The Partridge Kite (18 page)

But others felt a dreadful sense of hopelessness. Much was being hinted at now, loudly and in the open, and those sensitive to the slightest change in the country’s mood began for die first time to see reality in what had always been a vague threatening impossibility.

Despair felt the first trickle of fear at its edges.

Professor Linklater’s bouncers had strength; they had finesse.

The polite, well-dressed, soft-spoken well-accented young men, watched by the bleached-skinned professor, had gone beyond what was necessary. A long way beyond.

They had damaged McCullin in all those places it wouldn’t show; in all those places, as it happens, that the body is most sensitive.

So the policewoman who found him unconscious propped up in a sitting position, shortly after midnight in an alley off Great Queen Street WC2, thought he was either drunk or drugged. But then, having called for transport by radio, she smelt his breath and lifted his eyelids. . . and was convinced he was neither. She concluded he was an epileptic or a coronary.

Tom woke up in a small clinic in North Ealing, tucked up in one of the few remaining private pay beds reserved for Government ministers, senior Trade Union officials and similar among the nation’s privileged.

Fry sat a yard away, cold tea and toast on the breakfast tray on the floor at his feet. Tom focused on Fry’s fresh round face.

His head felt very light and full of fantasy. Whirling colours, like many pots of paint, stirred rapidly in a pool of white spirit, became a giant Catherine wheel, exploding at the edges, sparks hitting his face. Tom felt a shock of pain in his groin and, feeling the gorge rise, turned his head to be sick in the white enamel bowl Fry had nestled into the pillow at his side.

Fry wiped Tom’s lips with a paper tissue.

‘No lasting damage, Tom,’ he said quietly. ‘Doctors’ promise. They’ve got a drug, Xylocaine. Within a couple of hours the pain will have gone completely . . . it’s a kind of local anaesthetic.’

‘You mean they’ve frozen my balls?’

‘Yes.’

‘No more fucking?’

Fry coloured. ‘No, Tom! Not until you’re better.’

‘Can I get up?’

Tonight - maybe early this evening. I doubt if you could walk a yard at the moment.’

Tom looked down his nose to the bed. A frame under the light duvet raised what little weight there was above his middle.

He had expected them to be rough last night, but not like this! They had carried on hitting him long after he had told them all they had wanted to hear. Long after he had heard Linklater make his telephone call. They had done it out of hate, which in its method and thoroughness was quite new to him.

He knew something of torture. He had administered mild forms of it himself. Frequently, he had been witness to protracted sessions in Ulster years ago. Never in the interrogation rooms had it upset him, the relentless, clinical, slowly mounting infliction of pain, hesitating just short of shock. The military interrogators he’d watched then had stopped at very little to get what they wanted. But they did stop once the man in the chrome wrist clamps began talking to the military stenographer at his elbow.

It was different last night.

And now, with the memory of the pain and Linklater’s hysterical meeting swirling in his mind in separate and distorted images, he knew he had touched something of the reality of the New Order, The Linklaters and the Mostyns, the Curran-Prices and Haigs were not fighting for a return to the Old Order of things, the benevolent, sometimes compassionate, feudalism of Great Britain half a century or more ago. They were not contesting Socialism, or Communism or Unionism or any other Leftist-ism, so that they could bring Britain back to the world of Bertie Wooster and Elsie and Doris Waters.

No, he thought, CORDON can never take us back now. It has to go forward. It’s the only way it can destroy its Opposition. Has to outpace everything that has gone before. If intrepid Socialism must eventually be taken over by the hard Reds then CORDON’S new order, the Reactionaries, the Order of the Right, could only succeed with a totalitarianism far more absolute than anything Moscow or Peking or Hanoi had ever dreamt of.

If it wasn’t, how could it survive? How could it stop the old Opposition of the Left coming out of the holes again? What had Sanderson called it? ‘Monopolistic Greyness’. He’d seen the vision all right. No wonder he’d been terrified. Fry got up quietly to leave.

‘Don’t go. Fry, I’m not asleep. It’s just that my head feels like Niagara Falls and I think I’ve got someone else’s brain.’ ‘The doctors said you might have mild hallucinations . . . I shouldn’t worry.’

‘I’m not worried. Fry . . . except that someone’s going to come in soon and take their brain back again. Christ! I’ve just had my first original thought in years.’

He began to laugh but the contraction in his stomach muscles spread pain the length of his body.

‘Did it work last night?’ he asked, once Fry had finished wiping his lips clean a second time.

