The Human Front (7 page)

”Yes,” I said, “I certainly have, it’s a—”

He held up one hand. “Keep it,” he said. “I’ve had a lot longer to think about the origin of the pilot. My first thought was the same as yours, that it was a child. Then, when I got, ah, a closer look, I must confess that my second thought was that I was seeing the work of … another Mengele. The grey skin, the four digits on hands and feet, the huge eyes, the coppery colour of the blood … I thought for years that this was the result of some perverted Nazi science, you know. But, like you, I’ve read a great deal since. And as a medical man, I know what can and can’t be done. No rare syndrome, no surgery, no mutation, no foul tinkering with the germ-plasm could have made that body. It was not a deformed human body. It was a perfectly healthy, normal body, but it was not human.”

He turned to me, shaking his head. “The memory plays tricks, of course. But in retrospect, and even taking that into account, I believe that the pilot was not only not human, but not mammalian. I’m not even sure that he was a
vertebrate.
The bones in the leg were—”

His cheek twitched. “Like broken plastic, and hollow. Thin-walled, and filled with rigid tubes and struts rather than spongy bone and marrow.”

I felt like giggling.

“You’re saying the pilot was from
another planet?”

“No,” he said, sharply. “I’m not. I’m telling you what I
saw.”
He waved a hand, his cigarette tip tracing a jiggly red line. “For all I know, the pilot may be a specimen of some race of intelligent beings that evolved on Earth and lurks unseen in the depths of the fucking Congo, or the Himalayas, like the Abominable Snowman!”

He laughed, setting off another wheezing cough.

“So there it is, John. A secret I won’t be taking to the grave.”

We talked a bit more, and then I got out of the car and watched the tail-lights disappear around a corner.

Scotland is not a good country for rural guerrilla warfare, having been long since stripped of trees and peasants. Without physical or social shelter, any guerrilla band in the hills and glens would be easily spotted and picked off, if they hadn’t starved first. The great spaces of the Highlands were militarily irrelevant anyway.

So everybody believed, until the guerrilla war. Night, clouds and rain, gullies, boulders, bracken, isolated clumps of trees, the few real forests, burns and bridges and bothies all provided cover. The relatively sparse population could do little to betray us and—voluntarily or otherwise—much to help, and supplied few targets for enemy reprisals against civilians. Deer, sheep and rabbits abounded, edible wild plants and berries grew everywhere, and vegetables were easily enough bought or stolen. The strategic importance of the coastline and the offshore oilfields, and the vulnerability and propaganda value of the larger towns—Fort William, Inverness, Aberdeen, Thurso—compelled the state’s armed forces to hold the entire enormous area: to move troops and armour along the long, narrow moorland roads, through glens ideal for ambush, and to fly low over often-clouded hills; to guard hydroelectric power stations, railways, microwave relay masts,
the military’s own installations and training-grounds; to patrol hundreds of miles of pipelines and cables.

That was just the Highlands: the area where I was, for obvious reasons, sent. Those who fought in the Borders, the Pentlands, the Southwest, and even the rich farmland of Perthshire all discovered other options, other opportunities. And that is to say nothing of what the English and Welsh comrades were doing. By 1981 the Front was making the country burn. The line had changed—Deng Hsiao-Ping was making cautious advances in the Versailles negotiations—but the fighting continued and we felt proud that we had fulfilled the late Chairman’s directive. We had brought home the war.

The Bren was heavy and the pack was heavier. I was almost grateful that I had to move slowly. Moving under cloud cover was frustrating and dangerous. Visibility that October morning was a couple of metres; the clouds were down to about a hundred, and there was a storm on the way. Behind me nine men followed in line, down from the ridge. I found the bed of a burn, just a trickle at that moment, its boulders and pebbles slick and slippery from the rain of a week earlier. We made our way down this treacherous stairway from the invisible skyline we’d crossed. The first
glomach
I slipped into soaked me to the thighs.

I waded out and moved on. My ankle would have hurt if it hadn’t been so cold. The light brightened and quite suddenly I was below the cloud layer, looking down at the road and the railway line at the bottom of the glen,
and off to my right and to the west, a patch of meadow on the edge of a small loch with a crannog in the middle. Three houses, all widely separated, were visible up and down the glen. We knew who lived there, and they knew we knew. There would be no trouble from them. Just ahead of us was a ruined barn, a rectangle of collapsed drystone walling within which rowans grew and rusty sheets of fallen corrugated iron roofing sheltered nettles and brambles.

We’d come down at the right place. A couple of hundred metres to the left, a railway bridge crossed the road at an awkward zigzag bend. The bridge had been mined the previous night; the detonation cable should be snaking back to the ruined barn. A train was due in an hour and ten minutes. Our job was to bring down the bridge, giving the train just enough time to stop—civilian casualties weren’t necessary for this operation. We intended to levy a revolutionary tax on the passengers and any valuable goods in transit before turning them out on the road and sending the empty train over where the bridge had been, thus blocking the road and railway and creating an ambush chokepoint for any soldiers or cops who sent to the scene. Booby-trapping the wreckage would be gravy, if we had the time.

