‘Tell me about your friends,’ he said to Linda. He had his own ways of assessing the character of the troops.
‘Friends? You flatter them.’ She said it with feeling. ‘You have their resumés. What more do you want to know?’
Hawker had four sheets of paper headed O’Hara, Sullivan, Kreuzer, and Kelly which each of them had handed to him after Gaffney’s perfunctory introduction. He had to grudgingly admire Gaffney’s professional organisation because each sheet had a brief and specifically detailed history of its subject’s experience as it related to the mission. There was no waffle and there appeared to be no gaps. If Linda’s resume was a guide, they were factual and succinct.
The resumés told him that O’Hara was Sean O’Hara, in his late 20s, a trawlerman by trade. He had spent half his life on the North Sea, was qualified for bridge watch and knew his way around marine engineering. He had limited experience in sailing, through the Sea Scouts mainly, and he had plenty of urban combat experience. He had been involved with the IRA since his teens, smuggling men and munitions across the Irish Sea in small boats, with the occasional skirmish duly recorded in his curriculum vitae.
The O’Hara Hawker saw in the flesh was a huge bear of a man, bulky and heavy as a rugby forward. He sat hunched uncomfortably at the table, his chair pushed back to make room for an impressive gut. He had hair the colour of a dirty beach and a dark bushy beard. His dress made no concessions to Latin style by so much as a single stitch. He wore a greasy roll neck jumper and tweed jacket that, Hawker suspected, would have reeked of Guinness if he had bothered to get close enough for a sniff test.
O’Hara drank beer by the litre, scowling at every mouthful of the local Uruguayan lager. ‘Whore’s piss,’ he called it, which was about as long a sentence as Hawker would hear him string together all night. He sat sullen and glowering at one end of the table, interested in nothing but the glass of beer never more than a millimetre away from his fist. The only exception was whenever Gaffney spoke directly to him. Then he would sit straighter and adopt an expression of grim attention – a command-trained gorilla listening to his master’s voice.
John Sullivan was O’Hara’s complete opposite, both on paper and in the flesh. He was a small man with intense eyes under a fringe of Guinness-black hair. His features were sharp and fine. In combination with a fidgety habit of moving his hands constantly when he spoke, his head jerking with every inflection, they made him resemble a little bird.
Sullivan was articulate and intelligent. He spoke quickly in a refined, almost feminine Irish accent. His CV said he was a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, in history. He seemed dangerously close to the kind of idealist dreamer who had left Linda Kelly a widow so young. He had sailed with the university in dinghies but had little blue water experience. Most of his time on larger yachts had been gained in Uruguayan waters, as a member of the yacht club at Punta de Este. He claimed some knowledge of the local coast and a smattering of navigational knowledge.
Though there was no detail of IRA activity in Britain on his sheet, Sullivan was obviously a key man in Gaffney’s organisation. He was the one who handed command of the group over to Gaffney when they arrived. Not formally, more in the way he conducted himself as being responsible for the others. Hawker recognised the attitude of a professional officer.
He also spoke Spanish quickly and well. Almost certainly, Hawker deducted, Gaffney’s number two and a front man rather than a dirty hands operator. Why else the yacht club membership?
Wolfgang Kreuzer was the real surprise of the group. Hawker had been expecting a second generation South American German, possibly the son of an exiled Nazi. Instead, he found himself shaking hands with a tall, urbane and quintessentially European German. Kreuzer had pale blond hair and emotionless blue eyes. He was in his mid 20s, fit and confident. And arrogant. Hawker had been wrong: this was no son of a Nazi on the run. This was Nazism reborn. He even clicked his heels when they shook hands.
Kreuzer’s English was impeccable, with a slightly British modulation rather than the more usual television-induced American twang. The kind of accent that betrays an expensive and privileged education. He had as much ocean racing experience as Linda, almost as much sailboard time as Hawker, and he seemed intent on proving his superiority in ability to drink. He threw back schnapps with beer chasers, matching the others around the table glass for two glasses. At first he had succeeded in downing an impressive amount of the fiery white liquor without visible effect. Now he was beginning to look ugly drunk.
