SPANISH ROCK

by Lex Lander

  ‘Do you speak for both of you?’ I glanced meaningly at Elena, whose back was still stiffly presented, arms folded.

  ‘He does,’ she said grudgingly, without looking round.

  With the morning sun gathering strength and beaming directly into the room it was becoming uncomfortably warm. I removed my jacket while pondering furiously and getting nowhere.

  ‘But you’re Spanish,’ I said finally, more mistrustful than ever, unable to conceive of any motive that could justify such double perfidy, betrayal of both parent and country.

  ‘No!’ Elena’s cry was as someone in physical pain. She stormed in from the balcony, planted her curvaceous frame before us, long legs forming an A, arms akimbo. ‘No –’ more moderately now ‘– not Spanish.’

  I still couldn’t figure what other nationality would bear ill-will towards Spain.

  ‘So what are you – Portuguese?’

  Her face tightened, her lips drew back off her teeth giving her an unholy, savage look. I sensed Linda draw back.

  ‘Euskara!’ she spat the word, but with more pride than I had ever heard anyone speak of their race. ‘We are Basque!’

  * * * * *

  Beyond that revelation about the Irazola family tree I learned little of what was prompting the twins’ treachery. Maybe being Basque was enough on its own. Of all the enemies of Spain, past and present, the Basques were arguably the most relentless, the most implacable. They conceded no allegiance to the Spanish Government and its Head of State, the monarch. They conceded no commonality with Spain, not historical, social, dynastic, nor linguistic. The Basques are truly a people unto themselves.

  When digging for explanations proved fruitless I gave up and let the Irazola twins get on with the purpose of their visit. Elena was reluctant to speak in front of Linda, but Luis saw no harm in it. Which led Elena to fling up her hands, as if to wash them of the consequences, and withdraw once more to the balcony, there to smoke and brood away her disapproval and present her shapely bottom to admirers.

  The gist of the information they were willing, no, eager, to supply was that the corps that went to make up the South Regional Operational Command of the Spanish Army were on “special manoeuvres” out at some unpronounceable lake twelve kilometres north of Algeciras. The corps, of which Irazola was generalissimo, comprised two divisions: one infantry and one armoured. Plus a unit of Anti-Insurgency Helicopters.

  ‘Expecting a revolution, is he?’ Linda had asked, sarcastically.

  ‘Maybe starting one,’ Luis replied, without drama.

  Linda sobered at once.

  ‘Are you serious?’ I said, not yet convinced this wasn’t just some mischief-making escapade, or, much more likely, a baited trap.

  He was serious, he assured me, and from then on, curiously, I didn’t question his sincerity, not even privately. Something about him carried conviction. He was too intense to be other than straight.

  ‘You mean a Russian-style revolution?’ Linda said, pop-eyed.

  ‘No, not a revolution against Spain. But the outcome will mean war, as surely as I sit here before you.’

  The manoeuvres, if Luis’ interpretation was correct, were a screen for an invasion of Gibraltar. When he said it, flatly, in exactly that many words, I was astonished at how readily I absorbed and accepted the feasibility of such an act.

  ‘Will it take place before or after the Conference?’

  Luis shook his sleek, handsome head. ‘My father tells us little. Most of what we learn comes from spying on him.’ A glimmer of shame here. ‘Listening at the door, listening to his telephone conversations, things like that.’

  ‘What made you start spying on him in the first place? Surely not because of this difference between you over allegiance to the Basques.’

  On the balcony Elena stirred. I thought for a moment she was going to speak.

  ‘There is more to it than that, of course.’ Luis spoke with a quiet dignity. ‘But it is a personal matter, a family matter. I can say no more than that.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. It troubled me slightly but pushing too hard might stop the flow altogether. ‘All right, Luis. Tell me more about this supposed invasion.’

  He puffed out his cheeks. ‘What more is there to tell? It has not been possible to obtain details. Our father is very discreet, very secretive.’

  I asked whom the general took his orders from.

  ‘De Cadalso seems to be the main contact. He has twice been to the house and Papa has spoken often to him on the telephone.’

  I tried shock-treatment.

  ‘Where do the Russians fit in?’

