What happens when your past finally catches up with you?
…
Christmas is just around the corner, a time to be with family. For Will Mason, an orphan since he was fourteen, it is a time for reflection on what his life could have been, and what it could be.
Until a chance encounter brings back to life the reasons for his twenty years of self-imposed exile from a life only normal people could have. From that moment Will’s life slowly starts to unravel and it’s obvious to him it’s time to move on.
This time, however, there is more at stake.
Will has broken his number one rule, don’t get involved.
With his nemesis, Eddie Jamieson, suddenly within reach, and a blossoming relationship with an office colleague, Maria, about to change everything, Will has to make a choice. Quietly leave, or finally, make a stand.
But as Will soon discovers, when other people are involved there is going to be terrible consequences no matter what choice he makes.
Have you ever heard of someone rabbiting on, you know, endlessly rattling on about nothing?
That’s just one use of the word rabbit.
The most obvious is the animal, a rabbit. You know, that burrowing, plant-eating, long-eared, short-tailed animal that goes by the name of Bugs Bunny, maybe.
Nearly every child has a stuffed, cuddly one.
Of course, it’s of some significance at the moment because it’s Easter, and there are countless chocolate versions of the so-called Easter bunny.
Then there is that 6-foot-high invisible rabbit called Harvey, or not necessarily a rabbit, but a pookah.
We use the expression rabbit ears to describe those old interior television antennas.
There’s rabbit stew, rabbit pie, and white rabbit beer.
But my favorite is when the magician pulls the proverbial rabbit out of a hat. It’s an expression we also use for someone who pulls off an impossible task.
50 photographs, 50 stories, of which there is one of the 50 below.
They all start with –
A picture paints … well, as many words as you like. For instance:
And, the story:
Have you ever watched your hopes and dreams simply just fly away?
Everything I thought I wanted and needed had just left in an aeroplane, and although I said I was not going to, i came to the airport to see the plane leave. Not the person on it, that would have been far too difficult and emotional, but perhaps it was symbolic, the end of one life and the start of another.
But no matter what I thought or felt, we had both come to the right decision. She needed the opportunity to spread her wings. It was probably not the best idea for her to apply for the job without telling me, but I understood her reasons.
She was in a rut. Though her job was a very good one, it was not as demanding as she had expected, particularly after the last promotion, but with it came resentment from others on her level, that she, the youngest of the group would get the position.
It was something that had been weighing down of her for the last three months, and if noticed it, the late nights, the moodiness, sometimes a flash of temper. I knew she had one, no one could have such red hair and not, but she had always kept it in check.
And, then there was us, together, and after seven years, it felt like we were going nowhere. Perhaps that was down to my lack of ambition, and though she never said it, lack of sophistication. It hadn’t been an issue, well, not until her last promotion, and the fact she had to entertain more, and frankly I felt like an embarrassment to her.
So, there it was, three days ago, the beginning of the weekend, and we had planned to go away for a few days and take stock. We both acknowledged we needed to talk, but it never seemed the right time.
It was then she said she had quit her job and found a new one. Starting the following Monday.
Ok, that took me by surprise, not so much that it something I sort of guessed might happen, but that she would just blurt it out.
I think that right then, at that moment, I could feel her frustration with everything around her.
What surprised her was my reaction. None.
I simply asked where who, and when.
A world-class newspaper, in New York, and she had to be there in a week.
A week.
It was all the time I had left with her.
I remember I just shrugged and asked if the planned weekend away was off.
She stood on the other side of the kitchen counter, hands around a cup of coffee she had just poured, and that one thing I remembered was the lone tear that ran down her cheek.
Is that all you want to know?
I did, yes, but we had lost that intimacy we used to have when she would have told me what was happening, and we would have brainstormed solutions. I might be a cabinet maker but I still had a brain, was what I overheard her tell a friend once.
There’s not much to ask, I said. You’ve been desperately unhappy and haven’t been able to hide it all that well, you have been under a lot of pressure trying to deal with a group of troglodytes, and you’ve been leaning on Bentley’s shoulder instead of mine, and I get it, he’s got more experience in that place, and the politics that go with it, and is still an ally.
Her immediate superior and instrumental in her getting the position, but unlike some men in his position he had not taken advantage of a situation like some men would. And even if she had made a move, which I doubted, that was not the sort of woman she was, he would have politely declined.
One of the very few happily married men in that organisation, so I heard.
So, she said, you’re not just a pretty face.
Par for the course for a cabinet maker whose university degree is in psychology. It doesn’t take rocket science to see what was happening to you. I just didn’t think it was my place to jump in unless you asked me, and when you didn’t, well, that told me everything I needed to know.
