Down: Trilogy Box Set (153 page)

“Out for an evening stroll?” the tanner asked.

“Have you seen anyone fleeing us?” one of the soldiers asked.

“Why would anyone wish to flee the likes of you?”

The soldier was a dullard. “They’re alive.”

“If I were alive I’d be fleeing you too, I’m quite sure,” the tanner said.

“You’ve seen no one?”

“Only my own shadow but you fine men may enter and search my premises if you so desire.”

The soldier wrinkled his nose. “I’d sooner have my supper inside a rotting room,” he said, continuing his search along the alley.

The tanner came to the rear and lit another candle.

“Thank you,” John said. “What’s your name?”

“It is John. John, the tanner.”

“My name’s John too.”

“But you are no tanner.”

John smiled. “Why are you helping us?”

“I despise the king’s men. They steal from me, they beat me, they threaten to drown me in my vats. I spit on them.”

John reached into his pocket and produced one of Garibaldi’s gold coins. “Like I said, thank you.”

The tanner took the coin and bit down on it. “Well, I should be thanking you. It’s a fine piece of metal.”

“We’ll need to stay till tomorrow night,” John said.

“You’ll be wanting food then.”

John sniffed the air. “I don’t think food’s high on our list right now.”

The tanner chuckled. “Before long, you won’t even notice the smell. You’ll be thinking you’re in a flowering garden. We’ll be back to our beds. In the morn we’ll bring you some bread. This lovely barrel’s got beer in it. Don’t recommend you drink the water in here. There’s a slop trench over there.”

“What else could a man want?” John said.

“What else indeed?” the tanner replied.

Most of them slept fitfully in the miasma of noxious vapors but John and Trevor resolved to stay on guard. To keep sleep at bay they talked quietly into the night.

“If we get out of this what are you going to do with yourself?” Trevor asked.

“When, not if.”

“Yeah, all right, we’ll keep it positive.”

“Emily and I’ve talked about it. She says she wants to do something different, maybe teaching physics at a university.”

“And you?”

“Drinking beer, watching sports, and waking up every morning next to her—that’ll do me. Actually I thought about maybe opening a school for martial arts, you know, self defense.”

“You’d be good at it.”

“What about you?” John asked.

Trevor stifled a yawn. “I’m not a big planner, guv, never have been. I tend to follow my nose. That’s how I came to be working for you if I recall. But right now my nose is leading me to Arabel and her kids. I feel a serious case of domestication coming on.”

John buried his face in his hands.

“What?” Trevor said.

“Is that going to make us brothers-in-law?”

Trevor showed a bit of mock horror. “It doesn’t work that way, does it?”

“Even if it doesn’t we could be having Sunday dinners and Christmases together.”

“I’m a 42,” Trevor said.

“Huh?”

“My shirt size. If you get it right the first time, I won’t have to exchange the pressie.”

When daylight came the tannery workers got to work stirring up gut-wrenching smells from their vats. Those Earthers who’d managed to swallow their rations of bread struggled to keep the food in their stomachs.

Everyone spent the day huddled behind the barrels, tapping into the beer to keep from getting dehydrated. “Can you eat at all, luv?” Chris asked Smithwick.

The miserable woman was almost unresponsive.

“Can you drink a bit? You’ve got to drink some. You’re dehydrated.”

Chris detected a flicker of interest and spent the rest of the day patiently doling out tiny sips of beer.

Since half the Earthers had been away at the forge for several weeks, there was a good deal of catching up to do and everyone took part, everyone but Trotter who sat as far away from the rest of them as he could pretending not to hear when his name came up.

In the afternoon John woke from a nap and sat beside Bates and Lawrence who were locked in an animated discussion about Trotter. It grew loud enough that Trotter decided to get up and find a piece of wall to lean against closer to the front of the tannery.

“Want to help?” John the tanner said to him, offering up his vat paddle.

“No I do not,” Trotter replied, folding his arms.

John came over and sat beside the intelligence chiefs. “So what’s his story?” John asked.

