(2013) Collateral Damage

by Colin Smith

  Collateral Damage

  Colin Smith

  © Colin Smith 2013

  Colin Smith has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 1980 by Andre Deutsch Limited, as Cut-Out.

  This edition published 2013 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For Sylvia, Helena, and Gavin - with my love

  'Baader had the perfidy to shoot himself in the back of his head to make us look like murderers.'

  Werner Maihofer, West German Interior Minister, October, 1977.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  1. Delivery

  2. Preparation

  3. Dove

  4. Emma

  5. Rush-Hour

  6. A Theft

  7. Sale Houses

  8. Mew Clubland

  9. A Sensitive Matter

  10. A Country Call

  11. A Loose Net

  PART TWO

  1. A Meeting

  2. A Sad Tale

  3. Last Suspects

  4. Beirut

  5. Peace Talks

  6. Contact

  7. Training

  8. Before They've Finished Dying

  9. Fitchett and the Funny

  10. Just Fade Away

  11. Desdemona's Island

  12. No Shrines for a Terrorist

  13. A Hero Perishes

  Extract from Spies of Jerusalem by Colin Smith

  Prologue

  Siegfried Luntze, having told his enemies all they wanted to know, was being taken out to die. The man he had nicknamed 'Whistler' had informed him that he was being taken to another house. He badly wanted to believe this, but could not bring himself to. The very fact that Whistler had bothered to explain was ominous, a device to ensure he did not make a fuss. By now they must have checked out what he had told them and there was no further point in keeping him alive. Every professional knows that the best way to get rid of a body is to make it walk to its grave.

  Whistler was whistling that damn tune again, a sentimental soldiers' song from the forties.

  'Es geht alles voriiber, Es geht alles vorbei. Nach jedem Dezernber, Gibts wieder ein Mai.' (Everything passes, One day it'll be over. After every December, There's always a May.)

  Luntze was not ashamed of having talked. Everybody talked in the end. On the contrary, he thought he had done well, listening to his own screams with an almost clinical detachment. The beatings administered by the heavies who had first grabbed him in the street he had taken without a word. It was only when they started working on his feet with a pair of pliers that he began to give them the whole truth.

  How many were in his cell?

  Two.

  His comrade was called Hans Koller!'

  Yes.

  How did they receive orders from their organisation? Dead-letter-box or cut-out?

  Dead-letter-box.

  What was the keyword of the code to switch to cut-out?

  There wasn't one, he said. Orders for a change were delivered verbally. But in the end, he had told them what it was.

  He had some difficulty in walking. The pain had not exactly subsided, but had become a constant blaze, almost a numbness. Two of them were holding him up, one under each arm. Their gentleness surprised him. They had replaced the blindfold, gagged him, handcuffed his hands behind his back and were leading him barefoot out of the room. Since capture the blindfold had been removed only when he was being fed, and then his guard had always worn a balaclava helmet and ski-goggles. He had no doubt that this was intended to reassure, to implant the notion that if they were careful not to show their faces they might intend to release him.

  As far as he knew he had never seen Whistler, not even masked. He asked his questions in good German, perhaps a German's German, and to judge from his musical tastes, he was middle-aged. Luntze guessed that he had picked up the tune in one of the camps. He was fairly sure that his captors were Israelis, another reason for assuming that they would not hesitate to kill a German fighting for the other side.

  Sometimes he felt that the whistling was intended to put his nerves on edge. There had been several occasions over the last few days when he thought he had been sitting alone for what seemed like hours. Then, suddenly, a few soft bars would announce that Whistler had been there all the time, not saying a word. On other occasions he would start up when he was waiting for a reply - almost always the same song - as if it genuinely was a nervous habit.

  Another door and the fresh air hit him in the face. He took in as much as he could through the nose, savouring it. He was sure it was night-time; they would never risk murder in daylight. His feet touched gravel and he heard a car door being opened. As they bundled him into the back seat he tried to conquer fear for a moment by astral planing through the crowded Middle Eastern sky he had first studied in a training camp in the Lebanon.

