Knife Edge (2004) (2 page)

Like studying documents, or going through some one’s effects before a sale; it was vague one moment, vividly clear the next.

There had been a scandal of some kind; the family had closed ranks. Like the Corps.

Masterman said, “Take the picture. It’s between us, right?”

Their eyes met, and he was surprised that he had not realized before, or seen it immediately. The same features in some of the paintings . . . or the face of the man who had been killed by a terrorist bomb in Cyprus.

He held out his hand.

“If there’s any way I can help . . .”

He got no further.

“You just did, sir.” The mouth smiled, but it barely reached the eyes. The handshake was hard. “I’ll not forget.”

Then he was gone, and Masterman stood gazing at the empty frame, trying to remember every moment.

His new assistant asked brightly, “Some one from the past, sir?”

Masterman bit back a sharp retort, and said, “From the future, I suspect.”

The morning was bitterly cold, and yet the sky was surprisingly clear after overnight rain. A washed-out blue, enough to chill your bones to the marrow.

Lieutenant Ross Blackwood raised himself very slightly on his elbows, teeth gritted against the pain of loose stones, his uniform denims clinging to his legs. Cold, wet, impatient. He should be used to it by now. He was not.

Why did the army, and for that matter his Corps, the Royal Marines, choose such godforsaken places for their training exercises? He covered his mouth with one hand while he took stock of the immediate area. On the edge of Dartmoor, this was now a waste of fallen buildings, walls starred with rifle and machine-gun fire or scattered by every kind of lethal device. Even in the hands of skilled marksmen and eager instructors, the bullets were often too close for comfort. Or over confidence.

There had been a small, private flying club here once. Taken over and enlarged for a fighter squadron during the last war, it had become derelict in the uneasy years following Germany’s surrender. There was a village of some kind, too. Now only crumbling shells where men had tended the land and children had played at being soldiers.

When he moved his hand he saw the breath from his lips, like steam. The instinctive warning . . . He lifted his binoculars, small and powerful, and scanned the nearest cottages, eyeless ruins, shelled, burned and stripped by the countless drills and exercises this wasteland had seen.

He thought of the previous week. Or had it been longer? Hawks Hill, the gaping strangers, the expressionless auctioneer, and the silent exchange of signals. Money changing hands, deals settled. Like conspirators. Vandals.

He tensed. A shadow, dead leaves moving in the bitter air? It was Boyes, his sergeant. Too experienced to make mistakes on an exercise; he had seen and done too much of the real thing. A true Royal Marine. His mind lingered on the old house, as it had once been, and the life he had grown up to accept.
His
life. His future. Sergeant Boyes had served with his father, and had been at the memorial service. With many others, young and old, some wearing their medals, from campaigns he could only imagine.

Hawks Hill . . . Soon it would be demolished. Where, then, would go all the memories and ghosts?

He pictured his mother, strong and beautiful amidst the sadness and the well-intentioned sympathy, which must have torn her apart.

Afterwards they had walked through the echoing house together, past the bare walls and the packing cases, and some officials from the local council, already making notes.

She had stood looking up at the one remaining portrait in
the empty study, where, as a boy, Ross had first discovered an old photo album with some of the faded prints of the Great War. Groups of officers, sitting cross-legged and self-conscious, at some Corps function or other. Others, grim-faced in steel helmets; and one print of a battlefield, craters brimming with rain and mud. No trees. Nothing. Somebody, perhaps his grandfather, had written beneath that torn landscape,
Where no birds sing
. Ross had never forgotten it.

His mother had slipped her hand through his arm and said quietly, “Your father would be so proud of you, Ross.”

As she had done, he had looked at the portrait. She was taking it to her friend’s house in London, while she was getting her bearings. What would she do without him?
Your father would be so proud of you.
That was almost the worst part. Thinking back, he must always have been in awe of his father.
The colonel.
Out of reach.

He lowered the glasses and wiped the lenses with a piece of tissue. Even that was wet.

