Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  O’Reilly ordered revolutions for fifteen knots and turned the ship’s stem into the wind to allow his radar plot to update. Even though it was suddenly fully light, visibility was only two or three miles and apart from the Jean Bart and the destroyer Kersaint, the former muscling to the south west, the latter rolling horribly several hundred yards off the battleship’s starboard quarter, no other ships were in sight from the bridge.

  The Campbeltown’s commanding officer refused to be distracted by the sick berth attendant and the other men kneeling on the deck around the downed man, an able seaman who had been on lookout duties on the bridge.

  “The surgeon’s mate reports three casualties on deck, sir,” O’Reilly was informed as Campbeltown took the first big sea over her bow and the whole ship seemed, for a split second to halt before knifing ahead through the waves.

  “Very good,” he intoned. Then: “Helm. Come right to one-one-zero, if you please.”

  The guns had fallen silent as the ship had cleared the anchorage and the range to the snipers – any who had not been driven below ground by the ferocity of the destroyer’s counter-fire – lengthened.

  “Leading Rate Parkinson is dead, sir,” apologised a bloody-handed sick berth attendant.

  There were times when Dermot O’Reilly wished he was a cold-blooded, unfeeling martinet. He knew that the dead man had a wife and a two-year-old daughter back in Portsmouth. Sometimes, it was a mistake to know too much about the men one commanded.

  “Damn,” he grunted. “Dammit!”

  His anger burned, he wanted to lash out.

  He shut his eyes, fought to get a grip.

  “Thank you,” he murmured to the downcast man at his side. “You did what you could, Lewis,” he said, placing a paternal hand on the much younger man’s shoulder. “Carry on.”

  Twenty-six-year-old Sick Berth Steward 1st Class Wesley Lewis muttered “Aye, aye, sir” as his training kicked in. Other men were wounded and in the absence of Surgeon Lieutenant Braithwaite aboard the Jean Bart, he needed to concentrate on the living, not the dead for the next few minutes and hours, or however long it took, to do what he could for his injured shipmates.

  He and Tom Parkinson had been in the same pre-commissioning draft which had come aboard the old destroyer soon after she arrived in England. Their wives knew each other better than they did; that was the way of it sometimes. Sandra, Tom’s wife, was expecting their second child later that spring…

  The Old Man would not necessarily know that; it was not on his papers yet. Unless, of course, his Divisional Officer, Mister Moss, or one of the Chiefs had mentioned it to the Master and Arms, and he had said something to him. Parkinson had joined up in 1958 aged seventeen, mostly been ashore until the war, been on the Agincourt when she was sunk in Sliema Creek, got himself a Blighty wound that day. He had almost been posted to the Tiger back in sixty-four; luckily for him, he had gone down with a bout of War Flu, missed that bullet, thank God! Now he was on Captain O’Reilly’s ship – all the old-timers were proud to be on Campbeltown – serving with the man who had navigated the Talavera down the guns of those Russian battleships off Malta, and almost had the Cavendish shot out from under his feet in the Channel War, and then again by those Yankee terrorists in Philadelphia…

  His crew loved it that the Old Man, with his beard and a face heavily lined standing watches on the bridge of whale ships in the Southern Ocean, an honest to god veteran of the Battle of the Atlantic – truly a character who might have stepped straight out of the pages of The Cruel Sea – seemed to them to be a throwback, such a piratical figure, albeit one they all knew, with a heart of gold.

  Dermot O’Reilly had turned to the officer of the watch.

  “You have the watch, Mister Rainsford,” he said to the thirty-seven-year-old former merchant seaman and Cunard Third Officer, a reservist at the time of the October War, who had joined Campbeltown shortly after she had commissioned last autumn.

  “I have the watch, aye, sir!”

  O’Reilly allowed himself several seconds to study the radar repeaters. They were a juddering mess, the ship was rolling and pitching too badly apart from when she was taking the seas directly on her bow.

  He stood over the plot table.

