To Kingdom Come (9 page)

I received the first sign that I was nearing my destination half an hour later when we passed a brigade of soldiers in their scarlet tunics and chalky helmets, marching in full kit. I was accustomed to seeing the Horse Guards rattling through Whitehall on their chargers, gold helmets gleaming, but the lads marching on this road in the drowsy June sun would soon be fighting the Mahdi’s fanatical hordes in the blistering heat of North Africa.

Ought I to join them?
The thought of going for a soldier had never really occurred to me before. I’m certain that several of the lads I’d gone to school with were even now in the Sudan, and some had already given their lives while I’d been at university, wrestling with nothing more dangerous than
Paradise Lost.
Now I was employed by Barker. Were the words on the placards at the station correct? Was it my duty to go and fight for my country? As I sat in the railway carriage, I realized that I was already a soldier, a mercenary one, newly hired by Her Majesty’s government to safeguard the English way of life, and the Irish were a good deal closer than the Mahdi’s Muslims in the Sudan that the
papers were thundering about. Suddenly, I missed my Milton.

The train stopped at Aldershot, and I was able to cadge a ride to the barracks aboard the supply vehicle, once I supplied an abbreviated version of my purpose in coming. We followed the canal and soon found ourselves riding down a wide thoroughfare, a parade ground in which a dozen men could walk abreast. Off in the distance, I saw a long line of buildings, clusters of huts and barracks which collectively were known as North Camp. I began to wonder if we’d actually sent anyone to the Sudan at all. The whole English army appeared to be here. As I stepped out into a beehive of activity, I felt as if I were the only man in civilian dress within one hundred miles.

Everyone but me appeared to be moving with a purpose. My attempts at stopping someone to ask for directions were rebuffed several times. I thought I might spend the day searching in vain for the address Barker had given me on a slip of paper, when I finally found a chaplain who was willing to show me the way. It was a good thing, too. My next plan would have been to announce in a loud voice that I was a Russian spy, there to steal the plans to the Northern Frontier.

I was led to an outbuilding set far back from the others, whose doors and windows were open. As I stepped inside, and my eyes adjusted to the relative gloom, a voice spoke up.

“You are late!” the fellow protested grumpily, but I had passed a clock tower on the parade road, and had noted the time.

“No, actually, I’m still a quarter hour early.”

The speaker, a squat, slovenly-looking fellow in a white lab coat, consulted his timepiece, held it to his ear, and shrugged.

“No matter. I am van Rhyn.”

So,
I thought to myself,
this is the fellow Barker is to impersonate.
They didn’t look much alike. Johannes van Rhyn was a much shorter, rounder fellow, for one thing. His thick, graying hair was in wiry strands combed back severely behind his ears, and his
short beard looked as if it were made of steel wool. His face, like my employer’s, was dominated by a pair of black spectacles, but van Rhyn’s had brownish glass pieces covering the sides. They are commonly worn by the blind, but he appeared to see perfectly. He had a ferocious nose which curled over his mustache, and his tie and linen were stained and in need of pressing.

“You are Llewelyn?”

“Yes, sir. Thomas Llewelyn.”

“As you say. Bombs, sir. You are here to learn bombs.”

The word came out
bompss
in van Rhyn’s German accent.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good! Now, a bomb by definition is a device exploded by means of a fuse or by impact or otherwise. By a chemical process, energy is released very quickly, often with devastating results. Bombs are often made of common materials one can pick up anywhere. Look at this here. What is this?”

“It is a bottle of whiskey, sir.”

“
Ja.
Now you see, I take a strip of cotton and insert it in the bottle, and push it in tightly with a bit of cork. Now we have a bomb. It is inert, of course, and could sit on a shelf for years, completely harmless. But, if I light the cotton from this Bunsen burner, like so, we begin the reaction that results in a chemical change.”

