Invasion (54 page)

Alex brushed aside the tent flap and straightened up, stretching his limbs and scratching at the lice beneath his thick beard. He wiped his hands on the black smock that draped his bony frame, then made his way slowly between the endless rows of white canvas marquees that stretched in all directions
across the flat, sun-baked desert. Tent
city was expanding all the time, to accommodate the growing numbers of prisoners that were still arriving from Europe, and Alex cursed his ever lengthening journey, the mounting workload, the relentless sun. The surrounding terrain was featureless in every direction, except for a thin ridge of hills to the east. Beyond those hills was the Site, a place that people only spoke about in quiet whispers. Alex had yet to see it, and prayed he never would.

The Site was supposedly the largest single construction
project ever under-taken. Out there, across the arid desert, a whole city was being built, a city that consisted of huge mosques with soaring minarets, of marbled palaces, residential complexes and luxurious hotels, all surrounding some kind of giant monolith that held enormous religious significance for the Arabians. Mecca Two, some called it. Not in earshot of the Arabians, though.

The remote location of such a project was a familiar topic of discussion around the cooking fires in the evenings. Some said that an artefact had been found beneath the desert floor, an artefact so important to the Islamic faith that the Site had been decreed a Holy Place above all others. Others said that an ancient mosque had been uncovered by shifting desert sands, a mosque where Muhammad
himself was rumoured to have dispensed his divine wisdoms.

Alex didn’t know what to believe, but the nuclear exchange between Israel and Arabia, the one that destroyed Jerusalem, Mecca and Baghdad, was the most likely reason for construction on such a scale. It also explained the intense lights that had pulsed on the northern horizon, the shockwaves that had rolled across the desert floor and rippled through the massed ranks of canvas tents. It was only after those terrifying nights, now over eighteen months ago Alex calculated, that construction had begun. Almost overnight the bleak desert prison had been transformed into a work camp, and seen the arrival of so many important Arabian political and military figures.

The Site was to be built by the hand of man alone and without the help of labour-saving machinery, the prisoners were told. A never-ending supply of slave labour was required to carve stone and marble from distant quarries, to transport it to the Site and carefully construct the buildings that were springing up beyond the hills. It explained the endless stream of prisoners transported in from Europe and from the irradiated wastelands of Israel.

The parallels drawn with ancient Egypt were unmistakable. All that was missing was the crack of whips, and Alex didn’t rule that out either. He’d heard about conditions at the Site and thanked God he didn’t work there. The hours were impossibly long, the workload brutal, and many of the occupants interned beneath the sands of the workers’ cemetery had died because of heat exhaustion, many more by industrial accident. It was not quite as bad in Tent City, but the heat was a killer. Find every shadow, he’d been warned on arrival, every wedge of shade no matter how small. It will save your life.

Alex was surprised he still clung to that life, but not as desperately these days. He’d arrived in a batch of over two hundred prisoners on a windowless cargo plane,
one
that had flown them from a holding camp in Morocco to this remote, unknown area of desert. Prior to that, he’d spent several months in a clean-up crew in Madrid, a city that had been effectively reduced to rubble after heavy fighting during the invasion.

Talking had been forbidden during shifts, but there was always an opportunity for a clandestine conversation with a shackled neighbour. Alex discovered that most of his fellow prisoners
were police officers from a variety of European countries. Each man had similar stories to tell about their experiences, but most of them agreed that the sheer scale and audacity of the Arabian operation had caught them unawares. Others were more cynical, grumbling that the invasion had been an event waiting to happen. It hardly mattered now.

Alex spoke of his final days in England, how he and several thousand other prisoners had been paraded along a packed Mall in London. They had shuffled past the jeering crowds, past the Arabian cavalry in their ceremonial dress, flanked by the combat troops who marched in tight formation around them until they eventually rippled to a halt in front of Buckingham Palace itself. There, outside the former home of the British Royal Family, they had listened in silence
as the Grand Mufti Khathami himself spoke passionately to the crowds, and the throng gathered before the Palace had cheered and waved in ecstatic response. The ceremony over, the prisoners were marched away and transported to the docks in Portsmouth.