Yes, our relationship had a use by date, and it was in the next few days.
I was thinking, she said, that you might come with me, you can make cabinets anywhere.
I could, but I think the real problem wasn’t just the job. It was everything around her and going with her, that would just be a constant reminder of what had been holding her back. I didn’t want that for her and said so.
Then the only question left was, what do we do now?
Go shopping for suitcases. Bags to pack, and places to go.
Getting on the roller coaster is easy. On the beginning, it’s a slow easy ride, followed by the slow climb to the top. It’s much like some relationships, they start out easy, they require a little work to get to the next level, follows by the adrenaline rush when it all comes together.
What most people forget is that what comes down must go back up, and life is pretty much a roller coaster with highs and lows.
Our roller coaster had just come or of the final turn and we were braking so that it stops at the station.
There was no question of going with her to New York. Yes, I promised I’d come over and visit her, but that was a promise with crossed fingers behind my back. After a few months in t the new job the last thing shed want was a reminder of what she left behind. New friends new life.
We packed her bags, three out everything she didn’t want, a free trips to the op shop with stiff she knew others would like to have, and basically, by the time she was ready to go, there was nothing left of her in the apartment, or anywhere.
Her friends would be seeing her off at the airport, and that’s when I told her I was not coming, that moment the taxi arrived to take her away forever. I remember standing there, watching the taxi go. It was going to be, and was, as hard as it was to watch the plane leave.
So, there I was, finally staring at the blank sky, around me a dozen other plane spotters, a rather motley crew of plane enthusiasts.
Already that morning there’s been 6 different types of plane depart, and I could hear another winding up its engines for take-off.
People coming, people going.
Maybe I would go to New York in a couple of months, not to see her, but just see what the attraction was. Or maybe I would drop in, just to see how she was.
As one of my friends told me when I gave him the news, the future is never written in stone, and it’s about time you broadened your horizons.
It’s time to go back to working on Bill’s backstory now that we’ve filled in some of the gaps.
Like some TV shows and books, some of the action sometimes takes the form of flashbacks.
In Starburst, Bill has a complete backstory, of a time that he had mainly forced into the deep dark part of his memory, waiting for something or someone to trigger it.
This whole back story, from the moment he entered the war zone, to the moment his war ended, and those that participated throughout that time, will be in the form of flashbacks, the first of which is triggered by the painkiller Bill is given after being shot in the Aitcheson incident.
These flashbacks will not necessarily be in any sort of order, but I have been thinking about this part of the story and produced an outline of the sequences I will require, give or take. There may be more, or less, depending on how the story progresses.
…
Part 1 – From arrival in the war zone to being assigned to Davenport’s squad
Being sent to, and the first patrol in Vietnam
Death and mayhem some months after sent to Vietnam
First meeting Barry in army mobile hospital
R and R in Saigon, with the first of the Vietnamese girls
Psychiatric help, time in the stockade
No soldier who trains for war, nor can they have a real idea what war is like, and certainly a war in the jungle, on the enemy’s terms. Bill is like any other soldier, happy to go into service, but soon the reality, and death becomes apparent.
Endless rain, endless heat, endless and sometimes needless death, and a deep mistrust of those whom you are supposed to protect, start to work on the mind of a person young enough not to understand what is going on.
Then, when trying to blot out the memories of death, enemy and friend alike, something has to give. Of course, the last place you want to end up in the stockade.
…
Part 2 – A lifeline, and a pass into the so-called Davenport Operation
Training as a spy?
Colonel, calling Bill into a briefing on the Davenport operation
Talking to the Commanding officer in Stockade, as a preliminary to Davenport service
…
Was Bill sent to the stockade because he committed an act of folly, or his incarceration a part of a much larger plan, a plan to have an inside man to report on Davenport?
It’s not the first time someone higher up the chain of command has had ideas of trying to find out what Davenport is doing, and where only rumors abound of his ‘interests’. Agents had been sent in before, and those agents had disappeared.
Was Bill about to be the next, or was he just in the wrong place at the wrong time?
I’ve been reading the latest headlines and picked out a few:
The seems to be a currency war,
Oil prices are set to rise in line with a cut in production,
Some tankers will not be plying the Hormuz strait,
There was a massive power outage in the UK,
Gold prices are rising,
North Korea is shooting missiles into the sea
The USA needs more missiles,
There are Chinese survey vessels in the South China Sea,
In Russia there is an explosion on a secret base with nuclear implications, and,
There might be a global recession coming.
What do all these events mean? Nothing really when taken individually, but when you start combining them, then the thriller writer in me starts to see all sorts of conspiracies and plotlines for stories.
