by Adam Roberts
I fired my weapon. Another target dropped. More than a dozen remained.
I was pinged. ‘[There’s a push, a large group trying to break out, westward.]’
‘[A good sign,]’ put in somebody else: there was a delay on his tag, then it said McGinley. I’d never met him face-to-face.
I fired again, and this time my bullet went harmlessly into my target’s body armour. It didn’t, I could see, penetrate; but the force of it caused the man, whilst running, to put his leg out to the side and hop on the other foot once, twice. He regained his balance.
He turned his head in my direction.
The next ping was Todd. ‘[Can you handle your man Simic by yourselves?]
‘Sure,’ I said. I fired again. Missed.
‘[We’d come help, but we’re bogged.]’
My target had, as the phrase goes, acquired me. I like that idiom. It comes from the vocabulary of possession, and that’s the right way to talk about the selection of a target in battle. You take it; you collect it; it’s yours; you take the pride of ownership in it. You don’t want to let it go.
He levelled his weapon in my direction.
I pulled my head from round the corner at exactly the moment his weapon discharged, rapid fire. There was a ferocious clatter, and a steam-kettle spume of masonry dust and fragments from the edge of the wall. ‘Let’s,’ I yelled, to Tucker. ‘Let’s.’
He had already shouldered his weapon and the two of us grabbed Simic and hauled. This was not ideal. If the enemy had figured that they were facing only three people they would come straight round the corner and we would be facile targets. But perhaps they thought we were a whole squad, because we were able to cover sixty metres or more without being fired upon. We hauled Simic into the lobby of a building - marble floors, a mosaic on one wall of a carp the size of a cow, all orange and tomato-red with olive-black eyes against a blue backdrop. Our footsteps echoed chunkily.
There was nobody at reception.
Behind the desk a tic-tac-toe grid of television screens showed varied perspectives of empty office rooms.
The lifts were working, which made life a little easier. We hauled Simic into one of the aluminium rooms and punched the button marked 2. And up we went, to the muted sound of Carole King telling us that we made her feel, that we made her feel, like a nat-u-ral woman - and the lift bell chimed. So we dragged Simic out and into a small hallway. Past a monolithic snack-dispenser machine. Through some double doors and into an open plan office. Our charge was gasping with discomfort a little now - which, if it meant he was getting feeling back in his legs, was a good thing.
Cluttered desks, and forty screen savers all rolling the same corporate logo across forty screens - the carp again. We propped Simic near the window, so he could keep an eye on things and possibly contribute, upending a metal desk between him and the glass.
Tucker rolled him on his front and pulled his clothes up to be able to examine his wound. Examining, here, meant peering at the gash and comparing it to some google images on his armscreen. Then I squirted in some stem-cream on the red crater, and applied a fat plaster. Simic had his own analgesics, if he needed them, but he didn’t seem to be in much pain. Which was either a good, or a terribly bad, thing.
Back in the little hallway I was all for shooting through the Perspex of the snack machine to get at the contents, but Tucker disagreed. ‘You’ll just make holes in it and smash up the candy,’ he said. So instead we pulled the thing from the wall and actually unscrewed the back - Tucker, characteristically, brought his tool stick straight out, whilst I fished for mine in amongst the detritus of my pockets. Then we went back through into the office and piled a heap of stuff into Simic’s lap, all those bright coloured bars and packages, all those silvers and golds and sapphires and emeralds, all that crinkly foil wrapping. It felt more like treasure, more like wealth, than actual money. There’s a childish element to it as well, of course. I know that.
‘OK?’
‘My legs are still pretty numb,’ said Simic, checking the screen on his arm to see how the battle was getting on.
‘It’s a good vantage,’ Tucker said. Below us several roads and a wide paved square were in plain view, bodies lain out irregularly like litter and many other signs of damage.
‘When you say numb, you mean you can’t feel them at all?’
‘Just bugger off the both of you,’ said Simic. ‘Sooner we wrap up the town the sooner you can come back for me.’
We went down the stairs, chewing Snickers and slurping Diet Rand as we went. Risking a lift was one thing when we had a body to haul up; but of course a staircase is safer than a liftshaft. Battle is risky enough as it is, without adding unnecessarily to the danger.
4
Let’s say there was another hour or so of hard fighting. After that we had most of the enemy concentrated, in a defensive knot, in a square of buildings in the south of the town. The planes had gone - not, according to the wiki, shot down; just flown away - and both helicopters had crashed to earth. I passed one as I made my way to the last stand: its cracked canopy like a whale’s sorrowing head, its rotorblades twisted into dreadlocks, the metal of its body wrung like a cloth.
To summarize, then. Let’s say our eight thousand men, coordinating themselves via their wikis, voting on a dozen on-the-hoof strategic propositions, utilizing their collective cleverness and experience (instead of suppressing it under the lid of feudal command) - that our eight thousand, because they had drawn on all eight thousand as a tactical resource as well as a fighting force - had thoroughly defeated an army three times our size. Let’s say they had a dozen armoured- and tank-cars; and air support; and bigger guns, and better and more weapons. But let’s say they were all trained only to do what they were told, and their whole system depending upon the military feudalism of a traditional army, made them markedly less flexible; and that each soldier could only do one thing where we could do many things.
