He was a direct man and he held all the cards, or he thought he did. I glanced at the clock: I was getting nowhere, but the clock was, too fast. I said, “Yes, I am.”
“Unconditional surrender?”
“Yes,” I said. There was not much of a stir from the interim government; they had been sure of this all along, ever since I’d come back aboard. In their eyes my return was of itself an admission of defeat on Whitehall’s part.
The man in purple said, “Kindly spell it out, if you please, Commander Shaw.”
“Very well. On your assurance, to be transmitted by your radio to Downing Street direct, that the threat is totally withdrawn, the Prime Minister is prepared to order all service personnel to lay down arms and disperse to their homes, and the police — ”
“No, no. That is not what we require, Commander Shaw. The armed forces and the police must not be dispersed — we need them to control the population, to act under the orders of CORPSE. They must remain in possession of their arms and must retain their positions. The guarantee we wish is this, that they do not use their arms against CORPSE — that is all.”
I shrugged. “That will be acceptable, Eve no doubt. You can confirm with Whitehall direct if you wish. As to the rest of it, Her Majesty’s Government will guarantee to hand over to the interim government as soon as satisfactory arrangements can be made for the shift of power.”
“Which means?”
I shrugged. “So far as I know, it means you can put representatives ashore to meet the present government and officials and so on, and make mutually satisfactory plans for the handover.”
“You repeat yourself, Commander Shaw.”
I said pleasantly, “Yes, I know. But since you didn’t seem to understand”
“I wished to know the precise meaning of ‘satisfactory arrangements’. You must be honest with us, Commander Shaw. Is there anything else the present government of Great Britain has in mind?” The voice had hardened.
“Only this,” I answered, and proceed to exceed my brief. “The offer of surrender is expected to be met not only by the withdrawal of the theoretical threat, but also by the immediate standing-down and removal of the death-ships.” I paused. “To that extent, the surrender will not he unconditional, hut I submit that you can reasonably expect no less.”
*
That put the cat among the CORPSE pigeons: I believe the ladies and gentlemen of the interim government really had been banking all along on surrender, right from the start, and now that they had the cave-in confirmed and guaranteed the last of their worries had gone. They were against the idea of rejecting that handy surrender and they said so. Ron Gudge put it best. He said that union power was important and handled right they could get the unions on their side from the start. Unnecessary brutality, by which he meant the continuance of the threat once surrender had been offered, would cause a sense of grievance among the workers and they would get all manner of trouble. Strikes, official and unofficial, go slows, sit-ins. That sort of thing. The workers didn’t like the stick, the big fist, he explained portentously and at length until I began to wonder if he was past his prime after all. He had only to look at the expression in the eyes behind the purple hood. Those eyes said clearly that union power would be the first casualty of the take-over. For my money, once he’d played his part in persuading the union leaders to co-operate in the first instance, poor Ron Gudge himself would be the next casualty. However, he talked on loudly about the workers and he seemed to impress his colleagues even if for different reasons. Many of them would have families in Britain, and all must have friends. The lady who was bound for the Home Office backed up Mr Gudge with a series of short, sharp statements that emerged like barks. CORPSE must be seen to be civilised. One didn’t shoot sitting birds. One had one’s standards. One didn’t put women and children at risk. And so on. I even began to wonder if these people would ever have stomached the blow-up at all. They had probably never believed it would really happen. There was a decided hint of mutiny in the air now. More by good luck than anything else I had struck the right note with my impromptu commitment of Whitehall to the physical removal demand: it had appealed to them. The overall menace would still be there, of course, but a demonstrable act of goodwill in bringing the ships out to lie off the shores of Britain would be a salve to their consciences as well as a good propaganda point.