For instance
Take that explosion in Russia, and the fact the word nuclear is attached to it, and then look at the massive power outage in the UK. What if that site was a laboratory, working on small, powerful bombs that can easily be carried, installed, in or around vital infrastructure, and in that quest for smaller and more powerful something goes wrong.
After all, isn’t that what testing is for?
And the fact there’s been one major event involving vital infrastructure, should we be looking for more? Then there are a few problems with bombs being attached to tankers in the Hormuz Strait. Does anyone see the potential for an apocalyptic event coming on?
Then the North Koreans are firing test missiles, and the US calling for more missiles to add to their arsenal. Are they using North Korea as an excuse? Or is there something more sinister going on with Chinese survey vessels in the South China Sea? What if they’re not survey vessels?
Then there’s a small matter of rising oil prices. Whilst the same report might say that the rise is due to OPEC cutting output, there could be other reasons, such as the currency war that’s about to erupt, and will this pre-emp a global recession. A good indicator of impending disaster, wars, and other maladies is the rising price of gold.
The gold market goes into overdrive when currency starts to lose value, recessions are coming or have arrived, or there is about to be a war, or there is one. The US and China are facing off, the US and half the middle east are a disaster waiting to happen, and, hang on, North Korea is being provocative, and in a late development, India and Pakistan are facing off over Kashmir.
Are we surprised people are turning to gold?
Maybe I should go back to doing the crossword, and ignoring the news.
For a story that was conceived during those long boring hours flying in a steel cocoon, striving to keep away the thoughts that the plane and everyone in it could just simply disappear as planes have in the past, it has come a long way.
Whilst I have always had a fascination with what happened during the Second world war, not the battles or fighting, but in the more obscure events that took place, I decided to pen my own little sidebar to what was a long and bitter war.
And, so, it continues…
…
When Carlo stopped, I was out of breath and gasping. We all were. The smoke was getting more intense. At times it had made navigation almost impossible.
In front of us were more trees, but these looked different to those we had passed through. I watched Carlo walk back and forth a few yards each way, then disappear into the bushes. A minute later he put his head out and said, “This way.”
We followed him. It was a hidden entrance down to a drain that was quite deep and headed back towards the castle one way and into the forest the other.
If the fire kept up by tomorrow the cover would be gone.
It was still a hard walk through the bushes, but we made it to a wireframeand door with a lock on it. It looked ancient as if it hadn’t been used in decades, even longer.
Carlo produced a rather odd looking key and unlocked it. I would have thought it was rusted shut, but appearances were deceptive. The lock was almost new.
But the gate had not been used for a long time and it took Carlo a few minutes to force it to open. It had rusted shut. When it did finally move, it was with a very loud screeching sound.
We filed in and he relocked it. Anyone thinking they heard something and came to investigate; it would end up on the other side of the gate.
So far so good.
For a moment I was back in my element, the archaeologist exploring caves, a wooden fire torch lighting the way, dampness underfoot, and the trickling of water down the walls. All around the dankness from continual dampness.
It was easy the pretend if only for a few minutes I had not been caught up in the war, that I was on a quest for lost treasure, hidden away at the end of a labyrinth.
The reality was we were quite literally in an ancient sewer and the original builders of the castle had used an underground waterway to tap into to remove waste. It was far more effective than modern systems and used the earth’s own ecology.
Inside the castle, the places where the waste used to drop down into the waterway had been covered over by trapdoors that were still there, and that was how we were going to gain access, through rooms that were no longer used.
We were going in via four access points, two men at each door, and mine with one of Blinkys men would be going into the area where the soldiers were camping to mop up whatever the bombs left behind, before closing off an exit.
Carlo had reserved the last one for himself and the boy, where he hoped to find Wallace and the new German commander.
Our cue to move: the bombs going off.
We just had time to get to the point and lower the trapdoors. Then climb up onto the floor and wait by the door. From the other side, Carlo said, anyone in the castle would only see a continuation of the wall panelling.
We made it with seconds to spare.
We were closest to the bombs and the percussive effect was disorientating for a few seconds before we pushed through the door and into the smoke and dust raised by the explosions.
As the dust settled, we could see dead soldiers, and mess everywhere. If a soldier was still alive, we shot them, systematically picking our way through the debris. I counted thirty-one dead by the time we reached the other side, the other exit from the space.
In the distance, we could hear sporadic gunfire coming from other parts of the castle, and then, after taking up our position, near the tank, we waited.
Three soldiers came bursting out of the exit and we shot them too..
Ten minutes later Carlo yelled out, “It’s me, don’t shoot.” Then he stepped out the door. “It is done.”
