The Doomsday Carrier

by Victor Canning

  “And now?”

  “Do it now. It cuts out all the mystery. Charlie must be put in the bag soon. The story will die.”

  “Mightn’t it be better to say he escaped on the way to Fadledean?”

  “No. Some bright newsman might ferret out that Miss Blackwell is out in front because she knows Charlie and she’s the only one he’ll come and take a banana from. If she’s not that important why is she, a micro-biologist not an animal handler, in the picture?”

  “I don’t know. Charlie’s bound to be picked up soon. Why go nearer the truth than necessary?”

  Grandison replaced his monocle. He said heavily, “Because, Minister, truth walks on its own legs and often where it will—not where you want it to go. What happens if by a miracle Charlie stays out over twenty-one days? Then you’ll be forced to tell the whole truth, unless you want people dying like flies all over the country and start pretending it’s some natural disease brought in by an immigrant or visitor to the country.”

  “He can’t possibly last that long.”

  “He might. Particularly if—not knowing the truth—the public treat him as a national hero on the run and stop cooperating. Plenty will begin to take that line now because of those.” He nodded at the newspapers. “No, my advice is that we say he’s escaped from Fadledean where he was being used for harmless animal behaviour studies. Then, if a miracle occurs and he stays out, you’ll have a cast-iron reason for not having told all the truth right away . . . setting up a plague scare which would have caused panic and trouble all round unnecessarily.”

  “Well, it’s certainly a point. But it will depend on the way the P.M. sees it. And on what other advice he’s had. H^ll have had the Home Secretary’s opinion and you know he’s a great believer in playing these kind of cards close to his chest.” Bluntly Grandison said, “You had some good cards a week ago and they were played wrongly. It’s time some of the not so good ones left were laid on the table.”

  “I don’t agree. Not by any odds can this damned animal last another two weeks. In this country? With everyone on the look out for it?”

  Grandison sighed aloud, indifferent to the quick frown the Minister gave him and said, “On that particular point the real outcome rests with time and chance and the will of God. Nothing the powers and principalities have been doing for the last two thousand years could have over disposed Him towards politicians. The most that can be done should be done to curry favour. You called me here for my advice. I give it again. Charlie has escaped from Fadledean where he was being used for ethological research purposes. If he goes the limit then you have a valid reason for not having given the full truth needlessly early and scaring the country into a panic because all the odds were that Charlie would be caught—as I believe he will—well within the crucial time span. I say again, the best form of lie is the one which stays closest to truth.”

  The Minister was silent for a few moments and then he said, “I agree with you. But you know the P.M.’s thinking in this kind of situation where constituency, electoral and factional interests might be roused—do the least you have to because you may never have to do more.”

  * * * *

  Two hours later there was an official government press release that Charlie had escaped while being transported to Fadledean to be the subject of a series of researches into animal behaviour. The animal was harmless unless angered or maltreated and any sighting should be immediately reported to the police. It was confidently anticipated that the chimpanzee would be captured within the next few days.

  On reading this many an editor in Fleet Street realized that the Charlie story would be good, with luck, for some time to come.

  In the search area further troops and helicopters were deployed and police leave and rest days were cancelled so that more patrol cars could be kept on the roads. In mid-afternoon, the vicar of a parish well to the north of Salisbury reported in great agitation over the Charliephone that even as he talked he could see the chimpanzee in his garden chasing his hens. When the police arrived the reverend gentleman had recovered his calm and lucidity. His back garden was littered with feathers, three of the hens were dead and the wire netting of the hen roost had been ripped away from one side. The vicar said that immediately after his call the chimpanzee had climbed the wall at the bottom of the garden and had disappeared into the trees that fringed a small tributary of the Avon river. Helicopters were switched to the area and troops lorried to it to throw a ring around the district. That evening before dinner the vicar retired to his study—where he often held long and confidential talks with the Archangel Gabriel and the spirit of Karl Marx—to compose his sermon for the next Sunday confident in the knowledge that instead of the usual miserable handful of a congregation he would have a full house. The sermon when finished was a sane, well-ordered and pious one. Only his housekeeper, who had seen him twist the necks of the chickens with his own hands and prepare the scene, could have disproved his story but she did not choose to do so because she shared his bed twice a week and sometimes joined him in his talks with the angelic and spiritual world.

  As the vicar finished composing his sermon Charlie, who had slept most of the day through the intense heat in his tree, dropped to the ground, went down to the cottage garden for an evening meal of radishes, young peas and lettuces, and then wandered away northwards, keeping just inside the fringe of the wood.

  Half an hour later the keeper returned with his dog and immediately noticed the state of his garden. At that moment he was still in a bad temper at the way his young pheasants in the woods had been disturbed by the searching soldiers and low-flying helicopters. He was a sensible, phlegmatic man who lived alone, and he was well used to keeping his eyes and ears open and drawing his own conclusions. As his dog was clearly disturbed, running around in circles with its nose to the ground and barking, he shut it in his back shed and then returned to the garden. The pea vines had been pulled over and some were torn out by the roots. Here and there in the row lay, still fresh, the well-chewed lumps of the wads which Charlie had discarded after sucking all the juice from them. The strawberry bed had been completely stripped of its fruit and the loose net dragged half-way across the garden to a newly dug bed in which he was going to plant out more young lettuces that evening. In the friable, soft dry earth of the bed were the clear hand and foot marks which Charlie had made.

