He leaned back in his chair, raised his head backwards and turned it slowly from side to side to relax the neck muscles that nowadays tightened up more and more, making him hunch his shoulders with the nagging ache. As his head rolled, his eyes scanned the framed photographs screwed to the wall each side of the brass clock. The West Virginia, the first ship he had served on; the Yorktown and the Maryland of the Philippines campaign. And the Okinawa now, as he saw it, girding herself to defend US interests in this newest arena of the continuing American war against Communist aggression. Against the Russians in the Persian Gulf.
With his left hand he pulled a ballpoint pen from the breast pocket of his shirt and began to bend it between his thumb and finger, keeping his eyes on the photograph. It would not, as he saw it, be a contest of strength but a show of courage by a single US vessel, a declaration by him to the Soviets on behalf of his President that the game of hide-and- seek was over for all time and that the Russians’ attempt at a sea monopoly was at last being disputed. Hadn’t he seen it—hadn’t everyone?—the certain gradual build up of the Soviet fleets in all the seas around the world, dropping their anchors in more and more of the ocean’s ports, challenging the sanctity of the West’s established sea-lanes? For years now he had been warning people and they’d told him to go and shout ‘wolf somewhere else. But now at last the US Navy had a President who had decided to kick against the pricks.
Suddenly the plastic ballpoint broke between his fingers, and the noise seemed to wake him as if a hypnotist had snapped his fingers. He was alert and he looked quickly around the cabin. He got up and opened the door to the lavatory and then the door to his wardrobe. He looked puzzled, as if he was trying to remember why he was where he was, why he was wet with sweat and why there was a growing throbbing pain in his back molars.
By the time he had reached the bridge, the tension and the pain had gone. He had washed the sweat from his face and had put on his peak cap and, as he entered the bridge, the helmsman stiffened with a ‘Good evening, sir’, and Captain Hanks smiled back, something neither the crewman nor anyone else could ever remember him doing before.
‘Say your head,’ the Captain said to him.
‘Maintaining constant 042 degrees, sir, at 23 knots.’ ‘What time is it, son?’
The crewman looked at the large clock immediately above the gyrocompass to the side of the Captain’s head. ‘Just on 1800 hours sir.’
Captain Hanks leant forward to the control consul and spoke to the radar room. ‘Cap’n here. Position of Minsk?’
‘26-02 degrees North by 56-45 degrees East, sir.’
‘Expected time at the turn?’
‘Standby one, sir.’
The computer went rapidly through its wind-tide-speed calculation.
‘The leading ship should begin its turn west on to a new heading opposite the Musandum Peninsula in forty-five minutes, sir.’
‘Is that the narrowest channel of entry into the Straits?’ ‘Yessir. The deep water channel is only two miles across at that point.’
‘Thank you, radar.’ Captain Hanks turned back to the crewman. ‘What time’s sundown?’
‘18h33, sir.’
‘Completely dark about ten minutes later?’
‘Normally, sir. But tonight there’s a full moon and we should have good visibility.’
‘All the better to see them with.’
‘Excuse me, sir?’
But Captain Hanks was already walking to the forward window of the bridge on the port side. He looked out across the angled flight deck to the stub-nosed bows and the sea, gold with the low evening sun beyond it. Thirty men or more sat half-naked at the edge of the bows, their feet touching the safety net and watching, two hundred feet below them, hundreds of flying fish criss-crossing their way in front. There was a sudden cheer as a school of dolphins leapt from the water less than a hundred yards away to starboard.