‘Tell me how Kreuzer comes to be part of your group,’ Hawker said quietly to Linda. At this stage of the morning there was enough din from their table, the juke box, and two or three other inhabited tables to make an open yet relatively private conversation possible. Only Grivas could hear and there was no avoiding that anyway.
‘He’s not,’ she replied as softly. ‘He’s our contact with Colombia, where our supply is sourced.’
‘Submerging his morals for the financial benefit of his political organisation?’ Hawker laid the irony on thick.
‘You think I like it?’ Linda hissed savagely under her breath. ‘There are times when the cause is more important than who you have to deal with, and the facts of life in 1982 are that the neo-Nazis have the prime supply of good Colombian coke tied up tighter than a Gestapo interrogation detainee. What they do with their money, I don’t give a damn. As long as they don’t rip us off too blatantly, we’ll deal – whether I like the little Hitler shits or not.’
‘Is that how Gaffney and Sullivan feel about Kreuzer, too?’
‘None of your shit-kicking business,’ she hissed harder. ‘And anyways, where do you get off with this holier than thou baloney you love to sprout? You and the rest of your Argentine military aren’t exactly on the top of Amnesty International’s Christmas card list, you’d have to know.’
‘I quit the service five years ago,’ he replied and saw the puzzlement in her face. He left it at that and checked his watch. 0530. The sun would be up in another hour or so.
Already the musky dawn light would be filling the street outside. He hadn’t eaten since lunch on the Bertram the previous afternoon, and that had been a selection of insipid sandwiches from the Naval Dockyard canteen.
‘Hey, Gaffney,’ he bawled, standing up abruptly. ‘Where can we get a decent meal around here at this hour? I’m starving and I’ll be damned if I’d eat anything they might serve in this dung house.’
‘Noice idea,’ Gaffney checked his own watch, his face glowing a warm pink. This was obviously his kind of party. ‘I’ll be having to make a phone call in a couple of hours anyway. What say I arrange some grub for around seven o’clock. Do you think you can hold those worms of yours off until then?’
Hawker nodded. It would do. In the meanwhile, he needed a leak. He navigated his way through the cramped jumble of chairs and tables with sticky, cracked tile tops, towards the door at the rear of the bar.
There was another door leading from the toilets to outside. Its pane of frosted wired glass glowed softly with the rising light outside. Hawker opened the door in a natural reflex in the hope to breath some clean air and discovered a tiny back alley. It was crowded with rubbish and smelled almost as bad as inside the latrine, but he could see where is opened to a wider street just a few dozen paces beyond the door. Again, he was filled with an overwhelming urge to bolt. Again, he knew he must stay, trapped by Gaffney’s indication that his next call to Devon was due within two hours. Trapped so effectively that Grivas had not even bothered to follow him out of the bar.
He stepped back into the stale dim haze. The table they had occupied was almost deserted. Where Gaffney, Grivas, Sullivan and O’Hara had been huddled was now a desolate plain of empty bottles, glasses smudged to cloudy opaqueness and overflowing ashtrays. At the far end of the table, Linda Kelly and Kreuzer were locked in what looked like a passionate embrace.
As Hawker moved closer through the haze, he realised that the passion was stri
ctly one-sided. Linda’s hands clawed at the back of Kreuzer’s neck in defensive fury. He was half standing, half falling over her, his face buried against her struggling neck. His right arm held her in a powerful grip and his left hand groped inside her jumpsuit at her breasts.
Hawker came through the jumble of tables and chairs like a bull through brush. He grabbed a handful of Kreuzer’s hair and wrenched his arm out from her jumpsuit and around behind his back. It was too easy. Kreuzer hung limp. He let Hawker swing him in one fluid motion, so the two men were facing each other, Hawker catching the foul distillery stench of his breath and the blur of his leery drunken smile. Kreuzer winked, still hanging limp, then drove his knee in a forceful kick straight up towards Hawker’s crotch.
Hawker had been expecting it. He doubled his body away from the thrust and twisted Kreuzer’s arm tighter behind his back. But he didn’t expect to see such a sudden scowl of pain on the German’s face. Kreuzer grunted once and fell completely limp. Hawker let go his arm and watched him collapse in an untidy heap to the floor. Linda was standing behind where he’d been.
