The Conduct of Major Maxim

by Gavin Lyall

  "How many people do you get on a boat like that?" Maxim asked.

  "Could be just five or six," Blagg said. "That's what a British ship that size would have. It's all automatic, steering, the engine, you know. I don't know about East Germany, but it looked pretty modern. Mind, that doesn't tell you what theyhave got. There'd be room for more. "

  "We know they've got one extra, at least."

  "Major – one thing: if we have to sort of go on board, remember a ship's all made of metal. Most, anyway. I mean, you can't just blow away a door lock, not in a metal door. And all the glass, that'll be pretty thick, too."

  "Thanks. Did you pick this all up around the docks?"

  "We used to… look around… some of the ships. Like, Dave Tanner and me and the others."

  "Why didn't you go for the Navy instead?"

  "Say a lot of things about the Army, at least it don't bleeding sink." From his tone, Blagg could be recalling the flooded shelter in Rotherhithe. Maxim just nodded.

  The town was bright but utterly empty of movement. At the top of Bridge Street he kept on, so as to turn back near the station and come down to the docks by a broader and less obvious road. But he wasn't really expecting trouble. Theydrove slowly in through the gate by the church, along behind a warehouse and its loading bays, then turned as the Seesperlingcame into view two hundred yards ahead and parked in among several other cars and vans left there overnight.

  That part of the Aldam Dock was a small headland sticking out into the water, so that they could come up to the ship from only the one direction. She lay bows-on to them, still brightly lit by lights on the stumpy masts and the front of the wheel-house. To look at, Seesperlingwasreally nothing more than a big barge, a long metal box sharpened at one end and with all the living space and engines stacked at the other. They began walking.

  There were no big cranes at that berth, but the broad dockside was littered with stacks of timber that filled the night air with a rich resin smell and left a road perhaps only ten yards wide alongside the ship. They went slowly, a very close foursome, passing the bows of the ship on their left, the timber on their right and Blagg watching that way with constant nervous twitches of his head and the shotgun. The irregular piles made little dark alleyways in the harsh dockside lights.

  Nobody was in sight, and the only sound was the mumble of a generator somewhere in the fo'c'sle. Maxim halted the group about twenty yards before they came level with the wheelhouse.

  Sims must have been watching from behind the superstructure, because he immediately stepped out into the light and raised his hand.

  "Are you ready, Major?" he called in a voice that was half whisper, half shout.

  Maxim waved his left hand. Somebody pushed Caswell out beside Sims. He was heavily blindfolded and his hands were tied in front of him. He limped as he walked.

  "I am afraid your friend got a little hurt, " Sims called down. "But he is all right." From the deck beside the wheelhouse they had to come down a steep flight of steps to the main deck level, which was about the same height as the dockside. Sims helped Caswell carefully down, step by step.

  "All right, Major?"

  Maxim looked carefully all round, but saw nothing. Hehadn't expected to. It was just the moment of decision… "Ron?" he asked.

  "Go ahead."

  Maxim unlocked the handcuffs from 82 and 83, but held one of them back, close. Sims let Caswell go forward, feeling his way with his bound hands on the side of the ship that reached up perhaps four feet above the deck level. After a few paces he caught his foot on something, stumbled, but saved himself even though his face fell nearly into his hands.

  "That's notjim"Blagg shouted, but Maxim had seen the fully bent left elbow himself and was dropping and rolling aside. There was a vicious rattle on the hull and the dockside went totally dark.

  Perhaps not totally, but enough for a human eye striving to adjust, and that moment was what Sims had planned on. All Seesperling's lights and the nearest dockside lamps had gone out while the silenced submachine gun, somewhere in the timber stacks, had nearly taken Blagg out of contention for good.

  The moment was gone. The shotgun boomed – Blagg had shifted a surprising distance – and the fake Caswell, hands suddenly free, collapsed as he jumped the ship's side to reach Maxim. The two goons were galloping away somewhere, but unarmed so he ignored them and fired twice down the nearest alleys among the stacks. Then he ripped two grenades from his pocket and threw one into the ship, one over the nearest stack.

  "Grenade!" He flattened himself, hands over his ears and hoping Blagg did the same.

  A four-second delay can be infinity or the blink of an eye, depending on which you don't want. Then both exploded almost together, so either the fuses varied or he'd acted faster than he realised.

