“D’you weigh anchor, or can you beach her?” I asked Severs.
“She’ll go right in, but they’ve got to ‘ave the ropes.”
Damn it; this had no more sense than a pirate galleon sailing into a Royal Navy Dockyard, but it was far too late to jump ship and swim for it now. It was fight it out, or nothing.
I jettisoned the stifling hood and shouted for Tamang, conscious he was unlikely to hear me through those steel walls. There was no reply.
“No ropes,” I turned back to Severs. “Just forget about the ropes, d’you hear me? Get her in as close as you can without them.”
“But . . .”
“You’ve got your orders!” I rammed the gun still harder; he had to know I meant business.
Now we were fast approaching land. I scanned the coast for some distinguishing features, but the small bay was an unremarkable spit of shingle and scrub fronting the high chalk cliff, whose sparkling, white face dirtied to a splodged, pale grey as we grew closer. As far as I could see, there were no houses above the cliff, no church spires, lighthouses nor relics of the war. But . . wait a minute; the grey splodges that I’d taken to be marks upon the pristine white, deepened in colour until I realised that they formed a single entity; a shadowy hole which had been gouged from the face of the cliff. It was the entrance to a tunnel, or a cave. The entrance to a hiding-place.
The barge changed course, slipping sideways.
“No!” I grabbed the wheel from Severs and righted her with one hand, so that her nose pointed straight at land . “And don’t cut the bloody engine, either!”
“But . . .”
I walloped him over the head, as hard as I could, and then I made a dash for the front cargo hold.
“Tamang!” I shouted down the hatch. “Up on deck! We’re motoring straight at land and we’re outnumbered. We’ve got nothing but surprise on our side.”
His hooded head appeared and I swiped the hood off him.
“No need for that now. Here we go!”
He turned to shout back down the hatch:
“Mr Arkonnen, you must hold on tight!”
I remember we glanced at one another, the sad irony of Magnus’ situation (for what would he hold on tight with?) lost on neither one of us, before the Humber crashed onto the shingle and surfed up the beach, like a bloody, great, jet airliner hitting land and we were both swept off our feet and thrown head-first into the open hold.
I got off lightly; just a glancing blow to the cheekbone where I struck the metal ladder, while the padded suit cushioned most of it. Jay Tamang, too, rolled with the punch and was back on his feet before I was, but Magnus didn’t have it so easy and screamed blue murder when he was ditched out of bed. Nasty. Even the great, placid cat yowled with surprise. Meanwhile, I clenched my teeth and waited for the bigger crash, the crash that would mean the barge had hit the cliff. But it didn’t happen. The Humber just shuddered to a standstill, her motor juddering. (She’d scraped up a small mountain of shingle and sand when she propelled herself up and out of the sea and that wedged itself beneath her bows so that her nose stuck straight into the sky, I later discovered.) The chair sped across the cabin, followed by the bowl of apples, after which the prone body of Dilys Arkonnen slid straight past me and wedged itself in the open lavatory door.
“Oh God. You didn’t kill her, did you, Jay?”
“Frying-pan,” moaned Magnus from the floor.
That was something. I got myself upright and dived under the bunk beds for the gun, which had careered out of my hand when we’d crashed.
“Up and at it!” I shouted to Tamang, and we stormed back up the ladder to the crazily-angled deck.
There were swarms of them by now and we hadn’t a hope in hell, but that didn’t stop us giving it a good go. I fired a few warning shots and may have got at least one man, while Jay performed heroically with the cat o’three, but they kept on coming; more and more of them streaming out of the cliff, having clocked the almighty row that had heralded our arrival. I’d jumped onto the wheelhouse roof when my ammo ran out. Whatever game we’d been playing, was most certainly up.
Two of them wrestled my arms behind my back, while Severs - who’d come to in the crash - beat me black and blue, until I couldn’t stand straight. They had to pull him off me, or I’d have been a goner. As they carted me off the barge, I’d just time to see them reach up to unwind Joe Bloggs from the mainmast, where he clung, winched up high in the blue sky, like a flag.