  There was a metallic click. A pistol being cocked? He was pleased to be blindfolded, already deprived of one of his senses. Nor would they be able to see the terror he knew he was wearing like a mask.

  PART ONE

  1. Delivery

  Hans Koller was waiting for the cut-out to reach him.

  The German was on the nursery slopes of middle age, but was one of those blond men with sufficient hair and little enough belly to pass for twenty-five - especially when dark glasses hid the creases around the eyes. Normally he shunned dark glasses as theatrical; today he wanted to check out the other tables.

  It was still early spring, but the cafe was already crowded with the first of the season's tourists ogling the boulevard and grumbling about the price of their drinks. In another few months, thought Koller, it would become quite unbearable again: a great nodding sea of Herald Tribunes, blue rinses, plaid trousers secured by white plastic belts with matching shoes and loud, friendly voices demanding the way to Napoleon's Tomb. Then there were the Japanese storm battalions. He was watching a phalanx from the season's vanguard now as they captured a cafe across the road. Nobody sat until the flanks had been secured and every Nikon cocked and cleared for action.

  With the Germans, he found it depended on their age. His lot, the thirty- to forty-year olds, were mostly embourgeoised slobs forever bitching about being ripped off. The younger ones were just boring. Complacent, smug, materialistic ... some of them would be Nazis if they had the energy. And it occurred to him that he probably had more in common with Nazis, who at least believed in something, than with the lotus-eaters who believed in nothing ... ergo, also his father? Uncomfortable thought. Koller sometimes wondered if Standartenfuhrer Koller was entirely disapproving when he saw his son's police mug-shot in a newspaper. Perhaps it occurred to him that he too was a kind of soldier.

  The cut-out was a waiter. The man was working the last two rows, which was just as well because all the front tables along the edge of the pavement had been taken when Koller arrived. He wondered if the waiter had been clever enough to anticipate this. He didn't look very clever. He was a big man with an overfleshed face, black hair greased and combed straight back, and wearing a short white linen jacket too tight across his belly.

  Koller sat at a table at the end of a row glancing every now and then at a copy of Le Monde he had brought with him, waiting for the waiter to bring him the coffee he had ordered. He wished it was going to be good, light German coffee and not this black French shit. Good coffee was the only thing about Germany that he missed.

  For the second time that day he read an article about the arrest in Holland of various known left-wingers and liberals - two university lecturers, a journalist, a trade-union official, a moderate champion of the Moluccan cause - f
ollowing a particularly murderous terrorist bomb at a pro-NATO rally in a provincial town. There were the usual demands for the government to bring in more stringent anti-terrorist legislation and there was to be an emergency debate in parliament. Shock waves from the bomb seemed to be demolishing years of liberal tolerance. The opposition's feeble protests against the mounting backlash were overshadowed by their anxiety to be seen to be condemning the outrage. Koller knew that the arrested people would probably soon be released, no doubt with indignant stories of police brutality during interrogation, because he had a very good idea who was responsible for the bomb and it certainly wasn't them.

  Of course, he could not be certain. It was just a feeling. Two cells could be operating in the same city practically unaware of each other's existence. In a way he felt it was a pity that these people had been arrested. They were the sort of wet liberals who were very useful when it came to funds and safe-houses and false papers, and something like this tended to antagonize them. He pulled himself up. You're getting soft, he thought. If the price of the revolution is losing a few fence-sitting fellow travellers then it's a very cheap one. Christ! If it was as cheap as that there would be a lot more of them left. He thought of Siegfried floating in the Seine with a hole in the back of his head and his toe-nails missing. He lit a cigarette, cupping his hands around the match like a front-line soldier although there was no wind. He did not know it, but it was a habit he had picked up from watching his father.