The castle was ours.
“You wish to speak to your old commander before I execute him?
“Wallace?”
He nodded.
“Sure”
I followed him into the castle and walked through familiar passageways and rooms, much had not changed in a long time.
Wallace and the new commander were tied up in the dining room. The remnants of a meal and several empty bottles of wine were on the table.
Wallace watched me from the doorway until I stood before him.
“I knew it was a mistake letting you go. Jackerby was convinced you were a stupid fool who would unwittingly lead us directly to the resistance. I told him you were cleverer than you looked.”
“And yet…”
“Perhaps I was tired of people like you being killed needlessly. What just happened, that was a waste of human life.”
“I didn’t start the war, and for the record, I didn’t want any part of it. Unfortunately, higher authorities deemed otherwise, and here I am. This is not a victory to savour.”
“A victory nonetheless.”
I shrugged. “It didn’t have to be like this, but at least we’ve weeded out a few more traitors.”
This book has been written for some time and the manuscript was sitting in a box with half a dozen others gathering dust and not quite as complete, so this month it is going to get the makeover, a first draft for the editor.
And so it begins…
…
Coping without technology
…
There are no more surprises at least for today.
We have no internet, the power company came along and removed an old pole and that was the end of it.
It’s amazing what you can’t do when there’s no internet and then all the things you said you would do one day if only you had the time.
This morning’s word count accumulates quickly without the distractions so I had the afternoon to finally clean up my workspace.
In 1974 a 26-year-old farmer, Yang Jide, was drilling a well and found fragments of the terracotta soldiers and bronze weapons.
What was discovered later was one of the biggest attended burial pits of China’s first feudal Emperor, Qin Shi Huang. In the following years remains had been found in 3 pits, yielding at least 8,000 soldiers and horses, and over 100 chariots. The soldiers were infantry, cavalry, and others.
Emperor Qin was born in 259 BC and died in 210 BC. He began building a mausoleum for himself at the foot of Mount Li when he was 13. Construction took 38 years, from 247 BC to 208 BC. It was divided into 3 stages and involved 720,000 conscripts.
The pits of pottery figures are 1.5 km east of Emperor Qin’s mausoleum. Pit 1 has about 6,000 terracotta armored warriors and horses and 40 wooden chariots. Pit 2 is estimated to have over 900 terracotta warriors and 350 terracotta horses with about 90 wooden chariots. Pit 3 had so far yielded only 66 pottery figures and one chariot drawn by four horses.
Official records say it was discovered later that it was likely Xiang Yu, a rebel, intentionally damaged the Mausoleum and the soldiers in the pits, by setting fire to the wooden roof rafters, and these fell on and broke the warriors into pieces.
However, we were told that after the terracotta warriors were completed, the Emperor ordered the builders to be killed so that they would not tell anyone about the warriors, and then of those that remained alive deliberately smashed all of the artifacts.
The thing is, all of the terracotta figures that have been found are in pieces, and they need computers to piece them back together again.
The visit: The first impression is the size of the car park and the number of buses parked in the lot, and a hell of a lot more outside up the road an off on side streets. Obviously, it costs money to park in the parking lot.
The other first impressions; the numbers waiting to get in were not as many as yesterday outside the forbidden city, in fact, a lot less.
Be warned there’s a long walk from the entrance gate where your bags are scanned and a body scan as well, before admittance. This walk is through a landscaped area which it is expect might sometime in the future reveal more soldiers, or other artifacts.
At the end of the walk that takes about ten minutes, you can get a one-way ride to the second checkpoint, but we opted not to as no one else in our group did.
That walk is the warm-up exercise to an organized viewing of the exhibits after going through a second ticket checkpoint. On the other side, we had to hand our tickets back to the tour guide which was disappointing not to end up with a memento of actually having been there.
So, on the other side in the courtyard, the guide told us the most important parts of the exhibition, that we should spend most of the time looking at pit 1, and then spent a little time in 2 which is only there in the first stages of excavation. Then move onto the museum if only to see the replica chariots.
We do.
The chariots were small but interesting
The horses were better and intricately detailed
These are soldiers, perhaps complete examples of those types found in the end pit.
This is one of the archers. You can tell by the way he wears his hair.
Pit 2
The excavation of this pit has only just begun, so it is possible to see where they have carefully removed the top cover, and you can see the broken parts of the warriors lying in a heap.
Some parts of the warriors are more discernible closer up
These parts are carefully extracted and taken to the ‘hospital’ where they are digitised and the computer will match each part with the warrior it belongs to.
