Strike a Match 3

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by Frank Tayell


  “It was different,” Ruth said. “I shot Illyakov. I mean, she had a rifle, and I shot her, and I felt… not nothing, but she was a criminal. She was armed. She was going to shoot me. I don’t know whether she killed anyone herself, but she caused Mr Wilson to be murdered and was complicit in the deaths of those five Luddites and whoever else. But those cultists… I mean, it’s the same, but it’s not. It’s… one moment Private Bhatt and I were talking, and then next there was a grenade and he just jumped on top of it. He didn’t think or hesitate or anything. He had to know he was going to die, but he did it anyway. I don’t get it. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand any of it!”

  “Me neither,” Mitchell said. “And I’ve been doing this for twenty years. The good, the bad, they both still have the ability to surprise. I’m going on ahead. Isaac, stay with her.”

  But Ruth wasn’t going to be left behind, not again.

  The light at the end of the tunnel was a searchlight attached to a hasty barricade. Mitchell slowed, dismounted, and waved his empty hands above his head.

  “British!” he called. Clearly thinking his American accent made that a dubious claim, he added “We’re friendly. It’s Captain Mitchell and Constable Deering.”

  They approached the barricade, and found the admiral herself commanding the detachment of Marines.

  “Did you stop the train?” the admiral asked.

  “Yes,” Mitchell said. He took in the Marines. “Admiral, we need to talk. In private.”

  The two of them walked out of earshot, and that caused a barrage of questions from the Marines.

  “Sorry,” Ruth said. “I don’t know anything. I really don’t.” She pushed her way through them and towards… daylight? Dawn was breaking over Kent.

  “Was it still night in France?” she said to herself.

  “More or less,” Isaac said. He’d followed her outside. “There are still no trains here. Looks like they moved the dead, though.”

  Ruth had nothing to say. She looked up at the clouds, then at the trees, and then at a pair of blackbirds pecking at a gap between sleeper and rail. Next to the rails was a long platform dotted with small cranes and other machinery for the loading of heavy equipment. Everything seemed indecently peaceful.

  On the platform was a small office with two Marines at attention outside. Next to them was a bench. Ruth climbed up onto the platform, and walked over to the bench.

  The Marines eyed her, and her smoke-blackened, mud-stained, blood-soaked uniform.

  “You were in Calais,” one asked.

  “I was.”

  “What’s it like?” the other asked.

  Ruth thought about it, then about the kind of answer she would want to hear if she was a newly recruited Marine only a few hours away from being sent to the frontline. “It’s bad,” she said, “but we’re winning.”

  The two guards nodded. “Do you want to speak to him?”

  “To whom?” she asked.

  “The prisoner.”

  “You have a prisoner?”

  Inside, handcuffed to a chair, guarded by another Marine, was a man wearing the uniform of the railway company.

  “You worked for Cavendish?” Ruth asked.

  The man glanced at Ruth, her uniform, and then at Isaac. “Don’t I get a lawyer?”

  “We’d have to arrest you first,” Ruth said. She pulled out a chair from the table and sat down opposite him. “Do you know what was on that train?”

  The man shook his head. Ruth wasn’t sure if she believed him. She glanced at the Marine now standing by the door.

  “That train was rigged with explosives,” Ruth said. “When it reached the garrison in Calais, it was meant to detonate. It would have killed all of our people. A hole would have been ripped through our lines. Hundreds would have died, and the cultists would have poured down the Tunnel, and into Kent. Everyone here would die, and so would hundreds in Dover. More would have died in Sussex and beyond because most of our Marines would have been dead. Tens of thousands would have died before Britain was safe again. All because of you.”

  “Not me,” the man said, shaking his head. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “What do you know?” Isaac asked.

  “Just that we were told to make sure no one went onto that train,” the man said. “We had to keep the Marines off it.”

  “Keep the Marines off? You mean that you had to shoot at them if they tried to board?” Ruth asked.

  “No. I don’t know. I mean Ms Cavendish gave the orders and we obeyed. We’re soldiers, too, you know. What do you think we were doing when we laid track through the northeast, through Scotland? We fought and died to build this country.”

