HOME RUN

by Gerald Seymour

  The Customs official was walking down the length of a lorry and trailer, and heading for the cab of the Transit. Park watched. It was what they had sent him to do. He watched the Customs official peer into the driver's window, then nod his head, then step back, then cheerfully wave the Transit forward.

  The lorries in front of him nudged forward. Park swung his wheel. He drove off the metalled surface and on to the stone grit of the hard shoulder.

  He walked away from his car. He walked towards the buildings and the soldiers who were already seeking what shade was offered. His shirt stuck to his back, there was the shiver in his legs as he walked. He took as his place the flagpole. The wind pushed his hair across his face.

  He estimated that the Iranian flag and the Iranian buildings were 500 metres down the road. He thought that the border was at a point that was halfway between the two where a small stream crossed under the road through culvert tunnels. The road fell on its way to the tunnels, then climbed on a gradual gradient towards the Iranian buildings and the Iranian flag.

  The Transit was slipping away down the slope, going steadily for the dip where the culverts were set under the road. The wind in his hair, the sun in his eyes, the roar of the heavy engines in his ears.

  A young officer, regular army, had strolled to stand beside him, would have seen a foreigner at the post, and wondered, been interested. There were binoculars hanging loosely at his neck. Park didn't ask. A fast, sharp smile, his finger pointing to the binoculars. He knew nothing of the Turkish, nothing of their generosity. His gesture was enough. He had the binoculars in his hand.

  The Transit was climbing up the slope from the stream.

  His vision roved ahead.

  He saw the buildings of the Customs post, and huge on the wall facing the oncoming road was the image of the Imam.

  Past the buildings, uniformed and armed men held back a line of lorries from further movement towards Turkey. From a side door in the largest of the buildings he saw three men duck out and run, crouching and doubled, to take up positions behind parked cars. On the far side of the road, the far side to the buildings, was a heap of sandbags, inexpertly stacked and no more than waist height. With the glasses, through the power of the binoculars, he saw the sun flash on belted ammunition. There was a man standing beside the building closest to the roadway. He wore sandals and old jeans and his shirt tails weren't tucked in. He was not a young man. He was talking into a personal radio.

  The Transit was into Iran, heading up the shallow slope of the road.

  There was the crash of the gunfire.

  He started up. He clasped his hands to halt the shaking.

  "It's alright, dear, just the Pottinger boy . . . I don't mind him shooting pigeons, and I suppose I can't object at carrion crows, but I do think that killing rooks is the limit. I hope that you'll have a word with his father . . . Here's your coffee.

  Mattie, darling, you look frozen. I'll get you a warmer sweater, and when you've had your coffee, you're coming straight in."

  The sun was sharp on his forehead. There was the distortion of the binoculars and from the heat on the ground, but he could see well enough.

  The road was clear ahead and in front of the Transit, and a man in dun uniform had emerged from the ditch that ran alongside the road as soon as the Transit had passed him and he was waving down the following lorry. There was a moment, as the Transit came to an easy and unhurried stop beside the building, that it was the only vehicle within 100 yards in front or behind.

  Quick, fast movements. The van surrounded. He saw the men who ran forward towards the back of the van, and he saw their weapons raised to their shoulders and aimed at the Transit. Carried on the wind, must have been a megaphone, he heard a shouted order. They were closing on the cab. He saw the door of the cab open. He saw the barrel shape, the tube shape, jutting out from the opened door.

  There was the fire squirt.

  There was the following thunder hammer of the recoil of the LAW 80.

  Smoke and fire, and the building ravaged, and toy doll figures laid out in crazy posture under the galloping spread of black smoke and brilliant flames of the fire.

  He saw the Transit burst forward. He wondered when in hell Charlie had taken the launcher from the crates in the back of the T r a n s i t . . . He had seen the flash of the brass cartridge cases. He knew where it would come from. He knew where the stopping fire would come from.

  He thought the van might have made 25 yards. It was lurching forward, as if the driver was trying to hit the higher gears too fast. The Transit might have made 25 yards when the machine-gun behind the sandbags opened fire, belting the Transit. The van swerved, he saw that, he followed the swerve through the glasses. The van straightened. He was cold. He was not willing the escape of the van and nor was he cheering for the death of the van. He was the witness and he was watching. The Transit had swerved and it had straightened and it had swerved again. It was across the road. It was against the pole that carried the telephone line from the Customs post back into the interior. The hammer of the drum, the belt of the machine-gun, and the target was stationary, crippled.

  There was a shouting in his ear. It was the Turkish soldier, insistent but courteous. He held out his hand for his binoculars.

  There was little more for him to see. There was the bright orange glow of the ultimate explosion. He watched a dream's destruction. He thanked the officer, who was lost in concentration on the scene unfolding across the valley, and he turned and walked back towards his car. He thought that if he hurried he would still be in time to catch the flight from Van. He turned only once. When he had opened the door of the hire car he looked behind him. The sun was a high white orb, its brilliance shed by the rising pillar of smoke. Park drove away.

  He drove back along the straight road to Dogubeyezit, and past the sheep flocks, and past the shrill patches of scarlet. A job done, a man going home.

