At Close Quarters

by Gerald Seymour

  One of the players had tried to kick the ball that wallowed in ankle deep mud, missed and fell on his back, and left the ball to be slotted into the net.

  "That's my son and heir. God, he's pathetic, his mother's boy . . . FCO wouldn't see they've much choice but to go along with Ivan's version."

  "So I've been brought to this absurd game to be given a lecture in Anglo-Soviet relations."

  "You're being asked to help. Jane Canning was a member of the Service, and we will not take her death lying down."

  Holt saw that the player who had given away the goal had been dismissed to the wing. The young man was pencil thin and pale. He was beginning to feel sympathy for the kid, particularly if his father was a pompous ass called Percy Martins.

  "What does that mean in practice - not taking it lying down?"

  "What it says. Holt, you were in the Crimea, in the centre of the Crimea is Simferopol. In Simferopol is a military academy which takes groups of foreign cadets for periods of up to . . . "

  "Where is this getting us?"

  "Listen, will you? . . . Among the foreign cadets are always Syrian-sponsored Palestinians. The shooting was at lunch time; that same Saturday evening a Syrian Air Force transporter put down at Simferopol and then flew on to Damascus . . . "

  "How do you know that?"

  "Listen . . . and that's none of your business. It is quite credible that a Palestinian, at least an Arab, shot the ambassador and Miss Canning and was flown back to the Middle East the same evening. It is even credible that the Soviets knew nothing of the plan."

  "Why are you telling me this?"

  "We need your help in identifying the man who killed Armitage and a member of our Service, your girl."

  "And then?"

  "That's none of your business either."

  "I'd want him killed."

  "So tell me what he looked like, everything."

  Desultory cheers, H'ray, H'ray, H'ray; the game was finished. Martins's son tramped off the field. He didn't so much as look at his father. Martins made an attempt to greet him, but the young man kept walking. Holt thought Martins too proud to chase after him. And then it was too late. The two teams disappeared into the pavilion. Martins and young Holt paced the touchline.

  They were still there after the groundsman had come out to unhook the goal netting and to gather up the flag posts. They were still there when the two buses with the chemists from York and the lawyers from London drove away from the pavilion. Holt poured out every detail from his memory on the man who had held the Kalashnikov assault rifle. The way he moved, height, weight, age, the clothes, the wig, the shape of the eyes, movement, features. Again and again, the crow's foot scar. Still talking when it was too dark for Holt to see Martins's face beside him.

  Finally they walked back to the car.

  "You never even spoke to your son."

  "Watched him play, didn't I? That's what I promised his mother - how close would you have to be to him to see the scar?"

  "Well, I was ten paces and could see it as clearly as I described it to you. I mean, you wouldn't miss it if you met him. You'll go after him?"

  "She was one of ours."

  Martins dropped Holt off at Paddington station, thanked him again and said he'd be in touch in a day or so. Then he crossed London and the Thames and parked his car in the basement at Century House. It was not unusual for him to be returning to his office as the commuters were heading for home. Martins lived in a torpid cul-de-sac in Putney, but his home was the seventh floor of Century. No need for him to ring his wife and tell her that he would be back late. She took it for granted that he would work eleven or twelve hours six days a week and that he would fish on the seventh.

  He had been 27 years in the Service. He had served in Amman and Cyprus and Tel Aviv. He was a graduate, years before the fighting ripped the city apart, of the American University of Beirut.

  The debrief had taken days to reach him. It bore a string of FCO staff's initials and in Century it had come by way of the Soviet Desk. The seventh floor was Middle East. Martins was the Middle East Desk's third in the chain. The head of the Desk was twelve years his junior, his immediate superior was 14 years younger.

  Martins would climb no higher. Sometimes it rankled, most times in fact. His solace was his work.

  On his desk was the debrief and transcripts of messages sent from an Antonov en route to Damascus. These had been intercepted by the Dhekelia listening post in Cyprus and deciphered at the Government Communications HQ in Cheltenham. It was indeed none of young Holt's business that the messages sent from the Antonov within minutes of its leaving Soviet airspace were in the code systems of Syrian Air Force Intelligence and not those of the regular Air Force.