  ‘The Russians?’ If Luis was acting it was of Academy Award standard.

  ‘Somebody called Lavov or Lavrov and somebody called Vladimir.’ It was my only lead, garnered from that overheard telephone call at Irazola’s house.

  ‘Yes, I have heard these names. You think the Spanish Government is working with the Russians?’ He sounded incredulous.

  ‘Far-fetched, I know,’ I agreed with a wry grin. ‘But I have reason to believe your father has met up with this Lavov in St Petersburg.’

  ‘He went to Russia?’ Luis exclaimed, still sceptical.

  Elena came stalking back inside, still smoking, still magnificently moody.

  ‘Now I remember you asking me about de Cadalso, the day I came to your house …’ Her voice tailed off as she glanced at Linda, perhaps recalling that she too had come to my house that day. ‘I wondered about it afterwards. I wondered if you were some kind of agent perhaps.’

  ‘I wasn’t. Then.’

  ‘And now?’

  Linda’s head also turned towards me. My answer concerned her at least as much.

  I hesitated. They wouldn’t accept outright denial and I would lose much goodwill by it. I settled for a limited truth.

  ‘I am doing a job here in Gibraltar. It has nothing to do with Spain and not at all with the Basques.’

  Nor was I sure I wanted to plunge into whatever cauldrons were bubbling across the frontier. The Irazola twins had made me a gift of an opportunity that, had military intelligence still been my line of business, I would have seized two-handed. But even if their reasoning was infallible and Spain was indeed about to mount an invasion of the Rock, it was outside my jurisdiction. My terms of reference did not extend to private adventures. Yet to keep that knowledge to myself and blithely go on with my GIBESTÁ assignment was to reduce my function to that of a mindless machine.

  Then too, I remembered Toby’s secondary brief – keep tabs on Irazola.

  ‘Presumably you’re giving me this information so that I can somehow prevent the invasion from taking place.’

  ‘We have no wish to see Spain grab Gibraltar,’ Elena explained. ‘As Basques we can empathise with the people here. They must not suffer what our people have suffered.’

  ‘Noble sentiments.’ I wasn’t being sarcastic either.

  ‘How do we know you’re not just making this up?’ Linda said crisply. ‘About these army manoeuvres, I mean.’ She touched my hand. ‘It could just be a load of hogwash, Warner.’

  Elena glared at Linda, but held her tongue.

  Luis, with controlled asperity, said, ‘To what purpose, Miss Pridham?’

  ‘Maybe you’re bored out of your minds – how the hell do I know? It just sounds fantastic to me.’

  I sensed she was appealing to me to stay out of it. I stood square on to Luis, trying to see beyond the good-looking veneer. His eyes held mine, no wavering, no weakness.

  ‘Okay, Luis, I’m nearly convinced. But I want to see this invasion army for myself. My people don’t give credence to second-hand intelligence. They have to have it handmade, gift-wrapped, in wide screen technicolour before they’ll even open the package.’

  ‘I understand,’ Luis said. ‘We will take you. We will show you.’

  ‘Okay. When?’

  ‘Now. It is an hour’s drive, maybe a little more.’

  ‘I’ll need my camera to film w
ith.’

  Elena shook her head. ‘A cell phone is good enough.’

  ‘My camera’s telephoto lens will be a lot better. It’ll give us higher definition, and longer running time.’

  ‘As you wish,’ Luis said, as I went to fetch my camera bag from the closet.

  Luis was beginning to bother me. Not because I doubted his word. It was his motives that caused my misgivings. He was too wound up, too feverish. As if he was expecting trouble.

  My suspicious side was privately seeking a reason to delay, to ask advice, to make proper preparations. For a start, re-entering Spain might not be good for my health now that Irazola knew my whereabouts. He could have primed the border police to look out for me.

  The headstrong side of me dismissed these qualms and my petty niggles about Luis, and said, ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  Linda jumped up off the bed as if it had bitten her. ‘I’m coming with you.’

  ‘In your condition? Forget it.’

  ‘We will have to go some distance on foot if we are to make our approach unobserved,’ Luis warned her. ‘It would not be possible for you.’

