The Falconer's Tale

by Gordon Kent

  “This is just for me. Can you secure-fax it to me?” He gave Triffler a number. “What else have you got on OIA?”

  “Only open-source stuff. It was in a few papers, couple of magazines for a while, then the story died. Nobody was getting his jockey shorts wet over it back then. From what I read, it was a small bunch of people in DoD who agreed with like-minded folks elsewhere in the administration that intelligence was not something that should be left to people who spend their lives at it. They were going to be a fresh eye, a fresh voice. Welcome to Iraq.”

  “Anything about them ever being operational?”

  “Never heard that. People who wrote about it said it was into ‘purifying’ what the White House saw. And I can understand where they were coming from—after Nine-Eleven, the intel community wasn’t looking too good. I’d have voted for something new, myself.”

  “Yeah, but we’re still all here. And I understand they aren’t—they went away after Bush’s first term?”

  “You know the suicide note that George Eastman left behind—‘My work is done, why wait?’ And my hat is off to them—a government office that puts itself out of business gets a gold star!”

  Craik grunted. Or the STU hiccupped. Craik said, “I’m not ready to do that yet. Fax me the roster and I’ll take it from there.”

  When the roster came some hours later, he saved it to his computer and printed out a single hard copy, which he sent by snail mail to Abe Peretz at home.

  11

  Piat’s interest in the crannog was more than academic now. He had plans for it, and he brought them toward fruition with the same thoroughness that he ran an operation—indeed, in his mind, it was an operation, even if an operation subordinate to the one he was running for Partlow.

  It certainly ran on Partlow’s money.

  On a Saturday, Piat rented a cottage in Dervaig. It had two beds and could hold a third on a fold-out sofa. He paid cash and called himself Jack. Risky, but allowable. He caught the midday ferry to the mainland and drove around Oban, claiming various packages—a generator, an air pump, a surprising number of air tanks. He rented a second vehicle and put it on Partlow’s credit card, the riskiest part of the whole game, but he had no other source of funds.

  At two in the afternoon, he walked into the bar of the Saint Columba Hotel. Any splendor the Saint Columba might have had—and it had had plenty in its day—was long gone. The same might have been said of the three men waiting for him in the gloomy bar. They had a certain sameness about them—short hair, tired polo shirts, khaki trousers, heavy sunglasses, muscles, tattoos. Like dangerous, superannuated beach boys. Two of them were dirty blonds with identical moustaches. The third was black.

  “Sweet Jesus fuck, Jack,” one hailed Piat as he walked in. Lots of back-slapping. Then handshakes all around.

  “You all know each other already?”

  The black man leaned forward over his beer. “We’re already fuckin’ blood brothers, man. Leastways, that guy bought me a beer.” He indicated the thinner white man.

  The thinner of the blonds nodded. “Didn’t take a fockin’ rocket scientist to guess we was all here for you, Jack.”

  Piat nodded. “Introductions all complete?”

  “Never fockin’ came up,” said the thinner man. “Ken Howse.” He shook hands all around, again. His accent was peculiar—Irish, then cockney, then Irish again. Howse had been born in Belfast and spent twenty years in the SBS.

  The black man smiled. “Leamon Dykes. Just call me Dawg.” His hands were so big they covered the beer. By contrast to Howse, Dykes barely had a trace of an accent—the result of spending twenty years as one of the few black NCOs in one of the most elite—and white—units in Joint Special Operations Command.

  “Tony Dalepo,” the third man said. “Glad to meet you gents. Now, Jack. There was some mention of money.” Dalepo had put in his time on SEAL Team Two. Piat had worked with him twice.

  “Just fer showing up,” Howse put in.

  Piat handed out envelopes. He gave them a cursory brief on what he had in mind.

  “Shares?” Dalepo asked. His Alabama accent was so thick that “shares” had an uncountable number of syllables and two diphthongs.

  “No. Straight cash, payments weekly. Bonus if we find something worthwhile. Otherwise, payment for services rendered.”

  All three men nodded. They nursed their beers. Howse and Dalepo smoked. Piat waited. The money was good, and the idea was fine. Men like these—mercenaries, for want of a better word—had superstitions and beliefs that went beyond the simple realities of money and danger.

