A Line in the Sand

by Gerald Seymour

  Perry, half listening, dozed, with Stephen's warmth against him.

  "Letting me sleep when you bloody knew I'd hit him, that's below the bloody belt. How long have you known, you bastard, that I got the shite?"

  He could feel Stephen's slight spare bones. For a moment he had thought he lay against Meryl's warmth. He shuddered. The morning's light seeped into the house through drawn curtains and reached into the safe area between the mattresses and the sandbags. Rankin was cocky, bouncing. Paget was behind him with a slow grin spreading. The assembled company didn't see him. He thought he did not matter to them any more.

  He heard the lorry drive away.

  "I mean, telling me I'd missed when I knew I'd hit, that is a professional slur, Joe. If I say so myself, forty metres minimum and no light, a moving target, that is one hell of a shot. What is it, Joe? Come on, I want to hear you bloody well say it..."

  They were all laughing. Blake and Davies had been up all night, but Paget and Rankin had dossed down on the kitchen floor to catch a few hours' sleep.

  Perry asked quietly, "If he was hit, why do we need the blindicide screen?"

  He had interrupted them. They turned to look down at him and the sleeping child. They were the only friends he had and none of them cared a damn for him, they were strangers.

  Davies said, "His name is Vahid Hossein. He fired a single grenade from the launcher. There's a flash at the front and a flame signature at the back. Mr. Paget and Mr. Rankin were going off their duty shift. They engaged him. He ran into the churchyard. Mr. Rankin was presented with a difficult shooting opportunity. He took it, fired twice, but with a handgun at the limit of its effective range. There was no blood and nobody. Mr. Paget assumed that Mr. Rankin had missed his target, that's phase one. Later, a woman walking her dogs on the common starts bawling about "Black Toby". God knows what she's doing out with dogs in the middle of a deluge. She says she saw a lifeless woman and a black-faced man on the ground. She's going on about some nonsense that happened two hundred years ago. Police officers went to the scene and found a young woman raped and dead, but no man. The young woman was a Muslim convert, and the eyes, ears, fetcher and carrier for Vahid Hossein. She was covered in blood but it wasn't hers. The man who raped her, while he strangled her, bled on her from his gunshot wound. Mr. Paget and Mr. Rankin use soft-nose bullets in the Glock, and that is phase two. Phase three is incomplete. He is wounded, Mr. Perry, but he is not dead. Although he'd lost considerable quantities of blood, he was strong enough to leave the murder scene. He is out there, in pain, and still in possession of the RPG-7 launcher. The rain in the night has washed away the chances of tracker dogs finding him. He did not take the convert's car. We do not believe he has tried to leave. An hour ago, an inflatable was launched from an Iranian tanker in the Channel and came to a rendezvous on a beach. He was not there to be lifted out. We had it under surveillance, but took no action. Thus we believe he's

  still here. The military are beginning a search for him. Now, we classify Vahid Hossein as more dangerous than at any time. You, Mr. Perry, are the cause of his pain, his suffering. If he has the strength, in our assessment, he will make a last attack on your home. That, Mr. Perry, is the reason for puffing up the screen around the house that will prematurely detonate we hope an armour-piercing grenade."

  "And is that why you were laughing?"

  The wind swept the cloud away, leaving the sun balanced precariously on the sea's horizon.

  Geoff Markham thought the young man tolerated his presence on the bench overlooking Southmarsh.

  They had dossed down in the car. He had woken at the first smear of light, but Chalmers had slept on, curled in the back seat with his dogs, a baby's peace on his face. Only when he'd woken had the sourness replaced the peace. Once it had been light enough to see the village, the expanse of the green and the high iron poles in front of the house with the close wire mesh netting hanging from them, he had eased out of the car.

  Chalmers hadn't spoken, hadn't given any explanation, but had called for his dogs and emptied out the last of the biscuits from his pocket for them. He hadn't said where he was going, or what he intended, but he had walked away with the dogs scampering at his feet.

  Geoff Markham, not knowing what else he could do, had heaved himself out of the seat, locked the car, had stretched, coughed, scratched, then went after him.

