7 - The Legend of Special Forces

It was just before 6.30am when I arrived at my desk. I had arranged with Alex that he would make way for Sergeant Magath, at least temporarily until we found a longer-term solution. He was fine about it: we all had more space than we needed, and he could share with Bernard, who was spending more and more time either down at the coast or with his suppliers at their labs. His project, developing a new model of pavement-car for the immobile and the unwilling, had reached a critical stage. Bernard came into his own when that happened.

My easels – I had added another, in anticipation of further expansion – drew a crude semi-circle around the two desks which I positioned backing on to each other in the best light of the window. There was a small but significant gap between our corner and the tight pod of my ex-colleagues. I studied the arrangement from all angles: private, co-operative, focussed, spacious.

I made myself at home and watched the early morning bustle outside build to a peak. Betweentimes, I gave some vague attention to the backlog of mail on my screen. Both scenes were more dreamlike than real. I had Magath. I had Magath!

What finally roused me was the most almighty clatter, directly behind, dressed with surprisingly spicy swearing. I turned to look. Two of the easels had been sent sprawling and lay flat on the floor. On top of them a tangle of long legs, flailing arms and bald head. It was from that head that the swearing originated.

Magath finally sat up and became calm. He searched around him for his glasses, found them and placed them back on carefully. His sleeves were rolled immaculately to his elbows and there was a faint gleam of perspiration on his forehead. He looked confused. I rushed forward to help him up. He grabbed my hand and sprung to his feet.

‘What have I just knocked flying? Was that your easel?’ he asked me as he sat in the chair I offered.

‘Two of them, yes.’

‘You’ve just moved them, have you?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t realise you’d be here so early. I thought I’d make us a good corner, give us a bit of privacy and space to concentrate. There’s lots to do and I want to make the most of your time before it’s taken away again.’

‘You’re learning very quickly how things work,’ he smiled and he rose from his chair. He retrieved the folded stick from his rear pocket and snapped his wrist once. With the aid of the stick, he investigated the new layout, noting how it differed from his previous mental map and nodding slowly as he went. He sat down again and looked at me. ‘It’s good,’ he said. ‘Very good. We might have been very comfortable here. I particularly like the way we get the warmth of the sun even this early in the morning. Nobody can work with cold hands.’

‘“Might have been comfortable”’ I repeated his words. ‘What do you mean? Are you suggesting we can’t work here? Why not? Are there too many secrets?’

‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the set-up you’ve created, and there’s nothing we’ll be working on that’s terribly secret. If you ask me, more people need to know about the situation, but that’s neither here nor there.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘Come with me,’ he said. He got up, folded his stick and replaced it in his pocket. I followed him to the stairwell once more.

We descended in silence. Three floors and we were at ground level. Another extended flight took us into the basement. I had been in there once or twice before, looking for furniture. It was a vast warehouse of a space. The ceiling rose way above our heads and the floor stretched way beyond where I pictured the building’s footprint. Various corners were filled with what looked like junk, but the majority of the floorspace was unoccupied. Magath made a diagonal path across one of the more crowded corners, toward a set of wheeled goods cages. He stopped at the cages and pushed two of them apart. They were empty and moved easily to reveal a featureless wall. He pulled a long metal tubular key from his pocket and inserted it into an invisible hole. One turn and a door in the wall swung open outwards.

‘Pull the cages back together,’ he half turned to me as he spoke. ‘Nobody knows about this, it’s invisible unless you’re really looking for it, and there’s only one key, but I don’t see why we shouldn’t take the odd simple precaution.’ I followed his instruction, then stepped through the door. He shut it behind us.

We descended some more. He had clearly been down there a number of times, so surefooted was he on the narrow stone steps. The smell, of saltwater and sunshine, strengthened as we proceeded. Finally we reached the foot of the steps and we took a wide path around to the left. Magath stopped.

We had emerged into what I can only describe as a grotto. Above us rose a mighty dome of green-grey rock, punctuated with natural spotlights. Our path was bounded by the rock wall on one side and a lip on the other: raised around 18 inches and as wide as the path itself. Beyond the lip a circular pool of water trembled, shimmering green and silver under the lights and gently licking a wide sandy beach on the far side, which must have been 30 metres distant. The beach itself was lit uniformly across its whole extent.

‘The water is cooler than the actual sea,’ he told me. ‘It starts to lose heat as soon as it washes in here, and it warms the air to this beautiful temperature. The two are almost perfectly equalised. You can walk into the water from the beach and not notice.’