  “So why were you so happy to tear it apart?” Ruth asked.

  “It wasn’t like that,” the man said.

  “And you know what,” Ruth said. “I don’t care. Did Cavendish arrive on that train?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. What do I get if I tell you.”

  “Police protection,” Mitchell said.

  Ruth turned around. She hadn’t realised he’d come in.

  “If you talk, we’ll arrest you,” Mitchell said. “If you don’t, we’ll leave you here. They’ve telegraphed Dover, a locomotive will arrive in thirty minutes. How long will it take to get to Calais? Half an hour? An hour? Call it twenty minutes to load it with the wounded, and it’ll be back here an hour after that. In three hours, hundreds of wounded will come through here. What do you think will happen to you then? You’re not a criminal. You’re not even an enemy combatant. You’re a spy. A traitor.”

  “They’ll rip me apart. That’s murder. You’re talking about murder!”

  “Accidents happen,” Mitchell said. “The admiral confirmed that Cavendish arrived on that train. Where did she go?”

  “I don’t know. I swear. I don’t.”

  “How many with her?” Mitchell asked.

  “Two, I think. I’m not sure.”

  “Anything else you want to ask?” Mitchell asked.

  “No,” Ruth said. “Not any more.”

  “The prime minister wants him alive,” Mitchell said.

  “Understood,” the Marine said.

  Mitchell led Isaac and Ruth outside, and around the building towards the rear. “Cavendish forged orders from Atherton himself,” he said. “Trains were held in the depot in Sussex, and in Dover. Since yesterday evening, no train has come further east than Horsham.”

  “What’s going to happen in Calais?” Ruth asked.

  “The Dover train will be here in thirty minutes, give or take. The admiral is going to take all the troops in Folkestone through with her, and take over command in Calais, at least until someone else can be appointed. The wounded will be evacuated. The telegraph has to be repaired, as does the electrical supply. I don’t know how long that’ll take.”

  “It’s not your problem, Henry,” Isaac said. “The immediate crisis is over. All that’s left is to find Cavendish.”

  “No, the crisis is only just beginning,” Mitchell said. “The Railway Company, and their police, their guards, they’re loyal to Cavendish. I don’t know how loyal, but I can’t risk sending a report to Atherton by telegram. I’ll have to do it in person.”

  “We’re not looking for Cavendish?” Ruth asked.

  “We’ll use that train from Dover to ferry the wounded out of Calais,” Mitchell said. “We’ll need a second locomotive to ferry them to Hastings or Twynham, and that’s with whom I’ll catch a ride, but it won’t be for at least four hours, so we have time to search for her, but I doubt we’ll find her, not now. The best we can do is work out which way she went.” They’d reached the rear of the buildings built next to the platform. Mitchell pointed to a shallow ramp that ran down to a gravel path. “Start looking for wheelchair marks,” he said.

  “The gravel looks new,” Isaac said. “Remarkably new and clean.”

  They followed the path between two partially constructed sheds, both with roofs suspen
ded on massive steel girders, but where no walls had been put in place. Ruth left the path, and walked around the handful of scattered boxes, crates, and stacked lengths of timber.

  “What are you looking for?” Mitchell asked.

  “They had trucks in Calais,” Ruth said. “Maybe she drove away. I mean, she can’t have walked.”

  “And she had a diesel locomotive,” Isaac said. “She could have kept some of that fuel aside. Hmm. There was petrol in that old church where Ruth was taken after they abducted her. Perhaps the diesel came from the same place?”

  “Smuggled from the U.S.? No, I don’t think so,” Mitchell said. “What I now wonder is whether the diesel in Calais actually came from here. A lot of effort was put into biodiesel, and that can run in a ship’s engine as well as a locomotive or truck. If Cavendish’s plan was to live, to escape, then perhaps she didn’t go to London, but just to the coast.”

  “Well, there’s no wheel marks here,” Ruth said. “Not for a truck, not for a wheelchair.”