They were adamant. The man in purple was clearly furious, but he had a need of them, at least in the early stages, and he conceded. A message would go immediately to Whitehall: the surrender had been accepted by CORPSE, and Her Majesty’s Government as represented by the Prime Minister and full cabinet were to be flown to Exeter where they would be exchanged for the members of the interim government, heart attacks or not. In the meantime the in situ CORPSE heads of regions would take post, and as soon as they had reported back to the Sendar Maru by radio the nuclear-waste vessels would be boarded by their own crews and withdrawn three miles from the coast where they would remain for re-entry if required. This would include the vessel in the Devon-port submarine pens. In return, Whitehall was to withdraw the naval frigates from the vicinity of the Sendar Maru, this withdrawal to take place immediately upon receipt of the CORPSE message. At that, my heart sank: some basic planning was thereby scuppered, for now I would not be able to get the frigates ordered in on a rocket-blast mission when CORPSE switched off at the main as it were — which they would have to do, I believed, in order to prevent any chance of the death-ship crews inadvertently tripping the devices by use of their radio.
There was one other disquieting item in the man in purple’s list: to accommodate a slightly changed situation, the deadline was naturally annulled. It was no longer relevant. For me, however, it remained, and I was more than a little worried: it would be just too bad if I blew the bottom out of the Sendar Maru after the Prime Minister and cabinet had been brought aboard in place of Mr Gudge and associates …
*
As Britain’s only remaining hope my duty now lay below, in that cell above the double bottoms. I had to get myself put there, and the way to achieve that was to misbehave, so I misbehaved in a highly satisfactory way. I appeared to go berserk and I launched myself at the man in purple and got to him before the guards had gathered their wits. I got him down on the deck and before I was seized I pulled away that stupid purple hood. When I had done so I realised why he wore it: there was hardly any flesh and what there was, was purple like the hood itself. Burns — acid probably, for even the bone structure had been eaten away. He gibbered at me in German: I’d been right about the nationality. As the guards grabbed my arms and held me ready for him, he struck me viciously in the face, again and again and again. The interim government didn’t like it, but they didn’t interfere. They were flabbergasted, I think; until now, the man in purple had no doubt behaved like a gentleman fit to govern England. After a while he calmed down and replaced his hood. That gave him back his dignity and authority. The guards were ordered to take me below, and back I went, as planned, to the deep-down cell.
I sat on the steel shelf that acted as chair and bed and mopped my bloodied face. From now till the end came, my role was to be a passive one. All I had to do was wait for Mirko Zambellis to transmit into my gut and, through me, to sink the Sendar Maru. If I had to die, I hoped I would die usefully; but I wasn’t even sure of that, now. It all depended on the timing.
FOURTEEN
There was a maximum of one hour and a quarter before Zambellis transmitted and each second was going to be agony. I found myself reviewing my life, all the way from my earliest memories. I hoped I’d chalked up a few good points along the way. I thought about Felicity in St Thomas’s: by this time the surgeons would perhaps have operated or anyway would know the score, whether or not they could operate. I wondered what the sequence of events in Britain might be, at what stage the government would assemble at Exeter for the exchange. Most likely the frigates would have been ordered away from the Sendar Maru by now, and I was on my
own.
I rather wished I hadn’t got my watch. I could always smash it, of course; but I didn’t. That would have seemed unworthy, cowardly. There might yet be something I could do, and a knowledge of time might well be vital, though in all conscience I doubted most mightily that I could do anything at this stage except act as the vehicle for the end of the Sendar Maru. That, of course, could still save Britain even if HMG had been embarked by that time. They could be done without; Martial Law was in being anyway, and the Chiefs of Staff would cope. But in the meantime, right now, there must be the most colossal feeling of hopelessness, and increasing panic, right throughout the country. I wondered if the government had made any public announcement of surrender. There would be points in favour both ways arid no doubt there would have been plenty of argument in Downing Street.
The seconds passed. I was sweating like a pig. The atmosphere was close anyway. There was a quietness apart from the sound of the generators aft of my cell, and of the forced-draught system blowing air at me; I could hear no other sounds that might have given me some clue as to the passing events, such as helicopters touching down on deck, or boats scraping the plates as they made to come alongside the accommodation-ladder. Nothing. I was totally cut off, a being apart, a being on the point of fragmentation.
I wouldn’t know a thing about it, but I knew right now, so there was no consolation in that.
The infernal device in my gut was hurting badly, seeming to cut into me with its fins each time I moved. As the time ran down I found my attention riveted on my watch: an impulse I was powerless to fight though I detested every movement of the hands. Fifty minutes left …
Eternity passed and then there were forty.
