"Where is he?" Fenton asked.
"I don't know." Markham's voice, distorted by the scrambler, echoed back at him.
"I only know that he's sitting out there in the bloody bog."
"Have you called him, has he sit-repped?"
"I wouldn't dare to call the ungracious little beggar, I'm only the fetcher and carrier I reckon he'd garrotte me if I disturbed him."
"Doesn't he know the importance of continuous contact?"
"He knows it if you told him it."
"Geoff, does he realize how much is riding on his back?"
"That, too, I expect you told him. I'll call you when he deigns to make contact.
"Bye, Mr. Fenton."
Fenton shivered. He was alone, but for the company of a third-year probationer who watched the telephones. It was always late at night, when an operation was running towards climax, that he shivered, not from cold but from nerves. In the day, surrounded by acolytes, the confidence boomed in him. But Parker had gone, the American with her, and the elder of the probationers, the old warhorse from B section. Cox had left early to prepare for a dinner party. It would be the end of him if the boy, Chalmers, failed. He would be a casualty, washed up, sneered at, shown the early-retirement door.
Half-way across the world was another man who would be sweating on the fear of failure. He did not know what an office high in the Ministry of Information and Security would be like, but he seemed to sense that man shivering in the same sweat as dribbled on his own back. He had talked of contftil but late at night, he reflected, there was not a vestige of control for either of them. It was always like that, never different, when the little people took charge and the power of the high and mighty was stripped from their hands... He would sleep at Thames House that night, and the next, sleep there until it was over... Because he had volunteered to take responsibility, the career of Harry Fenton lay in the grubby hands of Andy Chalmers.
"Home is where we are. Home isn't about people, isn't about things. Home is where you are, and Stephen and me. There isn't anything for us here. You said home was about friends but there aren't any, they've gone. Anywhere we are together is home. I can't take it, not any more."
She lay with her back to him. Her voice was low-pitched and flat calm. Perry thought she was beyond weeping.
It was coming to the end of a complex day for the intelligence officer. The demand for information, clarification of a situation, from Tehran led to his walking along the corridor with the flowers on his arm and the grapes in his hand, one among many visitors.
The brigadier in Tebran had insisted. The intelligence officer, nervous, wary, had left his embassy office in the middle of the day. He had not seen a tail but always assumed one followed him. He had driven to the home in west London's suburbs of a colleague from Visa Section, parked outside the front of the house, been greeted at the door and invited inside. Without stopping, he had gone out of a back door, crossed the rear garden to the gate, tracked along an alley between garages and taken his colleague's car. He had driven to the offices and yard of the car-hire company at the extreme of south London, and asked about a BMW rented out to Yusuf Khan. A shadow of hesitation crossed the young woman's face, and he had eased his wallet from his pocket. A hundred pounds, palmed across the desk, in twenty-pound notes had lightened the shadow. He was shown, hurriedly, a photograph from an insurance file of the wrecked vehicle. He was told of the hospital where the injured man was treated.. . Did she know about a passenger? The police had not spoken of one... It was already early evening by the time he reached the hospital. After checking for the location of Delivery/ Post-natal, he headed for the casualty ward.
He was another visitor, one of many who anxiously came to see the sick, the injured and the maimed. He had the flowers and the grapes, as if they guaranteed him admittance.
He walked slowly down the centre of the ward, through the aisle between the beds, scanning the faces of the patients.
He seemed lost and confused but none of the harassed nursing staff came forward to help him.
A corridor was ahead of him, signs for the fire escape, and to the side a trolley carrying resuscitation equipment. He took a risk because Tehran required it of him. He edged forward with the fool's smile on his face.
Only when he was beside the trolley did he see the policeman with the machine-gun on his lap.
"I am looking for my sister and her baby."
There was a door with a glass window in it. Behind it a second policeman was reading a magazine that half hid the bulk of his firearm. He saw the bed, and the bandaged head of Yusuf Khan.
"Not here, no babies here thank God."