  22

  She was first out of the Chapel and Belinda and Jane were close at her back. She had dressed rather boldly and that had been her decision and without the prompting of the girls. She wore a suit of navy and a matching straw hat with a crimson ribbon. Perhaps the girls would not have approved. She had worn the same suit and hat only once before, nearly two years ago, and then she had sat in the Gallery and looked down on to the Investiture Room. She had watched with pride as Mattie had gone forward to receive from his sovereign the medal of the Order of the British Empire. She thought it right, on this autumn morning, when the leaves cascaded across the road from the plane trees in the park, to wear the same clothes as on that day. Mattie would have approved, and he would have liked the way that she held herself.

  She took her place a few yards from the doorway and there was a fine spit of rain at her back, and behind her the traffic streamed on Birdcage Walk. The girls were on either side of her. They were sentries positioned to protect their mother.

  Not that Harriet Furniss was in need of protection. There would be no choke in her voice, no smear on her cheek.

  She had been a Service wife, and now she was a Service widow. She understood very clearly what was expected of her.

  She thought that the Director General had aged, that his retirement had not given him a new lease of life. His morning coat seemed too large and his throat had thinned.

  "It was kind of you to come."

  It was he who had insisted on Mattie's immediate retirement.

  "To pay my respects to a very gallant gentleman, Mrs Furniss."

  She knew that he had resigned from the Service on the day the report of the internal inquiry had reached Downing Street.

  "You're looking well."

  "Good of you to say so . . . I've a little to occupy me . . .

  I shall remember your husband with nothing but admiration."

  It gave her strength to see his fumbling walk towards the parade ground, the man who had sent her Mattie to his doom.

  She had made it clear that she had wanted none of them to m
ake the journey from London for the funeral. The funeral, three weeks earlier, had been family and in Bibury, she had insisted on that. Two hard years they had been, from the time that he had come home to her to the time of death and release from his personal agony. Two wretchedly hard years they had been as the will to survive had ebbed from Mattie. The new Director General stood in front of her. His face was a little puffed as though he ate too much too often at lunchtime.

  "Most fittingly done, Mrs Furniss."

  "It was as Mattie would have wanted, I think."

  "We miss him very much at Century."

  "As he missed being there, desperately."

  "They still talk about his run, it was a magnificent memory for us all. He's not forgotten."

  "I expect that Iran Desk is substantially changed."

  "Well, yes, very changed. Now that we have the Embassy back in Tehran we are much more efficient."

  "I think Mattie understood."

  "Should you have any problem . . . well, you wouldn't hesitate, I hope."

  "Mattie would never have left us in difficulties."

  The new Director General nodded. She thought that she would have gone on the streets, put her daughters into a workshop, before she would have gone back to Century to plead hardship. All so different now. In the last months of his life Mattie had fumed at the exchange of diplomats, the reopening of relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran. They had angered him, insulted him. She had seen those wounds on his body, she had forced herself to look at them when he was bathing and pretended that she saw nothing, and she had raged in her mind each time she saw our people and their people shaking hands on the television screen. She had no line into Century for gossip because Flossie Duggan had gone the same week that her Mattie had been brought back to her, nor did she want a line. The wind caught at her hair and she pushed it decisively back. There was a surge of men past her, faces that she did not know. She imagined them to be from the Century desks, and from the administrative departments, and few caught her eye, most avoided her gaze. Henry Carter stood in front of her, and he held a trilby across his chest. It was Henry Carter who had come down to Bibury a week after he had first brought Mattie home and who had gone out into the garden with him to report that Charlie had been killed on the Iranian border. And Mattie had never spoken the name of Charlie Eshraq, would never even let the girls refer to him, from that day to the day of his slipping, passing, going.

  "So good to see you, Henry. Are you still . . . ?"

  "Alas, Mrs Furniss, no longer. I have a part-time job with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the mail-order section. I get the tea towels out, and the nesting boxes."

  "Was anything achieved, Henry, that spring, by any of you?"

  "Desperate question, Mrs Furniss. My opinion, it's better to believe that so much mayhem led to something positive, don't you think?"

  And he was gone, before she could press him. He almost ran. They were almost all gone from the church now, and the music had stopped. There was a middle-aged man standing a few feet in front of her, making no move to come towards her. He wore an old raincoat that was too small for him and that was gathered in tight lines across his stomach, and the half moon of his hair blew untidily in the wind. He met her gaze, he stared back at her. He was an intruder, she was sure of that, but she could not place him. She straightened her back.

  "Do I know you?"

  "I'm Bill Parrish."

  "Have we met?"

  "I came once to your house, bit more than two years ago."

  "You'll have to excuse me, I don't recall the occasion . . ."

  "I'm fulfilling a promise to a friend, Mrs Furniss. He's abroad and can't be here. Me being here is closing a file, you might say that it's shutting up shop. A very nice service, Mrs Furniss."

  She watched them all go. The old Director General was waving down a taxi, flourishing his umbrella at the driver. The new Director General was climbing into the black limousine Henry Carter was arguing down the street with a traffic warden across the bonnet of an old car. Bill Parrish was striding purposefully towards Whitehall. She let the girls link their arms through her elbows. Had anything been at achieved? Was there something positive? She hated them all.every last one of them who were now hurrying away to escape from the contact with the life and death of Maine Furniss.

  383

  Table of Contents

  Prologue