  For the next two hours he wrote down in neat longhand everything that Holt had told him. By the time he had completed seven foolscap sheets he believed he could build a picture of a face, a working likeness of a man. He was satisfied that he knew exactly where the crow's foot scar should be placed.

  Later, at a time when the train carrying Holt was west of Taunton, Inter City 125 and hammering, Percy Martins took the lift two floors up the 19-storey building to a small cubby-hole of a room where a technician had been whiling away the hours making a balsa wood 1:50-scale replica of a vintage Churchill tank. It would be a late night. The technician would work with Martins to make a likeness of the face of an assassin.

  The following evening the actual size portrait and the four typed sheets of briefing were carried in a large buff envelope in the nearly empty briefcase of a government messenger en route to Tel Aviv. For the duration of the flight, a little over four hours, the briefcase was attached to the wrist of the messenger by a length of fine steel chain. It would have been impossible for the messenger to eat the airline meal without his chain being noticed so he went without food.

  At Tel Aviv the messenger was met by the Service's station officer. A docket was signed. The papers were exchanged. The messenger flew back on the return flight after killing four hours in the transit lounge, and twenty minutes in the restaurant.

  Before dawn a light burned in the upper room at the rear of the British embassy on Hayarkon. This upper room had no view of the stretching Mediterranean sea.

  The walls of the room were of reinforced concrete, the windows were of strengthened glass. The room was reached by an outer corridor in which had been placed a gate of heavy steel vertical bars. Behind the locked door of the room, the station officer examined the face that had been built for him, and read Martins's brief.

  The killer of Sir Sylvester Armitage and of Jane Canning was believed to be Arab, most probably Palestinian. The distinguishing feature of the Arab was a crow's foot scar of approximately one inch in diameter on the upper left cheek. The station officer smiled at what he called Martins's fingerprints all over the brief, his unlovely grammar, but the substance of it was good.

  Near the bottom of the third page was the text of the message - underlined in red, typical Martins touch -

  from the Antonov transporter after it had entered Turkish airspace.

  " The target is taken."

  It was left to the discretion of the station officer as to whether he went for help to the Mossad, Israel's external Intelligence gathering organisation, or the Shin Bet, the state's internal counter subversion and counter terrorism apparatus, or to Military Intelligence. Since the trial of Nezar Hindawi and the severing by Britain of diplomatic relations with Syria, co-operation between London and Tel Aviv was unprecedentedly close. He had no doubt that he would get the help Martins requested.

  As the low-level sunbeams rose above the squat, dun-coloured apartment blocks of Tel Aviv, the station officer dialled the private telephone line of the man whose friendship he valued most in Military Intelligence. He liked the hours they worked. He locked his room behind him, and with the photofit in his bag he drove to the Ministry of Defence on Kaplan.

  As the crow flies, and nothing larger than a crow can make the flight
without plucking up a barrage of ground-to-air missiles, it is 125 miles from Tel Aviv to Damascus. The principal cities of the old enemies are adjacent in the currency of modern warfare. Behind the frontier that divides them, Syria and Israel have massed divisions of armour and mechanised infantry, regiments of artillery, squadrons of interceptor aircraft. The two client states scowl at each other from the cover of curtains of state-of-the-art United States and Soviet equipment. Two great coiled armies awaiting the order to commence the blood-letting, poised to exploit the moment of maximum advantage.

  In the waiting time, as the troops idle away the hours in their fox holes and base camps, the tanks are kept armed and fuelled, stacks of ammunition lie beside the heavy howitzers, the aircraft are loaded with their missiles and cannon shells and cluster bombs.

  They wait, two nations obsessed with the need for one gigantic heave to ultimate victory.

  For the Israelis the waiting is harder. They are the smaller nation and they are crippled by the cost of the feud.

