Field of Fire

by Roderic Jeffries

  “Look. You and me shoot it out at a thousand yards.”

  “Why? We shan’t be operating at a thousand yards.”

  “I ain’t talking now just about our job . . .”

  Dzur shrugged his shoulders to show his indifference to anything beyond the job.

  “You want to get with it, mate,” said Thornton. He was young, cocky, and determined to prove he was just as good as Dzur, whose reputation rankled heavily with him.

  “I shouldn’t argue too much with Josef,” said Napier mildly.

  “Why not, when he’s up the bleeding spout?” Thornton began to speak wildly.

  Dzur laid the gun gently down on the groundsheet. “There’s more to shooting than just pressing the trigger.” He took a round out of one of the boxes. “With a bullet this heavy, most of the man’s head will be blown away: with one of your bullets, a man can be hit about the head and live.”

  “When I’m shooting? D’you think I can’t get slap between the eyes at five hundred yards?”

  “A moment ago you were talking about the need of an endless supply of rounds for fear of missing time after time.”

  “You just aren’t with it, mate,” shouted Thornton, angered to a point where he no longer tried to argue reasonably.

  Napier smiled. “Let’s see who’s really right. Josef — show us.”

  Dzur picked up the Holland & Holland and several rounds of ammunition and crossed to a second groundsheet. He loaded the rifle, lay down with legs more apart than was usual and with the butt tucked firmly into his shoulder. He took aim through the telescopic sights and fired the right-hand barrel, then the left. The crack of the explosions echoed across the valley.

  The three of them went forward to the target, across dead bracken, grass that was beginning to grow, and clumps of primroses. The target was a wooden framework with slots into which a cardboard square with a four-inch bull had been dropped. The two shots were very close together, a foot out at two o’clock.

  “You’ve missed this Czech bastard and shot one of the bleedin’ footmen,” jeered Thornton.

  Dzur looked at the other with a quick questioning scorn, as if surprised anyone could be that stupid, and walked, with his typically shuffling movement, back to the firing point. He adjusted the elevation and bias of the telescopic sights, fires two more shots. These clipped the bull at two o’clock. A further sight adjustment and he put both shots into the bull and only just off dead centre.

  Over-confidence and anger upset Thornton’s first two shots with the S.M.L.E and one clipped the frame, the other missed altogether. He swore wildly, said the rifle was bent, forced himself to exercise self-control. His next sighting shots were close to the bull and the final two ended in the centre, clipping the holes made by the Holland & Holland.

  “I’d call that about all square,” said Napier.

  Dzur stared very briefly at Thornton and there was a tightness to his expression which suggested that for the first time he realised the other was something more than a mere braggart. Thornton looked sulky. He’d been hoping and expecting to get inside Dzur’s shots.

  “D’you feel ready for a moving target?” asked Napier.

  “Of course,” replied Dzur, as if the question was totally unnecessary.

  “Get on with it, Titch,” said Thornton, very loudly. “Let’s start sorting out the men from the boys.”

  Napier called Joyce out of the house and Joyce went round to the garage. He backed out a short wheelbase Land Rover and drove this up the right-hand slope until the ground became too steep, then turned so that the bonnet faced downhill. He unwound a rope, attached one end to the winch on the front of the Land Rover and the other to a second target on skids three hundred yards away. He engaged the winch in gear, looped the rope twice round it, and drew in the target. It moved up the hill jerkily and unpredictably, much as a man’s head would move in a badly sprung coach drawn by six greys. Dzur, at the standing position, fired both barrels very closely together. Joyce slacked off the rope and went down to the target. The bull’s-eye was in the shape of a man’s head and the two shots had gone through the right-hand top half. “Dead as old Chokey,” he shouted.

  Thornton fired twice, working the bolt so smartly that the interval between them was less than it had been between Dzur’s two. His first shot missed, his second was dead centre.

  Napier spoke to Dzur. “You’re even better than I thought,” His voice was very soft.

