Annerton Pit Page 9

  It was as though a bell jar had been lowered over him to cut him off from the roaring wind and the roaring sea; beyond the imaginary glass they threshed away, but inside it there was only this pocket of terror, the gas he breathed, the stillness in his ears, the chill along his skin—all terror. He stepped so sharply back on to the pile of rubble that he almost fell down the slope of it. The noise of wind and sea came back into his ears and the sea-smell into his nostrils, but his shudders were not caused by the cold. He slashed stupidly at the space where he’d stood as if a solid shape might be crouched there, but the thin stick whistled through air. He shook his head and clicked his tongue again, but now crossness at his own stupidity wasn’t enough to force him on. Sharp in his mind came the tangling clutch of briars, his own body trapped and helpless on the flank of the tip, starving there, or being found by the vengeful enemy. He almost whimpered at the idea of it. And what would they do to Granpa? He remembered hearing on the radio about some Irish kidnappers who had started to knock out their hostage’s teeth to make him do what they wanted. Granpa was proud of his good teeth. The important thing was to get Granpa away … If only it weren’t or that chain. If only …

  Just as though somebody had whispered in his ear Jake remembered other things Granpa had said. “ … heard a hacksaw going … man using a workbench over on the left …” A hacksaw! If Jake could find that! Say ten minutes back to the caravan, ten minutes to saw through the chain, ten minutes back here. They could climb the tip together.

  With another part of his mind he knew perfectly well that Granpa might be too weak to do any such thing. He mightn’t even be able to climb out through the caravan window. And. if the tip had been a scramble to come down …

  But Jake knew too that he was, at the moment, quite incapable of climbing the tip alone. Not allowing himself another moment to think more reasonably about the plan he turned and felt his way down the tumbled stones. As he rounded the door the wind seemed to be trying to blast him into the shed, but he remembered about trip-wires and tested his way through the gap between the truck and the doorpost: The shed was quite a bit wider than its doors, so he had to feel his way round by the front wall. Some loose sheet metal, quite new and rust-free by the feel of it, was stacked in the corner. If he unsettled that the clang of its fall might be enough to alert the sentry on the cliff-top—the wind was that way. Gingerly Jake inched past it and along the side wall until his stick, wavering in front of him, tapped lightly on a vertical strut. His fingers told him that it was a piece of the man-sized Meccano that is used for making things like factory shelving, and following it up he found it supported a wooden surface, greasy with oil and rough with metal filings. This was the workbench. Jake moved along it, systematically exploring its surface with his fingertips, but found only a few odd bits of metal, a heavy hammer, a vice and a single large chunk of machined steel that felt like part of an engine. What do workmen do with their tools at the end of the day, he thought. Put them in a tool-case, or hang them on the wall. He worked back, leaning across the bench and running his fingers up and down the brickwork beyond. Yes, they’d nailed a batten up and fastened clips to it to hold things—a matched set of spanners—three screwdrivers—something complicated he didn’t recognise—ah!

  Four or five feet away, behind Jake and to his left, a voice muttered, “Run! Oh, get on! It’s coming! It’s coming out of that crack! Run, damn you!”

  Nothing moved. With his hand round the frame of the hacksaw Jake froze, suddenly once more in the bell-jar of terror. Most of his mind shrieked to run, but his legs wouldn’t move, and then another part of his mind told him that he knew that sort of mutter. The man was talking in his sleep, the way Martin often did. There was a man asleep in the cab of the lorry. They couldn’t afford a waking sentry, so they let him sleep up here. Perhaps the trip-wire sounded in his cab …

  Slowly the bell-jar lifted again and Jake began to unfreeze, but didn’t dare pull the hacksaw from the wall in case the clip clicked. He decided to count to a hundred to let the man get back out of the shallows of his nightmare and into deep sleep, but he was still in the twenties when the man gave a violent snort and then swore in a waking voice. Jake froze again. There was the sharp little click of a torch-switch, another short pause, and then the man said, “Hey! Who the hell … ?”

