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Sadly unfinished.
This is one story I really wished I could have dug down and finished. But I just cannot do Sci-Fi no matter how hard I try. Maybe one day I'll have another go at this. And I can't correct the funny sized words......
I’ve always thought what harm could it possibly do now, after all of this time for the truth to come out? I got a visit from someone in the Ultra Division yesterday and his warning was veiled, but it was a warning all the same. Do not mention anything about what happened on the weekend of August 13th 2000. Fifty long years of keeping this terrible burden; afraid to tell anyone this dirty secret that has been slowly eating away at me.
Maybe someone else who was there on that day threatened to go public. I don’t know how many of us are left alive. I’ve seen one person who was involved that day in the last fifty years and that was by accident. Both hiking in Scotland. We barely acknowledged each other, let alone talk. Even in the mountains, you don’t know who is listening.
I know that the Ultra’s have been tempted to take us out of the picture ever since it was established. Always feared that we would go public. But maybe that’s what has saved us. Letters kept in the care of others and in case of an accidental death that seems too good to be an accident.
I have a stipulation in my will saying that if it is proven that I have died of natural causes, the letter that I wrote when I was at my most fearful of my life, be burned.
The visit yesterday though, has put the old fear back into me – but has it really ever gone away? That’s why I am going to write everything I know once more. I’ll send it to the Press as soon as I have done. I expect to be ‘removed’ – but not in an accident. It will be a death based purely on the act of revenge. It will be messy – but hopefully not slow.
There is new technology out there that enables the Ultra’s to read a document as you are typing away at your keyboard. Seemingly a test case in Liverpool was used on a writer of paedophile stories. The Ultras arrested him before he got to the end of chapter three. I have a blocker – expensive, but in this climate – you have to know every trick in the book – and nothing gets posted nowadays. Parcels are all done by security couriers after the bombing campaign in 2008. And sending a letter or anything of that ilk became obsolete in 2015.
When I think back to those early days of the internet – downloading a picture of a woman with her tits out took five minutes to do. Dial up – the horse and cart, broadband – the Linford Christie – and Thinkspeed – well, we all know the capabilities of that.
**
I was 19 in the year 2000 and I was on holiday, backpacking around the coast of Suffolk, East Anglia. What I saw that day as I camped up in the dunes had its seeds sown in a little incident on August 13th 1940, where 1000 Germans were attempting an invasion. The plan was to land and to take out many of the air bases that were dotted around the landscape. They would be landing in such a remote place, that they would never be spotted until they were right on top of the air bases.
If the Germans had succeeded, the course of British history would have been irrevocably changed. They were using a new underwater boat – until that day the British hadn’t even an inkling that it existed. Sleeker, faster and carrying more men and weapons than the U-Boat before it, the USL-Boat was cutting edge, decades ahead of its time. The Nazi think tank had not been sitting idly.
The whole flotilla was spoiled by a birdwatcher and his pair of spectacles.
Bob Burns, who’s son had died in France only three weeks previous was spending more and more time away from home. Relations with his loving wife Francis was at stretching point. He wanted to kill her, then himself and end all their pain. Instead, because ultimately, suicide was THE sin of all sins – he put his brave face on and headed out to the dunes where he spent vast hours watching the skies for planes, and the sea for the birds that fed.
It wasn’t normal for him to go to this stretch of beach; it was a good old slog on the bicycle. So while holding his battered binoculars up to his face, he scanned the sea – and out of the water was a small but very unmistakable shape.
A periscope.
Then another, then another, then another.
Bob Burns dropped his binoculars onto the sand; when he came back for them a few days later; they were melted and unrecognisable, fused with the sand. He jumped on his bicycle and tore his legs to shreds cycling to Hillman Airfield six miles away.
Now, 60 years after Bob cycled down the sandy path, I was walking up it – to a high point in the dunes with my camera, notepad and sketching pencils. My tent was a quarter of a mile away – hidden in the bigger dunes and the smoothness of the sand back there told me that no-one ever ventured there. I found a nice circle of grass and sat down and started sketching.
The sun was hitting its peak and I was stripped down to my boxer shorts. I looked down at the beach and saw a family of four walking their dog. A truck came onto the beach – a white one and trundled past. I picked up my camera and zoomed in on it. No markings – no bearing on who might own the truck. Three men in the front. The driver was smoking. I took a few snapshots of them.
My curiosity tweaked, I gathered my clothes together and put them in the little rucksack along with my sketch pad. In my boxers – I made my way through the dunes, keeping low and keeping my eye on the truck as it drove off into the distance.
I must have covered about two miles and when I a man who was happily metal detecting in the dunes – he nearly dropped down dead with fright.
‘You’re not some kind of stalker are you?’ he asked, only taking a few moments to recover his composure.
‘Nope, just too hot for clothes is all.’
‘So why are you this far away from the main beach?’
I told him about the truck and he seemed interested.
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