  Finally, Dykes drained his beer. “I’m in. Sounds like fun. Anyway, my daughter’s going to college—this’s a safer bet than robbing banks. Or playing rent-a-gun in Iraq.”

  Dalepo crushed out his second cigarette, picked up his envelope, and pushed it into the back pocket of his chinos. “Fuck, Jack. Ya’ know I hate divin’ in cold water. Long trip ta’ tell you that. Ya’all pissed at me?”

  Piat shook his head. “Catch you next time, Tony.”

  Dalepo picked up an old Navy flight jacket and walked out.

  Howse was terse. “Too fockin’ close to home, mate,” he said with a shrug. “I don’t do nothin’ UK. Okay?”

  “If you say so,” Piat answered. He was disappointed. He knew the job required two men. He preferred to use men he knew.

  Dykes watched Howse through the door and then turned back to Piat. “You don’t want no part of that one,” he said.

  Piat raised his eyebrows.

  “Just something I heard.” Whatever he had heard had thoroughly convinced him, though; Piat could read it on his face.

  Piat shrugged. “Either way, I don’t think you can do this on your own.”

  Dykes put his hand up. “Hey, man—I know a couple of guys over here. Good guys. I did a cross-training thing. Let me a make a call. Okay?”

  Dykes’s friend proved to be a retired rescue diver from Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm. He lived in Manchester, drove himself up and arrived in time to make the ferry. He looked more like a pirate than a retired British officer, with a bone-crushing grip, a heavy beard, and a striped shirt. Piat thought that all he needed was a parrot and an eyepatch. His name was Tancred McLean, aka Tank. He and Dykes seemed to get on like a house afire, and he needed the money.

  They caught the last ferry for Mull, Piat in his own car and Tank driving Dawg in the new rental with the equipment. By nightfall he had them settled in the cottage in Dervaig. He drove them over to the windswept road where the hillside rose to the slope of the caldera above the crannog. In the moonlight, it looked even steeper than it was.

  Dykes shook his head. “We’re going to carry a compressor and a generator up that shit?”

  McLean was filling his pipe. “Looks tough.”

  Piat said, “It is tough. I’ve been up and down three times carrying nothing but a pack.”

  The three men sat and watched the hillside.

  “What’s the plan, then?” asked McLean.

  “Later tonight, we come up here and unload the whole kit. See that shingle at the base of the glen? No, right here. Solid rock, screened from the road. Everything goes there. We make two trips a day until we get it up. Either of you guys know how to strip and reassemble a compressor?”

  Both men looked at him as if he was an idiot.

  “So we strip it and take it up in pieces.”

  “Fair enough,” said McLean.

  Dykes rolled his eyes. “You better be payin’ on time, Jack.”

  Piat put a colored square of pasteboard in the windshield. “Cover. We’re fishing. For the next three weeks.”

  Dykes brightened. “Hey, I like fishing.”

  Piat smiled. “Good.”

  They spent two hours unloading the rental van into the ravine. Every part of Piat’s body from the abdomen down ached after the first climb, and the repeated trips up and down the wet rock of the ravine sides turned the ache into a raging fire. Nonetheless, th
e three men worked well together. Jokes were made. War stories told.

  In the end, it was done.

  Dykes looked pointedly at Piat when Piat was ready to leave. “You better be around for some of this, boss-man.”

  Piat waved. “Until it’s done,” he said.

  He dropped in on them on a Sunday at the self-catering place he’d found for them. Dykes and McLean were eating breakfast together in their shared kitchen. After a round of greetings, Dykes set to work making a stack of American pancakes for Piat. Piat watched the big man cook. Dykes laid everything he needed out on the counter with military precision and cleaned his dishes as they were made, every movement planned and executed with precision. It was not Piat’s method of cooking by a long shot, and Piat wondered what the man was like as a husband or a father. Rigid? Authoritarian?

  McLean drank coffee and read the Oban paper.

  “I thought we’d have a go today,” Piat said.

  Dykes’s back indicated a shrug. He flipped a pancake. “Thought we were doing the moving at night.”

  Piat glanced at McLean. “No one drives down that road. No one much, anyway. I thought we’d take turns watching and climbing.”