Ross had just returned from Northern Ireland when the news of his father’s murder had broken.

He had had it all prepared. In his thoughts, he had heard himself coming out with it.

His father was leaving the Corps, with pride and with honour. There was no point in pretending, making any more excuses.

Your father would have been so proud of you.

How would his father have taken it? Reacted to being told that his only son was going to quit the Corps? Break with tradition. The last of the Blackwoods.

He watched the cottage on the end of the row. Empty windows, a fragment of tattered curtain still clinging to a splintered frame. Where people must have seen the enemy bombers, and the tiny fighters cutting the sky with their
vapour trails as they went after them. The high hopes and the setbacks. Korea, Suez, Cyprus and Malaya, and the Royal Marines were always there, often when it was already too late. The end of empire, some called it.

But men died because of it. And women, too.

Tough veterans had seen it all and made light of it. In the Corps, like the navy, the response was always the same. Maybe it had to be.

If you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined!

What had changed him? He heard a far-off crackle of machine-gun fire, blanks or otherwise. He often wondered how many men had been killed in bleak places like this one, by accident, by ammunition that was intended to make it a little too real.

He remembered the street in Belfast. Almost peaceful after the initial hostility. Backing up the local police, facing the threats and the bricks from the back of the crowd. And the petrol bombs. And there had been kindness too, like a bridge.

The police had cleared the street; hot drinks and some doorstep-like sandwiches had appeared. The marines had relaxed.

There had been a young marine named Jack, new to the commandos, who was always being ragged by his comrades because of his strong Birmingham accent.

He had been the only one to see the danger, but had not recognized it.

“Th’ kids’ll be comin’ back soon, sir. My grandad used to play one of them things. He’d never leave it lyin’ about to be nicked!”

The ‘thing’ was a barrel organ. Ross could see it now. Outside a boarded-up shop, with two ragged puppets propped on the top as if waiting for an audience.

Before any one could do anything Jack from Brum, as
they had nicknamed him, had crossed the street to have a closer look.

Ross could not recall the explosion. More of a sensation than a sound. Like a shock, and a blinding white flash.

He twisted round on one elbow, his nerves like hot wires. But it was only Sergeant Boyes. A big man, who could move like a cat when necessary.

He said casually, “There’s one of ’em in that second window. Not as smart as he thinks. Saw the sun flash on somethin’ – lookin’ at his watch, most likely.”

He might have been watching me.

Was that what Boyes was thinking? Wondering about his lieutenant, doubting him? He had been there too, that day in the street in Belfast, when the carefully set booby-trap had exploded. Where children would have come to play.

There had been nothing left of the young marine to bury.

He heard himself say, “Use the grenade. We’ll move in now!” Like some one else.

He saw Boyes nod. Approval, relief, who could say?

He loosened his holster and rose slowly on to his knees.

“Now!”

The stun grenade exploded, and some of his men were already converging on the row of ruined cottages. Whistles blew, and an officer had appeared waving a flag. The exercise was over. The pros and cons would be debated later.

Ross realized that he had half drawn his pistol, although he did not remember doing so.

Like that day when the bomb had exploded. The police had said that no one else had been killed or injured. Not like some they had faced.

All Ross recalled was that they had caught the man responsible, and somebody had been gripping his own
wrist, Boyes or one of the others, he was never certain. Like now, today, on a piece of Devon moorland, the gun in his hand.

I would have killed him. I wanted to.

He thought of his mother’s hand on his arm in that deserted study at Hawks Hill, sharing the moment. And the portrait of his father.

Proud? I wonder.

Lieutenant-Colonel Leslie De Lisle glanced at the cup of tea on the desk where a well-meaning orderly had placed it, and frowned. Something stronger would have been more welcome. He half listened to the regular tramp of boots, the occasional bark of commands, a tannoy speaker calling some one’s name. It was sometimes hard to remember what it had been like in those far-off days.

