This Other Eden (37 page)

Waste
disposal unit.

The mission, on which Max
would not be going, was to hijack the convoy of waste which regularly crossed
the English Channel from mainland Europe for what was inaccurately called
‘disposal’ in Britain. Then to take the captured convoy to the centre of
European administration in Brussels and dump it.

Britain
was Europe’s waste disposal unit, and indeed the world’s. Anything that could
not be illegally dumped in the poverty nations, Britain took. As far as Britain
was concerned, dumping other people’s crap, or ‘processing and disposal’, as it
was called, was actually a desirable industry that had been quite deliberately
developed over many decades.

‘Waste
is an inevitable by-product of growth, and what is growth?’ the Prime Minister
had inquired of the faithful at a recent Party conference.

‘Growth
is good!’ the faithful had thunderously replied.

‘How
often is it good?’ the Prime Minister shouted.

‘It’s
always good!’ came the nearly evangelical answer.

‘Exactly,’
said the PM, calming down. ‘And we should be proud of the amount of deadly
poison lying around in Britain, as it is proof of our important role in the
growth cycle.’

There
was much to be proud of. Every nook and cranny in the British Isles was crammed
to bursting point with hamburger boxes, old condoms and nuclear waste. From
disused mine shafts to condemned housing estates, the waste ‘disposal’
companies proved endlessly ingenious at finding new ways to ‘dispose’ of the
undisposable. And they needed to, for more kept arriving every day. Sometimes
the rubbish was comparatively benign. Many American cities, for instance,
banned from using up any more of their own environment as landfill dumps for
domestic rubbish, paid the British to take it off their hands. Often, though,
the rubbish was more sinister. Nuclear waste ‘disposal’, for instance, was a
major industry in Britain. Every day the thousands of power stations, with
which the French kept the European Grid alive, produced copious quantities of
radioactive waste which the British then ‘disposed’ of. They did this by
sealing it in concrete tombs. Tombs which they then covered in alarming
symbols, in the hope of dissuading as yet unborn civilisations, thousands of
years hence, from tampering with that which would surely kill them.

Such is
progress. The Egyptians left tombs which thousands of years later yielded up
treasures of indescribable beauty, testimony to the glory of their
civilisation. The British, who have produced so many things that could serve as
splendid witness to a great society, leave only deadly poison to be remembered
by.

Target
.

Then there were the
industrial toxins. Those embarrassing by-products of economic activity which
could kill a river or poison a sky. Toxins which were taken once a month by
convoy from the industrial centres of Europe to be ‘processed’ in Britain. It
was these toxins which were to be the target of Rosalie’s raid.

The
convoys had long been the focus of much peaceful protest. The Natura argument
was that at any point in the lengthy ‘disposal’ process, a terrible disaster
could occur. The authorities argued that such a disaster could not occur
because the safety precautions employed were foolproof. Eventually the Natura
leaders decided that this complacent attitude must be exposed. It was decided
that Mother Earth should demonstrate the convoy’s vulnerability by hijacking it
before it reached the Channel Tunnel and diverting it to Brussels.

‘We
will mount a terrorist raid and capture the whole thing,’ the Mother Earth
strategists had said at their secret planning meeting, ‘in order to demonstrate
how easy it would be to mount a terrorist raid and capture the whole thing.’

Once
the convoy had been taken to Brussels, the plan was that the entire cargo would
be dumped outside the thirty-five-chambered Palace of Peace and Profit. (The
thirty-sixth chamber had been destroyed by the bomb attack on Jurgen Thor.)

‘We
will see just how dangerous those Euro bastards think this stuff is when they
have to climb over it to get to their cars!’

The
Founding Beardies.

That Rosalie’s group
should have been chosen to carry out the hijack showed the great respect in
which she was held at Mother Earth. It was an enormous responsibility, towards
which Rosalie would normally have been looking with a thrill of excitement.
However, she could not get the grim discovery of how Mother Earth was financed
out of her mind. Jurgen Thor’s little lesson in pragmatism had changed her
attitude to her work entirely, and it was with weary resignation that she had
made the final preparations for the action at hand.

The
hijack was, in fact, to be Rosalie’s first direct action as a unit commander,
or ‘Group Facilitator’ as the rank was known within Mother Earth. To have
become a Group Facilitator was a tremendous leap for Rosalie. There were only
fifteen Groups worldwide, and Rosalie would be the youngest Facilitator by far.
Rosalie did not like being called a Facilitator, any more than her second in
command like being called a ‘Facilitator’s Friend’, or her superior liked being
called a ‘Team Enabler’. These rather horrid titles were generally felt to be a
total embarrassment. They could not be dropped, however, because they were part
of the Mother Earth tradition, and held dear by the very oldest activists,
veterans who had been so over-exposed to toxicity during the early days of
struggle that there was really very little left of them any more but false
teeth, boring anecdotes and a seemingly insatiable desire to inform people of
how things had been in the early days.

Before
Jurgen Thor had formed Natura, there had been a terrible period when
mainstream environmental politics were the preserve of naive, idealistic old
hippies and, perhaps even more gruesomely, witches and ‘new pagans’. Greenies,
who were nice (some of them, anyway) but a bit stupid, firmly believing that if
they and their friends pretended that something was so, then it would be so.

‘If we
want to change the world, we must first change ourselves,’ earnest people with
beards and big jumpers and the occasional pointy hat assured each other. ‘You
cannot destroy a structure by creating a structure.’

‘But
surely this makes no sense and could in fact be described as bollocks,’ the odd
brave soul would say, only be told that their hostility proved the point.