  His shoes sloshed with water, his socks were wringing wet, and his shirt and coat had not dried out in the night. The letter was damp in his pocket. The wind was sharp off the sea, raw on his face. A coastal cargo ship nestled on the sea's horizon line. The birds were up over the beach and over the marsh. He was cold, damp, and his stomach growled for food. Where did the arrogance come from, the belief that his small efforts had changed the movement of events? He wanted to be in bed, warmed, close to Vicky, and ordinary, without responsibility, free from the consequences of his actions. If he posted the letter he would have none of the things he thought he wanted. He slogged on. It would be the supreme moment of conceit if he posted the letter, it would be the statement of his belief that he changed events.

  He found Chalmers sitting, very still, on the bench, and the dogs were beside him. Chalmers, never looking at the sea, wouldn't have seen the coastal cargo ship; he was watching the Southmarsh. What disturbed Markham most about him was that the young man seemed merely to tolerate him and feel no need for his company.

  The bench was where Geoff Markham had met Dominic Evans, the shopkeeper. It was set high enough for him to overlook the sea, the beach, the sea wall and the marshland where the reed-tips whipped in the wind. The sun, throwing low light shafts, made it pretty. His mother would have liked it there, and his father would have taken a photograph.

  Eight of them materialized, in single file, along the path behind the bench where Markham and Chalmers sat in silence.

  Buried under the weight of their equipment they marched past the bench and briskly down towards the trees that shielded the shore-line of the marsh from his view. It would have been settled after the death of Meryl Perry. The secretary of state would have bowed to irresistible pressures and taken the control out of poor old Fenton's hands. The military would have stepped eagerly into the void he knew the men, or at least the unit, from Ireland. He knew the kit they carried and the weapons. He had seen the troopers from the Regiment slip away at dusk from Bessbrook Mill and the fortress at Crossmaglen, seen them run towards the threshing blades of the helicopters on the pads in the barracks at Dungannon and Newtown Hamilton. They were the quiet men who seldom spoke, who waited and nursed their mugs of tea and rolled their smokes and moved when the darkness came or the helicopters started up the rotors.

  Markham watched the column snake down the path towards the Southrnarsh and the black water where the wildfowl bobbed in the low sun's light. Two carried the Parker Hale sniper rifles. One had the snub 66mm anti-armour launcher, another cradled a general-purpose machine-gun and was swathed with belt ammunition across his torso, one had the radio, the stun grenades and the gas grenades. Three went easily with their Armalite rifles held loosely. They didn't look at him, nor at Chalmers and his dogs. Geoff thought it was the moment that his relevance, and Cox's and

  Fenton's, ended. Their faces and hands were blacked up. Sprigs of foliage were woven into their clothes. It was as if, he thought, in bitterness, the job was taken from boys and given to men. He looked obliquely at Chalmers beside him and the very calm of his face abetted the bitterness. Control had gone to the guns of the killing team. Everything he had done was set at nothing, snatched from him by the men with guns who went down into the marshland and the reed-beds. The last one had slipped from his sight.

  "That's it, we're wasting our bloody time," he said savagely.

  Chalmers remained impassive, silent.

  "Time we were gone. Time, if you know how to use one, for a bloody bath."

  Chalmers sat on the bench and his eyes searched the clear gold blue of the skies over the marshes.


  "Sending you was ridiculous, a humiliation for the Service. They should have been put in twenty-four hours ago. They're the professionals, they're the bloody killers. They'll find him." He stood up.

  Chalmers squinted at a point high above the reed-beds.

  "They won't find him." His head never moved, his gaze never shifted.

  "Enlighten me. On what is that stunning insight based?"

  "They won't find him because he isn't here." Chalmers spoke from the side of his mouth. His head was stock still, and he peered into the lightening sky.

  "He isn't here?"

  "Not here."

  "Then, excuse me, please, tell me, what the fuck are we doing?"