"This not the place for babies?"
He gazed at the bandaged head, the linking tubes, the opened eyes. The head shook, the tubes wavered, the eyes blinked with recognition.
"Absolutely, pal, this is not the place for babies."
He saw the tears gathering in the eyes, and he thought he saw a trace of guilt flicker there.
"I must ask again."
He walked away. He had seen what he needed to see. He laid the flowers and the grapes on the ward sister's desk. When he left his colleague's house in west London, he sped back to central London and his office at the embassy, with the urgent report to be sent by secure coded communication to Tehran locked in his mind.
"Is that what you want, a van coming to the front door? All those bastards out in the road, watching. You want to give them that satisfaction? Your things, everything that's personal to you your furniture, your clothes, your pictures, your life paraded for them. They'll spit at the car as it takes us away. Is that what you want?"
His hand was on her shoulder and his fingers massaged Meryl's bones and muscles. She never looked at hiWi and she didn't speak.
The brigadier was a careful man. If his back was to be protected, it was necessary for him always to be careful. He was that rarity in the service of the Ministry of Information and Security, an intelligence officer who had made the transition from the previous regime. He had crossed sides. The majority with whom he had worked as a captain in the SAVAK were long dead, hanged, shot, butchered, for their service to the Shah. But three days before the mob the street scum from south Tebran had entered and sacked the SAVAK offices on Hafez Avenue, he had taken a suitcase of files from his workplace and made contact with his enemy. The files were his credentials. With them were his memories of names, locations and faces. In the confused days that followed he was, to the new men of Iran, a small, treasured mine of knowledge. The names of former colleagues, the locations of safe-houses and the faces of informers, all had tripped off his tongue as he bought himself survival.
The new regime, of course, was innocent in the matters of security and counter-revolution. The change coat prospered as his colleagues died. When the captured Americans from the embassy protested that they were not employees of the Agency, the change-coat could identify them. When the Mujahiddin rose in revolt against the Imam, he could put faces to names. He had been promoted to major and then colonel in the Vezarat-e-Ettelaat Va Ammyat-e Kishvar, and now held the rank, in the VEVAK, of brigadier, but he was too intelligent, too cautious a man to believe that his position would ever be secure and above suspicion. A few detested him, a few more despised him, the majority, those who knew his past, were wary of him.
The protective screens with which he surrounded himself were the zealot's commitment to the new regime, coupled with a total, ruthless efficiency. No word of criticism for the mullahs in government and influence ever crossed his lips, no mistake in his planning of operations was ever admitted. If the mildest words of criticism were ever spoken he would be denounced and pitched from his office. There were many, and he knew it, who would clamour to fire the bullet or tighten the noose around his neck.
Vahid Hossein had been like a son to him.. . The communication from London was on his desk. The hot, fume-filled night was around his high office. Tears and guilt meant betrayal, were evidence that a coward, Yusuf
Khan, had talked. It was his hope,
alone in the cigarette-smoke-filled office, that the man who had been like a son to him would be shot dead.
It would be worse if the great tanker, which was the pride of the fleet, were intercepted as it slowed in the shipping lanes to launch the inflatable, was boarded and impounded. He weighed the possibilities open to him, then wrote an instruction for the VEVAK officer who worked as an official at the building of the National Iranian Tanker Corporation. The ship was to sail in the morning. There was to be no attempt at a pick-up.
For his own survival, to avoid an inevitable fate, he cut the link to Vahid Hossein. He did not hesitate.
"I want to go shopping, I want Stephen to go to school, I want you to go to work, I want us go walking I don't want, ever again, Frank, to see a gun. I want to be happy again. There's nothing left for us here."
Downstairs the television droned on, under Davies's tuneless whistling to himself. There was a muted cackle of laughter from the hut at the back, and the revving of the engine of the car at the front to keep the heater going. Everything they listened to, all around them, was sourced by the guns.
"Please, I'm begging it of you, please.. ." Perry's voice quavered to his wife's silence.
