‘So we encourage serving soldiers, civil servants and policemen to bring their families out here, and watch them get killed in the streets?’
‘Some are, yes, despite our best efforts. Good summing-up of the situation.’
‘What a cock-up!’
I looked around the room properly for the first time. It was a long, low, air-conditioned brick-and-concrete box. A soldier outside was washing the wired-glass windows. At the far end, with her back to me, was the woman from my flight, murmuring into a telephone. Collins followed my glance and said, ‘Liaison officer between the military and civil police powers. She came in on your flight, didn’t she?’
‘Yes. I noticed her.’ I don’t know why, but even with her back to us and maybe forty feet away, I’m sure she knew we were talking about her.
‘What can I do to skew the odds in my favour?’ I asked him.
‘Exactly what I said. Obey the army’s rules, and stay alive. From now on never go out without a side arm. You have one?’
‘I might have,’ I said cautiously.
‘In that case it will be a dinky little private piece with the stopping power of a blancmange – am I right?’ I nodded. ‘Get Tobin to issue you with a proper weapon. A Colt or a Browning, I’ll sign the paperwork. And never go out without it, OK?’ I nodded again. ‘He’ll also get you military uniform without flashes. Wear that too.’
‘Won’t that just invite someone to have a pop at me?’
‘If you were a terrorist who would you be most likely to shoot at – an apparently unarmed civilian, who can’t fire back, or what could be a British soldier, carrying a gun?’
I took a deep breath. At the other end of the room someone had turned on a radio and tuned it to Forces Favourites. Tex Ritter was singing that there was blood on the saddle and blood on the ground, and a great big puddle of blood all around. Just one of God’s little messages. I nodded again – slowly – and said, ‘OK. I understand.’ I took another couple of gulps of the strong tea, and asked, ‘Tell me again, who are these people who will be trying to kill me?’
‘They call themselves the EOKA organization. The Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston. They are not your usual Brighton Pier glee club. They believe that it will be necessary to get us out, before turning on the Turks and joining up with Greece. Their preferred method of negotiation is walking up behind Brits in the street and shooting us in the back. How good’s your hearing?’
‘Not too bad.’
‘When you hear a click assume that someone’s cocking a gun, and dive for cover. If you hear a shot – even half a mile off – get off the street. Don’t expect a Greek to help you if you get into trouble. If you need help and there are no Brits around, find a Turk.’
‘How do I know which ones are Turks?’
He smiled at last, and stroked the cat on his upper lip.
‘They have much better moustaches.’
There was another half an hour of this sort of advice. The dos and don’ts of Cyprus. How to stay alive in a country where the Brits were at the top of the Hit Parade, and it was nothing to do with music. Some streets were already off limits between 1700 and 0700. That Ledra Street in Nicosia I’d been told about was one of them. In fact whole chunks of Nicosia were closed to British soldiers after dark. It reminded me of Ismailia in 1953 – one half of the population, it seemed, was after your money, and the other half after your blood. I asked him about the outlying areas.
‘Cyprus is an exceedingly beautiful island, Charlie – particularly up in the mountains. Very tempting. Some think it was the Land of the Lotus Eaters . . . and the Cypriots claim the goddess Aphrodite as their own. The temperature can be cool, and the cypresses and pines scent the air. Very romantic and peaceful. Unfortunately, the further you get from civilization, the higher the density of terrorist per head of population is . . . and the higher and more isolated the village the less chance you have of walking away from it. The Troodos mountain range, north of here, is desperately full of the opposition: if you wander off the beaten track on your own, no one will want to go and get you back. We’re combing it with armed patrols all of the time, and gunfights are a daily occurrence. It can be like the OK Corral up there. Just try to remember that wherever you are on this damned island, there will be someone watching you who wants you dead.’ He must have seen the wry smile on my face, because he asked, ‘What?’
‘I was in Lancasters in the war. Night after night over Germany with people trying to kill me. I was just thinking . . . nothing changes.’