  For the. Syrians the waiting is easier. They have a surrogate force obedient to their discipline. They have the Palestinians of the Salvation Front. The Palestinians from their bases in Lebanon or from the camps around Damascus can be organised to strike at Israel, to harass Israel, to wound Israel. And the Palestinians are expendable.

  It was a dry, dust-laden morning. It was a morning when the flies with persistence crawled at the eyes and into the nostrils of the men who paraded in the dirt yard of the Yarmouq camp. The sun climbed and shortened the shadows, and the stink of the shallow latrine pits lay across the camp.

  The recruits had been standing on parade in the growing heat for a little more than an hour because the guests from Damascus were late and there was no explanation for the delay, and no one dared to stand the men down. They had come from the refugee centres in West Beirut, from Sidon and Tyre, and from camps in Jordan and South Yemen. They were aged between 17

  and 19. They had joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, because they believed that that organisation would give them the greatest chance to hurt the Zionist state. Some wore uniforms and boots that were Syrian army surplus, some wore jeans and T-shirts and pullovers. Some had already shaved their heads, some wore their hair to their shoulders. All held their unloaded rifles as if it were second nature to them.

  They were children suckled on conflict.

  The commander was at the gate, fretting with his watch.

  Abu Hamid stood in front of the squad of eighty recruits. His uniform fitted him well. He wore the tunic and top, camouflaged in pink and green and yellow, of a Syrian commando. He carried, loosely over the crook of his arm, a Kalashnikov assault rifle. Occasionally he barked an order at the recruits, ordered them to straighten up. He felt a new degree of authority. No one at the camp other than the commander knew his part in what had happened in Yalta, but there were other signs of the favour that had fallen into the path of Abu Hamid.

  Two days later than the others who had flown back from the Soviet Union, Abu Hamid had reached Yarmouq and when he had rejoined his colleagues he had been driven to the camp in a Mercedes Benz car by a chauffeur who wore Air Force uniform. Three times since then he had been off camp, and back late in the evening with the smell of imported whisky on his breath, and his girl had been allowed to the camp, and he had been promoted, which was why he now stood in front of the recruits.

  The cars, when they arrived, billowed a dust storm.

  Abu Hamid yelled for his men to stand still, he aped the instructors at Simferopol. He saw the commander fawning a greeting to an officer who wore the insignia of a brigadier general.

  The breath came in a sharp gasp from Abu Hamid's throat. He thought that every recruit behind him gawped at the officer who now climbed from the official car that had followed that of the brigadier general into the camp. The officer strode forward. He carried his cap in his left hand.

  The officer's walk was normal. His torso was ordinary. He had no fingers on his right hand, a stump at the knuckle. It was his head that captured attention.

  There was nothing sharp in the definition of his features.

  The skin across his cheeks and his nose and his upper lip and his chin seemed fragile and tightly drawn, the opaque skin of a butterfly's or a moth's wings. The skin had a lifeless quality, dead skin that had somehow been reprocessed for further use, and stretched over the bones of the face and the muscles by a human hand and not by nature. The nose of the officer seemed a squashed bauble, and his mouth was a parched slit. The earlobes were gone. The eyebrows were gone. What hair there was seemed to have been planted behind a line drawn vertically down from the scalp's crown to the deformed ears. The hair was bleached pale.

  A soft, small voice. A voice that he recognised. A voice with the lilt of a persuasive song.

  "Good morning to you, Hamid."

  He swallowed hard. "Good morning, Major Said Hazan."

  He stared blatantly into the broken face. He saw the cracked, amused smile that rose in the expanse of skin.

  He saw the medal ribbons on the chest of the uniform tunic.

  ' Major Said Hazan waved Abu Hamid forward. The commander was ignored as the major introduced Abu Hamid to the brigadier general. The ranking officer knew what Abu Hamid had achieved, it was there in his eyes for Abu Hamid to see, a shared secret.

  Abu Hamid escorted the brigadier general and Major Said Hazan along the four rows of recruits. Only one cloud in Abu Hamid's mind that morning. Of course, he had expected that military security would check all the weapons issued to the recruits to ascertain that no live rounds would be carried on parade.