  McLean turned a page in the paper. “Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

  Piat shook his head. McLean began stuffing his pipe. Dykes whirled and delivered a plate of pancakes with a flourish. “Better than sittin’ here all day,” he said as the first pancake disappeared into Piat. He glared at McLean. “Smoking an’ food don’t go together.”

  The first trip was the worst. Piat climbed with McLean, wearing two tanks as a pack, while McLean carried the frame of the generator and Dykes watched the road. The rain, though light, had soaked the turf under the grass, and every step was like walking in a marsh. The higher they got on the slope of the caldera, the heavier the tanks were on Piat’s back, the straps cutting into his shoulders, the tops of his thighs reliving every effort of the last seventy-two hours.

  McLean didn’t like it any better, but his response was humor, some of it dark, a lot of it funny. McLean had no notion of a race to the top, however. He stopped twice to smoke, and once, just at the rim, to admire the view. The weight of the generator didn’t seem to trouble him, nonetheless, and Piat realized that the pauses had been for him. McLean surprised him by being Canadian, not British, with a wealth of outdoor experience in places whose names were familiar but whose terrain was unknown—Northern Quebec, various ice stations north of the Arctic Circle, the Middle East and East Africa. He spoke easily of his career and past postings—probably the result of having been a rescue diver and not a special operations guy, Piat thought. He didn’t have to be cagey. By the time they built a hide on the loch, Piat liked him. They stowed their loads and started back.

  “You don’t strike me as one of Dawg’s hard men,” McLean said.

  Piat smiled. “No,” he said.

  McLean turned and looked at him, then smiled. “Oh—got it.” He was chuckling as he climbed down. “You’re a spook.”

  “Mmm,” Piat said, noncommittally.

  McLean raised an eyebrow. “What’s the angle?” he asked.

  Piat shrugged. “Angle?”

  McLean pointed at the hide. “Dawg doesn’t seem to care. I do. I know people who dive crannogs. The stuff inside them isn’t worth a shit on the market.”

  Piat shook his head. “Wrong. Northern Bronze Age is the hottest stuff on the market. One piece—one decent piece—will pay for this whole thing and some bonus money.”

  McLean gave him a long, steady stare. Then he shrugged and started down the hill.

  Dykes and McLean took the next load, and Piat lay on the grass and watched the road and the mountains, aware that the landowner might just as easily come across the moorland from the west on an ATV. He wanted to smoke. McLean’s pipe smoke was scratching at the door of his old addiction.

  The two men got up the hill in a little more than half the time Piat had taken with McLean, and they were back sooner, too, but by the time they came back, Piat felt better. He took the last two air tanks; Dykes took a pack full of machine parts. McLean was to follow them with the last load as soon as they were out of sight.

  Piat’s back still hurt, but his legs were surrendering to the exercise. He was still trying to find a way to make small talk with Dykes when he found that they were over the top of the caldera and on their way to the hide.

  “So pretty here, I’m ’mazed you’re paying me to come,” Dykes said with a big smile. His head was swiveling in all directions, as if he was trying to get everything in a single sweep. Then he pointed at the loch. “Got fish?”

  Piat was sitting in a heap on the shingle, just breathing. But he had carried his rod up snapped to the harness that held the bottles, and he pushed himself to his feet.

  “I’ll show you,” he said. Still trying to control his breathing.

  He stayed on the shingle and cast a heavy red fly into the mouth of the underwater vent. The second cast got a swirl of movement and the third cast hooked a good brown trout—possibly the same one he’d caught the last time, possibly not. Piat landed the fish with care.

  Dykes whistled. “I seen guys out west—Marine Mountain Warfare School, you know it? Anyway, I watched ’em fly-fish, and I thought, shit, I gotta learn to do that, it’s slick. But the stuff’s all so frickin’ expensive, and—”

  Piat got the hook clear of the fish. “Shall I kill it? You want to eat it?”

  Dykes said, “Shit, yes!”

  Piat whacked it in the head and moved along the shingle to clean it. “It’s not rocket science, Dawg. People are always adding mysticism to it. Nothing to it. Hand-eye coordination you got—the rest is just practice. And fishing is your cover here, starting today.”

