The Briefing Officer was Nick. I thought, So he’s reached out and grabbed me, not sure whether to be angry or proud and certainly wary.
He looked no different from that night three years before. He nodded to me familiarly and called, ‘Arry says, good luck,’ re-establishing intimacy as though we had never separated. After that he treated me as just one of the task force, knowing he had picked me up right where we left off. It was a self-confidence to drive you mad.
We four rookies stayed together, brawling forgotten, seeking comfort in each other. Nick looked us over and said, ‘Some fighting, I see. Who started it?’
I told him, ‘I did,’ trying not to sound sulky.
‘Someone wouldn’t let you have your own way?’
He always asked damnable questions that had to be answered. ‘Something like that.’
‘Sir!’
‘Sir.’
‘I’ll bet it was exactly like that. In six years you haven’t learned. How were they, May?’
May, who had spent much of the week in bed with Roger (who, it had eventually dawned on us, was her husband), said, ‘Like rats in a pit. Bitching egos swelling like puff-adders. We had to stop one fight. About normal for the course, I think.’ She added, ‘Very queasy stomachs.’
That brought a heartless laugh from our betters, having no pity; they too had had their Swill room days.
Nick made it worse. ‘It’s a hard way to get into the right state of BO and dirty underwear but in future you’ll be able to spray it on at the last moment. The real purpose was to let you understand something of what it means to be Swill, to drive out the idea of us against them. You will be dealing with human beings, some of them monsters, others whose opportunities and intel intellects cannot match yours but who are none the less your equals in the sight of God, Police Intelligence and, incidentally, themselves.’
The sight of God? Nick claimed atheism, but old speech forms die hard along with the beliefs that fathered them.
He continued, ‘You will not be merely ferreting out and arresting some unpleasant and dangerous people but protecting the innocent and the good, of whose demeaning environment you have gained some inkling in the past week.’
I thought he had lost his way in one of those messages from the heart with no clear idea to guide it, when he stopped dead, glanced at his notes and said, ‘The operation is apprehension of a large criminal group, as many as 400 or more strong. Army Support Group will be in attendance as back-up only, on call if we need them.’
Four hundred. Or more. Sixty-four of us. If we need them. This was big stuff. You could feel the room rise to it.
‘We will move into the area as soon as briefing is completed and the operation will commence at three a.m.’
Someone muttered, ‘Christmas Day and bloody noses all around.’
‘Quite so. The site is Newport Tower Twenty-three. An internal co-operating force will be directed by Tower Boss Istvan Kovacs.’
He did not glance my way, did not need to. What else is hidden up your sleeve, Game-player?
‘Twenty-two and Twenty-four are controlled by the Swain family who seem to feel that they need Twenty-three to consolidate their grip on the north corner. They want the Kovacs connections. They used the flood warning on the eighteenth to infiltrate the lower floors, before the water rose, with thugs posing as unattached street types sleeping in the corridors.’
That was a standard move in tower feuds; nobody would question refugees from rising water or throw them out before the ebb. An invader could put in enough men to seal off the exits and stairways and terrorize the vital lower floors, then sit quietly while starvation did its work above.
A voice asked, ‘And Kovacs did nothing about it?’
‘But he did. He contacted us.’
‘To do the work for him? Do we care? What’s the bait?’
‘He offers proof of two murders committed on Swain orders and evidence of two others.’
‘Greatheart Kovacs, the copper’s friend! Using the flood to keep them trapped till we come. Dog eats dog and sets up the meal in advance. But are a couple of killings excuse for calling the army out?’
Good question. Swill murders are rarely important in themselves. Now, if they had knocked off some Sweet. . .
Nick said, ‘There’s more to it than a couple of rats garrotted, a few families left in misery and a gang of wolves ruining what lives the Swill have.’ He didn’t fling it at us, just let it settle. It becomes too easy to take a detached view when you are thinking in terms of tactics and efficiency instead of people. ‘Kovacs claims to have evidence of Swain connection with coupon forgery. It’s making a shambles of Newport delivery and distribution.’ He said drily, ‘It’s an offer we can’t ignore.’
