by James Quinn
The room was as he had left it that morning; neat, tidy and with the panoramic vista of the mountains that always amazed him. Except… except for the seated figure outlined against this dramatic backdrop, who said, with just a touch of mischief in his tone, “Ah. I've been expecting you, Gorilla Grant.”
Chapter Three
“You know, we wouldn't do this for just anyone.”
Jack Grant always thought that the man had the look of a French Dean Martin about him, that smooth and easygoing manner wrapped up in an urbane and charming persona. No wonder the women fell at this guy's feet. He was the epitome of the cultured French intelligence officer.
Paul Sassi was anything but ordinary. A former Major in the 3rd Foreign Parachute Battalion, he had fought against the OAS in Algeria and was now a senior officer of the SDECE's Action Service. His department's responsibility was running a series of contract 'action agents' for the French Service – all at arm's length. You wanted a deniable job doing, Sassi's unit could get you the man or the woman. Sassi was the man who had personally recruited Gorilla Grant and had run him as an agent for the past three years.
Sassi was sat waiting, his back to the window and the Alps framed in the background. He causally tossed a glossy magazine that he had been flicking through onto the glass coffee table in front of him. “Almost four month's convalescence, all expenses paid, the best surgeons in Europe… It shows you how much we value you, Jack. How's the hand mending?” said Sassi, his voice smooth and welcoming.
For an answer, Grant opened and closed his hand slowly, wincing as he did so, his discomfort evident. Even after all these months of surgery and physical therapy, he still couldn't bring all the fingers together at the same time. It was like watching a windup toy slowing down. It was slow and clumsy.
The assassin's bullet had entered the back of his hand just below his index finger, close to the web space of the thumb, severely damaging the radial nerve. It had only been by a miracle of a few millimetres that it hadn't severed it completely. A centimetre to the left and the damage would have been beyond repair. The surgeon had told him that a direct hit to the radial would have resulted in loss of feeling and loss of grip strength, and in that statement Grant knew that would mean he would never be able to hold a gun or a blade with that hand ever again.
Following the surgery on his hand, he had been immobilized in a cast-type splint for a further eight weeks. That had been the easy part. What had come next was torture. Rehab had taken a further five weeks.
Three times a week, his rehabilitation had consisted of working with the physical therapy staff, who would move the joints to help him make a fist and straighten it out again, as well as opening and closing the fingers. He worked on grip strength, squeezing a ball, putty, and then moved onto fine motor skills, picking up specific objects with finger and thumb. His current forte was using chopsticks, something that he had never been able to do effectively in the past.
His regular Physical Therapist, a pretty blonde girl with a West Virginia drawl, called Courtney, told him that PT didn't stand for Physical Therapy – “It really stands, Mr Grant, for Pain and Torture.” Judging by the regular sharp intakes of breath as she manipulated his hand, he could agree with that.
Sassi looked over at him and nodded, concern etched upon his face. No case officer likes to see one of his best men incapacitated. Grant sat down on the leather sofa in the middle of his suite and sighed. ”They tell me that I will be able to use it in time, but that it will never have the fine motor skills that it had before the bullet tore it up.”
“You need anything?” asked Sassi.
Grant nodded. He knew what he had to do. Jack Grant had quickly come to the shattering realisation that he would never be able to shoot with his right hand, his natural hand, competently ever again. For a man of his skills and reputation, it was the same as an opera singer being struck dumb. “I need to retrain, Paul.”
Sassi looked confused and swung an arm out expansively, gesticulating at the luxury location around them. “Merde, Jack, you have the best of everything here. We've given you top rate surgeons and the best physical therapists…”
“I don't mean that.”
Sassi paused and let Grant's serious tone sink in. “Okay. Explain.”
“I need to be operational again. It's who I am, what I do. What I'm good at. But even I know that this…” he held up his hand, “is beyond hope.”
Sassi had to admit that while Gorilla Grant had been an exceptional intelligence operative while he had been under SDECE control, it was his skills as a paid assassin that he was valued for the most. Sassi had been coming under increasing pressure from his senior command at the French Secret Service to cut the little Englishman loose. “What is one Englishman who can fire a pistol?” they argued. “Any bloody fool can pull a trigger, damn it, Sassi!”
But Paul Sassi had stood his ground and fought for his agent. The trouble was, the voices were getting louder and more vehement and he was not sure how much longer he could keep his top gunman safely tucked away in this mountain retreat before matters were taken out of his hands. He needed Gorilla Grant back working or he would be 'retired'.
“Okay, I'll ask again. What do you have in mind and what do you need?”
So Gorilla told him.
Sassi looked at him, wide-eyed and not a little sceptically. “And you think that you can do this?”
“I'll have to. I don't have any other options,” said Grant. “What about getting operational again?”
Sassi stood and smiled. “One thing at a time, mon ami! Let's not try to run before we can walk. I'll get you what you want. You just be ready and waiting.”
A week later, a parcel arrived by special courier and was delivered to his suite. Grant had been expecting it for days. He knew what it contained and was eager to get to work.