  The waiter brought him his coffee, taking it off a tray full of beers and spirits ordered by his other customers. He put the cup down without a word and Koller hardly looked up from his newspaper. Only after the waiter had moved on did he take a sip, grimace, and then remove from beneath the cup the bill and from beneath that a small folded piece of paper which he put unread into his jacket pocket. After a few minutes he caught the waiter's eye and paid for the coffee. The waiter watched him carefully count out the exact amount from his loose change. He never left a tip, that was for the capitalists. A man should get a decent wage. Besides, the waiter was a fat slob.

  From the cafe near St-Germain-des-Pres Koller went to a flat in an expensive apartment block on the Quai d'Orsay. Here he sat at a low coffee-table in a living room cluttered with books and expensive prints, and read the note that had come with his coffee. Although the message consisted of no more than sixty words he read it several times. Eventually he set fire to the paper in a little copper ash-tray and beat the ashes into a fine powder with a pen. Then he telephoned Air France and asked about flights to London.

  2. Preparation

  This was the tricky bit, setting the clock. The woman was standing at the half-open door. Koller could feel her presence rather than see her. 'Go away,' he said without turning round. He heard the door shut, but didn't look up from the low bed at which he was kneeling like a child saying his prayers. All his concentration was focused on the items laid out on newspaper on the bedspread: a big brass double alarm clock; plastic explosive still wrapped in its brown greaseproof paper; a radio battery, detonator, wires and an ordinary clothes-peg.

  The clock he had bought that day at a Woolworth's in South London. 'This'll wake you up whatever you've been up to the night before,' said the teenage assistant, tottering about on platform shoes, all saucy looks, acne and eye make-up. Cockney shop-girls never ceased to amaze him. They acted like princesses, he thought, yet all they had to look forward to was kids and drudgery. Not like his curious friend. No kids, firm tits, and her very own urban guerrilla.

  She had not left the room, but merely closed the door behind her. 'Christ, I don't know how you've got the nerve,' she said. It made her feel good to be in the same room as the explosive, to share for a moment his danger.

  She was in her mid-twenties with shoulder-length auburn hair over the jungle-green soldier's shirt she wore with jeans. She used no make-up, called homosexuals 'gays' and liked her letters addressed 'Ms'. Despite careful camouflage her diction sometimes revealed an expensive education. Her father was a cabinet minister. She had no idea who or what the bomb was intended for. He never discussed a job with her before he did it. Knowing that something was going to happen was good enough.

  'If you won't go out please be quiet,' he said in his accented English. 'This is not a firework.' But in spite of his irritation he found her excitement pleasing.

  He assembled all the bits and pieces in a suitably anonymous black and chrome executive briefcase, paying particular attention to the position of the clothes-peg on the face of the clock. That was his safety catch: when it was removed the bomb was primed. He looked at the face of the clock again. The alarm was set for 6.05 p.m., giving the silly punctual bastard just enough time to open his car door, start the ignition and drive a couple of hundred yards before it went off. He was going to pay dearly for being a man of habit. He snapped the case shut and looked at his watch.

  'Einer fiir die Strasse?' she said. Her pigeon German, one of their jokes, had recently begun to grate on him. She was rolling a joint, sealing the cigarette paper with her tongue.

  'No,' he said, 'relaxed is not what I need to be. I'll have a coffee.'

  He made his own rules. One of them was killing on a clear head.

  'Such a clean-living boy,' she said.

  They walked out of the bedroom leaving the bomb he had just made on the bed. The next room was full of mirrors, low glass tables and bamboo furniture. The flat belonged to a television reporter, a foreign correspondent living abroad who had once, briefly, been her lover. It was decorated as a trophy room rather than a place to live in. When she first saw it she half expected labels under the exhibits. On the walls were opium pipes inlaid with silver and the bowl halfway down the stem; half a dozen types of shell cases; the rusty barrel and some of the stock of a shattered Kalashnikov; an Afghanjezaii; daggers, spears, bows and arrows; framed photographs of uniformed Asians, Africans, and Arabs confronting a single bush-shirted Caucasian armed only with a microphone and an expression of awful sincerity. The TV man had let her move in at a nominal rent while he was living abroad. If she had not met Koller she would probably not have accepted, but he was not one who liked slumming: in fact, she sometimes suspected that a Chelsea flat was her main attraction for him. Most of her contemporaries were still at the bedsitter stage: posters on the wall, red light-bulbs in the lamp near the leaky waterbed, and joss-sticks burning to cover the cooking smells. Either that or squatting in crumbling ruins where the cat's piss masked the damp smells.

