The Human Front (6 page)

I did not get involved in them. The first petrol-bombing, in January 1975, happened when I was in Glasgow. The first return fire from a group of U.S. naval officers trapped in a stalled and surrounded staff car on the coast road—they’d started going further afield, to the quieter, smaller resort of Largs—took place in February, also midweek, when I was definitely not in Greenock. I read a brief report of it in the
Glasgow Herald.

What was going on in Glasgow was political stuff, anti-war agitation, leafleting and picketing, that sort of thing. We took a hundred people from Glasgow to the
big autumn demo in London. A hundred thousand or so converged on Grosvenor Square, with a militant contingent of ten thousand people chanting “We shall fight! We shall win!” (we all agreed on that) and the Front’s hotheads following it up with “Joe! Joe! Joe Sta-lin!” or “Long live Chairman Lin!” and the Trots trying to drown us out with a roar of “London! Paris! Rome! Berlin!”

It was fun. I was serious. I knuckled down to the study of chemistry and physics (at Glasgow they still called the latter “Natural Philosophy”) which had always fascinated me. The Officer Training Corps would have been a risky proposition for me—even my very limited public political activity would have exposed me to endless hassles and security checks—but I joined the university’s rifle club, which shared a shooting range and an armoury with the OTC. And I was still, of course, in the Reserves. Following the Front’s advice, I kept out of trouble and bided my time.

I had seen the diagram a hundred times, and its physical manifestation, the iron filings forming furry field-lines on a sheet of paper with a magnet under it, in my first-year physics class at High School. I had balanced magnets on top of each other, my fingers preventing them from flicking around and clicking together, and had felt the uncanny invisible spring pushing them apart. It was late one night in February 1975 when I was alone in my room, propping my head over an open physics textbook, that I first connected that sensation with my childhood chance
observation of the curiously unstable motion of an anti-gravity bomber close to the ground, and with the magnetic field lines.

Was it possible, I wondered, that anti-gravity was a polar opposite of gravity, that keeping it stable was like balancing two magnets one upon the other, and that the field generated by the ship had the same shape as that of a magnet? If so, any missile approaching an AHAB bomber from above or below would be deflected, whereas one directed precisely at its edge, where the two poles of the field balanced, might well get through. The crippled bomber I’d seen had taken a hit edge-on, if that distant memory was reliable. The chance of that happening accidentally, even in a long war, might be slim enough for to have happened only once. Yet the consequences of doing it deliberately were so awesome that this very possibility might well be the secret which the dark-suited security men had been so anxious to maintain. It seemed much more significant than the minor, if grim, detail that the pilots were children or dwarfs.

It was an interesting thought, and I considered whether it might be possible to pass it upwards through the Front and thence across to the revolutionary air forces. Come to think of it, to pass on all I knew, and all I’d seen at Aird. The thought made me shiver. I could not get away from the idea, so firmly instilled by my parents, that anything I might say along those lines would be traced back to me, and to them.

The Allied states, and Britain in particular, had at the time a sharp discontinuity in tolerance—their liberal and democratic self-definition almost forced them to put
up with radical opposition, and to treat violent opposition as civil disorder rather treason; while at the same time the necessities of the long war inclined them to totalitarian methods of maintaining military and state secrecy. A Front supporter could preach defeatism openly, and would receive at the worst police harassment and mob violence. A spy, or anyone under suspicion of materially aiding the enemy, would disappear and never be heard of again, or be summarily tried and executed. Rumours of torture cells and concentration camps proliferated. To what extent these were true was hard to judge, but irrelevant to their effect.

So I kept my theory to myself, and sought confirmation or refutation of it in war memoirs. Most from the Red side were stilted and turgid. Those from former Allied soldiers were usually better written, even if sensationalised. If these accounts were reliable at all, the AHAB bombers were occasionally used for close air support and even medevac, in situations where (as my careful crosschecking made clear) there was little actual fighting in the vicinity and the weather was too violent for helicopters or other conventional aircraft.

I put my ideas about that on the back burner and got on with my work, until the Front had work for me. I left my studies without regret. It was like another call-up, and another calling.

Davey stopped screaming when the morphine jab kicked in. Blood was still soaking from his trouser-leg all over the back seat of the stolen getaway car. He’d taken a
high-velocity bullet just below the knee. Whatever was holding his shin on, it wasn’t bone. In the yellow backstreet sodium light all our faces looked sick and strange, but his was white. He sprawled, head and trunk in the rear footwell, legs on the back seat. I crouched beside him, holding the tourniquet, only slowing down the blood loss.

Andy, in the driver’s seat, looked back over his shoulder.

“Take him tae the hospital?”

It was just up the road—we were parked, engine idling, in a back lane by the sugarhouse. The molasses smell was heavy, the fog damp and smoky.

“We could dump him and run,” Gordon added pointedly, looking out and not looking back.

Save his leg and maybe his life for prison or an internment camp. No chance. But the Front’s clandestine field hospitals were already overloaded tonight—we knew that from the news on the car radio alone.

“West End,” I said. “Top of South Street.”

Andy slid the car into gear and we slewed the corner, drove up past the hospital and the West Station and around the roundabout at a legal speed that had me seething, even though I knew it was necessary. No Army patrols in this part of town, but there was no point in getting pulled by the cops for a traffic offence.