He handed me the bottle with a look of mild interest, as if I were one of his experiments. The cotton hanging out next to the cork was already emitting a large flame. I knew enough from my chemistry classes in school to say what would happen next. If I didn’t get rid of it immediately, the cotton would burn past the cork, ignite the liquid inside, and the entire bottle would explode. A glance about the room told me I was surrounded on all sides by beakers and bottles of various compounds and chemicals. Even if we did survive the initial blast, the explosion might ignite the chemicals around us and kill us for certain. I did the only sane
thing: I turned and tossed the bottle out of the door. There was a sudden loud report, and the walls and windows outside were showered with fragments of glass.

“Lesson one,” van Rhyn said. “After you set a bomb, get rid of it. Very good reflexes, by the way.”

“My word!” I said. “You nearly got us killed!”

“There is little chance of that,” van Rhyn assured me. “The urge for self-preservation takes over, you see. It is a powerful force.”

“I’m glad of that,” I said, my heart still racing.

“Come. Look here. Each of these materials can be turned into an infernal device. Here is ammonia, isopropyl alcohol, glycerin soap, common manure. A trained bomb maker would find an average home a treasure trove of materials. A few ingredients from a local chemist are also helpful. In these bottles are sulfur, magnesium, and sulfuric acid. Of course, we need not start from scratch every time. Here are primers, timers, fuses, blasting caps, a plunger. This cylinder is an artillery shell.”

“I must say, it seems strange to see a notorious bomber with his own explosives hut, in the middle of an army base,” I said.

“
Ja,
well, there was a time when I would have blown myself to bits before working for a government agency, but since then, I have learned to listen to the demands of the stomach. That, perhaps, and the fact that I have been deported from most of the countries in Europe. I have no desire to leave this one. Luckily for me, Britannia is a sentimental old girl, and she has hugged many a socialist, nihilist, and anarchist to her bosom while her sisters have shown us the door.”

“Yes,” I countered, “but they seem to have you under lock and key here.”

“She is sentimental but not stupid. Have no worries for me, young man. I’ve blown my way out of worse situations than this, when it suited me. I am comfortable here. For one thing, I am not
being pestered by factions such as the amateurs who tried to blow up Scotland Yard.”

“What do they have you working on, may I ask?”

“A new and improved form of dynamite at their request, a malleable form that can be pressed under a bridge or against a building. To tell you the truth, I am tinkering with it but not very hard. I have reached the twilight of my life, and this is the best an old bomb maker like me can expect. Believe me when I say I have no intention of giving anyone yet another and more dangerous type of bomb with which to inflict more carnage on the world.”

“How did you meet Mr. Barker?” I asked.

“He scooped me up in the street. I had only been in London a few days, and he hailed me from a passing cab. He said he recognized me from a photograph in an obscure Yiddish newspaper, the only one I have allowed to be taken of me. He took me to the most unusual restaurant.”

“Chinese?” I asked.

“
Ja!
They served rice and watery tea and animal parts that even a witch would refuse. Your master is a very unusual fellow, but—what is the Scottish word? Very
canny.
”

“I’m sure he’d say the same about you,” I commented.

“I? I am merely an old tinkerer. One day some Serbian anarchists came into my laboratory in Bonn to ask if a bomb could be fitted into a coronation crown. The would-be king was deposed, it turned out, before he could be crowned, but I’d made the device and my career was born. My most difficult assignment was to build a bomb into the revolver belonging to a Russian general. I hollowed out the cylinder and handle, and filed the barrel down to the final inch. When it blew up, it took him and several of his closest subordinates with him.”

“Amazing,” I said, trying not to picture the carnage. “And what, if I may ask, are your politics?”

“I thought that would be obvious, young man. Like all makers
of wholesale destruction, I am a pacifist. The bad thing about war is that it makes more evil people than it can take away, as Kant said. But come. We have work to do.”

I spent the morning assembling a picric bomb, the small metal sphere one sees in political cartoons, then we took it out and exploded it in a small bunker that had been dug for the purpose. Van Rhyn pointed out the pieces of shrapnel on all sides of the dirt walls and described in too-vivid terms the results if my sphere had been thrown under the carriage of the Czar or Emperor Franz Josef. At least he stopped at mentioning the Queen.