Immediately below the bridge towards the stern, Captain Hanks saw the neatly parked rows of Harrier vertical takeoff aircraft, the tips of their hinged wings pointing to the sky, exposing on their undersides the racks that carried their bombs and rockets and behind them Sea King and Sea Stallion helicopters. Squads of men in singlets and shorts were on physical exercises and beyond them in the gun turrets on the edge of the deck, men in green helmets turned the barrels of their three-inch guns left to right and back again, sweeping the sky and sea in silent gunnery practice. Every few minutes, gaping holes sixty yards square would suddenly appear in the flat deck aft as lift platforms sunk down into the hangars below to reappear with another Harrier or another helicopter, manoeuvred by men in blue helmets and jerseys. Ordnance crews wore red, the refuellers the purple, the plane captains brown, and the flight directors yellow. From the bridge a hundred feet above the flight deck, they looked like an army of technicoloured roving ants, moving rapidly in irregular directions, touching but never colliding, and to anyone not of the sea, the activity might have seemed frantic and uncoordinated and without discipline.
Captain Hanks seemed not to see or hear any of this.
Perhaps after so many years he noticed nothing so routine, saw only the exception, the irregular, only that which was out of place. But on his ship, nothing was ever out of place. He stood where he always stood on the bridge, the Captain’s corner they called it, quite still except for the squash ball slowly turning in the fingers of his right hand. The clock above the gyrocompass read 1805 hours. In forty minutes the leading ship of the Soviet fleet would begin its slow turn, ready to pass through the narrowest part of the Straits of Hormuz, the deep water channel between Kuzari Point and Resuradam Island, the tight sea corridor into the Gulf. And in thirty minutes, ten minutes before them, the Okinawa would be there too.
Lt Vaduz, the ship’s Communications Officer, came on to the bridge, bringing the warm, sticky evening air with him. He held a signal.
‘From Command, sir,’ he said.
Captain Hanks stretched his arms behind him and braced his shoulders. The little black rubber ball slowly revolved in his right palm.
‘Yes?’ he said without turning.
‘It reads, sir, “Ships of Soviet Seventh Fleet in your area 18h45 local. You will remain in Gulf but will proceed immediately South to 24 degrees 30 North, 54 degrees 100 East, remaining off Abu Dhabi until further notice. Confirm new co-ordinates. Repeat - confirm immediate receipt of this signal.’”
Captain Hanks did not move. Lieutenant Vaduz watched the squash ball turning. It was the barometer of the man’s moods. As anger and anxiety rose inside him, his fingers would spin the ball faster and faster until it was squashed flat by his short, powerful fingers, and his anger would explode in vicious and obscene language. But as he watched, Lieutenant Vaduz saw no change, the fingers turned slowly. He waited. ‘Shall I acknowledge, sir?’ Still no reply. ‘Shall I confirm change of course, sir?’ Another thirty seconds passed. Then Captain Hanks answered. His voice was low and quiet and even.
‘How far is Abu Dhabi, Mr Vaduz?’
‘Navigation say it’s two hundred and fifty miles, eleven hours sailing, sir.’
‘Not exactly eyeball to eyeball, is it?’
‘Sir?’ Lieutenant Vaduz looked at his Captain and then across to the crewman, who shrugged.
‘Give me the signal, Mr Vaduz.’ Without looking away from the window, Captain Hanks held out his hand and Lieutenant Vaduz gave him the piece of paper.
‘You have a copy?’
‘Yessir. For logs, sir.’
‘Bring it.’
‘Sir?’
‘I said I want the carbon, Mr Vaduz.’
Again the young lieutenant looked across to the young helmsman, but this time the sailor was looking dead ahead. From this point on, he decided, he would hear nothing, see nothing of the conversation between the Captain and the lieutenant.
Vaduz hesitated. He looked
down at the squash ball. The fingers still caressed it slowly.
‘Shall I send confirmation of receipt, sir?’
‘No, sir,’ said the Captain. ‘You will do no such thing, sir. You will send my own reply shortly—just as soon as I’ve written it. Goddamnit! Don’t you see? You see, don’t you?’ Suddenly he swung round at them. His face was on fire. The evening sun was now red and large and sitting low on the western horizon and it lit up the Captain’s head and shoulders; he was no longer grey, not his skin not his hair. He was crimson and sweat sparkled red on his forehead, and his eyes were wide and so bright they looked as if they were burning.
Then he whispered to the two of them as if only they should be party to his conspiracy.
