Colonel Butler's Wolf

by Anthony Price

  “Taking a bit of a risk, aren’t you—sending Dan up there on his own? I mean, if that Russian of yours is really going to show up?”

  “Maybe.”

  That was what Richardson had thought too—the doubt had been written clearly on his face, although he had held his tongue then and was still holding it. And that was another point to young Richardson, proof not only of self-control but also of that indefinable instinct that told him the game had got ahead of him and the time to argue was past.

  He caught himself staring at Richardson, who seemed to read his thoughts with embarrassing ease.

  “It’s no good trying to draw him, Mike.” Richardson grinned and shook his head at Klobucki. “We’re just the ruddy cannon-fodder—ours not to reason why!”

  Klobucki’s expression twisted wryly. “Don’t quote Tennyson at me, Limey. This—“ he gestured theatrically “—this isn’t a Tennyson set-up. It’s pure Thomas Babington Macaulay—

  Now who will stand on either hand

  And keep the bridge with me?

  If you’re going to quote at me you gotta get the right quotation.”

  Richardson chuckled. “Phooey ! It’s all the same, anyway— fearful odds and the rest of it. It’ll all be over soon, anyway, so don’t you fret.”

  “Oh, sure ! It’s okay for you,” Klobucki said bitterly. “You aren’t goin to kiss your liberal reputation goodbye when Teny turns up. But I am, and I’d sure as hell like to know what I’m doing it for.” He eyed Butler doubtfully. “Is this really what old man Hobson’s been warning us about—and what Dan’s got so steamed up about?”

  Butler regarded him curiously. Sharp—they were all too damned sharp for mere boys. They probed and questioned more than he had ever dreamed of doing at their age, accepting nothing but their own skepticism.

  “What makes you think it isn’t?”

  The American shrugged. “I don’t really know. It isn’t that I didn’t think there was going to be some sort of trouble—not with the way Dan’s been prophesying doom. But I kind of thought the Russians didn’t go in for this James Bond stuff in real life—guys with guns in the rocks up there, that sort of thing.”

  “We could be deceiving you, eh?”

  “The thought did cross my mind.” Klobucki regarded Butler candidly. “The trouble is I don’t really think you are, though. I guess I could be wrong there—but maybe you’re wrong instead. That’s the other possibility.”

  Butler felt another twinge of admiration: sharp again. Without knowing why, the boy had got close to the heart of the matter. And there was something of a debt here, too, owing to this young foreigner, of all people.

  “Aye,” he nodded soberly. “In a way you’re quite right about the deceit. But it isn’t our deceit, you know.”

  “I don’t get you,” Klobucki said, frowning. “You mean this isn’t for real? No bullets for—what’s his name—the Portuguese guy Negreiros?”

  “Oh, they’ll be real enough. That is, if your friends meet General Negreiros down there at Ortolanacum, they’ll be real enough then.”

  “Hell—now you’ve really lost me, sir.”

  “What I mean, young man, is that the Russians are not really concerned with the general—and certainly not with your fire-eating friends.”

  Klobucki’s face screwed up in puzzlement. “Well, sir, they’ve sure got a funny way of not being concerned. Who the heck are they concerned with?”

  “Why, with us, of course. What you call the fuzz. And with themselves—with themselves most of all.”

  Butler felt the words swell up in his throat as the American stared at him, bewildered. For once he felt he wanted to talk—

  I could tell you a tale, boy!

  A tale of two operations—three now—and how they all failed. Maybe four if we let those young idiots through now—

  Audley looked for Russians under your bed, but he didn’t find any. Because there weren’t any, that’s why.

  But that poor devil Zoshchenko tried to demobilise himself out of his own operation because he was in love with Polly Epton—and in love with being Neil Haig Smith too.

  And when he cracked, then the KGB had to cover up for him, so they tried to give Audley just what he was looking for.

  Tried and failed.

