Harry's Game

by Gerald Seymour

  Three and a half hours later the plane landed at Northolt and then taxied two hundred yards beyond the main reception area to an unmarked square of tarmac where a solitary set of steps and a civilian Morris 1800 were waiting.

  For a captain in transport it was a very remarkable set of circumstances.

  Chapter 3

  Harry was awake at first light.

  He was in a large room, painted soft pastel yellow with fine hard moulding round the ceiling. A study of a Victorian matron with a basket of apples and pears faced him from across the room. An empty bookcase against the same wall, a basin, small Ministry-issue thin towel hanging underneath it. There was a chair and table, both with his uniform draped over them. At the foot of the bed he could see the suitcase they said they’d packed for him, with no baggage labels attached to it.

  They’d avoided all checks at Northolt, and Harry hadn’t been asked to produce his passport or any travel documents. As soon as he was inside the car the two military policemen who had travelled with him had peeled away from his side and moved back into the shadows. He’d heard the boot bang shut to notify that his suitcase was aboard. Then the car had moved off.

  ‘My name’s Davidson.’ The man in the front passenger seat was talking. ‘Hope you had a good flight. We’ve got a bit of a drive now. Perhaps you’d like to sleep a bit.’

  Harry had nodded, accepted the situation with what grace his position allowed, and dozed off.

  The car had gone fast out of London, the driver taking them on to the A3, then turning off down to Leatherhead, south to Dorking and then into the narrow winding side roads under Leith Hill. Davidson was beside the driver and Harry had the back seat to himself, and it was only when the night sky was blotted out by the arch of trees over the sunken road that he woke. The car had driven on some miles, with evident care, before it swept through the wrought-iron gates of one of those great houses buried deep amongst their own woods that lie hidden in the slopes. The drive was rough and in need of repair. Abruptly the rhododendrons gave way to lawns and the car pulled up at a huge porticoed front door.

  ‘Bit formidable, isn’t it? The Ministry maintains it’s all they could get. Delusions of grandeur. A convent school went broke. Kids all died of exposure, more likely. Come on in.’

  Davidson, who had opened the door for him, was speaking. Harry was aware of several other men hovering in the background. The bag was collected, and Davidson went in, followed by Harry.

  ‘We’ve a long day tomorrow. Lots of talking to do. Let’s call it quits, have a good night, and breakfast at seven. OK?’

  Sandwiches and a vacuum flask of coffee were waiting in Harry’s room.

  The plate and dirtied cup were on the rug by his bed. He put his feet down gingerly and moved to his case. His shaving bag was on top of his neatly folded clothes. He wondered what on earth Mary was making of all this. If they’d sent that dreadful adjutant down to tell her he was called away on urgent business it would be enough to get him a divorce – better be someone with a little experience in the world of untruths.

  No-one he’d seen last night had been in uniform. After shaving he put on a checked shirt, Transport Corps tie and his grey suit. He folded away his uniform in the wardrobe and dispersed his other clothes to the various drawers and cupboards. He sat by the window waiting for someone to come to tell him breakfast was served. From his room on the second floor he could see he was at the back of the house. Overgrown tennis courts. A vegetable garden. A great line of trees before the ridge of Surrey hills.

  Harry was not naïve and had realized he was to be briefed for an intelligence mission. That didn’t bother him, he’d decided. It was a little flattering, and was welcome after brigade transport. Perhaps the remarks about nervous collapse had been rather overstressed on his post-Aden reports. Anyway, little had come his way that had stretched him to the degree he thought he was capable of. If they’d brought him from Germany then the hard assumption would be that they were going to use him for something in Berlin. This pleased him, as he prided himself that he had taken the trouble to learn passable German, have a near taxi-driver knowledge of the city and keep himself discreetly abreast of the trade techniques. His thoughts were full of the Reichstag, watchtowers, walls and clumps of flowers by the little crosses when the sharp knock came and the door opened.

  It began in earnest in what must once have been the drawing room, now furnished in the fashion of the Defence Ministry. Heavy tables, sofas with big pink flowers all over them and deep armchairs with cloth squares at the back to prevent greased hair marking the covers.

