Ken McClure - The Gulf Conspiracy

The bagpipes of the massed pipes and drums made their traditional hesitant start and the strains of Over the Sea to Skye filled the damp air with yet more melancholy while drizzly rain settled on the Guards’ bearskins.

Maclean took his right hand off the barrier and slipped it inside his plastic raincoat to grip the neck of the bottle, which he’d hung on a string loop from his belt. The poster was folded across the front of his chest inside his jacket and then tucked into his belt. His fingers, wet and cold from gripping the steel barrier for so long, fumbled to release the bottle from the string and he suddenly became aware that he was attracting suspicious glances from the couple standing next to him, especially the woman, a short, dumpy figure with badly dyed blonde hair and a sullen expression, who was clearly wondering what he was doing with his hands inside his raincoat.

Perhaps it was agitation inspired by the woman’s disapproving glances or the slight numbness in his fingers from having stood in the cold for so long but just as he succeeded in releasing the bottle from the loop, it slipped from his grasp and fell to the ground to smash on the pavement, creating a large, growing red puddle round his feet.

‘Oh my God, it’s blood!’ screamed the woman, clutching at the arm of her companion and pointing downwards. The immediate crowd shrank back to leave a space around Maclean just as several more women started to scream and cries went up for the police to come. A man with a cockney accent exclaimed loudly, ‘What the fuck?’

Gus stared down at the puddle, mesmerised for a moment, his plans in ruins and his mind in turmoil. When he looked up again there were hostile faces all around him. He had lost the visual impact that his prop would undoubtedly have had but he hoped it might still be possible to display his banner. It wouldn’t be nearly so dramatic as splashing blood on the cenotaph but maybe the cameras of some of the press would at least catch the message. He tugged desperately at the barrier to widen the gap but it proved more difficult to budge than he’d anticipated. He gave up and tried to squeeze through the small gap he had managed to open but got stuck half way. He was struggling to free himself when two burly policemen arrived, intent on smothering the incident as quickly as possible.

The crowd melted back to allow the policemen to manhandle Maclean out through their numbers rather than parade him along the front of the barriers where he might detract from the ceremony and possibly be photographed. Maclean was forcibly bent over as his arms were twisted painfully up his back. He couldn’t see the crowd — only their feet — but he could hear them.

‘Fuckin’ loony.’

‘Christ! They’re everywhere these days.’

‘He was gonna kill the Queen, the bastard.’

Maclean felt someone take a kick at his leg and cried out in pain.

‘He had a fuckin’ gun,’ exclaimed someone else.

‘You don’t understand,’ gasped Maclean. ‘I’m one of you... I went to war... I served my country... Don’t let them fool you... These bastards over there don’t give a shit... They don’t give a shit about any of us... All that praying and saluting... It’s just a fancy-dress party for them... They’re pretending, the lot of them. They don’t care: they just don’t bloody care.’

This only made the policemen twist his arms further up his back, making him cry out again before being thrown bodily into the back of a police van and driven off.

Maclean found it a relief when the cell door was closed behind him and he was blissfully alone again. It was infinitely preferable to being pushed and pulled around by police who had treated him as an object from the outset and steadfastly refused to acknowledge anything he’d said or asked. He’d felt like the invisible man, only with the proviso that no one could hear him either.

Maclean lay down on the bare bunk and stared up at the ceiling. He had failed in his mission to make his point at the Cenotaph and he felt dreadful. It was such a pity because he felt sure that the blood would have made such a strong impact, but, looking on the bright side, he might still get his chance to get his message across in court. He started planning what he would say to the magistrates and hopefully, to the Press in the gallery. He got no inspiration at all from the graffiti of despair on the walls.

An hour later, after having been examined by a police doctor and declared sane and lucid, Maclean was formally questioned.

‘Tell us about the blood,’ was the opening gambit from the interviewing officer.

‘It was horse blood,’ said Maclean.

‘Horse blood,’ repeated the policeman mechanically, as if humouring the village idiot.

‘We use it in the lab to make blood agar plates,’ said Maclean matter of factly... ‘to grow bacteria on,’ he added by way of explanation and in response to the look on the officer’s face.

‘Silly me,’ said the officer. ‘Maybe we can just go back a few steps here. Who exactly are you and what’s this all about?’

‘Gus Maclean, I’m a technician in the bacteriology department at Princess Louise Hospital in Glasgow.’

‘Now we’re getting somewhere. What exactly did you intend doing with the bottle of blood?’

‘Ideally I would have liked to have rammed it up Fatty Soames’s arse but I was going to make do with smashing it on the cenotaph to draw attention to the victims of Gulf War Syndrome.’

‘Fatty Soames?’ asked the policeman.

‘Ex Defence Minister,’ said a colleague.

‘So your beef is with the MOD?’

‘Among others.’

‘What did they ever do to you?’

‘Not just me,’ replied Maclean. ‘Thousands of us came back from the Gulf War sick and these bastards have been pretending that there’s fuck-all wrong with us.’

‘You fought in the Gulf War?’

‘Sergeant, 1 stField Laboratory Unit, replied Maclean. ‘The secret team,’ he added, as if he thought it a bad joke.

The policeman raised his eyes. ‘Secret team? What’s that all about?’

‘We weren’t supposed to exist,’ said Maclean. ‘We’re on nobody’s list. Forty of us in eight five-man teams. We operated out of Porton Down.’

‘The defence establishment?’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Maclean sarcastically. ‘We were deployed in the Gulf to detect the presence of chemical and biological weapons and then to identify them.’

‘If this is true, should you be telling us this?’ said the policeman. ‘Official Secrets Act, I mean.’

‘Fuck the Official Secrets Act,’ said Maclean.

The policeman thought for a moment before saying to the uniformed constable standing by the door, ‘Take him back to his cell.’

Maclean was brought back to the interview room two hours later. The police deferred to two men in plain clothes and left him alone with them. One asked Maclean. ‘Do you know who we are?’

‘Spooks,’ replied Maclean. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’

‘You do realise that you contravened the Official Secrets Act in this police station two hours ago?’

‘Yup,’ replied Maclean. ‘So charge me.’

‘So you can put on your one-man show in court? I don’t think so.’

‘So I’ll go on contravening the Official Secrets Act,’ said Maclean.

‘It’s one thing saying something, Maclean, quite another getting anyone to listen to you. Look at you for God’s sake. London’s full of unemployed Jocks with stories to tell. No one gives a shit.’

‘I’m not unemployed,’ said Maclean, stung by the comment. ‘I’m off sick.’

‘In the head.’

Maclean looked down at the floor. ‘There’s nothing wrong with my head,’ he said through gritted teeth.