Rules of Engagement

by Hurley, Graham

  Davidson was next. Unlike Goodman, he stood up, easing his chair back from the table, and letting a silence descend on the room before clearing his throat and fixing his gaze on a spot midway down the table.

  Speaking without notes, he offered a brief summary of the international situation. As everybody knew, the crisis in Europe had already ripened weeks before the dramatic appearance of the crippled Trident submarine in the Barents Sea. The real source of it all had been the upheavals in Moscow back in the winter, after Gorbachev’s second coronary. Even now, the political picture was still fogged with uncertainties, but it was clear that the hardliners were back in charge, with a mandate of their own to crush nationalist movements at the edges of the Empire, and restore the kind of monolithic Communism that Gorbachev had been at such pains to dismantle.

  In places like Georgia and Armenia, remote from Western Europe, and no threat to NATO planners, the more brutal of the counter-insurgency sweeps had gone largely unreported. But up in the Baltic republics, and in Poland, the Western media had taken a lively interest in the weeks of rioting in Riga and Tallin, the tanks rolling through the streets of Warsaw, and the huge security operation in Gdansk that followed the mysterious disappearance of Lech Walesa.

  There’d been rumours of mass deportations to a new Gulag, and reports of firing squads at work in the more remote areas of Eastern Poland, and every morning there were yet more interviews with the boatloads of Lithuanian refugees appearing at Swedish ports along the Gulf of Bothnia.

  No one in the West was quite sure whether Poland merited yet another world war, but the recent election of a new Norwegian Government, a novel mix of Green politicians and the hard left, had complicated the situation still further. The new masters in Oslo were, in Davidson’s phrase, babes in the wood, and had openly welcomed the top-level Soviet delegation that was still locked in bilateral discussions. Quite where these talks would lead was still a mystery, but the courtship was so abrupt, and so evidently promising, that it had shaken the Western Alliance to its foundations. Indeed, said Davidson, there were certain elements on the Scandinavian Desk in the Foreign Office that were already braced for a formal declaration of non-alignment that would take Norway out of NATO, and thus enable the Soviets to turn the Northern Flank.

  This possibility was menacing enough in itself, but it compounded a situation that had been developing in Central Europe since the early summer. Three months back, intelligence intercepts and satellite reconnaissance had confirmed that the Russians were calling a halt to their programme for dismantling Intermediate Nuclear Forces. Indeed, in some areas – in flagrant breach of the Geneva Accords – they’d actually begun to deploy the latest Gorki III rockets, a weapons system that Gorbachev had denied even developing. In secret top-level exchanges, the Soviets had offered various informal assurances that these deployments were purely temporary, part of the crack-down against the dissident republics, but as the data continued to pour in from Fort Meade and GCHQ, it became obvious that the Soviets were adopting an offensive posture along the length of the Central Front. Troops, armour, mobile formations, and dense screens of anti-aircraft assets echeloned in depth all the way back to the Soviet border, a, naked display of force that could never be justified by the suppression of internal rebellion.

  Thus, three weeks ago, the American decision to reinforce Europe, stiffening the resolve of an increasingly neutralist Bonn. And thus this morning’s announcement from Downing Street that the last of the UK’s Territorial Reserve would be mobilized and away by the weekend. The current situation, Davidson concluded regretfully, had all the appearances of a time warp. Post-Gorbachev, it should never have happened. Yet here we all were. Back in the coldest of wars. Praying for some end to the terrible momentum of events.

  At this point, Davidson paused and reached for a glass of water. His exposition had been masterly. He’d led them through the chronology stage by stage, calm, authoritative, the narrative carefully sauced with confidential detail, a name here, a document there. He’d paid them the compliment of trusting them, of opening the doors of Central Government and the intelligence community, and offering them a passing glimpse of what life was really like inside. With his low-key delivery and careful Whitehall prose, he’d asked for – and earned – their total attention. In the silence that followed his opening address, a voice spoke up from the end of the table. It was Nigel Quinn, the city’s leading policeman, a man who had the reputation for drawing the essence out of any situation. Soon, Goodman would ask him for an assessment of the Law and Order implications of the task before them, but first Quinn wanted to be quite certain of his bearings. Strange country. Difficult terrain.

