Sunstrike_The next gripping Commander Shaw thriller

by Philip McCutchan

  Which was quite a good starting point.

  I said, “Miss Mandrake, I have a job for you. Make yourself available to Colonel Early.”

  “Like hell I will, Commander Shaw.”

  “An order, Miss Mandrake. Be nice to him, starting with dinner tonight. Drop indiscreet words in his ear: I’m checking everyone out with thoroughness, and I already have a name.”

  “Which you haven’t?”

  “Correct. And I don’t believe I ever will, from this lot.” I shoved the lists back into the file and closed it, and sat back yawning with legs outstretched. “I intend to try a flushing action, a pulling of the chain. Get the idea?”

  She nodded. “You’re going to make yourself a target?”

  “Yes. It’s the fastest way —”

  “And the most dangerous.” She looked away from me, out through the window across the dust and the distant, dried-up palm trees. “Be careful, won’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said lightly, “I love me.”

  “Don’t joke, please.”

  I looked at her with a mixture of surprise, sympathy and pleasure. It would be nice to be missed if things went wrong, as well they might. But she’d known me only a matter of days, you could almost call it hours, and it was much too early to equate me with Derek Redward — but I knew that was what was in her mind. I said, “Sorry, Felicity. I’ll be careful, don’t worry. But do as I ask. It’s important.” I got up and went over and kissed her, and her face felt cold, colder than the conditioned air of Warfield’s office. We left then, I with a grim and knowing look for the benefit of the security staff. Outside the block we parted. My reading had taken a long time and dinner was not far off, but I had a thing or two to do first, a back-up for what I had asked Miss Mandrake to do. I did it in cloak-and-dagger fashion: I sidled into parts of the complex where work was still going on, notably in the communications sections, flashing my 6D2 authority at officers and senior non-coms and prowling tight-lipped. By a stroke of sheer luck I encountered Commander Warfield in one of the radio rooms and I made sure our brief conversation was conducted in the hearing of several communications ratings.

  “That list of yours.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks. It’s proved a goldmine.” I lowered my voice a little, but not too much. “I’ve got a name, Commander.” I moved on, eyes slitted and darting. I hoped I wasn’t overdoing it and I didn’t believe I was. I felt Warfield’s gaze on my back: he was anxious to know the details but wasn’t going to ask, not in the radio room anyway. His own reaction would be helping me. The word would spread like wildfire: thirteen hundred men in a base on a lonely Indian Ocean atoll had, in the absence of women, only two things left to do: booze and gossip. Rumour has swift feet. They would be running already.

