Days of the Dead

by David Monnery

  ‘Remember us?’ the older-looking one asked. He seemed more than a little the worse for drink.

  ‘No,’ she said coldly.

  ‘I’m Ramón,’ he said, sitting down beside her and stretching both arms along the back of the seat. ‘And this is my brother Paolo.’

  The younger man sat down on her other side, pulled out a packet of American cigarettes and offered her one.’

  ‘I don’t smoke,’ she said. ‘And if you don’t mind, I’d like to be alone.’

  Paolo actually started to get up, but thought better of the idea when he saw that his brother had no such intentions.

  ‘A beautiful woman should not be alone on a night like this,’ Ramón said sarcastically. ‘Why are you so unfriendly?’

  ‘I’m waiting for my boyfriend,’ she told him.

  ‘He is late?’

  ‘I was early.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s coming. Why don’t you come for a walk with us?’

  She gave him a scornful look. ‘Why would I want to do that?’

  ‘Because we can show you a good time. Go to a club maybe, or a party. Wherever we go it’ll be better than hanging out in a churchyard.’ He let his hand rest lightly on her shoulder. ‘How about it?’

  She brushed the hand away, and turned round to face him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Understand that? It’s really simple. N-o. No. I do not want to go anywhere with you. I do want you to leave me alone.’

  Ramón sighed. ‘This boyfriend must be a real superman. I think we have to stay and see someone like that, just so that we know how to improve ourselves. Don’t you think so, Paolo?’

  Having arrived on the other side of the wall in the middle of this conversation, Shepreth’s initial irritation soon turned to anger. The prospect of climbing back over and banging the two young men’s heads together was an appealing one, but he was quite sure Carmen could take care of herself, and there had to be more prudent courses of action open to him.

  He walked across to the wall which bordered the museum’s grounds. There had been no sign of armed guards on the street in front of it, and it was possible that the building’s alarm system was considered defence enough. In which case, he could use the grounds as an escape route.

  He was raising himself up to take a look across the wall when there was a rushing sound from the other side, and a slavering mouth full of very sharp teeth materialized not much more than a metre from his face. He dropped back to the ground, his heart suddenly thumping at about five times its usual rate, just as the dog began barking up a storm on the other side of the wall.

  In the distance a human voice was asking the dog what the trouble was.

  ‘Shit!’ Shepreth murmured to himself. The street had become his best chance.

  He hurried down the side of the Sánchez Construcción villa and stopped at the corner for a look. The dog was still barking next door, but there didn’t seem to be anyone out in front of the museum. Most of the street was out of sight from where he stood, and the chances of it being empty seemed somewhat remote. His watch told him the patrol would be passing in less than two minutes. The odds didn’t look too good, but they were only going to get worse.

  He ran for the wrought-iron gates, which seemed to offer the easiest climb, and concentrated on getting over them, not even looking up and down the street until he dropped to the pavement outside. About a hundred metres away a couple were walking towards him, but they seemed engrossed in each other. In the opposite direction a taxi had just pulled up outside the gates to the church grounds, but it was facing away. He was just congratulating himself on getting away with it when a shout came from behind him. Two armed guards had emerged from the museum and were walking towards him, sub-machine-guns at the ready.

  Hearing the dog bark, Carmen put two and two together. Shepreth must have realized he couldn’t rejoin her in the way he planned and sought another way out. She hoped he’d seen or heard the dog before crossing the other wall.

  If he had, what would he do? There was no back way out, so it would have to be the front. She stood up abruptly and walked away from the bench, hoping that the bastards wouldn’t follow her.

  They did of course.

  ‘If you don’t leave me alone, I’ll get a policeman,’ she half shouted over her shoulder.

  ‘We’re doing nothing,’ Ramón shouted back, but the footfalls seemed to die away slightly.

  She reached the gates and turned into the street just in time to see Shepreth halted by the guard’s shout.