  “I did just as well,” claimed Thornton aggressively.

  “You missed the first time,” said Dzur.

  “Yeah? So the second shot knocked his brains out. You didn’t do no more than slice the bleeder’s ear off.”

  Dzur spoke wearily. “I tried to explain. With a heavy-calibre bullet, if a man is hit in the head, he is dead.”

  Napier said: “We’ll try the shotgun.”

  Dzur showed an annoyance that none of Thornton’s crude jeers had provoked. “I tell you, the rifle is best. With that, I cannot miss.”

  “But like I said, I want to cover ourselves. We maybe won’t find any room or roof along the route we can work from.”

  “We’ll find somewhere. If we use a rifle we shoot and we’re away before anyone really knows what has been happening.”

  “If security is really tight, there could be nowhere along the route to use,” persisted Napier. “And we won’t know the degree of security until much later.”

  Dzur walked away. Napier shouted at Joyce to drive down.

  The shotgun was a boxlock ejector, of good quality but not best, and without much scroll chasing. Dzur felt the balance of the gun before climbing up into the left-hand passenger seat of the Land Rover. He slid the window wide open and poked the barrels out and then deliberately handled the gun clumsily, as if it would be impossible to fire with any accuracy. The stationery target was set up on a small rock and then Joyce drove at a steady ten miles an hour, giving the effect of a car overtaking the state coach at no very great speed.

  When abreast of the target, Dzur fired once. The range had been fifteen feet and the shot had only just begun to spread, so that although it missed the bull the target was shattered with a rough hole some six inches in diameter punched through it.

  Dzur shrugged his shoulders with typically expressive gesture. “You said one reason for using a shotgun was to allow for bad aim. Like this, the aim must be very nearly as good as with a rifle.”

  Napier took out his cigarette holder and fitted a cigarette into it. “Can’t we get a much wider spread by sawing the barrels short?”

  “Sure. So wide that at any sort of range we will hit everyone but Pakac.”

  “It’ll only need one pellet.”

  “Well, I fancy the shotgun,” said Thornton loudly, glad to find a way of obviously annoying Dzur. “We can get a wider spread of shot with different borings. What we want is a gun with true cylinders, not this one with choke in both barrels.”

  Dzur turned away.

  “Let’s have a rumble, then, and show you how it’s done,” said Thornton. He crossed to the Land Rover.

  His first shot destroyed the head. This made him insufferably cocky.

  *

  Detective Superintendent Dalby moved down to Fortrow and stayed at the Lion’s Head, a comfortable public house with three bedrooms for bed-and-breakfast guests. At borough H.Q., Kywood turned out three of the administrative staff to give him an office, two rooms along from his own. Dalby entered Kywood’s office at eleven-fifteen. “Have you got that list of estate agents?”

  “It’s on its way, sir.”

  “They’re taking enough time about compiling it.”

  Kywood could have replied that there was a great deal of work to be carried out before a definitive list of estate agents who dealt with property in Fortrow could be compiled: after all, London and Barstone estate agents handled many of the larger properties.

  Dalby sat down on the corner of the desk. “When we get the list, every agent on it must be conta
cted and asked for immediate notification of anyone wanting to buy or lease a property along or in sight of the processional route, or who’s bought or leased such a place in the last three months.”

  “We’re going to need more men for sure,” said Kywood gloomily.

  “I understood you’d be getting them from the county force?”

  “I know, but because we have to pay for them I cut our request to the minimum. What I was wondering was, as the circumstances are so unusual, d’you thing London would send along extra help?”

  “Which you wouldn’t have to pay for? Dammit, you’re getting me and five others from Special Branch for free. Any more men will have to come from county and you’ll have to cough up for ’em.”

  Kywood hadn’t really expected any other answer, but he still looked a shade gloomier.

  “How many men will you be arming?” asked Dalby.

  “We’ve one inspector, two sergeant, and six constables with the qualifications.”

