MISSION
The army is a big unemployment project. There are no fees for joining, and they will teach skills, and for those who are good at it there is world travel offered. They practise self-defence and espionage. They permit no personal profit or cameras.
Johnny had enrolled as a student in Canterbury. There was no income available for him apart from welfare. At home, an advertisement for recruitment flashed up on the television screen once. A computer-generated cartoon of a blonde blue eyed lady officer appeared. It told him that he could travel in the U.S.S.R. and save the planet. After he had to face the demands of the department of social welfare, he replied. He made considerations and heard the warnings. After training he received a letter of reference from Maxwell Stern. He abandoned his apartment and walked aboard a British Airways 747 at the city airport.
He was aboard the flight with men and women from a full kilt of personnel. There were navy, army, air force, intelligence and police. Discussions about tactic and whether there were pacifists aboard went around. It seemed that there was a common thread of purpose to get to England and work.
When the plane landed at Heathrow Johnny hailed a taxi to a lodge in the middle of London. It was somewhere near Hyde Park; he wasn’t sure where exactly in the map he was going. He slept a night then walked to the Army recruits’ office with his letter of reference from the kiwi officer. With a little cajoling and mockery from the man he met in the office he presented Stern's letter to an officer. Who took it and read it without a word, then asked him for his address and family details. The next day he met an arranged contact by the park and they rode in a small truck to a barracks in Trentham.
The training began with a round of introductions of staff in the kitchen. He assigned a temporary bed in a dormitory. Rest was not the initial purpose of his stay there, in fact he did not get to see the bad again for four days and nights. A night of physical drilling commenced. Sergeants called the routine and recruits jumped and bent and ran until dawn.
The food for breakfast was good followed by arithmetic and cube puzzles. He solved it and showed accurate answers. An amazed lieutenant asked him how he did that. He replied that he had been in the top class at Grammar two years’ previous. The questions extended to what he had done the most immediate year before. He said that he had been in a youth in Asia expedition and reached world record of age and altitude. Also maintained air force planes and had found that he’d had to be careful of the gangs in South America. The lieutenant invited him to a game of basketball with the junior officers.
There followed a series of tests which proved him. He lifted a light armoured vehicle by his limbs. Walked barefooted for nine kilometres on shattered glass shards. These spread along a landing runway. Ran in boots up and down Trentham hill. Not until then had he joined the British Army. The troop airlifted north in helicopters to a wasteland by Hadrian’s Wall.
Several soldiers cleaned cleared and checked the abandoned houses there. Radiation tainted the whole area. The houses assigned to remain abandoned. Five privates found three straying civilians in them. Who were there for an escape where they could use drugs and sleep. Once the houses were again made to be empty, the platoon went to the nearby air force base.
The journey of his lifetime commenced. Throughout all the years after these events he would reconsider his actions. The following series of events stayed in his mind. His memories would control his day and keep him awake at nights. He was young and in action. Varying ranks completed a division. Many platoons of women and men crossed from England and into Europe.
It was a time in the history of politics. Liberation was due to millions of citizens of a communist empire. The empire extended across half of Europe. Counter-revolutions guaranteed them their freedom. The wall in the middle of the continental back was being taken down. The wall was the device that held them in. It was and still is a symbol of oppression.
Yet to achieve all this was not a simple matter. Caution had added an element of danger to the scenario. But that caution was also hysterical and suspicious. It was an international fright. Rival empires had amassed a combined nuclear deterrent in missile weapons and bombs. Not only was there a liberation, there was also an issue of a possible accident with the deterrent. The combination of these issues prompted the English to send their army staff across. While they were in there they were to ensure that the whole sequence went off without madness. There had already been protests and demonstrations across the world. The threats that weapons of mass destruction embodied had serious effects. Predictions of the future history had come out in statements in popular culture. Now Johnny had become a tiny part of a cogwheel turned by the interests of the people of the world. He was proud to have achieved this role.
