Field of Fire

by Roderic Jeffries

  “Didn’t I read in the papers that President Kano is going up to a new factory of the Harran Group to open it?”

  Fusil nodded. “And if he’s not in the swindle, then obviously he could ask questions which could be embarrassing at home, to say the least, if any of this evidence leaks out. But when’s the substitution of the medicine made?”

  “In London. Harran Group send it down to the Dejai Trading Company, who ship it out to Dejai.”

  “I wonder . . .” Fusil slid off the desk. “I want a Whitaker’s.”

  Kerr left and went to the general room where there was a copy of the almanac. Welland was sitting behind his desk.

  “Here,” said Welland, “have you heard the latest one about the twenty-stone Irish Tom and the ten-stone Welsh bible-thumper? . . .”

  Kerr returned to Fusil’s room and handed over the copy of the almanac. Fusil flicked through the pages until he came to the description of the state of Dejai, listing its government, geography, finance, and trade. “The president is from the Fullinké tribe who mainly live in the north and are in the minority, all but one of the cabinet are from the Mallusu tribe in the middle and south and the power struggles have been continuous since independence. Suppose the president is entirely innocent. If he learns enough from Harran Group to put two and two together and get an idea of what’s going on, he’ll have the ammunition to break the cabinet and through them the Mallusu tribe. On the other hand, if he’s assassinated, the Mallusu will be able to bury the scandal in the following turmoil when they’re bound to make a bid for sole power.” Fusil picked up his pipe and smacked the bowl up and down on the palm of his hand. “That plane is flying down from Axton to land near Tawsey Head and pick the mob up after the assassination while we’re still worrying about road blocks back to London.” He stared at the time. “God knows if we can . . .” He was interrupted by the entrance of Kywood.

  “’Morning, Bob.” He looked briefly at Kerr and finally decided to nod. “Nice day for the visit. Well — bit of a difference from last week, when we were all sweating blood. Now we can just sit back and take things easy.”

  Fusil shook his head.

  Kywood chuckled affably. “I know you of old, you miserable old sod! Never stop worrying. You see bogeymen round every corner.”

  “No. Just one man with a double-barrelled four five zero rifle with telescopic sights.”

  “What’s that? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “It’s my guess that Jiri Pakac never really was for the chop. It’s President Kano they’re after.”

  “It’s what? Have you forgotten we found Dzur dead, accidentally shot . . .”

  “He was murdered in order to provide one final piece of evidence to convince us Pakac was the intended victim. Right now, we’ve less than an hour in which to try to prevent their getting Kano.”

  Beads of sweat gathered on Kywood’s brow and still he tried to argue because his mind fought against accepting the fact that the police had been hoodwinked into a position where they’d lowered so many of their defences. “But d’you have any proof? . . .”

  Fusil didn’t listen. He began to telephone.

  *

  As Detective Superintendent Dalby stood by the side of the mobile command post, the sunlight cut across his face and accentuated the lines of tired worry. “I hope to God you’re wrong.”

  “No more than I do, sir,” replied Fusil.

  “When are the extra men from county arriving?”

  “They’re promised in a quarter of an hour.”

  Dalby spoke flatly. “Too late to be of any effective use.”

  “But we had to do something.”

  “Of course.”

  They became silent as each tried desperately to work out how better to deploy their forces now available — an impossible task, since three times as many men could not have searched all the buildings, the manholes, the dozens of danger points, in less than an hour. In each of their minds was the picture of a man with a heavy rifle taking aim, completely undisturbed because the police had been led right up the garden path.

  The sergeant looked out of the command truck. “County H.Q., sir, report a second contingent of twenty-five men on their way. The first one will be arriving early, in about five minutes.”

  “Thanks,” said Fusil. Braddon would be waiting in Fulbright Square to detail the men on their search. Perhaps luck would finally swing their way and by chance they’d find the assassination point early on. Perhaps . . .

  “Bit of a panic going on at county, sir, quite apart from ours,” went on the sergeant.

  Fusil made no answer: indeed, he did not consciously hear the other.

  “A patrol car’s vanished. Got called out to a reported fight at an old quarry and that’s the last anyone’s heard of it.” When the D.I. still said nothing, the sergeant ill-temperedly returned inside.