  “Then with us that makes fifteen. Not very many for two miles of road.”

  It wasn’t. The odds had to be with the assassins.

  Dalby sighed. “We’ll concentrate our heavy artillery on the obvious danger points, of course. Every man on duty will have a photo of Josef Dzur so that he can identify him on sight. In the meantime, every office, flat, and warehouse along the route must be visited and the occupants told to report anything in the least bit suspicious.” He was silent for a short while, then he said in tones of annoyance: “I don’t understand the theft of those rifles.” Like Fusil, he couldn’t see why only the two rifles had been stolen from Jones & Craddon.

  *

  Kerr spoke over the telephone to the detective sergeant in Lincoln.

  “We’ve checked all we can,” said the other, noticeably less pugnacious. “We’ve come up with virtually nothing useful.”

  “Mrs Sydmonds couldn’t help?”

  “She couldn’t remember anything more about the package. It came some time before her husband died and some of the powder inside spilt out on the breakfast table, but that’s all.”

  “Were you able to get anywhere with the name of Swaithe?”

  “She continues to say it seems kind of familiar, but can’t think why. She doesn’t know whether her husband talked about him.”

  “No leads at where he worked?”

  “His colleagues don’t know a thing.”

  “That seems to be about it, then?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  After replacing the receiver, Kerr stood up, stepped round a pile of pornographic magazines taken from a small cargo ship newly out of Copenhagen, and picked up his mackintosh from the stand. Being an optimist he went down to the courtyard to see if the C.I.D. Hillman was in, but was hardly surprised to discover it wasn’t. A Panda car was just about to drive out and Kerr called across for a lift down to the New Docks. The P.C. said he was going in the opposite direction and in any case walking was good for newly marrieds, but he leaned over and opened the nearside door.

  In his office in the docks, Ormond seemed even more harassed than usual. He was speaking into one telephone, holding another in his right hand, and his secretary — a starchy woman of indeterminate middle age — was waiting with opened notebook. A man looked in and said in a worried voice that a rope sling at number five had just parted and several bales had split open. Ormond waved his free hand with a gesture which replied that with so many calamities on hand a few split bales were of no account.

  Eventually, Ormond’s telephone calls were over. He looked enquiringly at Kerr, who explained that he wanted to know what damaged cargo Swaithe had dealt with prior to his death.

  “You’ll have to give me approximate dates — even then it’ll take time to check.”

  Kerr said: “The nearest we can suggest, allowing for the passing of letters between Swaithe and his brother, is around the seventeenth of February for the damaged cargo we’re interested in.”

  Ormond ran his hand over his slightly wavy hair, started to say something and stopped, then stood up and left the office. When he returned, he had a large, cloth-bound ledger. “This is the rough log of all cargo damage or theft which Swaithe kept. All important items are extracted and included in the weekly reports which go to head office and, when necessary, to insurance companies. You said the seventeenth of February?” He put the ledger down on the desk, opened it, and checked rapidly for dates, then slowly ran his finger down two pages as he read the entries. He muttered something as he turned over a fresh page. After a time, he looked up. “Not a thing.”

  “Will you go back to before the seventeenth? Maybe the postal service from Dejai isn’t as good as we were advised and letters take longer each way.”

  Within seconds of each other, the two telephones began to ring. After a quick, worried look at Kerr, Ormond ignored them and resumed his search of the ledger. “There’s something on the twelfth. A sling of drums crashed on the dockside and two of the fifteen drums are listed as being badly damaged.”

  “And were they all for Dejai?”

  “That’s right. Their port of destination was Cotonou in Dahomey and they’d have been transhipped.”

  “D’you know what was in the drums?”

  “The entry just refers to white powder . . . No, hang on, there’s a note down here which says they contained medical supplies. The two drums were put in the damaged cargo bay and the rest were loaded. We’d have sent a note of the accident to the shipper, the consignee and, if we knew it, the insurance company concerned.”