There was a sense of finality about that night, Alex remembered. As he’d boarded the cargo ship, a feeling of despair overcame him and he wondered how long it would be before he saw the dark coastline of England again. As the months passed, that hope had faded to a point where his previous
life felt like a dream. It all seemed so long ago now, the heat of the desert evaporating his memories, stifling his emotions. Which
was probably for the best.

The hot sun was beginning to dip towards the horizon as Alex trudged between the long rows of tents, grateful for the slight drop in temperature. The black linen smock and pants they all wore were designed to soak up the heat, to
make life uncomfortable,
to make it easier for the Arabian patrols to locate the bodies of escapees against the white sands of the desert. With no guard towers or fences, plenty of prisoners had tried, heading out into the desert under cover of darkness, but their bodies had always been recovered and returned for burial. Every escapee was accounted
for, a reminder to those who might contemplate fleeing that only death awaited them out beyond the sun-baked horizon. The simple truth was that escape was futile and Alex discovered that most of the prisoners had come to accept their fate. As he had too.

He skirted around the ropes of the last tent and the empty desert opened up before him. A mile away was the burial ground and Alex could see the multitude of small white grave markers shimmering in the distance. It was a predominately Christian cemetery, tolerated by
the
camp administrators
and
divided by nationality for practical purposes. There
was a Jewish graveyard too, ten times the size and located far beyond the hills to the east. All Jews went to work at the Site, without exception. No one gave much for their survival and no one dared ask.

As he shielded his eyes against the setting sun, Alex could see several others making their way to and from the gravesite, their silhouettes quivering in the heat haze. He took a long swig from a water bottle and set off across the desert floor.

By the time he reached the cemetery, the shadows were beginning to lengthen. He moved slowly through the centre, past the neat rows of German, Italian, French, Dutch and Spanish graves and towards the far edge of the burial ground, where the new arrivals waited, wrapped in white sheets and bound by ropes. His fellow gravediggers waited too, shovels in hand, playfully teasing Alex for his tardiness.

They got to
work, scratching at the hard desert floor until the sweat dripped from their beards and the dirt piled high beside them. It took an hour to complete the pit and lay the bodies to rest. The Dutchman, Boeker, recited some lines from the Bible, the
freshly painted
headboard was hammered home with a shovel, and that was that. After the others had left, Alex reached inside the pocket of his loose trousers and produced a handful of small pebbles. Kneeling down, he placed them on the ground around the grave, forming a loose border, something that would give this final resting place a little more permanence and dignity. Besides, he was in no rush to get back.

He stood up, dusting the sand off his knees. The graveyard had grown fast in the last year, and wooden grave markers stretched for hundreds of yards in all directions. Here and there, men walked between the rows of white-painted headboards in silent contemplation or chatted quietly in small groups. People spoke of a sense of peace here, a place where man could find solace and comfort in the quiet of the desert and the stillness of the cemetery. Alex had never been particularly religious, but he often thanked God that he’d
been selected
as a gravedigger. It kept him away from the Site and, for that, he remained grateful.

B
ut lately, as the last vestiges of hope faded, he’d become resigned to his fate. Only one thing kept him going, stopped him from following the sun out beyond the horizon.

Shielding his eyes, he watched the huge red orb as it dipped to the west. Somewhere out there his son was growing up in a world without him. Yes, a son, Alex smiled to himself. Something told him the child was a boy. In many ways Alex considered himself lucky, that he didn’t have a memory of a baby that had features and a personality
all of its own. Occasionally, he would try and form a mental image of what the child might look like, or sound like, how he slept, ate and played. Or how he smiled. It was natural curiosity, of course, but when the images became too painful he banished them from his mind. Alex didn’t harbour any illusions that he would ever see the kid, but he hoped he would grow up safe and happy, and that Kirsty would make sure that his father wouldn’t be forgotten. Because, short of a miracle, this was where his life would end, buried out here in an empty desert with only a wooden headboard to mark his final resting place.

