The Conduct of Major Maxim

by Gavin Lyall

  "And if it isn't," Agnes said cheerfully, "we'll all have had a nice drive in the country anyway. "

  The abrupt silence startled her. Good God, theywant to go through with this charade! she realised. Even Harry… she snatched a glance at him; he was squinting ahead against the sunset with a fixed smile on his face and his shortish fair hair snapping in the breeze from the half-open window.

  Harry is asilly name, she thought, and Harold is even worse. But I just don't want him getting hurt.

  They came onto the start of the Mi at Brent Cross just on sundown. Agnes kept the speed down to let the traffic sort itself out, then moved up smoothly to seventy in the middlelane. The traffic was light, most of the London-loaded trucks had left hours before.

  "I did get some of the stuff you wanted," she said. It was the first thing anybody had said for twenty minutes or forty miles and she had beenso determined that it wouldn't be she who spoke first. But they had retreated into a dreadful male/ military communion of silence where a fart would be criticised only for its length.

  "Like what?"

  Oh, theeloquence of the man, she thought, and pushed her airline bag towards him with her left foot. Inside were a folder of photographs of Sims and his two colleagues, and two Citizen's Band walkie-talkies.

  Maxim passed the photographs to the back seat and fiddled with the radios. They weren't in a class with the Army's Clansman sets, with 840 channels to pick from, but they were handier in size and when switched on close together they produced nerve-scraping howls. He turned them off, satisfied.

  "Good. We're in communication, then."

  "Are we?" Agnes asked.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Skip it. Oh – and somebody at The Firm had another word with the one who dropped out of Sims's scheme. He said they've got hand-guns, and he believes there's a silenced submachine gun."

  "What sort?" All three spoke together.

  "He didn't know."

  "It could be just a Patchett/Sterling. "

  "I bet they've got hold of an Ingrams."

  "Make a difference if it's a.32 or.45."

  "You won't hear it any way…"

  At least they're talking, she thought. Maxim took a packet of sandwiches from his own bag and passed them around. They were strictly non-drip, cheese, ham or corned beef without mayonnaise or pickles. He gave out individual cartons of orange juice.

  "I've got a hip flask of Scotch," she offered.

  "Thanks. We'll have an issue later."

  The car thrummed on the stretch of concrete that begins atthe Bedfordshire border, the northern sky turned gold and dark blue and Maxim collected up the photographs, then said: "Ron, give me Sims himself."

  "Five-ten, well-built, about forty, dark brown hair neatly cut, clean-shaven, smokes heavily, usually well-dressed…"

  "That's him. Jim, give me one of the others. Don't bother with the name: they're all phonies. Call the older one 82, the younger 83. I want 83."

  "Five-eight, late twenties, fair-haired with moustache…"

  This game was part of Agnes's profession and she had routinely memorised the photographs and descriptions when she first got them. Now she could catch them out on an occasional detail and felt they respected rather than resented it. As the night closed around them they were becoming more of a unit, as she knew Maxim intended. She had never thought to see the day – or night – when Harry Maxim would be giving her orders and she'd be taking them.

  Chapter 26

  On the straight stretches the wide road was a two-tone river of twinkling red and white lights, soothing and even hypnotic if you forgot it was two counter-flowing streams of metal at closing speeds of up to 140 mph. Or faster, for a brief period around Nottingham, when it was time for the local Jaguar owners to hurry home from an evening of scampi and Scotch.

  Maxim was dozing, or pretending to doze, beside Agnes; in the back Blagg had gone fast asleep with his head on Caswell'sshoulder, which at least stopped him leaning forward every few minutes to breathe tobacco into her ear while he checked the dashboard instruments. But the car ran very smoothly, apart from a rhythmic rise and fall in the engine temperature: probably a sticky thermostat.

  They had been on the motorway just two hours when Maxim woke up and called for a stop at the Woodhallservice area. That was still fifty miles short of Goole, but he didn't want to show their faces any closer; in a couple of hours their descriptions might be chart-toppers on police and all-night radio wavebands. Agnes made a phone call, Maxim paid for the petrol, everybody used the lavatories and they tested the radios across the width of the car park. In ten minutes they were on their way again, the sleepiness gone.