The military division departed the shores of England in planes from the strip. Johnny stationed a gunning port in a classic plane where he should have had no trouble. A school mate of his was the pilot. Across the northern channel they did go as bright as daisies toward Holland. He enjoyed the trip until the plane came close to land on the far side. Then the pilot called to him through the speaker set that he encountered some fire. The shots from the ground were administrative. The military was meeting its budgets. Either this or the Commanders had sought no permission from the next government to enter. Johnny followed on with his pilot's request and opened fire. He used a casual short-burst method in three directions from his port. They did this until the fine Birmingham bomber lost altitude. Bullets pierced hull plating and it headed towards a levee at the shoreline.
Short of the runway, the plane veered to a skilled crash-landing through the levee. It rested in marshy ground next to a car park.
“Shit! I didn’t expect that at all,” said his school friend.
“Nah, same here, that’s too bad,” said Johnny as he clambered down from the gunning port seat. The remaining crew and passengers in uniform opened the doors. They shouted their disapproval. It was then that Johnny saw the bewildered tour bus passengers and their driver. They stared at the spectacle from where the bus parked on the bitumen. Johnny felt an urge to apprehend the driver and commandeer the bus. So this is what he did.
He walked to the tour bus. “Get them all out!” he said to the driver. The Dutch man at the wheel seat shrugged and said something in his own language. Behind him, the failed pilot said, “Hey what are you doing man?”
“Get them all out, or I’ll fire.” He brandished his Tommy gun.
The driver reacted in fright. “Fire!?” and he talked to the forty passengers in their comfortable chairs. Words exchanged in several languages. One by one like animals coming off the ark the tourists stood on the bitumen. Brits sprayed around the place a bit of flame retardant foam.
Johnny pushed the people in their chests with his fists. He then grabbed the driver by the collar and shoved him onto the pavement also. He took the keys to the bus from him and closed the sliding angle doors.
He had no idea of any law or custom of the place he was in. He turned on the ignition and cursed at everyone outside the bus. Clutched the gears to first and pummelled the accelerator to second and third. He sped along a foreign highway carrying in a compartment all the late luggage.
Time was the matter for his present break for glory ahead of the pack. He ignored the highway laws through three national borders and into Germany. Night fell and lights turned from blue to orange. Urban clutter passed left and right of him. With only seconds at every junction to interpret the route and drive on. The vehicle carried him to Berlin and well into the centre of that city. The Police helicopter trailing above it only lent to him an air of desperation. Guttural orders called from a loud haler and he radioed all signals a singing bluff nonsense. Petrol level fell and he abandoned the hijacked thing.
He alighted from his surprise tour on the side of another nondescript highway. Cars hurtled past him at high speeds. A ramp of dirt was on one side and his other hemmed in by the danger of velocity. He ran under a street sign which signalled the wall being eight kilometres from where he had parked. The helicopter had veered somewhere else. He shouldered his kit and free-heeled the distance.
Checkpoint Charlie was the codename given to a doorway through the Berlin Wall. It was being dismantled after forty-one years of keeping the peoples of the city divided. On one side they were prosperous and on the other imprisoned. Before that night, as Johnny travelled the world, in every country he visited would go to a consular office. He'd state that he had renounced his former citizenship. He'd make an application for a new passport to that nation. More often times than not, the new applications were successful. He had done this in eighteen countries until the night he stood at the door. In his satchel he had nineteen passports.
The guard wore a black uniform with stripes on the shoulder. He acted unimpressed.
“What reason should I let you through? Everyone is going the other way soon. This wall is being dismantled. It’s the end of a big prison and you still want to go into it,” the guard said.
Johnny saw that he was in the same nationality’s army as he. He identified himself and handed the guard all his passports. The man looked through them and shrugged his shoulders and said that the Israeli one was useful.
“You aren’t the first wannabe we’ve had here. But the payment’s useful,” the guard said.