  “Clemenceau, the De Grasse. La Bourdannais and Le Lorrain are approximately eleven miles south-south-east, sir,” he was told crisply by the petty officer responsible for constantly updating and verifying the navigation plot. Dundee is in company with that group. Perth turned back to support the second group, the Jean Bart and the Kersaint, on receipt of Campbeltown’s action alert, sir.”

  “Very good,” O’Reilly murmured, studying the plot. He looked again to the radar repeaters. Nine fishing boats had accompanied the first group out of the anchorage; wind tossed, tiny radar targets they blinked in and out of existence. “I should imagine the fishermen in the fleet are the only ones used to this sort of weather,” he grimaced.

  Back on the bridge he called up his captains; first Commander Sam Todd of the Dundee, a thirty-four-year-old who had been serving on the Ark Royal back in October 1962, when she had been Julian Christopher’s flagship in the Far East. He had stayed behind with the Anglo-Australian fleet fighting the communist insurgency in Borneo and Papua New Guinea, returning home only a year ago.

  “It’s a bit like herding cats, sir!” Sam Todd had reported, cheerfully. “None of these chaps seems to be able to steer a steady course.”

  Todd had married a widow a couple of years his senior shortly after being gazetted Commander; these days, it was almost a man’s duty to get properly wedded before he went back to sea.

  Dermot O’Reilly had resisted the temptation thus far but he was in a shrinkingly small minority within the brotherhood of naval officers. It happened that Sam Todd’s new wife had not needed to marry to avail herself – or her ten-year-old son the protection of the so-called Military Compact – because as the widow of a serviceman she was already beneath that umbrella; but Sam was a good man and perhaps, his new wife, recognising as much, had dragged him to the altar before somebody else did.

  The Perth’s captain, Commander Nigel Woodford was, like O’Reilly a bachelor, although unlike his Captain (D), of the never-married, confirmed type. This was a thing that within the Squadron his fellow captains often teased him about.

  ‘Dammit, what good woman would have me!’ He would protest.

  Woodford and O’Reilly were kindred spirits, real old sea dogs; the wilder the weather the happier they were.

  “We suffered several casualties from sniper fire,” O’Reilly reported.

  “Bad show,” the other man sympathised over the TBS. It was not a thing to dwell upon. “Now that were all at sea, so to speak, what’s the form, sir?”

  “You ride herd on the Jean Bart, Nigel,” O’Reilly directed. He knew he did not have to micro-manage, or wrap either of his captains in spiders’ webs of instructions. “Campbeltown will hang back for a couple of hours. I want the fleet to close up during the day but try to keep one thousand-yard gaps between ships.”

  “Understood!”

  Dermot O’Reilly planned to reduce speed and quarter the seas astern of the fleet, conducting an anti-submarine ‘trawl’ before turning to the south.

  Men were carrying Leading Seaman Parkinson’s body off the bridge when O’Reilly handed the TBS handset back to the Bridge Talker.

  “There were no other fatalities, sir,” the officer of the watch reported. “Minor injuries were sustained by three men manning the amidships 20-millimetre mounts. Rifle rounds struck splinter guards and the resulting spalling caused a few superficial injuries. All three men are currently receiving attention in the aft casualty handling station, sir.”

  O’Reilly breathed a very obvious sigh of heartfelt relief.

  “Secure the ship from Action Stations. Sound the bell for Air Defence Stations Two. Inform the galley to prepare to take hot drinks and sandwiches to the men who have to remain at their stations.”

 
“Aye, aye, sir!”

  Dermot O’Reilly listened to the bells, the warning ‘pipe’ and then the officer of the watch’s voice booming over the Tannoy.

  The bullet which killed Tom Parkinson must have passed within feet, more likely, inches of his head. If he had leaned forward at the wrong moment, he would be dead and the younger man, would still be alive…

  Chapter 27

  Sunday 5th February 1967

  Georgetown Pike, Langley, Virginia

  Kurt Mikkelsen had only realised how desperate the high priest of the Office of Security was, when he discovered the trap that James Jesus Angleton had baited and set for him at the Alexandria office of the American Institute for Free Labor Development.