In the seven days since he had last seen Sassi, Grant had upped his training regime. He still kept his PT work for his injured hand, Courtney was as strict as always so he had no choice, but he also began to introduce a private regime to strengthen his left hand.
But subterfuge came naturally to Jack Grant. He needed to be strong again and, in order to do that, he needed to feel a modicum of pain. Over the past week he had carefully, and out of the vision of Miss Courtney, flushed away the painkillers that he had been taking for the past few months. He needed them out of his system, needed to wean himself off them. He would rather have the pain than the numbness that the drugs provided. Drugs slowed your reactions down and made you sloppy. He wanted to be his own man again.
Inside the parcel from Sassi was a Beretta 1923 which had never been one of Grant's favourite guns, even with a good shooting hand. But that in itself was no problem. He reasoned that if he could make his new shooting method work with a gun he hated, he could more than make it work with a gun he was comfortable with.
Along with the pistol came two spare magazines, a cleaning kit, plastic holster and a dozen boxes of 9mm ammunition. There was also a little private gift from Sassi; a box of Cohiba Cuban cigars.
Over the past few years, they had become Gorilla Grant's secret vice. Sassi knew that Gorilla liked to savour them and would smoke one to relax and unwind, and it had been their little tradition that at the end of every successful operation, a fresh box of cigars would be delivered to Grant's apartment.
The final thing the parcel contained was a note which said: I'll be back in three weeks. I'll send a courier every week with a fresh batch of ammo. For your sake, get practising. Enjoy the Cohibas. Sassi.
He started slow, started small. For the first day, he did nothing but hold the empty gun in his left hand, getting used to its grip and how it sat in his palm. There was no other word for it but weird. It was the equivalent of learning how to write with your non-natural writing hand. Then, when he felt as comfortable as he could, he stood in front of the bedroom mirror in his suite. Dry-firing was the poor gunman's bread and butter training drill. It was free and gave you the oppo
rtunity to instil muscle memory.
The pistol was in a cheap holster attached to his left hip and, in slow motion, he moved his left arm in a fluid action. When he had a good grip on the butt of the weapon, he carefully pulled the gun up and out and then, when it had reached a point parallel to his pectoral muscle, he extended it out in a straight line. He needed the motion of a perfect right-angle; straight up the side of his body and punched out in front.
Then he re-holstered. Then he did it again and again… and again… slowly at first, but then getting more confident. Baby steps, Jack, he thought.
It took him a full week's work to get comfortable with those baby steps and, by the end of the first week, he was fast and smooth to the draw. The second week was his literal trial by fire. Dry-firing was all well and good, but it was hits on targets that counted. So every day Grant took the long walk out of the clinic and out into a private patch of land nearly a mile away. He never passed a soul on these illicit forays, the location was that remote.
He had set up a basic shooting range at the edge of a forest consisting of a cardboard target nailed to a large tree. He began at close range, no more than a few feet and slowly, over the next few hours, he gradually began to back up until finally he had reached the thirty feet mark, the extreme of effective close-quarter shooting.
To an observer, it would have looked as if this crazy man who was shooting out in the forest had never held a gun before in his life, he was that slow. But Grant knew the wisdom of this; slow and steady wins the race. He had to undo everything that he had known about drawing and firing and start again. What had once been an almost instinctive and natural way of shooting without thinking, had been replaced by a conscious thought process. It was the brain's way of over-compensating, re-wiring itself and working that much harder in order to accurately hit the target. At the end of the day, he packed up the target and the kit, cleaned the gun and trekked off back to the clinic.
On the second day, he jogged down to the 'shooting range' and spent the day working on quick draws. Then he sprinted back to the clinic. On the third day, he once again went for his now routine run and spent the day working on situational shooting – moving and firing, stepping off-line and shooting at multiple targets and then the obligatory run back to the clinic for a shower and some fresh food. By the end of that week, not only was his shooting more accurate, but he felt fitter and more confident in the role of a left-handed gunman.
He had worked out a system of drawing the weapon, dealing with stoppages, two-handed shooting, one-handed shooting, reloads – in fact, the whole gamut of techniques that he expected to use in the future. Once he was satisfied that he had an effective shooting system, Gorilla stood in the calm of the forest and, for the first time, lit up one of the Cuban cigars that Sassi had bought him. It was his reward for all his hard work. He savoured its flavour and sucked in its aroma.
Then he stuck it in the corner of his mouth, chomped down on it and reloaded the gun. “Once more,” he said out loud, standing square onto the target, ready to draw. “Just for fun.”
At the end of the month, Sassi came to visit him to see how his agent was recovering. They took a walk down to the shooting range and Grant had Sassi sit on a log in the centre of a half circle of trees, six in all. On each tree, he had nailed a cutout cardboard target.
Grant walked away from the target area, twenty paces, then stopped and faced Sassi. Grant's face was set in a grim mask of determination and concentration. He saw nothing but the targets. The Frenchman was an irrelevance.
Sassi, to his credit, remained impassive. He had been under fire in combat before and he knew the level of skill of the 'Gorilla', but it still gave him pause, even if he didn't outwardly show it.
“Give me the word when you're ready,” called Grant.