  *

  I had been allocated a room in the officers’ block and when l went to it before dinner I found my grip had been carried there from the transport. I washed and put on a clean light-weight suit, strapping back my automatic over a fresh shirt. Then I went along for the meal and found Miss Mandrake in a corner of the ante-room with Nick Early, drinking a pre-dinner fruit juice, iced but not ginned. We avoided each other’s eye: she was, I hoped and expected, obeying orders. I noticed in passing that Early was leaning right across her and she wasn’t withdrawing. Early had a heated look and I guessed he was going over in his mind how best to arrange total seduction. After that I was taken in hand by a lieutenant-commander wearing a gold caduceus with an acorn in the centre above the stripes on his shoulder straps, in indication of the medic branch. I went in to eat with him, sitting at one of around a dozen long tables. I pumped him a little about prevalent diseases on Diego Garcia and he spoke of the skin cancers that had come in with the evacuees from the Candar Islands — I’d expected he would come up with this, since there would be little else: the service personnel would be pretty healthy and the total absence of available women — the Candarian refugees were strictly off limits — would militate against the VD that normally formed ninety per cent of any service medic’s list. He elaborated about ultra-violet and talked also about the extra heat dimension that had hit Diego Garcia the last few days around noon, repeating the Admiral’s words. He went on to talk of other things: politics and the churn of world events, the ever-shifting power balances — ever-shifting, that was, in the sense that Russia was always seeking new alignments and pushing forward into new strike zones. He instanced the massive presence in Ethiopia, not so far to the north-west of the Chagos, that had started back in ’77 when the Russian military advisers and technicians had been drummed out of Somalia. From then on Ethiopia had been growing into an extended Marxist power base from which the Soviets could mount watch over the Horn of Africa. I thought again about that unknown submarine. Offhand I wasn’t sure if submarines could use the ports of Massawa or Assab but I saw no reason why they should not. Ethiopia had a navy of a sort, and almost certainly Russia would have carried out improvements to the port installations. Then there was Mozambique, another Marxist state and another massive Russian build-up. Nacala in Mozambique was a first-class natural harbour, a deep water port that could handle the largest tankers and would clearly have excellent submarine facilities. There was a big air base and a strong force, so it was believed, of MiG jets, and the area was defended by the latest radar installations plus surface-to-air missiles. It was a kind of answer, in fact, to Diego Garcia … Over coffee after dinner I got drawn into a general yack with several of the senior officers, a yack largely about sporting facilities on the atoll, and I saw that Miss Mandrake was still being sedulously wooed by Colonel Early though she, like me, was now the centrepiece of a largish group. I’d been talking for around fifteen minutes, I suppose, when the Admiral’s aide came in, looked around, and came over to say Rackstall wanted to see me. There was a bit of a general hush as I went out with the lieutenant, as though something important was about to happen; but in the event all Rackstall wanted was a yarn about Britain, where he’d spent some time during the Second World War: he’d been an ensign in the USS Tuscaloosa, a heavy cruiser on attachment to the British Home Fleet. And he was lonely, as commanding officers so often are, having to maintain a distance between themselves and those they command. He gave me a couple of pretty stiff rye whiskies and didn’t do badly himself either, and when he looked at the clock and stretched himself for bed it was past midnight. I wished him goodnight and left his quarters, walking back under a high, bright moon to the wardroom accommodation block. The whole place looked silver under the moon, silver dotted with black where the palm trees clustered. The waters of the lagoon lay placid, but I could hear the low thunder of the far-out breakers on the reef, and closer at hand the curious cry of a night-bird, rather like a scream. In my room I stripped off, went for a shower, came back refreshed and dropped on to the bed. I flicked off the light right away and I think I went out just as pronto myself. When I woke, which was with a start, it was still full dark and I’d woken because a torch was beamed right into my eyes and there was a knife prodding against my throat.

  6

  In the back-glow from the torch I saw a muscular man clad in singlet and slacks, white, khaki and anonymous. I couldn’t make out the face. I asked, and felt my adam’s-apple surge against the knife as I did so, “What’s all this about?”

  “Make a guess,” the man said. He had a curious voice, high-pitched, uneuphonious. I judged the accent to be Texas. “Limey dick bastards just are not wanted around here, okay?”

  “So?”

  He seemed disconcerted that I’d woken; I suppose he’d needed the torch to select the spot for the knife, but it struck me as bloody stupid. If I’d been in his shoes, I’d just have slid it in somewhere in the vicinity and scarpered fast. From my recumbent position I told him how bloody stupid he was. I said, “Now look here, sailor. Sure I’m on the ground floor and you can vamoose as quickly as you came. Or you could have done.” The window was open, as it had been when I turned in. “But there’s a maybe ab
out it now, isn’t there? I’m awake.”

  “Not for much longer,” he said, and I felt the knife move. I reacted fast: I rolled, and at the same time lifted my left elbow so that the knife was deflected upwards. I landed on the window side of the bed and brought my automatic from under the pillow. The torch beam was still on me, and it found the automatic in my hand as I got to my feet. The man didn’t like that; I saw his shadow moving fast for the window and going through like he was a physical training instructor, very efficient and nippy. I fired and missed: the bullet zipped into glass and there was a tinkle. Then he’d gone. I got to the window myself in a split second and dived out but there was no sign of anyone: he’d made it around the angle of the block, which angle I had no idea, but I ran to my right and found a blank. By the time I’d run back the other way the night had started to come alive, shattered by my gunfire. A patrol ran up, men in gaiters and armbands, carrying Armalite rifles. Heads looked from windows and a truck screamed up with a lieutenant junior grade aboard.