He gave me his grin again.
‘You’re right. I believe the French have a phrase for it.’
‘Bugger the French. Haven’t they run away from Suez even quicker than we have?’
‘No, they were just slower at getting in, that’s all. I believe it was their lunchtime.’
I asked him a question that had been on my mind for a couple of days. It was just one of those boxes I had to tick.
‘I don’t suppose there are any lions loose on Cyprus, are there?’
He was already looking for his papers; I had been dismissed.
‘No, I don’t suppose there are. Why?’ But he wasn’t interested in my reply, so I didn’t give him one.
Pat took me to an equipment warehouse, and I came away with light KDs. Shirts, a jacket, shorts and regulation-length trousers. And a decent pair of lightweight boots. Don’t forget that bloody webbing belt which always dug into your guts, and a webbing holster. They refused to give me a cap, but that was all right – I still had my old faded RAF cap pushed down at the bottom of my kitbag. I looked up at myself in a mirror and grinned.
Then I realized that I’d been wrong about something all my life – I’d always said that Mrs Bassett hadn’t had any stupid sons. I was wrong. One was grinning right back at me, and looking curiously pleased with himself back in a semblance of uniform again. What had I asked Collins half an hour before? Haven’t we learned anything? Pat was grinning as well. I snarled, ‘What’s so funny?’
‘You are, Charlie. Look at yersel’ again. Pleased as punch to be back in the colours.’
‘I must be mad.’
‘We all are. Ain’t you worked that out yet?’
‘Collins wants me to carry a gun.’
‘I’ll sort that out when we get back. Colt or Browning?’
‘How the hell would I know?’
‘Colt then. Easier to strip and clean, and it jams less.’
‘I want one that won’t jam at all.’
‘Bow and arrow then. Quit worrying – it’ll all work out in the end. It always does.’
I had this thing about having the last word when I was in my thirties.
‘That’s what worries me.’
He took me back along the Nicosia–Famagusta Road. My head was dancing on my neck like nobody’s business. There was a terrorist behind every white-painted cottage, olive grove or goat pen. I remember a small boy in ragged clothes slowing us down with a flock of scabby goats he’d spread across the road. Pat reached for his waist, and unclipped the cover on his pistol holster as we slowed, but the boy gave us a cheeky grin and played a tune on his home-made flute as the animals parted. Relieved, I smiled back.
‘I know that tune,’ I told Pat. ‘I’ve heard it before, but I don’t know where.’
‘The Olympics,’ he told me. ‘It’s the Greek national bloody anthem!’ and put his foot down. We only slowed once more, and that was when we saw the cyclists coming back towards us. They cycled slowly in orderly pairs. Two of the men were smoking pipes, and left a trail of aromatic tobacco smoke. I watched a couple of the girls. One waved gaily to me.
‘You ever heard of a painter named Picasso?’ I asked Tobin.
‘Sure. I even got a couple of his small drawings – an investment, see? Probably never be worth nothin’. Why?’
‘I met him once. I thought about him just then. I think he’d understand what was going on here. This whole island has gone mad – it’s a living example of
surrealism.’
‘We all are. Fancy a Keo in a safe bar in Famagusta? Too late for you to go to work today.’
Later he took me to the armoury, and had me fixed up with a .45. It hung on my belt like a diver’s lead weights: wearing it, I felt as if my body was inclined permanently to the right. The armourer would only issue me with twenty-five rounds, but Pat gave me another couple of boxes from a locker he had in the motor pool, ‘Just to be on the safe side.’ As he turned them over to me he said, ‘Silly to ask, I know . . . but I suppose you do know how to use that thing?’
‘I had a short course at Lydd a few years ago.’ I wasn’t about to tell him that short meant less than an hour.
‘I’ll take you over the range tomorrow evening. You can put some time in. You never know when it’ll come in useful.’ Sometimes you have to wonder where the human race is going: we shouldn’t be living in a world where pistol practice is considered useful.