Anyway, we beat them.
Here’s something else: they couldn’t believe we had beaten them, even long after we had done it. I don’t mean ‘they couldn’t believe it!’ as a periphrasis for general astonishment. I mean they literally could not believe it. It did not seem real to them. Something was wrong somewhere, and the wrongness must be somewhere else than the feudal logic of old-style military thinking (they outnumbered us by so much! They were better armed by so much! They were a professional experienced army! And so on). But we beat them for all that.
There were three hours, give or take, of further fighting, although it was intermittent and we neither killed nor were killed in large numbers. They held out that long, I suppose, hoping that reinforcements could be sent up from Deepcut, where another Regular Army corps was fighting another NMA. But neither that force, nor the much larger body of men and machine to the north, was free to come to their aid. After it became apparent that nobody was coming the battle wound itself up smartly. We selected a dozen negotiators - some NMAs like to decide on negotiators before battle, but I’ve always thought that a short-sighted thing to do (what if they get killed or wounded in combat? It takes no time to have the wiki randomly identify a dozen troopers, and we’re all, more or less, equally capable when it comes to such negotiations). Our negotiators went in and talked to the surviving ranking officers, and terms were agreed. We confiscated their remaining cars, and took some civilian automobiles as well; and then we loaded up the weapons we had seized into those and took them away.
We had a quick wiki debate about what to do with these two thousand unarmed men, some wounded (some wounded badly) and some not. If our enemy had been like us, their well men would have tended their unwell and everything would have gone better for them; but since it was a feudal force it depended upon specialized medics to look after the sick. Of course it is in the nature of such specialists that there are always too many of them, with not enough to do, in peacetime; and always too few, with too much to handle, in battle. The ranking medical officer insisted to us that h
is men be given hospital care. There was a hospital on the outskirts of town, but it wasn’t a very secure space - wide-sprawling, low fences and hedges, lots of opportunity to get out. So that was not an option. Generally it is a good idea to put your defeated and disarmed enemy prisoners in entertainment locations: football or other sports stadia, large theatres or cinemas, where the exits are few and easily guarded. But this town had no football stadium, and its cinemas were too small to take thousands of men; so we voted and agreed to march them out to the outskirts to a commercial mall.
This took several hours, with the healthy ones carrying the wounded, and the officers carrying nobody at all - which, in a nutshell, is everything that is wrong with old style feudal armies. The officers busied themselves with complaining about the violation of military rights, which helped nobody, least of all their own men. Then we gathered them all in two car parks, and set a guard about them, whilst our own wounded received treatment. Of course we gave our own people priority.
Let’s say the army we faced, regular troops, was twenty thousand strong. I would say we killed two thousand - killed outright, or wounded so severely they could not fallback with their colleagues. Another fourteen or fifteen thousand men had retreated from the battle in reasonable order and gone into countryside, whither we know not. Possibly to try and link up with their other divisions at Deepcut or elsewhere. A thousand more deserted, in ones and twos, when the balance of the battle shifted decisively in favour of us. The remainder was prisoners.
Let’s say our New Model Army consisted of eight thousand men and women. We lost seven hundred dead, and two hundred wounded so badly they could not fight for us again. There were also a number of civilian deaths. The boy with a key in his forehead was one of those. Once the adrenaline diffused and dissipated I found myself thinking a good deal about him. The force of an explosion, which is the breath of death, blowing hard through the locks.
That was the battle for Basingstoke.
5
I don’t want to fill this narrative with detailed accounts of fighting; because it would become tedious. And, more to the point, it’s not the street-to-street stuff that is the theme of my narrative. Awareness is the theme. On the other hand, as I understand it, when putting a novel together you ought to include, near the beginning, a scene in which the hero goes about his business. That is what I have done: shown you our ungentle giant at work. As for Simic, we picked him up after the fighting stopped, and he was fine, with chocolate lipstick messily on his face like a chubby little child. We took him to a private clinic - a drive of a hundred miles, well out of the war zone . I personally admitted him to a small Med@End surgery. His spine was uninjured, which was good for him; although contusion and tissue damage in the muscles of his lower back, combined with damage to the bone in his hip, had compressed his spinal cord, which resulted in a temporary paralysis.