  ‘Mr Davidson,’ he began. Davidson acknowledged him with a smile. ‘Be frank. Where are we now?’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This morning?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Davidson nodded, and paused for a moment, as if savouring the last sweet in the packet.

  ‘It’s difficult to be sure … but from my end of the telescope I’m afraid it looks very unpleasant.’ He paused again, searching for some kind of reference that everyone around the table would understand. Finally he found it, in the shape of the last Civil Defence exercise that they’d all been obliged to attend, three days in a Command Bunker in Reading, tussling with a scenario that led inexorably towards nuclear war. The Exercise had been code-named ‘Hard Rock’. Davidson gazed round, unblinking. ‘In “Hard Rock” terms, gentlemen, I suspect we’re at Zero minus three. And Zero, for those with perfect recall, was when the Americans went nuclear.’

  Mick and Albie were twenty minutes late for their meeting with Harry Cartwright. Cartwright’s offices were in the oldest part of the city, a stone’s throw from the Camber Dock, and he’d only taken the place over at the turn of the year. It was an old Georgian building, sympathetically converted, and Cartwright had written off the cost against the cachet his new address gave an already thriving business.

  Now he sat behind a large, antique desk, piled high with papers and correspondence. He was a small man, dapper, punctilious, with a thin pencil moustache. He had a thin, weak voice, and pale green eyes, and he had built an entire career on people’s readiness to underestimate him.

  He glanced up as Mick and Albie stepped into the room. Cartwright waved them both into chairs in front of the desk, and returned to the file that lay open on his desk. Endless columns of figures, most of them in red.

  Mick settled into the chair nearest the desk, and pulled at the knife-edge creases in his new Jaeger trousers. He told himself he felt much better after the session on the rowing machine. His head was clear, Albie had managed to remember most of the key figures he needed from the books in the garage, and in any case he found it difficult to believe that little Harry Cartwright, with his size six lace-ups, and his damp, flabby handshake, would pull any real strokes. Sure, they’d bombed on the mail order business. Maybe the world wasn’t quite ready for his brand of provocative night attire. And sure, the R&B club had been unlucky with its choice of bar manager. But criminal records were two a penny these days, and in his heart of hearts he still couldn’t believe that the personable young Geordie had stitched him up to that extent. No, Harry’s abrupt phone call had been about something else. A new opportunity. A fresh investment. Some kind of joint venture that would take him even further from the shadow of the council tower blocks he’d once called home. He smiled across at Albie and sprawled a little deeper into the buttoned Dralon. Albie ignored him, staring out of the window without a flicker of interest.

  Cartwright glanced up. He rarely bothered with formalities.

  ‘These are terrible figures,’ he said. ‘You have outflows of eight thousand a month. That’s a median figure over the last two quarters. This last month it’s twelve and a half. Your VAT is five months late on the mail order business. And you haven’t even started to make returns on the club.’

  Mick shrugged. ‘That’s down to you, Harr
y. You’re the accountant.’

  ‘I need a little co-operation, my friend. All I get are bills.’ He paused, not bothering to look down. Evidently he knew the figures by heart. ‘You owe the Revenue nine and a half thousand. You owe your suppliers half as much again. The firm that fitted out the club ring me daily. I tell them you’re owed.’ He paused. ‘Am I lying?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Mick said automatically. ‘Yeah … I am.’

  ‘How much are you owed?’

  ‘Thousands.’

  ‘How many thousands?’

  Mick sniffed and looked away, the gesture of a gentleman unprepared to discuss specific figures. Cartwright composed his fingertips together, unimpressed.

  ‘Technically, you’re bankrupt,’ he said. ‘In law, I should order you to stop trading.’

  For the first time, Mick frowned. He knew things were bad, but bankruptcy was something new.

  ‘Bankrupt?’ he said blankly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You kidding?’

  ‘No.’

  Mick glanced across at the figures on the desk. Upside down, they made no sense, simply a list of jottings. He looked up again. Cartwright was studying him closely. To his intense irritation, he began to feel uncomfortable. He shrugged again, affecting indifference, but his tone betrayed him, rising a semitone as he struggled with the implications of Cartwright’s cold analysis.

  ‘What about the garage, though?’ he said. ‘What about that?’

  ‘Ah …’ Cartwright looked thoughtful. ‘The garage.’