I waved forward next man behind me, and he did likewise, and one by one we all emerged from the fog and hunkered down behind the lip of a shallow gully. Andy and Gordon were there, they’d been with me since the street-fighting days in Greenock. Of the others, three—Sandy and Mike and Neil—were also from Clydeside and four were local (from our point of view—in their own eyes Ian from Strome
and Murdo from Torridon and Donald from Ullapool and Norman from Inverness were almost as distinct from each other in their backgrounds as they were from ours.)

“Tormod,” I said to Norman, “you go and check out the bothy there, give us a wave if the electrician has done his job right. Two if he hasn’t. Lie low and wait for the signal.”

“There’s no signal.”

“The fucking whistle. My whistle.”

“Oh, right you are.”

Crouching, he ran to the ruin, and waved once after a minute. I sent Andy half a mile up the line to the nearest cutting, with a walkie-talkie, ready to confirm that the train had passed, and deployed the others on both sides of the bridge and both sides of the road. Apart from watching for any premature trouble, and being ready to raid the train when it had stopped, they were to stop any civilian vehicles that might chance to go under the bridge at the wrong moment. A light drizzle began to fall, and a front of heavier rain was marching up the glen from the west. Still about five miles distant, but with a good blow behind it, the opening breezes of which were already chilling my wet legs.

I had just settled myself and the Bren and the walkie-talkie behind a boulder on the hillside overlooking the bridge, with half an hour to spare before the train was due to pass at 12:11, when I heard the sound of a train far up the glen to the east. I couldn’t see it, none of us could, except maybe Andy. I called him up.

“Passenger train,” he said. “Wait a minute, it’s got a couple of goods wagons at the back—shit, no! It’s low-loaders! They’ve carrying two tanks!”

”Troop train,” I guessed. “Maybe. Confirm when it passes.”

“I can check it frae here wi the glasses.”

He did, but still couldn’t be certain.

Two minutes crawled by. The sound of the train filled the glen, or seemed to, until a sheep bleated nearby, startlingly loud. The radio crackled.

“Confirmed brown job,” said Andy, just as the train emerged from the cutting and into view. It wasn’t travelling very fast, maybe just over twenty miles per hour.

I had a choice. I could let this one pass, and continue with the operation, or I could seize this immensely dangerous chance to wreak far more havoc than we’d planned.

I watched the train pass below me, waited until the engine had crossed the bridge, and blew the whistle. Norman didn’t hesitate. The blast came when the third carriage of the train was on the bridge. It utterly failed to bring the bridge down, but it threw that carriage upwards and sideways, off the rails. It ploughed through the bridge parapet and its front end crashed on to the road. The remaining four carriages concertina’d into its rear end. One of them rolled on to the embankment, the one behind that was derailed, and the two tank-transporting flatbeds remained on the track.

The engine, and the two front carriages, had by this time travelled a quarter of a mile further down the track, and were accelerating rapidly away. There was nothing that could be done about that. I opened fire at once on the wreck, raking the bursts along the carriage windows. The rest of the squad followed up, then, like myself, they must have ducked down to await return fire.

In the silence that followed the crash and the firing, other noises gradually became audible. Among the screams and yells from the wreckage were the shouts of command. Within seconds a spatter of rifle and pistol fire started up. I raised my head cautiously, watched for the flashes, and directed single shots from the Bren in their direction.

Silence again. Neil and Murdo reported in on the walkie-talkie from the other side of the track, and up ahead a bit. They’d each hit one or two attempts at rescue work or flight. We seemed to have the soldiers on the train pinned down. At the same time it was difficult for us to break cover ourselves. In any sustained exchange of fire we were likely to be the first to run out of ammunition, and then to be picked off as we ran.

This impasse was brought to an end after half an hour by a torrential downpour and a further descent of the clouds. The scheduled train, either cancelled or forewarned, hadn’t arrived. Any cars arriving at the scene had backed off and turned away, unmolested by us. We regrouped by the roadside, west of the bridge, well within earshot of the carriage that had crashed on the road.

“This is murder,” said Norman.

I was well aware of the many lives my decision had just ended or wrecked. I had no compunction about that, being even more aware of how many lives we had saved at the troops’ destination.

“Seen any white flags, have you?” I snarled. “Until you do, we’re still fighting.”

“Only question is,” said Andy, “do we pull back now while we’re ahead?”

”There’ll be rescue and reinforcement coming for sure,” said Murdo. “The engine could come steaming back any minute, for one thing.”

“They’re probably overestimating us,” I said, thinking aloud in the approved democratic manner. “I mean, who’d be mad enough to attack a troop train with ten men?”

We laughed, huddled in the pouring rain. The windspeed was increasing by the minute.

“There’ll be no air support in this muck,” said Sandy.

“All the same,” I said, “our best bet is to pull out now, we have the chance and there’s nothing more to—wait a minute. What about the tanks?”

“Can’t do much damage to them,” said Mike.

“Aye,” I said, “but think of the damage we can do
with
them.”