‘In a way, yes! Linklater did telephone just as we thought. But then the most extraordinary thing. We monitored the 405 exchange the moment he stopped speaking, which I timed at 2153 hours. He made the call an hour and forty minutes later at 2333 hours. He sounded very excited and upset so we can be certain he didn’t know you were coming, which backs up your theory yesterday that CORDON hasn’t sent out a general alert.’

‘But you got the number?’

‘That’s what’s so extraordinary!’

‘You mean you didn’t? After all that and now all this?’ Tom moaned and pushed his head back hard into the pillow. Fry leant forward and held Tom’s right forearm tight.

‘We got just one extra number, Tom. And we got exactly the same interference at the beginning of the dialling as we did with Mostyn’s call. We’ve compared the two recorded transmissions and they’re identical. It’s deliberate jamming, Tom!’

‘But that’s impossible. Not on a GPO line.’

‘Yes, you’re right, that’s exactly what they did say. . . not on public STD and not so precisely.’

‘But you got a number?’

‘Yes! Number 2. The jamming stopped in time to give us it and confirm the previous three numbers. So we now have 2843.’

There was a pause. Fry looked from Tom to the breakfast tray on the floor. A thin skin of milk fat now covered the cup of cold tea. The toast was thin and hard.

‘They’ve given it to us, haven’t they?’ he said quietly to Tom.

‘Yes! Four names, four numbers. If we’d cottoned on to it sooner, Curran-Price would have given us 3, Haig 4, Mostyn gave us 8, now Linklater gives us 2.’

‘Two more names to go, Tom, and two more numbers.’ ‘And then what? We ring them up and say “Hullo, what time’s the takeover?” ’

Neither man smiled.

-‘You see what it means?’ said Fry.

‘I see what it means, all right. Christ! They’re actually leading us to them!’

‘The Prime Minister wants to know who they are and how they would try it.’

‘You’ve spoken to him?’

‘Yes, of course. He called me to the House immediately after Question Time. He and the Home Secretary have had a hammering over this army exercise at Heathrow. Everyone’s furious at it but there are a lot more who are just confused.’

Kellick was sitting at his desk. Fry stood behind Tom’s chair, both hands on the backrest. Tom looked pale. He had had his last injection of Xylocaine at three o’clock and was due for another at seven. He wore his own heavy navy blue fisherman’s sweater and a pair of lightweight slacks bought for him by Fry on advice from the hospital doctors.

Tom felt no pain now. Just a numbness. He had also a feeling which wouldn’t go away that he was about to vomit, like a first-time voyager standing expectant by the handrail as the ship leaves the quay.

‘Why confused?’ he asked Kellick.

‘Because although according to the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office the exercise had been cleared in the routine way, no one, it seemed, realised it was going to be so big. Do you know that over six thousand men were out last night and we didn’t know about it? Nor did a lot of other people who should have done. I tell you, it’s shaken them, including the Prime Minister.’

‘Well, he does know more than most about what it could mean, so he should be. Has he told the Home Secretary of Sanderson’s interview?’

‘I don’t know,’ Kellick answered, ‘but I’d have thought so. Suicidal if he hasn’t.’

‘Suicidal if he has. I’d have thought!’ Fry said. ‘The Home Secretary’s not known to be the most discreet man and he hasn’t exactly been an ideal advertisement recently for Temperance as far as I can gather.’

Then perhaps he has been told,’ Tom said.

‘The question I was asked to put to you by the Prime Minister is, if they do exist, how will they try it?’

‘Like that, maybe?’ Tom pointed to the evening newspaper on Kellick’s desk, front page covered in photographs and the banner headline ARMY CLOSES HEATHROW.

‘A British Army coup . . . that’s absurd, McCullin, and you know it!’ Kellick’s voice grated.

‘I didn’t mean simply that . . . I’m not suggesting the British Army is CORDON. But it’s hard to see any nonmilitary coup succeeding if it doesn’t take some of the Service people along with it.’

‘You make it sound,’ Kellick said, ‘like a dreadful political fantasy novel. I’m willing to accept that there are elements within the Armed Services who might defect at the hour. . . a handful at the top and a following of sorts in the ranks. But mutiny is not a word in the British Military’s vocabulary. And I’m not talking about airy-fairy traditions, McCullin. I’m talking about centuries of careful mental conditioning. It couldn’t happen here!’