  The gamekeeper who was a good citizen, though there had been times when he had taken the law into his own hands with poachers, had been well aware of the reason for the patrols and helicopter activity in the area. He debated for a moment or two whether he should—since he had no telephone—cycle to the nearest call-box or take the law into his own hands. The sight of the havoc in his garden and the disturbance of his pheasant poults suddenly made him angry and he decided to go after the vandal on his own account. There was plenty of daylight left yet, but it would be dark before any help could arrive if he wasted time telephoning, and anyway he just didn’t want any more damn soldiers tramping the woods and his coverts.

  Taking his dog and his gun he set out after Charlie. The dog, a well-trained black labrador, was soon made to understand that this was no evening stroll but an extra work period. It soon picked up Charlie’s recent scent at the edge of the garden and headed up the slope towards the fringe of the wood, moving steadily. After a few hundred yards the scent line led them into the wood and the keeper soon realized that Charlie, although the general direction he had followed was northwards and not far from the wood’s edge, was really moving at random, wandering away to left and right as the mood took him. He found a young ash tree with the fresh scar where a leafy branch had been torn off and a little later came across the branch discarded on the gound. Ten minutes later he came upon a fresh mound of faeces at the foot of a rabbit warren. He called the dog closer to him, making him work slower, and sharply curbed any noise the animal made in its excitement. It was a good dog, one of the best he had ever had. He had no time for any dog which could not be train
ed to work for its keep, and to work his way.

  After an hour the keeper heard the sudden alarm call of a cock pheasant not far ahead. Looking up he saw the bird rocket out of the wood’s edge a few hundred yards away and plane low down the hill slope to the cover of a field of com. He motioned the dog to his side and they went forward quietly.

  Ten minutes later the scent trail took them a little deeper into the wood and to the edge of a wide clearing where a stand of chestnuts had been felled a year before. Only one tree still stood in the clearing, an old oak growing now in isolation, its far spreading branches a good fifteen yards from the nearest trees of the encircling wood. Squatting at the foot of the oak was Charlie holding in his hands a dead hen pheasant which he had caught in the undergrowth when the cock pheasant had been disturbed. He had pulled off the wings, roughly scratched and tom away some of the breast feathers, and was contentedly chewing into the warm flesh.

  Keeper and dog halted and the man slowly slipped the gun from under his arm and held it loosely ready for action. The cheeky little sod, thought the keeper, calmly sitting there eating one of my birds and not caring a damn even though he’s seen me.

  Charlie had seen man and dog. He had heard them coming the last few yards and when they halted on the clearing’s edge he looked up, feathers sticking to his mouth and hands. He parted his jaws slightly, his lips still covering his upper and lower front teeth, and gave a soft warning bark. The pheasant flesh was good and it belonged to him. When neither man nor dog made any move their stillness disturbed him. For men he had no real fear, but dogs always unsettled him. He opened his jaws wider, drawing his lips back over his upper and lower teeth and suddenly uttered a series of loud barking waa-waa-waas.

  The dog, for all its training, stirred and whined. The keeper spoke sharply and quietened it. He freed the safety catch on the shotgun. This would be one for the lads on Saturday night at the White Hart . . . half the bloody army and the sky full of racketing helicopters and they hadn’t come within a mile of the chimpanzee . . . all they’d done was to upset every damned pheasant in his woods for miles around . . . and if anyone bellyached because he had blown its head off what could they do? He’d thought it was a stray dog, upsetting his birds and had fired—as he had fired and finished off many a dog before.

  He brought the gun up slowly. As he did so his dog, overexcited, quivering with eagerness, began to run forward. Seeing the movement of the dog Charlie screamed in rage and slipped behind the tree as the keeper fired. The shot pellets blasted into the big trunk of the oak and a few of them hit Charlie in the lower part of his left arm as he disappeared. Charlie screamed with pain and went up the tree on the far side fast, climbing as high as he could.

  The keeper, angry with the dog, and furious at missing Charlie, went over to the tree and made the dog sit and be quiet. Then he walked around the tree, shotgun at the ready, looking up in search of Charlie. As he stood there Charlie, well hidden in the top of the thickly foliaged tree, screamed loudly at him and released the pheasant. It fell from branch to branch and hit the ground at the man’s feet. Incensed at the sight of the bird’s body, mangled and tom, the keeper raised his gun and fired blindly up into the tree. Most of the shot was blocked by branches and leaves and the rest whistled harmlessly away to Charlie’s left. But the noise of the shot and the passage of the hissing pellets frightened Charlie into panic. He ran out along one of the spreading top branches and launched himself on a great leap across the wide gap towards the nearest of the trees on the fringe of the clearing. He failed to reach the trees, dropping awkwardly to the ground, and rolled in three or four panic somersaults into the wood. He went rapidly up a tree and began to swing away, through the safety of the spreading canopy of the forest roof.

