(2005) Rat Run

by Gerald Seymour

  He suggested, softly and soothing, that it might be the right time to make the radio link with the boat, and reached out, took a cold hand and squeezed it in reassurance - because he was the equal of Ricky Capel, his friend - and felt no guilt at the deceit.

  'If you didn't know it, the weather out here is foul,'

  Harry shouted at the microphone. The trawler shook, then cascaded into the trough. Walls of water climbed higher than the wheel-house windows, then hit a solid, ungiving mass, and the Anneliese Royal seemed to stop. 'About as foul as I've known it.'

  For a moment she was dead in the sea and lurched to port. He clung, white-knuckled hands, to the wheel, and for endless seconds she seemed to go over, then the stabilizers dragged her upright. But at the limit of the trough a wave made a cliff face and she collided with it. He heard the boy, his grandson, cry out behind him in stark fear. Now Harry saw nothing beyond the windows as sheets of spray covered them, and rivers of the damn stuff would be sluicing on to the decks, weighing her down, and he could hear the roar of the weather and the engine's howl, and the distorted voice of Ricky Capel, and the questions coming more frantic . . . When was he going to be there? What time? Why so long? A rogue wave could come as one in ten or one in a hundred. A rogue wave could not be ridden by a trawler.

  They went on through it and the wheel-house

  seemed to go dark, seemed as though night came, of blackened blue and green. Then they burst clear. Light where there had been darkness and the Anneliese Royal steadied and Harry knew he would not be pitched over on to the wheel-house plank floor. He loosened his hold on the wheel, and the sweat spilled down the nape of his neck and on his throat. He looked behind him, and the boy hung in misery from the rail round the wheel-house's sides, and the door to the deck had come unfastened in the impact and hammered backwards and forwards. The sea came in and cleaned some of the boy's sickness. Harry tried to smile, to find confidence for the boy, took a hand off the wheel and gestured that his grandson should get the door closed. Maybe it would be the last time he went out of harbour for Ricky Capel, maybe . . .

  He depressed the switch.

  'Don't know where you are, Ricky. Where I am it's force ten and gusting up to force eleven and sometimes it's cyclonic . . . Right, when are we getting there? I'm reckoning to be in the approach channel for German Bight and turning into Jade Approach at approximately twenty hundred hours local, and that'll put me off shore around twenty-two thirty - if the old girl's still holding together. It'll be a dinghy pickup, which'll be no picnic. I don't want any more radio traffic before twenty-one hundred, don't want the world to know, and I'll want a light signal from twenty-two thirty for the dinghy . . . Oh, Ricky, I'll have the guest suite ready . . . and, Ricky, I won't be hanging about, so you'll need to paddle out quick for the pickup - like I said, no picnic. Over. Out.'

  'Give it to the Germans? Good God, no . . . absolutely not.'

  The meeting was chaired by the assistant deputy director, Gilbert.

  'Let the Germans in on the act - I can promise you

  - and it will be pain and tears.'

  He presided at the end of the table in a room set aside for conferences on the ground floor.

  'If the bloody Germans are involved, their lawyers will demand access to every slip of paper, intelligence material, that we have. No way, not to be considered.'

  Sandwiches, coffee, nibbles and jugs of fruit juice were at the side, and plates, cups and glasses had been brought to the table.

  'We all know the German style. It's endless court cases, appeals that'll go into the next century, and weak-kneed determination to see it through. Forget them.'

  Behind the assistant deputy director, sitting on six straight-backed chairs, was a line of stenographers.

  Each was there to write up the contribution of their own man, and later it would be polished in that man's interests.

  'Scrub the Germans out of it, and let us do our own thing.'

  Present, four on one side of the table and facing Freddie Gaunt, were Dennis from the Security Service; Trevor of Special Branch in the Metropolitan Police; Jimmy, who was senior in the Norfolk Constabulary and would also watch over the Suffolk brief, and Bill, who did liaison between Special Forces at Hereford and Poole with Vauxhall Bridge Cross. All of them, on arrival, had chimed complaints about the short notice given them, and all had let it be known with force that they expected the inconvenience to be softened by a matter of genuine importance.