  His old boss must have had the snare ready and waiting, pre-primed in his pocket for a long time to have been able to suddenly pull the lever and set it up over the course of just a weekend. But then when you were a guy with the resources to spy on all of the people, all of the time, resources were probably the least of the Locksmith’s problems, not the issue they were for an average Joe on Main Street.

  Kurt assumed that the real Jay Lovestone must be shut up in some safe house in DC; crapping himself. Hopefully. The agent, or maybe just a stooge, the Agency had put in place at the Prince Street office of the AIFLD had been good; as fat as Lovestone, and physically, from a distance a good likeness. Kurt had got the distinct impression the man he had executed had not had the least idea he was in any kind of danger until he saw the gun. Briefly, he had thought about interrogating the imposter. Although, not for long; it was not as if the schmuck was going to tell him anything he did not already know and besides, killing him was going to send exactly the same message, or as near as damn it the same message, as ending the real Jay Lovestone would have done.

  Kurt reckoned a man had to be a real shit to leave a woman like Clara Schouten literally, in the firing line. She had been a loyal, patriotic member of the Counter Intelligence ‘family’ at Langley right from the start. Heck, she had been with the Office of Strategic Services in DC and London before that.

  The fucking Locksmith had not even warned her she was in a bad place.

  ‘Jay’s got business in Manhattan next week; why don’t you go spend a little time with your folks in Uncasville?’ Angleton had said to her, like it was no big deal.

  Clara’s Ma had died a few years back, just before the war, and her Pa, an old Navy man had heart trouble. He was in his seventies now, did not like the VA poking around his affairs, he preferred to get by on his pension and Clara paid for help around the house. She was the youngest of four kids, the only one who had cared enough to stay close to her parents the last twenty years.

  Clara was a good person.

  Kurt had felt bad putting her through…this.

  That was new, or at least he thought it was before he started thinking about the other times he had, sort of, felt this way. Conflicted, as if nothing was quite as simple, straightforward as it used to be back in the day.

  Rachel used to describe what it was like feeling bad – guilty, he guessed – about some of the things they did to folks. Obviously, their working assumption had always been that the people they killed, or hurt, had it coming to them. Although, thinking about it, most of the time they had had no idea what any of their victims, targets, whatever, had done wrong, if anything at all…

  That was weird.

  Lately, he had started worrying about stuff like that…

  Rachel was right, it did not pay to ‘over-think’ shit!

  Kurt remembered the unmarked turn off the pike, from the last time he had been in this part of the country. That had been years ago. It was still there, just a little overgrown, the tangle of bare wintery tree trunks and branches had thickened either side of it. The track disappeared into the trees despite the time of year. Thank God for evergreens, pine trees that ought not to be there!

  He pulled off the pike and his old Dodge semi rumbled and rolled over the unmade surface of the track. From the map in the dash he figured the perimeter wall of the most secure compound in North America – well, after Fort Knox and NORAD under the Cheyenne Mountain – was about two hundred yards from where he planned to…stop awhile.

  It was odd that he had not yet decided if he was going to kill Clara Schouten. There had probably been times during the last few days she had longed for him to kill her, end it. Again, back in the day he could never remember worrying about what a mark thought about anything.

  If that was not weird, what was?

  He parked up, got out a pack of cigarettes, Camels, lit up with the Zippo he kept in the driver’s door side-panel – next to his Beretta M1951 – and smoked awhile, waiting to discover if anybody came along to see what he was doing.

  In most countries there would be soldiers, regiments of them guarding a place like Langley; even here only a stone’s throw from DC, there ought to be patrols in the woods, pressure pads underfoot, maybe even cameras. In Russia the woods would be a death trap, mined, the track he had just come down would be blocked off with sentry posts at the Georgetown Pike.

  God save America!

  The land of the free and the stupid…

  That was the trouble with Angleton and the others; they honestly believed they were untouchable, that they could do whatever they liked, whenever they wanted and it would never, ever have any consequences.

