The Rocks Below by Nigel Bird

Author:Nigel Bird [Bird, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sea Minor
Published: 2013-03-12T07:00:00+00:00

White Heat

White Sands was the last of the East Lothian beaches to be cleared of rubbish.

The county owed the Surfers Against Sewage a great deal for their help in tidying up the beaches so quickly. The movement had taken a break from their protests against the fracking in the central belt to work on something closer to their heart.

“You wouldn’t believe how the businesses are getting away with it,” Hashtag told Sam. “Shame our government won’t ban it, like.” Hashtag had a hint of a Geordie accent that didn’t really suit him.

Years of outdoor living had tanned his skin and sun-bleached the dreadlocks that he wore tied back in a ponytail held together with a yellow, tie-dyed scrunchy. He wore sunglasses that were like two dark mirrors in front of his eyes. He looked more like an exotic Frenchman than a boy from the streets of Newcastle.

Then again, he looked more like a hippy than a police officer. He’d been working undercover for a few years when his love of surfing and the sea made him the perfect plant into the new Surfers Against Sewage movement. Problem was, he already sympathised with the cause, it being about keeping the water clean for bathers, so it was only a matter of time before he became a full convert to their ideas.

From what he’d seen, the world was upside down. Here were these gentle people trying to make a difference while the government and the police were trying to stop them. That same government and police force were also allowing hydraulic fracturing to take place along the coal seams of Scotland. It was madness Hashtag thought and he wasn’t the only one. Pumping into veins and dikes to split them and extract hydrocarbons for energy use risked so much – air pollution, contamination of the surface water that people would be drinking and general spillages that might cause lord-knew-what. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there was the chance of causing earth tremors and quakes.

Things like this ought not to be messed with, not when there were so many renewable alternatives, but as always seemed to be the case, money and old-school ties seemed to be doing all the talking.

That was why Hashtag had turned. Become one of the protestors. A double-agent no longer working for the police in his heart even though they still paid his wages and expected him to keep them in touch with the movements of the group’s leaders.

He’d not only joined the protest group, he’d become one of the main organisers. His police bosses thought he was doing a great job; if only they’d realised that he’d fallen in love with a surfer girl and they were soon to have a baby together, or that the man was the force behind the group’s spreading of news via the internet, a skill that had earned him his new nickname.

“I can’t see us winning this one,” he went on, all the while his eyes pointing in the direction of the police car that was parked just behind them.

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