I jumped up onto the lip to give myself a better view of the seawater pool. The regular arrangement of the lights in the dome gave it a kind of chequerboard appearance. The water was as emerald clear as any I had seen. The sandy beach extended a few feet into the pool, then dropped away dramatically to an unseen bed. I looked up at the lights above.

‘Light tubes,’ Magath said. ‘They’re transporting the actual sunlight from the surface. That’s almost 300 feet above us.’

‘Is the level of the pool affected by the tides?’ I asked him.

‘Not massively. Maybe an inch or two either way.’

I was surprised. Our ocean’s daily rise and fall was among the most significant in the world, I had always been taught.

‘The entrance into the cave complex from the sea is pretty small,’ he explained. ‘So the amount of water making it in is much less than you’d imagine. And the complex itself is huge. We’re half a mile from the coast here, and these caves stretch all the way to the Fantasians. That’s a lot of area to share it over.’

I hopped down and we continued, although I remained spellbound by the gently rocking reflection of the borrowed rays on the dome. We had only completed a small arc of the pool when he turned to the left and climbed a couple more stone steps. I followed obediently and we found ourselves in another vast cave. It was around the same size as the previous one, except with a flat and dry floor, similarly lit by a dense arrangement of light tubes. Around the circumference were a number of standard wooden desks, arranged in groups of two or three. Chalkboards covered a large part of the warm blue stone of the walls. There appeared to be electrical outlets. Mobile curtains, like the type you might find in a field hospital, were stacked against a far wall. Directly opposite sat another stash of them. The cavern appeared to be totally symmetrical in its furnishing and layout. I walked the entire way around the chamber, partly to convince myself there were no mirrors at play.

In the centre of the cave were a number of square stone plinths. The largest sat in the very middle and four smaller copies surrounded it. They were all empty.

‘We build our models on the platforms,’ Magath said. ‘It’s great to get three-dimensional about things. I prefer to work that way, given my condition.’

‘This place is amazing,’ I said, still turning slowly in a tight circle as I spoke. ‘What is it?’

‘Ha ha ha! What is it? I thought I was the one with the eyesight problem. It’s a cave!’ He leapt up onto one of the smaller plinths and spread his arms. ‘It’s our cave. I call it The Bunker. You might want to refer to it the same way, to save confusion.’

‘I mean, what is it used for? It looks like we’re not the first people to have colonised.’

‘Of course you mean that,’ he jumped down and wandered around the perimeter. He made minute adjustments to a couple of misaligned desks. ‘It’s a home, of sorts, for me,’ he continued. ‘I’ve spent a great proportion of my life in here, and I feel very comfortable surrounded by this old rock. That’s important to me. I like to know where things are and how they work. Leaves more capacity for the task in hand.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘How come you’ve spent so much time in here? In what capacity.’

‘The whole network forms the old Special Forces Hideaway,’ he had perched on the edge of the main platform now, precisely in the centre of a column of light from one of the larger tubes. ‘This cave and the grotto next door are all that’s left – the others have been sealed up for some time now. I was assigned here when I first came to this country.’

‘Special Forces?’ I asked. ‘I’m not aware of Special Forces. Is that your section?’

‘Not any more,’ he said. ‘The outfit was disbanded a long time ago. Only a few of us left. But this is where we did our thing.’

‘What sort of thing was that?’

‘Mostly whatever took our fancy!’ he chuckled. ‘As long as it was difficult, controversial and ultimately useful to the country. An incandescent collection of brilliant men and women, they were. Still can’t quite believe how lucky I was to find them.’

‘Lucky?’

‘Very. I’m not originally a native of this country.’ He told me where he was born. I had never heard of it before. ‘I was part of a multinational agency that was investigating the feasibility of using the moons for agricultural purposes. It was clear back then that the planet had been sucked dry, and population projections didn’t make for pretty reading. So we were put together with that express brief.

‘I was part of a research party on the moon. We were quite a long way down the road in the planning of how exactly we were going to use it, and just needed a few days on site to sort out some of the finer details. We’d been there a day or two when we got wind of another party landing just a few miles away. It wasn’t all that peculiar – space travel was already widespread by then – but there didn’t seem any particular reason for anybody else to land on that moon. So we investigated. It was a detachment of Special Forces from here. They were doing a final survey. A little more advanced than the one we were in the middle of. Turns out they’d got hold of our early work and had developed a solution already. Better than ours. They were so keen to be the first to use the moon that they decided they couldn’t wait for us. I was impressed: there were some serious brains among that lot. And they were right: they would have waited a long time for us to come up with anything.