‘It’s not preposterous,’ Fry interrupted. ‘What prompts a military coup anywhere? It’s usually the inability of civilians to govern. We don’t really have to look back too far to find a comparison. Portugal. A disenchanted army. Fighting a colonial war in Africa, fighting political decisions at home that prevented them, they thought, from winning. Result? Military coup in Lisbon.’

‘Fry, you’re talking off the top of your head. This is not a political seminar. If you’re so keen on theories, maybe you’d like a transfer to an MOD Training College.’

‘Fry’s talking a lot of sense,’ Tom said.

He leant forward, shifting his weight on to his elbows on the wooden armrests of his chair.

‘Mr Kellick,’ he said quickly, ‘today is the first day in a great many years that I have spent in bed when I haven’t either been recovering from a hangover or on my way to one.” My brain this morning felt like a large empty hall. It felt all nice and clean at the sides. It was almost worthwhile being clobbered last night just to have that feeling today.’ Kellick looked embarrassed. He hated talk like this. He wasn’t a cleric.

‘Two things occurred to me,’ Tom continued, ‘in between

the jabs and the bed pans. The telephone numbers and the way we’re getting them confirms they are leading us by the nose. That’s the plan we were talking about yesterday. Remember?

‘The other thing is this. You say the British Army, Navy and Air Force couldn’t be involved in CORDON. I reckon you’re right. Not
all
the Services, not
every
serviceman. Not
all
the police, not
all
of Big Business, not
all
the country, or half of it, or a quarter . . . not even a hundredth. But what if just a little bit of them all were involved somewhere, somehow?

‘How many does it take to start something, anyway? All it needs is just a few people in the right places. And an IDEA! They don’t need to be convinced of
total
support before they begin. They just have to do a bit of homework first to make sure they’re standing on enough fertile ground.

‘Have you ever been to a strike meeting, Mr Kellick? You should! It’s fascinating. Twenty thousand men or more brainwashed in the open air. See them raise their hands, then look at the faces and the eyes of the small group on the platform. It wasn’t their splendid speeches that did it. It wasn’t the argument over threepence an hour extra that won. It was their groundwork. The hard monotonous needling that had gone on for weeks, months before, in the pubs, canteens, shopfloors. The men had put up their hands to strike even before they’d left home that morning. They’d been won over already and they didn’t even know it, let alone know how it had been done.’

‘It’s all very fascinating, industrial relations, McCullin, but I really don’t see what you’re getting at. The Prime Minister’s serious, you know.’

Fry’s knuckles went white, still clasping the back of Tom’s chair.

Tom smiled the only way he knew how. Kellick took it to be a grimace which made him feel he had scored a hit.

There was silence for ten seconds. ‘What I’m saying,’ Tom said, ‘is that we must not imagine that because there’s no evidence of support for CORDON now, it won’t be there on the day.’

‘But how will they do it?’ Kellick stood up and walked briskly to the window. The Prime Minister wants our opinions,’ he said.

‘You haven’t been listening, Mr Kellick? Or do you think it’s all nonsense?’

There seemed no anger in Tom’s voice.

‘No, McCullin, it’s all very interesting and I shall pass it on, if there’s time, to those who might have some use for it. But you will appreciate I have a report to complete for the Prime Minister by six this evening. That’s in forty-five minutes’ time. So how would they do it?’

Tom rubbed his hands together and stretched out his arms in front of him.

‘I’ve no fucking idea, Mr Kellick,’ he said. ‘Not the faintest fucking ideal’

He eased himself gently out of the chair and Fry held his elbow as he walked slowly to the door.

‘Maybe,’ he said, with the best exit line he could muster, ‘maybe they’ll use hang gliders from the top of Big Ben!’

The container came up gently. It broke the surface with only the slightest rustle as water ran off its edges. Just as gently it submerged again and all that could be seen was a large square shadow just below the surface of the sea settling itself.

Arcs from the foredeck of the tug lit the area above and a dozen or more underwater units lit from below. Frogmen passed in and out of the lights like slim black sharks, always on the move, one shadow slowly, smoothly dissolving into the next.

Except for the lapping of water around the tug and the wash of the tide on the rocks nearby, there was no other noise. There was no wind and no moon and, except for the black shapes below, no other evidence of living things.

The tug, a large 11,000 horsepower Ulstein, was anchored in the shelter of what is named on the charts as Great Crebawethan, one of a handful making up the Western Rocks which jut out of the Atlantic on the south-western approaches to the Isles of Scilly in the Duchy of Cornwall. There is nowhere more desolate or primitive in the British Isles south of the Scottish Islands. The sea here is the graveyard of centuries of straying or drunken sailors. Jack Tars who’d misread or couldn’t read the charts, or perhaps hadn’t heard the lookout’s cry above the wind or the noise of a brawling lower deck.

