‘Three of them. The other two got me.’
‘No hard feelings,’ said one of the men I’d ‘killed’, smiling, his voice claggy from the chocolate he was eating. We carried on back to the watchtower. Their lorry was waiting, and we all shook hands again. ‘See you later,’ I said, which got a laugh, because if I did, it would likely be with me having swarmed over the Wall, and them lying in wait for me, another fight to the ‘death’. No hard feelings, the living and the dead, more in common than you might think; a tiny bit of luck here and there dividing them; taking turns to live, taking turns to die; all in the same boat. All the same really. Others, Defenders – what’s the difference? I couldn’t decide if this was the opposite of what it would be like to fight to the death, or a good preparation for it.
11
At the debriefing, I thought the Captain would give us a giant bollocking, but that didn’t happen. It turned out he’d been in on it all along. That explained why he hadn’t been there the night before, which I have to admit I had been wondering about. The two Captains had discussed this sneak attack and ours had agreed to allow the set-up. It was a way of testing our combat skills: not how well we’d catch Others sneaking up on the Wall, but how well we’d do in an all-out fight with a big group who’d got over and ambushed us.
‘Not fair? You’re probably thinking that. No, not fair. That’s the point of the exercise. We train hard to fight easy. This may save your life one day. If you are overrun, you won’t be wondering how or why it happened. You’ll be fighting for your life. Lessons learned today may save you. Any questions?’
Hifa put her hand up. I was surprised: in groups she was usually quiet. ‘Yes. Do we get to do it to them?’
The Captain smiled slowly. ‘Oh yeah.’
‘Good.’
Thirty of them had attacked. The whole squad, as I’d thought. Eighteen of them had been killed, and seven wounded sufficiently seriously that, according to the assessors, they wouldn’t have been able to get away. Five of them had got over the Wall and ‘escaped’. In real life, if they really were Others, they wouldn’t get far, of course: they didn’t have chips. They’d last a few days at best. After being rounded up they’d presumably decide to be Help.
Seven of us had been ‘killed’, all five of the Defenders on the sections which were swarmed, and two others who went to help them. Five wounded. Out of fifteen on our shift, only three of us were ‘unharmed’. In real life, if a breach like that had happened, everyone responsible would be put to sea. A Defenders’ court would determine how many people that was. For a breach of this scale that could be the entire squad. If the other squad, the day shift, were found to have been slow in reacting, and that had contributed to the breach, some of them would be put to sea too. The Captain went into detail about the attack and our response to it, what had gone right, what had gone wrong. The take-away was clear: if Others get onto the Wall in numbers, and you aren’t waiting for them, you’re screwed.
Hifa had been one of those ‘killed’. Her section of the Wall had been swarmed. Whereas I was, I found, pretty chill about being killed – as the Captain said, it was a set-up, the whole point of exercises was that you went through experiences like this – Hifa didn’t feel like that. Being riddled with blank automatic bullets had got to her. She was silent and had gone into herself. After the debrief we went and sat in the mess and Help brought us a cup of tea.
‘It’s fake,’ I said to her afterwards. ‘It’s children playing let’s pretend. Think of it as being like a video game.’
‘I don’t play video games,’ she said, which was true. We sat there for a bit. ‘Let’s pretend …’ she said. ‘I used to like that. Let’s pretend … Grown-ups don’t do enough let’s pretend.’
‘You’re a grown-up?’
She chucked a peppermint at me. That meant she was feeling better.
‘Anyway, this was a nasty version of let’s pretend. We’re never going to get thirty Others hiding at the bottom of the Wall waiting when we come on shift. It’s as much let’s pretend as building a blanket fort and saying it’s a castle.’
‘What kind of castle?’
‘One with pointy turrets.’
‘Who lives in the castle?’
‘A happy ogre.’
‘Oh! On his own?’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘A lot of space. Even for an ogre.’
‘He needs space.’
‘He has commitment issues.’
‘And his breath is toxic. Literally – it poisons people. Even other ogres.’