Without brandishing a gun or signalling for help he called through to other side on his radio. A wait while he retrieved a paper check from his jacket pockets. He handed the paper check to Johnny then wielded a set of keys and turned several locks in the door.
“Give that to the other side,” the guard said.
All the legends that Johnny had heard about this place were after all only legends. He expected impenetrable cross fire, lethal gas and official denials of governmental passes. He had the foreboding warnings in mind when he approached it. The only thing which matched them was the electric fenced perimeter of the guard’s booth. With his payment of passports, he had defected. He compared the ease of passing he received there with the legends. He thought that he could not have picked an easier career.
He walked the thirty feet through the rectangular corridor beyond. It had a total lack of embellishment under twenty neon tube lights in the concrete ceiling. The wall which was a symbol of repression and insolence for forty years was so damn simple and plain.
He waited in the corridor for the far door to open. While the time was available he read the check. It was a plain official check. Though the account holder and recipient and signatory were well out of the ordinary. The Central Intelligence Corporate Holdings held the money. The amount was one and a half million dollars, written to the British Marines. Its signature was of the big daddy of the operations, Burton Starling. He waited with the proverbial hot potato in his hands.
When the door opened daylight had broken. He walked forward to meet a small group of people. Some had the authority of uniform and others dressed in shabby civilian. The first man he was to meet was hardly of a military quality but had more of a harassed tired feeling to him. He asked Johnny if he could join the army, and Johnny replied that it was not up to him. Then he saw a tall smiling blonde woman. She wore the standard operation slacks boots and shirt with stripes on the shoulders. This was what he was looking for. She greeted him and asked him how he was feeling. He said fine, and showed her the check. She read it and said that that was what they were waiting for. It changed hands.
He looked around him and saw a concrete and steel landscape. Pavement and perimeter wire constructed an organized array of boundaries. There were bunker buildings and surveillance towers. He saw a line of six trucks with canvas wagon cover trailers. This was East Berlin.
Privates in the army are usually expendable. This principle is what he had to endure next when the woman who took the check told him to go to one of the bunkers. Following orders as per usual, he did and she ushered him into the interior of a darkened building. A lock clicked closed behind him and his eyes needed a minute to adjust to the lack of light.
He saw when he could that he was in another grim dormitory, this one made of steel. The shade of the walls and beds was a dull military green. Despite the darkness, a man in front of him wore dark sunshades over his eyes. The man was black and said he was representing a major in the American army. Johnny asked him what was happening, and the answer he got was blunt. He said that he was in there as a matter of course to get a death sentence by court for passing through the checkpoint. The man then discussed this with himself by answering his own questions. He asked whether a death by electric chair or lethal injection would be best. He had already decided that hanging was too primitive, although cheaper. Johnny did not reply. He assessed the situation. Johnny thought that it must have been a long time since the man with dark sunshades had met the American major. He was likely a prisoner of war who had become mentally infirm.
“Look around,” said the prison officer. “Meet the other staff here because they’re going to be your equals. Remember you can’t leave until the President says so. Look in here,” and he showed him a bed in a room occupied by a sickly individual. A small malnourished man lay in a cot. His belly bulged and his skin was a shade of green. “He’s a little green man. He used to work in a nuclear power plant and now he’s sick. He’s a victim of an occupational hazard. He still shaves his chin when he can stand up though. We say that’s discipline.”
“Now lie in your cot and wait until we have executed you,” said the prison officer. The room with Johnny’s bad already had another young soldier in it. When the prison officer was not there, he and Johnny discussed their unfortunate situation. They agreed that the man in charge had lost his mind and that there was no reason to stay. Together they wrenched apart a steel bar from the frame of a bed. At the right time they sneaked behind the big guy and brought the bar down on the back of the officer’s head with a powerful blow. He grunted and fell. They did not check whether he was still alive or not. Instead went to a window at the end of the dormitory and wrenched that apart also. The sound of shattering glass rang out across the outside pavement. Two young men in uniform threw down their bags and rifles and leapt out of the prison. They hurried across the pavement in the dark to the line of covered army wagons. They clambered aboard the first one.