“Trotter?” Bates said. “He’s a snake-in-the-grass, first degree. Before we were sent to the forge he ingratiated himself to Cromwell and the Duke of Suffolk—a real creep, he was—and managed to get himself private quarters, better food, lord knows what. When we were sent to build the blast furnace he wouldn’t do a stitch of work. Saw it as beneath him. I can’t stand the guy.”

Lawrence nodded. “Karen took to calling him Hell’s Quisling and she was absolutely right. We suspected he was complicit in the suicide of Brenda Mitchell, a nice young lady who was snatched away by Suffolk for his personal enjoyment, if you know what I mean. Then Kelly, another nice young girl went missing and, well, the suspicion fell on Anthony.”

“Any evidence?” John asked, glowering at Trotter across the tannery.

“Well, not really,” Lawrence said, “but Karen was convinced. The night she went missing she went to confront him. He maintained she never arrived. Frankly it beggars belief and poor old Karen can’t tell us what happened to her. If I survive this, I intend to destroy him.”

“I’ll be right by your side, George,” Bates said.

At nightfall John the tanner agreed to have a quick walkabout to look for patroling soldiers. When he reported that the streets were quiet, John and Trevor made a run to the river to check on Cromwell’s barge.

They returned a short while later, dispirited. The craft was still crawling with soldiers.

John produced another gold coin and gave it to the tanner.

“Can we enjoy your hospitality another day?” he asked.

“If you pay at this rate, you can stay a year,” the tanner said, pocketing the loot.

“Did you live in London? Before, I mean,” John asked.

“I did. Not far from here.”

“When?”

“Oh, I passed away in 1820 or thereabouts. Touch of the plague.”

“Were you a tanner?”

“I was. All I ever knew, except for drinking and raising Cain which is what landed me here.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s a funny thing, really, but ever since I was a lad my mother always told me I was going to Hell so I sort of expected it. Didn’t quite have the right notion of it though, did I? I expected fire and brimstone and got an eternity of pigeon shit instead.”

Trevor came over and offered to take the first night’s watch. John didn’t debate him. He was beyond exhausted. Seconds after he curled up in the corner he was out cold.

The flat plain of the Helmand Province was somewhere below them hidden by the blackness of night. Staring out the open door of the Black Hawk MH-60, John could feel the wind against his face. The rotor action vibrated through his body.

No one in the squad had said a word since lift-off. Most of the men were fighting back tears. John wasn’t. He was too angry.

“Ten mikes to touchdown at Leatherneck,” the pilot called out.

It was impossible to look at Mike Entwistle’s body bag without looking into the swollen face of the man who’d killed him. Fazal Toofan was on his side, wrists and ankles zip-tied, moaning. He slowly came to, his eyes blinking open. He tried to lift his head and one of the weapon’s sergeants pushed it down with the sole of his boot.

“Keep your fucking head down, motherfucker,” the sergeant shouted.

The shouting seemed to clear the cobwebs away and the Taliban commander said crisply, “Where are you taking me?”

“Don’t talk to him,” John raged.

“Are you the one in charge?” Toofan asked.

John said nothing.

“What are you, Seals? Marines?”

The sergeant said, “Green Berets, motherfucker.”

“For the last time, I said don’t talk to him, goddamn it!” John shouted. “And you, shut the fuck up!”

But Toofan wouldn’t shut up. “This one, the one in the bag. Is he the asshole I shot? Are those the asshole’s brains on my leg?”

John rose as high as the helicopter ceiling would allow.

He didn’t say a word as he grabbed Toofan by the hair.

He didn’t say a word as he lifted Toofan to his knees.

And he didn’t say a word as he threw him out the open door into the blackness of the Afghan night.

The pilot and co-pilot swiveled at the sound of Toofan’s fading screams.

John sat back down, breathing hard.

“Turn your asses around,” the sergeant yelled at the pilots. “Nobody saw anything, you understand? You understand? He was never on this chopper. That’s the end of it. It’s the fucking end of it.”

That’s when John began to cry.

John awoke in a cold sweat to see Trotter sitting near him, staring.

“You were talking in your sleep,” Trotter said.

“Oh yeah?”

“Sounds like quite the nightmare.”

John sat up. “I don’t remember my dreams.”

“Everyone has their demons.”

John had half a cup of beer by his side. He drank the rest of it. “What are yours?”

