A Breed of Heroes (34 page)

He lay still for what seemed a very short time, but afterwards he worked out that it must have been several minutes. Perhaps his internal clock had stopped. He did not move at first, waiting to
see if there was any pain. Then he could not move because of a great weight upon his thighs, which he realised was the desk. His first clear thought was that he might be paralysed. He feared that
above all else. He wriggled his toes inside his boots and felt them move. He flexed his feet. Though pinned down by the desk, he could move his legs. His head was still in his hands, and the left
side felt wet. Something trickled across his eyes. He moved his hand in front of his face and saw it wet with red and blue liquids. He stared uncomprehendingly for some time whilst more liquid ran
across his eyes. He could not think what it might be. Then he struggled out from beneath the desk and stood, unsteadily at first as his feet slipped on the books, paper, glass, plaster and rubble
that covered the floor. He could not see the other half of the room where the door was because of a dense and continuously revolving cloud of dust. His Browning was attached to his shoulder by his
lanyard and dangled by his thigh. The CO had insisted that it should always be so attached. He had the notion that the bomb would be followed by an attack on the building and so he pulled a
magazine from his pocket and loaded and cocked the pistol.

He then walked, still unsteadily, to the great jagged holes in the walls where the windows had been. There was debris all over the street, the shops opposite looked as though they had been
shelled, with parts of their walls and roofs blown away, and there were upturned cars on the far pavement. A figure was running across the road towards him. Holding the Browning in both hands,
elbows locked, eyes open, Charles moved down through the target to the centre of the body, where two or three inches out in any direction would still be a stopping hit. He looked straight at the
man so as to line up the mid-line of his body. As he took up the first slight pressure on the trigger it was borne in upon him very slowly, from somewhere far back in his mind, that the man was
wearing a uniform. He was a military policeman, a Redcap. Charles lowered the pistol and uncocked it with hands that did not shake. His legs and his stomach felt empty but he was calm. He put the
pistol in his pocket with the magazine still in, just in case.

The dust in the room had thinned and he could see the telephone on the floor where Colin’s desk had been. To his surprise, it worked. He dialled 999 and was told by the operator that they
already knew about the bomb. Of course they knew. He must think more clearly. He next noticed a large blue stain on the ceiling above where he had been sitting, with bits of his inkwell embedded.
The ink was dripping off the ceiling on to his upturned desk. He put his hand to his face and head and found that he was wet with ink and blood. The blood came from a couple of tender places on the
side of his neck and on his left eyebrow. At his first attempt to leave the room he was forced back by the dust which made him cough and stagger clumsily. However, he got through the door at the
second attempt and found himself on the landing. Soldiers were running purposefully to and fro. No one seemed to notice him. He went to lean on the stair rail but found that it swayed. The stairs
were littered with bits of wood, concrete, plaster and glass. An upturned helmet rocked gently by itself in the exact centre of the centre stair. There were a few small splashes of blood.

He stood in the door of the ops room where everyone was active and everything seemed to be working. Again, no one noticed him. He made his way down the stairs, where a lot of people were moving
about. Two soldiers came running up the stairs three at a time. One stopped. ‘You all right, sir?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Want me to get a medic for you?’

‘No thanks, I’m all right.’ His own repetition of the soldier’s ‘all right’ echoed in his skull, along with the ‘all rights’ of a hundred other
voices. He thought, with the clarity born of supreme detachment, of how this was an Army stock phrase, an all-purpose measure of spiritual welfare, military competence and personal affability. He
seemed able to think only of irrelevancies.

The soldier was still staring at him. ‘There’s one in the cookhouse. I’d go along there if I was you.’

‘Thank you.’

He lost his bearings for a moment at the bottom of the stairs because several walls had disappeared, there was daylight in unexpected places and the floor was covered by concrete rubble. Some
soldiers were bending over something on the floor. They straightened and Charles saw that they were carrying a door, upon which was Colin. His head lolled oddly to one side. The empty feeling in
Charles’s stomach increased so much that he put his hand to it. As he watched the door go past he felt a deep and secret elation because he was alive and whole. They carried the adjutant out
through a hole in the wall and put him on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance. Charles followed them out into the street. A group of squat women were standing on the corner jeering and
laughing. There were several youths on the other side of the road. One shouted, ‘Let’s get their guns!’ and started forward but was pushed roughly back by some soldiers from A
company who had just arrived in their Pigs.

