The Crocus List - Lyall Gavin - Страница 2

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"Just as long as there's time to appeal to the Dunkirk spirit, put paper bags over our heads and let the Army take over."

"Oh, for God's sake."

Brenda pressed what she saw as an advantage. "There _are_ secret plans for the Army-and the police-to take over. They're going to block all the main roads out of cities with machine-guns and-"

"Rubbish."

"Really? Perhaps you just haven't been told. We actually had, well _they_ tried to have, one of those farcical Civil Defence exercises up near us, and the Army officers who were supposed to be taking part, they refused, just refused, to do what the town clerk told them."

That hardly surprised Maxim: where the hell did the town clerk fit into the chain of command? But he thought it best not to say that. "Perhaps your town clerk thought it was all a bit of a farce as well. The Army really does know something about survival training, what with Noddy suits and respirators and-"

"What suits?" their mother asked.

"We call them Noddy suits. Protection against fallout and gas… I sent you a picture of me in one, on the Porton battle run."

"It made you look like a man from Mars."

"It's supposed to protect you against secondary radiation. So you can move around when everybody else is in shelters-"

"And take over." Brenda smiled with quiet triumph.

Their parents had stopped work and were looking at Maxim oddly. It was, he realised, the ingrained British conviction that once a man put on uniform, the next step was for him to Take Over. You might speculate about race memories of Cromwell's New Model Army and even the origins of Magna Carta, but the end result was the way the Army ordered youout of uniform the moment you came off-duty. In London, and in no other NATO capital, when an embassy threw a military cocktail party, the rule was that only the hosts wore uniforms; they wouldn't be seen on the streets anyway.

He sighed and put away a handful of teaspoons in the wrong place. It wasn't the fear of a military takeover that annoyed him, but people's blindness to the fact that the Army was recruited from men born and brought up in that same fear. That, and a horror of trying to give orders to people who most likely wouldn't obey them.

"Oh well," he said, "since we'll just about all be in Germany you'll be lucky to find an Army officer with the time to run the country for you."

Brenda's voice stiffened but she stayed calm. "It doesn't look as if _you'll_ be in Germany, so maybe you'll get the job. I know: why don't you give us all some saluting practice this afternoon, so we'll have a bit of a start on everybody else? A military dictatorship usually goes in for family favouritism, doesn't it?"

"Saluting won't be required. You can kiss my arse from time to time."

"Harry!" his father exploded. "You can leave that sort of language on the barrack square. I will not have it in this house."

Maxim mumbled an apology, avoiding Brenda's eye. Their mother, quite unmoved after thirty years of pretending her children hadn't said what she had clearly heard them say, asked: "But that suit wouldn't stop you being blown up by a bomb, would it? I mean, it isn't made of armour?"

"It's only paper, impregnated with charcoal-"

"Paper!" Brenda laughed delightedly. "You mean even the Army believes that?"

"If you're going to survive _any_ explosion," Maxim said grimly, "you need a shelter. Or a bit of crisis relocation."

"What's that?" their father asked.

"Being somewhere else at the time."

The chuckles lightened the atmosphere and-luckily-annoyed Brenda.

"There's secret tunnels under all the middle of London," she announced. "With air and water and rations for weeks. Of course, you have to be a Very Important Person to get in, but I expect Harry made some useful friends at Number 10. There was a book about it. The tunnels."

"It doesn't sound too secret if it was in a book," their father said.

"Oh, they didn't mean it to be in a book. They started the tunnels in the last war, against the German bombs, and kept on improving them afterwards. "

There was only the encrusted aluminium teapot left on the draining board and Maxim picked it up. "We don't dry that," his mother said; "it takes all the flavour out of it." It was a ritual joke, relying on Maxim always forgetting the teapot didn't get dried.

"The trouble with shelters," he said carefully, "is that you have to be something like a mile down if you're going to be safe right under a 20-megaton ground burst. And what happens to your escape tunnels going back up? Even three miles away you have to be two hundred feet down."

As a retired works manager, their father knew something about the strength of concrete structures. He carefully spread his tea-towel over the radiator to dry and said: "So you'd advise crisis relocation instead, would you?" But his joviality was forced.

"Only if you're a VIP, again," Brenda said quickly.

"Are you going to be crisisly relocated or whatever they call it?" their mother asked.

"I always carry a strong paper bag with me."

They knew he was dodging the question, but family rules wouldn't let even Brenda probe further. She had to content herself with having winkled out confirmation of one small belief. "So there is going to be 'crisis relocation' for VIPs?"

"If it hadn't been thought of, there wouldn't be a word for it."

"Two words."

"And what are the rest of us supposed to do afterwards?" their mother asked placidly.

"After a nuclear attack or the whole war?"

They looked at him again, and their father said: "Doesn't it come to much the same thing?"

"Not necessarily. The Soviets might opt to take out just London, destroy the government, as an example and to wreck our command structure."

"That," Brenda said, "sounds like quite enough for me. Wouldn't that be the end of it?"

Maxim shrugged.

"You mean to say that with London blown to bits and radiation everywhereyou'd go on fighting? I do believe you would! Just a little clockwork soldier that refuses to run down!"

" 'It is a typically Hohenzollern idea to believe that it is a crime for a country to defend itself after its army has been destroyed.'"

"Who said that?" Brenda demanded suspiciously.

"Karl Marx, actually."

Rummaging in the bureau drawer for a couple of after-lunch cigars, Maxim's father asked quietly: "Tell me-just as a matter of interest-if the government is destroyed, who decides the war is over? When we…" he almost choked on the word: "… surrender?"

"It won't be Brenda's town clerk, I can tell you that much. You might say it was up to the individual."

"Within six months of a Russian occupation of Britain you'll find Resistance cells and circuits springing up everywhere. I'm quite sure they'll include even such people as trade union activists, the Far Left of the Labour party and so on, most likely our own Trotskyists and Communists. The trouble is, they'll be too late. By then they'll be on the lists, their faces and addresses known. The Russians don't fool themselves, they know they can't hang on to the loyalty of such people. They'll concentrate on keeping just one or two, enough to betray the rest. So the actual, effective, Resistance movement will depend on those who are prepared in advance. Those who can accept it as a real possibility now. That, I hope, means you."

The lecturer paused and coughed heavily but politely into her hand. She smoked too much, although never while giving a lecture and was never tempted to. It simply didn't fit into theroleof lecturer, and she played herroleswith now-subconscious dedication.

Hardened in backside and mind by years of Army lectures, the nineteen officers in front of her waited patiently.

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