Bolt Action

by Charlie Charters

  In all of this, Davane’s affection for the British soldier is real and visceral. This from someone who has given every last atom of her life to MI5, to the service’s motto, Regnum Defende. This after being kneecapped in 1975 and tied up to a lamp-post in Catholic West Belfast. For her, the young men of the British Army were the only force strong enough to hold the line. To keep the United Kingdom whole. And good men – 763 in total – had died delivering something like peace . . .

  Traffic was always so slow around Parliament Square. Davane had glanced at a newspaper kiosk, a poster with the first edition from the Evening Standard boiled down into six easy-to-understand words. New Govt Shame Over Injured Troops.

  Looking at the queues of people huddling around the kiosk, Davane had spoken quietly. ‘If word of this Ward 13 thing gets out, gets into the media, this government will fall.’

  Grainger had sounded shocked. ‘How do you work that out?’

  ‘Take from the rich, give to the poor, and we’re working the wrong side of the street.’ Davane drew her initials, SAD, Sheila Anne-Marie Davane, in the condensation.

  ‘I don’t see the connection.’

  ‘It’s Robin Hood . . .’ In the tiniest corner of the remaining condensation, a fleeting tribute to a distant memory of dreams and wishes as a young girl, Davane marks out the letters MM with her fingernail. ‘. . . the greatest story ever told.’

  The arrival of a working lunch has mellowed conversation in the Pepys Suite. Trays of sandwiches, quiches, vol-au-vents are wheeled in. Flasks of tea and coffee. Gassy or still water.

  Craddock, the First Sea Lord, is giving a rather toneless briefing on the Ward 13 investigation to date. The next step is involving the police, in some form or other. That sends shivers through the room. The downside, the admiral murmurs, is the inevitable leak to the media – either from the police themselves or through the process of interviewing suspects. To date, Ward 13 is being handled in-house. Specialists from 34 Section of the Royal Military Police’s Special Investigation Branch, based in Hounslow, working alongside a team from the MoD’s defence fraud analysis unit . . . Davane isn’t really listening. She’s intrigued by the Vice-Chief of the General Staff loading up with mini pork pies. He must be an addict. Building a low encircling wall of them around one side of his plate.

  ‘This name, Ward 13 . . .’ Davane clears her throat. ‘Am I the only person who doesn’t know what it means?’

  The vice-chief blinks his bushy eyebrows at her, looking start led, a pork pie between his thumb and forefinger, and glides easily into a smile, realising the oversight.

  ‘Why, in the military it’s shorthand for the funny farm.’ He takes a napkin and lays it over his plate. ‘We used to have a military hospital in Woolwich. The Queen Elizabeth. Something like two hundred and seventy-odd beds. Closed in 1996. Let’s see if I can remember this right: Ward One was a children’s ward . . . umm . . . Three and Four were general medicine . . . Ten was oncology. Anyway, Ward 13 was where the drunks were sent,’ and he snorts an all-purpose signal of contempt, ‘and those who were getting messages from outer space.’

  Davane closes her eyes. Lets out a long breath. So typical of the higher echelons of the army to have allowed that ward to be called Ward 13. ‘That knowledge would be fairly specific, to people who served in the armed forces?’

  ‘That’s where we are focusing our investigations,’ says Craddock. ‘Military and ex-military types.’

  ‘Exactly what sort of a pool of suspects does this give us?’

  The senior officers look at each other. Carefully, knives and forks are placed on the side of plates. Chewing stops. Concerned looks back and forth. Then mouthfuls are quickly swallowed. A mixture of embarrassment and unease, as if somebody’s honour had been grievously affronted.

  The Chief of the Defence Staff brushes away a speck from the lapel of his dark suit before looking up from his seat at the head of the table. His eyes narrow and his deeply lined cheeks suddenly flush. ‘I was assured your presence here, Ms Davane, was going to be helpful.’