‘Sounds a bit like Yos.’
‘Now that’s harsh,’ I said.
‘I bet the ogre whittles.’
‘He can’t, his hands are too big, he wants to whittle but he just busts things.’
‘Poor ogre.’
‘Then he takes the broken pieces of wood and assembles them into sculptures which he sells for enormous amounts of money to collectors. That’s how he can afford the castle. But he would trade it all for being able to whittle.’
‘I feel sorry for the ogre now.’
‘I think you’re right to.’
‘What does he eat?’
I thought for a moment.
‘Children.’
Hifa had a very appealing laugh, half an octave deeper than her speaking voice.
Sarge appeared at the far end of the barracks. ‘Oi! You’re back on shift in thirty minutes.’ The attack had meant that all the shifts were muddled, and we had swapped with the day watch. I sighed, Hifa sighed, we both began to get up and get ready. Sarge was in a good mood because he was one of the people who’d survived the attack (mainly by accident of place, if you ask me, though I wouldn’t say that to his face).
We got through the rest of our defensive turn on the pretend-Wall, five more days, without being breached again. That’s not the same as saying it was uneventful, because the longest spell between attacks was eighteen hours. Respect to that other company, they really gave it a go. But none of them got over the Wall. To be honest, none of them even got particularly close. A sequence of moonlit nights helped. The estuary landscape meant you didn’t have the distant blurred horizons of sky–sea which at dawn and dusk could make the light so difficult. Also, the waves were small to non-existent, river waves, and there was nothing like the chop and roll which would make it so hard at our usual post. So there were factors which helped. Despite that, it was reassuring, after the trauma of that first night, that well-trained attackers coming at you under normal conditions were relatively easy to track and kill. We would see them a few hundred metres off and light them up. The assessors claimed that a few of us were shot by people sniping from boats, but we all thought that was bullshit. Others with snipers using automatic weapons from boats? Sure, and they also ride in seven abreast on trained narwhals, blaring Wagner over loudspeakers. Their best attack was on the penultimate night. I slept through it. They swam in a kilometre and tried to climb the Wall solo. The crew on duty let them get close, then picked them off one at a time.
Then it was our turn. We sorted out our stuff, got on a lorry and drove off to the other barracks, which, as the guys from their company had said, was around the corner of the river, two watchtowers away. Halfway there we passed their lorry heading in the other direction, and some pleasantries were exchanged: our entire company stood up and gave them the finger, in formation.
The other barracks was the same as every other barracks, except with a few more recreational amenities: table tennis, pool tables, and it even had a gym and a cinema. Of course! The defensive watch had to be on duty all the time, every day, but as attackers, we could pick and choose. We didn’t have to work shifts, we could do whatever we liked, schedule-wise. Well, not quite: we’d do exactly what the Captain told us to do, exactly when he told us to do it. Still, by comparison, where the other shift had been a bit like a holiday, this really was a holiday.
The Captain, it goes without saying, had other ideas. We were given order
s an hour after we got to the new site. The meeting was held in the briefing room. He was standing next to Sarge and Yos and I wouldn’t say he was rubbing his hands with eager anticipation while cackling with glee, because he just wasn’t that person, but he was pretty close.
‘The fun part!’ he said. ‘Now, first, a little exercise. Hands up everybody who enjoyed the experience of being overrun by Others, killed and wounded, or surviving only to be put to sea?’
The contrast between what he was saying – naming everyone in the room’s worst fear – and his super-jaunty tone was like a slap. Nobody’s hand went up.
‘Didn’t think so,’ he said. ‘It includes me, by the way. The officer in charge of a company which allows a breach is automatically put to sea.’
I looked around the room. It was clear that most people had forgotten that.
‘The reason this is the fun part is, we get to do to them what they did to us. They get to feel what it’s like. You’re probably wondering how, given that the landscape round here makes the Wall unrealistically easy to defend. They got to ambush us. That was an advantage agreed in advance. In return, we get an advantage, like them, once and once only. A five-minute power cut.’