  ‘David,’ she yelled, turning his head once more, and ran towards him with outstretched arms. As they embraced like long-lost lovers, she saw over his shoulder that the guards were still coming forward. She freed herself from the embrace, glanced quickly back down the street and strode towards the approaching guards. ‘See those two boys,’ she shouted angrily, pointing back at the hovering Ramón and Paolo. ‘They have been harassing me. I want them arrested.’

  ‘That is not our business, Señorita,’ the first man said.

  ‘It should be the business of every man to protect innocent women,’ she said haughtily. ‘Come, my darling,’ she said, taking Shepreth by the arm. ‘We will be late.’

  The following evening Docherty was lying on his hotel bed, Walkman on his chest, listening to soul singer O.V. Wright lament a wrong verdict by ‘the jury of lurve’. He had spent a reasonably relaxing weekend, walking and swimming by day, reading and sleeping by night. He had really wanted to talk to Isabel, but there was every chance that the call would be monitored, and Bazua’s reach certainly extended to Chile. Carmen had promised to ring his wife from Cartagena, so Isabel would know that he was all right, but he still missed the sound of her voice.

  A police officer had joined him at his table during breakfast that morning. He said that he was from the local station in Santa Isabel, and that he was obliged to ask Docherty some questions.

  Actually there was only one – what the hell was Docherty still doing on Providencia?

  ‘Taking a holiday,’ the Scot had told him. ‘I was hired to come here and talk to Angel Bazua, as I’m sure you know. And now that I’ve talked to him, I’m spending some of the money. You have a beautiful island here.’

  The man had departed happily enough, though whether Bazua would be satisfied was something else again.

  Lying there listening to O.V. Wright, he found it hard to believe in happy endings, but then who wanted to listen to the Osmonds?

  There was a tap on the door. Docherty swung himself off the bed and walked silently across to the door. ‘Who is it?’ he asked, taking care to keep behind the jamb.

  ‘It’s me,’ Shepreth said.

  Docherty opened the door.

  ‘I moved in down the corridor,’ the MI6 man told him. ‘Carmen’s there now.’

  Docherty followed the younger man to his room, which looked practically identical to his own. Carmen was standing with her back to the curtained window, looking happier than she had three days before.

  ‘Did you talk to Isabel?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. She’s fine, the children are fine. She sends her love. I told her more or less everything and…’ She hesitated.

  ‘And she sounded worried,’ Docherty suggested.

  ‘Yes, she did. But she didn’t say anything, just that you should be careful.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Docherty. There was no way round that one. ‘So what have you got?’ he asked the two of them.

  Shepreth produced the architect’s drawings with a flourish, and laid them out on the bed.

  ‘You didn’t have any trouble, then?’ Docherty asked as he examined the plans.

  Shepreth told him the story of the break-in, stressing the role Carmen’s quick thinking had played in their getting away with it, and Docherty saw the look that passed between them. If they weren’t lovers already, they soon would be.

  ‘These were worth the risk,’ he said shortly.

  ‘And Carmen may have got something from Victoria Marín,’
Shepreth said.

  She explained about the moon-filled window, half expecting to see an incredulous expression on Docherty’s face.

  ‘This room or that one,’ he said, finger jabbing at the plan. ‘There’s two obvious ways this could be done,’ he went on. ‘Assuming the SAS get the job, we could bring in a troop – that’s sixteen men. The Royal Navy could bring them within range, but there’s nowhere to put a helicopter down inside the compound, so if we want to catch Bazua by surprise – and for the sake of the women and the records I think we do – then they’d have to come in by boat. I don’t know how sophisticated Colombia’s defences are – not very, I expect – but I don’t think there’s much chance a Royal Navy boat would get past American surveillance. And since they can’t be told what we’re doing there’s a good chance they’ll alert the Colombians. And we don’t want their air force turning up.’

  ‘Maybe the Navy could come up with a cover story for the Americans,’ Shepreth suggested.

  ‘Maybe,’ Docherty said, without much conviction.

