82

The submarine door was shut, but there was light coming through the small window. Light from the corridor beyond. Shadows played on the glass. Boots crunched on concrete. Men running into position. Metal on metal as guns were prepared.

I remembered what Bunny had said to me.

Nobody will know you’re coming.

The men on the other side of the door weren’t playing along with the scenario the Elstree scriptwriters had concocted. They didn’t know I’d been invited in. They didn’t care.

Vaughn and Miriam saw the light and knew its significance. Time to go.

The metal ladder that Bunny and I had climbed was on the far side of the foyer, painted white to blend in with the décor, leading upwards. In the high ceiling, twenty feet up, the hatch that would take us out to the clump, where -Freddie would be waiting.

The submarine door opened and a soldier hurried into the cinema lobby. He was young, barely out of short trousers. He was a local lad. He’d been propping up the bar at The Cross for the past year. Hadn’t been around for a while now. Must have signed up.

‘You’re not allowed to be here,’ he said to Miriam.

Miriam raised her gun.

‘Don’t,’ I said. But she didn’t listen. She pulled the trigger. Deafening, in the concrete bunker. The young lad collapsed, dead before he hit the floor.

Another gunshot rang out, a rifle. Bolt-action. Single shot, from the corridor beyond the submarine door. Miriam’s hand went to her shoulder and she pulled it away. It was red with blood.

A siren started up, the eerie wail rising steadily.

Miriam fainted, her body pulling blood to its core in a bid for survival.

The next sound was the crunch of the bolt as the man who’d shot Miriam loaded another round from his ten-shot magazine. I kicked the door shut. I looked for a lock, fantasising about a huge steel bar I could set across the whole door, but there was no way to secure the door from this side. The only thing stopping the sentries on the other side from opening it was the knowledge that we had guns, and that whoever opened it and stepped forwards would be dead within a second.

Above me, the round window in the door shattered and another shot hit the foyer wall.

I drew my Webley revolver from its holster, stood up, and put a round through the small window. I dropped my hand low and tried to angle it high, aiming for the top inch of the opening, but there wasn’t much leeway. I hoped I hadn’t taken anyone’s head off.

I looked at the ladder. Twenty feet, straight up. Miriam was out cold on the floor. If I left her behind, this was all for nothing.

‘Go,’ I said to Vaughn, nodding at the ladder. ‘Get that hatch open.’

Vaughn ran across the line of light from the submarine door, drawing a burst of fire. He reached the ladder -unscathed and looked back at me.

‘I’ll bring her,’ I said. ‘Go!’

Vaughn’s boots clanged on the ladder. They’d hear it in the corridor, on the other side of the submarine door. They’d be huddled there, on either side of the small window, working on a plan.

I put another round through the window, lower this time. I didn’t want to hit any of them, but if it came to it, and I had to choose them or me going down in a firefight, I’d choose them. This wasn’t a situation I’d created, I told -myself. Everything that played out was on Bunny. This was his show.

First problem, Miriam was still in view of the window. I dragged her out of the shaft of light, into the darkness.

‘You three!’ I shouted. ‘Keep your guns on that door and take out anyone that comes through it!’

If I was going to be an actor in Bunny’s play, it was time to start playing the part well. If the men on the other side knew it was only me, with one revolver and five rounds in the barrel, and an unconscious woman, they might decide the odds were in their favour. Someone at the back would give the order to open the door and rush me. No skin off his nose if the first couple of men through the door didn’t make it. That’s what infantry were for, soaking up bullets.

‘Use the Bren!’ I shouted, over-egging it perhaps. The Bren gun, a two-man tripod-mounted machine-gun, was -capable of firing five hundred rounds per minute. Eight rounds per second. Assuming a full unit of twenty men in that corridor, once the door was opened, a Bren would chew its way through all of them. Even the man at the back, giving orders, would think twice.

I put my shoulder to Miriam’s waist, and pulled her upper body over mine in a fireman’s lift, getting to my knees and then my feet, Miriam slung over my shoulder like a sack of feed.

I put two more rounds through the small window, ran across the shaft of light, and grabbed hold of the ladder.