Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (49 page)

He reached the mesh and got into a crouch, then pushed upwards with his hands. It wouldn’t budge.

‘Fuck.’

‘Use the gun, man,’ Murph urged. ‘Go ram it.’

Lexy took a firm hold of the weapon in both hands, pointing the muzzle away from his body, then slammed it upwards with every fear‐
multiplied ounce of strength he could muster. It flipped open on a hinge, then slammed shut again through its own weight. Lexy heaved to once more, this time following through with the butt to prevent a repeat, then levered it fully open and pulled himself up. He stepped clear and bent down to offer Murph a hand, but the wee man shot up through the hole like he had a trampette down there.

Lexy slammed the cover closed and looked around for something to place on top. They were in a short, curving, dead‐
end passageway with a bank of dials on one wall and several large chemical drums against the other.

‘Come on,’ Lexy said, running to one of the drums and attempting to push it. Murph joined him on the other side and between them they slid the hulking aluminium barrel on top of the drain.

Lexy panted from the effort and took hold of his gun again, turning just as a man in khaki combat trousers and matching jacket rounded the curve in front of them. He looked like a Nineties refugee, except Lexy didn’t imagine The Gap ever sold machine guns as accessories.

Reflex took over; it had to, because Lexy’s brain had no idea what to do. He dropped to his knees next to the drum, aimed his weapon and pulled the trigger.

It wouldn’t move. Murph, still standing, had the same degree of success.

Everybody in Khaki levelled his machine gun at chest height. ‘A hundred lines, boys,’ he said. ‘I must not leave the safety catch on. Now drop the guns.’

They both complied without delay, tossing the weapons to the floor and raising their hands without being prompted.

‘Oh Christ,’ said Wee Murph, his voice choking up.

Lexy was too scared to cry. His heart sounded like a trance mix and he was breathing in and out about twice a second.

‘Mercury, this is Mick Jones,’ Gap Man said, his voice coming at them both from his mouth and Murph’s radio. ‘I’ve got them.’

His accent didn’t match his name, and neither did his tanned and swarthy face. Wee Murph would probably have said he looked Turkish, but that was because Murph said everybody foreign looked Turkish, it being the only foreign destination he had ever visited.

‘Mercury here. The guns?’

‘Those too. You won’t believe it. It’s a couple of kids.’

‘Couple of wee neds, more like.’

‘Will I bring them in?’

‘No. Unfortunately for these little pricks, we’re well fixed for hostages. I don’t like people fucking with my property. Execute them and get yourself topside. You’re added to the look‐
out roster. Use any lift: all the aqueducts are dry now. Mercury out.’

Lexy felt a slumping sensation in his stomach, as though his heart and lungs had collapsed inside him. He looked at the barrel of the machine gun, then at the man’s eyes, where he saw no doubt, no conflict.

No mercy.

‘You were a good mate, Murph,’ he said, his voice dropping to a broken whisper as tears clouded his sight.

‘You an’ aw, Lexy.’

‘Nothing personal,’ their executioner told them, and pulled the trigger before Lexy could close his eyes.

Simon heard the two bursts of fire echo up through the machine hall from their source somewhere below, and felt the beginnings of calm settle about him. Just one problem finally being solved was enough to thoroughly alter his perspective: when there is zero progress on all fronts, a sense of hopelessness unavoidably sets in; but all it took was a single element falling into place to restore both confidence and optimism. It was more than a matter of having one fewer thing to worry about: it reminded him that such worry was an essential part of the job. Going right back to that fake passport for flight 941, there was always one factor that didn’t get sorted out until nail‐
bitingly close to curtain‐
up. In this case, it would be a pretty major factor, but it would happen in the end, and it would happen because he worried enough to make sure that it did.

Literally eliminating the unforeseen rogue elements had been the turning point; the intruders had been the source of all the problems, so it seemed almost poetic that their deaths should herald the onset of the solutions. He’d have to confess that it had therefore been a heart‐
in‐
mouth few seconds between the order and the kill. A turning point, yes, but one that could have turned either way. If Jones had chosen that as a highly inappropriate moment to grow a conscience, then it really would have been a sign that the mission was doomed.