  As the door handle of the lorry snapped down Jake ran for the open. The door itself touched his shoulder as he passed it. He scuttled with his stick probing at knee-level round the leaf of the door, up the pile of rubble and straight on to the slope of the tip. The man was in the open now too, shouting at the top of his voice. He must have missed Jake’s turn round the door for his footsteps thudded a few paces down towards the bridge, but then he stopped, paused and yelled “Hey! You! Come back!” in a voice which told Jake that the torch beam had caught him.

  Jake was only a few feet up the slope when a stone rattled off the rubble pile. A bramble caught at his anorak. He lurched forward to wrench free but his feet slithered under him and he fell. Before he was on his knees a hand closed round his ankle and dragged him bodily back down the slope. Jake was yelling “Let go! Let go!” without noticing. The man was still shouting too. Jake lashed out with his stick at the voice and the shout changed to one of pain as the thin rod slapped into flesh, but the man didn’t let go. Instead he jerked violently and for an instant Jake felt himself falling before he thudded into the man’s chest and was pinioned by hard arm.

  “Let’s have a look at you,” said the man. “Jesus, it’s the blind kid!”

  “Let me go!” yelled Jake.

  The man laughed.

  “Sure,” he said. “When you’ve had a word with Jack.”

  “I was looking for my brother,” said Jake. His pretend sob became real.

  “Sure,” said the man again. “With a hacksaw, uh?”

  Jake hadn’t realised he was still gripping the tool. The man spun him round and marched him towards the hotel.

  They met Jack Andrews at the point where the path became cobbles.

  “What’s up, Tony?” he said.

  The man who had caught Jake explained. Other footsteps began to arrive across the cobbles.

  “What were you doing, Jake?” said Mr Andrews. On the surface his voice was friendlier than ever, but in its depth Jake could hear the stress building towards an explosion.

  “Granpa’s worse,” said Jake. “I couldn’t sleep. I think he’s really ill, so I came to look for you, only I got lost …”

  He sounded as scared as he felt. Nobody ever dreams a blind kid might be lying, he thought. But this time …

  “He’d got the hacksaw off the workbench,” said Tony “When I spotted him he was out of the shed like a rabbit and running up the tip. Like he wasn’t blind at all.”

  “No, Jack, no!” shouted another man.

  At the same instant something struck Jake a huge blow on the side of his head. He felt himself beginning to fall and his throat beginning to yell with the shock of pain. Then he felt nothing.

  Chapter Seven

  The only times Jake had ever “seen” anything had come when he had hurt his head—once when he was about five in a playground when a wooden swing had knocked him unconscious and once, a couple of years ago, when an electricians’ van had lost its steering and knocked down him and Becky Skipwith while they were walking home from school. Becky had broken both legs, but Jake had been luckier and was only concussed. Both times Jake had been aware, as he came to, that something had happened inside his brain which wasn’t seeing, but was like it. There’d been brightnesses, sharp-edged but shapeless, with colours in them. They were part of the pain. Fully conscious he found it difficult to make his memory recreate what he had “seen”, but they’d been there, unlike the occasional tiresome dream he had in which he could really see—only of course he couldn’t, even in the dreams, because his dreaming brain hadn’t got any real experience of seeing to
work on. The dreams were just his suppressed and unconscious longing to see, coming out in this frustrating way.

  Now, though, as he was half aware of angry voices grumbling into agreement, like a dying storm, he “saw” the flashes and the colours. He was dangling head and feet down, over a man’s shoulder. The man was walking, and at every step the blood seemed to bounce in the hurt cells of Jake’s brain. The wrong side of his head hurt—not the one which had been hit, but the other side. For several paces the colours came and went, and footsteps creaked on pebbles, and the arguing voices dwindled—was one of them Martin’s, further, further away, drowning in the sea and the wind? Then there was numbness and silence.