  “What happened?” he demanded, and I told him. He seemed bewildered, finding Diego Garcia a hot spot this last week or so, hotter in that sense — than US security should have allowed. While I was explaining and demanding a fast muster of all hands, and a search of the base, Commander Warfield hurried into view in his pyjamas, which was a stage more decent than me.

  Warfield said, “Jesus Christ.”

  I explained again and Warfield lost no time. He got hold of the j.g. from the truck, and the j.g. drove off with screaming tyres for the Executive Officer of the base, a Commander Ingersoll — Exec for short. Within half a minute bugles were blowing and orders were being passed over the Tannoy system, loud and metallic and urgent, while I went off and pulled on shirt and pants and shoes. After that there was a degree of pandemonium, with men running hither and thither in every stage of undress to muster on the parade ground under brilliant floodlights. From his quarters came Rear-Admiral Rackstall, looking incongruous with his brass hat topping his dressing-gown, very small and stick-like in night attire.

  “What the heck!” he yelled at no one in particular.

  The Exec gave him a wide-swept-arm salute. “It’s an emergency, Admiral.” Once again, explanations were made while the muster continued amid a hail of loud complaint, and patrols armed with AR 15’s were marched through the buildings, with the Master-at-Arms and his assistants chasing out the loafers and making sure all compartments were cleared. I must say it was all done with speed and efficiency. Within twenty-five minutes of the assault on my person the reports were being made to the Exec and it seemed that every man was present or if not present yet, then accounted for: Pacific temperatures, iced drinks and air-conditioning all tended to affect stomachs and a number of men had been caught out in the john, or can. Among the officers, only one remained unaccounted for, and guess who: Lieutenant-Colonel Early. When I was told this, I became a trifle anxious and realised that Miss Mandrake hadn’t shown either. I hoped she wasn’t taking her duties too seriously. I approached the Admiral, asked permission to dismiss myself and invade his quarters, got his approval, and went to her room at the rush. The sentry had left his post — presumably to muster with the rest, but I thought this odd.

  I knocked on Miss Mandrake’s door, got no answer, and turned the handle. The door was not locked, and Miss Mandrake was not within.

  Thinking surly thoughts about Colonel Early, I ran back to the muster. Just as I did so, a chief petty officer came in with a camp patrol and doubled up to the Exec, looking pale. I was with the Exec when the chief reported a find in the palm trees fringing the lagoon: Colonel Early, very dead from an apparent knife wound in the stomach, which had bled a lot into his uniform. Hanging from the undergrowth nearby, a bra.

  *

  There had been no sign of Miss Mandrake, but by the dawn every man on Diego Garcia knew very well that the bra had been hers. The Candarian refugee women didn’t wear bras at all, let alone bras with the St Michael label. I was worried stiff: where the hell was she? The search had continued throughout what remained of the night, was continuing still and was being conducted with extreme thoroughness, the navy men acting as beaters to draw all the coverts. Result so far, nil. In the meantime the autopsy on Colonel Early had found the cause of death to be curare poisoning: hearing that, I thought of the Chinese knifeman in distant Woolwich, and wondered, with a retrospective shudder, whether my own last night’s attacker had also had curare on his knife. The bra had been brought back as a kind of Exhibit Number One, and now lay wrapped in plastic in a drawer, locked, of Commander Warfield’s desk. Modern scientific methods are wonderful: the bra bore Colonel Early’s fingerprints. That chagrined me, but Miss Mandrake wasn’t my property, and there were vastly more important overtones: I had a job to do, and the fate of Miss Mandrake obviously impinged upon it. No one actually made the suggestion in my hearing that she had committed murder repelling rape, but it seemed Colonel Early’s interests were well enough known and the theory was definitely in the overheated air. However, something positive was to come: when the abortive search was called off, the base was re-mustered and I spent a hell of a morning in Warfield’s office while each man was wheeled in individually to be looked at by me and to say: “Make a guess. Limey dick bastards just are not wanted around here, okay?” in Texan, hopefully. To cut a long recital short, I put a finger on the guy after listening two hundred and forty-three times. He was withdrawn from circulation while I went on listening and identified three more possibles but not quite likelies — their voices weren’t quite as high as suspect number one’s. In the end, these three were eliminated by cast-iron alibis and I suggested to Warfield that number one, a communications rating named Ellum, should be removed to the cells, with which he concurred.