Then they dragged me up the beach and through the gaping mouth of the cliff and all kinds of darkness swallowed me up.
——
I couldn’t believe the pain; it was hellish. It’d be more than a miracle if I ever walked again, ever held a pint in my hand, or used a typewriter. What had they done to the barge? Were we all about to drown?
“Frying-pan,” I moaned. And then, “Save me, man,” because there was nothing I could do to save myself.
Nobody answered. They’d left me all alone on the cabin floor. The noise stopped and there was total silence in that metal sarcophagus. I lay there, just waiting for the waves to come gushing down the hatch to drown me.
“We’re going to drown. We’re all going to drown,” I sobbed out loud; so loud I didn’t hear the steps coming down the ladder.
“Who’s going to drown, soft lad?”
It was my Uncle Reg, leering over me with his white eyes. Now I knew I really was in hell.
24. The Power-House & the Caravan
‘It is better to die than be a coward.’
The sacred words of my regiment returned to me when they took us down. I had been a scientist for a number of years and could no longer remember how it would feel to be ‘in the field’ (as Mr Upshott so liked to call it). To tell you the truth, it felt most odd - as if my years of diligent study had never been: the physics, the chemistry, the mathematics and my scholarship to Cambridge - and, yet, so very familiar. The Gorkha in me had not gone and I was glad to discover that I had no fear of death. Only the thought that there would be no Lama for my passing - to rescue my soul and allow it to be born again - disturbed my Tamang heart (for I could not think that any Lama would choose to live beside the barbaric British sea).
Barbaric, yes. I cannot describe the foreign nature of that grey ocean to a man born in the Kathmandu Valley! We Tamangs are men of stone, not water; from the earliest age we are accustomed to traversing the foothills of great mountains and thinking nothing of it. We Tamangs may not be Sherpas, but we have worked alongside them (whenever they allowed us to do so) and proved to be as expert climbers and guides as they. So, to be strapped to the mast of a ship with the waves spitting in my face! To be borne into a chamber within the cliff, where the sea cried out at such a volume that it threatened to burst the eardrums! The sea was a stranger to me, where death was not.
Which was not to say that I felt no fear of any kind. All soldiers live with some fear and the Gorkha is no exception. But the fear that I felt in that moment brought to mind my long-passed father; my father who had pulled a rickshaw all his life (for low porters and rickshaw pullers, drinkers and easy women: these are what Tamangs are supposed to be in the Kathmandu Valley). My father who had been so proud when I became a soldier in the British Army (despite his insistence that I would never be accepted unless I changed my name to ‘Gurung’, or any other name that wasn’t ‘Tamang’, which I refused to do).
‘It is better to die than be a coward’.
Mr Upshott may have been many things, but he wasn’t a coward. They beat him severely and he was in a bad way when they dragged him off the barge and into the chamber in the cliff. I followed soon after, allowing myself to be taken so that I might pay full attention to the strange new place where we now found ourselves. It was a place that belonged to the sea, as if the waters had only parted for our entrance and would rush in behind our backs. So close and shadowed and filled with the most powerful aroma. A large-leafed, brown seaweed had colonised the ground and clouds of tiny
flies swarmed around our feet. Kelp, I thought. Oarweed, or Laminaria digitalis, to be precise. The smell was deep and savoury as one of our fermented Nepali chutneys, or a fish sauce.
However, that is the limit of what I can describe in the first chamber, because we soon left it behind to enter a tunnel that opened up in the back wall, loosely stepped with the strange, white chalk, and graduating down into the belly of the earth. It was narrow and airless and what air there was seemed to heat up with each step we took. Every now and again the ground trembled, distinctly, beneath our feet. We would have been in darkness except that a cable of electric lights had been strung, most carelessly, over protruding nails, to light our way down. I couldn’t help being reminded of our journey down the slide and - by association - of my disappointment at the performance of my hat with the concealed ion chamber in the band. I wasn’t used to such failure and it still rankled with me. Even the remarkable success of my distance controlling device couldn’t compensate for it. Yes: I believe those were the very thoughts that were running through my brain as we arrived at a polished, steel door.