These Army wagons accommodated the majority of his long distance movement across Europe. The canopy covered the troops from sight. String through loopholes in the canvas tied up the back end. The rear was for boarding and alighting from the trucks. Inside the canopy the layout was very simple, having a double line of bench seats facing into the centre. The seats started at the front end by the metal division. The trailer with its canopy was separate from the cabin where the drivers sat.
Inside the truck seated next to each other were several army staff. In their plain green uniforms, they held their rifles against their knees. Johnny received a remark that he and his escapee mate were 'in'. The SAS. staff amongst them followed this comment with equivocations. These senior men were not sure whether the two newcomers had a right to be in the trailers. It seemed that they had yet to prove themselves. The doyens of rank had yet to witness their skill. A decision came. Johnny and the other guy had first to prove themselves to the Red Army in East Berlin. Until then they were not to have anything else to do with the British there. They were both to get off the truck.
As he was lifting his kit a man handed him a pistol and told him that he might need it. Johnny marched solo into the network of streets and fences. The militarized zone spread for miles around the wall. He came to a series of steps next to a dry canal which was watched over by red soldiers in a surveillance tower. Above him a soldier pointed a rifle barrel at him. Three people waited at a step. Two women talked with a dishevelled older man who stank of unwashed alcohol fumes. Johnny waited with them, and this caused a dispute about his right to be there and look at them. The man swore at Johnny. He told him he was a retired philosopher and that he wanted a drink. He then demanded access to the west, that he had been waiting there for twenty-six years. The women said that he was a pest.
Johnny took his pistol and popped him off one in the head. He had only been waiting his time for release from the communist society. One encounter late in his vigil coupled with a few unguarded words had spelt the end of him. His body lay sprawled across the concrete step motionless.
Now Johnny felt that he must approach the guards in the tower above. They had already shouted to him in their language, and they did not sound happy. He climbed the steel steps with their girder frame to the booth at the top of the tower. Inside was a similar scene to the meeting he had had aboard the U-1 in the Melbourne harbour four years before. Muscular and close shaved men leaned on the window frames of their outpost. They shouted at him in German and he shouted back with one of the few phrases that he had learnt. They called him a hardened asshole. They told him that he had killed the grandson of Frederick Nietzsche. Then they said that he was in the army, and told him to defend the people. Johnny gave them a badge from his pocket they swapped theirs with his. He went his own way along the road to where they had pointed. He had expected to get shot himself, but he had taken away an unwanted task from the Stasi.
He followed an unknown path. It went through an intricate catacombical complex of curved and cornered streets. No signs indicating place names or locations. He ran through a blind-cornered maze past regular white lines of paint on the road. He came to another Stasi by a dark shadowed wall. They passed after a brief recognition of a similar position. This required a vocal interchange of the three identifying words.
“Halten".
"Staten".
"Passer”.
He came to a ramp which led up a level to a warehouse floor. White lines drawn on the road led along the ramp. A group of people hurried along the road. BRAVE Johnny pointed them to go up the ramp. They were to wait there for the wall administrators to allow access for them to the west. He kept walking through the roads in silence and gloom like a speck of dust blown through a room. A large black car arrived and stopped next to him.
A man called out from the window of the black car. “Hey, you ready? Come on, the job doesn’t wait for you to take in the sights or anything. Get in.”
This kind of behaviour was atypical for a closed and repressed society. So he knew that the driver had a specific purpose when he stopped for him. No other instructions came. Not from the agents at the wall or the stunned prison guard or from the watchtower. Still he must somehow survive this alien society and the offer was in front of him so he got into the car.