‘Best thing was, they offered me an opportunity to be part of their team. I didn’t even have to think about it. I took my leave of the agency and became part of Special Forces, right there on the moon. Couldn’t have worked out better for me. The agency’s work was all theoretical, and now I had a chance to put it all into practice. I spent three or four very happy years down here in these caves. Let’s see if we can’t reproduce that environment now, the two of us.’

We started working straight away. I retrieved my easels from our work area and set them up in The Bunker. I plugged my phone into the hard-wired network.

‘Shall I read out to you what I’ve got so far?’ I said to Magath.

‘If you’d be so kind,’ he replied. ‘But would you mind writing it up on the chalkboards as you narrate? It means we can take your easels back upstairs where they belong, but more importantly it helps me to interpret the words. I like to hear the sound of the chalk moving against the board. That way I can picture the shapes you’re making and I end up with as much of a visual picture of the whole thing as you do.’

We progressed in that vein. I started centrally in my web of concepts and worked my way outwards along the various tendrils, writing them all up with the scratchy sticks of chalk. Magath sat mostly stock still, concentrating on the tapping and scraping. Every now and then he would get up and retrieve items from a corner: a box of plastic offcuts, wooden dowelling, a thin sheet of metal, industrial clippers; he would lay them down on one of the smaller stone plinths and continue to listen.

My full summary took an hour or more. In all that time he had not said a word. I sat down, drained. I had filled the best part of three chalkboards. There were maybe 50 of them covering the walls of the whole Bunker.

‘Fascinating,’ he pronounced. ‘You’ve done an extremely comprehensive job. There really are an awful lot of strands to consider, and there are no obvious omissions in your commentary. You’ll forgive me if I insist that we concentrate on matters up to and including the runway. That’s the limit of my influence, and, if I’m honest, my expertise. I can give my opinions on the rest of that stuff, but it’s no more than amateur rambling.

‘Still, there’s plenty to be keeping us busy even if we stop at the runway. I’ve got some ideas, based on what you’ve told me. We’re going to need a couple of others if we’re to make this work, but you can leave that with me.’

‘What sort of others?’ I wanted to know.

‘I’ve got some names in mind,’ he said. ‘But I can’t guarantee anything. I’ll do my best. I can probably have some answers by this afternoon, when you’re back.’

‘Back from where?’ I asked. While the words were leaving my mouth, a message landed in my inbox. The usual muted bell announced its arrival. Magath nodded towards my phone.

It was from Major Thompson. The subject line read: NEED SEE YOU URGENTLY ASAP. MEET AT THE ANGEL 1 HR. <EOM>. The Angel was the uninspiring pub I had visited with Captain Small after our lavish lunch in military headquarters. I would have to set off straight away if I was to be there on time.

I left Magath in The Bunker. He seemed happy enough with the prospect of some time alone. He told me he would be waiting for me when I returned. I climbed the stone staircase back towards the basement. Before emerging, I checked the monitor for any signs of life on the other side. Nothing. I opened the heavy door slowly and stepped through. I was about to pull it behind me when I heard a faint splash. It was far away, but most definitely a splash, a heavy object making contact with water. I held my breath and listened some more. For a few seconds, silence. Then a series of smaller, more graceful impacts on a watery surface. Perfectly regular in their timing. I smiled to myself as I imagined his long arms windmilling against the warm green seawater, his body moving between rock walls like a torpedo. I shut the door silently and made my way back up to the third floor.

Bernard was also due in the West End, and was leaving as I arrived. I grabbed what I thought I might need and we set off together. He had much longer legs than I did, and walked fast. We talked a while about the latest model of pavement-car, which he was about to unleash on the public. He had nothing but disdain for the consumers of his product, but he was passionate about enhancing his reputation and worked like a dog whenever a project looked like it might lead somewhere. I knew next to nothing about the personal mobility industry, but that didn’t matter; Bernard was quite happy to carry on both sides of our conversation. I always got the idea that he enjoyed talking to me: Alex or Donnie would never have allowed him such free rein.