  "His sister had been living in the Dales, you said?" Maxim asked.

  "She's got a cottage there. It was her husband's."

  "I don't think I knew she'd married."

  "Out in Africa, twenty years ago. He was working in South Africa and Rhodesia and seems to have been one of the few who didn't make money at it, or else they spent it all. He got leukaemia and came home to die in his family village. She still lives there. She gives piano lessons."

  She gives piano lessons. It was nothing to be despised, but what a leaden phrase it was for somebody who had toured the world.

  "One of her hands is a bit of a mess, arthritis I think, " Agnes said.

  "That can't help," Maxim said uselessly.

  Caswell leaned forward again. "D'you mean, Miss, that somebody can just marry a Brit and walk in without your people knowing?"

  "Just about, unless we were asking for tabs to be kept on her. She'd pick up her passport from a consul out there, and that's all there is. Six thousand people do it every year, we can't check on every one, and we never thought we'd be interested in Mina Linnarzagain until last week. "

  "And we grab her back," Blagg said. "I mean, that's the idea, and that's all, is it?"

  "More or less." It was a tricky question for Maxim. They were used – indeed, entitled – to clear orders. "I'll try and tell youjust what the score is at each step, but you're going to have to go by Sass rules. " The SAStraining at least meant that they were accustomed to making decisions for themselves.

  "This Sims," Caswell said. "Is he good?"

  Maxim hesitated, and Agnes chipped in: "You were with him in Germany; how did he come across?"

  "He's a hard case. In his way, he's got a real grievance; everybody's been saying how important this Plainsong operation was, but leaving him to do all the work and take all the blame."

  "That's our Guy Husband," Agnes said. "And swinging S-S besides. At our meeting they were using him like a glove puppet."

  "Atmy meeting, Husband pissed all over him in front of me and he just had to take it. I think he's got a lot of loyalty to his people and he knows that if this caper doesn't come off, they're dead."

  "Do you want them dead?" Caswell asked bluntly.

  "It wouldn't hurt," Maxim said reluctantly. "I wouldn't give them the first shot." It was an important point, perhaps one that Agnes didn't quite notice being made, and it marked awhole world of difference between civil and military thinking. "One of those buggers can shoot," Blagg said. It made Maxim feel a little better to remember why Blagg knew, and that he owed him the same order Sims must have given his people: shoot first.

  They slid off the motorway and down into the bright silent streets of Goole just after midnight. It gave no immediate impression of being a port: it was just a collection of low, mismatched shopfronts and then a level crossing in the middle of town. Agnes pulled into the station carpark, and a man got out of a dark car and walked over.

  They never got his name, he was just Our Man, stocky, old enough to be retired, wearing a cloth cap, blazer and a silk scarf against the evening chill. He spoke in a clipped telegraphic voice that suggested a service background – presumably Navy.

  "She's in the Ocean Lock now. Things running a bit late. Be berthing in the Aldam Dock. West side – there." He held a street map of Goole out under the R
enault's inside light, a single sheet where the complicated dock area was no more than a few inches square. But Blagg seemed interested, tracing a stubby finger around and saying: "Seems to be all corners."

  Our Man grunted agreement. "A boatman's harbour, is Goole. If you're any tonnage at all, you need boatmen to haul you round all those right angles. Ship you're looking for is the Seesperling,fo'c'sleand poop job, grey hull, blue and white funnel, 650 ton. " Seeing Maxim's blank look, he added: "That means small, about 180 feet end to end."

  "Fine, but I hope we can stay away from the ship. How would somebody get up to where you said, with a van? How'd they get into the yard?"

  "In Goole, if you want to walk in, walk in a thousand different places. To take a van, to that berth, you'd go in the gate by the church."

  "Is it open?"

  "Never closed as far as I know."

  "So if we cover that gate, we'd catch anybody going in for the ship?"

  "Should do. Mind, they could be there already. Some people are." They looked at him. "Dockers, somebody from the harbourmaster's office, pilot vans, Customs went on board at the lock most likely, somebody from the owners. Rush hour in Piccadilly every time a ship comes in."

  "They won't try and push an old lady on board through that, not yet," Caswell said.

