The Action

by Peter Tonkin

  Stone stood a little apart, shunned by all, watching silently. “Until the sea shall give up her dead,” said Laughton. It was as much as the boxer from Liverpool could remember of the marine burial service. Then Bates and Slobowski pushed the white canvas parcel off the cliff-edge. In silence, they all watched it falling.

  It fell feet first until halfway down the cliff, where the rock took a slight step out and formed a ledge. The corpse bounced off the edge of this, sending up a shrieking cloud of birds and tumbled into the ocean. They stood until the pale, uncertain shape was lost in the fathomless blue and then they filed back to their camp by the pool.

  “Well,” said Gant eventually, over a moody silence. “I think we need a new leader.”

  “Why?” snapped Slobowski. He was angry and wary.

  “Well…” Gant looked round for support. He felt it was imperative that there should be someone to make important decisions quickly: a leader.

  “I agree,” said Wells and Mrs Gash nodded brightly, very much a part of the conversation.

  “Who, then?” asked Bates. He did not sound happy. His eyes kept stealing towards Slobowski and Laughton.

  “I nominate Mr Gant,” said Wells calmly, as though this were a board meeting of some civilised London club.

  “I think Laughton,” said Bates immediately, his eyes narrow and cunning.

  “Yes,” said Slobowski, backing Bates.

  “I second Mr Gant,” said Mrs Gash to put him in his place.

  “We’ll have to take a vote,” suggested Wells.

  “Bloody democracy,” muttered Bates mutinously, but Laughton caught his eye and shook his head fractionally: he did not want to be the leader. He was far too well aware of what had happened to the last two who had held the post. Laughton and Gant did not vote of course. Bates and Slobowski voted for Laughton. Wells and the women voted for Gant.

  Stone did not vote. Instead he wandered away, lost in a brown study. He still had a lot of thinking to do. There was quite a little forest on two sides of the pool and beyond the clearing where the river would run to the sea when the rains came. Beyond that, towards the low end of the island, there was open ground covered with grass which grew more and more sparsely until it led to a sandy ridge falling away on one side to a curve of low sand-cliffs and on the other to the bay where they had beached the boat.

  Stone went down to the boat and then along the beach. As the island humped up again above him - he was walking back towards the cliffs - the crescent of sand narrowed until it seemed to vanish into the water, but here, with the waves busy about his feet, Stone discovered that he was at the point of a headland which fell back immediately into a second tiny bay bound entirely by low cliffs. He waded carefully round the headland and into the bay. It was shadowed and peaceful, the quiet broken only by birds, waves and wind. It was a perfect place to sit down, relax and try to work things out.

  For weeks now, ever since he had, without warning or reason, been told to leave Singapore and was presented with a ticket for the next departing ship, he had known that someone - probably Nash - had put him back in the field. At first he had been angry, of course. They had no right and they knew it. He had served his time and been granted honourable discharge after Anne’s death. But then he had thought: they will have known all that. Nash will have known it all and considered it all before sending his directive to those quiet, courteous policemen in Singapore. So the next logical question was: why? Why had they put him back in the firing line?

  He took out his cigarette case: only five left, he would have to make them last. He lit one anyway, thinking. If Nash had put him here then there was a good reason. He had never particularly liked Nash, but he never underestimated him. And if there was a reason, then it had to have been important, because Nash - or whoever was responsible - had broken the rules. First of all he should have been officially recalled. That he had not been recalled at all did not really bother him. He would never lose the instinct for when an action was running: it was clearly unnecessary to drag him back to Queen Anne’s Gate and say, “Look here old chap we’ve got a bit of an action running out of Singapore; we know you’re retired and all that but would you mind terribly much…” It wasn’t necessary, but it would have been courteous.

  More important was the lack of equipment. He had never really enjoyed traipsing around the various scientific sub-sections stocking up like James Bond with all the latest gadgetry, home-grown and imported, but there was a great deal to be said in the most vicious of stress situations for the spiritual comfort a gun might bring. (This thought from a man who had always steered clear of guns in so far as he could.) Or a hyperpowerful microtransmitter with its built-in assurance that somebody out there cared for you, and might come in and save your bacon at any moment.