A shifting and sitting-up took place in the room.
‘That’s right. Total loss of power for five minutes and five minutes only, on a night of our choosing. The idea is that Others or their sympathisers have co-ordinated a spot of sabotage. You might say it’s unlikely, but so was that ambush attack on the first night unlikely. In case you’re wondering, that is the standard training exercise here. These two respective advantages are always given to the two companies training on this site. This is our chance to even the score. Except, I don’t want to even the score. They got five over the Wall. I want to go not one better, not two better, but twenty-five better. I want to get an entire squad over the Wall. That would be a record and it’s a record I want.’
He looked around as if trying to catch someone, anyone, in the act of not wanting the record as much as he did. No takers.
‘So how do we do it? I have my ideas. I want to hear yours.’
Silence. Shuffling. More silence.
‘This is going to be a very long meeting if nobody has anything to contribute.’
Cooper put his hand up.
‘We make it hard for them.’
‘Yes, good. How?’
Fidgeting. I think it wasn’t so much that people were clueless as that we didn’t want to say stupid things in front of the Captain. He had that effect.
Eventually somebody said, ‘Keep them on the go.’
‘Yes!’ said the Captain, almost bouncing. ‘Exactly. Keep them at work. Especially at night. All night, every night. Constant attacks. Some small, some less so. One after another. Make it so that it never stops. Make them tired. And then – the big one.’
So that’s what we did. We made a token attack on the second day but apart from that it was just night work. We split into two shifts, again, but with the welcome difference that we were only on for a few hours each; three or four attacks for the first two nights, both shifts taking turns, sleeping as much of the day as we wanted. It was, as the Captain had said it would be, fun. Getting soaking wet and consequently freezing wasn’t pleasant, of course, but the basic pattern of being active and on the attack was inherently interesting and involving; knowing what you were doing and when made attacking much less anxious than being a Defender. On the first night our shift even managed to attack twice, catching the waiting lorry back to our barracks, changing into wetsuits and being driven back in motorboats for a second go. (Boat in close, swim in using snorkels.) We all got ‘killed’, but so what? I understood why the people we’d ‘shot’ and been shot by in the big assault were in such good humour. I spent more time with Hifa than I ever had before while on duty. I had got to the stage of finding reasons for doing things with or next to her, and was beginning to suspect she was at the same stage too – those little hints you get at the start of something.
Then the last night came, the time for the big assault. In all the time I knew him, I never saw the Captain in a better mood than he was that day. It had all been prep for this: small attacks mainly at the narrow point of the estuary, to misdirect from a single huge attack from the other direction. We had three fast inflatable boats, piloted by members of the Guard. (Not really cheating to use expert pilots: the Others were good sailors, by definition. Any who weren’t would have drowned before they got here.) We were favoured by the conditions, moonless and windy. We’d creep in as close as we could, five hundred metres by the Captain’s estimate, and on the exact moment of the power cut, the Guard would hit the accelerators and we’d race in. That would take ninety seconds. Focus on three attack points, one for every boat. We had grappling equipment and ladders and the Wall had that attacker-friendly ledge. Sixty seconds to get up and over. Then two and a half minutes of dark to kill as many Defenders as possible and get away from the Wall on the inner side. Our eyes would be dark-adapted; the Defenders’ wouldn’t be. They’d hear the boats coming but not be able to see them. They’d be knackered from constant attacks all night for the previous sixty hours, and with luck they’d be thinking the end was in sight and the worst over. Our odds were as good as they could be.
I was sitting next to Hughes during the briefing. The Captain was drawing a diagram of fire patterns once we’d got onto the Wall.
‘The Captain’s good at this, isn’t he?’ he whispered.
‘You’d almost think he used to be an Other,’ I whispered back, and immediately felt bad. That wasn’t a thing we joked about; it went too deep. What the Captain had lived through before he got here, what he had seen and done, were subjects you felt in his being, rather than topics for gossip. Having said that, when you saw him designing an attack like this, it was possible to understand how he had got over the Wall.