‘What did you do to him?’ asked Hawker.
‘Just one blow like this,’ she made a flat-bladed karate chop in the air with her hand. ‘In the back of the neck. Not too hard. I wanted him to hurt some before he went out.’
‘You don’t sound like a woman who’s suffered the trauma of an attempted rape.’
‘Not the first time. Most likely not the last,’ she said lightly. She picked her handbag up from the table. ‘An occupational hazard of working with jerks who outdrink themselves. Thanks for the help anyways. I guess it’s given us back something in common.’
‘Meaning?’
‘An enemy.’ She stepped past the crumpled mess he made on the floor and turned for the front door. ‘Come on, let’s go eat. He knows where we’ll be. He can follow later.’
Gaffney, Grivas and Sullivan were waiting outside in the street with Sean/Juan. A Nissan Patrol four wheel drive wagon was parked in the street behind the Mercedes, O’Hara in the driver’s seat adjusting the rear view mirror. No one asked where Kreuzer was.
They drove away in convoy, Sullivan and Linda riding with O’Hara. Sean/Juan drove the Mercedes much more slowly which Hawker reasoned to be in deference to the wagon lumbering behind. Gaffney was again in the front, Grivas beside Hawker in the back.
‘Have you made your choice then?’ Gaffney asked.
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Grivas. His English was precise, polite, trying to hide his all-nighter tiredness.
‘Not you, your mate. Have you picked your crew from my four fine people? The deal was three, remember.’
Hawker stretched, raising his arms over the back of the rear seat.
‘Sullivan seems smart enough from the little I’ve had to do with him so far,’ he said wearily. ‘Though I doubt his experience for this mission. O’Hara is an oaf. Kreuzer I’ve fought with, which I suspect you already knew. He’s the worst advertisement for the master race since the Berlin bunker. And Linda Kelly. She’s the best of the lot, but where we’re going is no place for a woman, no matter how much dirt she has on her hands from working with you. So, where’s the choice?’
‘You’re saying you want Sullivan, O’Hara and Kreuzer.’
‘I’m saying that I’m not impressed by any of your four fine people.’
‘You’re not, eh?’ Gaffney twisted his head around and his red face filled the gap between the two front seats. ‘And where do you think you’re going to get a crew closer to your high and bloody mighty specifications then? Or maybe you’re saying this is some smart arse poncy dago way of getting out of this whole deal.’
Grivas shot forward, suddenly alert. ‘Oh no, amigo, this deal goes on. I have no need to remind Paolo here,’ he shot an icy glance aside at Hawker, ‘what will happen if he does not proceed.’
Hawker had not moved from his stretching as much as possible in the confines of the back seat. He was too tired to spar.
‘The plan will proceed,’ he said, ‘with all four of your less than fine people. I need to see more of each of them to make my mind up. The little voyage back to BA will be a start.’
‘Can’t say fairer than that,’ Gaffney relaxed and twisted back to face the road ahead. ‘By God I’m fucking famished.’
The restaurant was at Playa Ramirez, right by the beach to the south of the city proper and not far from the casino. It was the perfect place and the perfect time, as they arrived, to see the changing of the guard from the night people to the day people.
The broad boulevard between the restaurant and the beach was almost deserted. Only one or two cars were parked at the kerb, their windscreens mottled with dew that sparkled in the low morning sun. They were cars of the night people.
As the Mercedes pulled up a young couple scampered gleefully out of the restaurant and across the empty footpath to a jet black Volkswagen Golf GTI. The girl wore a little froth of an evening gown, its vivid swirls of pink and blue pastel glowing against the burnished tone of her autumn suntan like reflections of the morning itself. She wore no wrap and only strappy evening sandals in bright defiance of the morning chill. The only hint that her body was aware of the cold came from two small but prominent peaks where her nipples stood hard against the light chiffon of her dress. Her boyfriend wore a dinner suit with a dazzling white shirt which was just now beginning to lose its starched crispness. He opened the car door for her, patting her playfully on the bottom as she bent to climb in with a peal of laughter as bright and light as morning bird song.