  There was even some comfort to be derived from the old cyanide pills - at least you were among the elite with utter control over your own final destiny. But he had been dumped in at the deep end with no equipment, and he felt like a child who can swim perfectly well, but was missing his rubber ring.

  Much more importantly, there was no Control. Nash had always been his Control during his working life. He had been one of the Soldier’s stable. Soldier Nash. God! how it all came back. He hadn’t thought of Nash or his nickname in years. How many others there had been working for Nash he never knew. He never wanted to know. Some agents, executives (another step back into the old slang) wanted to know all about their Control’s other boys and girls.

  An executive relied on his Control emotionally to a great extent, actually to the death sometimes. The bond between them was usually strong, even if they didn’t like each other much. An executive needed a Control for myriad reasons. To hate when the going got rough. To blame when things went wrong and it would be fatal to blame yourself. To rely on when God wasn’t listening to prayers. To make decisions when you didn’t have time. To talk it all out with if you made it through. Stone had always been independent and self-reliant. He had never let Nash too close, or tried to get close to Nash. And yet now he was in the middle of an action without him, Stone suddenly felt alone and unprotected.

  Finally and worst of all there had been no briefing. Stone found this enormously frustrating, and had he been more given to violence - like many others in his strange profession - he would have taken it out in blood. Of course a briefing is necessarily a shadowy thing. It is like a play: a suspension of disbelief, a mutual unspoken agreement between those involved not to ask stupid questions but to take at face value a lot of stuff that in your heart of hearts you know is not quite real. Like an audience content to watch Hamlet die while knowing perfectly well that the actor playing him will rise again for a curtain-call, the executive listens to his Control’s briefing or version of the current action complete with the agent’s place in this action and his proposed actions and reactions, knowing perfectly well that on the ground it will all be entirely - perhaps fatally - different.

  Nash had been superb at briefing. It was the heart of his success as a Control. Like a great dramatist, he would bring the action to life in his office in the Broadway Buildings. He would describe it in glowing technicolour, place you like Connery, Caine, Burton or Brosnan precisely in the middle, take you through what seemed like every permutation of possibilities, and explain to you how you could bring home the bacon yet again (and how only you could do it) to a country which would be infinitely grateful, if only they could know.

  You knew and Nash knew that it wouldn’t be like that, but he sold it to you every time, and it helped. It helped enormously, Stone now knew: for without it, without even the illusion that he knew what was going on, he found himself utterly out of his depth, and floundering around uselessly when he should have been swimming like a shark.

  Still, without Control and Nash’s technicolour briefing to guide him, he was still going to have to function. And, if necessary, that meant he would have to act as his own Control and brief himself. He shook his head. This was clearly enormously i
mportant, and not only to Nash. He thought about the bomb on the Wanderer. Who could have put it there? It was either political or it was private and commercial. He was tempted to rule out the latter because, although it was not unheard-of, SIS were usually too chary about the use of their executives to let them get mixed up in anything commercial - so his very presence here meant that it was almost certainly political. Who, then? The Russians? Had they a sufficient Far East network to arrange for a bomb on a British ship in the Singapore Roads? Probably.

  Even in those times when everything was so different from the nice safe simple world he had worked in during the Eighties. They weren’t even KGB any more. What did they call themselves now? FSS. That was it.

  Or the Chinese? Almost certainly. Would either of them care about the scandal if they were caught? Perhaps.

  And then Stone remembered that whoever it was probably didn’t have to care because there were going to be no survivors to make a scandal. Well one survivor, perhaps, or two: the murderer and the person they seemed to be searching for. And these would only survive if they were found in time. But there would have to be checks. That was the only failing in what seemed to be an otherwise perfect plan.

