be able to tow them. He estimated that if they took it carefully, hugged the coastline and hoped for calm weather, the barges would make it down the Thames, out of the Thames estuary and up the coastline of East Anglia to Bracton in what? . . . three . . . four days?
The alternative was to wait on here and oversee the gradual, systematic and orderly starvation of two thousand people.
He resumed his morning tour, nodding and smiling at the familiar faces he passed. He spotted the man who’d once been an officer in the RAF regiment, still wearing the tattered remnants of his khaki greens.
‘Morning, Brooks.’
The man looked up and nodded politely. ‘Morning, Chief.’
Maxwell had rather liked the young man but leading up to the ‘change of guard’, he’d begun to ask too many bloody questions. And he’d heard murmurs amongst the young Flight Lieutenant’s men that they should be in charge.
It had been a necessary move, kicking them out and replacing them with the boys. His lads, his praetorians, never asked questions. They just got on with what they were asked to do.
Without his platoon Brooks was no longer a threat. Good worker, too.
Chapter 52
10 years AC
O2 Arena - ‘Safety Zone 4’, London
Adam watched Maxwell go. He could quite happily stab that self-serving bastard in the eye. That regal fucking nod, the pompous way he acknowledged his people; once a mid-level civil servant, now the absolute ruler of his own little kingdom.
And he’d made damn sure there was no one going to challenge the way of things here, hadn’t he? Damn sure.
Adam hadn’t seen it coming.
The school Maxwell had set up had made perfect sense at the time; there’d been over a hundred boys in the camp of schooling age. Another hundred or so girls as well. And Maxwell, being an ex-teacher, his pre-crash job something to do with a regional education board, it made sense that he’d want to see the kids get some sort of schooling.
It didn’t even to occur to him that Maxwell was playing some kind of long game when he announced he wanted to school the boys separately. It just happened. Anyway, there’d been too many other things on his mind. He and the lads of his squadron were out patrolling almost daily, foraging, looking for survivors in the aftermath, looking for signs of any other communities hanging on.
That bastard was clever about it, too. Moved the boys into the middle of the dome for their classes. The young lad, Edward Tindall, the oldest boy in the camp, was about seventeen when the crash happened. He became Maxwell’s ‘head boy’. All the other lads looked up to Edward; all urban-cool, hip.
Adam resumed his work, kneeling down and potting onion bulbs. Maybe it was how the Cheltenham safe zone went down; the army finally turning on the civil authorities. Or maybe Maxwell had caught wind of Adam’s men grumbling. Whatever it was, at some point the bastard had made up his mind that he didn’t want thirty trained soldiers and another twenty-seven police officer auxiliaries hanging around the dome.
How it happened, the ‘changing of the guard’, was pure bloody Maxwell. One of the girls was found raped and shot dead just outside the zone. Enough evidence had been strewn around to indicate it had been one of Adam’s lads. The same night Maxwell instructed Adam to order his men to hand in their guns so they could be inspected to identify which one had been fired.
And that’s what he’d done. Naively, stupidly - followed the bastard’s orders.
In the early hours Edward Tindall and his boys, all armed with those same fucking guns, had turfed the lads out of their bunks and out of the camp.
Oh yeah, they’d picked out one man to make an example of; said it was him who’d raped the girl and murdered her. Gunner Simon Lawrence. The soldiers were kicked out but Adam and the three other platoon NCOs were allowed to stay. Maxwell’s intention communicated quite clearly to the men as they were escorted out; try breaking back in or causing any mischief and your officers will suffer.
Next morning Maxwell had gathered everyone together in the dome’s entrance foyer and made his big ‘Year One’ speech - new order and all that. His students, his boys, were now functioning as the zone’s security personnel. The time had come for them to prepare for the future, no one was coming to rescue them, so now it was time to