Again the past came to me: happy days, and not so happy days, but mainly the happy ones. So many memories of so many people, so many countries where duty or leave had taken me. Felicity … I’d not known her all that long, but she’d grown on me. So, in his way, had Max. Max wasn’t so bad when he wasn’t being an official bastard. He was always fair, and knew by instinct when a field man had had enough for a spell and needed a good, long leave and a good, strong woman to go with it. Life hadn’t been too bad … maybe I was lucky to be going out while it was still good, before old age and the retirement pastures struck. I had never wanted to be a geriatric: once, I’d spent a leave, misguidedly and not for long, in Worthing. You couldn’t move along the shopping streets for nasty little bags on wheels full of groceries and whatnot that could be lethal to a fast-striding active man. It certainly wasn’t for me, and in any case didn’t look like being so …
Thirty-five minutes.
I believe I passed into a coma. Perhaps it was a kind of protection sent by God to make the end easy — I don’t know: what I did know when my watch showed four minutes to deadline was that I was hearing things, and what I heard was not the heavenly music of harp-strings being plucked on a cloud but the clang of footsteps on metal. Someone coming down the ladder from the deck above. They would be just in time to join me.
The footsteps banged along the alleyway and came to a halt outside my cell and then I heard the outside clips being taken off the door and a moment later it opened up and the man in purple came in with two armed guards. He didn’t say anything, he just stared at me through his slits.
I said, “Welcome. Are you ready for a surprise … like when you used to rummage in your Christmas stocking!”
There was the gleam of a smile behind the slits, but he still said nothing. I took another look at my watch: just over two minutes left. Zambellis was leaving it a little late, a little close to 1800 hours. There was poetic justice around somewhere; the CORPSE boss would be the first, with me and his guards, to go. Wouldn’t he be mad, when we reached the Other Side in company, down the dark corridor and out into the everlasting light, hand in hand!
He stared at me, eyes mocking away behind the purple, and light of a different sort began to dawn on me as my watch ticked on and the hands drew towards their full 180-degree angle. 1800 hours came, and went again. I was still there, so was the man in purple.
At 1801 he laughed. “The surprise is yours. Commander Shaw. Zambellis is dead. His throat was cut soon after he contacted you.”
I asked, “H ow come?”
“His telephone call to your Ministry of Defence was tapped. Just one of many. We knew where to find Zambellis. So the Sendar Maru lives on, unlike Zambellis, and our threat still has a stranglehold on Britain. And on your interior. Commander Shaw.” His voice changed, hardened. “Get up, and come with me.”
I obeyed, automaton-like. I felt no sense of anti-climax at all, just a sense of postponement. And the bug was biting harder than ever. With the guns of the uniformed guards in my back, I climbed the steel ladders until I emerged on the upper deck. The day was fine as it drew into evening, and the sea was a flat blue calm. And it was empty: the friendly frigates had sailed away on orders from Whitehall, the last link gone now. There was still no land in sight, but as I stared out helplessly at that vacant sea I felt the vibration beneath my feet and when I looked up at the Sendar Maru’s navigating bridge I saw much brass: the Captain and some of his officers. We were on the move. This, the man in purple confirmed.
“Where to?” I asked.
“Closer to the British coast.”
“The Channel?”
“Not the Channel.”
“Too much shipping? If there is, I’d be surprised. All shipping’ll be standing clear of British waters till further notice.”
The man in purple agreed; monitored broadcasts had indicated this already. The Channel was becoming strangely deserted, he said, a vacant seaway now. But the Sendar Maru was bound for Scottish waters. More precisely, she would enter the Firth of Clyde by dawn, remaining outside the Cumbraes, somewhere off the isle of Arran, in the deep-water lane.
I asked why.
He said, “A handy place to govern from, particularly if we should need to send the vessels with the nuclear cargoes back into the ports.”
“From which I deduce that they’ve all been withdrawn — and that you don’t intend sending back the one off Greenock?”