Charles was facing a TV camera and a reporter he knew. He was being asked what had happened. ‘There has been an explosion,’ he said. More people were asking him and he repeated it
several times. He was asked how it happened and how many injuries there were. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, again many times.

Then he was looking at the CO, whose face was drawn and grim. ‘Charles, are you all right?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You’re not.’

‘No, sir.’

‘Go to hospital and get cleaned up.’

There were more questions from the press. Then he was standing inside amongst the rubble, again facing the CO. ‘I thought I told you to go to hospital.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, go on then.’

‘Yes, sir.’ He made his way to the cookhouse where he found Henry Sandy’s medical sergeant, grinning. ‘They told me you was dead, sir. I was all ready to go on telly
meself. Sit down here and let’s have a butchers. Blue blood, eh? Always knew you were different. Red stuff too. At least you’re human. More blood than cuts, I reckon. You got some glass
in there. Where does it hurt? Sorry. Where else? Won’t even need stitching, this won’t.’

A normally reluctant and surly cook produced gallons of tea in a very short time and with no visible equipment. As Charles drank his he began to feel a little more in touch with the world. The
cut above his eye was throbbing. When he got outside a troop of Sappers had arrived with lorries to clear away the debris. One half of the ground floor of the building was completely wrecked and
the upper two storeys remained only because the pre-stressed concrete structure was designed so that the pillars stood firm even if the walls blew out. The quarter-inch steel shutters on the
windows on the ground floor had disappeared, as had those in Charles’s and Colin’s office, which had been directly above the blast. One pair of shutters had been blown across the road,
through the front of the house opposite and into the kitchen at the back. There were press swarming everywhere and, after many enquiries, Charles was able to establish that about thirty people had
been taken to hospital. A baby, the adjutant and one other not yet identified were seriously injured. The rest were civilians who had chanced to be in the area. It was believed that the bomb had
been in a suitcase brought into the police station by a young man, who had run out. Someone had shouted, ‘Bomb!’ which was the shout Charles had heard.

He answered queries for about an hour, repeating himself often. Later he saw himself on the television news saying, ‘There has been an explosion,’ with the devastated building in the
background and blood down one side of his face. Then there was a close-up of his cuts, robbing them of their impressiveness, to the commentary, ‘Officers refused to have their wounds treated
until all the injured had been accounted for.’

Chatsworth and his platoon turned up to help clear the rubble. ‘If it had gone off ten minutes later I’d have been here anyway,’ he said.

‘Then you might not have been here now.’

‘True.’ He enjoyed the scene but was obviously disappointed. ‘I don’t think much of your wounds. They won’t last. Mine will last longer. Even though it’s
hidden by clothes most of the time it’ll still be there. The one on your neck is quite near the jugular, though.’

‘Did you hear about the adjutant?’

‘He’s bad, isn’t he? That’s a bit serious. Brings it home to you. All because they won’t let us shoot the bastards unless they’re doing something. I wish
I’d seen it, all the same.’

Arc lights were set up as it became dark. It was impressive how quickly and easily the necessary equipment and personnel were mobilised. The artificial glare made the scene of toiling men look
slightly unreal. Some of the local women protested about the noise. They stood on the spot where the complaints desk had been and shouted in their harsh Belfast accents about civil rights. The
operations officer also had a complaint for Charles: ‘Some bloody oppo of yours called Beedley or something keeps ringing up on the ops room phone to know what’s happened. I keep
telling him to come down and see for himself or piss off but he won’t. Screw him or something, will you?’