Pit 1
This has quite a number of standing soldiers that have been glued back together, but not necessarily complete and I notice a number if the statues were incomplete. And if they cannot find the missing pieces, then they are not added to or filled in.
The scale of the pit is enormous, and they have hardly scratched the surface in the restoration process.
What is there is a number of horses as well.
That’s at the front of the pit, a long line of statues, and what is clear is the location of the well where the first fragments were found by a farmer.
There are about eight lines of soldiers, and some lining the sides.
Midway down there is a large area currently under excavation
At the back is the hospital where the soldiers are reassembled. There’s nearly a hundred in the various stages of rebuilding. These days the soldiers are rebuilt using computer imaging.
The hospital area is where they are put back together
And these are some of the statues in various stages of reconstruction
Another two views of the size and scale of the reconstruction project
The coffee shop is also a sales centre, but there are too many people waiting for coffee and too few places to sit down.
It seems that there are many ways of bringing children to life in your stories.
The most obvious is your own, but those traits might seem so polarised they and others might realise who they are based on, with the distress that comes with it.
Then there are the children of your friends and relationships, definitely fodder for many stories because those children are definitely far worse than your own, or better perhaps.
It leaves you questioning where you went wrong, or why you didn’t get the manual when the hospital kicked to the kerb with this screaming bundle of joy, their words not yours.
So we start with real-life experiences.
To muddy the waters so they don’t get the impression you’re paying out on them, you can always add the traits of those you see in the shopping malls.
Shopping malls are a gold mine for behavioural traits, from the very worst tantrum thrower to the best behaved. For my money and proven time and time again, those well-dressed, very well-behaved children are purely evil.
With the tantrum thrower, what you see if what you get.
With the well-behaved, you spend all of your time watching your back and waiting for the knife to penetrate your spine between the fourth and fifth vertebrae. You just know instinctively they’re medical school prodigies.
Of course, there are one or two good children, Santa has to have a reason for existence, but they are like 1,000 ounce gold nuggets; very, very hard to find.
I’m back home and this story has been sitting on a back burner for a few months, waiting for some more to be written.
The trouble is, there are also other stories to write, and I’m not very good at prioritizing.
But, here we are, a few minutes opened up and it didn’t take long to get back into the groove.
Chasing leads, maybe
Monica, from the last interrogation, had brought a file. It looked the same as the last one she brought with her, the one with my name on it.
This time it was thicker.
Intelligence gathering at its finest. There’d be stuff in there that even I didn’t know about me.
She didn’t open it, just looked at me.
“What have you been doing?”
“Working?”
“For whom?”
“Nobbin, of course. I am now assigned to his section. Did you do that?”
“He did. He tells me you’re working on the O’Connell investigation.”
“Is that what it’s called. He never told me that. And I had to find out where I’d been assigned by logging onto a computer. An email or letter would have made my life a little easier.”
“You’re just lucky you’re still working here. Now, tell me more about this Severin character.”
“I told you everything I knew the last time you spoke to me. Apparently, you seemed to know who it was. Perhaps you might tell me, too.”
“It’s…”
“And,” I interrupted, “don’t tell me it’s above my pay grade. I was potentially working for traitors and could have finished up in jail for treason.”
“You might still get there.”
Then why hadn’t she had me arrested and thrown in a dungeon the last time we met? There was an easy answer to that question. She needed me out in the field. Nobbin needed me in the field. They presumably needed me to remain available to Severin for whatever reason.
“What do you want?”
She opened the file, turned a few pages, and stopped at a yellow sheet of paper. I wasn’t able to read it upside down, but it had very small spidery writing on it.
Then she looked at me again.
“Some secret documents appear to have gone missing. We believe that is to say Director Dobbin thinks these may have been on a USB drive that was in the possession of O’Connell at the time of his death. You were there at the time of his death. You can see where this is going…”
No matter which answers I gave it was the wrong one, which led to do not pass go and do not collect two hundred dollars, or pounds as the case may be.
“I haven’t got it, and he didn’t tell me where it was, and I saw him die.”
“If you say so.” She went back to the file and turned some more pagers.
“What do you mean?”
She looked up. “So far, there’s no body been recovered, or any evidence there was a shooting where you said it was.”
“Are you trying to tell me he’s alive, because if you are, then I must be a very poor judge of people who have no pulse. He was not about to get up and walk away.”
“Did you see the body removed?”
Now there’s an interesting point. I had done as I was told and left when told to. I assumed Severin would sort the problem out, in fact, hadn’t he called in the cleaners? I saw a white van.
Actually, when I thought about it, I had no idea what happened after I left. And, now that I remember, I didn’t see anyone get out of the white van.
Thrills, Spills, and just a dash of Romance 