  Dykes smiled from ear to ear. “You sure this ain’t a vacation?” Then he put the smile away. “Hey, Jack. About that Howse guy. He’s gonna talk.”

  Piat smiled. “I expect he will.”

  Dykes nodded, having confirmed something. “So you got that covered.”

  “Unless he talks to the cops. I don’t have that covered.” Piat tossed another cast into the vent. “Your friend McLean wanted to know the angle. I don’t know him. I know you. So here’s the angle.”

  “I’m all ears,” Dykes said.

  “Conditions are pretty much ideal for a lesson, Dawg. Nothing to hit on the back cast, fish to catch in front. Take the rod.”

  Dykes hesitated, an odd look on his face. Embarrassment. Fear. “My spin rig’ll come up with Tank,” he said defensively.

  Piat forced the cork grip into his hand. “Dawg. It won’t bite. The line’s on the water. When you want to re-cast, just pick it up and flick it again. Never mind—you’ve got a fish on.” Without changing his tone, he said, “I doubt you’ll find anything in the water here, Dawg. But that’s not a problem. I’m going to supply a few artifacts.”

  Dykes’s hesitant movements of the rod tip had apparently lured a small brown trout. Dykes got it ashore. It was ten inches long and worth eating.

  “And we’ll just find them,” Dykes said. He killed the fish.

  “And I’ll sell them. If Howse runs his mouth, it’ll just help sell the idea that we’ve found a site.” Piat took the dead fish and put it in a mesh bag in the cold water of the loch.

  Dykes was casting when McLean walked up, dropped his pack, and lit his pipe.

  “I caught a trout,” Dykes said.

  Piat had to hide a smile. Dykes had done HALO jumps and desperate missions, and he was beaming at having landed a ten-inch trout on a borrowed rod. It was one of the things that made Dykes so easy to like.

  McLean spoke around his pipe. “We’ve got the fishing?”

  Piat said, “Yeah. For two weeks.”

  McLean nodded, took in a lungful of smoke and exhaled slowly. “You going to stand there with that rod, or you going to fish?”

  That night, they went over the possibilities. McLean and Dykes had made a single dive in the last
good light, swum all the way around the foundation of the crannog, lifted the silt a little.

  McLean had another bite of fish, chewed, swallowed. “No way we can shift the foundation of that thing. The base timbers must weigh a ton.”

  Dykes shook his head. “Maybe a tackle from the shore. But it’d show, Jack.”

  McLean said, “And it’d wreck the fishing.”

  Piat ate more fish, drank some wine. “Okay. Let’s just sift the silt around the edge. With the blower. Can we do that?”

  Both men thought that they could. They all clinked their glasses.

  Piat relaxed and enjoyed himself. He had too much wine, but he still managed to issue them a communications plan, pay them for two weeks, and work out a schedule.

  McLean looked inside his envelope and frowned. “This is spy shit.”

  Piat shrugged.

  Dykes put a hand on McLean’s shoulder. “I told you how it would be.”

  McLean looked from one to the other. “I went out of my way to avoid this kind of shit in the RN. Dykes said cash for some cold water dives and no questions, eh? That’s good. But the rest of this shit. Comms plan? Fallback? Who are we fooling, the KGB? Eh?”

  “Humor me,” Piat said quietly. “Old habits die hard.”

  McLean stared at him for a long ten seconds. Then he gave a quick smile. “Okay. Just don’t push me. I always thought James Bond was a twat.”

  Piat knocked back the rest of his wine. “Me, too.”

  The next time he went to the farm, Hackbutt wasn’t there. He didn’t know that when he pulled in, scratched the dog, and looked up to find Irene leaning in the doorway with a peculiar smile on her face. “Well,” she said. She leaned against the door sill. “Edgar isn’t here. I tried to call you.”

  “You want to offer me a cup of tea?” he asked. He wondered if in fact it was a good idea.

  “Of course. Come on in.” She was wearing lavender track pants and an old T-shirt. A yoga mat stood rolled up against the fireplace. She had incense burning in the grate and a single candle on the old trunk that served as a coffee table. The smell of incense caught at Piat’s throat, as did the smell of pot. Music with a heavy beat played in the background.