  Fusil put his unlit pipe in his mouth and chewed down on the stem. Why? he thought with angry futility. Why hadn’t he seen the deeper meaning of Swaithe’s death in time? Why had it taken right up to the very last moment for the significance to become apparent of the aircraft up at Axton? Why hadn’t the letter from the Dejain Ministry of Health arrived twenty-four hours earlier? Why hadn’t Kerr mentioned before that the field trials of D.G.H. were proving relatively unsuccessful. Why . . . He sighed. What was more useless than to keep on asking the sort of question? Apparently illogically, his mind returned to what the sergeant had said. The words irritated him. Patrol cars couldn’t vanish. Their radio sets might break down, but then the crew could telephone through to H.Q. and the observer always signed off before leaving the car . . . Or, he wondered, had the crew been disabled and the car stolen because today President Kano was to be assassinated?

  His mind began to flood with queries and surmises. Because the stolen .450 rifle was still missing, he’d assumed like everyone else that this was to be the murder weapon. But in this case nothing had been so straightforward. Suppose the man leading the mob was clever enough even though believing the police had been lost a long time before to make allowances for the one chance in a thousand that they would stumble on the truth? Then if the .450 rifle remained missing, wouldn’t they believe that that was to be the murder weapon, fired from a building? And news of a missing police car wouldn’t ring any particular alarm bells and the presence of an extra patrol car would go unnoticed . . .

  He whirled round and spoke to Dalby. Dalby listened in silence, then rapped out: “Is anyone immediately available who knows all the crews of all the patrol cars now on duty here?”

  Fusil shook his head. “No one, because we’ve brought in five extra from outside the area.”

  Dalby called out to the sergeant. “Top priority. What’s the number of the missing patrol car?” He shrugged his shoulders, turned, and spoke quietly to Fusil. “If they’re as clever as we’re crediting them with being, they’ll change the number for another patrol car.”

  Yet they daren’t miss out on anything in these last and desperate moments. Fusil imagined himself in a stolen patrol car, wearing uniform, driving in for the kill. What could be easier? There were ten genuine patrol cars in the immediate area, two of which would be bringing up the rear of the procession. If a third one drove up the route, the crew would have to be questioned before anyone could know whether they were genuine. If they weren’t and were stopped, the villains would gun down the police, take off, drive up alongside the carriage and kill the Dejain president, and then drive on and away in the inevitable panic. Within minutes they’d be airborne. How to distinguish between villains dressed as coppers and genuine coppers without risking the lives of those who questioned the crew of the patrol car?

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Foley drove the police Volvo they’d stolen from near Endbridge and Joyce sat next to him. Thornton and Napier were in the back. Foley’s and Thornton’s uniforms, taken from the men in the patrol car, fitted reasonably well: Joyce’s hardly fitted even where it touched: N
apier was dressed as a blonde woman police constable and looked rather voluptuously attractive.

  As they turned into Peters Road there was a message from county H.Q. to tell a second patrol car to go to Endbridge Quarry to assist in the search for the missing patrol car. Halfway along Peters Road, the B.B.C. commentator — Napier had a transistor set by his side — said that the Dahomian frigate was all fast and President Kano would be disembarking in one minute. Napier ran the fingers of his right hand through the blond locks of the wig he was wearing with a gesture wholly feminine. He tried to hide from himself the nervous tension he felt, looked at the others and was satisfied that each was experiencing greater tension than he. He wondered how closely Alec Thornton would keep his nerve? Would he shoot as accurately as at practice? No real matter if nervousness deflected his aim a little. The lack of any choke to the barrels of the shotgun gave a ten-inch spread of shot at the distance there would be between the car and the coach and it needed only one pellet to reach the bloodstream. He wondered how much agony the president would suffer before he died.

  They reached Chambers Crescent which ran parallel with High Street. Halfway along, a police man on point duty stopped the cross traffic and waved them through. It was an eerie experience to be only minutes away from committing murder, yet to be helped along by the police.

  “Guns,” ordered Napier. In addition to Thornton’s gun, Joyce and he each had sawn-off automatic five-shot twelve-bores. They picked them up from the floor and held them ready in their laps. Nobody was going to stop them. Thornton, sitting on the left of the car, broke his twelve-bore and checked it yet again it was loaded with the curare-treated cartridges.