‘Maintain our course, boys. Get me there before them and give me time to turn broadside. We’ll not go south, not us, not the Okinawa, not the United States Navy. We’ve finished running and you’d better thank God and the President of the United States for it. We’ve turned about at last. Keep engines full ahead. Goddamnit, don’t you see? We’re on the march again.’
LONDON—DUBLIN
‘With the help of young Kieran’
Just as Cheaney had promised, Franklin got his Cairo Embassy shower and his Embassy change of clothes and his Embassy steak and onions. He also got his call to the New York Times and dictated fifteen hundred words of copy. His night editor was ecstatic and promised him a Pulitzer.
The story was syndicated to a hundred newspapers worldwide and used as the lead by all the News Agencies. Television networks coast-to-coast ran it at length. The ex-Mrs Franklin saw it, watching the ABC evening show from her bedroom in Tamworth, New Hampshire. Quietly she packed her bags and just as quietly left the house, leaving the large man asleep in her bed, snoring and smelling of sweat and Jack Daniels.
Franklin left Cairo in the Embassy Lear-jet for Rome a little after three in the morning and arrived at Leonardo da Vinci airport in time for breakfast and the Alitalia flight to London Heathrow. But there the Agency’s forward planning did a turnabout. Agents began running, Embassy phones began ringing, deputies began chattering.
Forward Planning dealt with the untoward and were proud of how well they manoeuvred with the unforeseen, but there’s nothing more untoward than fog at London airport and nothing more unforeseen than visibility below a hundred yards. So Franklin was requested to remain in transit at Heathrow.
Anna Schneider bit the plastic sachet and spat into the bath. The she squeezed the rest of the bath oil into the hot water and lowered her body until only her nose and eyes showed. She felt the current of water from the slow-running hot tap move inside her thighs like an eel and rest on her stomach. She closed her eyes, slid her hands along the enamel of the bath to her thighs. She gently fingered her pubic hairs and as steam descended like a warm cloud she began luxuriously to masturbate.
Her Dublin flight had been delayed and then cancelled because of fog at London’s Heathrow. So, like many hundreds more in the departure hall that afternoon, she had been shepherded into a convoy of buses and distributed to the nearby tack and tinsel hotels which depended on the cussedness of British weather, unable to make their money any other way.
This was not something her own people or those at the other end would have taken into account. European weather could not be. The Irish, used to such things, would simply wait for the next day’s flight, but she hoped he would take trouble to cool the Arabs. They were the anxious ones, the ones who would do the wrong thing in panic. The Irishman would have to stay with them. There was nothing she could do.
That was the rule when things went wrong. No contact outside the list. No unilateral initiative. She could not move until London’s fog lifted. People would simply have to wait until that happened.
Her years as a courier with the Reds had taught her patience at such times, had taught her not to side-step, not to detour. From her early revolutionary reading she remembered that George Grivas, the Cypriot EOKA leader, worked the opposite way. If anything went wrong with his schedule, however small, however apparently insignificant, he would cancel the entire plan. A late car, a plane delayed, an appointment made too early or kept overdue, and he would revise. It was, he had written, his way of reducing anxieties and keeping alive.
She preferred her own strategy, such as it was. At moments of alarm, at times when fate or man’s stupidity forced her to move sideways or not at all, her own chemistry took control of the situation. She became sexually highly charged. Enormously so. She understood from what she had heard and read that such a thing was not unusual. Men and women in the Reds had spoken of it during the drugs and drinks in the early days—but listening then she knew none felt it her way. It was after her first bank raid, and the elation that follows survival, that to her surprise she had taken the most energetic role in her first sex orgy. Three men, all since dead, and four women, three of them also dead, had been astonished at her inventiveness. But the men, despite their initial enthusiasm, had tired too easily and the other women had crept away after their orgasms. Only she was left alone, still waiting to be exhausted. She had tired of men so she had tried women and had tired of them. So eventually she took to herself, frequently, sometimes violently and often in the most absurd places, wherever the urge took her. As it did tonight.