  ‘What’s the alternative?’ Carmen asked him.

  ‘More stealth, less men,’ Docherty said. ‘Assemble a four-man patrol here on the island and bring them in one by one. With surprise more or less guaranteed, I don’t think the five of us would have too much trouble.’

  ‘I have a feeling someone might point out you’re no longer on active service,’ Shepreth said, remembering Docherty’s record.

  ‘So I’m an on-site consultant,’ the Scot said.

  ‘And anyway there’ll be six of us,’ Shepreth said with a smile.

  ‘Seven,’ Carmen reminded him.

  Later that night Docherty lay awake in bed, trying to remember how many of The Magnificent Seven had survived. Had Horst Buchholz been one of the three who rode away, or had they already left him behind in the village? He had been one of the three, Docherty decided, which meant four had died. He could remember them all – Coburn’s knife dropping from his fingers, Robert Vaughn’s fingers scraping down the wall, the gold-happy one whose name no one ever remembered. But most of all he remembered the children putting flowers on Charles Bronson’s grave.

  He didn’t want Maria and Ricardo doing that, not until they were well into middle age.

  10

  The sun was barely over the horizon, the fields sparkling with dew in the early-morning light, as Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Greaves drove south from Hereford towards the Severn Bridge and the M4. There were shorter routes to London, but he had always loved this road through the Forest of Dean, and the meeting in Whitehall didn’t start until eleven.

  Of course, he could have saved himself the drive by arranging a flight to RAF Northolt, but in these days of military economy it was considered somewhat extravagant to use the RAF as a personal taxi service. And in any case who could think in a helicopter?

  Greaves was not exactly looking forward to the meeting, but there were butterflies of excitement in his stomach nevertheless. It was nearly a year now since he had succeeded Barney Davies as the Officer Commanding 22 SAS, and he had spent quite a lot of that time waiting for the chance to play his part in one of those special operations which punctuated the history – the legend, almost – of the Regiment. They didn’t happen very often, and when they did they were as likely to take place outside the public eye as in it.

  The subject of that day’s meeting would not be offered as grist for headlines, and that fact gave rise to a certain ambivalence in Greaves’s mind. He would have to ask his men to risk their lives in the awareness that they would be unacknowledged in success and quite possibly disowned in failure. Several such missions had been carried out in Barney Davies’s time, and Greaves knew that his predecessor’s pride in their success had been more than a little tinged with bitterness. Too many men had died unrecognized.

  Sergeant Jamie Docherty had been involved in several of those operations, including one of the most dramatic, the insertion of a four-man patrol into Bosnia. He was newly retired when the need arose, but had been reinstated for the duration of the mission.

  Greaves had read through Docherty’s file the previous evening and wondered. No other regiment in the British Army – probably no other regiment in the world – would have persevered with someone like Docherty when he went so comprehensively off the rails after his wife’s death. And just about any other regiment would have court-martialled him for wilful disregard of orders at some point in his career. Yet there seemed no doubt that he’d been a brilliant soldier, at least insofar as the SAS defined the breed. His record in action showed that he’d frequently been better than his orders.

  Greaves himself had seen precious little action since the capture of South Georgia and the reconquest of West Falkland. Then there had been training stints in a couple of African countries and a couple of mind-numbing tours in Northern Ireland. He shook his head, as if to dislodge the thought that soon he’d be sending more men into that murderously futile mess.

  But first the joys of Colombia, he told himself, as he passed the midpoint on the swaying Severn Bridge. The river below seemed choppier than usual, despite the clear blue sky overhead.

  His thoughts returned to the morning’s meeting, the exact purpose of which seemed far from clear. During their telephone conversation the previous day Sir Christopher Hanson had implied that it was both a rubber-stamping exercise and a ritual sharing of responsibility, but Greaves had learnt to take anything Intelligence said with about a ton of salt. He feared a concerted attempt to impose political restraints on his military freedom of manoeuvre, and knew that he would have to resist any such pre-emptive tying of his men’s hands.