  He scrambled up. "Get the bastard with the SMG!" They rushed the little village of timber-stack houses, moving as fast as they could behind the dazing, deafening grenade. They worked entirely by trained instinct, swapping sharp barks of command, fire and move, fire and move.

  Somebody staggered out from a cross-alley and Maxim shot him in the face, but he had no gun with him. Perhaps he'dbeen the one to turn off the lights. He jumped past the alley mouth and the wood tore open behind him, slashing him with splinters. The shotgun blasted. Blagg said: "Okay now, Major."

  Maxim took the silenced gun – it was a 9 mm. Patchett/ Sterling after all – and tried to test how many rounds were left by the pressure of the magazine spring, but that was never much help. Call it fifteen for certain. There couldn't have been more than nineteen fired.

  "Reload," he ordered, but of course Blagg was doing so already. "And give me your grenades. I'm going for the ship."

  "Sure, Major." Blagg sounded surprisingly breathless until Maxim remembered the lung.

  "Are you all right?"

  "Course I am. " But in the feeble glow from across the dock, he saw Blagg smear away a trickle of blood from his lip. Maxim hesitated, then there came a gabble of distant shouting.

  "You're the light machine-gun. Give me the Go."

  Blagg moved through the stacks to get a better angle on the ship's superstructure. Maxim peered out at the Seesperlingand now his eyes were getting used to what was really only half darkness. The fake Caswell lay sprawled, unmoving, on the dockside. Where S2 and S3 had got to he couldn't tell; probably still running.

  Blagg called softly: "Go," and Maxim ran for the ship.

  Behind him the shotgun boomed regularly, one… two… three, spattering the wheelhouse and the portholes aft of it with shot. Fire and move, always keeping one foot on the ground – and as he ran he had a brief sharp vision of the schoolboy sergeant on the bright Kent cricket field. Then he had vaulted into the ship and came up in the narrow walkway between the side and the hatch coaming. He moved towards the wheelhouse, the muzzle-heavy submachine gun trying to droop in his hands and still counting. Five. He froze as Blagg's gun emptied.

  "Major? Major, is it you?"

  Sims's voice sounded tired, but Maxim tried to grovel himself invisible among the deckplate rivets until he could justmake out the shape jammed in a space between the steep steps and the foot of the wheelhouse. Sims must have dived in there when the grenade clattered aboard; the blast couldn't have slotted him in so neatly.

  "Where's Jim? Where's my man?"

  "A hand grenade… I should not get into fights with soldiers… What has happened to my men?"

  "Where's Jim?"

  "It is too late, Major… It was too late from very early on… Colonel Eismark got angry with your man when he would not talk… he is not very subtle, as I told you…"

  Blagg called: "Okay."

  "Hold it, Ron." Maxim dragged Sims from his corner one-handed, finding surprising strength in anger. He had been within six or eight feet of the grenade when it exploded, and the steps hadn't been enough protection: his face was nearly blind with blood and he was limp, panting at every movement.

  "How many more?" Maxi
m demanded. "How many more guns?"

  "There is one… I think he is down there…"

  Maxim rammed him against the steps and then up them, using him blatantly as a shield. Behind the cabin affair at the back of the wheelhouse there was an open metal door leading into darkness.

  "Say something, " Maxim ordered. "Like: Don't Shoot Me. '

  "I say you do not have to go down. Your man, he is already -"

  "Tell them to put on a light."

  "Einschaltendas Lichtl"It was a tired shout.

  Nothing happened. Maxim reached around and fired the Patchett/Sterling one-handed into the dark. It made only a pobbling noise, but bucked in his hand and the bullets clanged and crashed very convincingly.

  "Tell them a grenade comes next."

  Sims told them. A feeble yellow glow came on, from somewhere down a stairwell directly in front of them. Maxim called Blagg on board, waiting until he was beside them before moving. One foot on the ground, as they said.

  Clutching Sims by the nape of the neck ahead of him, Maxim stumbled down the steep companionway. At the bottom was a tiny U-shaped lobby, its veneered panels ripped by his burst of fire. Doors led off each arm of the U; one was open, showing light. With his back to the wall, Maxim pushed Sims through.

  The man sitting upright with his hands on the folding table must be Colonel Manfred Eismark. He looked like his photograph, anyway, which was just about all Maxim could remember for the debriefing team later; it didn't impress them. But he could have told them, only they didn't ask, exactly what Jim Caswell looked like, stripped to his underpants and socks to clothe the phoney Caswell on the dockside. There were bullet wounds, which must be from the silenced gun Maxim now held, but they weren't what had killed him.