  Joyce put a stick of chewing-gum in his mouth and chewed faster than usual as Foley turned left. Ahead was High Street, with a wooden barrier guarded by a uniformed policeman. Foley flashed the car’s headlights and the policeman moved the barrier aside sufficiently for them to drive past. The thin crowd, who had watched the procession at that point, were beginning to disperse and they swarmed across the road. Foley sounded the horn in short peeps and the constable at the barrier shouted at the people: reluctantly, they parted to allow the Volvo through.

  Over the transistor radio, the commentator said that the procession was now almost at the historic South Gate, all that was left of the six gates in the city walls which dated from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Napier checked the time. “You’ve got to make up thirty seconds, Tim.”

  “Easy,” replied Foley, as he accelerated smoothly into High Street.

  *

  The fire engine, two-toned siren wailing, drove down High Street and met the oncoming procession. The police motor-cyclists, using their strongest language, since there was no chance of anyone in the procession hearing them, tried to wave the fire-engine to a stop, then cursed again when they had to draw over. Local dignitaries in the following cars stared at the fire-engine with resentment, wondering how its driver had dared to upset their moment of importance. The off-side police car bringing up the end of the procession had to brake hard and swerve across the road.

  Fusil, driving his battered old Vauxhall in from a side road, flashed his lights to stop the fire-engine. A Ford, with four men from Special Branch, squealed to a halt. Fusil jumped out and began to shout to the men on the fire-engine, then saw the approaching police Volvo. He checked the number and it was not the number of the stolen police car. The Volvo flashed its lights and as it slowed down its indicator flashed to show it was coming round the side of the fire-engine. Fusil saw the woman police constable and was half convinced this was a genuine car, yet still gave the signal. The crew of the fire-engine aimed the nozzle and a jet of foam arced across to cover the windscreen of the Volvo, which swerved. The foam was sprayed over the left-side windows, then over the windscreen again and the Volvo slammed into a lamp-post.

  The four Special Branch men, guns at the ready, took up position, gaining what cover they could from the cars and the fire-engine. Constables on crowd control tried desperately to move the gawping people out of danger.

  Fusil ran round as the Volvo backed violently, slamming into the off-side wing of the fire-engine, which was still pouring out foam. He had a ball of putty in his right hand and he jammed this over and up the exhaust pipe of the Volvo, then ran back, foam streaking him. The Volvo revved, shot forward and missed the lamp-post, but mounted the pavement and went into the front of a dingy office. Glass showered down. The engine died away. The starter churned, but the engine refused to fire.

  Time passed and the car virtually disappeared under the foam. Then the rear near-side door broke through the foam as it opened and a sawn-off automatic shotgun was thrown out. This was followed by a second one and a side-by-side with full-length barrels.

  “Come out with your hands up,” shouted Fusil.

  Napier, hands high, was the first out of the car. With his blonde locks all streaked with foam, he looked like Aphrodite being born of the sea.

  *

  Kywood spoke with a deep satisfaction as he stood by the side of the steps of the mobile command truck. “I feel we have considerable cause to congratulate ourselves having — thanks to quick thinking and acting — defeated a most ingenious assassination attempt.”

  Dalby lit a cigarette: Fusil tried to wipe the last oily traces of putty from his hands.

  “As I have always told those who’ve served under me,” continued Kywood, “never be content with appearances. Suppose I’d been content to accept the deaths of Swaithe and Sydmonds as mere accidents, ignored the real meaning of the death of Josef Dzur . . .”

  There was a gleam of sympathy in Dalby’s eyes as he looked briefly at Fusil.

  *

  Helen snuggled up against Kerr as they sat on the settee whose springs were rapidly becoming very noisy indeed. “So it’s really all because of you?”

  “That’s right,” he agreed immodestly.

  “But for you, President Kano would have been shot with those terrible poisoned bullets?”

  “Right again.”

  “Mr. Fusil must be very grateful to you. What’s he said?”

  “Nothing much except to blast me back at the station when he caught me having a quick bun and a cup of char down in the canteen.”

  “You — you must be joking!”

  “I never joke about him.” He put his arm round her.

  “But the terrible ingratitude.”

  “He thinks gratitude is an obscene word.” He nuzzled her neck and his right hand began to wander. “To hell with him, let’s concentrate on ourselves.”

  A little later, she giggled. “He’s dead right about one thing, though. You are always hungry.”

  *

  THE END

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