Finally, even Bernard ran out of opinions on pavement-cars, and he turned the subject to my own work. He wanted to know more about what I was up to. I gave him the usual rundown, with the scariest bits toned down, and explained how I had been given a lifeline in the form of Sergeant Magath. Even just talking to him in The Bunker during the morning had made things clearer in my head, and I was confident that he was, as we spoke, righting many of the issues over which I had been struggling for the last few days.

‘So, who is it you’re going to see now?’ Bernard asked me. ‘If this Magath fella is still underground somewhere.’

‘Major Thompson,’ I replied. ‘He’s the one who got me involved in the first place.’

‘And what’s his position?’

‘His position? Well, he’s…. he’s in charge of……’ I had to physically stop, and think. It didn’t do any good. I had no idea where Thompson slotted in to the organisation. He was a Major, so he must have had some seniority, but I couldn’t exactly pinpoint the discipline. Small didn’t report to him, and neither did Farbrace. Canning was one of Brown’s men. The two men from the demand planning meeting were from completely different sections. I couldn’t imagine that Magath reported to anybody. If he wasn’t a law unto himself, the world had finally gone insane.

We had come to the road where we were to go our separate ways. Bernard stopped and looked at me hard. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ I replied. ‘I’m off to a meeting with my boss.’

‘I mean, what are you doing working on this job? Let’s face it, you know nothing about the technology they’re using. It’s got nothing in common with Civic Events or Town Planning. You don’t know the techniques, you don’t know the pitfalls, you don’t know any people that can help you, except this blind bloke. You’re singularly unsuited to the role you’ve been asked to perform. Why would they pick you out? Where did they even get you from? None of us have even heard of that lot. There must be hundreds of others better qualified.’

I couldn’t answer. He had a point, as I knew. One I had already raised with Thompson and Brown, but they had made light of my concerns and I had followed suit easily. The gift of Magath had swept away any residual concerns I might have had. With him on my side, I didn’t actually need to know anything. I told Bernard that I was focussing on achieving what had been set out for me, the best I could. Like him, I had faith in my abilities and was confident I could turn my talents, whatever they might be, to any number of challenges.

‘You might be right, mate,’ he said, without sounding convinced. ‘I just want you to be careful. Do what you can. I don’t doubt you’ve got the qualities you need. But look out for yourself. You don’t know these people. You’re not one of them.’

He pulled me toward him and stretched his enormous arms around me. I slapped him on the back a couple of times. He released me and turned away.

Thompson was already in the pub when I arrived. There was a pint for each of us on the table. His was already half-finished. ‘Sorry,’ I said as I sat opposite him, ‘am I late?’

He checked his watch. ‘No, a little bit early, in fact.’

‘Oh, good,’ I was relieved. I sipped my pint and asked him what it was he wanted to see me about.

‘You’ve met Sergeant Magath, I take it?’ he started.

‘Yes. Thank you for him,’ I said. ‘He came to see me yesterday, just to introduce himself, then started properly this morning. We’ve already covered a lot.’

‘What about this Canning character?’ he said. ‘What do you make of him?’

‘Well, I’ve only met him once, but he comes over well-drilled. Colonel Brown seems to think very highly of him. He’s already offered to do most of the legwork in terms of lining up experts for us to use. I don’t know. We only met the once. I think he’s fine.’

‘Well. Drilled?’ the Major repeated my words deliberately. ‘What kind of an impression is that? Is it some back-handed compliment? Next you’ll be telling me he’s cordial, or good value for money, considering. What do you really think of him?’

‘Well, if you really want the truth, I think he’s probably an enormous liability,’ I admitted. ‘There’s no way he’s dynamic enough to keep track of all the strands that depend on each other here. He’s a namedropper and a bullshitter. He’d drop me in it to save his own skin at the first opportunity. His track record is as bad as they come, and I can’t see it improving any, as long as he’s working on this. He’s a disaster waiting to happen.’

Thompson continued drinking calmly. ‘But,’ I continued, ‘none of that matters. His incompetence pales into insignificance beside the real problems.’

‘And what are they, exactly?’ the Major asked me.

‘Where to start? We’re around two years behind where we ought to be. The entire system needs an overhaul. It’s being held together with gaffa tape, and if we introduce any extra pressure at any point, the whole thing is going to come crashing down around our ears. If it’s not shuttles burning up in the atmosphere, it’s crumbling runways or interstellar sabotage or riots in supermarket car parks. Everywhere I turn there’s some kind of problem approaching crisis point. And I can’t make out who’s in charge of it. I’ve not yet found anybody who seems prepared to take any responsibility or to even smooth any paths to help me out. And every day I inherit a new problem, another one that’s been tossed around for months or years but nobody has seen fit to take on. It’s all very well stacking my plate full of these problem children, but it’s not going to make things any better. And I still appear to be working under this six-week deadline. Nobody has told me any different. So far, I’ve not come across a single action that takes less than eight weeks to carry out. I don’t understand how the two can live together. But I’m doing my best to make sense of it all.’