  All for nothing, boy: an old man’s nightmare and a young man’s dream of freedom are about to coalesce here in Boghole Gap, and come to nothing—

  “They’re comin’!” Arthur came stumbling down the track beside the Wall, stabbing northwards with his finger. Butler looked across the causeway. They were coming.

  “Not much of a demo there if you ask me,” murmured Richardson contemptuously. “There can’t be more than a couple of dozen, if that.”

  It was true enough. In the confined space of the common room and the dining room of Castleshields House there had seemed enough of them, but in this wide open wasteland they were lost: a pathetic straggle of innocents in a cold and barren landscape.

  “I make it twenty-five to be exact,” said Klobucki. “With Dan and me on this side that means there were only seven who didn’t succumb to Terry’s eloquence. He didn’t do so badly.”

  “Ah, but half of ‘em are only coming for kicks. It’s the hard-core ones we’ve got to worry about. We’ll soon sort the sheep from the goats, mark my words, Mike old lad. Besides, isn’t Terry supposed to be non-violent?”

  “So he darn well is.” The mid-western accent thickened as irritation rose to its surface. “But if you think he hasn’t got any guts—he’s got a whole heap of guts, Terry has.”

  Richardson shrugged. “So long as they’re non-violent guts—“

  “That’s enough of that,” Butler snapped angrily.

  He had sensed the natural antipathy which lay between the American and the Englishman—between the Transatlantic Slav and the Anglicised Latin—but this was no time to let them indulge it. Not when he needed them both, Richardson because he was trained for trouble and Klobucki because his very presence on this side of the ditch would confuse the demonstrators.

  “It sure doesn’t mean he won’t try to get past if we try to stop him.” Klobucki spoke to Butler, ignoring Richardson. “Saying ‘Stop’ to Terry just puts him on his mettle. He’ll come on, he’ll come on—you can be damn sure about that.”

  Butler ran his hand over the stubble on his head, staring at the American. He could feel the damp on his palm; imperceptibly the gossamer-fine rain on the wind was building up to wetness. If only it would deluge down. But the bloody weather never closed in when you needed it, only when you didn’t. That was always when rain stopped play.

  “Then what can I say to him? What would you say?”

  “You could try the truth, I suppose.” Klobucki cocked his head, testing the idea. Then his shoulders lifted, acknowledging the uselessness of it. “But I guess that isn’t really on. And he probably wouldn’t believe it if you could tell it … I just don’t know, Colonel. I just don’t know. I don’t have the gift of the gab.”

  Neither do I, thought Butler bitterly. Maybe David Audley could have swung it, could have found the right formula of words. But all Jack Butler knew was how to command and to obey. To wheedle and argue and convince had never figured among the required skills.

  He turned back towards the causeway.

  “All right, then.” He looked left and right, injecting confidence into his voice. “You all know what to do. Close up behind me if they come on, and then just stand your ground. But no undue violence. Push ‘em back, don’t hit ‘em. Like a rugger scrum—“

  “Rugby Union, not Rugby League,” murmured Richardson. “No rough play except when the ref’s looking t’other way. No eye-gouging, rabbit-punching or swinging on each other’s testicles in the loose ruck, or boring like David Audley used to do when he was the Saracen’s prop forward. Just good clean dirty play … “

  Butler caught the younger man’s eye for one fraction of a second and saw in it the wish that was his own—the wish that
it was Audley in charge here now, not Butler.

  With that flash of insight the anger came welling up in his throat like vomit: to dither in the face of a handful of students was despicable, gift of the gab or no. One got on with the job that was to hand, whatever it was, without crying. And this was his job now.

  He locked his eyes on Terry across the fifty yards which was all that separated them and stepped forward on to the causeway.

  Five more paces brought him abreast of the ditch. He stopped.

  “That’s far enough, chaps,” he called.

  The tone was right, more a request than a command, and the distance made shouting unnecessary. But that “chaps” had been the wrong word, false even to his own ears. Too late to unsay it though.

  But they were slowing down all the same.

  “You can’t come any further.” He managed to hold most of the neutrality in his tone, but with a suggestion of finality in it, as though it was a friendly warning that somewhere behind him, just out of sight, lay a far greater obstacle, impassable and far more hostile.