  “What then?” he asked.

  “Third degree. I’d like to conduct it myself it that’s all right with you?”

  He needed higher authority for that: but Rackstall gave his permission and I went to the cell block with the Master-at-Arms, who remained on view with an armed seaman while I was locked inside with Ellum. I started as I meant to go on: hard faced and tough. I said, “The bastard limey dick now has you where he wants you, and is going to be a bastard till you crack. All right?”

  He spat at me; saliva drooled down my face. I wiped it away with my handkerchief. I said, “Right, I take that as an admission I got the right man.”

  “And you can stuff it, limey.”

  “And you,” I said, “can fry in the electric chair. I’m suggesting you killed Colonel Early —”

  “Ah, bullshit.”

  As a matter of fact, I believed him. Whoever had killed Early had, in my view, also removed Miss Mandrake and to seaward at that. Ellum was definitely not in possession of Miss Mandrake and was not at sea. However, the crime of treason still theoretically attracted the death penalty in most states of the Union, and even though the chair was so seldom used these days that it could be said to be abolished de facto, I fancied it was likely enough they might fry Ellum on that charge, and I said as much once again. I said, “Treason’s what you’re going to be booked for whether or not you killed Early. You’re heading for the chop, Ellum.”

  “So I’m heading for the chop.” His mouth was a thin line even when it opened for speech: he was no grass, that mouth said. “You’re wasting your time, bastard.”

  I shrugged. “I’ve plenty to waste. Talk, and I’ll help all I can. We have a phrase, turning Queen’s evidence. No doubt you have something similar. And don’t,” I added, “worry about WUSWIPP. I’ll see you safe from that lot.”

  He was shaken — not very obviously, but enough to show that WUSWIPP had registered. He had taken on a new wariness and there was anxiety in his eyes rather than just cold blank fury. I pressed on that. “You’re a WUSWIPP man. That’s playing with more than fire. It was you that got a message out that your friend Roosenbacher had blown his top and was in arrest. It was you that brought the killer squad in. I want to know wher
e from, and where to after they’d done their killing. That’s for a start. There’ll be more later.”

  He said nothing, just stared at me as though any minute he would up and throttle me. I began to put the screw on. I said, as though thinking aloud, “The best way might be to let you out after all … with a word to the boys that you brought the killers in. After that, a blind eye.”

  He took it in, all right. The killers’ victims that night would have had friends, and friends or not, no one likes the spy in the midst, the spy that leads to killing. Ellum looked a shade less confident and I said again he wasn’t to be scared off talking by thoughts of WUSWIPP’s revenge. Less confident he might be, but he wasn’t going to talk. Yet, I was going to make him and I wasn’t going to fight with the gloves on: there was too much at stake. I said, “Before I came along here, I checked out your personal file, Ellum. You live in Dallas, Texas.” I quoted the address at him. “You have a wife — name, Eliza May. Two children, a boy and a girl, aged seven and three respectively. If you think they’re at the mercy of WUSWIPP, you can forget it. My organisation has a powerful American end, and they’ll be alerted for a twenty-four hour watch on your family. That’s a promise, Ellum. But that coin has another side, and I reckon you’re a big enough bastard yourself to know what that other side is. Right?”

  No answer; but he knew all right. I saw it in his eyes, in his pouring sweat despite the air-conditioning. Every organisation has its strong-arm mob, 6D2 included. Ellum wasn’t to know if I was bluffing and the sweat went on pouring and he began making a low hissing noise, clenching and unclenching his fists. A froth formed at the corners of his mouth and he rocked on the bench he was using. But he didn’t break. I felt rising anger that any man could risk his family, not to mention his country; and all at once Felicity Mandrake’s face rose before me and beseeched. God alone knew where she was, what had happened to her — God and this lousy rotten bastard called Ellum. I stared down at him, hate rising to my surface like a tide. I said, “On your feet.”