Indeed we could not. The system, the balance, the status quo must be preserved, a fact that transcended lives.
Elsie spoke up. ‘We clean out his rat’s nest for him, then he pays us with evidence you couldn’t hang a dog on.’
‘Kovacs is dependable – that’s his survival trait. He wouldn’t risk his tower unless he could pay hard graft. He let the Swains in to make sure of getting them cold.’
‘So what does he get out of it except a bigger reputation as a copper-loving bastard?’
‘What do you think he gets – Teddy?’
No problem. ‘A dead enemy. Also control of Twenty-two and Twenty-four. The whole north corner to himself.’
My voice must have rasped. ‘You disapprove?’
‘What’s to choose between him and the Swains? Perhaps he’ll take over the coupon racket as well.’
‘That he won’t! And there’s plenty of choice between him and the Swains. We might talk to him about it.’
His grin made no bones about using the job to further his private meddling.
One of the girls asked were we to draw weapons?
‘No! If we find guns against us – unlikely – we’ll call in the troops. However, as soon as this meeting dismisses you will draw chainmail.’
The lightweight metalloplastic undershirts were new and untried; we would be guinea-pigging as well as fighting, but karate against knives and iron bars is not unreasonable odds. You might get badly cut hands or a cracked skull if you weren’t fast, but very few Swill had more than novice training in solo fighting – their forte was group tactics. They did not have the instructors or the diet for building point-directed strength and split-second reaction.
The shirts were chainmail in name only, being cut from rolled sheets, like soft calico to the touch. They were long enough to cover the genitals and cut high enough to cover the base of the throat and the arms down to the elbows; the necklines, which would be visible, were already greyed with dirt by the Quartermaster. They felt and looked less than chain armour but the strongest of us could not start a tear in them. We were marginally impressed.
2
Police Transport took us around the inland rim of Yarraville and down through the factory strip between Yarraville and Newport to the flood water’s edge. Under starlight but with no moon we boarded canoes, four in each, and paddled down the flowing street toward the Newport towers, their black shapes dotted with lights like spots on dominoes. Swill may live by day but the towers are never entirely dark.
Predictably, Nick had detailed me to his canoe. Elsie was also with us; the idea seemed to be that a woman could inspire calm and confidence in the Swill women when the brawling began, so there was one with each attack group. It may have been psychologically right but I’d pity the Swill who shaped up to Elsie, taking her for a helpless maiden.
It was filthy hot, even for an Australian Christmas, and the pores in the chainmail helped little; we were live sweat boxes. Paddling was a thrusting through resistant night. No lights showed from the windowless factories locked against force and pillage; their remote hum was the only sound in a thick solitude. Floating between their automated bulks, where half a dozen Sweet employees in each watched screens and Telltales but no-body had to inst
ruct the machines in their work, it was not hard to read the economic lesson of the fact that the buildings were raised on stilts, safe from the rising water, while the habitations of the Swill were not. Machinery must not be damaged but Swill could vacate a floor or two until the discomfort passed.
Yet the factories were not safe: floods had lapped higher than the builders had prepared against and were already a centimeter or two over the door sills in many cases. They had been raised high in the years when panic said it must be done, hoping that the water could surely rise no higher than this generous mark. The water could and had done and would rise further. It was time to shift production to the hills. If the expense could be met Troubles beget troubles.
While the State beat its bankrupt brow Police Intelligence, uninterested in the automated props of civilization, moved on Newport Twenty-three, at the call of a scheming cheapjack who had chanced his tower and all in it to enlarge his personal empire. I could see our action in no other way.
Nick, seated directly in front of me, was an outline, shoulders thickened where the cylindrical screamer bomb was slung. Its detonation would be the action signal.
I asked him, in a low voice, how Kovacs could know how soon to hold his men ready, though the answer might be obvious and the question foolish. Perhaps it was, because it seemed that Nick had had a man in there on the first day – ‘wired for sound,’ as he put it – while the infiltration still proceeded. The Swains had never stood a chance once Kovacs had spotted them as offerings to the law and his profits.