Alex watched the setting sun for a few more minutes then headed off. He made his way slowly through the lines of graves and set off across the white sands of the desert, back to the sprawling camp that shimmered in the distant haze.

Inside the walls of his opulent home in Warwick Square, the Emir led the two brothers down a narrow staircase into a large basement area. They were perfect candidates, the Emir decided. They had carried out a difficult task already, finding their way back into the city after dark, but the remainder of the mission was still fraught with danger. What they required now was intelligence
as well as courage, qualities he’d been assured both men possessed. But they also needed faith. To put one’s life willingly into the hands of others, especially when those others were strangers with strong ties to Arabia, took a giant leap of faith. Yet, faith in the success of their mission and its aftermath
was all the boys had. Without it they were nothing, doomed to a servile existence within the city walls and a life of squalor outside them.

The boys followed the Emir through the
brightly lit
basement to a large steel locker that was fixed to a whitewashed wall. The Emir opened it, revealing polishes and cleaning rags, bottles of detergent and several pairs of overalls. He squatted down with some difficulty, fumbling around inside the locker until he heard a soft click. Satisfied, he lifted a false panel to reveal an empty space below the floor, retrieving a clear plastic pouch that contained a roll of black cloth.

‘Come,’ he puffed. They
sat down at a long wooden bench in the middle of the basement. The Emir opened the pouch and laid the transparent dark cloth on the bench. He pointed to the red-haired boy, the one with steel in his eyes.

‘Put this on beneath your clothes.’

The boy quickly removed his black smock and pulled the wafer-thin vest over his head. He swung his arms about and stretched, testing the flexibility of the strange material. He eyed the Emir quizzically.

‘It is comfortable,
is it not?’ noted the Emir. ‘Yet the material
is strong
and possesses a certain quality. It is the latest technology from the Americas.’

The boys’ eyes met at the mention of the word. The Americas, where lives were lived long and fruitfully, where light and power were never rationed, where poverty and sickness were non-existent, where there were mountains and lakes and the freedom to roam them. It was Paradise.

But to get to Paradise one must first sacrifice, the Emir often reminded young fighters like these. There
was a price to pay for everything, and the price for a place on a ship to the New World was a mission of great importance. Like this one. The attack would remind the Rulers that there was still some fight left in this nation, that its people hadn’t forgotten a history that successive regimes had stifled and buried. When the blow was struck the word would spread, even
to the camps in the north, and maybe
as far as the Borderlands,
from
where the first fighters had
originated.

History told that the invading Arabian armies had stopped short of the cold, snow-capped
hills that heralded the gateway to the Borderlands, had tired of the struggle against the guerrilla fighters who lived in the impenetrable
forests and beneath the deserted cities. Even now, over two hundred years since the Great Invasion, the guerrillas continued to probe the Wall, the massive fortification that stretched from coast to coast, constructed to keep Arabia’s enemies penned inside what was once called Scotland. Border troops manned its high walls and gazed out across the stormy frontier, shivering in the cold winds and thick snows that swept down from the north.

The Emir spent the next hour explaining how best to use the vest and where to place it for maximum effect, outlining the plan on a simple chalkboard. They went over the instructions
several times; the boys were not stupid, but speed was of the essence and they rehearsed the practical side of the operation with specially constructed props.

He watched them carefully
as their hands displayed a speed and dexterity that was impressive beyond their years. Despite their mundane lives and menial employment, they had maintained a decent level of physical fitness and mental sharpness. That in itself was an achievement for mere Workers, realised the Emir. The drudgery of their existence, the poor diet and squalid living conditions tended to crush a man’s spirit long before he reached his middle years. But these young men were different, their courage to be applauded. Secretly, of course.

