War Game

All he had to do was to operate in a regulation manner, using as many operatives and as much equipment as they would let him have. These could be deployed in complicated operations, while he himself was engaged in exhaustive researches into —into what?

The Jerseys were pouring out now, stepping daintily with their forefeet, but lurching boney hindquarters and distended milk-bags behind them as though their rear halves had been added on from some different and much more ungainly animal.

Into the seventeenth century, of course! Into the Civil War, and the Gold of Standingham Castle—and even into the Double R Society itself. He ought to be able to lose himself safely in all of those without offending anybody very much.

Meanwhile others could research into Charlie Ratcliffe and dummy5

The Red Rat.

He closed his eyes and tried to remember what the Rat looked like. He had only seen the thing once, together with a report of an investigation into the charge that the underground and semi- underground press was being funded by external subversive organisations.

Which, apparently, it wasn't . . . And all he could really remember was the origin of its title, which had derived not so much from Charlie's own name as from an insult hurled at him during some political rally —You bloody little Commie rat!

Which Charlie, in the best political tradition, had seized on and gloried in—If I'm a rat, then the plague I carry is death to the oppressors of the workers!

Good rousing stuff, that. Much better than the smudgy, crudely-printed character-assassination sheet packed with half-truths, innuendoes and near-libels which had taken its name from that violent occasion.

Audley opened his eyes and smiled at a doe-eyed heifer which had thrust her dripping black nose at him through the window of the car. The rich sweet smell of cow was infinitely preferable to the sour smell of hate and envy that rose from The Red Rat's pages.

All the same. The Red Rat had had a clean bill of health. For all that it occasionally came up with an uncomfortably genuine morsel of scandal—which it usually ruined with dummy5

crass exaggeration— there had been no hint of foreign manipulation, KGB or other. The only string to it was the shoestring on which it ran: it had almost certainly avoided the legal consequences of its most outrageous accusations because it wasn't worth taking to court, not because of the victims' generosity.

Now it would have to tread more carefully. But now it could also afford to tread more heavily.

He drove on steadily, stopping first to purchase a bottle of beer and a pie, and then to turn two pound notes into small change.

The Jerseys had relaxed the last of his Atlantic tensions, the Jerseys and the quiet of the countryside, the green and yellow countryside of the last days of harvest time.

There hadn't been so much stubble-burning this year, he noted approvingly. But what was saddening was the epidemic spread of Dutch elm disease which was browning the leaves everywhere with a false autumn. It looked as though the day of the elm was over in southern England, his own elms among them.

He realised he was seeing all around him what he wanted to see, not what should be uppermost in his mind. The countryman was seeing the fields and the trees, just as the property developer would see choice building land, and the psephologist would pass from one parliamentary division to dummy5

the next, remembering each one's electoral swing.

What he should be seeing now was not the peaceful countryside of the 1970s, but the war-torn land of the 1640s, the divided England of the last great English Civil War.

Except that was easier said than done, because for all his degree in history there wasn't a great deal he could recall about the seventeenth century—

King versus Parliament.

Cavaliers versus Roundheads.

Dashing Prince Rupert versus dour Oliver Cromwell.

Cavaliers—wrong, but romantic.

Roundheads—right, but repulsive.

And, of course, the Roundheads had won, and dear old Sir Jacob Astley, surrendering the last Royalist army, had summed up this and all other wars—You have now done your work and may go play; unless you fall out amongst yourselves. . . .

Which the victorious Roundheads had promptly done.

Because now, in place of the King and his cavaliers, they had Cromwell and the terrible New Model Army which had won the war—the unbeatable Ironsides who knew what they were fighting for (more or less), and loved what they knew.

It was coming back, thought Audley. Some of it, anyway.

dummy5

And then Cromwell had ruled England with his New Model sword, and a great many people had felt the edge of it—the Scots and the Irish and the new young King Charles II ... and the Dutch and the Spaniards, and even the Algerine pirates, by God!

And the English themselves most of all, and they hadn't liked that very much—

In the name of Lucifer, Amen; Noll Cromwell, Lord Chief Governor of Ireland, Grand Plotter and Contriver of all Mischiefs in England, Lord of Misrule, Knight of the Order of Regicides, Thieftenant-General of the Rebels, Duke of Devilishness, Ensign of Evil, being most wickedly disposed of mind— they hadn't liked it at all, having a man who made the trains run on time, and solved the parking problem, and evened the balance of payments by throwing a sword on to the scales.