So, imagine my astonishment when the door slid open and we were confronted with a man wearing the familiar, protective suit and mask, and holding a distance controlling device identical in every way to the model that I, Jayagaon Tamang, had invented!
Now, I must say here that, during the course of my scientific career, I’ve found that ideas belong to no one person, alone; that they run like electric currents and we merely scramble to pick them up. If a scientist does not discover such and such a thing and make it known to the world at large as quickly as he is able, then another scientist surely will. The times in which we live dispose us to think along the same lines, and no idea is ours and ours alone. (In my humble opinion it is certain that the West puts far too much importance upon the individual in every aspect of life.) Therefore, I was prepared to admit that others would be at work on Jay Tamang’s distance controlling device, despite the ‘spec.’ - the exact specification of the dimensions and materials used - being so similar.
I decided to waste no further time on this problem and to turn my attention to the room in which we found ourselves; an area of much activity, suggestive of an engine-room, or power-house (and not wholly unlike our own technical department in the basement of HQ). These are my observations:
It was intensely hot and busy, for ten, or more, men in protective suits were congregated around a singular apparatus. The noise of the sea had been replaced by the rumble of a mighty generator. What could all of these men be up to? I thought of turbines; the heat energy of combustion being converted into mechanical energy and sent to power a generator. A closed loop cycle? The second law of thermodynamics concerned me[47]. Were they using the sea to cool the waste heat? But, burning fossil fuels so far down in the depths of the earth would present problems. They would be forced to pump out the sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide, methane and mercury compounds, for a start. The protective suits suggested nuclear power, of course, yet I hesitated to assume that a nuclear power station was being operated below ground . . when my questions were abruptly curtailed. For I’d caught sight of some equipment that reminded me, peculiarly, of my own work on the production of uranium from diverse sources.
“Blindfold them, you morons!” Somebody shouted.
Straight away, a hood came down over my face, shutting out the possibility of further speculation. Then a knee pushed me in the back, urging me to move and I set off once more, stumbling forward into black heat. After a time, I collided with a wall and heard the mechanism of a lift grind into play, before the floor jolted beneath my feet. I was shoeless and could feel the warmth of the metal floor underfoot. It was as if the whole of that underground power-house was warmed by its own, hidden, sun.
The lift bore us up to the top of the cliff and a whistling rush of chill sea air. Voices came and went nearby and I strained to pick them out.
“Permission to . . now, sir,” said one man.
“No. I said no and I . . .” answered another.
“If you’d seen, sir . . what he did . . barge . . pay for that with his . . .”
“Listen, you jumped-up . . not now . . later . . coming later . . .”
Later? I didn’t like the sound of this ‘later’. I flexed my torso and managed to dig into whoever was behind me with both elbows.
“Aargh!”
A boot kicked out and caught me on the back, so that I fell onto the grass, but I was still wearing the protective suit and it did no damage.
“Watch the Chink, you moron! That’s what comes of using Gyppos. Christ, do I have to do everybody’s job for them? Right, this one’ll do . . .”
A padlock was unlocked.
“Into the caravan with the both of them. I want arms and legs tied. Got that?”
They threw me in and I collided with the long limbs of Mr Upshott, who moaned, so very quietly. Then they tied my arms behind my back with a flexible strap that I surmised was leather and secured my ankles with another.
“You, you and you on guard duty. As for you, you’re coming with me. I don’t trust you. You can have your bit of fun, later.”
The door slammed shut, leaving us bound and hooded and lying side by side on the cold floor of a caravan, which was, presumably, parked above a hollow cliff.
“Mr Upshott?” I whispered into the dark. My voice was muffled by my hood, so I spoke a fraction louder to make myself heard. “Are you able to hear me, Mr Upshott?”