  They stopped.

  Butler knew instinctively that this was how it had been—how it must have been—when some band of young Pictish warriors, half cut on heather-beer or whatever they soused themselves in, came strutting up to the frontier post looking for trouble. The guard-commander’s trick would be to get it into their addled heads in a stern but fatherly way that there was a regiment of Lusitanians just down the valley and that he was only the point of a thousand spears.

  There was a murmur, confused and rising until Terry stilled it with a raised hand.

  “This is a right-of-way, Colonel,” he said coolly. “You can’t stop us using it.”

  “I’m afraid I must stop you.”

  “By whose authority?”

  By whose authority? Butler searched frantically in his memory for some authority these young men might accept, and found not one. It was precisely because they recognised no authority but their own judgement that they were here now: it was a question without an answer, and Terry, a veteran of so many confrontations, had known that before he asked it. He had out-manoeuvred Butler with ridiculous ease.

  “It’s for your own good,” he growled desperately, aware that whatever he said now would be wrong. The moment of earlier confidence faded like a dream.

  “Of course. It always is.” Terry smiled. “But our own good isn’t good enough any more—“

  “Come on, Terry!” came a rude shout from behind. There was a bunching of the crowd on the causeway. Another second and they would be coming on.

  Butler knew he had lost. There had never been a chance that he wouldn’t lose—Klobucki had been right.

  “WAIT!” Butler bellowed above the rising hubbub. If reason wouldn’t work, lies at least might delay them. “I tell you—Negreiros isn’t coming! He won’t be there!”

  The noise subsided, then redoubled.

  “Then why are you here?” Someone shouted, unanswerably, to be echoed instantly and derisively.

  “Quiet!” Terry faced the demonstrators for a moment before turning back to Butler. “If Negreiros isn’t there, Colonel, you can’t possibly object to us coming over the Wall. But even if he is there, all we’re going to do is to demonstrate peacefully—we’re not going to cause any trouble—“

  “Kick him out of the way, Terry!”

  They were moving, but even as they did so Butler saw Klobucki corning up on his left.

  “Terry—“ Klobucki yelped “—he’s right. You’re being taken for a ride. For God’s sake—“

  He was seconds too late, his words lost in the shouting. For a moment it looked as though Terry was trying to hold them to an organised movement, but as his mouth opened a stocky young man ducked past him and made to pass Butler. He slowed as Richardson came into the gap and Butler caught him by the arm and swung him backwards the way he had come—he tripped over his own feet and sprawled in front of the crowd. There was an angry growl and the whole body surged forward.

  Butler closed an arm round first one man on his left and then another on his right, hugging them to him and bending forward into the press in an attempt to form a solid obstacle in the centre of the causeway. But the weight of bodies was overwhelming and he felt himself slipping and slithering backwards, his boots searching for some solid anchorage in the mud.

  He seemed suddenly surrounded by grunts and curses. The prisoner of his left arm—it was Terry—wriggled furiously. Feeling him slipping from his grasp Butler shifted his grip to take hold of a handful of windbreaker, only to feel the material rip under his hand. Then there was a joyful yell and a meaty thunk just outside his vision and Terry stumbled and was left behind in the mud.

  Arthur had abandoned his post to join the fight.

  “Bastards! Pigs!” someone was shouting, and a fist glanced off Butler’s cheekbone. He looked up just in time to see the fist flying again and ducked smartly to take it on the side of his head. With his newly-freed left hand he seized the wrist and twisted it fiercely, bringing the puncher to his knees. But now the prisoner of his right arm had stopped trying to break away and was battering him on the body with short but hard jabs which made him wince with pain. At the same time someone tried to wrap an arm round his neck: he was inexorably being pulled down on to the muddy roadway, dragged to the ground like a bear under the weight of the dogs—he heard himself growling fiercely, bearlike and helpless.

