The O.D. Read online

  Signed

  The Knights of Blasius.

  Satisfied that the fiction of this prepared statement would be proven by subsequent events, Dragan Dragić clicked Save Draft on his email and downed a large slivovic.

  It was their third night out, and the fleet had cleared Cape Finisterre to begin the final leg to Eydos. Dragić was too keyed up to sleep and was on the bridge when the island finally came into view at first light. Initially, it was just a dark cloud bank on the horizon. Eydos was still twenty miles away, and should not yet be visible, but as they drew nearer, the shape resolved itself into something more solid – a seemingly endless cliff rising over three hundred metres out of the sea.

  From a quarter of a mile, the extraordinary smoothness of the cliff face, apart from the occasional turbidity ravine, became apparent. Unlike the craggy, chiseled coasts of her near neighbours, Eydos had not had hundreds of millions of years of erosion to etch character into her face.

  In stark contradiction to earlier photographs of Eydos were the vivid lime greens, yellows and rusts of the ‘tablecloth’covering the cliff top− lime greens, yellows and rusts, rendered all the more powerful above the stark grey of the underlying rock. The sun behind Dragić lit the scene full on and was reflected back into the man’s face by the mirror of a flat sea.

  The three small ships were approaching that same part of the coast that Bradingbrooke’s exploration party had reached from landward nine months before. The target wasn’t far away now, but the fleet was ahead of schedule, so Bobkar cut their speed to five knots. The invaders did not want to reach the mouth of the fjord leading into Nillin before dusk, so they stole as near to the base of the cliffs as they dared so as to avoid detection by any lookouts that may have been posted at the top.

  Bobkar was looking for an entrance resembling a narrow chink in a set of very tall curtains. Even using Global Positioning it was easy to miss unless you knew the coast well. The captain had been flown over the site and along their current route twice. He knew exactly where he was and was pacing himself to arrive at the entrance at sundown. From its mouth, the fjord cut into the island for half a mile to its elbow, where it turned east southeast towards Nillin. The difficulty would be in landing. The budding rows of cottonwoods and poplars along the northwest perimeter of the settlement would screen their approach, and might even allow them to tie up and come ashore undetected. The Islanders were notoriously slack when it came to security.

  Thanks to Soldo and the spy Cafard, every last inhabitant was known to the Knights, down to where they slept, where they were likely to be found at any given time of the day and how they were liable to react individually to invasion.

  The Knights of Blasius, together with the Albanians, numbered ninety-seven, but only the Knights, and Gilbert Cafard, already in place in Nillin, carried firearms. If Cafard was successful in dispatching his five targets, the remaining inhabitants would be easily overpowered. On coming ashore, the Knights would disable the satellite dish and close down the radio to ensure no communication could be made with Pilot’s backers, whoever they might be. General Fascisse and his fleet of helicopters would be standing by on the mainland for the signal. If all went well, the conspirators would have everyone off the island before dawn. Taking Eydos would be ‘nema problema’.

  There was considerable cloud piled low on the western horizon and as the sun slipped down behind it, all daylight was extinguished. So much the better. Bobkar had remarkable night vision and could steer his ship like a gondolier. The others needed only to follow his stern light.

  As they cleared a last headland and began the final approach to the fjord, the radar operator detected something which, according to their information, shouldn’t have been there. It was impossible from that distance to make a positive visual identification of the objects which could have been rocks or even small islets. Bobkar and Dragić peered at the radar screen as if willing the blips to unmask themselves. “What are they?”Dragić asked. But before Bobkar could answer, the lookout shouted that he could see lights. The two men looked at each other in alarm.

  “Stop engines,” Bobkar commanded.

  Dragić looked as if his life’s blood was seeping out of a hundred holes in his belly. “Who are they?”

  Behind Hrabrost, Stanko Jerić, unaware of the strange lights up ahead, didn’t notice the lead ship’s gradual loss of forward motion until too late and only had time to turn Sloboda Dalmacija four points to starboard before hitting the larger ship a glancing blow at three knots. Bobkar had forgotten to command the ships behind him to stop engines. The captain of the Libertas, following far enough behind to avoid the pile-up, skirted round the outside before cutting his engines.