  If the ship was to be sunk with the agent on board, whichever power had started the action would have to be certain to pick up the survivors, or run the risk of a perhaps unwelcome scandal. Unless the agent, as seemed to be the case here, had been told to destroy the survivors himself or herself. In that case two possibilities existed: either this was a suicide mission - in this case unlikely for the murderer had had more than one chance to sink the lifeboat and destroy them all together - or the agent was searching for someone or something and was destroying witnesses who were not, or were not possessed of, what he or she was looking for.

  In that case - in this case as that is what seems to be happening now - there must be somebody out there searching extremely carefully for their executive and whatever he is going to bring home with him. And even if he was not going home, ever - and in these circumstances that too seemed likely - the masters of this executive would have to be absolutely certain that he or she was dead. A shipwrecked agent, perhaps delirious, might be fatal in the wrong hands. No. In this sort of action, whoever planted the bomb that sank the Wanderer, whoever was running the executive who had killed Slattery, Spooner and probably O’Keefe, and who incidentally had punctured the cans and salted the water, whoever was responsible, would have to take the Indian Ocean to pieces and search it if necessary drop by drop.

  Stone went back over his logic. It seemed good so far. The next two questions were Who? and Why? But the answers to these questions were tortuous and labyrinthine, leading his mind only to the cool quiet caverns of sleep. He was wakened some hours later by the explosion.

  Gant decided that their first priority should be to explore the island fully. Bates and Slobowski showed every inclination to go off and leave them to it but Laughton managed to keep the peace and so they stayed for the time being. “I think,” said Gant, “that we should split up. It will be quicker that way.” The others nodded their agreement. “Well then, let’s see: Miss Dark and I will follow the coast along from the boat towards the cliffs. Mrs Gash and Miss Buhl, perhaps you would like to go the opposite way from the boat down towards the point. The land seems quite flat down there, so you won’t be put to any unnecessary exertion. Mr Laughton, perhaps you and Mr Bates could go up the cliffs from this side. Mr Slobowski, Mr Wells, there doesn’t seem…”

  “I want to go with Laughton and Bates,” said Slobowski mutinously.

  “And I think I’ll just go and see what’s happened to Stone,” said Wells. And so it was decided.

  It was just after 1400 when they all re-assembled at their makeshift camp by the pool. By that time they were in a good position to build up a fairly comprehensive picture of the island. It was almost two miles long, and at its widest point it was almost half a mile wide. From the sea it had looked like a wedge with sheer cliffs rising abruptly out of the water to slope gently back again into the low spit at its south-western end. From the air, however, it would resemble a rough comma.

  At the top of the comma-shape were the cliffs. Facing India, these cliffs stood tall, curving round and falling away in a smooth curve of shore, until the cliffs of rock became cliffs of sand, then dunes, then the curling tail of the sand-spit. Facing Africa, however, the curve of the cliffs was much more abrupt. They came round almost in a semi-circle falling off much more rapidly until they formed the gentler slopes on the north side of the bay where the boat was beached. This bay continued to reverse the curve of the cliffs so that this coastline formed a huge letter ‘S’, the tail of the ‘S’ reaching out in the low sand-spit to join the reversed ‘C’ of the other coast at the low point of the sand-spit.

  The main feature of the island was the stream they had found last night. It came out of the foot of a low cliff cut back into the steep shoulder of the slope climbing up towards the cliffs. It formed a small pool on a step in the rock, tumbled musically down the waterfall, formed a much larger pool on the thin soil at the foot of the second cliff, gave life to a few sage-like bushes and a couple of seemingly barren date palms on land, and a hoard of fascinating tiny silver-sided fish in its own clear heart, and then simply vanished.

  There was none of the salt-pan edging which would have suggested evaporation, so Gant, stretching his fourth-grade Physical Geography, reckoned it must simply be soaking into the rock. Away from the stream, the vegetation consisted mainly of a wild springy plant, seemingly a mixture of marsh-grass and heather. Here and there, more of the bedraggled bushes. Everything except the shaded riverside dwellers, was burned brown and seared by the sun.