  The sound of the shot, when it came, seemed so unnaturally loud that he thought for a moment it was a noise inside his head. It was the slackening of the press around him rather than the report itself echoing from the cliffs which corrected the misinformation in his brain.

  The hands on him loosened, and instinctively he slipped his own holds, shaking himself free backwards and upwards. He felt Richardson’s hand under his elbow steadying him, lifting him. As the gap between defenders and demonstrators opened up he could see a confusion of bodies squirming on the causeway, scrabbling for footholds.

  But they weren’t looking at him.

  “Well—I’ll be buggered!” exclaimed Richardson.

  Butler turned, his eye running up the line of the Wall on High Crags.

  The one thing about amateurs, the one thing you could rely on, was that they would ignore the plainest and simplest orders.

  Dan McLachlan had plainly and simply ignored his, anyway: the Russian Alek—the deadly man with the gun— walked five yards ahead of him along the beaten path on the top of the Wall, his hands held stiffly above his head. The stiffness, even at this distance, suggested to Butler that Alek was extremely nervous, which was reasonable enough with a shotgun in the hands of an amateur pointed at the base of his spine; a shotgun held one-handed, too—over his left shoulder McLachlan carried the spoils of war, a delicate-looking long-barrelled sniper’s rifle.

  Butler understood the reason for Alek’s nervousness. Apart from the public humiliation of it, that casually-held shotgun was enough to frighten anyone. And that shot, a feu de joie rather than a warning, must have given him a nasty jolt. He walked as if he realised only too well that he was lucky to be alive.

  Even as they watched him McLachlan raised the captured rifle in the air triumphantly, very much as he had waved the croquet mallet the evening before.

  “The cheeky devil!” murmured Richardson. “You know, David’s never going to believe this. Never.”

  Butler grunted non-committally.

  “You think not?” Richardson’s tone indicated that he found Butler’s reaction ungracious. “Well, I tell you one thing for sure: he’s damn well saved our bacon. We don’t have to mix it with Mike Klobucki’s non-violent friends any more. They can demonstrate until they’re blue in the face now, thank God.”

  Butler was slightly surprised at the feeling in Richardson’s voice. Then he noticed, with an ignoble sense of satisfaction, that Richardson had the beginnings of a fine black eye.

  “True. They can go or stay as they please now,” he replied curt
ly.

  “And Alek?”

  “You take him back to Castleshields. Then drive him to Carlisle or Newcastle and turn him loose.”

  “Turn him loose!” Richardson’s dented nonchalance cracked.

  “Aye. He hasn’t done anything.”

  That was the irony of it all: nobody had done anything. Apart from a few punches on the causeway, which the demonstrators would soon forget in the interest of their own self-respect, the slate was clean.

  Because of that, this operation would never go down as a famous victory, a close-run thing. Only a handful of people would know that the realm had been successfully defended without fuss, which was the mark of the most desirable conclusion.

  Only one job remained now, to finish what Neil Haig Smith had started.

  XIX

  NOW THAT IT was no longer required, the drizzle perversely thickened into steady, slanting rain. With it the visibility quickly closed in around them, blotting out first the more distant ridges to the north and south, and then the crags on each side.

  Butler stood silent, watching the bedraggled procession fading into the mist beyond the causeway. Their heads were down and their shoulders hunched against the downpour. Only Alek walked with any suggestion of spirit.

  But then the sun shone for Alek, a sun of survival that no English weather could dim. How much he had known, or how much he had hoped, Butler couldn’t tell. But knowing the way the KGB worked he guessed Alek had known little beyond the inescapable truth that he was the expendable man in this operation; the man with the dangerous and thankless task, the one-time tiger who had been demoted, like Butler, to the role of staked goat.

  Butler had recalled that same feeling of bitter impotence so vividly—he had been prey to it himself less than twenty-four hours before—that it had softened the rough edges from the few words he had spoken to the man. It had not exactly warmed him to say those words—that would have betrayed a most dangerous and wrong-headed sentimentality. But it felt like an assertion of humanity as well as strength to grant freedom to an enemy.