  Maxim pushed Sims down onto the bunk beside Caswell and lifted the submachine gun at Eismark.

  "Major?" Blagg called down. "Things is moving up here."

  All it needed was a little pressure on the trigger, let the gun lift with the recoil and Eismark would tear open from crotch to neck. So easy – and that was the trouble. It would be almost as easy for Eismark.

  "Colonel – I could kill you. Instead, I'm going to own you. I know something about you that you don't even know yourself. We'll make sure you know, and we'll make sure you believe it. And then you'll belong to us, and begin to love us. Every day you'll love us a little bit more because it'll be one more day we didn't destroy you. All the rest of your life, Colonel, every second of it, you'll never be lonely again because there'll always be us. And your little secret. That's the way it goes, isn't it, Dieter?" But Sims was silent, perhaps dying. "That's the way it goes."

  He wasn't even sure that Eismark understood English, but was happy to know that he would understand in the end. Indeed, quite soon.

  "Major!"

  "On my way. And Colonel – don't tell the police who you are and we won't tell either. That would spoil our little secret. And we don't want that, do we?"

  In what Blagg called 'a real docks', meaning something that needed his childhood expertise to break in and out of, they could well have been caught, at least momentarily. In Goole they waited while a thin swarm of dock police and real ones buzzed into the area asking each other where to go, because the source of shooting is always difficult to establish, and when there was a brief lull they just got into the Renault and drove away. Caswell had been right: it didn't look like a getaway car.

  The police never set roadblocks on motorways, and they could join the MÓ2just over a mile to the west. Agnes found them back in the car park at the Woodhallservice area soon after three in the morning. She had somehow acquired a two-year-old Cortina.

  He told her, briefly and efficiently, what had happened; she knew a lot of it already from Our Man with his local contacts, and probably a little eavesdropping on police radios.

  Under her supervision – she knew where people left fingerprints better than they did – they wiped the inside of the Renault with petrol-soaked rags and then left it; the shotgun and submachine gun were at the bottom of the Aldam Dock but they hadn't had time to dump the last of the grenades from the Renault's boot. They risked taking those on the journey south.

  Maxim drove – insisted on driving – since he was still too tense to sit and be driven.

  "Mina 's safe with some of our people," Agnes said. "Once we've established a little agreement with East Berlin it'll be okay for her to go back to Ramsley."

  "How are you explaining away tonight?"

  "Oh, you were a group of East German dissidents, emigres, trying to stir up trouble and disrupt trade. We'd heard rumours and we're sorry we didn't warn the local Special Branch people, but we never thought it could happen in Goole. You know."

  "Are they going to believe it? – the police?"

  "Not one word in ten, I imagine, but nobody local got shot and they'll settle for a fuss between two sets of foreigners that was only technically on their patch. They won't lose their no-claims bonus for that. And whatever the captain and crewand the Colonel say, it won't be the truth either, we can count onthat. Are they going to identify Caswell?"

  "Have you got a cover story for him, too?"

  "A mercenary, hired by the emigres…"

  "They won't identify him by any photograph. His fingerprints… he's still got those left, but I don't suppose they're on file any where. "

  She looked into the back where Blagg, with his wound and the blessed talent of youth for unwinding fast, was already asleep.

  "What should we do about her? – Caswell's wife?" Agnes asked.

  "I'm going to talk to her now. As soon as I get there."

  "What are you going to say?"

  "I don't know yet."

  "Look-our people can do that."

  "I was in charge."

  "There won't be any problem with an increased pension or whatever."

  "How bloody right you are."

  She let the silence between them run on for a long time, then said: "Why don't you come home with me?"

  He let the silence run, too. "I've got to talk to Mrs Caswell. "

  "Look, nothing has to happen, I just don't like to think of you going back to that crummy little flat of yours and… ohhell."

  After a time, he said: "Loneliness isn't enough reason." Then he thought for a time, or perhaps just drove, and said: "Did I ever tell you about the first time I got posted to Germany? All the houses, the buildings at the small stations, they all seemed familiar. I'd never been there before. Then I realised: they were the big versions of the kits I'd had on my model railway when I was a boy – all the best kits are German – so now I think of them the other way round: the buildings you see from a train window are just oversized plastic fakes…"

  She didn't see why he was saying all that, but she understood the ridiculous logic of it and couldn't help laughing.

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