  "He saved the life of the bird, and I have time for that, and now he's hurt .. . I have respect for the beasts where I work, I have a duty to them when they're hurt. He fed the bird and treated the bird's injury. The bird is searching for him and cannot find him. If the bird cannot find him then he's not here."

  Markham sagged back down on to the bench. He looked out over the reed-banks and the water. The wind came into his face and his eyes smarted.

  He peered into the clearing sky. Far below where he looked were the birds of the marsh and the Regiment's troopers. He searched for it but it was a long time before he saw the speck of dark against the blue. He held it, and perhaps it turned, and he lost it. It was very high, where the winds would be fierce. Chalmers's eyes were never off it. Geoff Markham blinked and his eyes watered as they strained, again, to locate the speck. Beside him, Chalmers sat rock still and relaxed, leaning back as if to be more comfortable. His dogs scrapped at his feet. When Markham found the bird again, he could have yelled in triumph. He was trained in the analysis of covert computerized data, he was offered work at what they'd call the coalf ace of fiscal interpretation, and he could have shouted in excitement because his wet, sore eyes identified a speck moving at a thousand feet up, about a thousand yards away. He saw the bird, and it had moved, gone north, and it still searched. He could have hugged Chalmers because the keenness of this stinking youth's eyesight had given him hope, at last.

  "I am sorry what I said was out of order. I apologize. Did you think of telling them, the military, that he wasn't here?"

  "No."

  He wanted only to be alone.

  A woman police officer, a cheerful, pleasant girl with a blonde pony-tail of hair and a crisp clean uniform, knelt awkwardly because of her belt, which carried handcuffs, gas canisters and a stick, on the hall carpet to help Stephen with a colouring book and crayons.

  To be alone and to think of her.

  Blake, dressed but with his shoes kicked off, slept on the settee in the living room. While his eyes were closed and his breathing regular, his hand rested on the butt of his gun in the holster of his chest harness, his radio burping staccato messages from his jacket pocket.

  To remember her.

  Davies, in shirtsleeves because he had two bars of the electric fire on, was at the familiar slot of the dining-room table with the newspaper spread out, reading the market and the financial comment. He coordinated the radio link to the crisis centre and the locations of the mobile patrols.

  And to mourn.

  He was not allowed, by Davies, to go upstairs to their bedroom.

  "Not protected there, Mr. Perry, I'm sure you understand."

  He was not allowed, by Paget, to go out through the kitchen door into his sunlit garden.

  "Rather you didn't, Mr. Perry, wouldn't be sensible."

  They denied him the space that he yearned for.

  Perry sat on the floor between the mattresses and behind the sandbags.

  Chalmers moved.

  It was a full half-hour since Geoff Markham had given up on the search for the speck. The sky was clearer, brightening blue with pale cirrus corrugated lines of cloud, and it hurt more to look for the bird. He was thinking of the future of his career, whether he would be positioned back with Rainbow Gold, whether, he would be assigned to a university town where there were faculties of nuclear physics and microbiology growing botulisms at which Iranian students were enrolled, or whether he would be dumped into the new team working on illegal immigration, or the old Irish unit or narcotics.." when Chalmers moved.

  Chalmers was already twisted round, his eye-line no longer on the skies above the marsh. The Regiment men would be down in the reed-banks and the water now, and there was nothing to show their presence. Chalmers stood, his back turned to them, and moved.

  There was no discussion, no conversation, no explanation.

  Chalmers whistled softly for the dogs to come to his heel, then started to track back up the path towards the village.

  He walked with his head craning upwards, as if the sight of the bird, the speck, was too precious to be lost, and Markham was left to trail behind.

  The path brought them back to the village between the hall and the pub. Chalmers strode surely, briskly, never looked down to see where his feet trod, and puddles splashed on to his trouser-legs.

  Cars scuttled past them, and a van with a builder's ladder lashed to the roof, but that was the only motion of life in the village. It was a bright, sunny morning with cheerful light and a bracing wind, but no one walked and took pleasure in it. He thought the fear and the shame were all around, in the houses, the road and on the lanes as if a plague had come and the inevitability of disaster was upon them.

