"Do we have a better plan?"
I shook my head. "We'll just have to choose our moment carefully, won't we?" I said.
After breakfast the next morning – a surprisingly good Kedgeree made with fish from the river – everyone gathered in the briefing room. Without explicitly detailing the situation, Mac told the boys that there was a new threat abroad and that we were going to be searching for their HQ. A group of five search teams was assembled, each comprising one officer and two other boys, and they were allocated specific targets to recce. The rest of us were to concentrate on repairing the damage of yesterday's attack and bolstering our defence perimeter.
As walking wounded I was excused any actual work. Instead I spent a quiet day with three boys who had been wounded in the fight. The youngest of these, Jenkins, had been shot in his left hand, which was shattered and unlikely to be fully useable ever again. He was only eleven but he had already made it to grade six on piano; he was having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that he'd never make grade seven. Vaughan had a nasty head wound, although this was from crashing into a table as he dived for cover. He was a bit concussed but he'd be fine. Feschuk had taken a splinter of glass to his left eye, and it was likely that depth perception was a thing of the past for him. We spent the day rummaging through the dusty library for any useful books and sharing stories of life before The Cull.
I casually manoeuvred the conversation around to the subject of Mac and was horrified to learn that, despite the wounds, despite what his actions had cost them, despite how he'd treated Bates and Matron, they were starting to like the bastard.
"If it weren't for him we'd have been captured and hung yesterday," said Feschuk. He related how Mac had taken his place in the defences when he'd been hit and had rallied the boys in the heat of battle to regroup and ambush the attackers inside Castle itself.
"The officers are a pain, but at least we're safe here," said Jenkins. His best mate Griffiths had died in the fight but he seemed detached and unconcerned by this. In shock or just accustomed to losing people?
"I never liked Matron anyways," said Vaughan. Who was a prick.
The next morning I swapped dusty books for damp leaves and beetles, as I crawled through mulchy undergrowth on a reconnaissance mission. My side stung every time I moved, but the stitches held and the painkillers I was taking helped a bit. When I reached the edge of the forest I brought out my binoculars and looked down a long sweeping lawn at the headquarters of the Blood Hunters.
"I don't fancy trying to storm that," said Mac, who was lying beside me.
Neither did I.
Ightham Mote was a solid wood and stone 14^th century manor house that sat in the middle of a deep wide moat. This house was specifically designed to withstand siege and attack. The main entrance was a stone bridge that led underneath a tower flanked by stone buildings. The other three sides of the house comprised a half-timbered upper storey sitting on a solid stone lower level. There was another, smaller stone bridge at the rear. There were sandbagged gun emplacements on both bridges. There used to be a wooden bridge on one side, but that had obviously been pulled down by the building's new occupants; the National Trust would have had a fit.
One of the teachers used to take junior boys on trips to Ightham and had produced photocopied floor plans for the lessons he gave before the trip. Earlier we had turned Castle upside down and found a pile of these sheets in a store cupboard. The building was a maze, not somewhere you wanted to get involved in close quarters combat.
"This is suicide," I said. "There is no way we are getting in and out of there without getting shot to pieces."
"What this? Nine Lives Keegan walking away from a fight?"
That was his new nickname for me, Nine Lives. Funny guy.
"Yes," I replied. "Always. Whenever humanly possible I walk away from a fight. I don't like fights. They hurt."
"Petts is in there. He's one of our boys. We never leave one of our boys behind."
Grief, he was starting to speak 'Tabloid'.
"Mac, mate, we're schoolboys not Royal Marines. He's probably already dead. And I know it's callous, but chances are some, if not all of us, will die getting him out. Surely one dead, however regrettable, is better than twenty?"
Mac favoured me with a look of total disgust.
"You'd really leave him in there?"
"Considering the odds, yes."
"Then you're not the man I thought you were."
Hang on, I wanted to say, since when did the murdering rapist have any claim to the moral high ground?