The driver sped out of the maze complex of streets. The Daimler diverted onto an empty highway. Past a million unlit apartment blocks, construction gave way to farm. He finally breathed air which was not stale.
In the late hours of the night Johnny found himself involved in a staff guard change over. He was for the first time in his life at a nuclear power station. He had not expected. He decided to imitate. He followed other security over a fence and to the outside of a large building. The boss replaced the novice. He went back to the car which had brought him there. The driver of the Daimler returned him to a platoon in Berlin.
The driver re-introduced him to his Auckland drill sergeant. Stern assigned him two jobs, the second one of which became an estimated use of brute force.
There was a street with apartment doors on ground level. Here the representatives from the secret service dwelt. First the platoon kicked in their doors. Aimed rifles down the corridors. Fired tear gas canisters. The cans bounced down through the hallways.
At the next, Johnny's order was to go into one of them and disable the woman inside the domicile. She was planning a missile attack against the USA. So he entered the apartment. At a table in the living room was a blonde blue eyed six feet tall lady. She fit the description.
He wrestled her and she fought back well. He had no information on her martial arts skill. Since she struggled well, he fought harder and broke her neck. He carried the blame.
Before he entered the door, Johnny heard the officers speak from behind him. Stern described him as an enthusiastic delusional. It was this first event which made him regret his military service. He rode in a black car to the gates of an apartment block and told to get a place to stay.
Another Stasi opened the GATE and let him in.
The apartment building was sixteen levels of cramped wooden decor units. When he met some of the occupants they showed him into a room which served as the lounge for a couple. He met three women there. From talking to them he learns things about the society into which he had wandered. Men had a working schedule of sixteen hours each day and their spouses would stay at home. The gates locked at most times. Vouchers were their pay, and normal supply amounts for any consumables rationed. Everyone drank vodka. The State radio broadcast through speakers. These sound-sources built into the internal walls of the rooms. An on-and-off switch was peoples’ option for hearing the news at any time. A lucky one who was brave and foolhardy enough to trade products on the black market had a stereo. A turntable amplifier and speakers for vinyl albums to spin on. An absent man had acquired it. Johnny asked what he traded for the asset. Her answer was that he bought and sold tobacco. He included in his trade any broken second hand items from the tenants. The residents played it on Saturday nights. Not at other times of the week. Classical music was popular, although the tobacconist had stolen a new pop album. The ladies told him that they had expected bibles from him. Since most of the newcomers into the bloc carried them in. But all he had was a useless gun.
He asked her for directions to the exit before finding his way out again, but received blunt advice. She told him that at that time the only way out was through the main sewer. The building manager prescribed times when the building’s gateway to the road opened. He chose them to fit the work schedule hours. Now was half-time. Closed.
At concrete ground level in the apartment building courtyard, he lifted an iron grill. It led to a wide pipe, which he entered and followed to a tall sluice which he slid down. He was now in the city sewer corridors, and he wallowed along while checking above him for exit points. He saw a second iron grate with apertures. The prisoner peered through it to assess whether it led to a road or another enclosure. A car passed above him and he decided that leaving the sewer was worth the risk. He pushed and shoved the grate and climbed out, closing it behind him.
He still had his rifle. He was in a road but the commotion he had caused was obvious to potential witnesses and so he ran to somewhere else. He followed the complexity of the East Berlin streets trying to find the truck wagon. He heard the telling sound of a recognizable engine. He spun around watching all directions, trying to locate the vehicle. It passed him on a main street when he was on a connecting side street. He lifted his rifle and fired a brief series of shots to raise notice. The second truck stopped by the intersection and he spoke to the driver and he let him in to the covered wagon. As he climbed in, ties loosened on the canvass and warning shots fired out.
The soldiers in the wagon remarked that shit covered him. A lieutenant told the drivers that they had found the missing man. The trucks accelerated out of Berlin traveling east to Poland. Johnny had located his last chance for freedom within the platoon. This prevented his imprisonment for trespass.
