other, usual gear they’d packed without a second thought. They had matches, but wouldn’t dare risk a fire. Not now. Not yet.
“Two hours to go,” Tuck signed, tapping her waterproof watch.
Locke nodded. Two hours until the attack. Afterwards, counting the minutes until they knew if it was a success, would seem even longer. She brushed her heel against the sand, trying to quietly clear a patch where she could more comfortably sit, but as she did, she listened. She tapped Tuck’s arm.
“We won’t hear anything here,” she whispered.
“Say again?” Tuck signed.
“We’re too sheltered,” Locke said. “I can barely hear the waves. Oh, I suppose we’ll hear the explosion, but we won’t hear the approaching submariners before we can see them. From here, we’re not going to see anything that isn’t right in front of our faces.”
Tuck frowned, and shook her head.
Locke thought carefully, sorting through the handful of signs she’d learned. “We’re too well hidden,” she signed. “Can’t hear the sailors.”
Tuck’s eyes darted left and right, then out to sea. “Understood,” she signed, and Locke wondered if she really had.
The soldier stepped away from the boat, looking up and down the shore before stepping back into cover. “There are tower blocks to the north. Good vantage point,” she signed.
Locke nodded, gathered her bag, and followed the soldier inland.
She had looked at the map before they departed, but had fallen into the contemptuous trap of familiarity. Having been to Calais twice before, she’d only given the chart a cursory glance, saving her energy for arguing the case that she should be leading the assault against the cartel. She remembered the beach was on the southern edge of the curving bay that ringed Calais. To the north, Fort Risban guarded the entrance to the harbour itself. But the towers ahead of them didn’t belong to some old coastal castle. These were seafront apartments, built for their view. Inland of the beach, there were scores of them. Seven or eight storeys high, they wouldn’t have won any prizes for their architecture, but certainly would have been priced for their view. Beyond, though, was one taller than the others. Ten storeys high, narrower, it squatted some two hundred metres away.
She saw it just as Tuck grabbed her arm and dragged her into the lee of a brick kiosk-cafe from which the metal shutters had been ripped clear. There was a light. Inland. At ground level. An electric torch? Probably. It was moving. Cautiously, she eased around the kiosk. Yes. A light. Singular. One light. One torch. Moving along the pavement. Heading north. Fifty metres away.
Tuck’s hands moved, but Locke couldn’t make out what the soldier was saying. She understood when Tuck tapped her suppressed rifle, then pointed in the direction of the light. Locke nodded. Tuck pointed to her ear, to Locke, and ahead.
Taking the lead, Locke led them quietly across the road and into a sparse park, angling
towards where the light was heading. Her nostrils flared. Battling the rotting seaweed stench of the sea was the acrid tang of burning paint and woodchips. Someone had lit a furniture-bonfire, and somewhere close.
The smoke came from a litterbin fire in a wide car park that served three seven-storey apartments and the taller, ten-storey block. Their windows were dark, and the car park was mostly empty except for a septet of cars pushed into a rough ring around the entrance to the ten-storey building. The fire had been set behind the crude barricade, and it was to there the torch-wielding sentry walked.
Hidden at the junction, behind the edge of the building, Tuck took out her optical scope and aimed it at the fire-lit barrier. She held up a hand with four fingers showing before turning the scope upward at the tower block, then at the other apartments.
Locke had a pair of binoculars in her pack, but left them alone. There were no lights in the windows, and if anyone was there, awake, they’d turn on a torch. Hoping that didn’t mean there were hundreds inside asleep, she tapped Tuck’s arm. “Attack?” she signed.
Tuck nodded.
With little light, with less vocabulary, communication was hard, and so was expressing any excuse to delay. Locke found herself smiling. She didn’t relish action, though she enjoyed it far more than she’d admit, but she truly detested delay. The smile turned into a frown as Tuck’s hands moved.
“You. Zombie. Stagger. Lurch. Walk,” Tuck signed, then pointed at herself, and her suppressed rifle, before she attached the optical scope.