  ‘Yeah, the garage.’ Mick looked across at Albie. Albie was rolling a cigarette. ‘Tell him, Albie, tell him about the garage.’

  Albie looked up, as if surprised by the question. He licked the edge of the Rizla paper, and sealed the cigarette with the thumbs of both hands.

  ‘Tell him what?’ he said at last.

  ‘Tell him how well we’re doing. Tell him about the bomb we made last month.’

  ‘Ah … last month.’ Albie nodded. ‘Yeah … we did OK.’

  ‘OK? OK?’ Mick uncrossed his legs, and pulled himself upright in the chair. ‘OK?’ he said for the third time. ‘You call five grand a week OK?’

  Mick paused, while Albie produced a Zippo lighter from the pocket of his bomber jacket and lit the cigarette. Cartwright, a dedicated non-smoker, blew his nose.

  ‘I understand your garage has been requisitioned,’ he said at last, returning the handkerchief to his pocket. ‘That could make things a little difficult.’

  Nonplussed for a moment, Mick said nothing. He’d hoped to keep the news from Harry until the thing could be sorted. He hadn’t a clue how he’d found out so soon.

  ‘Yeah … well …’ he said, ‘gotta be illegal, hasn’t it? Gotta be. You can’t just close things down like that. It’s against the law. Gotta be …’ Cartwright looked at him.

  ‘We’re going to war, my friend,’ he said, ‘the law’s on their side. They’re defending the realm. I’m afraid it’s a sign of the times.’ He paused, the voice softer, even sympathetic. ‘It’s gone, Michael. As a commercial venture with any relevance to this,’ he tapped the file on the desk, ‘it’s no longer a realistic proposition.’

  Mick frowned again, refusing to accept the logic of what Cartwright was saying.

  ‘But how can they do that?’ he said. ‘Who do we fix? Who does Albie talk to?’ He glanced across at Albie for support. Albie was lost in a cloud of shag tobacco. He looked back at Cartwright. ‘Give us a couple of hours,’ he said. ‘Give us until tonight.’

  Cartwright reached forward and slowly closed the file. The action swept aside Mick’s protests and moved the discussion on towards an inevitable conclusion. The initiative now lay entirely with Cartwright, and Mick knew it. Cartwright sat back in the big chair. He looked, if anything, reflective.

  ‘Friends of mine had faith in you, Michael,’ he began. ‘You came highly recommended, which is why I took you on. You were said to be quick on your feet. Sharp. Good eye for the right openings. Which is why my friends trusted you with so much money.’ He smiled, the smallest adjustment to the thin, tight line of his mouth. ‘You also had a reputation as a fighter, someone who didn’t recognize failure, someone who could turn any comer.’ ‘The smile widened, intimate, encouraging. ‘Now’s the time, Michael, now’s the time …’

  ‘How much time have I got?’

  ‘Forty-eight hours.’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘People want to realize their assets. Understandably so.’

  Mick nodded. ‘And what happens if …?’

  Cartwright got up, sparing him the rest of the sentence.

  ‘My friends will send in the bailiffs.’

  ‘In where?’

  Cartwright paused a moment, then glanced down and reopened the file. The address he wanted was on the head of the page.

  ‘16 George Street.’ He looked up, the smile wider than ever. ‘Or have you moved from there?’

  Joanna Goodman was out in the garden, hanging the last of the morning’s washing on the rotary dryer, when she heard the opening jingle of the hourly radio news through the open kitchen window. She normally made a conscious effort to avoid news broadcasts of any kind, weary of a world where planes were always crashing, icecaps melting, and half the nation’s kids ending up in cardboard boxes under Waterloo Bridge. But over the last day or two, she’d found it impossible to ignore the growing drumbeat of events in Europe. She was no historian, but she knew enough about the last war, her parents’ war, to recognize the way things were going. Regardless of the insanity of it all, regardless of the certain prospect of death, or disfigurement, and huge dollops of human misery, the thing just seemed to happen all the same. Only this time, it would be far, far worse.

  The first item offered an update on the Americans’ wretched submarine. Other warships were heading north. The Russians were already in the area. The wind and the weather were pushing the submarine towards Soviet territorial waters. Washington had warned Moscow that any interference would be met ‘in kind’. Flashpoint was predicted for the day after tomorrow. She shook her head at the neatness of it all. The perfect Hollywood plot, scored for oblivion and full orchestra.