The marines camped by the side of a road in Poland. Forest surrounded the road in a rural zone. The few were lying under canvass covers. Sergeant Stern spoke to him and congratulated him for smart thinking. They were not doing much, headed for a memorial site from the second world war. Stern told him that he would have to live in filth until washed, and he put him on hygiene patrol. A quiet night passed. In the hour and a half before dawn the platoon dissembled their camp and marched.
He was in a massive line up of military staff. He was standing in rank and file with a sum of twenty-thousand male and female soldiers in Eastern Europe.
He cleaned down under a hose. He was now less filthy and also wet. They marched forward. On the right of them was a place, a particular place. There, an infamous mass murder had happened fifty-four years previous. To their left was senior army staff that were inspecting and assessing the troops.
He shifted his eyes a little to look left and recognized one of them from his home town three years previous. This woman had hidden in the cupboard of his bedroom and come out at night and whispered threats. She had warned him of how close the world was to a nuclear annihilation and of how great the risks were. Here she wore the same drab green jacket and black pants and boots as she had worn then. These coupled with the same dark glass spectacles she used to have. They had a handle which she held and lifted them to her eyes with her left hand. There were other similar female captains dressed the same. Through small sets of binoculars, they watched the young recruits.
They were marching past the remains of Auschwitz in Oswiecim and he did not care. He was both impressed at his present achievement of being there and also surprised that he had done it. In a line of twenty thousand they followed the orders of the feet as they swung left and right.
It was here that he broke rank when invited to. He was the only one of all who chose to do this. He walked to the perimeter of the abandoned death camp. He followed the line of a wire fence for some distance. He walked until the thorny weeds that had grown about the wire impeded his progress. It was here that he turned back and walked towards the army again. A notable feature of the ground around the perimeter was that ash covered it. The ground was brown and on top of that was acres of grey ash. He bent and reached his left hand to the ash on the ground and he picked up a small handful of ash and brought it to his lips.
The act of kissing the cinders was for him an emotional act. It recognised remorse. Then he walked back into the line of rank and file.
The thoughts he had after doing this involved what a great pity it was that he was there in the army navy and air force at all. He considered what a far distance he was from his home town and family. How uncross able the distance was. How far divided he had become from all his common recognized things. They called him back into line.
The commanders dispatched the platoons to stations across eastern Europe. He travelled by truck with his comrades to Warsaw. It was there that they announced the start of their part in the velvet revolution. With comrades England and Germany and France they set up a limited broadcast. They announced their intentions to the public in the railway stations. They told them that they were not revolutionaries who would limit any freedoms. That they were there to announce a new era of civic freedoms. They said that they would not risk the potential of there being a war or a limited war. That they did not risk any annihilation which that could bring. As they made their speech, trains shunted and people disembarked. Strangers walked past keeping their heads up.
Then some of the troops went all the way to the Ukraine. At the October revolution square in Kiev they performed a series of rifle shots. They aimed at the sky and fired from a podium. One after another each rifleman walked three steps to the top of the podium and fired once. This was a ritual notification to the events of 1917. It was an honorary procedure. After this an officer dispatched Johnny to return to Poland.
He rode overland in a truck wagon behind canvas cover with thirty other hardened army men. A blue eyed man expressed an interest in Johnny’s scout jersey. It had thirty emblem badges stitched onto the sleeves. They agreed to swap for a thermal overcoat since the weather was cold.
The truck diverted into an industrial manufacturing estate at Krakow. Johnny got off at a location where the English travellers met at a party around a barbeque fire. They discussed politics and freedom. He met a pretty lady and they talked with each other about their individual lives. When the party ended, the officers had arranged another job. Mark accompanied him. They bombed a prison. Then they drove to Czechoslovakia.