  “Who were the consignor and consignee?”

  Ormond flapped his hands, looked at his watch, then hurried out of the office. He returned with a second and very battered ledger which had been covered in rough brown paper. The first ledger gave him a reference number for the second one. “The manufacturing firm was the Harran Group (Medical Supplies), up near Birmingham, the consignor was the Dejai Trading Company in London, and the consignee was the Ministry of Health, Koffineba.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It’s the capital of Dejai: rather a lovely town I was told by a bloke who’d been there. Laid out by the British in nineteen ten when we thought we were there for the millennium.”

  Kerr asked how to spell Koffineba and wrote in his notebook. He looked up. “Is there much chance of finding out more about this particular cargo?”

  Ormond shook his head. “No chance at all as far as we’re concerned.”

  Kerr stood up. “Thanks a lot, then. I hope we won’t be bothering you again.”

  “No bother at all,” replied Ormond, with patent insincerity. Before Kerr had left the office, he’d called his secretary on the intercom and dialled a number on one of the telephones.

  After leaving the docks, Kerr crossed the road and had a cup of coffee and a doughnut in a sleazy café, after which he caught a bus to the station. Once in the general room, he telephoned directory of enquiries and asked for the number of the Harran Group, in Birmingham. A starchy sounding female said she must have the full address. He flashed his rank and was amused by her sour acknowledgment that perhaps she could, after all, find the number on the information he’d given.

  As in most large organisation, no one in Harran Group was at first ready to admit to anything and he was shunted from department to department, but in the end he spoke to a woman who was able to help. On the second of February a consignment of D.G.H. in drums had been dispatched, via British Rail, to the warehouses of the Dejai Trading Company in north-east London.

  “Can you tell me the quantity of drug in the consignment?” he asked.

  “There was about a ton. It was the largest amount we’ve sent out so far.”

  “What would that be worth? I’ve been told the stuff is pretty expensive?”

  “I don’t know off-hand, but I expect its value is close to a million pounds.”

  He whistled.

  “It does sound a lot, doesn’t it? But the research was very prolonged and manuf
acture is still very complicated and expensive. Of course, the Dejain government are buying this with the grants they’ve been given by our government, so it’s probably not costing them a penny: with three-quarters of their population suffering from one debilitating disease or another and few natural resources, they couldn’t begin to undertake any major health programme except for the grants.”

  “Then it’s nice to know our taxes are doing some good in at least one country and not buying more presidential jets!”

  “You needn’t worry about that as far as Dejai is concerned. The estimates give nine hundred thousand sufferers from bilharzia in the country, one third chronic cases. The expectation of life for a man is only thirty-seven and a half years. It’s unfortunate, but reports have indicated D.G.H. isn’t maintaining the breakthrough in eradicating bilharzia that we’d all thought it would, but I feel sure a little more research . . .”

  Kerr listened, interested by the obvious emotional involvement of the speaker. It was impossible not to realise that she saw herself as a small part of a very large crusade.

  She finished talking and he thanked her for all her help and rang off. Something under a million pounds’ worth of drugs, in drums, loaded aboard a ship after two drums had fallen and been badly damaged. Had Swaithe sent a sample of the D.G.H. from one of the broken drums up to Sydmonds? Quite obviously, Swaithe’s brother was the person who might be able to answer that.

  Kerr left and went down the corridor to the small room, opposite the D.I.’s, in which Miss Wagner worked. Here all was precise, orderly, clinical neatness. He asked Miss Wagner very politely if she would type an important letter for him. She said she was far too busy. She seldom did anything for anybody but Fusil. Indeed, she seemed a little afraid of everyone else, as if she expected an immediate assault on her virginity, so devotedly guarded for all these years.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Kerr reported to Fusil after lunch.

  “I’ve written the brother a letter, sir, and asked him to tell us why Swaithe was sending a sample of the drug from the broken drum up to Sydmonds.”