The Border Reiver (20 page)

They passed the bus depot which was now ablaze. Nat knew the reason: their buses were being used by the NSO. But not anymore - five of them burned where they stood. The journey continued down a left hand turn, the narrow road leading to the river. The convoy stopped in the middle of the road a good mile out from the river. Nat bumped the car up onto the verge behind another. There were cars and people everywhere, hundreds of them. Everyone was armed, some with shotguns and hunting rifles; but, others, most, were carrying new shiny military hardware such as automatic rifles, heavy machine guns and some had hand held rocket launchers. Stuart was nudging Nat, pointing at the new weapons and repeating, “It’s gotta be Scottish Army gear, aye, Nat, look, it’s gotta be from the Scots”.

As they got out of the car, the atmosphere hit them. The sound of boots on the tarmac and the metallic clicking and grinding of weapons were the only sounds, but due to the sheer numbers involved those sounds made a swarm- like din. The vocal silence was eerie, but the atmosphere was tense, electric and heated to boiling point. They could see in the faces around them that they were fired up and itching for a fight.

Nat barged and thugged his way through the maelstrom, the heaving mass of men and women, young and old, marginalised by the regime, hungry for revolt and baying for blood. Stuart trod at Nat's shoulder, Amber floated in their wake. He followed the young Rowell; he didn’t know where to, he just followed through the chaos down the muddy path towards Waters Meet. The beautiful meeting point of the turbulent South Tyne and the languid North Tyne rivers. A spot Nat had been in the past to swim across the frigid waters from Kielder Reservoir that filled the North Tyne to the milder natural flow of the South Tyne.

Unrecognisable this day, the ground was being churned up in the thickening crowds. As they burrowed their way further into the army, the noise of energy barked and hollered from every direction. Through the trees came the glow of lights and the ever-present sound of the steel grinding and springs clicking - the metal of weapons being readied. They were the sounds heard over a dull, hushed drone of lowered voices.

Nat could see in the faces around him a steady determined concentration driven by fear and desperation. There were accents from all over the country but predominantly the Northumbrian lilt and borders Scots came through. Many of those marshalling small groups into units were Scottish and the weapon being carried by most of the people present was the SAR90 the standard assault rifle of the Scottish Army.

Nat caught the nod from Stuart, he had been right, both men realised that the Rowells were being organised and armed by the Scots military. They suddenly felt a reassuring acceptance that this was an orchestrated revolt against the regime in which the Scots wanted all the players, especially those who had recently courted some fame or infamy depending on your viewpoint. The leathery farmer didn’t care, he wanted to save his friend and kill whoever was left of the raiding party; he was a willing pawn.

They approached the tunnel under the disused railway line, there was a fire burning and so the crowds within it glowed with a flickering orange and gold. He saw Old Man Rowell sitting to one side while his eldest belted out instructions to those around him. Nat and Stuart nodded to the ruddy round-faced old man and passed the circle around the fire, absorbing the image of those young men coming to terms with the gravity of the unfolding situation. Rowell's eldest, Phalin, raised his gun in the air acknowledging the newcomers and returned to his rant.

Like the eye of the storm the three came to rest with their backs against the side of the tunnel, still, calm, watching the human commotion before them. Amber checked her weapons; she had a new automatic weapon taken from the NSO, a handgun and, of course, the hunting knife her father had painstakingly taught her how to use.

“What do you think?” Nat asked Stuart.

“We go in, get Claire and fuck off,” replied Stuart.

“You think they’ll win?”

“Maybe…who knows? But I don’t want to be in town when the air force arrives.”

“Aye.”

Nat looked down at his daughter; she looked so young for a moment. He put a big hand down on the auburn curls covering the back of her neck.

“You stay close to me and him, ok. If you’re not next to one of us, you’re low to the ground and in shadow, ok.”

She looked up from where she rested on her haunches and smiled nodding briefly.

Nat looked around the milieu, these moments of reality never as paralysing as the thought of them. For those few seconds, he picked out faces that he recognised - farm hands, labourers, gamekeepers, his postman - a few weeks ago this scene would have been inconceivable. Now these men and women prepared to fight as an army for a region which was theirs through the blood and sweat of generations before them. These were the people who believed in the regime’s original message, before it had been rapidly warped and abused by those in charge. It dawned on him then that these people would never stop fighting. The NSO would never contain this part of the country because these people had no choice, this land was their blood and they had fought over it for centuries. They were exactly like him, one and all.

Calls came across the line and the army quietened down, slowly beginning to form some sort of procession, bottle necking its way up the steep bank and onto the disused railway above their heads. Calls of ‘stay off the bridge’ came from above as the sheer weight of numbers could cause the old structure to collapse. Nat, Stuart and Amber joined the procession, now eerily quiet, the heat and smell of all the bodies and the electricity of expectation filled the air with a feral energy. As he climbed the slope up to the railway line, Nat heard the roar of powerful engines through the trees. The headlights danced between the branches and he realised the Rowell brothers, or whoever was organising this army, had made preparations for some kind of vehicular support for the men on the ground.

A short man whose head Nat was looking over caught his eye. “That’s John, Rowell's middle boy; he’s a great fighter but wild. He’s off to raid the food banks out at Whittonstall.”

“What do you mean food banks?” Nat asked.

“There’s no trade anymore as far as food is concerned; it all goes straight to Whittontsall, where it is stored and distributed through the Northeast…all fresh produce. It’s well you stopped farming, Nat; they take it all now.”

“This John, don’t we need him tonight?”

“Don’t worry, if we need him he’ll be there. He blew the factory…he won't let us down. He's like you, Mr Bell.”