The Emir checked the time; it was almost sunrise. Soon the first Worker trains would enter the city, the buses would fill, the subways transporting them to their places of employment. The boys had to report to the Chambers
of Justice by seven o’clock. It was time to leave.

On the Emir’s instructions, the brothers snapped new security bracelets around
their wrists. He ushered them upstairs and out through the kitchens to a large garage, where they came face to face with the Emir’s official vehicle, a silver Bentley limousine. It was a splendid vehicle, petrol-driven of course, a symbol of the Emir’s rank and standing within Arabian society. The Emir nodded to his manservant Ali, who quickly removed the rear seat. Underneath
was a hollow compartment.

‘Do not worry,’ the Emir assured them. ‘The
ride is short and the space below is adequate.
Here are the tools you will need.’

He handed over a small nylon bag, indicating they should climb into the recess. Ali locked the thick leather seat back into position and the Emir settled his heavy frame on top of it. At
six-thirty
am precisely, the car glided out into Warwick Square and turned east towards the river. There was no traffic to speak of and the Emir noticed only one or two pedestrians on the streets. So much the better, for
today was all about timing. Now that the sun had risen, the night patrols would soon be stood down, the shift changes meaning fewer uniforms on the streets. And he had timed it well. As the car continued on its journey, the Emir didn’t see a single policeman.

When they reached the road that swept past the lush, well-tended gardens of the Chambers of Justice, the Emir looked beyond the neat rows of palms that ringed the building and up towards the dome that glowed a warm bronze in the morning sun. So many laws passed under that high arch, so much oppression heaped upon the people that inhabited the derelict Workers’ camps around the country. The military battles may have been won long ago but, for the Workers who inhabited this island, the struggle continued.

The
Emir thought about the site on which the Chambers
stood, the significance to British history that the whole area held. It was the site that once housed the first parliament building and an abbey that had crowned British kings and queens for a thousand
years. Both buildings were gone now, replaced by a symbol of Arabian occupation that gave so much freedom to the few, while denying it to so many others.

The Emir seethed at the injustice of it all, his plump fists balling in his lap. He himself had hidden his own past well, rising to his present position of moderate power and influence amongst the Arabians. He held a seat on the city’s policy committee and governed his own protectorate down in the Southern Territories, far beyond the wastelands, where the rich enjoyed the sea air in their coastal palaces. Yes, the Emir had achieved much through his wide network of powerful connections and his faithful obedience to the system. But it only served to mask his true motives, to free the Workers from the poverty in which they existed, to end the persecutions they endured, condemned for the faith that some still practised in crude places of worship across the camps and in the wastelands beyond.

There were others like him too, decent Arabians who secretly served another God, determined to change the laws of an empire that stretched from the Borderlands to the foothills of Kazakhstan far to the east, where the battles with the Chinese still raged. It was an empire vast in size and the Emir often felt like a single ant nipping at the thick hide of a giant elephant, tiny, inconsequential. But, if enough ants could be persuaded to attack that great beast, well
,
maybe things could change.

The Bentley hummed past the Chambers of Justice and continued north before gliding to the kerb by a large,
well kept
park adjacent to the riverbank. His eyes drifted across the road, to the twenty-metre high statue that dissected the highway, up towards the chiselled marble features of General Faris Mousa, one of the first Arabian soldiers to land on these shores during the Great Invasion. Mousa had been a much-admired soldier, earning his place in Arabian history as one of the architects of the fall of Europe. He’d died, along with thousands of
others, when Chinese Special Forces had detonated a tactical nuclear weapon in
New Delhi, just before the Nepalese offensive.

Beyond Mousa’s
gleaming edifice stood another memorial to the Great Invasion. The small street had been preserved for historic purposes and already a small crowd of tourists, fresh in from the Gulf no doubt, had formed a queue outside the bomb-damaged and pock-marked buildings. It was a strange site, incongruous amongst the ornamental gardens that now surrounded it, but the remnants of Downing Street still drew the crowds.