  Davidson was there, and three others.

  Harry was given the armchair to the right of the fireplace, dominated by an oil painting of the Retreat from Kabul in the snows of the Afghanistan passes. One man sat behind him by the window; another, not ostentatiously, close to the door. The third sat at a central table, his files spread out on the drapes that covered the polished oak surface. One was of stiff blue cardboard, its top crossed with red tape. ‘secret’ had been written across the front in large letters, and underneath were the words: ‘brown, harry james, capt.’ Four sheets of closely-typed paper were inside – Harry’s life history and the assessments of his performance by each of his commanding officers. The first page carried the information they had sought when they had begun the search for the officer they wanted.

  Name: Brown Harry James

  Current rank: Captain

  Age: 34 years

  Born: Portadown, NI, November 1940

  Distinguishing marks and description: 5'11" height, medium build, brown hair, blue eyes, no distinguishing marks, no operation scars

  Service UK: Catterick, Plymouth, Tidworth, Ministry of Defence

  Service Overseas: Cyprus (2nd Lt), Borneo (2nd Lt), Aden (1st Lt), Berlin (Capt)

  Decorations: Cyprus – Mentioned in Despatches, Aden – Military Cross

  In the last quarter of the page was the passage that ensured that Harry came into the operation.

  Aden citation: For three months this officer lived as a native in the Arab quarter of Sheik Othman, moving inside the community there and supplying most valuable intelligence concerning terrorist operations. As a result of his work many important arrests were made. It should be stressed that this work was extremely dangerous to the officer, and there was a constant risk that if discovered he would face certain torture and death.

  Too right, Harry would have thought if anyone had let him see the file. Day after day, living with those filthy bastards, eating with them, talking with them, crapping with them. Watching for new cars, watching for movement after curfew, observing the huddles in the coffee shops. And always the fear, and the horror if they came too close to him, seemed too interested, talked too much. The terrible fear of discovery, and the pain that would follow. And the know-alls in intelligence back at headquarters who only met an NLF man when he was neatly parcelled up in their basement cells, and who pass discreet little messages – about hanging on a few more days, just a little bit longer. They’d seemed surprised when he just walked up to an army patrol one hot, stinking morning, and introduced himself, and walked out of thirteen weeks of naked terror. And no mention in the files on him of the nervous breakdown, and the days of sick leave. Just a metal cross and an inch square of purple and white cloth to dangle it from, all there was to show for it.

  Davidson was moving about the room in sharp darts around the obstacles of furniture.

  ‘I don’t have to tell you from your past experience that everything that is said in this room this morning goes under the Official Secrets Act. But I’ll remind you of that anyway. What we say in here, the people you’ve seen here, and the building and its location are all secret.

  ‘Your name was put forward when we came into the market for a new man for an infiltration job. We’ve seen the files on the Aden experience, and the need has now come up for a man unconnected with any of the normal channels to go in and work in a most sensitive area. The work has
been demanded by the Prime Minister. Yesterday afternoon he authorized the mission, and I must say frankly it was against, as I understand it, the advice of his closest military advisers. Perhaps that’s putting it a bit strong, but there’s some scepticism . . . the PM had a brother in SOE thirty years ago, he has heard over Sunday lunch how the infiltration of agents into enemy country won the war, and they say he’s had a bee about it ever since.

  ‘He wants to put a man into the heart of Provo-land, into the Falls in Belfast – a man who is quite clean and has no form in that world at all. The man should not be handled by any of the existing intelligence and undercover groups. He’d be quite new, and to all intents he’d be on his own as far as looking after himself is concerned. I think anyone who has thought even a little about what the PM is asking for knows that the job he has asked us to do is bloody dangerous. I haven’t gilded it, Harry. It’s a job we’ve been asked to do, and we all think from what we’ve read of you that you are the ideal man for it. Putting it formally, this is the bit where you either stand up and say ‘Not effing likely’, and walk out through the door and we’ll have you on a flight to Berlin in three hours. Or it’s the time when you come in and then stay in.’