The flood around us came alive with smooth skullcaps as army frogmen joined the advance, kicking lazily. We were close now to Twenty-two, close enough to see dimly the army floats moored in its shadow, four of them, each carrying a platoon armed with machine pistols. Their job was the collection of prisoners, possibly the whole 400; nobody wanted to call them for anything else unless the situation turned wickedly desperate. We did not want blood and deaths.
We stroked across the drowned area of cement skirting, toward Twenty-three, and on Nick’s signal back-paddled to a halt. The frogmen closed in to hear final instructions. Nick spoke quietly but each word was audible just as far as he meant it to be. ‘This is Twenty-three. You can see that the water is halfway up the second story. Luck for us, that’s where we’ll go in. The lights showing unshaded on third, fourth and fifth stories are ends of corridors. Swain’s crew are on those floors watching for attack by Kovacs from above. Not likely to be watching the water but could be. So we proceed from the corner, in full shadow, hugging the wall until each façade is covered by four groups. Then, in through the windows. You know what to do after that. Questions?’
‘Anything for us?’ That was the frogman Captain.
‘Stay at the windows on the flooded second story. Pick up anyone trying to get out. Nothing else unless I call. I don’t expect heavy resistance.’
Did he not? From 400?
No other questions.
‘Right. From now on, Swill-speak only. I’ll slaughter the nit who talks Sweet.’
It was a necessary order. Only a few trusted Kovacs men would guess how he had produced a force of fighting Swill from the flood water to sandwich the Swains top and bottom.
My skin crawled. This was my first major operation and I was young enough to respond to the drama of thick night with the tremor of violence waiting in the air.
The actuality was not quite a let-down, rather a gradual deflation as proper planning demonstrated what planning was for. It went off like a drill movement.
Each canoe selected a point along the wall to plant its mooring suckers, well apart so that each group was handy to a different interior staircase. Nick took out an upper window pane with a gimmick I had not seen before, a glass cutter that loosened molecular cohesion to bring the pane out entire, without sound. We slipped through and into the flooded apartment. Swimming in full dress is not difficult for a short while.
At the apartment’s outer door Nick duck-dived down to the lock to open it with a skeleton key. In less than half a minute we were across the corridor and into the opposite flat, which gave access to the lightwell. Nick went ahead to take out the inner window and toss the screamer bomb into the lightwell, where it floated while the acid fuse began to gnaw.
We moved to our assigned staircase. The first occupied floor was less than two meters above our heads; we heard grunts and snores. The Swains, we had reckoned, would use this as a dormitory floor, also, possibly, the one above, maintaining sentries only on the highest level.
The stench defies description. Our Swill rooms had not prepared us for the dense odor of cramped, sweating, filthy humanity and its effluents after a week’s imprisonment by flood. Heaven only knew what had happened to their drainage as the tide rose but it is certain that we had swum through raw sewage. I heard behind me the sound of vomit being choked back.
‘If anyone must vomit,’ Nick whispered, ‘dive down a meter or two first,’ but nothing would have prompted me to open my mouth under that cesspool surface.
He went to the top of the stairway and peeped into the corridor, then beckoned to us to put our heads out and observe. The corridor was some 100 meters long and two and a half wide, lit only at four spaced points. The sleeping bodies lay too closely packed for an estimate of numbers; men and women were crammed like cannery fish, mostly half-naked in the stinking heat. Here and there one stirred or moaned or snored but most lay like slabs of meat in a species of exhaustion which may have had less to do with heat and tension than with blessed relief from a life-starved wakefulness.
There could have been upward of 1,000 people on each floor of this seventy-story termitary. The reality was much worse than Sweet fear or PI teaching – not despair or degradation but simple, brute existence. You can never decide the precise moment of a revolution in heart and head but I think it was that doss-house of the hopeless and denied that drove out of me the last spasm of contempt for the Swill, I saw the reality at the bottom of the human barrel; these were the most luckless of all, brutalized even below their hapless norm by the feuds of the Tower Bosses, kicked and held down by their own kind.