Further to
the
east, the
Gold
Mosque squatted magnificently where Buckingham Palace had once stood, its towering minarets reaching up into the dawn sky. Soon the call to prayer would begin, and he intended to be in his usual place inside that magnificent
building
as the first notes echoed across London.

The Emir slid across his seat and powered down the window, glancing at the pavement. The front tyre was directly in line with the faint chalk mark on the kerbstone. He nodded to a watching Ali in the rear-view mirror and the Bentley’s engine was shut off. That was the signal.

As Ali feigned
concern over the off-side front tyre, the boys twisted beneath the rear seat and slid open the lower floor of their hiding place. Beneath them was the surface of the road and a wide drainage inspection cover. From the nylon bag, one of the boys produced a special tool and twisted it into a central slot on the face of the cover, lifting the metal grid out of its recess. He placed it carefully to one side and pulled himself down into the drain, twisting his body around and descending the iron ladder cemented into the drain wall. The other boy did the same, tapping three times on the exhaust pipe before sliding the inspection cover back in place above his head.

He joined his brother down on the lower level, finding himself in a wide, dry intersection of rainwater drains. The
rainy season was still some months off, so they were safe from the annual deluges that London endured. Above them, the Bentley’s engine purred into life and the car pulled away from the kerb. So far, so good. Now it was in God’s hands.

One of the boys produced a compass and a small, hand-drawn map from the bag. Taking a bearing, they headed south along the tunnel, darting through the shafts of sunlight that beamed down from the drains above. They continued for another hundred metres and stopped. There.

At their feet was another inspection hatch, thick with filth and rusted around its edges. Using the same tool, one of the boys knelt down and, with a stifled grunt, heaved the cover off. The other man clicked on his pen-torch and shone it down the black shaft at their feet. Hand-holds cut into the old brick walls served as ladder rungs and the bottom of the shaft looked to be about five metres below them. Quickly, both boys climbed into the shaft, replacing the cover above them. At the bottom they found themselves in a well of darkness. With the help
of the torch, they discovered a long, narrow tunnel that disappeared into inky blackness in either direction, exactly as they had been told to expect. Down here, the tunnel was smaller and the air was musty and damp, a thin layer of moisture coating the curved brick walls. This was part of the old city that was built many years ago, long before the invasion, and the smell of the river was strong down here. Another compass bearing was taken and the boys headed south.

As they moved they felt a deep rumbling beneath their feet that reverberated around the walls. They were getting closer. Presently they found themselves in a darkened cavern, the brick ceiling arching high over their heads. There seemed to be lots of old equipment here, much of which they didn’t recognise. There were piles of steel rails and indistinguishable metal objects, old crates filled with rags and brushes and wheeled trolleys full of portable warning signs. To their right, rail tracks snaked away into the darkness alongside a concrete walkway. It appeared to be some kind of workshop, except that this equipment hadn’t been used for years.

With no further use for the contents, the boys dumped the nylon bag, moving silently along the concrete walkway until they reached another tunnel. The torch beam glinted off the tracks to their left and the rumbling they’d heard earlier grew louder and more frequent. Ahead they could see a dull wash of light against the far wall and switched off the torch. The tunnel curved to the right and now they slowed their progress. The distant rumble grew in volume until it seemed to shake the very ground beneath their feet. Using the noise as cover, they scurried towards the tunnel junction.

The underground train roared past them, the light of its carriages banishing the darkness. The boys waited until the train’s brakes squealed in protest and the last carriage flashed by. The torch was discarded and they turned quickly into the tunnel, following the rapidly slowing train. With a loud blast of compressed air it shuddered to a stop, and ahead they saw the platform of Justice Station. They passed the rear carriage of the train and walked quickly up a small ramp that led to the passenger concourse.