In Prague, another set of complex orders issued. These he had trouble understanding. He joined another platoon. They received instructions to go into a brothel with money and enjoy themselves. This seemed to be contrary to the purposes of the mission. Johnny communicated with his buddy Jim about the purpose of the wasteful orders. It was a test and weaklings were being weeded out.
Some of the battalion staff had already given away silver jewellery to ladies. Johnny had purchased jewellery before he had departed home. He'd carried it with him in his kit the entire distance. The soldiers had handed away the jewels to the women who mobbed their trucks. All blonde and blue eyed and laughing they were, with hands outstretched to them. He felt happy to give them this symbolic promise of wealth.
Johnny saw here a competent society. He had come from exploitation in a competition ruled by thumb. His witness was of not only the suits, hats, ties and overcoats of the public. Here in the region’s capital he also was the faces of their young ladies. But this was different. Here at Prague they walked straight into a brothel to waste their time.
But the officers had given them the money for it so there must have been another, hidden purpose to the order. Hidden behind the brothel and connected by a door was a loathed asylum. This was the way that the weaklings in the platoon would tarry. Eleven men walked through wooden doors and upstairs with mouldy carpet. Cheap coloured light bulbs lit the way up. A captain counted heads one by one.
They handed their money over and were then offered a drink and a woman in a room each. Johnny’s experience was easy and regular, like nothing which he had not already had.
He learned at that age that in this world, not only the strong survive but also one must be cunning. Before he had volunteered for this mission, Stern advised. He told him that it was an armed prison with a population of two hundred million. So he would need criminal skills to survive it. So he had equipped himself with a criminal resource with which he was also experienced.
After the deed with the willing woman they started talking. He knew that if he did not get out of there unseen he would not escape the asylum jail next door. He had already seen two members of his platoon ushered through at gun point. A metal door at the far side of the lounge marked the division. At once undercover infiltrator, and at the next move a state captive. There was nothing he could do to help his seized comrades. He aimed to get his hands on the captain's car.
As they were in a private room, he could behave and say whatever he liked free of witness. The jailers outside of their room expected him back at any time. He lit a reefer and explained that that was what he wanted from her.
Persuading her to do as he wanted was a task. He had a considerable language barrier to manage. She was likely to be lazy and loyal to the pimp. He tried a brief spiel about religion, and she rebuffed it with disbelief. He waited and watched her as they passed the grass from one to the other. As they breathed it in, he saw that she was under the influence. So he exploited her altered state of mind. He demanded her pimp's car keys and threatened her.
She tried to scream but couldn’t. Johnny realized by seeing the trauma she was in that this must have been the first time she had been high on the weed. So he told her to get her underwear on and moved to his last resort, British cash bank notes. She smiled and took the extra money and went into the lounge and came back with the car keys. Johnny dressed and with a quick remark of ‘God bless you’ fled down a separate fire exit flight of stairs. He shoved the middle bar of the noisy doors which crashed open. A siren tripped and alerted everyone in the building that their prison plan had failed. So he ran like hell to the first red car he saw in the dark.
It was the right car and the keys fit. As he started it he saw the flashes of police sirens behind him. He floored the accelerator. He wished that the vehicle was the type of super car which his accomplices had trained him in back home. They had faster accelerator action and could outrun any other vehicle. But this was an ordinary German factory model and the police were close behind him.
It was all he could do to keep pace until he saw a farm paddock gate beside the road. He swung in through the wooden barrier and drove across a flat paddock. He tried to keep pace now with the army wagon on the road next to him. The police were manoeuvring their way at their best to intercept him. When he was abreast of one of the dull green trucks he burst through the wire fence on the perimeter of the paddock. The truck slowed to let him in.
From the left hand side driver’s door of the car, he leaned out. He held a handle on the rear of the tray. Pulling and standing out of the car, he lifted himself and swung up. He was now inside the allied forces wagon again. The police force wailed their sirens and sounded their horns behind them. The truck did not stop. The red car veered driverless and crashed. The force stopped around it and let the army go.
