by Ben Elton
‘OK, OK,’ he said, trying not to sound offended. ‘I’ll just sit on my butt in Paris and get wasted. You know, really get in touch with my excessive side. That’s what I like to do anyway. Party, right? Your mission is to save stuff, mine is to party. I was only trying to be cool.’ There was a pause, then Max gave himself away by adding, ‘You’re sure you told them it was me?’
‘Yes, I did, Max, I’m sorry, but I think that made it worse.’ Now Max knew there had been a mistake. He attempted to absorb what Rosalie was suggesting but he simply could not, it was too alien a concept. His name had made things worse? Impossible.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘it’s kinda clear there’s been a balls-up at their end, but don’t you worry about it, OK? Just let it go. Walk away. I’ll have my office check it out with these droogs and we’ll have the cruddy little no-names crawling to us on their knees in a day or two.’
Rosalie took Max’s advice and let it go. Reminding herself always to remember that even though hers and Max’s worlds may have collided, they were still worlds apart.
Waste disposal unit.
The mission, on which Max would not be going, was to hijack the convoy of waste which regularly crossed the English Channel from mainland Europe for what was inaccurately called ‘disposal’ in Britain. Then to take the captured convoy to the centre of European administration in Brussels and dump it.
Britain was Europe’s waste disposal unit, and indeed the world’s. Anything that could not be illegally dumped in the poverty nations, Britain took. As far as Britain was concerned, dumping other people’s crap, or ‘processing and disposal’, as it was called, was actually a desirable industry that had been quite deliberately developed over many decades.
‘Waste is an inevitable by-product of growth, and what is growth?’ the Prime Minister had inquired of the faithful at a recent Party conference.
‘Growth is good!’ the faithful had thunderously replied.
‘How often is it good?’ the Prime Minister shouted.
‘It’s always good!’ came the nearly evangelical answer.
‘Exactly,’ said the PM, calming down. ‘And we should be proud of the amount of deadly poison lying around in Britain, as it is proof of our important role in the growth cycle.’
There was much to be proud of. Every nook and cranny in the British Isles was crammed to bursting point with hamburger boxes, old condoms and nuclear waste. From disused mine shafts to condemned housing estates, the waste ‘disposal’ companies proved endlessly ingenious at finding new ways to ‘dispose’ of the undisposable. And they needed to, for more kept arriving every day. Sometimes the rubbish was comparatively benign. Many American cities, for instance, banned from using up any more of their own environment as landfill dumps for domestic rubbish, paid the British to take it off their hands. Often, though, the rubbish was more sinister. Nuclear waste ‘disposal’, for instance, was a major industry in Britain. Every day the thousands of power stations, with which the French kept the European Grid alive, produced copious quantities of radioactive waste which the British then ‘disposed’ of. They did this by sealing it in concrete tombs. Tombs which they then covered in alarming symbols, in the hope of dissuading as yet unborn civilisations, thousands of years hence, from tampering with that which would surely kill them.
Such is progress. The Egyptians left tombs which thousands of years later yielded up treasures of indescribable beauty, testimony to the glory of their civilisation. The British, who have produced so many things that could serve as splendid witness to a great society, leave only deadly poison to be remembered by.
Target.
Then there were the industrial toxins. Those embarrassing by-products of economic activity which could kill a river or poison a sky. Toxins which were taken once a month by convoy from the industrial centres of Europe to be ‘processed’ in Britain. It was these toxins which were to be the target of Rosalie’s raid.
The convoys had long been the focus of much peaceful protest. The Natura argument was that at any point in the lengthy ‘disposal’ process, a terrible disaster could occur. The authorities argued that such a disaster could not occur because the safety precautions employed were foolproof. Eventually the Natura leaders decided that this complacent attitude must be exposed. It was decided that Mother Earth should demonstrate the convoy’s vulnerability by hijacking it before it reached the Channel Tunnel and diverting it to Brussels.
‘We will mount a terrorist raid and capture the whole thing,’ the Mother Earth strategists had said at their secret planning meeting, ‘in order to demonstrate how easy it would be to mount a terrorist raid and capture the whole thing.’
Once the convoy had been taken to Brussels, the plan was that the entire cargo would be dumped outside the thirty-five-chambered Palace of Peace and Profit. (The thirty-sixth chamber had been destroyed by the bomb attack on Jurgen Thor.)
‘We will see just how dangerous those Euro bastards think this stuff is when they have to climb over it to get to their cars!’
The Founding Beardies.
That Rosalie’s group should have been chosen to carry out the hijack showed the great respect in which she was held at Mother Earth. It was an enormous responsibility, towards which Rosalie would normally have been looking with a thrill of excitement. However, she could not get the grim discovery of how Mother Earth was financed out of her mind. Jurgen Thor’s little lesson in pragmatism had changed her attitude to her work entirely, and it was with weary resignation that she had made the final preparations for the action at hand.