It went more or less exactly as planned. That’s rare for anything military. At the debrief, we all agreed the weather had been a big help. The night really was black. There was so much wind the inflatables had to stop further away than we had intended, because the choppy wind-whipped wavelets were pushing us towards the shore. Somebody dropped a rifle against something metal, one of the boat fittings, and it felt as if the noise would carry for ten kilometres, let alone the few hundred metres to the Defenders waiting on the Wall. It didn’t, though, or if it did nobody noticed. We counted down, looking at our watches, and the lights cut exactly when they were supposed to; the Guards floored it, or hit it, or whatever the verb is for maximum acceleration in a boat. That feeling, the light boat sprinting and bouncing through the total dark, spray all over us, one hand on the rope handrail, the other grabbing our guns, was as pure a feeling of exhilaration as I’ve ever had.
Splash the last couple of feet. Grapple for security, ladder in place, swarm up, start shooting. The expression ‘they didn’t know what hit them’ is exactly wrong: they knew perfectly well. It’s just that they couldn’t do anything to stop it. We were ready, we could see, they weren’t and couldn’t. It was almost unfair, though still not as unfair as the advantage they’d had on the first night. We hit the two Defenders nearest our breach, then eight of our shift got over the Wall and started to get away. I’d agreed to stay and set up a rearguard, and so had Shoona. (In real combat I wouldn’t have volunteered, I hope it goes without saying. The soldier’s most fundamental rule, never volunteer. But on this exercise I thought staying behind and shooting would be more fun.) They got a counter-attack going with about thirty seconds of darkness to spare. Shoona and I got a few of them, then as the lights came on, we went over and slid down the inner side of the Wall. The Defenders shot at us; according to the assessors, afterwards, Shoona got away but I didn’t. So what? Our shift alone got eight people over. The others got eleven between them. Nineteen over the Wall was an all-time record. The next best was fourteen. From the moment the lights went out to the moment the assessors said the fight was over was seven minutes. C
ombat is like that, an undanceable rhythm: slow, slow, slower, sudden pandemonium.
When we got back to barracks, the Captain, unlike the rest of us, wasn’t elated. He just went calmly round and shook everyone’s hand individually, the only time he ever did.
12
The other squad came over and we had a few drinks. No alcohol on the Wall, but this wasn’t the real Wall. Somebody put some music on and there was dancing. There was karaoke, and people took turns, then one of their squad, a woman, had such an amazing voice we stopped taking turns and listened to her sing soul classics for a while. Then a few more drinks. And a few more after that. Like I said, a holiday. Their squad was supposed to go home to their barracks but it emerged that their lorry drivers had got into conversation with our lorry drivers, and had opened some cans, and then further cans, etc., and they had ended up as hammered as everyone else so there was nobody sober to drive the lorries. They ended up crashing in our barracks, using spare beds, sofas, chairs, even the pool tables. Only a drunk Defender can think a pool table makes an adequate bed.
The next morning we were due to go back to our real posts. That would involve about five hours in the lorry, ash-mouthed, suet-faced, smelling of recent disinterment. The other squad had it even worse: they were going back to north Wales. Hifa, who I’d last seen dancing with the woman with the amazing voice, was wearing a beanie, the same one she’d worn in her indeterminate-sex phase when I first met her, and her small features were peeking out from beneath it, scowling with hangover. If I’d been less hungover myself it would have been funny. My day began with an increasingly panicky fifteen-minute search for my glasses, which ended when I realised I’d never taken them off. Before our journey of horror, in the briefing room, a lecture. Or rather a ‘little talk’ from a member of the elite, some politician or government official, a short shiny young man with a mop of blond hair in an also shiny suit. He came into the overlit room and stood at the podium. We stand up for officers, but he wasn’t an officer, so we stayed put. He looked a little surprised at the state of us. Sixty dishevelled and severely hungover Defenders, unimpressed and unimpressive: not the world’s easiest audience.
The Wall Page 8