  The man at the table with the files shuffled his papers. Harry was a long way from a rational evaluation of the job, whatever it was they were offering. He was just thinking how large a file they’d got on him when he became aware of the silence in the room.

  Harry said, ‘I’ll try it.’

  ‘You appreciate, Harry, once you say “yes”, that’s it. That has to be the definitive decision.’

  ‘Yes, I said yes. I’ll try it.’ Harry was almost impatient with Davidson’s caution.

  The atmosphere in the room seemed to change. The man behind Harry coughed. Davidson was on the move again, the file now open in his hand.

  ‘We’re going to put you into the Falls with the express and only job of listening for any word of the man who shot the Minister, Danby, three days ago. Why aren’t they doing it from Belfast? Basic reason is they’ve no longer got an infiltration set-up that we’re happy with. They used to do it, lost out, and have pretty much withdrawn their men to let them stooge on the outside and collect the stuff they want from informers. The activity has been down over the last few months, and with the risk that exists – I’m being straight with you, Harry – of an undercover man being picked off, and the hullabaloo when it hits the fan, those sort of operations have been scaled down. There is a thought that the intelligence division over there is not as tight as it ought to be. We’ve been asked to set up a new operation. Intelligence in Belfast won’t handle you, we will. The Special Branch over there won’t have heard of you. Whatever else your problems may be they won’t be that someone is going to drop you in it over there, because no-one will know of your existence. If you have a message you pass it to us. A phone call to us, on the numbers we give you, will be as fast – if you want to alert the military – as anything you could do if you were plugged into the regular Lisburn net, working under their control.

  ‘I stress again, this is the PM’s idea. He raised it at the security meeting yesterday and insisted we push it forward. The RUC don’t want you, and the military regard it as something of a joke. We reckon we’ll need you here for two weeks before we fly you in, and in that time they may have the man, or at least have a name on him. If that happens then we call the whole thing off, and you can relax and go back to Germany. It’s not a bad thing that they don’t want to know – we won’t have to tell them anything till it’s ripe, and that way we keep it tight.’

  He’d wondered whether to mention the Prime Minister’s involvement, and thought about it at length the previous evening. If this man were to be captured and talk under torture the balloon would be sky high, the reverberations catastrophic. But there was another side to it. Any man asked to do as dangerous a job as the one envisaged had the right to know where the orders originated; to be certain he wasn’t the puppet on the end of wire manipulated for the benefit of a second-rate operation. It was Davidson’s own inclination to be open, and he reckoned that apart from everything else a man in these circumstances needed all the morale-building he could get.

  ‘So far the police and military have put out pictures, appeals, rewards, launched raids, checked all the usual angles, and they haven’t come up with anything. I don’t know whether you would. The PM’s decided we try and that’s what’s going to happen.

  ‘I’m sorry, but on this there cannot be a phone call to your wife. We’ve told her you’ve been called away on urgent posting. This morning she’s been told you’re on your way to Muscat, because of your special Aden knowledge. We have some postcards you can write to her later and we’ll get them posted by the RAF for you.

  ‘I said at the beginning this would be dangerous. I don’t want to minimize that. The IRA shoot intelligence men they get their hands on. They don’t rough them up and leave them for a patrol to find, they kill them. The last man of ours that they took was tortured. Catholics who work for us have been beaten up, burned, lacerated, hooded and then killed. They’re hard bastards . . . but we want this man badly.’

  Davidson paused in his stride, jolting Harry’s attention. Harry fidgeted and shifted in the chair. He hated the pep talks. This one was damn near a carbon copy of the one he’d had in Aden, though then the PM’s name had been left out, and they were quoting top secret instructions from GOC Land Forces Mid East.

  Davidson suggested coffee. The work would start after the break.

  The Prime Minister had been hearing a report on the latest speech to a Bulawayo farming conference of the rebel Prime Minister – his ‘illegal counterpart’, as he liked to call him. He scanned the pages quickly and deftly, assimilating the nuances the Rhodesian’s speech writers had written in for the reader on the other side of the world. It was a static situation, he decided, not one for a further initiative at this stage. When his secretary had left him he turned back to his desk from the window and dialled an unlisted number at the Ministry of Defence.