  “What’s going on?” Nell asked the captain.

  He was answered by muttered curses. Through the window, distant lights were becoming brighter in the growing darkness.

  “Is that Nillin?” Nell asked.

  The captain ignored him and raised Dragić on the radio. Hrabrost and Sloboda Dalmacija weren’t badly damaged and attention had once again turned to the dilemma now facing them. The radio speaker exploded with a superfluous command from Dragićto shut off their lights− superfluous, because the watchers inside the radar blips had been following the fleet’s progress for the past five hours, lights or no lights.

  “Are we going in there or not?” Albert Nell’s instincts always preferred action over thought, despite his MA in Urban Studies. The captain wheeled around and told him to shut up.

  “How many can you see?” It was Dragić again, marginally calmer this time. “We count two.”

  The captain left his bridge to make a visual check with his high-powered and highly treasured Swiss night binoculars. When he eventually came back into the wheelhouse he looked like the man who has lost the winning lottery ticket. “Four,”he reported back to Dragić. “Four war ships. It’s a problem.”

  Old school Mafia don, Sandro ‘Sandy’ Condoso, President of Global Hotel & Condo, to name just one outpost of his vast business empire, and Jelena ‘Oilslick’Milanović, the first and only female Knight of Blasius, left the lobster bar arm in arm and walked quickly towards the chauffeur-driven Cadillac badly parked on the curb a short distance away. The only place Condoso walked slowly was behind the fortified walls of his estate on the Hudson.

  As they settled into the back seat, Oilslick slid her arm through her escort’s and maneuvered her elbow to rest suggestively in his lap.

  “As soon as Colonel Domaigne gets the signal from Dragan, he will phone me,” she said. “It’s nine at night on the island and our men will have already landed. You and I can drink a toast to the future at the Resort while we are waiting for the call. Would you like to join me, Sandro?” The invitation was not spoken to the man – it was breathed on him.

  “Sure,” he answered, staring out of the window. Sandy Condoso had stopped trying to impress women years ago. Because of his immense power, he no longer had to, and as a result his life had become quite boring – in one respect, anyway. The female next to him was nervous and that made him even more disinterested.

  “When we wake that island up, there will be no stopping us, Sandro,”Milanović continued, trying to pump some life into the man. “I wish you could see what I see.”

  “What’s that, kid?”

  Oilslick gripped Condoso’s thigh with both hands and turned the blowtorch of her words directly onto his face. “It’s not just money, Sandro. It’s international influence. And strategic importance− to NATO; to the United States; to France, Britain and Spain. We’re not just talking about a Cayman Island or a Monte Carlo. Zapad Dalmacija is 5,000 square kilometers of opportunity – and it lies supremely, like a sleeping lion, at the gates to Europe itself. Out there waits the kind of power we have only dreamt about – and part of it can be yours if you stick with us.”

  If he found the word ‘part’ offensive, Condoso didn’t show it, other than via the light grimace on his face and the way he tossed his mouth
around as if he’d just eaten something rotten. He sat inscrutably for a moment before answering.

  “Miss Milanović. Me and my organisation think that we got to come up with a classier name than the one you people put forward. The guy from Wichita’s got to be able to pronounce the place he’ll be spending his money in. It’s middle America we’re aiming at and you ain’t gonna hit ‘em with Zapid Almacha.”

  “Do you have a better name, Sandro?”

  “New Liberty,” he announced with the conviction of a god. Sandy Condoso was never required to explain or dress up the decisions he made. The island would be called New Liberty, full stop. That was the end of the matter.

  Oilslick, at this stage of the game, sensing that their American partners were teetering on the verge of pulling out of the deal, was prepared to make any sacrifices necessary to save the project – over and above offering her body to all whose influence qualified. The Knights of Blasius would object vehemently to losing Zapad Dalmacija, but without the capital and the input from their American partners, there would be no island, no development, no power.

  “New Liberty is a beautiful name, Sandro,” she lied.