Locke baulked. She wanted to object, but that required an alternate plan, and she couldn’t think of one. Instead, she handed Tuck her spear, dropped her pack, pulled her hood over her head, then, for her own peace of mind, checked that pistol and bayonet were loose in her belt before stepping out onto the road.
Acting undead was harder than she’d anticipated. Head bowed, back hunched, she shuffled rather than walked, dragging her heels, all the time listening for the alarm being raised, hoping she’d hear that before the gunshot. Would she hear the gunshot? Trying to recall the speed of sound and the speed of a bullet kept her distracted for another ten paces. No shot sounded. No alarm rang. But she heard something, a soft clatter followed by a heavy thump. She raised her head. Shadows moved behind the dancing firelight, shapes moved in front. The flames burned too bright for her to make out details, but were there now only three figures?
Another clatter was followed by another thump she assumed was another falling body, shot by Tuck. Should she keep shuffling forward? Would they leave the zombie until after they’d dealt with the human?
She was twenty feet away from a shadowy lump coalescing into a figure. A woman in a white coat, with dyed white hair. Not blonde, but snow white. A strip of plaster ran from lip nearly to her widening eye. An eye looking at Locke with growing confusion, because if Locke could make out those details on the gangster’s face, she could surely see a similar level of detail on hers.
Locke ran, already drawing her bayonet as she sprinted for the cars. She leaped, springing over the car’s bonnet, kicking aside a tangled mess of wooden bric-a-brac. She was almost on target. Almost. She’d jumped before aiming, and was off by a kick. Her foot sailed past the head of the gangster, but her left arm caught the white coat, knocking the rising gun flying. The two fell together in a tumbled heap. Locke felt nails scrape against her cheek, while the other hand jabbed at her gut, but Locke had the bayonet in her free hand. She stabbed it down, into the woman’s heart. Blood pulsed around the wound as Locke tugged at the hilt, but the knife was stuck.
Behind, she heard a growling roar. She rolled, spun, stood, and then had to duck under a cleaving axe that swiped above her head. Straight-handed, she jabbed her fingers into the man’s kidney, punching low with her left, into his groin. He winced. She straightened, jabbing her hand into his throat. He gasped, stepping back, dropping the axe. One hand went to his throat, another to his holster, but a third hand appeared, gripping his chin, pulling it back as Tuck stepped forward, plunging her bayonet into his back. The soldier let the man fall.
“You ran,” Tuck signed.
“To get here so quickly, you must have done the same,” Locke said, but the soldier was already moving quickly from corpse to corpse, checking they were dead.
Locke bent over the corpse of the woman in the white coat. The tattoo on her forearm was old and of the style of those who’d taken the ink in prison: the three-leafed branch wrapped in barbed wire. She was cartel, and she wore white. Two of Flora Fielding’s captors had worn white. The women-in-white, Flora had called them. They’d been snipers, murderers, and from what Locke had pieced together, Cavalie’s overseers in the slave camp. Was this woman another, or just someone who’d adopted the style?
Tuck picked up one of the fallen rifles the now-dead gangsters had carried, examined it by firelight, and nodded to herself. “Wait here,” the soldier signed.
“I know, you’ll be back,” Locke said, and began gathering the ammunition. The figures Tuck had shot first had both carried AK-74s, while the lug with the axe carried a handgun, just like the woman in white. Did that mean she wasn’t a sniper?
“You’re reading too much into a white coat,” Locke said to herself.
Tuck returned with their packs and Locke’s spear.
“You were following me, weren’t you?” Locke said. “Close behind, but I didn’t hear you.”
Tuck shrugged, and gestured at the tower block behind them. Inside, they found treasure, or what passed for it in their world, and it didn’t amount to much in either quantity or quality. Boxes and suitcases were stacked in the middle of the lobby, containing a smattering of food, toothpaste, soap, and over-the-counter medication.
“They were looting the apartment buildings,” Locke said. “I— down!”
