London - Edward Rutherfurd [589]
After a few minutes, Charlie glanced down into the crater beside him. It seemed like any other, bigger and deeper than most, perhaps, but nothing very special about it. It was clear that the bomb had gone clean through the foundations of the houses that had been standing there. He could discern lines of earlier foundations of stone, too. In the flickering light from the surrounding fires, he thought he could make out a piece of tiled floor of some kind. From a nearby building, a little explosion caused a flash of reddish light to illuminate the pit further for a moment, and as it did so Charlie noticed a faint glint from something down at the bottom. Curious, he glanced about to check that no one was looking, and clambered over the edge. A second or two later he was feeling about in the dark. The faint glint seemed to have come from under a lid of some kind, covered over with rubble. He must have been looking from the top of the crater at just the right angle. He felt inside, frowned, whistled softly, and then drew his hand out carefully. The coins were heavy. He guessed they might be gold, but he hadn’t enough light to see.
Then, all of a sudden, a powerful torch cut down from the rim of the crater and in an instant he saw that he indeed had a fistful of solid gold coins. The metal lid belonged to some sort of box and in the beam of light he saw that it contained a quantity of similar coins, and saw, too, that there were other containers like it nearby. Charlie Dogget, though he could not possibly have known it, had found the stolen bullion left by Roman soldiers one sunny afternoon nearly seventeen hundred years before.
“What are you doing?”
The owner of the torch was a tall man wearing an ARP warden’s tin hat. By the light from the fires, Charlie could see that he had a large nose.
“You’re looting! It’s against the law,” said Neville Silversleeves.
“No, I’m not. This is buried treasure, this is,” Charlie riposted. “I’m entitled.”
“The building, as it happens,” Silversleeves said officiously, “is Church property. You are entitled to nothing. Now get out of there at once!”
“If you ask me,” said Charlie firmly, “another bleeding raid’s starting and it’s you who’d better move!”
For the air suddenly erupted with the sound of anti-aircraft fire from every side, while overhead a fresh, droning roar of approaching bombers was heard.
Charlie had no intention of being shifted from his gold, and it seemed that Silversleeves was equally determined to stay at his post to make sure that the fireman didn’t sneak off with any of it. The crash and thud of approaching bombs was heard, but neither man moved. The bangs grew louder.
“I shall report you,” called Silversleeves.
“Suit yourself,” muttered Charlie.
Then the bomb fell. It must have fallen, Charlie supposed, a hundred yards or so behind Silversleeves. The flash and roar were so great that for about twenty seconds he could not even make out what had happened. Then he realized that the unconscious body of Silversleeves was lying half-way down the opposite side of the crater from where he had been standing.
“And I hope you broke your bleeding neck,” he murmured. Reaching in again to the coins, Charlie quickly began to stuff them into his boots. Ten, twenty, thirty. He had just got to his fourth handful when he realised that he was going to die.
The sound made by a high-explosive bomb just before it lands is a whistling scream. Charlie had heard plenty of those in the last two weeks. He had become quite an expert at sensing where they were about to fall. As he heard the pitch of the bomb’s scream above him he knew at once that it was subtly different from any he had heard before. It was coming directly for him.
He dived frantically for the side of the crater. Hampered by his boots weighted down with gold, he started manically scrambling upwards, the rubble crumbling under his hands. As the bomb crashed