I felt more or less secure inside the wire. Walking back to my billet I came across Watson marching his gawky march in the opposite direction. He stopped and smiled.
‘Afternoon, Charlie. Sleep well, did you?’
‘You know I didn’t, sir. I was in your bloody cell all night.’
His cheeks and nose were red. If it wasn’t sunburn he was back on the juice. He said, ‘Worked though, didn’t it, old son?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You just called me sir, and didn’t even notice it. You’re a quick learner, Charlie – always knew you were.’ He had an old leather-covered swagger stick which he touched to his cap peak before he moved on. ‘Bye for now.’
And he was off again: just li’ that, as the great man would have said. I hated the bastard, but I just couldn’t seem to get away from him.
We had to drive up to the army den for supper – it was the closest I’d come yet to my working office. Spam fritters and chips: I still look on that sort of thing as men’s food. Lashings of good old HP sauce. That’s one company and brand they can’t sell off to Johnny Foreigner, can they? We wouldn’t stand for Houses of Parliament brand brown sauce being made abroad, and imported.
‘Spam again?’ I asked Pat.
‘Every meal. Get used to it, Charlie, you’re gonna eat Spam in every guise God can think of, and then some more.’
‘Spaghetti Spamalese?’
‘Thursdays.’
‘Is there anything that’s good about this goddamned island?’
‘It’s very cheap. The only thing to spend your money on is beer – and that’s very cheap. You’ll get by on a fiver a week and still save money while you’re ’ere.’
‘Girls?’
He shook his head. ‘Probably not. The nice ones are gen’rally spoken for.’
I pushed my plate away, leaving half a fritter for the cook’s dog.
‘Your Captain Collins told me about these EOKA people . . . Ethniki something . . .’
‘Yeah.’
‘What do the words mean?’
‘National Organization of Cypriot Fighters . . . although they don’t do all that much fighting. Their idea of fighting is stabbing British women while they’re out for the Saturday shop.’
‘He told me that. How many terrorists are there?’
‘Someone told me about eight hundred and fifty – maybe a thousand.’
‘And us?’
‘I never thought about it.’ So he took a thoughtful swig of his beer. ‘Ten thousand at least. Maybe twenty.’
‘So EOKA’s way of fighting us has a certain logic.’
‘Christ, Charlie – you only been here a day! You going native already?’
‘No, Pat. I just want to know what I’m up against, that’s all. This feels like Suez all over again, doesn’t it?’
He looked across the canteen. The thousand-mile stare that goes back years.
‘I liked Suez, you know that? Plenty of opportunity. A lotta grift goin’ on. The coppers have got this place sewn up tight – I have to be careful.’
‘Do you still run your own bank?’
‘Nah, I sold it to David Yassine – remember him?’ I nodded. ‘The Wogs bought him out: made it legit. They call it the Ismailia Banking Group these days, an’ all their government ministers go there for preferential rates. I was pleased when I heard that – he’d never become a proper banker. It was bound to end in tears.’ I smiled. I had good memories of Yassine, and his club – the Blue Kettle – and his dancing girls. I hid there once, dressed up as a woman, to avoid the MPs, but that’s another story.
‘Am I going to work tomorrow, Pat?’
‘Yeah. I’ll pick you up at your hut at 0700, OK?’ I nodded again. ‘Breakfast, then you goes on duty at 0800.’
‘OK. Look, I met an old pal on the plane over, and agreed to look them up in their hotel in Famagusta.’
‘Tony’s place?’
‘That’s what they said.’
‘You like nice surprises, Charlie?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘We’ll take a run in after five, when we’ve finished. Should be OK.’
Chapter Nine
Spontaneous Reproduction
Don’t even bloody ask.