He nodded. “Just so. Also the one in the Forth. If we need to blow the others, Scotland will remain relatively free from fall-out and radiation. The Sendar Maru is capable of remaining clean after being battened-down against fall-out and we can survive indefinitely, for we can replenish food stocks at sea — and our nuclear reactor can power us indefinitely, of course. But government cannot be carried on very conveniently if no one can leave the ship for fear of radiation.”
“I take your point,” I said. “Going back to Zambellis … has there been any change of plan?”
“As a result of what?”
I said, “Of my dirty dealing. Are you still in negotiation with Her Majesty’s Government?”
He smiled. “Very much yes! Now there will be even greater urgency for surrender … and I am informed by my regional controllers that all is going according to plan. You yourself have helped to demonstrate physically to the British people that CORPSE has the power to do all it says, Commander Shaw.”
“Me? How?” I shifted a little, and the bug bit again, and suddenly a great fear swept through me. I said, “Miss Mandrake — ”
“Yes, Miss Mandrake. I failed to hear in time of the operation. I am told she came through it and that the device was removed. On hearing of this, I at once transmitted the signal that blew the nuclear content, with results that were remarkably if fortuitously effective against morale.” The man in purple paused. “St Thomas’s Hospital wished to rid themselves of the device as soon as possible, and a helicopter was sent to pick it up and then to fly it out for disposal at sea. It appears that my transmission took place while the helicopter was stupidly low over Brighton beach. It was very spectacular and there were many deaths.”
I took a deep, deep breath. Many deaths indeed. This was the holiday season and the weather had been set fair for many days past over the British Isles.
In spite of panic, I would have been prepared to bet that there had been plenty of people on Brighton beach of a sunny afternoon, all staring up at the friendly helicopter with its military or naval markings. The man in purple was totally unconcerned; for him, it had just been a lovely piece of luck. He’d capitalised, he told me: his radiomen had cut in from the Sendar Maru on the BBC broadcasts, claiming responsibility for CORPSE. There was absolutely no point in my telling him what a bastard he was, but I was about to do so anyway when there was a hail from the bridge and a lot of Japanese chatter, and a gold-ringed arm was waved in the air.
I turned to look: distantly to starboard a fleet of helicopters was coming in. Six big machines, coming out of a heat haze, the Rising Sun of Japan approaching in blood-red blobs of fire.
“Her Majesty’s Government,” the man in purple said.
*
I was taken down below again, this time to a different section of the ship, to join the hi-jacked naval boarding-party from the frigate. The man in purple had wished at this stage to keep all his prisoners together and I dare say I had now lost my particular value to CORPSE and was just a number. I didn’t expect to die by transmission just yet; CORPSE wouldn’t wish to sink their own mobile government unit just to get back at me, though I supposed they could always throw me overboard and steam away from me and then blow me up like a mine once they were clear. That wasn’t a happy thought and I sheered off it and thought instead about the defeated bunch who had disembarked from the helicopters while I was still on deck to watch. The muffled one in the stretcher had been the Prime Minister, boarding with an attacked heart. All the faces so familiar from the telly: Chancellor of the Exchequer with a face as desolate as a Return of Income Tax; Minister of Defence giving me a very bleak look indeed; Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary; Environment, Social Services. Energy, Trade, Industry and the rest plus Lord Privy Seal and so on. There were some backroom boys whom I didn’t recognise, probably Ministers of State roped in with their cabinet masters, or maybe top civil servants, the ones who really had the knowledge and did the work for the politicians. They all looked like death warmed up. Some of them tied themselves in deferential knots when they met the man in purple, new ruler of Britain. Perhaps they hoped to get their jobs back one day, but if so I felt they were due for a disappointment. CORPSE would make a clean sweep. Apparently the interim government boys had been put ashore in the helicopters that had picked up HMG, as planned; by now they would be taking over in the name of CORPSE and making contact with the new regional controllers hived up in their RSGs. The man in purple had told me, while we were awaiting the touchdown of the helicopters, that the last broadcast to the people by HMG before leaving had ordered the armed services and the police to obey CORPSE orders. It was all systems go for CORPSE now …
Corpse (Commander Shaw Book 15) Page 16