The hot tap was still slowly running and the gurgle of the overflow mixed with her moaning as she suddenly surged. Her body arched out of the water, her hands lost in the foam covering her stomach and thighs. Her legs twisted and her hoarse shouted obscenities were suddenly lost as she turned over gurgling ‘Pappa, Pappa’ in the tiny voice of a child.
An hour and ten minutes later she woke, chilled. The hot tap was trickling cold and the bath oil covered the water like a slick. She got out, covered her shoulders with a towel, and stood shivering in front of the mirror. The cold had turned the scar on her neck a dull blue, a thin curved slightly raised purple line contouring from the clavicle three inches up towards her left ear but after a minute using her make-up stick the scar might easily have been a varicosed vein or something just as comfortably explained. She combed her straight blonde hair tightly back, squeezing the ends dry. Her crutch ached. She had not enjoyed it. She had had orgasm but the cold water had denied her satisfaction. She went into the small bedroom, as grey and as blank as the television screen that dominated it. Outside she could hear the droning of diesels as the coaches queued to drop off more despondent passengers from the emptying airport halls. She read the single-card room service menu, then dropped it into the waste-bin. She could feel irritation rising to anger. The tension had not been got rid of this time. She dropped the damp towel and wrapped herself in the quilted bedcover and sat on the warm air vent by the dressing-table. She picked out a cigarette from the Benson and Hedges packet, lit it and inhaled slowly with a hiss. The scent of sweet marijuana filled the room. She had broken the rules for the first time. Others smoked it regularly, some even during a job to keep themselves easy. But she had never done that. She had always insisted you were never properly in control.
Recrimination fired anger and she wanted to crush the cigarette. But the longer she delayed doing so the easier it was to smoke, and the easier it was to cope. She knew she could not sleep until she was tired and she would not be tired until long after midnight, four hours away. She drew in, a long pulling of air through the sides of her mouth. Malawi Gold they had always called it, to be distinguished from the rubbish. She felt its warmth inside, mingling with the growing warmth coming up from the vent and spreading inside. She was beginning to feel the fire again, distant and remote but still there. She shook her head and dry warm hair fell across her face and she sucked some into her mouth to tickle her tongue. Success was so near now. Two days and she would be done, safely away and lost.
There was an inch of cigarette beyond her fingers. She threw her head back and blew hard to the ceiling. Then slowly she inhaled its last pleasure, watchin
g the dark paper turn to ash in the side mirror of the dressing-table. And she focused on herself as the inner warmth moved into the tips of her, the skin on her knees, her ankles, her toes, her nipples. For the first time in many many years she felt irrational, almost careless. She broke the burning ash between her forefinger and thumb and felt the tingle of pain. She would not wait alone tonight. For once she would not be on the outside. Tonight she would wait with the bourgeois for the fog to lift and enjoy bourgeois things, a gin, a steak and the warmth and light of their idiot noisy bars.
Franklin was into his fifth large whisky and soda and eating peanuts from a bowl when she sat down at the bar, leaving an empty stool between them. He had watched her in the mirror opposite. He turned, smiled, and nodded to the stool. ‘You mustn’t let a little thing like this come between us.’ Without a word, she stepped down and then stepped up again to sit next to him.
He looked astonished and grinned. ‘That was real Yankee corn and I didn’t expect it to work.’
She nodded back. He held out his hand.
‘I’m Matt Franklin. Can I get you a drink?’
She nodded again.
‘What’ll it be?’
‘Is that bourbon?’
‘No, it’s Scotch.’
‘I’ll have bourbon.’
‘American style?’
‘With rocks.’
Franklin laughed loudly, much encouraged.
‘On the rocks. Great.’ He caught a passing waiter’s arm and held him. ‘One large bourbon, one large Scotch, lots of ice, separate glasses.’ The small man smoothed his sleeve and went away whimpering.
Franklin swivelled his stool and faced her.
‘You’re Swiss?’
‘Yes.’
‘And if I’d said you were German?’
‘Yes, too.’
‘But you’re not Australian.’
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