  The keeper saw him land from his leap and spring to the nearest tree but, although he took little time in reloading the double-barrelled gun, Charlie was out of sight before he could use it again. Standing there, his anger still high, the dog whimpering at his feet, he heard Charlie crashing away into the wood at top speed. For a moment or two he contemplated following but then decided against it. A quarter of a mile away in the valley was a farmhouse which he knew had a telephone. He would go down there and get in touch with the police. Meanwhile Charlie, thoroughly frightened, kept going through the tree tops, whimpering and grunting to himself but slowly becoming less aware of the few shotgun pellets which had lodged shallowly in his arm and body through his thick pelt and tough skin.

  Police patrol cars covered all the lanes and roads in the Collingboume Wood area later that night, and early the next morning the army patrols and helicopters were back, but none of them found any sign of Charlie.

  * * * *

  Rimster and Jean Blackwell were sitting late that night in the lounge of Redthorn House having drinks after coming back from a conference at the operations centre. Just before they had left a report had come through that a gamekeeper had sighted Charlie in the northern area of Collingboume Wood.

  Accepting one of her now occasional cigarettes from Rimster Jean said, “Either the good vicar this afternoon was seeing things or Charlie can move faster than a normal chimpanzee. Even as the crow flies it’s a good twenty miles between the two places.”

  Rimster smiled. “Don’t forget the hens. They’d had their necks twisted. Perhaps there are two chimpanzees kicking about.”

  For a while, thinking that this was the first time she had known him to be flippant about the search, she was silent. Then she said, “There’s only one Charlie. Whose word would you take?”

  “Not the man of God’s against a gamekeeper’s. And you?”

  “I think I agree with you.”

  “You’ll see—now that the statement has been made publicly that Charlie is connected with Fadledean we’ll be tossed a lot of false information. It’s a game the public like playing—the pub wits after a few drinks, the cranks, the quietly mad but apparently sane types like the vicar, the nice old ladies who genuinely think it’s a shame to keep any animal shut up in a cage, and all those who for some reason or another have a grudge against the police, the army or the government. It’s an easy game to play and a safe one. The only thing that would bring honest co-operation would be a frank statement of the truth. Tell them that if Charlie stays out for twenty days then this country runs the risk of a new form of plague and then, whatever they might feel about the ethics of the thing, nobody would care a damn for him except to get him back in his cage as soon as possible.”

  “Would you do that?”

  “If I were an ordinary citizen who knew the facts, yes. But if I were the Prime Minister or the Minister of Defence or somebody like that I don’t think so. Not yet anyway—because like them I’m a gambler and for the moment the odds are on Charlie being picked up soon. But I would have stuck much closer to the truth right from the beginning. What about you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Rimster smiled. “That’s why I’m partly here. Left to yourself there would always have been the risk that you might be tempted to pick up the telephone and call some editor.” Stirred, Jean said sharply, “You think I’d do that?”

  “Don’t jump at me. My opinion doesn’t count. I’m here because other people just want to have every safeguard they can. Emotion set Charlie free. Your emotion. That makes you a risk.”

  “You still haven’t given me your opinion.”

  “No, I don’t think you’d do it.”

  “Well, thank you for that.”

  Rimster shrugged his shoulders gently, and said, “Would you like another drink?”

  “No thank you. I’m going to bed.” She paused, and then, not knowing even what prompted it, she said, “I get the feeling sometimes that you don’t care a damn whether Charlie is caught or not, that the whole thing bores you.”

  Rimster laughed. “You’ve got it wrong. I do care that Charlie should be caught before the time limit. But you’re right. The whole thing bores me.”

  “Why?”

/>   He was silent for a while, debating whether he should tell her. Unexpectedly he suddenly realized that he did want to tell someone. He was over the hill, burnt-out. Oh, yes, he knew he was just as clearly as Grandison did. Nerve, muscle and brain—maybe even conscience—had been tautly stretched over the years. Now the slackness was beginning. Small things escaped him . . . like not foreseeing that that damned Colonel might refer to Jean by name in front of Sparrow. Yes, Grandison was being kind in relegating him, otherwise some small thing, overlooked, might finish him off on one of his usual missions.

  He said calmly, “Because it’s not my usual kind of job. And that’s the reason I’ve been given it. It’s the first step to easing me out. I’ve seen it happen before with other people like me. People who’ve been burnt-out doing what they have had to do in our service. It’s a pretty common occupational hazard. And when the people upstairs, the bosses, see the signs there’s a sort of kindness in them which makes them offer you a choice without putting it into words. You can either settle for a simple life doing jobs which don’t set the adrenalin pumping, or you can sign the final document and retire to nurse your dirty memories dozing in a club armchair or digging your cottage garden.” Spreading his hands and smiling, he asked, “Make sense to you?”

  Shocked at the sudden nakedness of his reply, she said, “What do you mean that you’ve done things? That you’ve—”

  “Killed people? Of course. In many ways. With these.” He spread his hands, palms up. “Often without a weapon. Seldom from a safe distance. Shocked?”

  “Yes, I am, though I know I shouldn’t be.”