  The meeting had started tetchily. The assistant deputy director had sketched through a picture of a co-ordinator, who was believed to be travelling to the United Kingdom, only believed, and was now probably, only probably, on the German island of Baltrum on the Frisian coast. The ADD had then asked: Should the German agencies be informed?

  Should their help be sought?

  'I think I have the general drift of opinion/ Gilbert said. 'I think you have all made clear a lack of enthusiasm for that course. Any final thoughts before we close on it?'

  Dennis, of the Security Service and irritable because he had walked over the bridge from Thames House, been caught in a shower and had sodden trouser ankles, said, 'They'd flood the target area with goons, pick up this man who is probably there and believed to be significant and any chance of control is lost to us.

  Look at the last two cases to go through their courts, in Hamburg and Mainz - enough said.'

  'Yes, yes . . . I'd like Freddie, now, to tell us what he knows. The ball's in your court, Freddie.'

  It would be, of course, a turf war. Each of them, opposite him, would fight a corner for primacy. He started with the story of a war being fought in distant mountains in a distant time. He saw a pencil twisting, a demonstration of impatience, in Dennis's hands.

  'Please, could we have something of today, not of times before I was born?'

  He spoke of Ricky Capel, drugs importer from south-east London, and of alliances that facilitated the movement of class-A narcotics into Britain, and saw boredom on the face of Trevor, the fidgeting at his cufflinks.

  'I hardly think, Freddie, that we have been dragged round here for a lecture on how cocaine and heroin end up on our streets. We're supposed to be flushing out al-Qaeda operatives, not mincing round the drugs problems.'

  He talked of a trawler that was, in foul weather, somewhere out in the North Sea, and said that he thought it would be used for a rat run across the water and back to British shores, and saw the first light of interest settle in the eyes of the Norfolk policeman, as if everything said before had been dross.

  'Well, there's your answer. Seems simple enough to me, Freddie. I've excellently trained firearms officers ready to be deployed, and so have Suffolk. We're not yokels out there. We have experience, we've done the exercises. We follow the trawler, radar and all that, back over the North Sea, and we have my people -

  and Suffolk's - on standby along the coast. Soon as they're ashore we've got them. Open-and-shut business. Not that we need it, but do you have any more for us?'

  He said that the trawler did not have a regular home port, and he could not promise where it would come into harbour, and the Special Forces liaison, Bill, seemed alerted to the opportunity. All of the others round the table wore suits, but this man had obviously reckoned his different status should be recognized by his faded cord trousers and heavy cable-knit sweater.

  'With the greatest respect to our country cousins, I don't think this is up the street of Norfolk and Suffolk.

  This is a job for us. I'm putting my weight behind a joint team, Hereford and Poole - which keeps both of them happy - and taken to sea tonight in a coastguard cutter, or anything that's got the legs on a trawler, and an interception in international waters. It's the sort of operation that should be left to professionals, and that's us. We're discreet and dynamic . . . It's for Special Forces, my people. I really don't think there's room for debate.'

  He described the island. He talked of Polly Wilkins, out on the dunes, who would give a warning
when the trawler came inshore. With some pride, Gaunt spoke of the achievement of this young woman, on her first overseas posting, and of the doors she had prised open since a fire and a death in Prague. He saw overplayed incredulity snap at Dennis's face.

  'Am I hearing you right, Freddie? Are you telling us that you have, on the ground, in a situation of this importance, a rookie? A slip of a girl just off your induction course? Is that it? I'll say it to your face, Freddie, if this all goes sour, and it's down to your young woman's failure, I would not imagine - as far as government service goes - your feet'Il touch the ground. You'll be out on your arse, Freddie, and damn well rightly so. It is, and I'm sorry to say it, a cavalier road you're following. Not that it's for me to criticize the actions, procedures and operational decisions of a sister organization but I reckon it hard to credit that we're going to be dependent on the skills of one young woman, a rookie, a raw recruit.'

