James Becker - Echo of the Reich

Bronson looked at him. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

Mike shrugged. “I don’t care. According to John here, you think you’re fairly tough and you’ve been running a one-man campaign opposing the London Olympics. Personally, I’m not sure about you. So here’s your chance to prove me wrong. You do whatever you want to do, but if you want me to take you seriously, I’ll be expecting a bit more than just a few slogans painted on some wall. I want to see damage, real damage, the kind of damage that will keep their machinery out of action for weeks. There are tools in the back of the van over there. Take whatever you think you’ll need.”

Bronson nodded. “Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

He strode across to the vehicle that Mike had indicated and opened the rear door. Inside was a large wooden box containing a selection of hand tools and equipment, the kind of stuff you’d expect to find in a vehicle owned by a jobbing builder. There were hammers, chisels, saws, screwdrivers, crowbars and bolt-croppers, all entirely innocent within their present context, but not exactly the kind of thing most people would expect to see being carried through the streets of London in the middle of the evening.

Bronson glanced at Eaton. “You know this site,” he said. “What will we need to get inside?”

Eaton didn’t hesitate. “There’s a chain-link fence all round it that would take too long to get through, but it’s got steel gates secured with a length of chain and a padlock, so that’s how we’ll get inside. We can use the bolt-croppers to cut the chain, no problem. I don’t know what we’ll find inside the site that we could use against the stuff that’s stored there, so I suggest we take a couple of club hammers as well. You can do pretty serious damage with one of them.”

“Fine with me,” Bronson replied. He reached into the tool box, picked up a set of bolt-croppers, a large chisel and a heavy hammer, and then a pair of heavy-duty gloves, and waited while Eaton selected his own tools of choice. Eaton picked up a canvas bag, the kind sometimes carried by a carpenter or plumber, put all the tools inside it and closed the rear doors of the van.

He nodded to Mike, and then he and Bronson strode away from the garage, heading down the street toward their target.

Mike watched them go, a thoughtful expression on his face. Then he turned and walked back onto the garage forecourt, toward the two other men who were still standing there, waiting by the Transits. They were the drivers-Mike himself would drive one of the vans away from the garage when the others returned.

“You know what to do?” he asked. “And you’re sure you’ve got everything?”

The man nearest to him nodded. “Yeah, no problem. Be a piece of piss. Used one of them before, see.”

“Good. Right, you’d best get moving, then.”

The man he’d been speaking to reached into the cab of the Transit next to him and took out a small gray bag made of a soft fabric, and nodded to Mike. Then he set off down the street, following exactly the same route Bronson and Eaton had just taken.

20 July 2012

“It’s not far now,” Eaton said, turning the corner and heading down another street principally occupied by light industrial and commercial premises. Like the other roads they’d walked down, this street was virtually deserted, devoid of both cars and pedestrians. They walked on for about a further thirty yards, then Eaton nodded in the direction of a yard on the opposite side of the road.

“That’s it,” he said.

A pair of tall steel gates, painted dark blue but showing the inevitable scrapes and bumps caused by the movement of heavy machinery in and out of the yard, marked the entrance. The gates were supported on steel columns on either side, and heavy-duty steel-mesh fencing was attached to the other side of each post and, as far as Bronson could see, completely enclosed the yard. Parked inside, and clearly visible through the fence, were several pieces of construction equipment, including a low loader, presumably used for transportation, three bulldozers, a number of cranes of various sizes, several machines that looked a bit like tractors but which were fitted with digger attachments, and dozens of cement mixers of various types and sizes.

Bronson was feeling increasingly uncomfortable. He’d broken rules in the past and cut corners when he thought he could get away with it, both during his time in the army and later as a police officer. From a legal point of view, the most dangerous act he’d ever undertaken was probably buying the Llama pistol from Dickie Weeks, because he knew better than anyone that unauthorized possession of a firearm in the United Kingdom attracted a mandatory custodial sentence. But what he was about to do now disturbed him more than that, or any other act he had ever performed. What he and Eaton were planning to do was nothing more than mindless vandalism, impossible to justify on any level.

Except, of course, that the only way he could possibly be accepted as a member of the group was to live the lie that he had created, to do for real the kind of things that he claimed to have been doing already.

But he really didn’t like it.

Eaton glanced both ways, but the street was empty. He checked his watch, nodded, and then led the way across the road, stopped beside the double steel gates and opened the canvas tool bag.

“You’re stronger than I am. You cut the chain,” Eaton ordered, leaving Bronson no choice.

As Eaton had done, he checked that there weren’t any pedestrians anywhere near them, or anyone watching. Then he reached into the tool bag, pulled on the gloves and took out the bolt-croppers. He fitted the jaws around one of the links in the heavy-duty chain and forced the handles together. It was harder than he’d expected, and he changed his grip a couple of times until he felt the steel starting to give. Once the jaws started to bite, the chain began to part, the link finally giving way with a sharp crack that sounded uncomfortably loud in the quiet of the street.

Cutting through the other side of the broken link took less time, now that Bronson knew the level of force he had to exert, and in less than a minute the steel gave way and the chain fell to the ground.

Eaton pushed open the right-hand-side gate and they stepped into the yard, pushing the gate closed behind them to retain the appearance of normality.

“What now?” Bronson asked.

Eaton shrugged. “It’s your show,” he said. “Do what you like.”

Bronson nodded. Essentially on trial, he knew he had to make it look good. But for the sake of his own conscience, he was going to try to do as little damage as possible.

He grabbed the hammer and chisel he’d put in the tool bag and walked over to the closest bulldozer. He rested the blade of the chisel against the pipe leading to one of the diesel injectors on the side of the engine and rapped the end sharply with the hammer. The pipe fractured instantly, a trickle of diesel fuel weeping out of the broken end. Then he repeated the action on the other injector pipes. He wasn’t doing any lasting damage to the bulldozer-to do anything major would require far more powerful tools than just a hammer and chisel-and he knew the construction company would only have to replace the pipes to get the vehicle working again. But he was taking it out of action for a day or two, and he hoped that was the kind of thing Eaton was expecting him to do.

It wasn’t.

“Come on, Alex, that’s just fiddling about. They’ll have that dozer running again in a few hours. You need to think bigger. Get into the cab, smash up the instrument panel. Do something that’ll take it out of commission for a few weeks.”