As it happened, Jones didn’t let him down, but you could never be sure with the kiddie factor. People could be so absurdly sentimental about it, especially face‐
to‐
face. Christ knew how many kids were going to die when the water hit Cromlarig, and nobody had a problem carrying out the op, but put one right in front of them and there was always a danger that their brains would spontaneously turn to mush. In fact, it wasn’t merely absurd; the hypocrisy was sickening. People always made such a disproportionate fuss over the child victims, and bugger the rest. What was the cut‐
off point, Simon wanted to know, where they ceased to be eligible for special sympathy? Puberty? The age of consent? Or was there a sliding scale of tragedy about their deaths: maximum points for babies and toddlers, down to minimum in mid‐
teens, when they’re moody and objectionable and therefore mourned but not missed?

These two certainly weren’t going to be a great loss in the grand scheme of things. Two fewer sales for Limp Bizkit: what a fucking tragedy.

He’d order Lydon and Matlock to dispose of the bodies later, as their first lesson in the importance of keeping the truck locked and their eyes open. And unless they were suitably contrite, their second lesson would be a couple of bullets in the back of the head. Months of planning and reconnaissance, every component double‐
checked, every trace erased, every precaution taken, yet all it required was two inquisitive little bastards to sneak on board and the entire mission had been jeopardised. Jeopardised, but not thwarted, which luckily for them was the only thing that mattered right then. The turning point had come. Time and expertise, he knew, would do the rest.

And they did.

Over the next few hours, one by one the elements clicked tightly into place like a rifle being assembled. The production line at Deacon’s improvised electrical workshop started rolling at around four, beginning with one operational drill and followed shortly after by the generator. Drilling got underway topside at four‐
forty, supplemented a little over an hour later by the second appliance, Deacon’s initial pessimism proving misplaced.

The control‐
room phone started ringing just before six, the first of the dayshift workers based south of the road collapse waking up to the news on the radio and calling in to make his understandable excuses. Simon had the head engineer, one Michael Livingston, brought upstairs at gunpoint to take the call and to make a whole lot more. Livingston had to inform the visitor‐
centre staff that the place was closed and they had the day off, as well as ringing the nightshift’s other halves regarding the compulsory overtime. He would also be required to field the inevitable calls from the Grid regarding the facility’s temporary lack of output, in response to which he could accurately assure them that the water would definitely be in full flow by around three o’clock.

Simon was aware, he explained, that all of this provided Livingston with the opportunity to raise the alarm through some subtle form of subversion: calling someone by the wrong name, perhaps, or making an obscure reference that would communicate a surreptitious S O S.

‘So I just want you to know that if the authorities do show up, even by coincidence, the first thing I’ll do is shoot you in the balls. Then I’ll shoot you in the knees, and then the soles of your feet. And I promise I won’t finish you off until I have to leave, which in a hostage situation could be quite some time. The alternative is that you’re a good boy, you say your piece, we get our work done, and you all get to go home to your loved ones. Of course, you’ll also get to give statements and descriptions to the cops, but we’ll be long gone by then, so we won’t hold that against you. You have my word.’

‘What is it you want here?’ Livingston asked, curiosity temporarily edging out fear.

‘The less you know, the less reason I’ve got to kill you. Agreed?’

‘Agreed.’

Simon had heard it said that some actors gave their best performances when they were at their most nervous. Livingston could now be considered among them. His voice barely wavered throughout, and it was unlikely he’d be able to think up anything esoteric while his thoughts were dominated by the protection of his family jewels.

With no word of police interest from Simonon topside, the shield door was reopened at 7:45, in time to admit those dayshift workers lucky enough (ha) to live at the right end of the loch. At 8:30, a headcount was carried out, minus the stranded Crianfada contingent. With all staff accounted for, the shield door was closed once again and the newly restrained dayshift group were placed with the rest of the hostages in the now thoroughly reeking storage chamber. (Toilet trips for hostages were filed under ‘Negligence’ in Simon’s book. Aside from the security risk, people tended to feel a sight less defiant when their trousers were soaked with their own pish.)