  Going inside, she began to open a tin of baby-food. Lamb dinner with cauliflower. Charlie spotted it at once, and began to reverse the spoon, careful, deliberate movements of his tiny hands, a trick learned barely days before. She eased back the flap of the tin, and reached for a saucepan. The news-reader began an item about the Pope who, predictably enough, was praying for peace. Thousands had packed St Peter’s Square while diplomatic representatives from many nations had joined the congregation inside. The American Ambassador, Scott Harrimann, had evidently been notable by his absence, and afterwards someone had released one hundred white doves. Stupid, thought Joanna, spooning the pale yellow mush into the saucepan. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  The news-reader ground on. Advice from Canberra for Australian nationals in the Northern Hemisphere to return home. Extra flights from Heathrow, courtesy Qantas. An undertaking from the IRA to observe an unofficial ceasefire for the duration of something they rather quaintly called ‘the current troubles’.

  Charlie’s lunch began to bubble on the stove. She stirred it slowly with a wooden spoon, thinking yet again of the quiet, softly-spoken man from London who’d arrived so unexpectedly. The man who’d knocked at her front door, and showed her a Home Office pass, and enquired apologetically about her husband. The man who’d sat only feet away, there in the lounge, nursing a lukewarm cup of coffee, and filling in the missing clues from last week’s Sunday Times. Even after Martin had arrived, as shattered as ever, she was no closer to knowing who the man was, or why he’d come calling so early. Except that he was Government, and mysterious, and important enough for Martin to be unusually deferential.

  She closed her eyes, oblivious for a moment to the torrent of news from the radio. Martin had begun to worry her. Recently he’d become so visibly detached, so obviously in a world of his own, that sh
e’d started to wonder about his sanity. He seemed incapable of sustaining the simplest conversation, of offering her anything but the most cursory of answers. His bedtime stories for the children, the precious hinge around which their days closed, had become so brief as to be pointless. He’d also started drinking heavily, big measures of gin topped with a spoonful of tonic, and she’d yesterday found an empty bottle of Panadol in the swingbin in the bathroom. The tablets had been extra strength, and she was quite certain he’d emptied the entire bottle in less than a month.

  At first, she’d thought of confronting him, of asking what the matter was, of trying, somehow, to help, but whenever she’d managed to steer the conversation in the right direction, he’d spot what was coming, and ease himself off the sofa, and head for the drinks cabinet for a refill, or towards the telephone for yet another call that couldn’t possibly wait.

  Their sex life, too, had begun to suffer. It had never rung the loudest of bells, but they’d been fond together, and she enjoyed the feeling of his body over hers, his smell, and the way he collapsed so completely when it was all over. It made him somehow young again, and helpless, a near-adolescent, briefly needful, briefly hers. Lately, though, their lovemaking had virtually stopped, a consequence, she vaguely assumed, of the gin.

  The man on the radio was at last bringing the bulletin to a close. A spokesman for the motoring organizations was warning about the possibility of fuel shortages. Drivers planning long journeys should take appropriate precautions. Joanna hesitated. She stopped stirring the babyfood for a moment and gazed at Charlie, wondering whether the crisis justified taking the children away somewhere, to her mother’s perhaps, in Wales, or to the country. Charlie beamed back and lifted the spoon. She was lucky. He loved his food. She reached for his bib and tied it carefully round his neck. She emptied the food into a bowl and tested the first spoonful with her tongue. Then she began to spoon it gently into his mouth. She began to sing at him, very low, very soft, the way she used to when he was the tiniest of babies. Charlie gazed up at her, and reached out, fascinated by the noise. She fed him more of the lumpy yellow mush, and he swallowed it slowly, quietened by her singing. She ran out of words, and began to make them up, nonsense phrases, yummy and mummy and tummy … teddy and steady and ready … love and above and dove. The last phrase made her think briefly of the Pope, and the crowds in the Vatican square, and the image of the white birds fluttering upwards. And then she thought again about Martin, and the sight of him walking across the gravel towards the strange man’s car, and the ever-courteous wave of farewell as they drove away towards the road. Her voice faltered and died, and the child gazed up at her, his mouth half open, wondering at the tears pouring down her cheeks.