  In his written submission to the Prime Minister he had offered two possible courses of action, both loosely based on the suggestions emanating from Providencia. Hanson’s man Shepreth was supposedly the source of these, but Greaves thought he could see Docherty’s fingerprints all over them. He was also pretty certain that the politicians would refuse to sanction the larger-scale plan – no matter how it was dressed up, the dispatch of a full SAS troop sounded too much like an invasion.

  But four men out of uniform could be inserted in secrecy, and once the job was done they could be passed off as mercenaries in the employ of a rival cartel. Admittedly there wasn’t much chance of weapon supply or bodily extraction without the Americans taking notice – it was surprising any sunlight still reached the ground with all the surveillance planes and satellites that littered the skies above the Caribbean – but risk-free options seemed remarkably thin on the ground.

  If the politicians asked for certainty he’d tell them there wasn’t any, but that he certainly wouldn’t bet against his men getting the job done as discreetly as was humanly possible.

  The Prime Minister was already seated at the head of the rectangular walnut table when Greaves entered the room. This was not the first meeting he had attended in Whitehall, but it was his first view of the famous Conference Room B, which turned out to be stunningly ordinary.

  There were six seats around the table. A man with thin, greying hair and piercing blue eyes sat facing the PM. Seeing Greaves, he got up and offered his hand, introducing himself as Christopher Hanson. There were two men on the other side of the table, one of whom Greaves knew, one he had frequently seen on Newsnight and Question Time. The former was Douglas Minchey, a junior minister at the Ministry of Defence, the latter Martin Clarke, who held an equivalent rank at the Foreign Office and was also rumoured to be a possible challenger for the Party leadership. They both nodded greetings, Minchey with a smile, Clarke with a frown that would have curdled milk.

  The Foreign Office would hate this, Greaves thought as he sat down. The chair next to him was apparently spare.

  The PM cleared his throat – nervously, it seemed to Greaves. ‘Sir Christopher, if you could bring us all up to speed…’

  Hanson obliged. Without once consulting his notes he told the story of MI6’s increasing interest in Angel Bazua’s twin career as drug smuggl
er and bankroller of Argentinian irredentism. He described the various and vain British attempts to interest the Americans in action against Bazua, and went through the events of the past few weeks – the accidental involvement of an ex-SAS man, his discovery of the Argentinian’s possession of certain Dirty War records and the possible explanation of American behaviour which that suggested, the decision to ask the SAS proper to consider operational options.

  The PM asked Greaves to outline what those were.

  He was about to do so when the Foreign Office minister intervened.

  ‘With respect, Prime Minister,’ Clarke began, ‘wouldn’t it make more sense to discuss the potential consequences of any such action before we get down to specifics?’

  ‘I think we’re all aware that our relations with both Colombia and Washington could be seriously affected,’ the PM said. ‘And once we’ve heard what is possible we should have a better idea of how to minimize the potential damage,’ he added dismissively, turning his attention back to the SAS CO.

  Greaves outlined the two options he had submitted, on impulse stressing the purely military advantages of the larger-scale assault. He was conscious that when it came to playing politics he was an amateur among seasoned pros, but he was hoping that giving the Foreign Office something to shoot down would make them more inclined to let the smaller insertion go through. Out of the corner of his eye he could see a smile on Hanson’s face, as if the MI6 man knew exactly what was going on.

  ‘Which do you recommend?’ the PM asked when he had finished. He still seemed nervous to Greaves.

  ‘If we send in the larger force we can be pretty certain of achieving our immediate objectives – the destruction of Bazua and his boats. But the element of surprise won’t be so great, there’ll be more casualties and it will be impossible to conceal the operation from the Americans. The second option relies more on the skills of a few men, but as long as we solve the weapons supply problem the operation will be effectively over before anyone else knows about it. And if by then we have the means to mollify the Americans, then the Colombians will find it hard to prove our involvement.’