Great Crebawethan is only a hundred yards across, black and brown rock, speckled with the nests of gulls, cormorants and guillemots, and is surrounded by what looks on the charts like a scattering of pebbles. It lies somewhere midway between the Island of St Agnes and the Bishop Rock lighthouse a mile and a half to the south-west. Years ago, civilian and Royal Navy divers came here hunting for the wrecks of a lost British Fleet. A hundred and twenty feet down they went, picking around the seabed for the doubloons, ducats and silver caskets the flagship
Association
was carrying in its hold before the Retarrier Ledges and the Gilstones ripped it apart and let the cold Atlantic in. The divers took what they could until their patience and air ran out.

Occasionally other divers would come, less ambitious men, turning over the rocks below for lobsters.

But now the seabed had been thoroughly scoured and the last lobster to try to quench the insatiable appetite of the French had long been caught. No one came here any more.

Which was why the tug and its deadly container were anchored here now.

Despite the tide and the strength of the currents that moved with it, the stainless-steel cube, forty-five feet in all dimensions, had remained safe and secret, held by steel chains, under water now for ten months.

Tonight was time for it to move, and the divers who had secured it to the seabed then had now begun to unshackle it, pulling away the clams and limpets, unlocking the steel chains and hawsers and reconnecting them to the tug, ready for the journey.

By seven o’clock on a rising tide, the tug raised anchor. Gently it began moving out of the shelter of rocks as shags and gulls lifted their heads from their nests to watch it go. The tug took the strain of the tow, the chains and hawsers became taut, shivering along their length with the dead weight of the black shadow just below the surface. And above the rocks, looking west, the occasional flight of red from the light on Bishop Rock.

Within twenty minutes the tug and its container were underway, out of Crebawethan Neck and into the open sea. The wind was a north-easterly, and it began to snow again . . . gusts of it at first, swirling about the deck of the tug and spinning off into the sea. Then with the bow directly into the wind, the snowstorm promised by the BBC’s weather forecast began.

The snow was falling so thick that neither the bow nor stern of the tug could be seen from the wheelhouse. Only the green phosphorous light of the radar scanner lit the faces of the crew inside.

An hour later, as the tug passed south of Melledgan Rocks, on a heading of 094°, the storm passed on as suddenly as it had come. The container, raised a foot or so out of the water by the pull of the tow, was now covered in snow, turning rapidly to ice. It looked at the end of its steel links like an immense, perfectly square sheet of glittering ice, planing across the black sea.

The sky was now clear and although there was no moon the lights of ships passing to and from the most crowded sea corridor in the world could be seen and counted quite easily.

They were on a constant course and averaging a steady six knots. By midnight they would see the light on Wolf Rock at the entrance to the English Channel. There they would wait for instructions to proceed by radio, from CORDON’S local Area Director at her country estate on the Lizard Peninsula.

‘I remember thinking, Kate, that you first bought this for a dirty joke. Should have known better – knowing what a prude you are.’

‘It happens to be my favourite wine and you know it is, so don’t make fun. But you are right, Tom, I am a prude.’ ‘Sometimes I’d never guess.’

‘My excursions into depravity are rare and have more to do with adrenalin and alcohol than you and your charm.’ ‘You have a special way, Kate, of making a man feel unique. Must have something to do with your salad days at Roedean.’

‘Is it chilled enough?’

‘I wouldn’t know, sweetheart. A little warmer than your heart, if comparisons are any help.’

Kate pretended to ignore the banter and began pouring out the wine, a Sancerre Clos de la Poussie ’72, into thick glass goblets. She drank and felt good because of it.

‘I must say,’ she said, looking over the rim, running her tongue along the rough edges of the cut glass patterns on the sides, ‘you are not behaving like a man with anaesthetised nether regions.’

‘Frozen balls, sweetheart! Bring the adjectives nearer earth. And it won’t be nether-nether land for ever, so don’t be too bloody cocksure of yourself.’

‘Oh, it’s a nice feeling, really, Tom.’ She sounded gay and made an exaggerated sweep round the table towards him, wine bottle in hand. ‘It’s so nice you should want me for myself, for my intellect and not just for my drab body. So nice that we can sit and talk, and to know you are listening to what I’m saying and not just wondering how soon you can have it.’