  He ploughed on, led with his chin. He had learned well, at the break-up of his old unit, that when dogs circled him he could expect no help from his own, no protection from the assistant deputy director. He anticipated the sneers and inevitable derision. But, without enthusiasm, he described Polly Wilkins's companion on the island, and his past, the information he had provided. When he drew breath a babble broke round him - after the quiet and the shock.

  'Are you levelling with us? You've dragged in a bloody vagrant for back-up?'

  'Am I getting this correctly? A man who is disgraced with the stain of cowardice in the field has been taken on to your pay-roll?'

  'Are you short of bodies, or just a sense of priorities? What's going on here, Freddie?'

  He shuffled together his papers. Everything except the photograph of Anwar Maghroub went back into his briefcase. The case was his pride and gave him the small sense of belonging to the Service, little enough of it. It had been bought for him by his wife on his first birthday after their marriage. A technician down in the basement of a former building had, for cash in hand, put the gold stamp of EIIR on the case's flap

  - worn and faded now, the edges were curled from use. He felt old, tired and useless, and each barb of their contempt had hurt a little more than the last...

  but the worse hurt was that he had not defended with resolve the efforts of Polly Wilkins and the man with her on the far-away dunes. He said, with a trifle of dignity, that he did not think he could be of further help.

  'Well, that's it, then. Most grateful to you, Freddie,'

  the assistant deputy director intoned. 'I'm sure that the comments of colleagues were in no way meant as personal, not as reflections on your very satisfactory summary of where we are . . . That's the past. Our concern now is where we should be in the future, the next few hours.'

  He hardly listened. Gaunt could have written the script.

  'We are the providers and you, gentlemen, are the customers, and I think - bar some small blemishes -

  we have provided well. It seems to me that the point at issue is whether to intercept at sea—'

  'It should be at sea,' Bill, the liaison man, said. 'At sea is where my people have expertise.'

  '—or whether we should go for the land option.'

  'So much tidier if it's us doing it,' Jimmy, the assistant chief constable, said. 'On land and done by us or Suffolk.'

  Dennis was asked, did he have a dog in this fight?

  He shrugged. 'Doesn't matter to us, we'd be easy with land or sea.'

  Watching his Almighty, who had descended from an upper-floor firmament, Gaunt saw the lips purse and the forehead of the assistant deputy director furrow. He could predict the judgement, as if from Solomon's seat. Divide the baby, chop the little beggar in half and then there would be two parts to the corpse. Special Forces to shadow the trawler and watch for a drop-off short of the coast, with constant readiness for intervention and a cordon of guns from the Suffolk and Norfolk forces to be on the quayside at whatever port on the East Anglian mainland the trawler docked. It was theatre but it would be compromise. The Almighty, or Solomon, held his hands together in front of his mouth and pondered, the prayer gesture, and took the deep breath. Gaunt knew what he would say, could almost recite it.

  'I believe a median solution will see us where we all want to be. I suggest that—'

  'Excuse me.'

  Gaunt flashed a glance at the source of the interruption, the Special Branch officer.

  The assistant deputy director flicked a tongue -

  Gaunt thought it a snake's strike - across his lips. 'Yes, Trevor?'

  Not lifting his head, speaking with a gentle Welsh accent, Trevor said, 'Excuse me, but I think you miss the essential.'

  'Do we, Trevor? Well, that's a late but interesting contribution. We are all busy men, so perhaps you could enlighten us. How do we "miss the essential"?

  You have the floor.'

  Gaunt thought it that sort of moment when men in waders stand in a wretched stream and identify the reward, a trout, and prepare to cast a fly over it.. .but a damn great cormorant comes from the clear blue sky and nicks the fish. His mood lightened and he anticipated amusement.