"In a way it's like Khe Sanh, not that I was there."
They were so nervous, as if frightened of each other. Littelbaum would not undress her. Cathy had done it herself, stripping while he had turned his back to her to shed the old tweed suit, the crumpled shirt and the underclothes that weren't quite clean. He had gentle hands and they touched her breasts with a teenager's awe, as he lay on her, was inside her.
"Khe Sanh was staking out a goat. We put down a base, the middle of nowhere, and we invited them to come and get us. We thought the North Vietnamese Army would destroy itself when it came on to our wire."
Cathy thought it was his nerves that m'~ade him spatter out the bullshit, and she reckoned he hadn't a woman in Riyadh, was as lonely as herself. It was a long time since she had had sex. This was ship-deck romance, without commitment, and in less than forty-eight hours he would be on the flight back to where he had come from. We reckoned we had it right at Khe Sanh, had learned the French lessons from Dien Bien Phu. The French hadn't the resources we had, but they believed in the same principle, which was putting out a bait with the opportunity to smack the bad bastard when he comes sniffing..."
She was not into public-service sex. She was not available to the Germans, the Israelis and the Italians, who came to liaise for a few days at Thames House. She was not a convenient bicycle for men far from home. The American was as lonely and as diffident as herself, and hid it behind the gruff all-knowing professionalism, as she did. She had known they would end up there, on her bed, when she had suggested brusquely that she'd cook him supper. It was what she'd thought she needed after the long drive down from Derby, with the girl preying on her mind. In her car, outside the door as she'd fished in her bag for the keys, inside when she'd brought him the big whisky, in her bedroom where she'd led him by the hand, he'd looked like a scared cat in a corner. He was above her, going so slowly as if terrified of failing her, and talking.
You've got to have nerve when you get into this game, and you have to be prepared to take casualties. The young fellow -Markham he doesn't have the nerve, doesn't accept that foot-soldiers get hurt. You've got to go for broke we weren't prepared to at Khe Sanh, nor the French at Dien Bien Phu. We lost, they lost, but the principle was right."
She didn't give a tinker's toss for Khe Sanh and Dien Bien Phu. It was a relief to have the smell of a man with her, his weight on her, and the size of a man in her. She moved as slowly as he did and she dreaded the end of it. She didn't care that he talked.
"You know, Cathy, I think the worm has turned."
She squeezed him. She raked his back with her short nails that she never bothered to paint, as other women did. She laughed out loud.
"Are we off goats?"
"You are a lovely, fine woman, and I regret, I apologize, I'm not doing much good for you. We are on to worms."
"Tell me about worms."
She heaved up against him, against his bones and the wide flab of his stomach. Too long since she had known it, the pleasure seeping through her, and she thrust again, and she heard her own moan, and she was not lasting, and he was quickening and it was to her, lonely each day and each night, a little piece of pleasure that had no future.
"Worms can turn. The defence is in place. The guns are covering the goat. The predator has to come. It is not acceptable to the predator that he goes back to his lair without a kill. He can't bug out, Cathy, can't go back to Tehran with an empty gut and the odds against him are stacked higher, and the marksmen are waiting for him. It's turned, that's the feeling in my water... turned ... advantage lost.. . what I say... Christ, Cathy..."
He gasped and cried out. She held him. She knew that she would never hear from him, nor of him, again. The flight would go. He looked down at her with devotion. She pushed him off.
"I'm hungry. Come on, let's eat."
She went naked, as if the shyness was shed, to the kitchen, and heaved open the fridge. It would be instant bloody curry out of the microwave. She heard him call, tired, with a quaver in his voice, from the bedroom.
"The worm, might have, might just have, turned..."
"Please, I'm saying it again and again. Don't go. I can't walk away. Once was one time too many. I'm nothing if you've gone. Do you think I haven't thought about it, going? Packing and running? I have to stand and face it, for what I did. It's nearly over, nearly finished... Please stay, please."
