From the back seat, I could see the traffic ahead being diverted. It was a hot and humid night and the streetlights were pale in the unseasonal mist that swirled thinly round them. The colonel, who was driving, muttered under his breath, cursing the delay, while his civilian passenger - my brother - picked absently at his thumbnail.
"Did they say how many?"
"According to my radio report, three so far. But the first one across said the whole family of six was on its way."
We inched forward. When we reached the roadblock, the colonel briefly switched on a small blue light, perched discreetly on the dashboard. The policeman saluted as he waved us through, and we made good progress for the next two hundred metres.
"We’d better stop here," said the colonel. The road had ended in an open space with some ruined buildings barely visible nearby. Across this space, stretched out in front of them, was a four metre high concrete block wall, topped partly with barbed wire. It looked unfinished and dropped down to three metres as it disappeared off to the right. The car edged forward until we could see a handful of armed British soldiers grouped around a military ambulance, parked well back. A dog barked in the distance. The whole scene was like an old black and white movie, without any other sounds of life or movement.
I leaned forward between the front seats. "What now?" I whispered.
"We wait and watch, then your brother and I go back to our offices and send in our reports. You, my boy, stay out of sight and do nothing, because officially you’re not here." I was spending my school holidays with my diplomat brother and we had all been dining out at a lakeside restaurant when the call came through, and the older men did not feel they could leave a fifteen-year-old behind.
For five minutes, nothing happened. Even the dog had fallen silent. We opened the car’s windows to get some air.
Suddenly, a shout from the other side of the wall alerted us. A brilliant white light split the darkness, silhouetting the figure of a man on top of the wall, who waited an instant, then jumped down. He landed with a cry of pain, and a couple of soldiers ran forward. Immediately, another figure appeared on top, swung his legs over, then paused.
"Jump," the soldiers cried. "Quickly. We’ll catch you."
A shout of “Halt” from behind encouraged him and he leaned forward. A rattle of automatic fire fractured the stillness, and then he was falling, in slow motion, down, down into a crumpled heap at the foot of the wall, where he lay motionless. Almost at once there was another short burst of gunfire from the other side, followed by screaming, silenced abruptly by a single shot. The searchlight went out.
"Bastards, that makes up the six," said the colonel. "Two more victims of the socialist utopia of Walter Ulbricht."
"I feel sick," said my brother.
"Don’t you dare," barked the colonel, then, more gently, "you okay, Richard?"
"Yes, sir, I think so," I replied in a subdued voice.
A woman broke free from the group behind the ambulance, ran to the body, lifted it into her arms, and rocked and howled her grief into the night.
Richard Newell was born in England nearly 80 years ago and educated at Oxford and London Universities. He retired after almost fifty years practising medicine and decided to try writing. He has self-published a book of short stories for young adults (and older ones!) --> FACEBOOK
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