Gavin Lyall - Midnight Plus One

I moved along the firestep, where there were no puddles but just heaps of wet sand that had spilled down from the rotted sandbags. When I ducked my head, the wind shut off as if I'd closed a hatch, and the air was close, warm, and slimy.

The firing trenches had their own pattern: the zigzags were squared off, like the shape of huge battlements laid flat on the ground. The front parallels were where you were supposed to win the war from; the rear ones (what the hell did they call them? – yes, 'traverses') for having a quiet smoke while somebody else won it.

I walked round several corners, from traverse up to front and back again. Almost every front wall had something in it: dark, foul-smelling entrances to deep dugouts, or steps up to a squat pillbox sunk into the parapet. The pillboxes were always on the front parallels.

Then I saw the tank path. It crossed on a culvert built into a traverse: a heavy concrete affair to support the weight of a tank above, yet leaving a three-foot tunnel for crawling through underneath.

I stayed where I was. I knew now that if Alain was in the trenches, he wasn't in this third line. He'd have somebody on both sides… I shivered as I remembered how cheerfully I'd walked up round those corners.

I walked back more carefully, found the communication trench leading to the second line. As I turned in, I looked at my watch: I'd used six of my fifteen minutes.

The lines were supposed to be seventy yards apart, but the zigzag of the trench turned it into a hundred-yard trip. And at one point a barbed-wire entanglement laid across the top had collapsed into the trench itself. I slid through with no more than three or four injections of blood-poisoning off the rusted spikes.

But at least it told me how far I'd come: barbed wire should be laid just outside grenade-throwing range of the trench it protects. Rules of War – before people started throwing dive-bombers and armoured columns instead of grenades…

Grenades. Would Alain have grenades? Yes-if he was expecting a car. But he wasn't. Just several people in the open – and there grenades are useless. All that time waiting for them to go off, and after the flash and bang, you don't know if they're dead or hiding in the ditch. So – no grenades.

So what instead? A burst of Sten-gun fire. Just waiting until we were close enough to chop us down with one burst…And where had I thought of that idea before? Yes – in Quimper, the man in the car, the dead man. Resistance Sten-gunner.9 mm. cartridge on his key-ring – probably from the first time he killed with his nice new Sten. Sentimentalist. Realists fight for money. Like Alain. Like Caneton.

I stopped at the corner, lowered my head, and peered carefully around three feet off the ground. Nothing. I hadn't expected anything. But I'd remembered I was in a trench system built to have as many corners as possible for men with guns to wait behind…

Was I here for twelve thousand francs? No. I'd insisted on being told that Maganhard was in the right- that he hadn't raped anybody, that he wasn't trying to kill anybody but people were trying to kill him. That made him in the right – and me too. Just an old sentimentalist.

Or because I was Caneton?

I looked quickly left and right into the second-line firing trench, stepped across on the firestep, and started moving left, towards the tank path.

Suddenly it was a long, cold bright way to the next corner. I got there, but it cost me something that I wouldn't have left to get me round the next. And the next after that.

I moved carefully, feeling with my foot for obstacles before putting it down, keeping my eyes and the gun on the corner ahead.

Put 'He died for twelve thousand francs' on a man's tomb and nobody'll sneer. They'll reckon he knew what he was doing. Twelve thousand francs is something you can count; you can say it isn't enough; you can change your mind and not earn it.

But you can't count being Caneton; you can't back down from that. And for that, maybe you'll do things you'd never do just for twelve thousand francs…

Then the next corner was a long way off and horribly close, and I was moving towards it far too fast and much too slowly. And my time must be nearly up – but I daren't look at my watch. I had to look at the corner. And the corner looked steadily back.

I froze, with the Mauser up and aimed and the trigger a fraction away from loosing a bright, noisy, friendly blast of fire. And the quiet corner watched me.

But Maganhard is right and Alain is wrong… And me? Then I knew that nothing I could do would ever change either of those things. All I could do was fix the cost – the cost of being right or wrong. And perhaps who paid.

Slowly, very slowly, I lifted my left wrist and laid it across the barrel of the aimed gun and flickered my eyes for an instant at the luminous dial of my watch.

Three minutes. Just time to go back, to say the hell with twelve thousand francsand being Caneton. To tell Maganhard he'll still be in the right whether he gets through or not, and that what matters is the cost…

But still time enough to fix the cost, to make that right. Because it was still the fight I'd planned and not what Alain was expecting. Because Iwas still Caneton – and nobody else was that. And I could get round that corner.

I took three quick soft strides and was around it, pointing the Mauser into the long, dark loophole of a pillbox, staring down at me from the next front parallel.

Nothing happened.

I walked very carefully towards it, up a few yards of fore-and-aft trench without a firestep. There was another corner just before the pillbox, but I knew nobody would be around it. If they were anywhere in this trench, they were up behind the loophole. At the corner, I stopped and studied it.

It was a six-sided affair sunk into the front parapet, with loopholes around five sides. The sixth was the way in from the trench: you climbed three steps and in through a low doorway. I didn't climb anything. I just looked. Beside the pillbox the parapet had rotted and sand had poured down on the steps…

If anybody had got into that pillbox in weeks, he'd done it hi a flying upwards dive. The sand on the steps hadn't been touched. I scuttled up and inside.

Like the blockhouse, you had to walk in around a blast wall. And inside, there were a lot of complicated bits of internal wall so that nobody could sneak up, shoot in through an unoccupied loophole, and hit everybody else in the back. A lot of thought had gone into this pillbox. I stepped quickly across to the rear left-hand loophole.

It looked half-backwards: above and across the bushes -and just twenty yards away, there was the square outline of another pillbox. And running between across another culvert over the trench, the tank path.

I saw the pattern now: the two pillboxes placed like gateposts to guard either side of the tank path, the one weak spot in the whole defence.

And now I knew where Alain was – where he had to be. In the same twin pillboxes up on the front line; the only places where he could stand up to see above the bushes without being seen. And where he could catch us in the only place where a bunch of people on foot couldn't be straggled out to make a difficult shot: crossing on the culvert.

Behind me I heard the distant heartbeat of the Rolls. My time was up.

I jumped the steps down into the trench and ran. The corners didn't matter any more; now the corners weremy protection. Nor did the noise; the steep sides of the communication trench would channel my crashings and splashings straight up in the air. In a concrete pillbox, already intent on the throb of the Rolls, Alain would never hear me.

I burst into the front line, turned left, rounded a couple of corners, and jumped on to the firestep. The sound of the car slapped at me.