  The conversation was short and obviously to the point. It lasted about twenty-five seconds. The Prime Minister put his opening question, listened, and rang off after saying, ‘No . . . no . . . I don’t want to know any more . . . only that it’s happening. Thank you, you’ll keep me informed, thank you.’

  Off the Broadway, halfway up the Falls, the man and his minder locked the doors of the stolen and resprayed Cortina and moved through the protective cordon of white-painted petrol drums to the door of the pub. The minder had been there from the morning, not knowing and not asking who was the man he had been sent to protect. With the job went the PPK Walther that pulled down his coat pocket. The gun was a prize symbol of the old success days of the local IRA company – taken from the body of a Special Branch constable ambushed as he cruised late at night in the Springfield Road. It was now prized, partly for its fire power, partly for its value as a trophy.

  The man led the way into the pub. It was the first time he had walked the streets of the city since his return, and after two days on the move from house to house and not a straight night’s sleep at any of them he showed the signs of a life on the run. The Army Council had anticipated this and had decided that for his own safety the man should as soon as possible be reintroduced to his old haunts, as the longer he was away the more likely it was that his name could become associated with the shooting in London.

  The pub boasted a single bar, dark, shabby and with a pall of smoke hanging between shoulder height and the low ceiling. A sparse covering of worn lino was on the floor, pocked with cigarette burns. As always most eyes were facing the door, and conversation died as the man walked in and went towards the snug, away to the left of the serving area. The minder gripped him by the arm, and mouthed quickly in his ear.

  ‘They said in the middle of the bar. Show yourself. That’s what they told me.’

  The man nodded his head, turned to the bar and ordered his drinks. He was k
nown only slightly here, but the man with him was local, and that was the passport to acceptance. The man felt the tension easing out of him, as the conversation again spread through the bar.

  Later he was asked by one old man how come he’d not been in. He replied loudly, and with the warm beer moving through him, that his Mam in Cork had been unwell. He’d been to see her, she was better now and he was back. His Mam was better known in these streets than he was, and it was remembered by a few that she’d married a railwayman in Cork three years after her first husband died, and moved away to the South from Belfast. Lucky I was too, she’d say. The railwayman himself had died now, but she had stayed south. The man’s explanation was more than adequate. There were mutterings of sympathy, and the subject closed.

  His main worry had been the photokit picture. He had seen it reproduced on the front page of the Belfast Newsletter on his second day back and read of the efforts to track him down. He’d seen pictures of the troops sealing streets off, looking for him, and looked at quarter-page advertisements taken by the Northern Ireland Office urging people to tell all they know about the killing to the police via the Confidential phone. There were reports that a huge reward was to be offered for his capture, but if any of the men in the bar linked him with the picture there was no sign of it. The man had decided himself that the picture was not that similar to his features, too pinched in the face, the word the woman had used, with the hair parting too accentuated.

  He was on his third pint when the patrol came into the pub.

  Eight soldiers, crowding the small area, ordered everyone to stay still and keep their hands out of their pockets. With the shouting from the troops and the general noise of their entry, no-one noticed the minder leaning against the bar slide his gun down towards the washing-up bowl. Nor did they see the publican, ostensibly drying his hands before displaying them to the troops, put his cloth over the dark gun-metal. With his final action he flicked cloth and gun onto the floor and kicked them hard towards the kitchen door. The design of the building prevented any of the soldiers seeing the young girl’s hand that reached round the door in answer to her father’s short whistle, gather up the gun, and run with it to the coal shed. The men in the bar were lined against the side wall by the empty fireplace and searched. The man’s search was no more, no less thorough than that of the other men. They searched the minder very thoroughly, perhaps because he was sweating, a veil of moisture across his forehead, as he waited for their decision on him, not knowing what had happened to the gun that bore his palm prints and could earn him five years plus in the Crumlin Road.