The
bearded and bejumpered ones (the ones with pointy hats having by this time
walked out in disgust and gone off to celebrate a convenient solstice) claimed
that, since it was power structures which maintained the polluters in their
positions of authority, then those structures should not be copied.

‘We
will not caricature the methods of those we wish to destroy!’ they said. ‘We
will reinvent a non-exploitative structure, to bring about a non-exploitative
world. We must
be
what we stand for! Otherwise we will be hypocrites.’

Whether
they were hypocrites or not was a matter of opinion, what was beyond dispute,
however, was that they very soon became a complete joke.

Having
rejected the concept of leadership, their position was presented by an ad hoc
committee of occasional speakers, which meant of course that they completely
failed to communicate with the outside world. The truth (as everybody knew but
no one had the guts to admit) was that an argument, no matter how good, if
delivered by an ad hoc occasional speaker was always going to be less
convincing than an argument, no matter how bad, delivered by a fiery and
charismatic media star.

‘If you
consume a resource without making provision for its replacement, it will
eventually run out,’ mumbled an occasional speaker.

‘So
what? Let’s party,’ shouted the well-oiled, highly-geared media campaign,
organised by those who profited from resource exploitation.

When
Mother Earth was formed, it was recognised even by the stupidest Big Jumper
that you can’t have an army without commanders. However, the Founding Beardies,
as they were already becoming known, remained opposed to aping the structures
of the forces against which they would be called upon to fight. Hence, Mother
Earth soldiers were called ‘activists’, which was fine as far as it went, but
who was to tell the activists what to do? The answer the Founding Beardies came
up with was ‘catalysts’. Catalysts would tell activists what to do and would be
the rough equivalent of sergeants. Unfortunately, as the command structure grew
larger and more complex, the Beardies soon ran out of credible alternative
terms to describe the various posts that were being created. Rosalie had risen
to the rank (or NHL which stood for non-hierarchical level) of Catalyst by the
age of twenty-one. Since then, she had been a Suggester (whose ‘suggestions’
had to be obeyed by both catalysts and activists) a Co-ordinator, a
Facilitator’s Friend, and now she was a Facilitator. If the Earth and she were
to survive long enough, Rosalie might eventually hope to rise to the exalted
Non-Hierarchical Level of Number One Equal Person, which was Jurgen Thor’s post
and meant Commander-in-Chief.

Nice
work if you can get it.

The hijack took place at
Lille in Northern France, which was the
rendez-vous
point for all the
great toxic convoys of Europe. It was here that the colossal transports coming
from the industrial regions of Germany met up with those arriving from Italy,
France and Spain and made up a super-garbage convoy which would then make its
way on up to Ostend. It was at Ostend that the mouth of the third (and least
leaky) of the Channel Tunnels was located.

Taking
control of the convoy had been absurdly easy. Even the terrorists, who had only
embarked upon the hijack in order to prove how stunningly easy it would be,
were stunned at how easy it actually was. They just walked in, pointed a gun or
two, and drove the tankers away. Of course they should not really have been
surprised at the ease with which the crime was executed, the world was far too
overloaded with poison for governments to get very excited about its
transportation any more. For well over a century, the stuff had been shifted
round the world endlessly, on trucks, boats, railways. It was, as they say, as
common as muck.

‘I
don’t know, I thought they’d have hidden guards or security locks or
something,’
Rosalie’s Facilitator’s Friend had remarked to her as they took control.

Someone
to watch over us.

The fact was, that the
cynics in Mother Earth had been as naive as everybody else in the world about
the nature of government. The basic presumption of modern society is that
‘they’ (that vague, catch-all term for the powers that be) are at least
attempting
to look after our best interests. That there is a logical and at least
partially benign force which watches over us and for which we pay our taxes.
Certainly, we all think that ‘they’ are, in the main, a bunch of hypocritical
bastards on the make, but deep down we presume that at heart they want what’s
best for us. ‘Surely “they” wouldn’t let us drink polluted water?’ we say to
ourselves. ‘Surely “they” would tell us if the food was poisonous. Surely
“they” would never stitch people up for crimes those people did not commit and
put them away for twenty years without appeal?’

But
most of the time of course, either out of malice or incompetence, ‘they’ would
do these things. They would also, and have always, left nuclear missiles lying
around behind wire fences, allowed radioactive materials to travel on ordinary
trains and, as in the case of the Lille convoy, allowed toxic waste to be
trundled round the public highways, protected by poorly regulated private
security companies whose only reason for being in the ‘business’ at all is to
make a profit from it.

The
dreadful suspicion.

And so the terrorists
drove the tankers away. Brussels was only about forty minutes’ journey from
Lille and by the time ‘they’ (in this case the police) knew that anything was
wrong, the convoy had already arrived in the suburbs of the capital city of
Europe. At this point there was nothing much that the police could do. They
could not risk confronting or attacking the tankers, for every one of the
transports was a Pandora’s Box, filled with hellish poisons. The only course of
action open to the bemused police was to wait for the hijackers to stop and do
whatever it was that they planned to do.

It was
very late at night and so there was little traffic as Rosalie led her cargo of
death through the streets of the city. Brussels, being home to all the
politicians, had an orbital filter, so of course it still operated on day-time.
In the darkness of the cab, Judy was trying not to shift about too much on his
piles. He did not wish to provoke Saunders’s anger, partly because he was
scared of Saunders, and partly because Saunders was very noisy when roused, and
Judy needed peace to think.