Fried Spam, but at least they made their own bread and fried it, and the army was always pretty damned good at training bakers. In the middle of breakfast there was a pistol shot inside the canteen, and we all hit the floor. Some silly bastard had swaggered in with his gun still around his waist: not only that, he’d left the safety on the pistol off, and had then clouted it with the chair back as he turned to argue with a neighbour. The bullet went through his thigh and calf without touching a bone. It took ten minutes to restore order, and another five to find a medic.
‘I love the smell of gun smoke,’ Pat told me.
‘Even at breakfast?’
‘Particularly at breakfast. At least the silly bastards aren’t shooting at each other yet – that happened last month.’
I’d said it before: I was going to love Cyprus, wasn’t I?
As Pat dropped me off he asked, ‘This them you’re gonna meet at Tony’s: a he or a she?’
‘Just a them, Pat.’
‘Girl then. Hope she’s pretty. See you later, alligator.’
In the 1950s the British military had a thing about building large square buildings with very small windows. These evolved into even larger square buildings with no windows at all. Then someone cottoned on to the idea that if you were in a building that had no windows you might as well bury it beneath the ground. The excuse they gave at the time was to make them impervious to nuclear attack, but it was really just an inability to deviate from an evolving design pathway: another way of saying lack of imagination.
They hadn’t buried all of the communications block. Yet. Maybe they should have done. It was the ugliest thing I’d seen in years: windowless reinforced concrete, with a skin of local brick – a sort of architecture to make your average dead pharaoh feel at home.
What I hadn’t expected once I was through the blast-proof door, and past the small security and admin office on one side – and the aerial room on the other – was that I would emerge into a single open space. A blessedly cool air-conditioned open space. No clicking fans. The area was broken up into smaller open rooms around the wall, like chapels in a cathedral. Each had a couple of radios, and one or two operators. A couple of the operators waved to me. I waved back. No harm in being friendly.
The young man who let me in and conducted my initiation was an untidy-looking Signals lieutenant with a spotty face, and an engaging grin. Handshake.
‘Andrew de Whitt. Andy.’
‘Charlie Bassett.’
‘We were expecting you yesterday, weren’t we, lads?’
There was a series of grunts – not all of them enthusiastic, I thought. As we walked into the centre of the space he continued, ‘The room’s broken up into churches and chapels.’ At least I’d got that right from the word go. ‘And each chapel is a listening post, manned
by one, two or three bodies depending on the level of traffic.’
‘Who’s listening to whom, Andy – and where do you want me to sit?’
‘I’ll come to that. The two guys here are monitoring the Communist Bloc – we call them the Russian Orthodoxies. Those three over there are doing the Israelis . . . their spot is known as the synagogue, and the guy in the small cell has the Greeks . . . and Makarios and Grivas. To his right Tom, Dick and Harry over there have all the Arab states except one. The big empty space is for eavesdropping on our allies – some goons come in from time to time, but we don’t know who they work for, and they never speak to us anyway.’ That left one small cell containing what looked like two new RX 108s. It was backed onto the aerial room.
‘Tom, Dick and Harry?’
‘Sheer coincidence, but I placed them together myself – couldn’t resist it.’
‘And you said they listen to all the Arab countries except one?’
‘Yes. Saudi Arabia – that’s where you come in, Charlie. The Saudis have bang up-to-date comms, and they’re leading us a merry dance. We asked HQ to come up with more experienced operators who could chase their signal, and not lose it. You’re the latest.’
‘I haven’t met any others yet.’
It was the first time he hadn’t met my eye.
‘I know. Some went for a walk, and didn’t come back . . . and your immediate predecessor shot himself.’ He had seen me check my weapon at the door. ‘I’m surprised they let you have a gun.’
At least he hadn’t ducked the issue.
‘What happened to the ones who didn’t come back?’
‘Probably EOKA – they were a sloppy bunch – but there’s a rumour they stole a fishing boat, and got clear across to Turkey in it. Can I check you out on your sets? It’s going to be a busy morning.’
A Blind Man's War Page 15