  He turned on the radio.

  He hated country music, re-tuned, got a talk program. All everybody wanted to blab about was Operation fucking Maelstrom. If they had been paying attention they would not be so upset now!

  Nobody came and knocked on his window.

  After a second Camel he got out, tucked the Beretta into the back of his trouser belt, stretched, ground out the butt of his smoke under his heel and walked around to open the trunk.

  It was cold and he wished he had a sweater, or maybe, a waistcoat under his sports jacket.

  Never mind, this would not take long.

  Clara Schouten’s wide, terrified eyes greeted him when he opened up the trunk.

  Kurt wrinkled his nose.

  She had pissed and soiled herself.

  Somehow, that made him feel bad…again.

  Reaching down into his right boot he pulled out his switchblade, flicked the blade open, three-inches and some of razor-sharp steel.

  Clara Schouten squeezed her grey-green eyes tightly shut and would have screamed but for the gag, which was a little bloody, in her mouth. She had tried to put up a fight when he put her in the car. Heck, the lady had a lot more courage than any of the arseholes she worked for…

  “Fuck it, lady,” Kurt complained, growling his mild exasperation as he leaned over her and slashed the ropes around her ankles. He was hardly going to slice and dice her in the trunk of the car!

  He re-folded the blade, stuck it back down his boot.

  ‘Don’t make this harder than it has to be,’ he had said to her when he snatched her seventy-two hours ago.

  He had been angry by then because he had expected the Agency to send people to transfer her to a safe house. He could have made an example, sent a message, killing them. Instead, he had had no choice but to put Clara through the treatment.

  She had tried to put up a fight when he picked her up, too. Tried to scratch, well, gouge out his eyes actually, so he had had to hit her a couple of times, then again, a lot harder than he had meant to in order to quiet her down.

  Clara was a pretty lady, just past fifty, curvy; she had always been above the ‘help’ like him, with all the hoity-toity, airs and graces of the big men she had worked for down the years. People wondered how many of those bastards she had slept with; Kurt did not think she had screwed any of them. She had probably been a fifty-year-old virgin until he fucked her raw in that dirty shack off the Connecticut turnpike.

  He had liked the idea of wearing out untouched pussy.

  He had gagged her to stop her screaming.

  She had just stared at him with contempt t
hat first time.

  So, he had turned her around and taken his own sweet time taking her again.

  ‘Why… Why are you doing this to me?’

  He had honestly believed she was better than that.

  Had she not been paying attention at all for the last few years?

  He knew she was more than just the Locksmith’s secretary; so, all that shit about what her bosses did was nothing to do with her was just bullshit. According to her she typed the orders; she did not dictate them. She was just a nine-to-five office girl; none of the heinous shit that came out of Langley was down to here…

  Yeah, right, now that he had her full attention, he had planned to put her right on a few points. Except, that had not happened. She stuck to her story, looking at him as if she was something bad, she had stepped in on the sidewalk…

  He had drilled a slew of holes in the bottom of the trunk so she would not suffocate on the journey back to DC, left her trussed up like a hog in the cabin out in the woods over towards Manassas. There were always hunting cabins out in that country the owners never used in the winter. Finding a suitable one had taken him only a day.

  Before they left that morning, he had even let her clean herself up before he trussed her up again.

  Shit, he was turning into a real gentleman…

  The guy impersonating Jay Lovestone had had a Navy Colt in his top drawer, if he had had the courage to go for it, he would have died like a man, not crying, on his knees trying to tell Kurt secrets he either already knew or did not give a damn about.

  Tap, tap…

  And the guy was on the floor in a pool of blood.

  He had waited a few minutes to see if Clara’s replacement turned up; she had not. That did not matter; he already had Clara, the real thing. Whoever the dead guy’s sidekick was, she would not be anybody important. A nobody, expendable, with no secrets to burn.

  After the hit, Kurt had stopped at a grocery store on the way back to Manassas; purchased bread, milk a couple of bottles of beer, breakfast cereal, tinned soup, and a bar of soap for Clara.