He was suddenly on his feet at one of the big windows that overlooked the barracks square. A grey January forenoon, the square still shining from the last rainfall.

He shivered despite his usual self-control. Winter in Plymouth: Stonehouse Barracks. Less than a week ago he had been sweltering in Singapore.

He opened the window very slightly and braced himself against the keen air. As assistant to the Chief of Special Operations he was far removed from the mysteries facing those marching ranks of Royal Marines, raw recruits for the most part.
As we all were.

“At the halt . . . On th’ right . . .
foooorm . . . squad!
” It could have been the same sergeant.

He saw some other marines marching easily past the square, their green berets marking them out as commandos. The recruits would be watching them with envy and perhaps awe, dreaming of the day when they, too, might number among the elite.

De Lisle turned away as another bellow of commands snapped them back to reality.

He caught sight of his reflection in the glass. Self-contained, austere, with the neat moustache favoured by many senior officers in the Corps. A splash of colour on his uniform;
for gallantry
, the citations had said. Not a cloth-carrier like some he had known. And still knew.

It would be strange to be leaving his H.Q. and his personal staff. Away from the steady stream of signals from all over the world, wherever Royal Marines were keeping the peace and being first in the field in the bush wars, and against terrorism wherever it appeared.

He smiled. And away from the General. Some one else had already been appointed to take the weight.

His wife had been less understanding.

“Why you, Leslie? You’d be retired in a few more years! Why throw it all away?”

They had been married for twenty years. Was that all it meant?

He glanced at the painting opposite the commandant’s desk. Royal Marines manning the International gun at Peking, during the Boxer Rebellion. It would never be like that again. He touched his moustache with his knuckle. There had been a De Lisle during the embassy seige. He looked at his watch. A Blackwood, too.

There were voices outside the door. Right on time. But then, this was Stonehouse.

De Lisle made a point of knowing as much as possible about every addition to the various sections of Special Operations.

A name or some family connection,
The Old Pals Act,
as the General had been heard to call it, was never enough. Courage, leadership, self-dependence, were only a part of it.

The Blackwood name was well known in the Corps, and De Lisle had been working with Ross Blackwood’s father just before he had been killed in Cyprus. A strong man, professionally and ethically, and a good friend. The combination was not always possible in their trade.

The door opened and closed, and they faced each other. De Lisle held out his hand. He disliked formality; sanctimonious bullshit, his old colour sergeant called it.

“Sit down – this won’t take long. Ross, isn’t it?”

They studied each other across the borrowed desk, the marching feet and hoarse voices like a soundtrack in the background.

De Lisle had always learned everything he could before this kind of interview, and had trained himself to distinguish fact from surmise, and truth from intuition. For once, he could admit surprise. Ross Blackwood was twenty-five years old, by only two months. His record was good, and his commanding officers well satisfied with his progress. He was patient but firm with his subordinates, and wary of some of the older N.C.O.s. And an excellent shot with a rifle on the range. Not that it counted for much in these days of rapid fire, when the gun could too easily take over from a nervous marksman.

But it was not the youthful, eager face he had been expecting.

The eyes were level, grey-blue, and almost cold, the colour of the sea. Outwardly he seemed very calm, almost relaxed. Detached, as if they were meeting by accident.

De Lisle said abruptly, “I was very sorry to hear about your father, of course. We all were. A fine man. A first class Royal Marine.”

Yes, the family likeness was there, in the eyes most of all, steady, giving nothing away. Yet.

Strange that he had never got used to the new Lovat
uniform, although some six years had passed since it had been adopted by the Corps, as something between the familiar battledress and the formal blues. De Lisle had been at the ceremonial parade at Buckingham Palace when Her Majesty the Queen had carried out the inspection held to mark the Tercentenary of the Corps, the first occasion on which the new uniform had been worn. Six years ago. It felt like yesterday.

“This is short notice, but then, it usually is. Most of the details are still top secret. Have to be. If the press got wind of it . . .”