  Blagg coughed politely and asked: "What about the dock police, sir?"

  "Prowl around from time to time. Want to know who you are if you're off the beaten track. Nothing much to pinch except Renault cars and you've got one of those already." He gave an elderly cackle. "They deliver 'em here, a compound over beside the Ocean Lock. They say they've got guard dogs loose in there, but some kids got in the other night and scratched up a whole lot of cars and I never heard of anybody getting bitten."

  There was a moment of silence, then Our Man said to Agnes: "Is that it, then? Where d'you want me?"

  "Back by the phone. Just -" she said something quickly and quietly to him; Maxim realised there must be some fallback plan, to try and muffle any scandal he might stir up. Our Man grunted a good-night and drove away.

  "All right, " Maxim said. "Time to hand over all identifiable possessions."

  Agnes watched, wondering, as Blagg and Caswell started turning out their pockets, putting wallets, keyholders, Cas-well's cheque book and Blagg's necklet ID disc into the holdall. Maxim put in his own share; they all kept some money.

  "You're sure your clothes aren't marked?" he asked, handing out packets of field dressings. "Not even laundry marks?"

  They stood confidently silent, and with a shudder in her stomach Agnes realised they were trying to make their corpses unidentifiable. Maxim gave her the holdall and she said: "I'm glad you didn't ask me. I'd bestarkersbefore I was sure I wasn't wearing anything marked."

  They grinned with a wolfish politeness, then started distributing and loading weapons. The grenades, ten of them, were American M26A1's,probably smuggled in by Caswell from Germany stowed somewhere in a military vehicle. The Customs would be looking for booze and drugs, not weaponry. They screwed the fuses into six of them, and were as ready as they could be.

  Maxim said: "You mentioned a flask of Scotch… Anybody in the market?"

  Blagg wasn't interested, but Caswell said casually: "I'll take a dram," and Agnes poured him a stiff one. Maxim took a taste, more to keep Caswell company than anything. Perhaps Jim had become more adjusted to civilian life than he cared to believe. They got back into the Renault, Maxim driving.

  Goole was built entirely on one side of the river; there wasn't even a bridge in the town itself. The dock area beganjust south of the centre, where the streets suddenly became rows of boarded-up broken-roofed houses and shops, an abrupt reminder in space of how fast the British ports had collapsed in time. The Army could have moved in tomorrow to use those streets for training and hardly disturbed a private citizen.

  At least it meant there was no-one to see the creeping Renault as Maxim fixed the pattern of the area in their minds. The docks themselves were surprisingly bright, given an almost carnival air by tall street lamps throwing patches of blue-white, orange and yellowish light. The occasional ships – the berths were far from full – were also well lit, with floodlights boasting their funnel markings and harsh work-lights glaring down from the masts. Each ship hummed to itself, living off its generators, so that when they stopped the car the dock was a basket of purring metal creatures, and very far from the stark silence and darkness Maxim had expected. He had been through ports at night before, but only as a passenger smugly assuming the place was staying alive for himself alone.

  There was some distant shouting from the lock gates, and from where they had parked on a disused railway line sunk into the road, they could see a small bunch of figures on the far side of the dock waiting for the Seesperling. The ship itself came gliding in with the dignity that even the smallest vesselhas when moving slowly through dead calm water, also bright and purring. The Goole boatmen were out of luck that night, since she was taking the simplest route in the harbour, with nothing more than a thirty degree turn out of the lock. Their turn would come when she had to back out again.

  Maxim drove slowly back to the huge nineteenth-century church that stood right up against the low dock wall – or perhaps it was the churchyard wall; in any event it was no more than four feet high – and the ever-open gate down past the warehouses to the Aldam Dock.

  "I don't know where we're going to set up here," Caswell said, and Maxim didn't know either. The lowness of the wall and the fact that the gate was on a corner of two streets, each quite wide, made it near impossible for an ambush.

  "Somebody had better go in for a shufti," Maxim decided. "You, Jim. With a radio. "

  It had to be that way: if you split your force, you had to split your commanders. Caswell took Blagg's pistol; they set the radios at channel 3 and agreed to change to 5, 7, 9 and11in that order if they had to shift. Caswell walked quickly through the gate and was lost behind a stack of forklift truck pallets. He had about three hundred yards to go to the Seesperling's berth.