  ‘Then I’ll stay with the car,’ Linda snapped. She flounced around the bed and snatched my car keys off the night table. ‘There. Now you won’t be able to stop me. If you go you’ll have to use their car and I’ll be right behind you from A to Zee.’

  * * * * *

  We went in the twins’ car anyway – a silver Audi 4WD station wagon with Spanish plates, it was less conspicuous than my Aston – and Linda came with us, she and I sharing the back seat. Elena drove. We were held up for ten minutes on the road out of Gibraltar; an RAF maritime patrol aircraft was taking off from the airport. Since the runway intersects the only exit from the Rock all road traffic comes to a standstill for the duration. We were further delayed for over an hour at the frontier while the Spanish guards played their usual games and checked every car minutely. No special interest was shown in me when I presented my bogus passport, bearing my almost-real name.

  We enjoyed a fast run past La Línea and around the top of Algeciras Bay, swinging right towards the mountains onto the A381 autovia. Linda’s hand rested high up on my thigh, fondling occasionally, trying not to smirk at my reactions. My anger over her trick with the keys had only partially abated, coming as it did from plain, honest worry that she would come to harm through her lack of mobility. All I could do was wring from her a promise to vamoose back to Gib in the car, if our escapade went belly-up. This wasn’t some kid’s goof-off and I wasn’t in it for kicks. Irazola had already shown his fangs. If he ever got his hands on me again, the weather couldn’t be relied on to save me. And what I was about to commit was, in any country’s book, a hostile act.

  In some respects, I was a fool. But I felt it was my duty. Not just to my employers, but to Gibraltar and its innocent citizens, who had no idea what was being cooked up for them.

  Okay, an honourable fool then, which was marginally better.

  As the road climbed clouds were beginning to form in big bunches, like cauliflowers, each with its own smear of rain trailing beneath. I checked that the Sony digital camera with its various accessories was snug inside the shoulder bag, ditto the binoculars in theirs. A well-kitted out spy was I.

  ‘Sunny Spain,’ Linda muttered as the first drops spattered us.

  The village of Los Barrios, a mixture of old Andalucian and tacky tourist villas, fell away into the valley behind. Below and to our right the river, like a discarded length of rope, muddy and swollen with rain, descending in a serious of rapids. This was wild country. It didn’t seem possible that the busy coastal highway lay a mere five minutes’ drive to the rear.

  Beyond Los Barrios we exchanged the highway for a narrow country road, complete with potholes. We met no other vehicles and made fast progress in a continuous shallow climb, Elena holding the car in third, negotiating the bends on lightly squealing tyres.

  We crossed a bridge, the river wider and more turbulent here, and pulled over onto a meagre shoulder. Elena switched off the engine.

  ‘From here we must walk,’ she announced.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘but leave the keys with the car.’

  ‘You can be the driver in case we have to leave quickly,’ Luis said to Linda. ‘Like the getaway car in a bank robbery.’

  Linda’s smile was forced. ‘Count on me. I’ll keep the motor warm and my powder dry.’

  He looked bemused but didn’t ask for a translation. We all got out. The rain had eased to a fine mist. Visibility was poor for photography, zoom lens or not.

  As if reading my mind, Elena said, ‘This will pass – look.’ She pointed towards a long bare ridge. Above it a swathe of blue was squeezing out the grey. ‘That is where we are going. The lake is to the right of that ridge. You cannot see it from here because it is on higher ground. The main camp is beside the lake.’

  ‘I would have expected more military traffic.’ I said. Right on cue a helicopter, a gnat on the strip of blue, rose up from the vicinity of the ridge and stayed there, hovering. It bought home the nakedness of the terrain. From above we would stand out like boils on a bare backside.

  Linda, too, was alive to the dangers. ‘This is crazy, Warner. You won’t get ten yards before those guys up there spot you.’

  Elena made an airy motion of the hand and said, ‘You cannot see it from here but there is a ravine running up the side of that ridge. That is the way we will go. We will be invisible from above, I promise you.’

  ‘I’ve got to go, love,’ I said to Linda and tried to exude confidence. ‘You can see that, can’t you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, resigned. ‘I can see that, you goddam dupe. It doesn’t mean I got to like it.’