Down on the beach, throwing dramatically long shadows that danced across the white capped wavelets and then were lost against the darkness of deeper water, two of the day people jogged along the tideline. They were another couple, older than the night pair by just a few years. They both wore faded grey Le Coq Sportif sweatsuits, each with a bulky towel tucked into the collar against the chill. Their breaths steamed in unison, little clouds that glistened in the gold morning light before fading in the slipstream of their running. They were happy and laughing, too. Their laughter and the soft thud-thud of their running shoes on the damp sand carried faintly across the silent expanse of the esplanade as the GTI burble of the Golf died away in the distance.
Night people, day people. Night and day couples, Hawker thought, with a stab of pain in his heart. He could see in his memory moments when his wife and he had lived each of these scenes with the same joie de vivre as this morning’s two couples.
‘Live for the moment,’ Anne used to say. But the moment for him now was the loneliest he had ever felt. Surrounded by people he could not trust, who each in their own way held his whole family’s life in their hands.
It was a thought Hawker didn’t dwell on too long. He was more inclined to think of solutions than self pity and in this particular moment as he stepped into the welcoming warmth of the restaurant, he realised an even more basic priority took charge.
He was ravenous. The sizzling smell of thick steaks on a grill caught his nostrils and his stomach growled in animal response.
‘You wouldn’t be minding parrillada at this hour, now, would you?’ Gaffney boomed brightly as he bustled his two carloads of troops towards a large table already set for them.
‘Good, good,’ he crooned without waiting for a reply. ‘For that’s exactly what I’ve ordered, and plenty for all of us what’s more.’ He waved cheerily to a bleary-eyed man in the jacket of a maitre d’hote.
‘Guillermo’s a fine friend,’ he continued to Hawker and Grivas as they all took their seats. ‘He normally stays open very late, picks up a nice little trade with the stragglers from the nightclubs, then the bonus of the croupiers and a few others who can still afford to eat after the casino closes.’ He gestured around the dining room to prove his point. Three or four other occupied tables were crowded with men in dinner jackets and women in evening wraps. They were all drinking coffee, and the dark aroma mingled tantalisingly with that smell of sizzling meat.
‘Mozo!’ Hawker called to the nearest waiter. ‘Café para todos, por favor, y huevos con las carnes. Muchos huevos fritos.’
Sullivan leaned across the table. ‘So, that’s the signal we’re now working for you, Mr Hawker, is it then?’
‘I made no signal,’ said Hawker.
‘You took command.’
‘I made an assumption. Do you disagree that we could all use some coffee at this hour? And if you don’t like eggs with your steak, O’Hara will probably eat them for you.’ He was already imagining the platter of parrillada the waiters would bring to the table – thick cuts of steak and chops, plump kidneys and spicy sausage, all grilled to just short of crisp incineration outside, juicy and running with flavour inside. Eggs fried to the point where the yolk was thick but not hard would sit with that beautifully. A real pampas breakfast.
‘Don’t get me wrong now,’ Sullivan brushed his fringe of hair away from his eyes. ‘It suits me just fine. I’d prefer a cup of tea, but I know the muck they make here’s not worth using for dishwater. What I mean is, are we working for you or are we not?’
‘The man talks about working. You don’t know yet what the bloody job is,’ O’Hara chimed in with a grumble.
‘Nor will you know,’ snapped Hawker, ‘until we’ve all departed Montevideo.’
‘All?’ Sullivan’s voice raised by an octave. He and O’Hara looked hard at Gaffney across the table. They had obviously been briefed on the arrangement for three out of four. Gaffney simply nodded and they seemed to accept it without hesitation. So, there was at least a degree of discipline in the ranks.
‘When do we leave?’ Linda asked.
‘Tomorrow,’ Hawker replied. ‘After we’ve all had some good sleep. Meeting at Punta del Este early morning.’
‘I need more detail,’ Sullivan pulled a small business diary from his pocket. ‘How long will we be required? What’s our destination? There’ll be documentation needed for sure …’
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