"Look," I said. "I agree with you in principle, of course I do. But for fuck's sake, look at that place. What good does it do anyone getting ourselves slaughtered?"
He just ignored me and crawled away. Clearly I was beneath his contempt.
The more I thought about attacking that place the less I liked it. I could see Mac's point about rescuing Petts, it was the only honourable sentiment I'd ever heard him utter, but it was going to get us killed. The power base that Norton was trying to build for a coup was just not strong enough yet, so there was no way of seizing power before the attack. And Mac was riding a wave of post-victory loyalty, so even our progress so far was looking wobbly. The boys had seen Mac's strategy win them a battle, and he'd been in the thick of the fighting, leading from the front. He'd proved himself both clever and brave. Which is, let's face it, what you want in a leader.
Not for the first time I wondered if maybe Mac was the best choice to lead us after all. And not for the first time I recalled Matron's face and Bates' screams, and felt my resolve harden.
Time was of the essence. We needed to devise a plan of attack quickly and efficiently and for that we needed more intelligence. We were clear on the approaches to the house and its internal layout, but we needed to know more about the routines and behaviour of the people who lived there. After all, attacking in force during their daily weapons training drill, the only time of the day when every single person inside is armed to the teeth, would not be a good thing. We needed to know stuff, and the simplest way to find stuff out is to ask. Rather than knock politely on the door and ask the insane cannibals to fill in a survey we decided to wait until someone left and then capture them. We didn't have to wait long.
A group of three young men left the house around midday, armed with machetes and guns, and headed off in the direction of a nearby village. Speight led an ambush in which two of the men were killed, and then rode back to school with the survivor strapped across the back of his horse.
"You'll bleed for this, cattle fucker!"
The man was in his early twenties. His blonde hair was slicked back with dried blood and his face, torso and arms were similarly daubed. He stank like a butcher's shop and his breath reeked. Mac had tied him to a chair in an old classroom and was sitting facing him, turning his hunting knife over and over in his hands, saying nothing.
"David will come for me and when he does you'll pay. You'll all pay." This last directed at me and Speight.
"Let me guess," said Mac, impersonating The Count from Sesame Street. "We'll pay… in blood! Mwahahaha!"
Speight chuckled. I rolled my eyes.
"You'll help make us safe. We're chosen. You're nothing."
"This whole 'safe' thing, let me see if I've got this straight," said Mac. "You smear yourself in human blood to protect you against what exactly… the plague?"
"The chosen shall bathe in the blood of the cattle, and they shall eat of their flesh, and they shall be spared the pestilence."
"But you've already survived the pestilence, yeah? I mean, you're O-neg, right? David's O-neg, your blood brothers are all O-neg, your victims are O-neg. You're all immune anyway otherwise you'd be dead, wouldn't you? So what's the fucking point?"
"The pestilence was sent by God to cleanse the Earth. It was The Rapture, don't you see? The worthy were taken up to The Lord and we have been left behind. We are the cursed ones and we must prove ourselves worthy in his sight befo
re the Second Coming. We are living through the seven years of The Tribulation. We must not fail the trials before us or we shall burn in hell forever. David is the prophet of the Second Coming and he shall lead the chosen into Heaven. He anoints us with the blood of the unworthy so that when the pestilence returns to carry off those who have failed in the sight of The Lord we shall be protected from the mutation. We shall live forever, don't you see? When David takes the blood of the cattle and blesses it then it becomes the blood of The Christ and we are cleansed. Hallelujah!"
We just stared. None of us really had an answer for that.
"Um, right," said Mac, for once rendered almost speechless. "Okay. Look, mate, I don't want to get into a philosophical discussion with you and stuff. I just want to know the routine in your little manor house, yeah? What times you eat, what time you put the lights out, guard changes, that sort of stuff. Oh yeah, and where you keep the cattle from Hildenborough locked up. You know, just the basics. Think you can help me out?"
The prisoner appeared to think about this for a moment and then replied: "Piss off."