After that we proposed ransom for the soldiers we had captured. This sometimes goes over, and sometimes does not. On the occasions when it doesn’t go over it will usually be because an NMA encounters old-school feudal officers who consider ransom demands outrageous and so flat rejects them. That leaves us with the logistical problem of carrying several thousand people along with us - since, clearly, we do not have the facilities to incarcerate them in a standing gaol, any more than we have people spare to stand guard over them, or territory secure enough for such an antiquated arrangement. Personally I think the advantages of bringing prisoners generally outweighs the inconvenience - for in what does the inconvenience reside, except in applying a large number of handcuffs and requisitioning many secure trucks? The advantages, on the other hand, are that these prisoners provide us with cover from aerial obliteration in areas where civilians are few. The better case, of course, is where feudal officers agree to the ransom demand, and here the advantages (I am stating the obvious and you will have to forgive me) are that we disencumber ourselves of a logistical burden and the army accounts receive a sum of money. We were not, at that stage, short of money; but money, like numbers, is always receptive to addition.
You will have heard stories of NMAs executing their prisoners, sometimes in the many thousands, so as to be rid of them before going to battle. I will not deny that such things have happened, although I tell you, and I expect you to believe me, that our NMA has never done it. There are dangers in the rhetoric here. Saying ‘awful things happen during war’ is to speak truthfully but unpersuasively. Alternately, to say: ‘if our enemies established smoothly operating structures of ransom and reclaim these things would never happen’ - although also true - strikes even me as unhelpfully coldblooded. My NMA hasn’t executed prisoners en masse because we have never needed to. And naturally enough you want to know what would happen if we did need to? Let’s say, if our enemies refused to ransom after a number of consecutive battles and the numbers of prisoners became unmanageable?
Well, what would happen in those circumstances is that we would take a vote on what to do. That is what democracy means.
You want more details. I must move into hypotheticals. I presume that different proposals would be put before the army: as it might be, ‘I say we shoot them all’, and ‘I say: we leave them all behind - find some warehouses, lock them all in and piss off out of it.’ Then there would be a debate, with any and every soldier entitled to put his case. Some would say ‘if we leave them and walk away, then the enemy will learn that they do not need to pay a ransom to get their troops back, and we’ll never collect a ransom again.’ And others: ‘war is one thing, but mass-murder is a crime against humanity.’ And then we would vote, and act on the result. The result might be: lock them up. Or it might be: execute them all, to make the point that we’re serious about ransom. Or maybe it would be some clever compromise, or third way. It is the vote that is the important thing.
But it has never happened. Not in my experience. You may want to counter with the case of that Croatian NMA, the one the media call Don Quickshot. I heard about what happened after the Fighting in Zagreb. But that’s not my personal experience. This is a personal account. Pantegral has never done that.
At any rate, after the battle for Basingstoke, we prepared for the transport of many enemy prisoners whilst waiting to hear from the British Army high command on the subject of ransom. Our ordnance had fared pretty well in the battle, and with the materiel we had seized we needed little by way of resupply, although half a dozen of us were delegated to take a plane to Turkey and bring back small-arms ammunition. This was a day trip: leaving before dawn and returning late in the afternoon. This trip was not without danger, given that we were at war; but much safer with one small plane than with a convoy of larger transports, something which was sometimes required. The trick is slipping through the crowded skies without being noticed. That’s easier than you might think.
On the ground we prepared to ship out.
We are at our weakest when it comes to mass transit of this sort. It’s not what we are best at doing. Moving in swarm, thousands of individuals making their own myriad ways, is our natural mode of transport. Moving en masse puts us at danger. But I do not offer this to you as a tip, since if pressured tactically at such a moment - should you, in plain language, seek to take advantage of that situation - we can easily eliminate the problem by killing our prisoners and dispersing ourselves. We would prefer not to, but it is an option available to us: and in that case the problem is removed. The only difficulty would be in killing such a large body of people quickly enough not to be disadvantaged tactically; but here the nature of NMA combat structures - the fluid and rhizomatic nature - was on our side. A feudal army would, I suppose, select a number of men as an execution detail, and work methodically through the mass of prisoners. But we were all armed, and there were more of us then the prisoners; so once the vote was taken it would be a simple matter for each member of the NMA to pick a prisoner, dispatch him, such that it would all be over with a single boomingly multi-tracked gunshot. We are all equally capable, and responsib
le.
At any rate, on that particular day we moved on.
What happened next was that we discovered our negotiatory delegation of six had been taken prisoner. This was short-sighted by the commander in question, a British Army officer, feudal old school. I could imagine his justifications to the others in his hierarchy. They would be: ‘I will not treat these criminals as if they are soldiers.’ But it was a foolish play. We, after all, were the ones who had won the battle. Negotiations would have given the British Army the chance to get two thousand of its men back, and perhaps to have arranged a cessation in the fighting. But this, of course, was not what our anonymous feudal officer wanted. He did not want peace. He wanted another battle, because he wanted to smash us. He could not believe that twenty thousand men at Basingstoke had failed utterly to destroy eight thousand (as he saw it) irregulars, rebels, mercenaries and amateurs. He was a stubborn-minded individual, I’d guess.
What this meant is that he - the giant who is the hero of our tale - shrugged his shoulders. We moved out and we trailed two thousand men in several dozen trucks, arranged in a convoy only in the sense that all the drivers were linked in the wiki, but otherwise travelling at different times along different roads.
I’ll say something now about surveillance.