‘You’re a bitch, Kate!’

‘No! I really do mean it.’

T still have my hands.’

‘Your hands might make me feel okay but they’re not going to help you. And anyway, I’m not in the mood for halfway house tonight so you can forget all about it for a change. We’ll just sit down quietly, eat my excellent stuffed aubergines, drink all my wine and talk about old times like some luvvy middle-aged couple. Let’s make out we’re celebrating our ruby wedding, Tom!’

Tom couldn’t remember when she had been so lighthearted or so girlishly pretty. She began busying herself at the stove, humming between sips of her wine.

Her kitchen was at one end of the long elegant sitting- room. The fresh, clinical white-glazed kitchen paraphernalia was hidden behind a screen.

Tom sat at the oak refectory table fingering the wine bottle. He’d arrived at Kate’s flat in a panic of sorts, having remembered to make the precautionary telephone call first. He’d come straight from Kellick’s office. Kellick, he realised, was trying to bury him. Having selected and hired him, briefed him and encouraged him, Kellick was now trying to knock him down. And Tom couldn’t understand why. It didn’t make sense, but then none of it was really making sense any more.

It had started simply enough. A bunch of cranks, neo- Nazis, neo-Fascists or whatever neo fitted, with ambitions on a near-derelict Britain. A Britain already split apart by the devolution antics of third-rate scruffy Scots and Welsh, mischievous tribesmen full of small talk made to sound big in the Gaelic tongue.

But now it was beginning to get ahead of him. At times it seemed so real, the threat so immediate, that he felt like running up and down outside Buckingham Palace shouting ‘Wolf!’ But now, sitting in Kate’s flat, warm with her wine, comfortable in her company, CORDON seemed as real as a Disney fantasy.

The wine was making him heady now. ‘No drink whatsoever’ was the last thing the doctors had shouted to him as he left the clinic. But the sight of Kate, the smell of her, fresh and warm from her scented bath, wrapped in her white bathrobe, her blonde hair still slightly wet, had made him quickly forget. Forget Linklater and bruised balls, Kellick and bloody hang gliders!

He turned the bottle round in a circle on the table using the edge of its base as a pivot. He knew the wine well, and although he often joked about it, it meant as much to him as it did to Kate. And he remembered why.

In the spring of 1975 he had flown out to Bangkok en route to Cambodia and Phnom Penh. He was on secondment to the British Embassy Staff in Saigon. He moved freely around South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos as a diplomat but he was in fact feeding back military intelligence. It was small-time stuff. He realised that the moment he met the members of the British Military Attaché’s staff out there. Nothing could really be that important if he had to hand it to men like that to digest and forward their analyses back to London.

But it was dangerous, nevertheless. And this particular assignment would be especially so. It meant staying in Phnom Penh after the Khmer Rouge had captured it. Staying behind, hidden long enough to gauge the nature of the new regime, report who came in with them and what form the new society was to take. He would be hiding in five different houses belonging to Cambodian agents, whose loyalty, he realised, could not be relied on at the moment of final self-survival.

Kate had been in Hong Kong, helping to patch up security arrangements before the Royal stopover in May. She flew to him immediately for the one night together before he caught the early morning Air Cambodge the following day.

They ate in the Fish Restaurant of the Siam Intercontinental and she had ordered Sancerre. Reports of the dreadful atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge encircling Phnom Penh and the incessant rocketing of the city were in the newspapers and Kate had read them all on her flight over. And Tom, for the first time in his life, felt it was all a foregone conclusion. This unexpected meeting with Kate, the food, the wine, his flight tomorrow, the eventual Communist victory, his discovery, his death. All already written. Already moved on!

Tom had hidden his melancholy with silly faces and bad jokes. He made Kate helpless with laughter as he chased a giant grilled prawn round the table with a headless sea-trout.

He even allowed a ten-dollars-a-time photographer to take a picture of them both. They’d giggled together at the Polaroid badly technicolored image giving Kate a red nose and blue hair. Tom was startled by the flash, his hair ruffled, bow tie crooked, looking, as someone was much later to remark, like a second-hand car salesman caught pouring sawdust into a sump!

Then when the label had come off the wine bottle and begun floating in the ice bucket, they had found something new to laugh at.

He stood up unsteadily and toasted too loudly, ‘Here’s to Poussie on Ice.’ Kate had laughed and then begun crying. She’d carefully dried the label between the folds of her table napkin and held it to her lips. She gave it to Tom.