  Beyond the unfinished warehouses, gorse and bramble grew out of and around stubby concrete ruins. Beyond those was a new-growth forest. Mitchell left the path, stalking towards it. Ruth looked at Isaac. He shrugged and followed. Ruth glanced back towards the station. Her rage from earlier was fading, but so to was the fear that had welled up as they’d cycled through the Channel Tunnel. She didn’t think Mitchell would really have thrown that prisoner to the Marines, or that the Marines would have harmed him. No, if their rage was anything like hers, they would want to see him tried and hanged.

  “Here!” Isaac called. Ruth turned around. Isaac was pushing back a dense thicket of brambles. All of the suckers and tendrils had been carefully trimmed, so that, with only a few scratches from the longer thorns, a three-foot section could be rolled back. Underneath was a patch of muddy dirt, but in it were an unmistakable pair of wheel marks.

  “I should have seen it before,” Mitchell said. “But there are none so blind as those who don’t want to see. There were tracks like this outside that church they held you prisoner, Ruth.”

  “Similar, maybe,” Ruth said. She wasn’t sure, and wasn’t sure it mattered.

  The trail continued intermittently until the track met an old road. There were a few moss-covered wrecks pushed into the ditch, but the road was otherwise clear. Remarkably clear, really, considering how impassable disused roads usually were. Had Cavendish done that to aid her escape?

  “I’ve lost the trail,” Mitchell said examining the verge either side. “But she would have gone north.”

  The wind picked up. Ruth raised her collar, and the movement cracked the mud crusted on her hands. As Mitchell and Isaac drew their weapons, she plunged her hands into her pockets. Her left hand found something hard. The grenade that Johannes had given her. She almost pulled it out, wanting to discard it, but she stopped herself. That wouldn’t be safe for anyone else who ever came along this road. Instead, she left the grenade where it was, and let her hands fall to her sides.

  The road ahead was bisected by a brook. The stream emerged from a shallow hill in a gentle trickle. Over the years, that had worn a path through the road, angling down to a lush grove of towering spruces. On the far side of the stream were four footprints, two pairs facing one another, as if two people had been carrying something over the gap.

  “Two sets of footprints,” Isaac said. “Two people carrying a wheelchair.”

  Mitchell glanced behind, then ahead. “If she’d come through here last night, before the train left, those would have dried by now.”

  “You mean she waited?” Ruth asked.

  “I would have,” Isaac said. “Somewhere close enough to the railway that she would know that her plan had worked.”

  “But how would she know?” Ruth asked. “How would she know if it failed?”

  “By the sound of the artillery,” Mitchell said. “But it’s more likely she waited until first light so as to avoid having to use a torch whose light might have betrayed her presence to any patrols wandering the countryside. She didn’t linger around here, though.”

  The road continued north, curving in and around thickets and groves that increasingly encroached on the battered tarmac. A seven-foot-wide path had been cut through them. From the discoloured stems discarded on the roadway, it had been done at least a week before, but nothing heavy had been ridden over them. Nothing heavier than a wheelchair. There were occasional wheel-marks visible in the damper patches of dirt.

  Mitchell abruptly dropped to a crouch, and ran to the edge of the road and the cover of a rusting white van. The wheels had been removed, as had the lights, two of the doors, and all bar one of the seats, but the word ‘Police’ was still visible on the battered bonnet.

  “Ahead,” Mitchell whispered. “Do you see that house? There’s a truck behind it. That’s an old British Army truck.”

  “The one covered in leaves?” Isaac asked.

  “Covered in branches,” Mitchell said. “But there’s no tree near them. That’s hasty camouflage.”

  “You think they’re in the house?” Isaac asked.

  “Maybe.”

  The house was at the bottom of a dip in a road, a few yards south of a crossroads. On the far side, the road rose up a shallow hill disappearing behind a larger building with a sign affixed to the front. It was too far away to read the sign, but it had probably have been a pub, and it would have made a far better vantage point than the unremarkable detached house. The roof was moss-covered, but otherwise looked intact. The guttering hung loose, and at least one window was broken, but…

  “Someone put boards over that window,” Ruth whispered. “Someone tried to live here after the Blackout. No smoke, though. And I can’t see anyone.”