We ate in a small mess, a term which in every way describes the lunch I had there, then returned to the eccentric bomb maker’s little potting shed laboratory. Van Rhyn seemed no more particular about food than Barker, and he came away wearing much of it on his beard and shirtfront. He had another similarity to my employer, I thought, which was a detached air, as if while speaking to you, he was also thinking other, deeper thoughts. With van Rhyn it was abstruse chemical formulas and shrapnel trajectory, while with Barker … well, one never knew with Barker. He was either contemplating the universe or figuring out the most expedient way to get someone in a headlock.

In the afternoon, we made our own version of Mr. Nobel’s dynamite. We started out with a bowlful of crystalline silica, which van Rhyn insisted was known as kieselguhr, and a test tube that contained a yellowish liquid that he informed me was nitroglycerin.

“This is very unstable. The least thing could cause it to blow up—sudden jarring, a change in temperature. I would swear that sometimes it explodes out of sheer bad temper. I am very vain, Mr. Llewelyn, about the fact that I have all ten of my fingers, and each one is intact. You don’t know how many of my associates are missing digits. It is the badge of our profession. We are not a long-lived group, you see, and so far, there has been no need for pensions.”

One would think pouring some crystals into a cardboard tube, saturating them with liquid, and attaching a fuse and primer would be a matter of a few minutes, but producing dynamite is a slow and dangerous process. The kieselguhr is supposed to stabilize the nitroglycerin, so it can be transported and handled safely, but the old bomb maker handled the harmless-looking length of tubing far more gingerly than the lethal-looking sphere of the picric bomb. He also made sure the length of the fuse was long enough for us to get far away. Van Rhyn lit a little German cheroot that looked like a sausage, and used it to light the dynamite. He tossed it into the bunker and we didn’t need an invitation to run as fast as our legs would carry us. The second explosion was much louder than the first. I momentarily lost my hearing, and there was a high-pitched ringing in my ears when we came back to explore the bunker. Actually, “hole” would be a better word now. The shape had been altered from a rough rectangle to a circle, and there was a concentric ring of dirt clods around it. Van Rhyn was going on about the purity and simplicity of explosives, but I was catching only every fifth or sixth word.

That was my introduction to the world of bomb making. Johannes van Rhyn promised that the next day we would explore low-impact bomb making, followed by high-impact explosions on the next; and near the end, the course would conclude with me actually making my own nitroglycerin from scratch in van Rhyn’s little lab. I wasn’t looking forward to that. For one thing, I’m awfully fond of my fingers, every last one of them.

“Allow me, sir,” the German said, taking a heavily carved walking stick from a corner, and locking the windows and doors, “to walk you partway to the station.”

“That is almost two miles,” I said. “There is really no need.”

“I am a great walker, young man,” van Rhyn told me. “It shall give us a chance to talk further. How long have you been working for Mr. Barker?”

“About two months, sir.”

“This is quite a plan Barker has concocted,” he said. “Your employer will have to keep his wits about him, but he is essentially correct. The Irish have laid hands upon a supply of old industrial-use dynamite from America, but it had degraded. Some of it will no longer explode, and some will at the slightest provocation. They need an explosives expert, and I am the only recognized authority. I have been wooed by the Irish before. Some of them tried to recruit me half a year ago.”

“Really?” I asked. I was curious about the old German. “Why didn’t you join their organization, if I may ask?”

“I thought it unlikely that they would win, and I had just arrived in England and did not relish the idea of being thrown out.”

Van Rhyn and I walked along the side of the wide road talking, while uniformed soldiers marched and drilled at our elbows.

“So how did you get tossed out of your own country?” I asked.

“There was a little misunderstanding. Filling a statue of Bismarck with explosives did not necessarily mean that I wished it to be delivered to the Iron Chancellor himself.”

“Of course not,” I said, wondering what the English authorities would think of a hollow statue of Her Majesty, filled with explosives. “But, tell me, what do you get out of this?”

“Well, Mr. Llewelyn, I have been promised a small remuneration from your boss, but, principally, I am paying off a debt. It was he who helped to secure me this work. He spoke to the army, and told them who I was. They are not pushing me here, and, for once, I have room and board and a place to work in peace. They let me alone most of the time, and they are never so happy as when I blow something up. We shall make them very happy this week.”