80

The fence was as I remembered. No expense spared. -Concrete posts, eight feet high, angled outwards towards the top. Holes drilled every six inches, so the wire could be threaded through. Every post firmly bedded into the ground with more concrete. I pushed a post, feeling for give. Nothing.

Cutting the wire would be easy, but keeping that fact -secret wouldn’t. The wire was tensioned somewhere along the boundary, pulled tight, like a guitar string. If we cut the wire, that strand would go slack all along the length of the fence. A good defence mechanism – instant feedback to -anyone keeping an eye out for intruders.

Vaughn took off his rucksack and opened it. He pulled out two large wrenches, giving one to Freddie and one to me. We all knew our part. We’d practised this on a set-up on Vaughn’s land. Freddie and I fastened our wrenches to the bottom wire, four feet apart from each other. I nodded to Vaughn, who took a large pair of wire cutters from his rucksack and cut the wire. The loose ends between me and Freddie sagged, but the rest of the length held taught as long as we kept the tension with our wrenches.

I walked in an arc back from the fence, back around the nearest concrete posts. I wrapped the wire around the post and tied it in a rough knot. It wasn’t pretty, but it held the tension. Freddie did the same.

Now our section of fence had one less strand, near ground level. The next strand up was a foot off the ground.

We repeated the process, faster this time, now we had our technique. Soon we had eighteen inches of clearance -between the ground and the lowest strand of wire.

There was a pause. A moment. Cutting the line had felt like a transgression but it was still only that. Crossing the line was different. Once you crossed the line you were committed.

Freddie took off his rucksack and casually threw it under the wire. I winced as it landed with a thump. The rational part of my brain knew the explosives it contained wouldn’t go off without a detonating charge, but it’s one thing to know something, another thing to bet your life on it.

I lay down and pushed my face into the grass. The soil smelt of year upon year of rotting leaves. If you’d asked the younger me, I’d have told you that no bad can come to a man in a world where the soil smells like that. Of course, that young man hadn’t been to the front. Now I knew the full spectrum of things that can happen to a man when he puts himself in harm’s way, but still the smell of the earth was a comfort.

I stood up, on the other side. Across the line.

‘Time to move,’ I said, using my command voice, no -discussion. That broke the spell.

Miriam was the last under the fence. She pulled herself up from the grass and pulled a map from her pocket.

Vaughn opened his coat and spread it around the map, while Miriam shone her torch on it, covering the beam so it wouldn’t give us away. She looked up, checking her bearings, then stood and walked to a large gorse bush in the middle of a patch of short, sheep-cropped grass.

I’d given Miriam the job of map-reader. She had a sharp mind and took things seriously. And it gave her a job to do, something to focus on.

‘It should be here,’ she said.

There was an edge of panic in her voice. That moment when reality intrudes on a well-laid plan. It’s a moment that occurs, without fail, on every mission. No plan is perfect, and it’s how you deal with the imperfection that separates the winners from the losers.

We kicked the long grass, hoping to find the access hatch. I’d seen it from inside the tunnel, the size of a manhole cover, set into concrete. My memory of how far along the tunnel it had been wasn’t perfect.

‘It’s meant to be here,’ she said.

I nodded at the gorse bush. Twenty feet across. Eight feet high. Thick foliage, dense with sharp thorns and the remnants of yellow flowers that would have been in full bloom a month earlier.

I reached into the bush and grabbed a branch, my arm complaining at the instant attack from hundreds of thorns. I pulled the branch, and the whole bush moved towards me easily. Too easily. No resistance from deep roots.

I walked backwards, pulling the bush with me. There was a certain weight to the whole thing, but not nearly enough. Most of the weight was from the two-foot diameter root ball, wrapped in hessian along with a clump of soil. Enough to keep the bush alive, the hessian acting as a barrier to stop the roots taking hold in the soil surrounding the access hatch. A neat disguise, straight out of a spy novel. It smacked of Bunny and his Elstree screenwriters.

Miriam was on her knees by the hatch, and the others hurried over, boots clomping on the ground. I held up my hand to them. They stopped, and I put my finger to my lips.

I knelt next to Miriam. The hatch was a simple manhole cover. A steel D-ring lying flat in the centre of a steel disc, stamped like a waffle with the imprint of its maker – Hancock Foundry, Leicester.

I pulled up the D-ring and got three fingers through it, then pulled the cover. It came away easily, a small shower of soil falling down into the darkness. I put the cover down on the grass and we all listened. There was nothing. No sirens. No running footsteps. No cries of alarm.

Miriam already had her rucksack off, ready to go in. We stood back, watching her. I pictured her sitting in the empty fuselage of a bomber as it flew across the Channel, steeling herself to jump out into the pitch-black sky, not knowing whether she’d land in a field or be impaled on a tree. Not many people would raise their hand for that mission.

Freddie was looking out into the darkness. Now our eyes were accustomed to the dark, we could make out the faintest outline of the clump of trees, with the secret transmitters hidden amongst them.

‘Freddie,’ I said. ‘You’re next.’

Freddie shook his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay above ground. I’ll meet you at the towers.’

Freddie was nervous. Nothing new there. From the -moment I’d met him I couldn’t think of a second when he’d been at peace. But this was different.

‘You’re coming with us,’ I said. I still hadn’t worked out how I was going to neutralise the threat of the explosives, but one thing was clear. If Freddie and the explosives -weren’t with us, I wouldn’t stand a chance.

‘I’ll meet you there,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

He hurried off, into the dark.

I looked at Vaughn, but he looked away. Didn’t want to meet my eye.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ he lied. ‘Freddie being Freddie.’

I couldn’t chase Freddie without giving the game away. As he disappeared into the night, my own illusions about keeping this night under control disappeared with him. I’d been a fool to think I could stage manage this whole thing. I’d been as naive as Bunny’s Elstree screenwriters. Worse – I should have known better. I did know better.

Miriam was below us, in the tunnel. I handed her rucksack down, thinking furiously. It had been vanity to assume I could control this. But I still had a job to do. Get Miriam in, and then get her out. Then I could turn my attention to Freddie. Everything else was a distraction.