The Night the Lights Went Out

by John Eider

With caution we returned to where our belongings were buried, Wareing having half a notion that after the sighting in town the men might be back there to look for the ‘hunters’. We found our stuff and found a new woodland base half a mile away, well off the road. There he produced a piece of kit from his pack that I hadn’t seen before: a small black box no bigger than a cigarette lighter, with an aerial he proceeded to extend and a button he then pressed, causing a red light to illuminate.

  ‘There’s a beach three miles north of here,’ he explained, ‘famed for its ruined tower and chosen for that landmark – plus the fact that it’s remote. At the press of this button a boat was called to land there exactly twenty-four hours later. I’ve just committed us; I hope you don’t mind, but I wanted to give the crew a chance to get in and out before the sun is fully up – they do appreciate cover of darkness.’

  Which also meant…

  We sat beneath an oak tree as that day’s grey dawn struggled to break. He continued,

  ‘You see, Crofts, how we have to go in sometime today, while at least one of those pairs of armed guards are off fetching diesel. The evening will see them all back, the town in lockdown and eight boats of, probably also armed, smugglers here to help them out. After that this Ashe will be left even better armed, better fed and cockier after pulling off a huge deal.’

  ‘If they pull it off.’

  ‘Well, we can’t risk waiting to see if it goes wrong…’

  As we spoke, he made a list in pencil on the back of one of the maps, of all that we had overheard the men say that night (and it is from that list, that I still have, that I based the transcription recorded above).

  ‘This Ashe,’ I asked. ‘We saw him in the woods, right? The one in the hat?’

  ‘The one who the others called “boss”, being driving around in his sheepskin, with his armed guard? Yes, I’d say so. You know, I saw fellows like him in Bosnia as a young soldier. There’s nothing like a power vacuum to make a certain breed of idiot feel self-important. They’d have been something in their town to begin with, a Mayor or businessman, and probably already felt that they owned the place. And then the war came, and governments split and borders changed and power shifted, and they would find themselves in charge of a local division rounding up their neighbours. They’d give themselves the best house in town, the best car, the best clothes – all the time proving that power corrupts and that money can’t buy class.’

  ‘So this Ashe…’

  ‘I bet he used to run that dancehall on the front…’

  ‘The Palais,’ I remembered the men calling it.

  ‘…and has made sure that of every building in town it’s that one that stayed lit. And if his smuggling didn’t start till after E-Day then I’m a Chinaman.’

  ‘Or a Dutchman.’

  ‘Right, kip if you can. We leave at lunchtime and won’t be coming back. I have to plan.’

  ‘Then forget sleeping, come on.’

  Despite my bravado he insisted, knowing that however eager we were we needed rest and could afford a couple of hours; yet before my damp hair had even hit the makeshift pillow of my pack, we heard the rumbling.

  ‘Sounds bigger than a car,’ I ventured.

  ‘Well, we wouldn’t hear it otherwise.’ Wareing was thinking, ‘Crofts, where in Britain today would you go for diesel?’

  ‘A refinery! This part of the world’s full of them. Aren’t there pipelines from Mainland Europe?’

  ‘The main sites are probably secured,’ he mused, ‘but there’d be secondary sites, motor fuel stores for tankers, tankers themselves sitting around that never left the depot. Let’s get to the road and pray we’re not too late.’

  Scrambling through the undergrowth, boots slipping in the mud, branches scratching our faces, we found the site of our previous encounter with Ashe and his men; and this time stayed hidden from view. The sound was clearly still approaching, the vehicle slow on this narrow road.

  I asked, ‘What are we going to do with the truck? Take it?’

  ‘And what would we do with it? No, we just need to stop these men from getting back to town.’

  ‘But we could use it to drive into town ourselves.’

  ‘With three machine guns on us, at least? I think we can lower those odds a little further yet.’

  ‘But we could get their guns, have them drive the truck for us while staying out of sight.’ The ideas were coming quickly now.

  ‘And how long would that cover last before we had to show ourselves? We haven’t even seen our target in daylight yet. Do you really want to be doing our work amid a firefight?’

  In his bag, Wareing found the smallest explosive charge and set a fuse for the longest duration.

  ‘Find the biggest branch you can,’ he bid me, ‘and throw it across the road.’

  Feeling like a wartime partisan, I broke cover to drag a rotten bough from the forest floor and dump it in the middle of the road six yards ahead of us; before dashing back behind the bushes and intertwining branches for cover. The engine was getting ever louder in its slow approach, and it carried something foreboding in its tone.

  ‘Take this, you’ve got better legs,’ he said, shoving the explosive device in my hand and pressing its ignition as he did so. ‘Twenty minute fuse: takes them even further away from town before they’ve got to walk back.’

  ‘You get hidden then,’ I told him. ‘There’s no use our both getting caught.’

  But he just raised his knife, ‘No chance, if there’s trouble I’ll be right there.’