“ . . not deaf,” his voice came back - a little slurred - but sounding reassuringly much as he always did.
“Are you in much pain?”
“I’ve felt better, Tamang.”
“I am sure. Listen, Mr Upshott, I believe that strange coincidences are at work here.”
He gave a snort of laughter, which I found more reassuring, still.
“Truly. I hesitate to boast, but I believe that these men may be familiar with my work on the production of uranium from diverse sources. They also possess a distance controlling device identical to my own invention, which you may recall from our travels along the slide.”
You see, I had been prepared to apply my theorem of the multiple ownership of ideas to the distance controlling device, but the distillation apparatus that I had glimpsed - boiler, condenser, fractioning tower and centrifuge designed to an unusual spec. of my own devising - was a step too far. I heard Mr Upshott shuffle about beside me, bravely suppressing a gasp of pain.
“Are you suggesting you’ve a mole in the technical department, Tamang?” The curiosity in his voice sprung out of the darkness, as if it were a flame flaring from a match.
“I think that might be the case.”
“Interesting. Tell me, what’ve you been up to in the lab? With uranium?”
“Well, I’ve been running a series of tests on the uranium-bearing capacities of glass, obviously; although I must admit that I still don’t fully understand how such quantities could be contained within the fabric of an inert material, despite all the information we have received on Operation Crystal Clear. However . .” I continued, warming to my subject, “ . . I have also been experimenting with the production of uranium from seawater. We know the rich mix of chemical compounds in marine water, of course, and I’ve been separating the mineral ions - such as sodium, iron and calcium, at a very basic level - and employing a fractional still to divide many substances from each other by means of evaporation and condensation to . .”
“I had to go and ask,” he moaned. “D’you know, I’m not sure I’m up to this, Tamang.”
“However, the results are not encouraging, I must admit. Trace elements are all I have been able to produce so far. And hydrogen, of course. I believe I can say, with complete confidence, that while uranium is present, viable levels cannot be harvested from the sea at this moment in time.”
“Right; I think I’m with you. What you’re making such a song and dance about is, in effect, that parts of your work have been stolen and that
Arkonnen has succeeded where you failed . .”
“Well, I’m not sure that . .”
Again, that wry laugh of his, so unfathomably British.
“Ha, ha. Bite the bullet. Looks like they’ve got one over on you!”
“You are certainly feeling better, Mr Upshott.”
“Oh, God, no I’m not,” he sighed.
There was a protracted silence and then he said, most unexpectedly:
“I hate all this, you know, Jay.”
I considered the reason for his hatred. Was it the beating that he had undergone? No man would enjoy that. Yet, I didn’t think brave Mr Upshott would remark upon a mere beating. Not in those terms. I thought beyond the beating.
“The field?” I enquired.
“The field, the cows and the entire, bloody, farm.”
That was the first of many interesting conversations that Mr Upshott and I had during this time. They kept us hooded and bound for five days, feeding us bread and watery soup and taking us out to relieve ourselves on the field early in the morning and late at night, as if we were dogs. Apart from that, they left us completely to ourselves. It was a most peculiar time in our lives and, I’m sure that I speak for Mr Upshott, too, when I say that the effect it had upon us was deeply unnerving. We waited for the forthcoming interrogation, expecting it to happen at any minute and yet, day after day, we did no more than wait. Even our nights were fragmented; pierced through with the expectation of sudden violation from forces beyond the intimate darkness that we, two, had come to share. Yet nothing happened. We agreed that they seemed to be waiting for something, or somebody. (How much later would ‘later’ be? We asked one another.)
“So, we think it’s a gypsy camp, yes?”
“The caravans would suggest so, Tristram.”
“These foul, leather bindings, too; I’ve worked out what they are, Jay. I knew they reminded me of something. They’re horse leather; cut lengths of bridle and rein. There are a hell of a lot of Gypsies and travelling people in Kent, of course. They pick the hops and fruit in season . . with a nice side-line in the manufacture of home-grown uranium, apparently.”
The Yellow Glass Page 25