Sassi nodded, swallowed once and then said, “Aller!”
Gorilla moved, walking at a steady pace, hands by his side. He was calm. And then, in his mind's eye, he was in the middle of a scenario, armed attackers coming at him, an innocent bystander at their centre. The draw was smooth and confident, his left hand snaking around his body to the left hip of his jeans, guiding the hem of his shirt out of the way, and then the weapon was up and out, pointing straight ahead at the nearest target. His right arm acted as a rest, to steady his aim. His thumb flicked off the safety, his finger was off the trigger, ready and waiting.
In the old days, his first close-quarter battle instructor had always instilled in the students the CQB rule of 3: “When entering a kill zone, always shoot the first one that moves: he's engaged his brain and is now a threat!”
Gorilla shot the first target; a double tap to the head. A target to the side got the same treatment. Then another. He dropped out the empty magazine and slammed in another with his right hand and then the Beretta was up and on target again.
“Next,” said the instructor in his memory,” shoot the men nearest to you. They are close enough to attack you! They must be eliminated.”
Gorilla was ten feet away when he shot out the targets either side of Sassi. The Frenchman felt the whisper of the bullets as they passed him by, heard the crack/whump as they hit the targets. He was almost upon Sassi, they were nearly touching.
“Finally,” said the instructor in his memory, “shoot everyone else that is left! We don't want them to get into the fight; we want to take them OUT of the fight!”
Gorilla pivoted left and fired at the last remaining target. The two holes appeared as expected, in the head.
Grant stood with the weapon pointed down. He stripped out the magazine, cleared the chamber and placed it gently on the log next to Sassi.
Sassi looked down at his watch. “Impressive, twenty seconds. Not bad for a 'lefty'.”
Grant grinned. “I could probably get that faster. Problem is, you gave me a garbage piece of hardware to work with, Paul.”
“Okay, okay,” conceded Sassi, smiling. “You've proved that you've still got it.”
Grant frowned and shook his head angrily. “I've proved nothing, except that I can make it work in a controlled environment. Going out into the field and doing it against a live opponent is another matter. For that, I need new weapons, ones I'm used to, not this hunk of junk you've given me here,” he said, flicking a look at the old Beretta.
“Okay. Leave it with me. I have something in mind that I'll think you'll like, something a bit special.”
Grant cocked his head quizzically. He knew better than to try to push Sassi; the intelligence officer enjoyed being enigmatic. It was what made him such a good spy.
Chapter Four
SDECE – Action Service Headquarters, Paris – August 1973
La Piscine was the informal name for the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage, France's external intelligence gathering and covert operations organisation. Nicknamed 'the pool' because of its close proximity to the swimming pool belonging to the French Swimming Federation, its actual address is on the Boulevard Mortier, on the 20th Arrondissement in Paris.
But even within this most secret of establishments in the French capital, there is another address that is even more covert. This belongs to the Action Service of the French intelligence agency and is based out of an old Fort at Noisy-le-Sec, a fifteen minute drive away from SDECE headquarters.
From here, the spies, agents and 'hard men' of the Action Service are sent out to infiltrate, sabotage and assassinate enemies of the state. Everyone from OAS terrorists to Communist agents had been placed under the intelligence microscope. And it was here, on a sunny spring morning, that Paul Sassi climbed into his standard black government issue Citroen and drove into the centre of Paris.
That morning, he had been summoned to the office of Colonel Delgarde, the current head of the Action Service. As usual, the Colonel had been in a bullish mood, something that didn't usually bode well for his officers for the rest of the day.
“An operation is in the offing, Sassi. It's all highly classified. This one co
mes all the way from the top, way above the DG of the Service. This one came from the Minister himself. I want you to lead this operation,” the Colonel had boomed across the office, as Sassi watched him pace like a clockwork soldier. And that had been it. Sassi, with his usual focused mind, had set about reading the intelligence packet that the Colonel had given him.
However, he wasn't quite sure why this new operation had put the Colonel in such a foul mood. It was only later, when he sat in his small office surrounded by the trophies of wars gone by – unit photos, medals in frames, a knife that he now used as a letter opener – and then read the documents enclosed, that he understood.
He skimmed them once, and then read them through in detail twice. At the end of it, he whistled in surprise. The Colonel was a serious man, loyal to his department and Sassi knew that he didn't like his operatives being used for someone else's political agenda. Sassi had been involved with politicians long enough to know that when someone high up wanted a 'dirty job' doing, they didn't care about the professionals doing the work or any collateral damage, they only wanted results that would save their own necks.
It had been the final line in the intelligence packet that had really hit home and had also been quite revealing: this operation should be handled by third party agents at 'arm's length' and should be 100% deniable. No SDECE officer should have a direct involvement in the field.
It was clear that the operation called for a deniable operator, someone professional, covert, but good enough to get results quickly. For Sassi, there had been no need to think about who he would choose.
Judging by the intelligence in the files, it seemed that fate had decided who it was to be. The coincidence was staggering, especially to an intelligence officer like Sassi who didn't believe in coincidences. He knew instantly that he would bring his best freelance agent back into harness. He would call back Gorilla Grant.