“I don’t think we know each other well enough for me to bare my soul. Perhaps when we get back to London, the real London, we’ll have a few drinks.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

Trotter feigned offense. “Really? Do you have something against me?”

“Yeah, maybe. At best you’re a greasy little shit. At worst you’re, well …”

Trotter wouldn’t let him finish. He was on his feet saying, “Let me tell you something, Camp. I don’t like Americans. Never did. I work with the CIA on a regular basis and I’d say it’s the absolute worst part of my job. Give me the Germans, the Poles, anyone, even the bloody Turks any day of the week. I leave a meeting with Americans and I generally want to vomit. I hate your pseudo-Boy Scout rectitude, your black-or-white simplistic worldview, your appalling lack of subtlety and class. I’m going to sit by the stinking vats now, Camp. The air is fresher over there.”

Trevor came to the rear of the tannery and handed John the rifle.

“Two of you getting into it?” he asked.

“Not really,” John said, “but I’ve got a feeling he and I are going to have a reckoning one day.”

The following night John and Trevor tried again. Creeping up on the barge they saw only a handful of soldiers onboard.

“This might be as good as it’s going to get,” John whispered.

“I agree, guv.”

John pulled a knife and said, “Use the rifle as a club but no shooting.”

Most of the Earthers were near the front of the tannery anxiously awaiting John and Trevor’s return. Leroy Bitterman looked around and noticed that Trotter wasn’t with them.

Stuart Binford and Matthew Coppens went looking for him, circling around the tannery from opposite directions. It was Matthew who found him standing over Smithwick.

“What are you doing?” Matthew asked.

Trotter palmed his knife and said, “I thought I heard her choking. No one was about and I was trying to help.”

“She seems all right to me.”

There was a small commotion near the door as John announced they’d secured the barge. He came to the rear of the forge to get Smithwick and on the way he called John the tanner out of his bunkroom.

“We’re off now,” he said. “You’re a good man, John.”

“Not half as good as you are,” the tanner said.

John gave him his last gold coin.

“I haven’t earned this one,” the tanner said, though he quickly pocketed it.

“Sure you did. We drank all your beer.”

Emily reviewed the latest computer simulations from Geneva and looked away. “I think we should be operational by tomorrow morning.”

Loomis drank his tea. Even after a week, he let it be known that each sip was marvelous, something to be savored. “You don’t seem happy,” he said.

“You know why.”

He nodded. “I’m concerned about the modifications we’ve made to the particle guns,” he said. “Bit of a chewing gum and Sellotape job.”

“Of course it is,” she said. “If we were using uranium gas in the normal course of business, we’d have spent a year or two in design and manufacture with input from dozens of experts.”

He clenched his fists then rapidly dealt out his fingers while turning his palms upwards. It was a magician’s gesture. Presto! She’d forgotten he used to do it all the time. “We’ll just have to push the button and see,” he said.

She got up from her workstation. They were in the new, makeshift control room set up in the recreation center.

“Maybe we should hold off until we’ve done more prep work,” she said.

“Emily, I realize you’re worried about John but you’ve heard the powers-that-be on the conference calls. They want this done and they want it done now.”

“Yes, but I’m the one who has to push the button, as you say. If I refuse to do it there’s nothing they can do.”

“Is that really the way you wish to play it?” he asked. “Personal good over the greater good?”

“That’s ripe coming from you, Paul, for God’s sake.”

She stormed out and went to the washroom where she splashed her face and stared into the mirror trying to calm herself.

When she returned, Paul had something in his hand.

“What are these doing here? I found them on the floor,” he said.

“A few of the people in the control room were armed the day of the last restart. The MI5 guards, Anthony Trotter too, I think. There’s metal and synthetics all over the place, all of it left behind.”

She took the guns and slid them under a table in the corner.

Then she apologized to him but Loomis said she was right to point out his hypocrisy.

“Selfishness has become a way of life for me,” he said. “I wasn’t always like this. I hope you can remember the man I used to be. I suppose I changed the moment that I madly and selfishly killed my wife, depriving my children of their mother and her parents of their daughter. And then I compounded it by selfishly taking my own life.”