  “What do you think, Henry?” Isaac asked.

  “I think Cavendish cleared the road from here to the Tunnel’s entrance. I think that crossroads marks a point where she could choose between heading towards London or going due north to somewhere she’s concealed a boat. The question, then, is whether she had two trucks, and if not, why is she still here?”

  “Here’s hoping that her two compatriots decided to leave her behind,” Isaac said, checking the magazine in his pistol. “How do you want to do this?”

  “Quickly,” Mitchell said, “because there’s no way to do this circumspectly. Go through the trees. Get a bead on the back of the building. Stop them from driving away. Cavendish can’t run, so if she can’t drive, we’ve got her trapped. Anyone else who wants to run, let them.”

  “Just like old times,” Isaac said. He jumped the ditch, pushed his way through the hedge, and disappeared into a forest that had once been a field.

  Mitchell turned to Ruth. “We’ll follow the hedge. Keep your head down. And…” He gave a rueful shrug. “And I don’t have any more advice to give.”

  They were a hundred yards from the house when the first shot rang out. Ruth didn’t see who fired it, though she was certain it came from ahead. Mitchell sped up, so Ruth did the same, running doubled-over along the ditch. Another shot came, and then a third, and then came a shout.

  “There! By the road!” It was a man’s voice and was followed by a staccato rat-a-tat of machine gun fire. Mitchell dived forward for the cover of a three-foot-high brick wall that separated the house from the fields around it. He fired blindly, emptying his pistol at the building as Ruth skidded into cover next to him.

  “Aren’t you meant to ask them to surrender?” Ruth asked.

  “Good point,” Mitchell muttered as he reloaded. “It’s over, Rebecca!” he called out. A burst of gunfire came in reply. “Can you see the truck?” Mitchell asked. “Can they drive away?”

  Ruth crawled along the edge of the wall to a section that had broken, spilling bricks and mortar down into the ditch. “I… no, there are branches in front of the engine. I don’t think it can move.”

  Mitchell fired another two blind shots. The bullets hit stone. This time there was no return fire. Ruth rolled onto
her side. She could see down the side of the wall to the rear of the property where a figure was running towards the woodland. Ruth raised her revolver, but before she could fire, the man collapsed. Isaac stepped out from behind a tree and ran towards the rear of the house.

  “Isaac didn’t let him run,” Ruth said, heedless of the weapon in her own hand.

  Mitchell didn’t reply, but pushed himself up and over the wall, sprinting for the side of the house. He reached the wall by the window as the door opened and a figure ran out. Mitchell fired before the man had a chance to raise his rifle. He collapsed. Mitchell edged to the doorway.

  The boards fell from the window next to him. A woman was there, an assault rifle in her hands. Not Cavendish, but someone younger. Someone not much older than Ruth. She barely registered that as she brought her revolver to bear, firing two shots into the window. The woman collapsed, slumping forward onto the frame.

  “That just leaves you, doesn’t it, Rebecca,” Mitchell called out. “Two who helped you away from the garrison, but one who was already here, keeping an eye on your truck.” He glanced at the corpse hanging from the window. “I remember her, I think. Another child you adopted. Another one who’s dead. Did you really only save their lives in order that you could kill them later on?”

  In a crouch, Ruth ran for the house. She reached the other side of the window.

  Mitchell motioned toward the open window, and that she should fire two shots through it. Before Ruth could, there was a blast from a shotgun. The pellets shredded the doorway. Mitchell motioned for Ruth to stay where she was. He reached into his coat, took out his tablet, tapped at the screen, then put it on the ground.

  “Rebecca,” he called. “We disarmed the bomb on your train. The garrison in Calais is intact, and has been resupplied. The pirates have been repulsed. We’re winning. It’s over. There’s no sanctuary for you in France. Not now.”

  “I… I see,” Cavendish said. Her voice was clear, close. She couldn’t be more than eight feet from the door. Ruth watched Mitchell, waiting for his signal.

  “Why did you do it?” Mitchell asked.

 

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