Mac turned to me and Speight, and beamed. "Finally, fucking finally, I get to torture somebody!"
He turned back and brandished the knife. "Right, you smelly little toerag, I am going to cut you into tiny chunks and feed you to the pigs!"
"Mac, a word," I said. I was still in Mac's bad books but he hadn't demoted me or anything, so I figured I was still persona grata.
"What is it Nine Lives? I'm busy." He advanced towards the captive.
"Mac, a moment please," I insisted. "Outside."
He turned to look at me. He did not look happy. "This had better be good."
In the corridor I explained my idea to Mac, who thought about it for a moment and then nodded. Speight scurried off to get the necessary torture implements.
"Does this mean I don't get to cut him?" said Mac, disappointed.
"You can, yeah, but not now, eh? Just let me do this, we'll get the info we need, then you can do what you want with him. Fair?"
"All right. This better work though."
"Trust me."
Speight returned and handed the tools over to me. I re-entered the room, with Mac and Speight behind me, and I advanced on the bound prisoner. I placed the torture devices on the bedside cabinet, pulled up a chair, and leaned forward to whisper conspiratorially in the captive's ear.
I told him what I was going to do.
He begged for mercy, but I refused to relent.
I reached into the bowl, pulled out the wet flannel, wrung it out and began to wash the blood from his face.
He screamed.
Not so safe now.
By the time I reached for the shampoo he was telling us everything we wanted to know.
Everyone assembled in the briefing room later that evening, in full combats, camouflage on their faces. Guns had already been issued. The thirty-eight remaining boys, four remaining officers, myself and Mac gathered together to plan an attack that I felt sure many of us would not survive.
Mac talked us through his plan and I watched as it dawned on the boys exactly how dangerous this night was going to be for them. Rowles looked terrified, Norton was ashen-faced. Defensive fighting is one thing, but to deliberately pick a fight with a heavily armed force entrenched in a near impregnable fortress is quite another. Mac gave it the hard sell, and nobody refused to participate. And to be fair, the plan could work, with a huge truckload of luck.
As the sun fell we marched out the front door and began the three mile yomp to Ightham Mote, determined to rescue our schoolmate and neutralise a threat that could destroy us.
St Mark's school for boys was going to war.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The main assembly hall in Castle is full of names. On the wall that used to face the massed school each morning are six large black wooden boards, all hand decorated in blue and gold. The first three list, in chronological order, the Head Boys of the school going back 150 years. The next two list those pupils and teachers from St Mark's who died in The Great War, and the final one lists the Second World War dead.
But these aren't the only names in the main hall. The wooden panelling which clads the walls, deep polished and ancient, has been carved on by generations of boys. From the modern graffiti, simple scratches with a compass, to the old, ornate graffiti, with serifed fonts and punctuation, which must have taken hours of patient work with a penknife, boys have left their mark on St Mark's.
These names tell stories, and one name always fascinated me. James B. Grant carved his name into the wood panel beneath the farthest rear window. It's a beautiful piece of work, one of the most elaborate signatures in the hall. It must have taken him ages. It reads 'James B. Grant, 1913'.
His name also appears on the middle board of Head Boys, which tells us that he was Head Boy for the school year 1912-13; he must have carved his name on the wall in his final week at school, unafraid of punishment.
Finally, his is the last name on the board listing the dead of The Great War. He died in 1918.
A whole life story in three names.
There are pictures of the boys St Mark's sent to war, all dressed up in their corps uniforms. The faded, sepia photographs hang in the corridor that leads to the headmaster's study, each one with a list of names beneath, telling us who these boys were. There is one photograph, of the school corps from 1912, in which every single one of those names is to be found on the list of war dead. Every single one. Even given the slaughter of those years that's a remarkable and tragic clean sweep.