Don’t imagine my bleeding heart dissolving in pity; easy sentiment had never been strong in me and the down-to-earth years of PI training had sharpened vision rather than emotion. Yet I knew guilt because all we fortunate Sweet shared responsibility for the existence of this corridor and hundreds like it. The revolting smell of the place was the smell of our own bathed and cleansed but forever dirty hands.
The feeling came and instantly went; it was no moment for contemplating upset philosophies.
Nick motioned us up the next stair. He checked the watch tucked up his sleeve, out of sight, counting seconds while the acid fuse ate through the plug of the bomb. He signaled us to put in our earplugs. We found the fourth story as close-packed as the third. He signed hurry, hurry and we positioned ourselves until all sixteen of us on that façade were set in our groups on the upper landings of the four staircases.
On this floor a few were awake when we stepped into the corridor and a child squalled in the arms of its mother, who came instantly alert. Somewhere in the human carpet a voice called out and at once the whole place was astir. What they saw, or thought they saw at each staircase entrance, was an inflow of Swill dripping from passage through the flood; the error held them long enough to begin asking who we were and what was going on – until they saw that we stood back to back in pairs at the exits, with coshes and brass knuckles.
Whatever they might have done was frozen into shock by the screamer bomb. Dead on time, in the moment we were set and ready, the fuse pierced the plastic plug and compressed air shrieked through the siren. It began at full pitch, not whining up to it but screaming to rip the eardrums, high in the alt register. Nobody in the building could have escaped the demonic sound – it must have been heard in City Center and in the Hampton Towers across the bay. Our earplugs were good protection but the Swill were in instant pain; though it lasted no more
than ten seconds it could have done damage. Then it whined down like a whimpering dog and was silent.
The Swill were held at gaze, reactions spintered by noise, puzzled at our appearance, aware of disaster and unable to move against it for lack of an order or an idea.
In the pause a woman beat at her ears with frenzied palms. As I removed my earplugs I heard her cry, ‘Wozzit, wozzit?’
Nick grinned at her. ‘That brain bomb, Swainey-girl!’
That, as he intended, identified us to their understanding. A man yelled, ‘Em’s Billy-boys!’ and flung himself across the narrow hall. Nick kicked him in the kneecap and lifted his brass knuckles in threat. Anger and a rustle of intent ran through the crush and they began to move on us.
Our luck held with the instantaneous outbreak of fighting on the floors above, a tumult of thudding and yelling that rolled down the stairwells to us. Kovacs, we found later, had had his men poised practically over the Swainey-boys’ heads and had closed with them in seconds. The sound spread hesitation through our corridor long enough for the trappers to see that they were the trapped and that four defenders at each stair exit, armed and determined, could hold the narrow passes indefinitely against a planless foe.
We had a moment of danger when the mob from the lower floor came racing up to discover what had happened and found themselves kicked back down by groups of what they took to be soaking wet Billy-boys sprung from nowhere.
The fighting was minimal. The disorganized opposition fell apart as Nick had foretold in briefing. Most of them took the obvious course of diving out through the windows, to be picked up by frogmen and harried to the military floats; the rest retired into sullen quiet. Not too many escaped out of a bag of over 300, of whom only three were finally arrested as the killers Kovacs fingered.
He had poured a torrent of men and not a few fighting women down the stairs so fast that they commanded the exits before the Swainey-boys realized what had hit them. Those with no nerve for the dive into the flood gave it away with only token fighting. The Swains’ problem, as leaders, was that once in retreat they commanded no loyalty; their backing was too much coerced and too willing to desert if it could be done safely. Kovacs could probably have routed them without our surprise and nuisance value, but that would have left it to be done all over again on some future day. Besides, he had wanted not just a victory but a profit and a trophy. Like us pragmatically trained types, he saw clearly in his fashion.
The Sea and Summer Page 23