  Trevor said, 'We are missing the essential. I tell you what is our fear in the Branch, and the same fear will be mirrored at Thames House. That fear is the "sleep-ers". Each time we go out on an arrest job I feel little elation. The fear is not bred by what I know, but what I don't know. I am in ignorance of the sleepers. How many? Where are they located? What are their common factors? I will answer each point. There might be ten sleepers, a hundred or a thousand, I don't know. They are located anywhere you choose to put a pin in a map, in any major city or in any provincial town. The common factors are that they swim unrecognized in our society, are normal and ordinary in every outward facet of appearance -

  and they hate us and all that we in this room seek to defend. I go further in explanation of us missing the essentials, with due humility. We are told that a resourceful and valued man, a co-ordinator of attacks, is seeking covert entry to Britain. Such a man does not waste his time, and hazard his freedom, if the individuals he will work with are of second or third grade. He will only travel if he believes he will meet young men or women of dedication and skill - and the purpose of his journey is to wake them. Who are they? I don't know. How do I find them? I can't. What is my assessment of their worth? A team of sleepers can inflict, guided by a strong hand, damage to us not equalled since the blitz bombing of the 1940s. We have to find them.'

  He paused. Gaunt reflected that any of them round the table could have made that speech - perhaps not with such Celtic flourish - and hit the same nails . . .

  but none had. No chair scraped, no pencil was twirled, no fist masked a yawn. The Branch man used his hands as if he spoke of something of childlike simplicity, outstretched them. Said it, like it was obvious to an idiot.

  'He takes us there. Arrest him at sea or in port and we will gain little because he will carry no laptop, won't have a convenient and uncoded address book.

  He leads us to this disparate cadre. The new leaders are trained in counter-interrogation methods, trained well, and I doubt he would talk even without fingernails and with his testicles wired to the mains.

  His is the road we follow. Lift him at sea, or on a dock-side, and we would have the empty shell of a body and not his mind's contents. I suggest we permit him to land and we are with him . . . Under close and expert surveillance, we let him run.'

  The silence, into which only the Welsh voice had intruded, broke.

  'By God, that's high-octane stuff.'

  'Exciting, fascinating, challenging - a cell block filled with little scrotes.'

  'Sends a signal to whatever cave that bearded bastard's in that we're on top of him, crushing him.'

  The assistant deputy director smacked the palm of his hand on the table. 'I congratulate you, Trevor.

  Original thinking where we were lacking - we let him run. First class. What I like, everybody is involved.

  Special Forces shadow at s
ea. Suffolk and Norfolk are at the landfall, creating a sanitized perimeter. The Service, Dennis, are singing off the same hymn sheet as the Branch, Trevor, and will do the clever stuff, the surveillance in co-operation. I would like to suggest, if there are no dissenters, that I should chair a daily meeting of principals - I think noon as good a time as any. We're a big family and so much the more effective when we pull together. "We let him run". Brilliant.

  Let's get it in place, gentlemen. Let's do the detail.'

  Gaunt stood, and it seemed not to be noticed. The photograph of Anwar Maghroub lay on the table, and the women who did the shorthand had the details of Ricky Capel's life, and of the trawler that was called the Anneliese Royal, and of the island. He thought he had no longer a part to play. He turned to Gloria and, almost imperceptibly, raised an eyebrow, then flicked a glance at the door. He saw her smooth her skirt and drop her pad into her bag.

  Around the table there was a sudden explosion of voices. A call to Hereford and the alerting of the section on stand-by, done staccato, then Poole notified. A barked demand to Constabulary Headquarters for firearms officers to be pulled off all other duties - no, not Sandringham. A full muster of Thames House guys and girls, A Branch people who did surveillance and bugs, to be made ready. Special Branch teams to be put together that afternoon. Gaunt moved towards the door, Gloria alongside him. He saw, from the corner of his eye, the look on her face of suppressed fury, her man put down, then hung out to dry - unwanted. He stepped aside to let her go through the door before him.