It proved to be Van Horne’s hour of triumph. Uninjured, apart from an already picturesque scar on the cheek that excited Chatsworth’s envy, he composed and phoned through
Beazely’s copy whilst Charles dealt with the more adventurous press. Later Charles was called back up to his office by the CO, who was examining it. The room was a shambles. There were gaping
holes where the windows had been, cracks in the other walls and everything movable was smashed or twisted. Even the floor was unevenly shaped, with a great cracked hump in the middle where Charles
had seen the sheet of redness leap up. ‘You ought to be dead,’ said the CO. Charles remembered having been told this before and wondered whether, if he were to be killed, the CO would
then say, ‘It ought to have happened some time ago, of course. I’ve told him twice before.’ The CO paused and then began again, as though the point needed emphasis. ‘By all
that’s reasonable you ought to be dead. This floor is reinforced and blast-proof and it’s still come through it. If it had been a normal floor you wouldn’t be here. Nor if
you’d been sitting in a different position. I can’t understand why you weren’t cut to pieces. How’s your eye?’

‘Fine, sir, thank you.’

‘Well done. You did well to escape.’

When they got outside again there was alarm because a car had been spotted parked around the corner against another wall of the building. It was thought it might be another bomb. A warrant
officer from the bomb disposal team was summoned and the street cleared. From the safety of the corner they watched him advance alone to the car and examine it. He got down on his knees and peered
beneath the boot. Charles was indulging in the warm pleasure of relative safety when the CO, after peering impatiently round the corner, said, ‘Go down and see if he wants a hand,
Thoroughgood.’

Charles walked down the street as slowly as he dared. It was pointless to hazard two lives instead of one and he knew nothing about bomb disposal. It was probably even contrary to Army procedure
but he did not have the nerve to disobey the CO. Even if he had, the habit of obedience would probably have sent him down there. He felt calmly fatalistic as he stood by the car. ‘D’you
want a hand?’ he asked the warrant officer.

The man was half under the car. ‘There’s a wire here I can’t identify.’ He wriggled out. ‘We’ll go in from the top. You can hold those for me.’ He
handed Charles some tools, selected a strange-looking drill and cut a hole about four inches in diameter in the top of the boot. ‘All clear,’ he said after a minute or so.

Charles was very relieved, despite his calmly fatalistic feelings of a few minutes before. He offered the man a cup of tea, which was all he could think of to say. ‘No time,’ he said
as he collected his tools. ‘Got another one in the city centre. They’re popping up like mushrooms tonight. This is my third. Mostly hoaxes.’

Much later Henry Sandy returned from the hospital. He looked very tired. ‘Colin’s dead,’ he said.

Again, the secret thrill of being alive. It was a shameful thrill though his heart leapt within him to hear Henry’s words. Yet it was still a shock to hear it said. He knew there was no
reply, as Henry knew, but there was a desire to say something. ‘Blast?’

‘No. A severely fractured skull. The whole of the right side was smashed in. He must’ve hit something or something hit him. He never had a chance. His brains were coming out of his
mouth in the ambulance. They did everything possible at the hospital. They had two surgeons working on him for an hour and a half.’ He pulled slowly on his cigarette, talking quietly. His
face was expressionless. ‘And there’s a baby with a part of his brain outside his skull. He’ll live. They’ve saved him, as a vegetable. He was in one of the cars,
apparently. And some bird who’s lost both legs. She was in the building, I think.’

‘Mary Magdalene.’

‘What?’

‘Local girl.’

‘Ah.’

The Army had a way of dealing with death that took the edge off the acute sense of futility and helplessness that afflicts most people. Woven into its collective subconscious was an expectation
of death and even a vague sense that it was apt. It was a part of the contract. Besides, the war had to go on and there were things to do – repairs, new defences, reports to write, kin to be
informed, precautions to be taken. Two clerks packed Colin’s kit that night. They stripped his bed, collected his clothes, gathered the family photographs, the cigarettes and personal
oddments from his locker. His money was counted and recorded. Charles pointed to a family photograph that included Colin in uniform. ‘I’d better have that for the press,’ he said.
The two clerks hesitated, sullenly. ‘Otherwise they’ll be bothering his wife and family for one. It’s better if they get it from this end.’ He signed for it and within an
hour the only trace of the adjutant was a pile of kit stacked and labelled in a green metal cupboard in the orderly room, waiting to be shipped off. So long as the procedure was followed, the
now-living and meaningful book which was so often abused, everything would be all right. Slow and unwieldy as it was in normal times, the Army was one great system designed for disaster and, so
long as enough of it survived to work the system, that was when it worked best. It was believed in. Tony Watch took over as adjutant that night.