He fiddled with his empty glass for a while in silence. I took the hint and went to the bar to get my round. He started on his second pint just as thirstily as the first.

‘Have you met RSM O’Hara yet?’ he asked me eventually.

The name rang a bell. I had an inkling I had seen it on some of the documentation relating to the old projects I read up on. I hadn’t met the man himself, though.

‘He’s one of our last links back to Special Forces,’ Thompson told me. ‘Do you know about them?’

‘I do. Sergeant Magath filled me in a little bit this morning. They must have worked together, then?’

‘Oh yes. They know each other well enough. They’re not as close as they once were, but they can work together, just as long as they’re given the room they need. They complement each other. Both could wipe the floor with most others on any area of logistics and distribution, but they have their specialties. Magath is an absolute authority on everything up to the landing strip, but O’Hara covers a wider range. He was on the team that designed the original shuttles, the ones we’re still using today. He knows those craft inside out. Even better than Magath does. He also built, by hand, the first working version of the robotic system in use within the warehouses. That’s how all the transports are loaded. And it goes further. He personally selected all the guards at the checkpoints on the road and rail network. He travels round weekly to assess them. There isn’t a piece of work that can get through the system without passing under his eyes. In short, he knows everything. Special Forces is long gone now, only three survivors from the glory days, but its soul lives on in him. Magath has found a new niche for himself back in the mainstream, almost. You might say he’s adapted better. But all that means is that O’Hara is probably now the most powerful man in the country. Despite his rank, while he refuses to remove himself from the heart of everything, nobody else is in a position to do it for him.’

‘Wow. He must be a very important person to get to know,’ I pondered.

‘You can say that again!’ Thompson laughed. ‘He’s the reason that projects succeed or don’t. And that’s why I’m talking to you now. He tells me you’ve not been in touch. Well, that’s a fine way to guarantee failure. You must get him on your side. There are things that only he knows.’

I wrote down all the details that Thomson could give me. O’Hara was a difficult man, he told me, to track down, but I would probably find him soon enough if I used my head and persevered.

‘Word up: he’s not the easiest to work with,’ Thompson told me. ‘Watch your step. Don’t annoy him. He’s probably the one man who can guarantee the failure of your project.’

‘Thanks for the warning,’ I said. ‘But why would he want the initiative to fail? Surely that would mean the end for the whole country?’

‘It would,’ he nodded. ‘But that means less to somebody like O’Hara. He’s got plenty of offers from other countries. Wouldn’t surprise me if he ended up on another planet, even. Christ knows where his horizons are by now.’

‘Maybe we should all do that?’ I suggested.

Thompson laughed out loud. ‘You think anyone would take you if word got out about this? No, young man. Failure isn’t an option for you here, I’m afraid. Emigration even less so! That’s why it’s so important to get O’Hara on side. I’d make that your top priority.’

I muttered some assent.

‘How are you managing for time?’ Thompson asked. ‘Are you busy enough? Is Canning keeping you occupied?’

‘Errrr, yes and no. I’m busy. I haven’t stopped since I was assigned. But it’s all been getting my head around things and meeting people. Canning hasn’t really been relevant yet. I’m expecting to catch up with him in the next day or two, but so far he’s not been responsible for any of my workload.’

‘OK. Well, just make sure you’ve got enough to keep you fully occupied. I can’t keep an eye on you all the time. I’m relying on you to let me know if you’re drifting. Don’t let yourself drift. Use Small if you need. She’ll get the right people focussed if Canning can’t.’

‘I thought Captain Small had been replaced by Corporal Farbrace?’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Captain Small herself.’

Thompson tutted loudly. ‘Have a word, will you? Farbrace is supporting her, not taking over. The man’s a complete joke. Nobody would put him in charge of something this critical. No, continue to keep Small in the loop. I talk to her regularly and I need to know what’s happening with my men.’

I promised I would do as he asked. My phone rang. I excused myself and took the call. Major Thompson drained his glass, pushed back his stool and left the pub. I watched him disappear as I tuned in to Canning’s breathless voice.