  The only non-plant life of the island except for the fish were the seabirds which nested in their thousands on the forbidding cliffs. They were black and raucous. They had reddish eyes and long, vicious beaks. Laughton said he thought they looked like gannets, but he didn’t know enough about birds to be sure. “If the worst comes to the worst,” said Gant, “at least we can eat them, if we can catch them; or their eggs, if there are any left this late in the year.”

  “Talking of eating…” said Slobowski, and began to get up. Wells sauntered into the clearing. “Any sign of Stone?” he asked.

  “No,” said Gant.

  “That’s funny. I couldn’t find him anywhere. Nevermind. I expect he’ll turn up. Did someone mention food?”

  “I’ll get it,” said Laughton, coming to his feet quicker than Slobowski.

  “It’s all right,” said Wells to the Chicagoan, “I’m already on my feet. I’ll help.”

  “Wells,” said Gant as the little reporter turned away.

  “Yes?” Wells turned back. “Hang on, Laughton,” he called over his shoulder. Laughton paused. Gant looked around the rest of the group and then got up. Laughton began to walk towards the bay. Wells followed, with Gant catching him up. “Did you look everywhere for Stone?” he asked in a low voice.

  “Everywhere I could think of. It felt quite creepy out there on my own with him somewhere I didn’t know about, I can tell you: even in broad daylight.”

  “You don’t think he’s been killed, then?”

  “The thought never crossed my mind. No. I don’t think Stone’s going to die at all...” He left it at that and hurried after Laughton. Gant came to a stop at the top of the rise, looking down the dunes into the bay. Laughton strode purposefully across the beach towards the boat. Wells was hurrying to catch up with him. They seemed to be almost side by side when Laughton reached the boat. He called something to Wells and leaned over the gunwale. Wells hesitated fractionally, mopping his face with his hands and Gant found himself automatically echoing the action in the stifling heat. Then the boat blew up.

  When it burst, Laughton was lifted on a livid balloon of fire and cast away like a blazing scarecrow. Wells was clear of the boat but close to the blast. He gave a strange ducking motion and the wave of red and black washed over h
im.

  In a second he staggered clear but he too was ablaze now. Like a walking match in the mid-afternoon sun he staggered around the beach, making no sound, leaving a trail of heavy smoke. Then he turned and began to run towards the sea. Still burning he waded in.

  Gant blasted forward like a sprinter then. “Lie down!” he screamed to the blazing Wells, but Wells couldn’t hear. He continued to wade out into the water and he continued to bum. The others topped the rise above the beach. Gant hit the water, the first waves slapping viciously at his legs, his eyes riveted to the shapeless blazing bundle that was Wells. He could almost see the man behind the flames.

  Then Wells slowly toppled forward. There was a loud hiss, a cloud of steam and he was gone. Gant reached the place the little man had fallen, but there was nothing except the stench of fire. He cast about in the water but there was no sign of a body at all. The afternoon sun drew curtains of blazing gold across the surface and hid the depths. Once he thought he saw something, yards away towards the cliffs, but it was gone before he could clear his eyes.

  With all the weight of the world on his shoulders he turned and waded ashore. The others were standing shocked, not knowing what to do. Laughton, yards away, was a crisp black homunculus, still burning. “How could this have happened?” whispered Gant, shaking his head.

  Then Stone came running over the rise. Mrs Gash turned, screamed, “Him, he did it!” and pointed directly at Stone.

  Stone took one look at the wreckage, the carnage and the almost insane faces, turned in a flurry of sand and began to run. Bates uttered a strange guttural sound somewhere between a sob and a cry. He launched himself after the fleeing man. Slobowski grabbed a length of oar, blazing at one end, from among the wreckage and followed Bates at full tilt. After a few yards Stone lost his footing in the soft sand and Bates was upon him, arms flailing wildly. Stone hardly seemed to move, yet the Radio Operator stumbled past without actually touching the fallen man. Then Slobowski arrived with 4 ft of smouldering oar.