dtente, peace moves in Vietnam, the Vatican’s liberalized policy towards birth-control and divorce. Even the Red Guard movement and the chaos it brought could be seen as a subtle means of deflecting Chinese militancy at a time when she might have intervened in Vietnam.
Then, three months later, Charles Whitehead telephoned me.
‘There’s a report in Der Spiegel,’ he told me with studied casualness. ‘I thought you might be interested. Another young genius has been discovered.’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘We’ll do a programme about it. The usual story, I take it?’
‘Absolutely. That same forehead and eyes, the mother who lost her husband years ago, our friend in the villa business. This boy looks really bright, though. An IQ estimated at 300. What a mind.’
‘I read the script. The only trouble is, I never got to see the programme. Where is this, by the way?’
‘Hebron.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Near Jerusalem. In Israel.’
‘Israel?’
I put the phone down. Somewhere in my mind a tumbler had clicked. Israel! Of course, at last everything made sense. The twelve young men, now occupying positions of power, controlling everything from the US, Russian and Chinese governments to satellite policy, international finance, the UN, big science, the youth and protest movement. There was even a Judas, Giuliano Caldare of the Cosa Nostra. It was obvious now. I had always assumed that the twelve were working for some mysterious organization, but in fact they were the organization. They were waiting for the moment of arrival. When the child came, he would be prepared for in the right way, watched over by the Comsat relays, hot lines open, the armies of the world immobilized. This time there would be no mistakes.
After an hour I rang Charles back.
‘Charles,’ I began, ‘I know what’s happening. Israel..
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Israel. Don’t you see, Hebron is near Bethlehem.’
There was an exasperated silence. ‘James, for heaven’s sake… You’re not suggesting that—’
‘Of course. The twelve young men, what else could they be preparing for? And why did the Arab-Israeli war end in only two days? How old is this boy?’
‘Thirteen.’
‘Let’s say another ten years. Good, I had a feeling he would come.’
When Charles protested I handed the receiver to Judy.
As a matter of fact, I am quite certain that I am right. I have seen the photographs of Joshua Herzl taken at his press conference, a slightly difficult lad who rubbed quite a few of the reporters the wrong way. He vanished off the scene shortly afterwards, though no doubt his mother now has a pleasant white-walled villa outside Haifa or Tel Aviv.
And Jodrell Bank is building an enormous new radio-telescope. One day soon we shall be seeing signs in the skies.
The Killing Ground
As the last smoke from the burning personnel carrier rose through the wet dawn air, Major Pearson could see the silver back of the river three hundred yards from his command post on the hill. Pulverized by the artillery fire, the banks of the channel had collapsed into a network of craters. Water leaked across the meadow, stained by the diesel oil from the fuel tanks of the carrier. Working the binoculars with his thin hands, Pearson studied the trees along the opposite bank. The river was little wider than a stream, and no more than waist-deep, but the fields on both sides were as open as billiard tables. Already the American helicopters had climbed from their bases around the city, clattering in packs over the valley like mindless birds.
An explosion in the. driving cabin of the personnel carrier kicked out the doors and windshield. The light flared across the water-soaked meadow, for a moment isolating the faded letters on the memorial stone that formed the rear wall of the command post. Pearson watched the nearest flight of helicopters. They were circling the motor- bridge a mile down-river, too far away to notice the wrecked vehicle and its perimeter of corpses. The ambush, though successful, had not been planned. The carrier had blindly driven up the embankment road as Pearson’s unit was preparing to cross the river.
With any luck, Pearson hoped, the crossing would now be called off and they would be ordered to withdraw into the hills. He shivered in his ragged uniform. Corporal Benson had pulled the trousers off a dead Marine machine-gunner the previous morning, and there had been no time to wash out the blood caked across the thighs and waist.
Behind the memorial was the sandbagged entrance of the storage tunnel. Here Sergeant Tulloch and the seventeenyear-old lieutenant sent up overnight from the youth cadre were working on the field radio, rewiring the headphones and battery. Around the emplacement Pearson’s thirty men sat over their weapons, ammunition boxes and telephone wire piled around their feet. Exhausted by the ambush, they would have little energy left for a river crossing.
‘Sergeant… Sergeant Tulloch!’ Pearson called out, deliberately coarsening his over-precise schoolmaster’s voice. As he half-expected, Tulloch ignored the shout. A pair of copper terminals clamped in his sharp mouth, he went on splicing the frayed wire. Although Pearson was in command of the guerilla unit, its real initiative came from the Scotsman. A regular in the Gordon Highlanders before the American landings six years earlier, the sergeant had joined the first rebel bands that formed the nucleus of the National Liberation Army. As Tulloch himself openly boasted, he had been drawn to the insurgent army chiefly by the prospect of killing the English. Pearson often wondered how far the sergeant still identified him with the puppet regime in London propped up by the American occupation forces.
As he climbed out of the slit trench gunfire flickered from the central traverse of the motor-bridge. Pearson waited behind the plinth of the memorial. He listened to the roar of heavy howitzers firing from the American enclave five miles to the west. Here nine hundred Marine artillerymen had been holding out for months against two divisions of rebel troops. Supported from the air by helicopter drops, the Americans fought on from their deep bunkers, firing thousands of rounds a day from their seventy guns. The meadows around the enclave formed the landscape of a drowned moon.
The shell whined away through the damp air, the explosions lifting the broken soil. Between the impacts came the rattle of small-arms fire as the attack went in across the bridge. Slinging his Sten gun over his narrow shoulders, Pearson ran back to the tunnel.
‘What’s holding us up, Sergeant? This radio should have been checked at Battalion.’
He reached out to the mud-splattered console, but Tulloch pushed his hand away with the spanner. Ignoring the young lieutenant’s selfconscious salute, Tulloch snapped: ‘I’ll have it ready in time, Major. Or are you wanting to withdraw now?’
Avoiding the lieutenant’s eyes, Pearson said: ‘We’ll follow orders, Sergeant, when and if you repair this set.’
‘I’ll repair it, Major. Don’t worry yourself about that.’
Pearson unfastened the chin-strap of his helmet. During their three months together the sergeant had clearly decided that Pearson had lost heart. Of course Tulloch was right. Pearson looked around the fortified position shielded from the air by the ragged willows, counting the pinched faces of the men huddled beside the field stove. Dressed in ragged uniforms held together with American webbing, living for months in holes in the ground, under- fed and under-armed, what kept them going? Not hatred of the Americans, few of whom, apart from the dead, they had ever seen. Secure within their bases, and protected by an immense technology of warfare, the American expeditionary forces were as remote as some archangelic legion on the day of Armageddon.