  He came to in a quite different place. It began as a dankness and deadness in his nostrils, and the clicks of falling water-drops in his ears. He was lying on chilly, slippery earth. His head hurt, still on the wrong side. He realised that he must have fallen badly after the man had hit him and caught it on something. He felt sick, too. There were a lot of faint echoes. Each time a drip fell it was answered and answered again, so that after lying there a minute or two Jake knew that he was in a widish tunnel, but close to the end of it. The end, in fact, was a nearly flat surface, made of something less echoing than the walls and roof. The other end was out of earshot. Straining, he thought he could hear the mutter of waves, but not the wind. The smell was very peculiar, not strong or unpleasant, but unlike anything else, heavy and wet and lifeless. The air felt as though it hadn’t stirred for a hundred years.

  There was another noise, even fainter than the sea. Jake couldn’t decide whether it was real, or was only an effect of the fall—a low, continuous, throbbing hoot. Sometimes it seemed to be coming from further up the tunnel, sometimes from all round him, and sometimes from inside his head. Once he’d noticed it, it bothered him.

  After a while a voice spoke, muffled as if on the other side of a wall. Another voice answered. Wood creaked on wood and the sea-noise became much louder. Footsteps squelched. A load, light but large, flopped to the floor. The footsteps came nearer.

  “How’re you feeling?” said a man’s voice. “Are you awake?”

  It was Dave, the one who’d demonstrated how the caravan tilted. Jake groaned.

  “Come off it,” said Dave. “You’ve done us once, playing soft. That won’t wash any more. I’ve brought you a couple of Disprin. Here. Sit up. I’ve got a groundsheet for you, too. Every comfort.”

  Jake allowed himself to be levered into a sitting position. This time his groan was real, stifling all questions. By the time the pain ebbed he was sucking at the dusty-sweet Disprin pills and listening to more footsteps coming, several people, moving slowly.

  “Where’s my grandson?” said Granpa’s voice. “What have you done with him?”

  “He’s in here,” said one of the women. “There. Shine your torch on him, Terry.”

  “Jake! Are you all right?”

  “My head hurts. They hit me, then I hit it on the ground. It wasn’t all their fault.”

  “Now, listen …”

  “Stow it, Mr Uttery. You brought it on yourselves. Look. Dave’s got a rubber mattress for you, and Terry’s got your blankets. You lie down now and keep warm, and think yourself bloody lucky that you aren’t worse off than you are already.”

  Granpa drew a breath to argue but let it become a sigh. He seemed to be moving very shakily as they led him to the mattress. While they were covering him with the blankets more voices reached into the tunnel—mainly Mr Andrews giving orders in sharp bursts of words. Footsteps again, one set well known.

  “Jake!” cried Martin. “Are you all right? I saw him hit you! I saw it!”

  “I’m OK,” said Jake, automatically making his voice noncommittal in order to balance out Martin’s excitement, as if this had been an ordinary family row in the kitchen at home.

  “They might have cracked …”

  “Shut up,” said Mr Andrews. “Right, Dave. Thanks Helen, thanks Terry. You go back and get a bit of sleep. See the others do, too. Ask Ray to find a sack, fill it with food and drink for three days, and then hang about outside, while I lay it on the line to these idiots.”

  “OK, Jack,” said someone.

  Their footsteps slopped away over the slimy floor. A door creaked and the sea-noise muted.

  “Right,” said Mr Andrews. “You go and sit there, Martin, by your grandfather’s head, where I can see you both. Put your hands on your knees and don’t move them. I’ll come over here, by Jake. Now you’re all three in the line of my torch. This gun is loaded and its safety-catch is off. I promise you that if I have the slightest trouble from any of you I’ll shoot Jake’s knee-cap off.”

  “But Prop Five …” began Martin.

  “Shut up. Can’t you see that you’ve changed all that? I’m not even sorry I hit him. I’m sorry it was him I hit, but it was going to happen to someone. That’s the way this sort of stunt goes. You start off telling everybody, including yourself, that nobody’s going to get hurt. But if you’re honest with yourself you recognise that there’s got to be the possibility of people getting hurt—getting killed—innocent people.

  “If you aren’t prepared to hurt and kill then you’ve got no leverage. Of course, you try to set it up so that it doesn’t come to that, but the possibility must be there, you get me? Well, now we’ve reached that point.”