  On the other side of the church, the town centre side, therewas a small car park. Maxim backed the Renault in there, behind a truck loaded with what looked like sections of oil pipeline, and they waited. The walkie-talkie was jammed inthe driver's window so that its telescopic aerial stuck upoutside, and it murmured to itself. Agnes doubled herself over to light a cigarette near the floor of the car, trying to hide theflare of her lighter. They went on waiting. There was no wayto call Caswell: his own radio would be turned off, that close to theenemy.

  He came in surprisingly strongly. "Jim. "

  "Go."

  "Pilot van's just leaving. White job."

  "Roj."

  They got just a glimpse of the van beyond the church, thirty seconds later. They waited. "Jim."

  "Go."

  "Customs just leaving. Blue Allegro. And two men on bikes."

  They saw that, too, again just about on thirty seconds later. The bikes – probably dockers – came up Church Road past them, much more dangerous than a car driver surrounded by his own noise and light. Maxim snapped off the radio until they were gone.

  Caswell was calling.

  "Sorry. Go."

  "One car left, a green Metro. I can't see anybody around."

  "Roj."

  The night went silent again. Blagg whispered: "Would they be using radio themselves, sir?"

  "Likely enough." Now that CB radio was legal, they wouldn't even have had to pinch sets from the Intelligence Service's quartermasters. But there was nothing he could do about it.

  The walkie-talkie suddenly squawked: "Hey, did I hear a good buddy out there ready to shoot the bull? This is the Dog in the Smog tooling down the rip strip and feeling kinda lonesome. Do you copy?" It was an adenoidal Birmingham voice trying to sound like a Tennessee truck driver.

  Maxim glared at the radio as if it had bitten him, but the voice came back, jamming the waveband with more verbose CB garbage. Given a pause
, Maxim snapped: "You fucking moron," which wasn't military radio procedure either, and switched to channel 5. It stayed silent.

  Then at last: "Jim."

  "Go."

  "I've got Sims and 83 out on the deck. Two others with them. Nobody who looks like Eismark."

  "Roj."

  "Well, I'm damned," Agnes said. "We're in the right place."

  "D'you think the old lady's there already?" Blagg asked.

  Maxim and Agnes glanced at each other, then she said: "No. Sims and his bloke will have gone aboard to set up a deal. She's stored away somewhere."

  Caswell's voice crackled: "Sims is using a walkie-talkie. sb's getting off the boat. Going for the Metro."

  "Roj." Maxim started the engine. "We're going to have to stop him."

  "He's most likely going for the old lady," Agnes said. "He could lead us there. "

  "He'll talk once I get at him."

  "You and your trusty ammonia? It could take hours. "

  Caswell reported: "Metro's on its way."

  Maxim pulled the radio back into the car. "Wehave to stop him. I can't tail him, not through an empty town, this time of night."

  "Of course you can't, but I can. Shift your arse."

  Maxim scrambled around to the passenger side as she slid across under the wheel. The green Metro slipped out of the gates and up past them; there was one person in it. Without turning on the lights, Agnes jumped the Renault forward to the edge of the park just as the Metro turned left at the end of the road.

  "Stanhope Street," Maxim said, juggling the map, a torch and the radio. "He has to go either left or right in three hundred yards."

  Still lightless, the Renault bounded forward and slewed into Stanhope Street; the Metro's tail-lights swung left.

  "Bridge Street. Long and looks dead straight. Leads out of town southwards."

  It was indeed dead straight – it was the main road feeding the west side of the docks – but became a series of humped-backed bridges over offshoots of those docks. Agnes let the Metro go over the first, out of sight, and then hurled the Renault down to it, jammed to a stop and crept up for a look. And so she went on, driving like a rifleman moving forward under fire, using the car with a skilled savagery that made Maxim and Blagg, men who lived with machinery, wince as they would have done had she used the walkie-talkie to hammer in a nail. But she kept a quarter of a mile back from the Metro yet out of its sight until it crossed the last bridge and turned down the Swinefleet Road along the south bank of the Humber. The soft-sprung Renault screamed around after it.