  She liked the flat, but sometimes she felt guilty about it. It was a difficult place to untidy and the reporter had insisted that she retain the weekly cleaning lady.

  'Jesus, Ruth. It's like something out of a bloody Sunday colour supplement,' one of her friends from the tiny Trotskyist party she belonged to had declared, putting his ammunition boots on the chaise-longue and flicking his ash on a Kurdish rug. At the end of the evening he wanted to fuck her. Damn cheek!

  But she remained an enthusiastic member of the Pure Earth Republican People's Party - or PERPP, as they preferred to be called. For her it was the logical evolution of her parents' political progress. Mother, a German Jewish refugee who came to England as an adolescent with eyewitness tales of Nazis on the rampage. Father, the son of a don, had spent a few months with the Republican side in Spain before pleurisy probably saved him from a bullet. Both quit the Communist Party after Stalin kissed Hitler for a slice of Poland. After 1945 her father drifted further to the right with every cold-war crisis, trading youthful passions for responsibility, honours and possessions. He still called himself a socialist, a democratic socialist, and sang a throaty Red Flag once a year at the party conference. By joining PERPP Ruth felt she was somehow compensating for his betrayal.

  Not that her comrades would approve of Koller. Adventurism, they would call it: true revolution could come only from the masses. Mussolini had started out as a revolutionary socialist who believed in a violent elite and we all knew where that had ended didn't we luv? B
ut then all the party did was talk. Talk and produce newspapers which she admitted, in her more honest moments, were read mainly by party members and Special Branch.

  Koller, on the other hand, acted. He had crossed that line separating the doers from the talkers and could never go back. He didn't need to wear a combat jacket and jeans and put his feet up on somebody else's sofa to prove he was a revolutionary. She loved to watch his chunky, manicured hands make a bomb or load a pistol. Mind you, at times she wished he was not so damned neat. Look at him now: brown lace-up brogues; herring-bone trousers; Harris tweed jacket; striped shirt (from Turnbull and Asser, no doubt).

  She began to walk towards the kitchen to make his coffee.

  'Come here,' he said. He looked stern. She might have been a small child.

  She walked over and they embraced. They first kissed standing and then, still entwined, collapsed on to one of the sofas where he undid the buttons on her army shirt and gently stroked her breasts until he felt the nipples harden. Suddenly he pulled away. She sat up confused, smiling, slightly embarrassed, as if she had allowed some drunken stranger to fondle her at a party and was now beginning to sober up.

  'We'd better have the coffee,' he said. No sex before the job. That was another of his rules.

  'Swine,' she said, but with resignation.

  She got up, one hand among her buttons, the other searching her pockets for the joint she had rolled.

  In the kitchen Ruth ignored the jar of Nescafe she always used for herself and started fiddling with the percolator. Coffee was something else he was bloody particular about.

  3. Dove

  Just south of the Coventry turn-off it started to rain, and Stephen Dove observed the action of the wipers with the satisfaction often felt by an unmechanically-minded man when a piece of minor engineering works at his touch. He eased his foot off the accelerator, reduced the speed of his old red Cortina to sixty, and stuck resolutely to the centre lane of the southbound Ml. On his inside was a convoy of heavy lorries, the gaps between them causing cross-winds that obliged Dove to wrench the Cortina back on course every time he passed one. On his right, in the fast lane, newer and faster cars continued to break the 70 m.p.h. speed limit despite the weather which, according to his radio, had just stopped play in the first cricket of the season at Edgbaston. At times like this Dove was glad he could not afford a car in that league. Fast driving frightened him.