  He paused for an instant, then spoke more slowly.

  “I am prepared to hurt you, if necessary to kill you, and so are most of the others. In a way I’m glad that things have panned out this way, because your fooling around has forced them to recognise that necessity before it comes to the crunch. They’ve got to face the facts now, instead of in three days’ time. That means that if the necessity arises then, they won’t hesitate.”

  This was a new Mr Andrews, neither bluff nor cheerful. He was arguing with himself, proving to himself that what he was doing was right. He was less certain about that than he thought he was.

  “Now I’ll explain the set-up to you,” he said. “You’re in what I believe is called a drift-mine. It’s an abandoned tunnel into the cliff. We use it as our explosives store. The explosives are beyond that partition there. Beyond that is another partition, and beyond that is a shed. If you come to it from the outside you think it’s a shed built against the cliff. The outer partition looks like all there is, but a panel in it can be moved to let you into the explosives store. Just in the same way, another panel in the second partition lets you through into here. We don’t use this space, because it’s too damp for explosives. Now, listen carefully, because this is the bit you’ve got to get into your thick heads. The outer partition is wired on an electrical circuit, so that if anybody tries to open the panel or break through without throwing a hidden switch, then the whole explosives store will go up. Four and a half hundredweight of plastic, Mr Uttery. You know what sort of a bang that’ll make. I suppose if you go right up to the end of the tunnel you might live through it, but it’ll bring the cliff face down for sure, with you inside. So, then— suppose your friends the police come round—suppose they start nosing about—what do you do? You sit quiet. You don’t shout. You don’t bang. You just pray they don’t notice that outer partition’s a dummy. Got it?”

  Nobody answered. Instead Granpa said in a low voice, “Why didn’t you put me in here in the first place?”

  “Because the others weren’t ready to recognise the necessity. Instead we had to go through that charade with the caravan. This isn’t a charade, I promise you, and they do recognise it now. And I’ll tell you why I put you in the caravan instead of down at the hotel—because I didn’t want them getting involved with you. I wanted them to have as little to do with you as possible. This is my first go at this kind of stunt. I’ve been base man, till now, looking after explosives, all that. And we’ve never messed around with hostages. But I’ve read the literature, and one thing’s for
sure from what I’ve read. If you do find yourself with hostages, you can’t afford to build up a relationship with them. That’s why, when I go now, I’m not coming back. I’m going to spend the rest of tonight wiring this inner partition into the circuit, so that if you start playing silly-bastards with it you’ll blow yourselves to bits. Then I’ll leave you strictly alone. When we leave, we’ll take most of the explosives with us, but we’ll leave a couple of pounds still wired up. Then, when we’re out there, we’ll radio back to shore and tell the cops where to look for you and where to find the safety-switch. That’ll show we mean business, and it’ll also show goodwill, uh? So you get it, you three? You sit tight and you’ll come through. You muck about like you’ve been doing so far and you won’t.”

  “Out there?” said Granpa.

  Mr Andrews had been squatting down to Jake’s right, only a few feet away. Now cloth rustled and soles and tendons creaked. His voice rose to standing height.

  “Martin’ll tell you,” he said.

  His footsteps squelched towards the partition. Jake hesitated, gulping the damp, tomb-chill air.

  “You can’t leave Granpa here,” he whispered. “Not for three days. He’ll get pneumonia, like on Exmoor.”

  “Yeah,” said Martin, caught by the new idea. “That’s right. You can’t leave him here. He sounds a bit grotty already.”

  “You haven’t got it,” said Mr Andrews in a low, tense voice. “I’m doing the best I can for you. I haven’t got any more time. I slept three hours last night, and two hours this, so far. Now I’m going to have to spend an hour wiring up this partition. I’ve got to keep a clear head, got to keep track of the whole op. I can’t afford to go groggy, not getting any sleep. So I’m giving you an hour of that time, when I could have shot the three of you and gone straight back to bed. If your granddad dies, I’m sorry. But it’s still if. A bullet is for sure.”