James B. Grant sits front and centre in that photograph. He's wearing puttees and a peaked cap, and he's got a swagger stick lying across his lap. He looks confident but not serious; there's a twinkle in his eye and a slight hint of amusement about the lips. He looks like a man who doesn't take himself too seriously, and I like that about him. He was an officer in the school corps and was doubtless an officer at the front.
When I was much younger I told my dad about this boy, whose name recurred through the fabric of my school. I remember asking him if I'd ever have to go to war, and he said no. He promised me there'd never be another war of conscription, not in my lifetime. The only people who'd go soldiering, he said, were those who'd chosen that life for themselves, like him. I was reassured.
When I had to do a special project for my history GCSE I took Grant as my subject, and I researched his war record. What I discovered horrified me and reinforced my determination that I would never become a soldier, like Grant or my father.
Now I was marching to war like so many boys before me and all I could think about was the tragic fate of James B. Grant.
Because Grant wasn't killed in action.
He was executed.
The sun was just edging over the horizon as I ran to cover and peered around the corner of the hedge. The two guards on the west bridge hadn't seen me. I gestured to the others and, one by one, Mac, Norton, Wolf-Barry, Speight and Patel hurried across to join me. If we could make it across the five metres of open space in front of us then we'd be out of the guards' line of sight and safe. One of the Blood Hunters' biggest mistakes was trusting the moat to keep them safe – there were no perimeter patrols at all, just the two sets of guards on the East and West bridges.
Dressed only in a pair of shorts, but daubed all over with shoe polish and carrying a plastic bag with clothes and weapons in it, Mac crawled forward across the lawn until the corner of the building shielded me from the bridge. Then he ran to the stone wall that ringed the moat on the North side. We followed quietly and without incident. There had been a wooden bridge entrance on this side of the house, but it had been knocked down by the Blood Hunters. They thought this side of the house was safe from attack.
Mac clambered over the wall and then climbed down the rough stone. He slid into the moat silently, but we heard him give a tiny gasp at the shock of the cold. He trod water until he was acclimatised and then he turned and swam slowly across the moat to th
e tiny set of stone steps that led down to the water's edge from a small door. He climbed out of the water and stood in the doorway. Once there he opened the plastic bag he'd been carrying and popped on a dry shirt and trousers. He also pulled out his gun and machete.
We watched him climb the three narrow steps and peer through the leaded window into what had been the house's billiard room. There were no lights on, so we couldn't be sure if anyone was in there or not. He used the machete to force the fragile door until it opened with a splintering crack that I felt sure must have been heard. We all crouched there, frozen, listening for sounds of alarm. Nothing. He pushed the door open and stepped into the room, then turned and waved us across. We were in.
A few minutes later all six of us were assembled inside, each of us armed with a gun and a knife that we were hoping we wouldn't have to use. So far we hadn't heard a single sound. Patel, Wolf-Barry and Speight hurried away. Mac, Norton and I waited but we heard no-one raise the alarm. Two minutes later the old longcase clock behind me whirred and chimed six. We heard footsteps overhead.
The Blood Hunters were waking up. Right on time.
Stage one accomplished.
"First in is me, Nine Lives here, Wolf-Barry, Speight, Patel and Norton, coz I'm told he's good in a fist fight, right Norton?"
"Yes sir."
"The two stone bridges on the east and west sides are guarded, but there's another way in they don't have covered. On the North side, out of the sightline of both sets of guards, there's a door in the billiard room that opens onto some steps down to the moat. Nine Lives reckons that when the posh blokes were smoking pipes and playing snooker then the ladies went out this door to a little boat so they could have a row on the moat. Charming, innit? That's our way in.
"Now, the building is square, with all four sides looking down into a big central courtyard. The Blood Hunters get up at six sharp, so we've got to be inside and in place before then, coz that courtyard won't be safe once they're awake. Once inside we split up. Patel and Speight go through the billiard room to the west bridge. There's two men on guard there but they won't be expecting anyone to come at them from inside. It's got to be a knife kill, quick and silent. Think you can manage that?
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