  The instant the car pulled to a halt outside the Algonquin Hotel, a gold-braided, white-gloved doorman appeared from nowhere to help remove its contents. Jelena Milanović got out first and had to stop herself from assisting her portly companion. She stood to one side pretending not to look and reapplied her lipstick as one of Condoso’s soldiers struggled to get him out of the car.

  As they walked regally towards the hotel entrance, Condoso’s presence towered over all around him. The fact that Oilslick was five inches taller than the man made not the slightest difference to his stature in Manhattan.

  They hesitated a moment in the grand foyer in the self-conscious posture people adopt when they enter a crowded room. Condoso was looking for enemies; Milanovic, for admiring glances. Beside them, a deep and rounded Vincent Price voice cut through the classy cacophony of New York’s foremost hotel and caused them to turn.

  “Miss Milanović, Mr. Condoso. I’d like a word with you, please. It’s important.” The odd couple looked at the tall man in puzzlement. “Let’s sit over there.” Oilslick stopped dead in her tracks, an expression of annoyance just discernable under her make-up. Condoso’s three bodyguards, looking like badly decorated cupcakes on a plate of caviar, also stopped and were weighing up the potential threat to their boss.

  “I represent Lonnie Pilot and this will only take a minute.” Condoso signaled his men to stand down and followed the stranger to some rich red leather chairs set around a magnificent mahogany coffee table. “I’m here to lance a very painful boil on Lonnie Pilot’s bottom, Mr. Condoso.” He turned towards the man’s simmering consort. “Miss Milanović, your invasion fleet is shut out of the mouth of the fjord by the Irish navy, so I wouldn’t bother waiting up to hear from Dragić if I were you. We’ve sent a message to General Fascisse at his airfield in Brittany, telling him what I just told you. I don’t think he’ll be taking any independent action with half the world’s press−on a tip-off from ourselves− camped by his helicopters. Mr. Condoso, rather than your celebrating with champagne on false pretenses, and then hearing this news in the morning and taking it out on Miss Milanović, I thought I’d give it to you in person now.”

  Intelligent people don’t fight against unbeatable odds, being quick to see the futility of such action. Jelena Milanović, stripped naked in the lobby of Manhattan’s foremost hotel, had just resigned. Forrest Vaalon turned towards the woman with a benevolent look in his eyes.

  “From what I’ve heard about this man, Miss Milanović, I’m probably saving your life by killing this serpent in the egg before it gets up to your hotel room.” With that, Vaalon sat back, having said what he came to say, and looked at each in turn.

  Without uttering a word, and without so much as looking at either Vaalon or Oilslick, Condoso rose up on his tiny, alligator-skinned feet and marched out of the hotel, followed by his three minders.

  The young woman from Dubrovnik just stared at the coffee table, powerless through the presence of the milling hotel guests, to vent her anger and frustration on the man who had just caused her ruin.

  Two weeks after the abortive invasion, Mirko Soldo was still languishing in a Schweinfurt jail awaiting news from the Knights. No one had bothered to tell him. Libertas, Hrabrost and Sloboda Dalmacija were no longer to be found in the Bay of Biscay. The Ragusan fleet had scattered. Stanko Jerić’s ship was back in the effluent of Gruz Harbour. Libertas was on her way to South Africa and the Hrabrost was once again gathering barnacles in Las Palmas.

  In Whitehall and the City of London, in more than one corridor of British power, important men who had hoped to become even more inflated on the hot air of the new regime of Zapad Dalmacija, silently mourned the coup’s failure, as did other men of avarice in Paris, Brussels, Bonn, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Miami and New York City.

  In the Bay of Biscay, love was in the air. Dubravka Horvat had recovered from Pilot’s rejection with a vengeance. She and Aaron Serman had hurdled the language barrier with their eyes closed and were inseparable. Odile Bartoli and Gilbert Cafard were already a quarter way through their unique adaptation of The Perfumed Garden. And it had only taken Lonnie Pilot and Jane Lavery one trip to move her personal effects, including a perfect specimen of an infant bonsai tree, into his dome. Other pairings had been made, leaving only a handful of unattached people on the island – some more detached than others. Henry Bradingbrooke had been dipping his toe in the water but had not yet jumped in with anyone. And, since landing in August, Macushla Mara had turned down the advances of eight crew members, including her latest suitress, Rebecca Schein, preferring for the moment to remain single and heterosexual.