The hijack was, in fact, to be Rosalie’s first direct action as a unit commander, or ‘Group Facilitator’ as the rank was known within Mother Earth. To have become a Group Facilitator was a tremendous leap for Rosalie. There were only fifteen Groups worldwide, and Rosalie would be the youngest Facilitator by far. Rosalie did not like being called a Facilitator, any more than her second in command like being called a ‘Facilitator’s Friend’, or her superior liked being called a ‘Team Enabler’. These rather horrid titles were generally felt to be a total embarrassment. They could not be dropped, however, because they were part of the Mother Earth tradition, and held dear by the very oldest activists, veterans who had been so over-exposed to toxicity during the early days of struggle that there was really very little left of them any more but false teeth, boring anecdotes and a seemingly insatiable desire to inform people of how things had been in the early days.
Before Jurgen Thor had formed Natura, there had been a terrible period when mainstream environmental politics were the preserve of naive, idealistic old hippies and, perhaps even more gruesomely, witches and ‘new pagans’. Greenies, who were nice (some of them, anyway) but a bit stupid, firmly believing that if they and their friends pretended that something was so, then it would be so.
‘If we want to change the world, we must first change ourselves,’ earnest people with beards and big jumpers and the occasional pointy hat assured each other. ‘You cannot destroy a structure by creating a structure.’
‘But surely this makes no sense and could in fact be described as bollocks,’ the odd brave soul would say, only be told that their hostility proved the point.
The bearded and bejumpered ones (the ones with pointy hats having by this time walked out in disgust and gone off to celebrate a convenient solstice) claimed that, since it was power structures which maintained the polluters in their positions of authority, then those structures should not be copied.
‘We will not caricature the methods of those we wish to destroy!’ they said. ‘We will reinvent a non-exploitative structure, to bring about a non-exploitative world. We must be what we stand for! Otherwise we will be hypocrites.’
Whether they were hypocrites or not was a matter of opinion, what was beyond dispute, however, was that they very soon became a complete joke.
Having rejected the concept of leadership, their position was presented by an ad hoc committee of occasional speakers, which meant of course that
they completely failed to communicate with the outside world. The truth (as everybody knew but no one had the guts to admit) was that an argument, no matter how good, if delivered by an ad hoc occasional speaker was always going to be less convincing than an argument, no matter how bad, delivered by a fiery and charismatic media star.
‘If you consume a resource without making provision for its replacement, it will eventually run out,’ mumbled an occasional speaker.
‘So what? Let’s party,’ shouted the well-oiled, highly-geared media campaign, organised by those who profited from resource exploitation.
When Mother Earth was formed, it was recognised even by the stupidest Big Jumper that you can’t have an army without commanders. However, the Founding Beardies, as they were already becoming known, remained opposed to aping the structures of the forces against which they would be called upon to fight. Hence, Mother Earth soldiers were called ‘activists’, which was fine as far as it went, but who was to tell the activists what to do? The answer the Founding Beardies came up with was ‘catalysts’. Catalysts would tell activists what to do and would be the rough equivalent of sergeants. Unfortunately, as the command structure grew larger and more complex, the Beardies soon ran out of credible alternative terms to describe the various posts that were being created. Rosalie had risen to the rank (or NHL which stood for non-hierarchical level) of Catalyst by the age of twenty-one. Since then, she had been a Suggester (whose ‘suggestions’ had to be obeyed by both catalysts and activists) a Co-ordinator, a Facilitator’s Friend, and now she was a Facilitator. If the Earth and she were to survive long enough, Rosalie might eventually hope to rise to the exalted Non-Hierarchical Level of Number One Equal Person, which was Jurgen Thor’s post and meant Commander-in-Chief.
Nice work if you can get it.
The hijack took place at Lille in Northern France, which was the rendez-vous point for all the great toxic convoys of Europe. It was here that the colossal transports coming from the industrial regions of Germany met up with those arriving from Italy, France and Spain and made up a super-garbage convoy which would then make its way on up to Ostend. It was at Ostend that the mouth of the third (and least leaky) of the Channel Tunnels was located.
Taking control of the convoy had been absurdly easy. Even the terrorists, who had only embarked upon the hijack in order to prove how stunningly easy it would be, were stunned at how easy it actually was. They just walked in, pointed a gun or two, and drove the tankers away. Of course they should not really have been surprised at the ease with which the crime was executed, the world was far too overloaded with poison for governments to get very excited about its transportation any more. For well over a century, the stuff had been shifted round the world endlessly, on trucks, boats, railways. It was, as they say, as common as muck.
‘I don’t know, I thought they’d have hidden guards or security locks or something,’ Rosalie’s Facilitator’s Friend had remarked to her as they took control.
Someone to watch over us.
The fact was, that the cynics in Mother Earth had been as naive as everybody else in the world about the nature of government. The basic presumption of modern society is that ‘they’ (that vague, catch-all term for the powers that be) are at least attempting to look after our best interests. That there is a logical and at least partially benign force which watches over us and for which we pay our taxes. Certainly, we all think that ‘they’ are, in the main, a bunch of hypocritical bastards on the make, but deep down we presume that at heart they want what’s best for us. ‘Surely “they” wouldn’t let us drink polluted water?’ we say to ourselves. ‘Surely “they” would tell us if the food was poisonous. Surely “they” would never stitch people up for crimes those people did not commit and put them away for twenty years without appeal?’