  ‘Make sure your cell phone is switched on.’

  She patted the only pocket of the artist-style smock she had taken to wearing, her only sartorial concession to her condition.

  ‘Switched on and fully charged.’

  ‘A bit like its owner.’

  ‘Is that a compliment?’ She touched her lips fleetingly to mine.

  ‘Don’t leave the car,’ I said. ‘If anything goes wrong …’ Alarm flared in her face. ‘I mean … it won’t, but if it does, scoot.’

  ‘Is there nobody I can go to for help?’

  Was there? It was a gold brick to a dud cheque that Toby’s crowd would disown me after this. Government bodies always disassociate themselves from failure. Break the rules at your peril – that was the first and most inviolate commandment.

  ‘Try Michael Vella. Everybody knows him in Gib.’

  And then we were off, moving at a trot. The chopper had flapped away northwards and we made it to Elena’s ravine just ahead of that big band of blue that was so welcome yet so dangerous to us. Sunlight raced down the ridge to meet us. Elena, who was leading, made a brief halt to put on sunglasses. I did likewise. I flicked her a sidelong grin but she ignored me.

  To the crest of the ridge was maybe five hundred feet. The going was rough, the bottom of the ravine consisting of small boulders and fragments of stone. I stubbed toes frequently and ricked an ankle more than once. Then the sides of the gully began to taper inwards, eventually down a hair crack, obliging us to abandon it for the bleak hillside. The sense of exposure was unnerving: it was like wearing no clothes in a blizzard.

  We came to the highest point, a flat mesa of rock topped by a pyramid of boulders that had not been visible from the road.

  ‘You see.’ Elena drew these to my attention in triumph. ‘Under there we will not be seen.’

  ‘Under where?’

  She was about to explain when the flip-flop of another or the same chopper wafted over us. The machine itself was not yet in sight but definitely coming closer.

  Elena was the quickest thinker among us.

  ‘Come quick!’ she yelled and was up and running for the boulders.

  It was a near thing. As we drew close to the boulders I saw that the underside of the two largest formed a sh
allow arch, just about high and wide enough to accommodate a prone body or two. Beneath the arch was a depression, in which rainwater had collected. This did not deter Elena who bellyflopped into it without ceremony. Luis went next, me last, loaded as I was with camera and binoculars. Then the air above us was shredded with noise as the helicopter crossed the ridge, directly overhead. In a line, in our cosy little puddle under the two great slabs of rock, we lay still, panting.

  ‘That was lucky,’ Luis said, snorting with relief, as the clatter died away.

  It struck me we were leaning pretty damn heavily on luck. Too late now to start applying scientific precautions.

  The rock surfaces around us were slick from the recent rainfall, and steaming in the sun’s heat. I wiped my palms on the sleeves of my windbreaker and again wondered at my sanity in being here. To the north, where a higher, more rugged ridge joined two moderate peaks, a second helicopter was circling lazily. There was no vegetation hereabouts to speak of. Just the blue mirror of the lake and the river that fed it, a scrawl in a beige landscape.

  Oh, yes, and the biggest concentration of military hardware I had ever seen.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘See!’ Elena pointed downwards into the basin of the valley. ‘Now do you believe us?’

  The binoculars’ 10X magnification reduced two kilometres to two hundred metres. I panned across rank upon rank of tents, a row of Portakabin-style buildings, parked vehicles galore: jeeps, trucks, personnel carriers, AFVs, towed guns, two fuel bowsers; plenty of heavy metal too in the shape of about thirty tanks, two distinct types. Their grey-green paintwork gave off a dull sheen. Helicopters stood around, the rotors of two of them were revolving slowly, warming up. Their fuselages all bore the legend FAMET, in square white letters.

  ‘That’s the Army Aviation division,’ Luis explained when I asked about it. ‘Nothing to do with the Air Force.’

  The whole encampment measured perhaps a kilometre by a half, and I could readily believe it contained thirty thousand troops, or three divisions. About what you’d expect for a full general in peace time.

  ‘What did you say this unit is called?’