J.G. Ballard - The Wind From Nowhere

He sat up and peered into the periscope, but the cobbled street ahead was empty.

"What's going on?" he asked the driver.

Goldman flipped away the butt of his cigarette. "Some sort of rumpus back there, Commander. Couldn't make it out exactly."

He leaned a little harder on the accelerator, pushed the carrier's speed up to 15 miles an hour. The pounding stopped, then took up again more insistently, the voice hoarser above the wind.

Lanyon tapped the steering wheel. "Slow down for a second. I'll go back and check."

Goldman started to protest, but Lanyon straddled the back of his seat, stepped past the two orderlies sitting on the mattress, and got to the rear doors. He slipped back the shutters, peered out through the grille. A small group of people clustered around the porch of a gray-walled church on the north side of the square. There were several women among them, all wearing black shawls over their heads, backing into the recessed entranceway. A loose heap of rubble lay in the square at their feet and clouds of dust and mortar were failing around them.

The church tower was missing. A single spur of brickwork, all that was left of one corner, stood up 15 feet above the apex of the roof. The wind was tearing at the raw masonry, stripping away whole pieces of brick.

One of the orderlies crawled across the mattress and crouched next to Lanyon.

"The tower's just collapsed," Lanyon told him. He indicated the stack of cartons. "What have you got inside there?"

"Plasma, oxygen, penicillin." The orderly peered at Lanyon. "We can't use it on them, Commander. This stuff's reserved for the general."

"Don't worry, they'll have more supplies at Nice."

"But Commander, they may have run out. Casualties are probably pouring in there. It's a small hospital-just a dysentery unit for overtired weekenders on the Paris mill."

Just then a figure appeared around the end of the carrier and pressed his face to the grille, jabbering in Italian. It was a big gaunt man with bulky shoulders, and black hair low over a tough face.

The orderly backed away but Lanyon started to open the doors. Over his shoulder he shouted at Goldman.

"Reverse up toward the church! I'll see if we can lend a hand."

"Commander, once we start helping these people we'll never get to Nice. They've got their own rescue units working."

"Not right here, anyway. Come one, you heard me, back in!"

As he slipped the catch the big Italian outside wrenched the door out of his hands. He looked angry and exhausted, and pulled Lanyon out of the truck, yelling at him and pointing at the church. Goldman was reversing the carrier out of the street into the square, the orderlies jumping down and bolting the door behind them.

As they reached the church, brickwork and plaster shattered down onto the pavement around them. The Italian shouldered his way through the people in the entranceway, and led Lanyon through into the nave.

Inside the church, a bomb appeared to have exploded in the middle of a crowded congregation. A group of women and older men and children crouched around the altar while the priest and five or six younger men pulled away the mounds of masonry that had fallen through the roof when the tower had collapsed, taking with it one of the longitudinal support beams. This lay across the pews. Below it, through the piles of white dust and masonry, Lanyon could see tags of black fabric, twisted shoes, the hunched forms of crouching bodies.

Above them, the wind racing across the surface of the roof was stripping away the ragged edge of tiles around the ten-foot-wide hole, hampering the men tearing away the rubble over the pews. Lanyon joined the big Italian at one end of the roof beam, but they failed to move it.

Lanyon turned to leave the nave and the big Italian ran after him and seized his shoulder, his face contorted with anger and fatigue.

"Not go!" he bellowed. He pointed to the pile of rubble. "My wife, my wife! You stay!"

Lanyon tried to pacify him, indicated the truck that had backed into the entranceway, its doors open, one of the orderlies crouched inside. He tore himself from the Italian and ran Out to the truck, shouting: "Goldman, get the winch running. Where's the cable?"

They pulled it out of the locker under the end board, clipped it into the winch and then carried the free end through into the nave. Lanyon and the Italian lashed it to the main beam, then Goldman gunned up the great 550-hp engine and tautened the cable, slowly swinging the beam sideways off the pew into the center of the aisle. Immediately two or three people trapped below the pews began to stir. One of them, a young woman wearing the remains of a black dress that was now as white as a bridal gown, managed to stand up weakly and pulled herself out. Between her feet Lanyon could see several motionless figures, and the big Italian was digging frantically with his hands at the masonry, hurling it away with insane force.

More figures pressed into the nave behind him, and Lanyon turned to see that a squad of uniformed troops, with a couple of police carabineri, had arrived, carrying in stretchers and plasma kits.

"Every thanks, Captain," the sergeant told him. "We are all grateful to your men." He shook his head sadly, glancing around at the church. "The people were praying for the stop of the wind."

Lanyon and the orderlies climbed back into the carrier, sealed the doors and moved off.

Massaging his bruised hands and trying to regain his breath, Lanyon turned to the orderlies slumped down on the mattress. "Did either of you see whether that big fellow got his wife out?"

They shook their heads doubtfully. "Don't think so, Corn-. mander."

Goldman accelerated the engine and straightened the periscope. "Wind speed's up, Commander. One ten now. We'll have to keep moving if we're going to make Nice by dark."

Lanyon studied the driver for a few moments, watching the cigarette butt rotate nastily around his mouth. "Don't worry, sailor," he said, "I'll concentrate on the general from now on."

They crossed the border at Vintemille at 7 P.M. and cleared through by radio with Nice and Genoa. The flimsy customs sheds and wooden turnpikes had disappeared; the frontier guards on both sides were dug into sandbagged emplacements below ground surface.

They reached Nice within a couple of hours, taking the Corniche road through the hills. The hospital compound was packed with hundreds of trucks and jeeps, their drivers huddled in the entrances to the loading bays. A couple of MP's steered the carrier over to one of the rear wings, where Lanyon and the orderlies climbed out and battled their way inside.

"You're later than expected, Commander," a burly red-faced major in reception greeted Lanyon. "I gather it's really blowing up outside.

He led Lanyon into a side office where there were coffee and hot rolls on a table.

Lanyon pulled off his leather jacket and helped himself to coffee, then sat down thankfully on a teak chest resting on a low table against the wall.

Putting out his cigarette, the major hurriedly pushed across a canvas chair.

"Sorry, Commander, but perhaps you'd better sit on this. Don't want to show any disrespect to the general, do we?"

Lanyon pulled himself to his feet. "What are you talking about?" he asked, puzzled. "Which general?"

The major smiled. "Van Damm." He pointed to the teak box. "You were sitting on him."

Lanyon put down his coffee. "Do you mean that Van Damm's dead?" When the major nodded he stared down at the coffin, shaking his head slowly. It was ringed with heavy steel tape, and there was a Graves Commission seal franked with a Paris movement order.

The major began to laugh noiselessly to himself, looking Lanyon's wind-torn uniform up and down and shaking his head in dry amusement. Lanyon waited for him to finish.