But most of the time of course, either out of malice or incompetence, ‘they’ would do these things. They would also, and have always, left nuclear missiles lying around behind wire fences, allowed radioactive materials to travel on ordinary trains and, as in the case of the Lille convoy, allowed toxic waste to be trundled round the public highways, protected by poorly regulated private security companies whose only reason for being in the ‘business’ at all is to make a profit from it.
The dreadful suspicion.
And so the terrorists drove the tankers away. Brussels was only about forty minutes’ journey from Lille and by the time ‘they’ (in this case the police) knew that anything was wrong, the convoy had already arrived in the suburbs of the capital city of Europe. At this point there was nothing much that the police could do. They could not risk confronting or attacking the tankers, for every one of the transports was a Pandora’s Box, filled with hellish poisons. The only course of action open to the bemused police was to wait for the hijackers to stop and do whatever it was that they planned to do.
It was very late at night and so there was little traffic as Rosalie led her cargo of death through the streets of the city. Brussels, being home to all the politicians, had an orbital filter, so of course it still operated on day-time. In the darkness of the cab, Judy was trying not to shift about too much on his piles. He did not wish to provoke Saunders’s anger, partly because he was scared of Saunders, and partly because Saunders was very noisy when roused, and Judy needed peace to think.
He was very tense. He knew that at some point he would have to act, but he did not know when. For Judy was convinced that Rosalie planned to poison the heart of Brussels and he knew that it was his duty to stop her. It all fitted, the same sequence of events that he had followed on so many previous occasions was happening again. Except that this time Judy was not piecing it together after it had happened, he was actually there, right at the heart of it. He could prevent it.
Judy believed absolutely that this operation would not be a mere demonstration, he knew that Rosalie’s team would not simply dump the convoy at the Palace of Peace and Profit and then disappear, as they had said they would. Judy believed that there would be a far, far more spectacular protest than that. There always was.
Stealing a glance at Rosalie, he reflected on how little one could ever tell about a person from their appearance. Rosalie did not look like a villain, like a person capable of coldly murdering hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people to further her own political agenda. Not that Judy doubted Rosalie’s aggressive commitment to the environmental cause, but it had seemed to him that her principles were based on a love of life and a respect for other living things. She seemed an unlikely murderer. Yet unless Judy had made the most monumental miscalculation, Rosalie was about to render Brussels, and possibly the whole of Belgium, temporarily uninhabitable; and Judy knew that he had not miscalculated. The disasters always occurred where Natura were best placed to exploit them, and the shadowy hand of Mother Earth was always detectable. It was the same as before, all the elements were in place.
This was why Judy had infiltrated the radical green movement. He had become convinced that a dreadful, black propaganda war was being fought. From the wealth of evidence that he had assembled over the years, Judy had concluded that Mother Earth must have become frustrated with the complacency with which the public viewed the environmental destruction of the Earth. They had therefore decided upon a most terrible course. Planning and executing a colossal double bluff, whereby the public might be shocked out of that complacency.
Judy had concluded that Mother Earth were creating set-piece disasters in order that they might then protest against them.
Hidden agendas.
The poison convoy quickly arrived at the piazza of the Palace of Peace and Profit and came to a halt amongst the sculptures and the fountains. As the noise of the engines began to die away, Judy knew that he had to act. The plan as described to him was that, at this point, the transporter drivers would disable their tankers, and scatter into the night to take refuge in safe houses around the city. The piazza was huge and all the floodlighting had been knocked out by an auxiliary unit. Besides which, the p
olice were keeping well clear, being unsure as to what the hijackers intended to do with all the poison. The activists would simply melt away, having proved the vulnerability of the toxic waste disposal system.
That was the plan, as Judy had heard it, but he did not believe that the transporters were going to be merely disabled. He believed that they would be sabotaged, which was why he had to act.
Judy produced the inflatable handgun which he had kept secreted about his person since infiltrating the unit (he rather suspected, in fact, that this was the source of his aggravated haemorrhoids). He held it to Rosalie’s head.
‘Ms Connolly. I am an FBI agent and I demand that you order the immediate withdrawal of your people from the scene of this operation.’
‘Judy, you —‘ Rosalie blurted out, but Judy was in a hurry.
‘Now, Ms Connolly! I mean it. I suspect that you are intending to poison the city and I shall certainly kill you to stop that. Order a withdrawal now or I fire!’
Rosalie thought that Judy had gone mad. However, mad people are perfectly capable of pulling triggers and Judy looked serious. Rosalie shrugged.
‘The operation’s basically over anyway, disabling the transporters was just a bit of mischief.’ Taking up her radio, she gave the order to withdraw. ‘Take no further action,’ she recited on Judy’s orders. ‘This operation is terminated.’
Through the window of the Land-Rover, Judy watched the activists scatter.