We stopped in a dark spot around the corner from my parents’ house. Andy drove off to dump the car and Gordon and I lugged Davey through a door in a wall, past the backs of a couple of gardens, over a fence and into the back porch. I still had the keys. It had been two years since I’d last used them.

Balaclava off, rifle left behind the doorway, into the kitchen, light on. Somebody was already moving upstairs. I heard the sound of a shotgun breech closing.

“Malcolm!” I shouted, past the living-room door. “It’s just me!”

He made some soothing sounds, then said something firmer, and padded downstairs and appeared in the living-room doorway, still knotting his dressing-gown. His face looked drawn in pencil, all grey lines. Charcoal shadows under the eyes. He started towards me.

“You’re hurt!”

“It’s not my blood,” I said.

His mouth thinned. “I see,” he said. “Bring him in. Kitchen floor.”

Gordon and I laid Davey out on the tiles, under the single fluorescent tube. The venetian blind in the window was already closed. My father reappeared, with his black bag. He washed his hands at the sink, stepped aside.

“Kettle,” he said.

I filled it and switched it on. He was scissoring the trouser-leg.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Get this man to a hospital. I’m not a surgeon.”

“No can do,” I said. “Do what you can.”

“I can stop him going into shock, and I can clean up and bandage.” He looked up at me. “Top left cupboard. Saline bag, tube, needle.”

I held the saline drip while he inserted the needle. The kettle boiled. He sterilised a scalpel and forceps, tore open a bag of sterile swabs, and got to work quickly. After about five minutes he had Davey’s wound cleaned and
bandaged, the damaged leg splinted and both legs up on cushions on the floor. A dose of straight heroin topped up the morphine.

“Right,” Malcolm said. “He’ll live. If you want to save the leg, he must get to surgery right away.”

He glared at us. “Don’t you bastards have field hospitals?”

“Overloaded,” I said.

His nose wrinkled. “Busy night, huh?”

Davey was coming to.

“Take me in,” he said. “I’ll no talk.”

My father looked down at him.

“You’ll talk,” he said; then, after a deep breath that pained him somehow: “But I won’t. I’ll take him to the Royal, swear I saw him caught in crossfire.” He looked out at the rifles in the back porch, and frowned at me. “Any powder on him?”

I shook my head, miserably.

“We didn’t even get a shot in ourselves.”

“Too bad,” he said dryly. “Right, you come with me, and you, mister,” he told Gordon, “get yourself and your guns out of here before I see you, or them.”

Gordon glanced at me. I nodded.

“Through the cemetery,” I said.

I only just remembered to remove the revolver from Davey’s jacket pocket. My mother suddenly appeared, gave me a tearful but silent hug, and started mopping the floor.

We straightened out a story on the way down, and I disappeared out of the car while my father went inside and got a couple of orderlies out with a stretcher.
Ambulances came and went, sirens blaring, lights flashing. A lot of uniforms about. By this time we were fighting the Brits as well as the Yanks. After a few minutes Malcolm returned, and I stepped out of the shadows and slid into the car.

“They bought it,” he said. He lit a cigarette and coughed horribly. “Back to the house for a minute? Talk to your mother?”

“Dangerous for us all,” I said. “If you could drop me off up at Barr’s Cottage, I’d appreciate it. Otherwise, I’ll hop out now.”

“I’ll take you.”

Past the station again, at a more sedate pace.

“Thank you,” I said, belatedly. “For everything.”

He grinned, keeping his eye on the road. “‘First, do no harm,’” he said. “Sort of thing.”

He drove in silence for a minute, around the roundabout and out along Inverkip Road. The walls and high trees of the cemetery passed on the right. Gordon was probably picking his way through the middle of it by now.

“I’ll give her your love,” he said. “Yes?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Won’t be seeing you again for another couple of years?”

“If that,” I answered, bleakly if honestly.

He turned off short of Barr’s Cottage, into a council estate, and pulled in, under a broken streetlamp. The glow from another cigarette lit his face.

“All right,” he said. “I have something to tell you.”

Another sigh, another bout of coughing.

”You may not see me again. Your mother doesn’t know this yet, but I’ve got six months. If that.”

“Oh, God,” I said.

“Cancer of the lung,” he said. “Lot of it about. Filthy air around here.” He crushed out the cigarette. “Stick to rural guerrilla warfare in future, old chap. It’s healthier than the urban variety.”

“I’ll fight where I’m—”

His face blurred. I sobbed on his shoulder.

“Enough,” he said. He held me away, gently.

“There’s no pain,” he assured me. “Whisky, tobacco, and heroin, three great blessings. And as the Greek said, nothing is terrible when you know that being nothing is not terrible. I’ll know when to ease myself out.”

“Oh, God,” I said again, very inaptly.

His yellow teeth glinted. “I have no worries about meeting my maker. But, ah, I do have something on my conscience. A monkey on my back, which I want to offload on yours.”

“All right,” I said.

He leaned back and closed his eyes.

“Another time I treated a leg with a very similar injury …” he said. “You were there then, too. You were much smaller, and so was the patient. You do remember?”

“Of course,” I said. My knees were shaking.

His eyes opened and he stared out through the windscreen.

“The last time we discussed this,” he said, “I suggested that you look into the origin of the bomber. No doubt you have read some books, given the matter thought, and drawn your own conclusions.”