  He had not expected that his own AK-47 would be scrutinised, that he would have to clear the breach and show that his magazine was empty. One small cloud . . .

  After the inspection the brigadier general called for the recruits to come close to him.

  " . . . In today's world no man can be neutral. A man is either with the oppressed or he is with the oppressors. We have to fight to our last breath. It is better to die with honour than to live with humiliation . . . "

  When he was cheered, when the fists of the recruits were aloft, the brigadier general smiled his satisfaction.

  Abu Hamid clapped his hands, waved three of the recruits towards the administration building.

  His remaining recruits formed a circle, facing inwards. A photographer edged forward, stretching on tiptoe to see into the circle. A European photographer.

  Abu Hamid saw the brigadier general gesture to the photographer to push harder. A dozen live chickens were brought to the circle, thrust into the ring. Abu Hamid shouted, "Death to all enemies of the Palestinian Revolution."

  The circle closed. The chickens were caught, torn apart, wing from breast, leg from body, head from neck.

  Hands groping into a bedlam of movement. The raw meat of the chickens, the warm flesh of the chickens was eaten, the blood drunk. Young faces frothing pink meat, spewing red blood.

  It was a tradition of the Popular Front, designed as the first measure in the breaking down of the human inhibition against killing. For the first ritual a live chicken sufficed to play the part of an enemy of the revolution.

  The photographer was on assignment from a news magazine in the German Democratic Republic. He took a roll of film on each of two cameras. Among his images was the man who wore a khaffiyeh headdress across his face, and who chewed at a chicken wing.

  The brigadier general congratulated Abu Hamid on the dedication of his recruits, and Major Said Hazan clasped his shoulder in farewell. Abu Hamid was bathed in pleasure.

  The Prime Minister's cars swept into Downing Street.

  There were a few older men and women on the head of government's staff who could remember when a prime minister travelled with only a single detective and the chauffeur for company.

  But over the wreckage of a seaside hotel from which a Cabinet had been pulled by firemen or dragged by police minders, a spokesman of Irish
liberation had declaimed, "You have to be lucky every time, we have to be lucky once".

  The Prime Minister detested the paraphernalia of the bodyguards, and the closed circuit cameras, and the alarm systems in Downing Street.

  The Director General, who waited in the outer office, knew well the Prime Minister's impatience with security.

  He saw the Prime Minister, hemmed in by Branch men, in the brief moment between the car and the doorway as he gazed down from the window above the street. The flash of the face that was reddened from the sunshine of the Asian tour and the jetlag. The Director General had the automatic right of access. He reported directly to the Prime Minister.

  "It was a pretty dreadful funeral," the Prime Minister said, and shrugged off an overcoat. "Lady Armitage was first class, could have been welcoming us to a cocktail party, but there was a granddaughter there who cried her eyes out, noisily, rather spoiled things. What a thing to get back to, fourteen hours in the air and straight to church..."

  The Director General knew the form. He allowed the talking to go on. Neither of the previous Prime Ministers he had served had exactly rushed to allow him to throw into the fray whatever hand grenade he was waiting to communicate.

  " . . . Do you know the Soviet ambassador read the second lesson, and read it pretty well. I thought that was a very spirited gesture . . . "

  "He was badly overdue a spirited gesture, Prime Minister," the Director General murmured.

  "I don't follow you."

  "The deaths of Sylvester Armitage and Miss Canning are a considerable embarrassment to the Soviets. The killings were an act of political terrorism," the Director General said flatly.

  "My brief from FCO said quite clearly that our diplomats were shot down by a common criminal."

  "Which is regrettably untrue."

  "Meaning what?"

  "Meaning that the Soviet Union lied. Prime Minister, we are still looking for the last piece of evidence, but our belief is that the assassinations were the work of a Palestinian terrorist who was on a course in a military academy in the Crimea. We believe he flew out of the Soviet Union on the same day as the killings."