By midday, drilling was almost complete, with May estimating they would be fully ready to rock’n’roll at around half past one.

Simon resisted the temptation to say ‘I told you so’. His abstinence was assisted by a reluctance to tempt fate, but he knew this was just irrational superstition. All the pieces were in place. The rifle was fully assembled, and would very soon be locked and loaded. After that, he only had to pull the trigger.

Nothing could go wrong now.

In the beginning, there was Doom.

Well, strictly speaking, in the beginning there was Castle Wolfenstein 3D, and if you wanted to get truly archeological about it, then in the beginning there was 3D Monster Maze for the Sinclair ZX81, requiring the optional 16k RAM pack, which was so heavy that its own weight frequently hauled it off the interface and crashed your machine.

To say it wasn’t much to look at was an undeserved kindness that cleverly avoided the ancillary issue of it having absolutely no sound. What it did have, however, was a first‐
person, three‐
dimensional perspective; even if it was a first‐
person, three‐
dimensional perspective of an amorphous black blob that was recognisable as a dinosaur only to those who had read the cassette‐
sleeve and were sleep‐
deprived to the point of hallucination from staying up all night trying to play the fucking thing. The game was, nonetheless, genuinely creepy, with the lack of sound arguably adding to the effect: when you know there’s an invincible enemy stalking you but you can hear nothing and can see only a long corridor stretching out ahead, the atmosphere can get absurdly tense. Throw in the constant anxiety that the ZX81 is about to crash and you’ve got the original high‐
adrenaline 3D gaming experience, which any history of the first‐
person shooter genre would ultimately lead back to.

The technology had advanced exponentially over Ray’s lifetime, and with it, so had the boundaries of the programmers’ imaginations. There were new genres, indeed whole new concepts developing, as ZX Spectrum gave way to Amiga, Amiga to PC, 486 to Pentium, CPU to GPU. Doom looked as primitive now as it had made its black‐
and‐
white antecedent look then, but when it came along in ’94, it provided an experience far more frightening and ten times as involving as any horror movie; and it was enjoyed all the more by those who had once felt the hairs on their necks stand on end while exploring those black‐
and‐
white corridors, trying to evade ASCII‐
rendered death.

For more than twenty years, Ray had been roaming those computer‐
generated mazes and getting as much from them as an adult as he had as a geeky teen. This was not, he would fiercely contend, because he had never grown up; he had, and could point to the wife, wean, job and mortgage to prove it. It was because the games had grown up with him. If he was still playing pixelated and antiquated teen‐
era fare such as Jet Set Willy or Skool Daze for hours on end, then yes, he’d be referring himself for therapy (the occasional late‐
night drunken resort to a ZX Spectrum emulator for nostalgia purposes didn’t count), but gaming had turned into something much more. Between the virtual environments within the games and the social subculture surrounding them, it provided what often seemed like a whole other world. Sometimes it was a world Ray knew he was retreating to, but mostly it was a place that augmented the world he was already in, a place to visit in order to meet old and new friends and to have a good time. Not for nothing was his favourite newsgroup called games.pub.

‘But don’t these games make you violent?’ he was unavoidably asked, by people who had never played; just like it was people who never watched horror movies who wanted Video nasties’ banned back in the early Eighties. Ray regarded this as such a frank confession of the questioner’s stupidity that he considered it futile to even respond. His favourite maps back in the early Quake days were The Abandoned Base (DM3) and The Cistern (DM5), because both contained the vastly entertaining combination of the Lightning Gun, the Pentagram of Protection and large quantities of H
₂
O. The funniest and most satisfying trick in the game was to grab the LG and the invulnerability power‐
up, then hop into the drink and pull the trigger, instantly frying everyone else who happened to be in the water. Pretty soon players began to interpret the distinctive sound of the Pentagram as ‘Everybody out of the pool’, but now and again you still caught out a few newbies or someone who just couldn’t get clear in time.