She dived forward, knocking Tuck off her feet as the man fired. Locke hadn’t seen the gun, but she’d seen the door open. She rolled to her feet, but Tuck was quicker, firing a burst from the AK-74. The gangster had ducked back behind the door, but the bullets ripped into the wooden frame. The doorway was thick, but not thick enough. When Locke pulled open the door, she found the gangster dead, in a pool of his own blood.
The door led to a stairwell, dark, forbidding, but silent.
Tuck raised a hand to her ear.
Locke shook her head. “Quiet,” she signed.
Tuck nodded, then motioned they should wait and listen.
Locke stood nearly still, though she let her torchlight move slowly around the lobby, finishing the inspection that the fifth gangster had cut short. There were a trio of sleeping bags in one corner. On a low square pine table sat a camping stove and an assortment of saucepans. In the corner, a wastepaper bin was full of used crockery. This wasn’t a permanent base, then, so why had they chosen to spend the night here? Why not return to the ship? Had they been given a target for what quantity of supplies to gather?
Impatience getting the better of her, Locke was about to ask for how long the soldier expected them to play statues, when Tuck signed, “Hear anything?”
“No,” Locke said. “It’s still quiet.”
“Five of them, alone,” Tuck signed. “We should go up.”
“To the roof?” Locke asked.
Tuck nodded. “We came this far.” She checked her watch. “Fifty-five minutes until the attack.”
There was no way of hiding the bodies outside. If the gangsters’ relief arrived, this was a terrible place to fight, and a worse one to defend. Would a relief arrive? Were there more people upstairs? Perhaps, and if they began a battle here, the odds were they’d be trapped and they would die, but at least it would help distract the gangsters from the submariners’ imminent assault.
Twenty minutes later, breathless, they were on the roof of the apartment block. It was as empty as the rest of the building.
“If Lisa had asked me what I would miss most after the nuclear war,” Sorcha Locke said, “the last thing I’d have thought of saying
was an elevator. Remind me never to volunteer again.”
Tuck didn’t reply. She had her back to Locke, quickly finishing a short search of the empty rooftop. Other than a sun-bleached, frost-warped plastic table and chairs, it was completely empty. A five-foot-high barrier ran around the building, tall enough to prevent an accidental fall, and to prevent anyone from enjoying the sea view.
“I think white has become their uniform,” Locke said, speaking to herself as Tuck took out her optical scope, found a gap between the barrier and the uprights holding it in place, and began scanning the distant harbour below.
Locke grabbed the table and dragged it over, close to the soldier, then carried over two chairs. She unslung the AK-74 she’d brought from below, and leaned it on the table, lining up the barrel with the doorway.
“Yes, I think white is their uniform. These guns are new, too. Newly taken from storage, anyway. I can smell the oil. They were looting, weren’t they? Searching for food, one assumes, to provision the ship. Odd they were sleeping downstairs, but I suppose that kept them close at hand if those awake required help. Or were they all awake because they expected someone to come check on them at dawn? We shall find out, shan’t we?”
Tuck tapped her arm, and pointed at the gap between the barrier and the upright holding it in place. Locke retrieved her binoculars, and peered through. There were lights aboard the ship, illuminating the outline of nearly half the vessel. The rest was hidden behind the dark void of harbour-side buildings. On the expansive car park beyond the ship, she could just make out the tank, too. And if she could see it, dawn truly was on its way.
She checked the time. Ten minutes to go. They’d timed the assault late, then. They’d made a calculation of sunrise based on the cloudy dawns of previous days in Ireland, and got it wrong. No matter. At least they hadn’t timed the attack too late. Another day or two, and the ship would be provisioned and ready to sail.
Mills had devised the plan, which was why he was leading the main assault. The colonel had wanted to swarm the destroyer, sweeping forward with as much sound as fury, disorientating the defenders. Mills had opted for the more direct approach. They needed to sink the destroyer. For that, they needed more powerful weaponry than the one remaining Gatling gun on the Courageous’s deck. They needed an artillery piece they could fire from a distance, and in relative safety. Where was such a weapon? In the tank parked on the seafront. Mills and his submariners would capture it, turn it, and fire on the destroyer until the ship was smoke and flame. Then all would retreat.