Nat looked down at the man in front of him, caught out by his comment and with no idea what to say in return. His eyes moved on down the column without a word. They began the two-mile journey south to Hexham as the convoy of vehicles rumbled off to the east. The march was slow going as the column compacted and stretched like a concertina. There was little talk.

The rain clouds had parted. The deepening night sky was as clear as a dark sapphire cut to a million points as the stars blazed down on them. After twenty minutes or so Nat noticed up ahead the column was becoming more congested and people were dropping out briefly to the left before re-joining the army. He couldn’t make out what was going on in the failing light, but slowly they drew closer and up alongside an old hawthorn tree. There, someone had left a battered guitar with a note scratched onto the rosewood which read ‘hands off…I’ll be back for this’. Surrounding the guitar others had left their most treasured possessions, from wedding rings and necklaces to photographs and clothes. As they passed, Nat saw Amber break from the crowd. As she hung her mother’s necklace upon the tree, she turned to look at her father, his eyes piercing, but he bit his tongue, he didn’t feel or care for any superstition.

After an hour, they reached the river and crossed in single file over the ruin of the old railway bridge. All that was left of the iron structure were four massive stone pillars and two huge girders spanning the river. The river was not deep or raging, but it was a good twenty feet below so each person gave the person in front plenty of room. As they stepped off the other side, Nat, Amber and Stuart were still together. They looked around them. There must have been four or five hundred people on the bank of the river with the same amount still behind them crossing and waiting to cross the bridge. Nat tapped his two companions and began leading them off into the shadows when teams ran along the banks telling the force to fan out all along the river in readiness to sweep into town over the golf course.

Nat wanted to head due south past the clubhouse, down the main drive to the golf course, meeting the Haydon Bridge road about three-quarters of a mile west of the police station where Claire was being held. It seemed that this plan closely resembled the main forces’ and so he stayed with them, adjudging the three of them could slip away at any point.

*    *    *    *    *

“Why aren’t you on the ground yet, Beaston?” screamed Start down the cell phone that lay on the desk. He stood in front of it. His face was bright red, and he was leaning on his white, clenched knuckles. The crunch, wail and grind of the military vehicle powering along created a great deal of distraction.

“Sir, I did not want to showcase our convoy of thirty-two military vehicles. Which I understand can be viewed from hundreds of vantage points along the valley where our enemy are camped out. So I took a rougher but far more clandestine route over the moors from Blanchland. We are two miles out from the school where we will set up camp.”

“Ok, ok, just get your men on the ground and crush these bastards! I’ve got the Cornish coming up my arse and the Geordies down my neck, we can’t let this escalate. Do you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, sir. Don’t worry, we will control this end. Do we have drone back up, and what are your orders in terms of contact?”

“Yes, drones will be available from later today or tomorrow latest. You meet resistance, you use all necessary force; and, if you think you are meeting passive resistance, harbouring or human shielding, you do whatever is necessary, you hear, whatever you have to do.”

“Ok, sir, thank you. I’ll report back at one hundred hours.” The phone clicked off. Start looked up from the table at his advisors.

“You have to make these calls, Lucas,” said Steve Jones, the man who was shadowing his leader closest now. Start was beginning to rely more and more on his kowtowing. It was easier than looking across the table at his old friend Baines, whom he remained unsure of.

It was true Baines had pledged his allegiance but Start was all too aware that words were cheap. Baines himself was torn; he currently looked at Start with a face that showed his sadness. He watched everything that he had worked for, his life's work fall to pieces before him, helpless to turn it around because Start had already gone too far.

It was no longer possible to lead the population into his model of collectivism because Start’s thugs had destroyed the trust. They controlled the cities, but the heartland of staple production, the countryside, was lost. Now that the food supply and waste disposal services were suffering there was increasing unrest in the cities also.

His vision was slipping away and would certainly vanish under Start. On the other hand, Baines wanted to see the farmer pay for what he had done to his brother, and the simplest way to make that happen was to leave Start to crush the uprising. So, for now, his interest lay in the border war. As he sat watching Start’s sweating brow and the rain drops dribble down the window behind his head, he rested back in his chair and let the carnage unfold before him. After the farmer was dead, then he would reclaim his future.

*    *    *    *    *

The convoy of heavy military vehicles pulled into the car park and tennis courts of the local school. Beaston gathered his officers to his truck and spelled out his tactics for the day. He took the rolled up map of Hexham that he had studied on the journey - it was a town easily defended with the right organisation. The centre sits high up the valley side from the northern quarter where the out of town shopping, leisure centre, cattle mart and industrial park are located. It was in this location that Beaston wanted his troops to meet the rebels. It was here that the battle would be open and the NSO training, however brief, would prove invaluable for his men.

The small, wiry general was also keen, however, to stop the rebels entering the higher ground in the town. So he gave particular instructions for a third of his men to blockade the roads leading into the town with the use of the vehicles, and it was on these placements that the heavy weapons should be situated.

In a previous life, Beaston had toured Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt and Greece with the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. He knew about street warfare and he knew that the rebels could amass and dissolve like a flock of starlings if they were allowed into the narrow winding streets of their home town with its sympathetic front doors. The NSO force was to move quickly into the streets of the town, blockading routes in so that the rebels would have to stand and fight, something he was eager to discover their hunger for.

His men totalled over five hundred at the moment, although Start had seen to it that that figure would treble in the next twenty-four hours. He looked up to the night’s sky, his sharp nose and chin pointing the way. He was a fidgety man of fast precise movement. He snatched his cell phone from the breast pocket of his woodland greens. He waited impatiently while the phone repeated its monotonous burps. Finally, he heard a voice at the other end.