  A fierce rapping, knuckle and glass, and a protest shout, startled him. He saw a woman at a window, her face contorted in fury. The woman pointed at her cut front lawn. One of the dogs had crapped on it, the second lifted a stumpy rear leg against the Venus statue that was a bird-bath. Chalmers didn't call off his dogs, didn't look at her or seem to hear her, just walked on and all the time he studied the skies. Markham stared pointedly at the far side of the road.

  They went by the house on the green, the sun making silver patterns on the new wire of the screen.

  Chalmers never glanced at the house, as if it held no interest for him.

  They went through the village.

  A few times, Markham looked for the bird and could not find it. He thought of it, high in the upper winds, soaring and circling and searching, and he thought of the power of the bird's eyesight and he thought of the man, Vahid Hossein, in pain and in hiding. Andy Chalmers had talked of respect and of duty to a beast that was hurt. He didn't think they would understand at Thames House, and it was pretty damned hard for him to comprehend why respect was due to a wounded killer and what duty was owed him. Chalmers walked remorselessly through the village, and out of it.

  Beyond the village was a river-mouth, then more wave-whipped beaches; at their furthest point were the distant bright colours of a holiday community nestling in the sunlight.

  A path ran alongside the river on top of an old flood-defence wall. In the fields between the village and the path, cattle grazed on grassy islands among the pools of the winter floods. Chalmers was ahead of him, high above the river and the fields, and all the time he gazed upwards.

  Hungry, thirsty, the foul taste in his mouth, his shoes sodden, his feet cold, his back stiff, Geoff Markham followed blindly, thinking of food, coffee, a shower, dry socks, a clean shirt and dry shoes, and ... he careered into Chalmers's back, jolted against it. Chalmers didn't seem to notice him. Beyond the fields, going away from the village, and the banks of the river and the raised pathway, was Northmarsh. The sunlight gently rippled the water.

  The sun caught the flight of the bird, now lower in the sky, but still high above the swaying old reed-heads of the Northmarsh.

  The bird had come down from the upper winds and now it quartered over the marshlands. It was as he had seen it over the Southmarsh. The bird searched.

  Chalmers walked to where the path cut back towards the village then stepped over a fence of sagging, rusted wire and settled himself down on the small space of rabbit-chewed grass beside the water and the reed-beds. His dogs began to fight over a length of rotten wood. There
was peace, quiet and serenity, until Markham heard the bird's call.

  "Do you want help? Do you want the guns here?"

  "No."

  He watched the bird search, and listened for its shrill, insistent call.

  "Man'? It's Joel, I'm doing night duty. Sorry to disturb you yeah, I know what the time is... Duane's been on. He's very perky. They have the jerk winged and holed up. Duane says it's close to over. I need your say-so for getting the wheels moving y'know, camera, microphones, lights, action. I guarantee you that the mullahs are about to have a very bad day. They are going to squirm like never before. Duane says it won't fit the Brit picture, going public -Duane says to go quiet till there's a prisoner or a corpse, then hit the mullahs, and hard. Can I start to move the wheels, Man'?.

  That's all I need, thanks. Oh, the jerk got the target's wife last night they're so fucking incompetent it's not true but the game's still running..."

  How many sausages for Stephen? How many for the nanny policewoman? Did Davies like his eggs turned over? Should Blake be woken? Rankin had found one of Meryl's aprons and wore it tied to his lower stomach so that his waist holster cleared it.

  And Perry hadn't been asked how many sausages he wanted, nor about the raid on the refrigerator. There would be a plate for him in the kitchen with sausages, bacon and eggs, whether he wanted it or not. He wasn't consulted because he was only the bloody principal. He felt a sickness in his stomach. He ached for Meryl. Paget came past him, carrying two loaded plates, heading for the dining room, the french windows and the outside hut, where the new team were on duty.

  He had to be with her and alone, to kneel and cry for her forgiveness.

  The policewoman shepherded Stephen into the kitchen. Davies followed with his newspaper, and Blake in his stockinged feet.

  He was an afterthought. The life of the house went on, they were all sitting at his kitchen table.