  And then it came, a small modern tanker, ‘Jenkins’ Domestic Fuels’ written on the side, the sort of thing an outlying house may have had come to fill its generator. But we had misjudged: they had seen the branch too early, and stopped not slightly-past us as hoped, but rather directly alongside. It was hard to see very much from our position not two foot from the rear tyre of the truck (for they had come onto our side of the road in a failed attempt to round the obstruction). But after a muffled exchange, I saw through the branches a man moving cautiously forwards away from the vehicle, pointing his machine gun warily.

  It occurred to me then that Wareing had kept us on the driver’s side, perhaps guessing that it would be the passenger who would get out to clear the blockage – otherwise they might have jumped down from the cab almost on top of us. With a fierce nudge in the ribs that hurt more than my partner would have remembered it would, I took my life in my hands, scrambled through the bush and out into the open behind the truck. No calls of alarm were raised, no trigger fingers twitched as I stood there stupidly in the road.

  ‘The tool box, below the hose,’ I heard from the brush, said barely loud enough to reach over the sound of the engine still chugging at idle.

  As gentle as a thief, I lifted the lid of the metal box attached to this truck’s chassis, just beneath the tank but above the beam that held the numberplate and rear lights. Into it I dropped the charge beside oily spanners and wrenches.

  Job done, I had to leave the pool of safety that was the rear-view mirror blind-spot directly behind the bulbous diesel tank; to fling myself back into undergrowth. Again I listened breathless for several seconds – but neither man had seen me; and with the passenger climbing back into the cab after moving the branch, they carried on their way.

  There was a massive anti-climax in the vehicle’s rumbling off along the road to continue its journey without event. More so when Wareing, standing again to stretch cramped legs said,

  ‘With any luck they’ll get so far away we won’t even hear the blast. I wish we’d had longer fuses in fact, as we could have risked letting them trundle on for another hour.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Well, if they were saying last night that they were worried they might not get back before nightfall, then the refinery is rather more than twenty minutes away.’

  I must have borne a worried look myself, for he added,

  ‘Don’t fret, the blast won’t kill them. I didn’t want the tank
to explode, just for the mechanicals to be jarred enough to stop them from moving. Had we had the equipment and the time to fix it, then I would have strapped the charge directly around the rear axle. Ho hum, we’ll just have to hope an explosive higher on the chassis does the trick.’

  We rested by the road awhile, before retracing our steps to our base camp. The pattern of adrenalin bursts and a lack of sleep left me not knowing whether I was ready to go or craving rest; but we knew that time was of the essence, and so it wasn’t long before Wareing had us pack up our stuff, asking,

  ‘Right, you’ve got your breath back? Then we’re going into town.’

  The walking itself hardly registered in my mind by that time. Despite us both being injured, it was in the lay-offs, the rest-periods when I had nothing to distract me, when I could feel every twinge and muscle aching. For, even half-crocked we were still soldiers, trained to hike for days with heavy packs, kept awake and with the skin rubbed off our feet.

  As we walked towards town than bright morning I talked a little, on subjects as diverse as the return of Radio 1, and whether the lorry drivers would be injured in the blast – Wareing expected not. My partner though was in his element, calculating aloud how long he thought it would take those men to get back to town without the truck; and speaking again of men like Ashe, of how in Bosnia their reigns were not always long-lasting, that the pure freedom they felt often drove them to drink and decadence and losing any semblance of military control. The major upshot of that effect in relation to our mission though, he felt, was that a town that stayed up all night was not likely to be the brightest in the mornings.

  However, it had been the drinkers who we had seen outside the pub the previous evening who had most fascinated him; and it was so good to see him in that happy mood where he could just talk and talk,

  ‘They were just lolling around, laughing,’ he had begun.

  ‘Well, so were people at the commune,’ I recalled.

  ‘But you could see where they were coming from,’ he replied, with nary a wince at the mention of that place. ‘I can’t work this town out.’

  He went on to explain,

  ‘There was a psychologist called Maslow who placed human feelings and sensations in a pyramid. He said that you had to attend to the basic needs at the foot of the pyramid – warmth, food, safety – before a person could relax into the finer feelings higher up – love, friendship, self-improvement, the appreciation of art.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘So put it this way – those fellows weren’t at the foot of the pyramid, they were joking around, relaxing. Someone is taking care of their basic needs.’

  ‘But that isn’t always the case, is it?’ I asked from somewhere. ‘Some people can laugh in the face of disaster.’

  ‘Granted; but for every person who can write poetry in a prison camp, there’s a thousand who can’t get on in life because of poor housing or bad relationships. It’s the exception to live with the pyramid upside down, not the norm. These men weren’t laughing in the face of imminent destruction – they had no fears: no fear of their food or booze running out, no fear of the cushy number they’ve got running in this town not continuing.’

  ‘They’ve bucked the E-Day odds?’

  ‘And in a way we’ve seen hardly anyone manage so far.’

  Chapter 25 – Along the Seafront