The Fourth Bear

“So are we.”

“They’ve probably got fleas.”

Jack pulled him aside and whispered in his ear, “Listen, Baker, I’ve been in there for half an hour and I’m not scratching. Tell the others and heed this yourself: If I hear of any ursism in my division, I’ll have you up on disciplinary charges. Do you understand?”

Baker nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Which way did Goldilocks go?” asked Jack. Ed pointed a claw toward a small path leading up the hill to a ridge.

“Gretel?”

“Sir?”

“You and Baker should follow us up when you’re done. Mary and I are going on ahead.”

They walked out of the clearing and back into the forest, this time following the path Ed had indicated. The trees were younger and smaller, letting in enough light to permit a thick carpet of grass to grow.

“How did you find me?” Jack asked Mary.

“A woodsman told me he saw you over here. The bear’s house is only five hundred yards from Goldy’s Austin.”

Jack shook his head. He must have been walking in circles.

They followed the path up to the top of the ridge, where they found a high and very sturdy wire-mesh fence. Beyond this was a muddy landscape, a thousand acres of churned earth and stunted, shattered trees. A quarter of a mile away in the muddy wastes, the remains of a small church nestled in a slight hollow near some leafless trees. On the hillside below the church, the zigzag pattern of a trench was readily apparent, the web of rusty barbed wire an impenetrable barrier in front of it. Behind this first trench was a support trench, and beyond this a battery of guns sat in supposed readiness. Behind them was the visitors’ center, unfinished and of modern brick and steel. The wasteland was totally incongruous to the green setting of Berkshire and an ugly scar on the land. Its construction had been fought at every step, but the theme park had gone ahead regardless. Jack and Mary looked up and read the threatening notice board that faced them. The message was clear:

“SommeWorld,” muttered Jack. “That’s all we need.” They walked slowly along the perimeter until Mary noticed a gap in the fence. She went and had a closer look as Jack went on ahead.

“Jack, I think you better look at this.”

“It’s probably kids,” he said, retracing his steps, “wanting to have a look at the park before it opens.”

“Look,” said Mary, pointing at a small scrap of cloth stuck on the chain-link fence. “It’s a scrap of blue- patterned dress.”

“Goldilocks wore a dress of that sort,” murmured Jack as they both stared into the silent park. It wouldn’t open for another three months. “Thinking what I’m thinking?”

Mary nodded, and they carefully climbed through the hole and looked around. The pockmarked damage of the shelling began about thirty yards in from the fence. The First World War theme park had been a major news story over the past six years, and the biggest problem the designers faced was to make the park “guests” undergo a two-hour-long artillery barrage, but with zero danger. No one knew how they managed it, but they had been testing for a number of months, and all, apparently, was well. Jack and Mary picked across the freshly tossed earth and came across a large crater with battle debris scattered about and the remains of some barbed wire. The wire was real, and it tore a hole in Jack’s trouser leg. He was just surveying the disjointed landscape and thinking that perhaps Goldilocks was sunning herself on a foreign shore somewhere when Mary reached down and pulled something from the freshly pulverized earth.

“What do you make of that?” she asked.

It was not from the First World War, or even close. It was a small piece of white plastic the size of a Scrabble tile with the letter M printed on one side. But it wasn’t a Scrabble tile. It was a computer key.

“Her laptop?”

“Could be.”

They had both started to search the ground for anything more when there was a loud whompa! noise and a plume of earth shot high in the air less than thirty feet away. They ducked as the soil and debris fell around them and coughed in the cloud of dust that drifted across.

“What was that?” said Mary, rubbing her eyes.

Before Jack could answer, there were two more dull thuds and two more plumes of earth shot skyward, this time with greater force—and closer. The search momentarily forgotten, they dashed for the fence amid a barrage of increasing violence, with earth, roots and small stones cascading down around them.

Jack reached the fence first and threw himself through the gap.

“Well, Mary, that was—”

He stopped. Mary wasn’t with him. He stared back into the barrage, the rising column of soil and the pebbles bouncing on the ground in front of him and the dry dust in the summer heat drifting like a smoke screen, making him blink and hiding the scene from his view. He had run over his previous sergeant with his wife’s Volvo and killed him. It was an accident, of course, but to lose one sergeant is a misfortune. To lose two would be considered…

He was just about to dash back toward the destruction to look for her when a small figure stumbled from the barrage, which even now was beginning to wane. She was covered in dirt, her hair was sticking almost straight up, and she had lost a sleeve off her jacket. She fell to the ground quite out of breath, but with a smile on her face.

“What happened to you?”

“I… saw… this,” said Mary in between breaths. She passed him a large section of broken laptop. “I… thought… it… important!”

Jack turned the casing over. Written on the bottom, in indelible marker, were Goldilocks’s name and phone number.

16. SommeWorld

Most pointless loss of life in the First World War: The Somme Offensive makes a good claim to this title, but competition is pretty stiff. Begun along a fifteen-mile sector of the Western Front at dawn on July 1, 1916, the attack followed a weeklong artillery bombardment of an unprecedented 1.5 million shells that achieved little except warn the German High Command of the impending attack. There were 19,240 British dead on that first day—for a gain of only a thousand yards. Despite numerous “pushes” to effect a breakthrough, little was accomplished aside from more loss of life, and the battle was abandoned three months later. There had been a Franco-British gain of five miles for a total casualty list on all sides of 1.3 million. An obscenely profligate waste of human life? Undoubtedly. Totally pointless? Maybe not. Historians agree that the German army never recovered from the losses, and it is likely that “the foundations of the final victory on the Western Front were laid by the Somme offensive of 1916.”

The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records, 2004 edition

Jack and Mary drove into the car park at SommeWorld a half hour later and parked in front of the theme park’s buildings. Most of the visitors’ center was finished, but the roof had yet to go on to the auditorium, and the canteen hadn’t even been started. Builders were toiling around the clock in order for the construction to be over by Christmas. That was four months away, but there was still a lot to do. Two years behind schedule and ten years in the planning, the bizarre theme park was the longtime personal dream of the Quangle- Wangle, the reclusive industrialist, computer and shipping billionaire whose own experiences on the Somme had been the basis of what he called “the only safe real-life war experience in the world.”