Perry held her against him. He wondered if the detective or the men in the hut were listening. He clung, in the darkness, to Meryl.
The cups and saucers for the coffee, the biscuit plates and the glasses for the fruit juice had been stacked on trays and carried away into the kitchenette area. The chairs scraped the wooden floor as the audience settled. Gratifyingly, the hail was almost filled, but the Wildlife Group always attracted the village's best response.
Peggy was busy rounding up the last of the lost crockery. Emma Carstairs was fussing with the blinds, el'~ecking they would keep out the nearest glow from the street-lamp. Barry fiddled with the beam from the slide projector and called for Jerry Wroughton to move the screen fractionally. Mary was helping to manoeuvre Mrs.
Wilson's wheelchair into a better position to see the screen. Mrs. Fairbrother sat aloof in the front row, Mr. Hackett behind her, and Dominic and his partner talked softly. There were more than fifty present, a good turnout on a bad night; the numbers of village regulars were augmented by a few who had driven from Dunwich, a carload from Blythburgh, and more from Southwold.
Paul clapped his hands for attention and the chatter died.
"First, well done for coming on a filthy night. Second, apologies that we won't be having minutes from the committee's last meeting and can't hand out the usual list of summer speakers. I reckon most of you know the problem we've had with getting things typed up -any volunteers?" No hands were raised, but there had been a growl of understanding at the mention of the problem.
"Third, my pleasure in welcoming Dr. Julian Marks from the RSPB who is going to talk to us on the subject of migration. Dr. Marks..."
To generous applause, a long-haired man, with a gangling body, his face tanned by weather, stepped forward.
Dr. Marks said loudly, "I'm taking it I can be heard. Everyone hear me at the back yes? Excellent. I want to begin with a thank-you, two, actually. Thank you for inviting me, but more important, an especial thank-you from the RSPB for your last donation, which was an extraordinary amount from a village of this size and reflects a very caring and decent community. Fund-raising on that scale marks this village as a place of warmth, a place of overwhelming generosity. Now, migration... The lights faded.
The beam of the projector caught the screen.
Few in the hall's audience saw Simon and Luisa Blackmore slide sou
ndlessly into empty seats in the back row; none present would have known of her fear of crowded, bright-lit rooms.
"You know, living as you do alongside those wonderful empty marshlands, the most beautiful of the migratory birds, the marsh harrier..."
"You're protected, and Stephen, and me."
"He was at the door, he was only trying to break down the fucking door. With a gun to kill us, in our home-' "It can't happen again, I promise it's what they've told me. You can't move for men here, everywhere, protecting us.
Meryl twisted on the bed to face him. Her arms were around his neck. She had his promise and clung to it.
Gussie, in the summer months, dug gardens in the village when he had finished at the piggery, then went home for his tea, then to the pub. In the darker winter months, when he couldn't use the evenings to turn over the vegetable patches at the Carstairs' and the Wroughtons', and at Perry's house, he went straight home from the pig farm for his tea, then to the pub. After the pub, his mother, his younger brothers and sisters already gone to bed, he sat in the chair, master of the house, and read the magazines he bought in Norwich, stories about combat and survival, and he dreamed. He sent away for mail-order books and reckoned himself expert in counter-terrorism, low-intensity warfare, and the world of the military; he should have been listened to in the pub. His father was gone, living the last four years with some tart in Ipswich, and he was the breadwinner for the family. He had his tea when he wanted it. Home revolved around him, and his earning power. He believed, as the wage-earner, that he was the equal of any man he met in the pub. But he never found, quite, the popularity he thought he deserved. His life, with the other workers in the pig-fields, with the people in the cul-de-sac where he lived, or in the pub where he propped up the bar each evening, was a constant search for that elusive popularity. Stories never heard through to the end, jokes never quite laughed at, his opinion rarely asked... He was big, well muscled, could throw around the straw bales on which the pigs slept with ease, and because of his size he had never known fear.
A Line in the Sand Page 33
