Simon Tolkien - Orders from Berlin

‘Get down!’ Trave shouted. He pushed Thorn violently to the ground and then followed suit. He pulled his legs up under his chest, put his hands up behind his head, and closed his eyes, waiting for death. And in that last moment before the explosion, he had a crystal-clear vision of his wife, Vanessa — one that he would never forget. They were outside, standing on the postage-stamp lawn in the walled garden at the back of their little terrace house in Oxford, and the sun was shining and she was laughing, holding their baby up towards him. He reached out to touch the child’s unbelievably tiny fingers and splayed toes, inches away, and suddenly there was nothing. A blinding white light and a deafening roar, and Trave felt as if his eyeballs were being sucked out of his head. He was moving through the air, and then he hit something hard and felt a sharp pain in his lower back. Only when he opened his eyes did he realize that the blast had thrown him against the thick trunk of an old beech tree. When he looked up, he saw it had lost all its leaves, while less well-entrenched trees on either side had been uprooted and blown to the ground.

He pulled himself slowly to his feet, leaning heavily on the tree for support. His legs and his hands were trembling and he was hurting all over, but at least he seemed to have the use of all his limbs.

After a few moments, the dense cloud of dust thrown up by the explosion began to clear a little and Trave was able to get a blurred view of the other side of the road. Except that it didn’t seem like the same road. What he was now seeing bore no relation to what had been there two minutes before. Gloucester Mansions no longer existed. It had been replaced by a vast pile of broken masonry. Brick and iron and plaster smashed together in an amorphous mass of devastation. A human landscape replaced by an inhuman one in the blink of an eye. No one in the building could possibly have survived. Trave thought of the kind neighbour Mrs Graves, who had plied him with whisky on the night of Albert’s murder and had done her best to help Ava get over the shock. She had to have been one of the frightened voices that he and Thorn had heard coming from the basement on their way out. And now she was buried under tons of rubble. Trave hoped that she had died quickly.

It added to the strangeness that this new world was silent, sucked clean of sound by the blast. The cacophony of the raid — the droning planes; the whistling, exploding bombs; the booming anti-aircraft guns — had all disappeared, replaced by this new throbbing silence that pressed painfully upon Trave’s ears. He wondered if he’d been made deaf by the blast. He’d heard of such things happening, and it was a relief when the noise of the crying began — a chorus of lamentation and suffering that grew in volume until he could hear it all around him, out in the road and behind him among the trees.

Trave’s sense of smell returned with his hearing. Foul odours — of ash and smoke and leaking gas and sewage coming from ruptured pipes — mixed with the choking dust that was burning his throat and nostrils. He threw off his jacket and pulled off his shirt, then tore off one of the sleeves and held it over his mouth and nose to make it easier to breathe.

He let go of the tree and forced himself forward towards the road, walking slowly and unsteadily on his shaking legs, taking care not to fall over the tangled mass of broken branches that covered the ground. He saw Thorn lying close to the pavement. He recognized him from his clothes. Thorn wasn’t moving and Trave knelt beside him, fearing the worst. One side of Thorn’s face was covered in blood so that his eye was invisible, and he lay twisted over onto his left side, contorted by some other injury that Trave couldn’t see. Thorn’s breath came in laboured gasps, and it was obvious that he was in great pain.

‘What hurts?’ asked Trave, frightened to move Thorn in case he made the injury worse.

‘My shoulder. And I can’t see properly, just enough to know it’s you. I’m glad you made it,’ said Thorn, speaking in a whisper so that Trave had to bend down close to hear him.

‘I’ll get you a doctor,’ said Trave, although he had no idea where he was going to find one. The only ambulance he could see was turned over on its side further down the street.

‘No, listen,’ Thorn said urgently, reaching out to take hold of Trave’s bare arm. ‘You’ve got to find out what Seaforth’s planning. You have to. Heydrich-’

‘Don’t worry about that now,’ said Trave, interrupting. ‘We can talk about it later when you’re feeling better.’

‘No, I don’t know if there’ll be a later,’ said Thorn, digging his fingers into Trave’s wrist. His tautened features showed how much even this small physical effort was costing him. ‘Find his mother. Maybe she’ll know something. There’s a town-’ He stopped in mid-sentence, closing his eyes, and Trave thought for a moment he was gone. The unbloodied side of Thorn’s face had a deathly white pallor, and his breathing seemed to have stopped. But then, just as Trave was about to try to resuscitate him, Thorn spoke again. ‘Langholm,’ he said, pronouncing each syllable separately, as if determined to get it right. ‘It’s just the other side of the border. Maybe she’s still there. Promise me …’, he said, looking imploringly up at Trave.

But Trave was spared the need for a response. An ambulance — a converted greengrocer’s van — came to a screeching halt beside where Trave was kneeling and the driver jumped out — a determined-looking man of about Trave’s age wearing an ill-fitting tin hat with SP for ‘stretcher party’ stencilled on the front in capital letters. Trave could see that the rest of the crew were heading over to the devastation on the other side of the road.

‘Let’s have a look,’ he said, taking Trave’s place beside Thorn, who appeared now to be unconscious. He examined Thorn quickly and then cut away the sleeves of Thorn’s jacket and shirt with a pair of sharp scissors and injected his arm with a syringe. Trave assumed it was morphine.

‘Is he going to be all right?’ Trave asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said the medic, who was now busy writing on a tag that he’d taken from his pocket. ‘He’s hurt his shoulder, although I can’t tell if it’s a break, and he’s got some nasty shrapnel injuries around his right eye. Maybe there’s more, but that’ll have to wait for the hospital.’

‘Which one?’ asked Trave.

‘St Stephen’s — over the river,’ said the medic as he tied the label around Thorn’s ankle. There was a capital M written on it and an X with a question mark. Trave had been at enough incidents before this one to know what the letters stood for: M for morphine and the X? for the possibility of internal injuries.

‘Come on, help me with this,’ said the medic, opening the back of the van and taking out a stretcher. ‘You’re lucky you were in the park, you know. Word is the mine exploded on the other side of that building,’ he said, pointing over towards the ruins of Gloucester Mansions. ‘You’d both have been goners if it had gone off in front.’

Trave swallowed and his hands shook as he helped lift the now comatose Thorn onto the stretcher and carry him to the back of the van. He realized he’d been saved from extinction by nothing more significant than the strength of a south-westerly wind that had happened to be blowing just hard enough and in just the right direction to take the mine’s silk parachute over the roof of Gloucester Mansions before it fell to the ground and exploded. His survival was pure chance, and the poor devils who had died were the victims of an entirely random harvest.

There was nothing more Trave could do to help Thorn. So, holding his shirtsleeve mask over his face, he crossed Prince of Wales Drive to get a closer look at the smoking ruins of Gloucester Mansions and the destruction in the narrow streets beyond. He moved carefully, picking his way around an abandoned fire engine smouldering in the road with its rubber tyres entirely melted. Shattered glass lay everywhere like dirty drifts of pack ice.