  On a cliff-top overlooking the entrance to the newly named Blasius Fjord, five people strolled on a shallow carpet of spongy green lichen, their hair and clothes rippling like flags in the fierce east wind.

  “It’s beginning to look like proper land,” Jane Lavery said, picking up a clump of lichen. She held it in her open palm and it was immediately ripped away into the distance. “How on Earth does it hold on in this wind?”

  “A bit like us,” Macushla Mara said, composing the colours and shapes for her next knitted jumper from the inspirational rusts, greens and greys underfoot. “Still holding on against all the odds.” In another sense, conditions had never been calmer in the Bay of Biscay. The wind of invasion had abated for the moment; the island’s position was as secure as it ever would be; and it was time for the settlers to throw all their energy into their Big Idea before the world outran Eydos’ ability to rein it in.

  Lonnie Pilot’s gaze was directed seaward. Beyond the horizon, an unthinkable blight was descending. Unthinkable but not unexpected. Just three hours earlier they had been watching news footage of the half-million-strong ‘Poor March’ on Washington. Unlike the Great March for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, this one had ended in violence. The images had stunned them all and was soon colouring their wind-blown conversation.

  Henry Bradingbrooke: The bloodstains on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

  Lavery: Who would have thought that could ever happen?

  Josiah Billy (after Martin Luther King): I have a dream… that one day the waves reaching our western cliffs will be red with the blood of all fifty States.

  Lavery: Not funny, Josiah.

  Bradingbrooke: Poetic, though.

  Billy: No. Prophetic.

  Mara: It doesn’t bode well for the Land of the Free.

  Lonnie Pilot: There’s no such place.

  (pause)

  Mara: Where do we go from here?

  Billy: I feel sick.

  Lavery: Where do we go from here?

  Billy: To the bottom of the Bay. Put us out of our misery.

  Mara: Cheer up, Josiah. It might never happen.

  Billy: What might never happen.

  Mara: It.

  Billy: I�
�ve got post-traumatic stress, Macushla. I can’t help it. The French… the Knights of bloody Blasius…

  Lavery: Take it out on one of your pieces of wood, Joe. Carve some sonnets.

  Mara: Or limericks.

  (pause)

  Mara: There once was a man named Bill-ay, Who fretted and bayed in Biscay.

  (pause)

  Lavery: His groans and his moans, Set negative tones,

  Mara: And drove all his neighbours away.

  Billy: I see no reason to be cheerful. None at all. Do you think they’ll come back?

  Bradingbrooke: Who? Your neighbours? The French? The Knights?

  Billy: No. The Disciples of the Seraphic Prodigy.

  Bradingbrooke: You mean Debbie Rae.

  Billy: She was nice. Uncomplicated.

  Mara: Ignorance is bliss.

  Billy: She was nice. Uncomplicated. Unthreatening.

  Mara: Yes, she was, Josiah.

  Billy: She needs looking after. I hope she finds someone.

  Lavery: There are eight billion people out there who need looking after. I hope they find someone.

  (pause)

  Lavery: I’ve got a new recipe to try on you.

  Bradingbrooke: Let me guess. Moringo leaves on toast.

  Lavery: Lentils. On lentils. But you mash the leaves up with brandy and chilli peppers into a paste first before adding it to a soya roux.

  Billy: Can’t wait to try it, Jane.

  (pause)

  Billy: As soon as the first potatoes come up, I’ll make us all a giant vat of pottage and we can get pissed for a month. Drown our… my… sorrows.

  Mara: You’re thinking of poteen, Josiah. Pottage is soup.

  Bradingbrooke: I’m thinking of handing myself over to the International Court.

  (pause)

  Lavery: What did you say?

  Bradingbrooke: I said I’m thinking of turning myself in. There’s a stain on this place in the eyes of the world – an impurity− and it’s me. It’s time I was removed.