Gunner Kelly

“Don’t need ‘em for where we’re going, my lad,” said the sergeant.

“No coppers or traffic wardens to worry about, you take my word for it.” He looked at Audley. “About an hour, sir—would that be right?”

“Come on Ben!” Darren encouraged his friend. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing to it, lad,” the sergeant supported Darren. “Remember those pictures on the telly of the Scorpions coming ashore at San Carlos Bay?”

“Off you go, then!”Audley gestured to push the boys towards the door. “I can look after Herr Wiesehofer for an hour, don’t worry.”

“Ben—” Darren caught his friend’s arm “— come on!”

“All right!” Benje shrugjed off the hand, but looked at Audley.

“And you’ll be here with . . . with Mr—Mr Veezehoffer?”

“I won’t step out of this place. I’ll just show him the tanks,”

promised Audley. “Don’t wcrry about us, we’ll be okay, young dummy1

Benjamin.”

Benedikt watched them depart—Darren eagerly, Benje with the backward look of a prisoner going to a firing squad.

“Hmm . . .” murmured Aadley. “A clever little boy.”

Benedikt turned to him. “But frightened? No ... ?”

“No.” Audley met his gaze. “Our young Benjamin has led a sheltered childhood—he hasn’t learnt to be frightened yet. He’s just too clever for comfort, that’s all. God help Oxbridge when it gets him . . . Perhaps we should put his name on the list, though—

to get him inside our tent.” He shook his head slowly.

Benedikt stared at the Englishman.

Audley sighed. “He knew I was getting rid of him—the chance to drive a Scorpion . . . and he still knew it!” He shook his head again.

“Get... get rid of him?”

“Oh, yes. Kelly’s got Benjamin sewed up tight—and I haven’t had time to unsew him.” Audley nodded. “Young Benjamin is Mr Gunner Kelly’s spy-in-the-sky on this trip— make no mistake about that. I got away last night because I’d given them you and your contact lenses on a plate, and they had to trust me . . . And then I gave them Captain Benedikt Schneider for good measure, to justify that trust . . . But Kelly still doesn’t like anything that happens where he can’t see it—or overhear it... I told you—in Duntisbury Chase I’m still one of the foederati from outside, not one of the native Britons: when it comes to the crunch, they’re not sure whose side I’m on.”

Benedikt struggled with this interpretation of reality, even though dummy1

it coincided with his own. “And that child . . . ?”

“That child is old enough to believe in a cause, if he trusts whoever is feeding him the bull-shit.” Audley’s jaw set hard. “In a year or two he’ll think for himself, and no one will make his mind up for him. But at the moment he can still remember the Old General, and he’s got adolescent yearnings for the way Becky’s shirt bulges, which he doesn’t understand . . . And he believes Mr Gunner Kelly is an extension of those bulges, on the side of Good and Right. And if I tried to tamper with that I’d get my fingers burnt.”

Gunner Kelly. Mr Gunner Kelly ... It always came down to him!

But they were here now—and they had got rid of ‘young Benjamin’, however unsatisfactorily—

“What are we doing here, David?” The organisation of ‘Major Kennedy’ and those Armoured Corps NCOs to get rid of the little spy could only have been encompassed during Audley’s brief period of freedom, which meant that it had been planned in advance for a reason. And there could only be one reason worth such a risk. “Kelly?”

“Kelly.” Audley pointed to the hall of the tanks. “I had one opportunity, three days ago, to get a question out. . . Now we’ll see whether I’ve got an answer to it. Shall we go and find out?”

Benedikt strolled into the hall alongside him. On one side there was a line of Panzers which could obviously hold their own on any modern battlefield, so far as any armoured vehicle could in the present state-of-play on the North German killing ground . . . while on the other—the museum was ranged anti-clockwise, he could see that at a glance—while on the other there were those crude dummy1

rhomboid-shapes—God! But they must have been brave to have faced such things, crawling out of the smoke, crushing barbed-wire and men in their remorseless advance—the ultimate horror of machine against flesh-and-blood on the ground, before rockets and computers had abstracted the collision of the two to petty imagination—

“No time for a proper tour . . . Another day, maybe . . .” Audley’s voice was casual. “It’s a good cautionary tale, really—the story of the tank, right from the beginning . . . Ploughshares into swords, to start with, you might say.”

Benedikt looked at him. “Ploughshares?”

“Oh, yes . . .” The big man gestured vaguely to his left, towards the anti-clockwise beginnings of the fully- fledged leviathans lined up on his right. “The caterpillar track began its life as a bit of agricultural machinery, anyway—‘to boldly plough where no horse had ploughed before’, that sort of thing.” His voice was still casual, but there was something in his face which hinted to Benedikt that the Statute of Limitations on bad memories hadn’t altogether run out, whatever had been said to the contrary. “But it put paid to the cavalry charger much more comprehensively than to the farm-horse and the plough-ox—there are plenty of quadrupeds still at work in the fields in third-world countries well-equipped with tanks. Like I said, a cautionary tale—a matter of human priorities . . . Or,