  As at a tennis match, all eyes roll to the other end of the table. To Davane, standing by the back of a chair. ‘Well. In that, you were flat out wrong . . .’

  Grainger neatly inserts himself into the rally. ‘I think what my colleague is trying to get at is that we can be most helpful if we understand the true extent of the problem.’

  Davane leans forward, steeples her fingers, as if in prayer. ‘Just so you’re clear, General, I’m not in the business of being helpful. You’re the one with the problem . . . we might just be able to find you a solution. But that certainly is not going to involve me saying, What jolly good chaps you are . . . This Ward 13 . . . it strikes me, we might as well consider any and everybody who leaves the armed forces to be a potential recruit. And that would be – what? – upwards of five, ten thousand people a year. Am I wrong?’

  She looks carefully at each of the MoD officers in front of her. There is no immediate reply, but hostility lights up their eyes. Their body language frigid. Knuckles whitening on the mahogany tabletop. How dare you?

  Davane understands this unspoken message for what it is: these are men who get obeyed in an instant; who, with a twitch, can dispatch aircraft carriers and planes and divisions of fighting men. And then along comes Ward 13. A crisis you can’t be trained for. No battle space or salients or bridgeheads to dominate. No flanking manoeuvres or reverse-slope defence.

  Once you see these defence chiefs for what they are – scared but clinging on to whatever levers of power they have left – well, there’s no reason to cut them any slack whatsoever. The gauntlet is about to be thrown down.

  The Ulsterwoman crosses her arms and glares down the table. Her eyes hot little lamps of pure brilliance. ‘And while you’re sitting on your hands, getting all red faced with me . . .’ Davane stalks around the long table, limping heavily, seeming to take an age as she pegs the length of the room, finally reaching the side of the Chief of the Defence Staff, professional head of the UK armed forces and principal military adviser to the Secretary of State for Defence and the government. ‘ . . . can you tell me exactly when the hell you were planning to tell me about Ward 13 ripping off Sir Dale Malham and his multimillions?’

  Davane looks around the room, watches her audience quailing. ‘I mean Dale focking Malham. What a bunch of idjits you people are.’

  Well. You could have heard a pin drop. For several minutes afterwards.

  Operation Macchar, minus five days

  US Embassy

  Diplomatic Enclave

  Islamabad

  US ambassador Nancy Zoh is giving Bill Lamayette a severe dressing down, an indignant, by-the-numbers special, flashing anger in her eyes, and colour rising up the white of her neck. All eighteen stone of him can think about is what fun it would be to rip off her ambassadorial clothes and run amok amid those long, willowy legs. Try as hard as he can to prevent it, he feels a grin edging across his face. There are three exwives and any number of former girlfriends who wouldn’t be at all surprised at the simplicity of Lamayette’s thought process.

  This Come-to-Jesus meeting had actually progressed in two parts. Just as Zoh was working up through the gears the first time, the alarms had started to blare. ‘You are advised to evacuate . . . secure all windows . . . secure all classified material.’ The stentorian tone over the loudspeaker system was from the on-duty Marine guard, but the drill was being run by the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security.

  So. They had duly scampered, following a much-practised evacuation plan. Lamayette hustled quickly, despite his bulk, in his fawn-coloured salwa kameez. Zoh was almost lifted off her feet by a pair of escorting Marines in their desert-styled combat-utility uniforms. Down the long corridors. Funnelled into their respective armoured cars. Squeezing in tight. Go. Go. Go.

  Nine minutes and forty-five seconds it had taken to empty the whole campus-like compound.

  Uniquely among all of America’s embassies
Islamabad has a softball field, a restaurant, tennis courts, even a fifty-metre swimming pool. As the address indicates, it is an enclave, in the truest sense of the word because the world beyond the high fences is too dangerous. Nine minutes forty-five is not good enough. Lamayette knows. They had been hitting under six minutes when he first arrived. Five thirty-seven remains the record. True. In those days, as President Musharraf’s government took on all comers in the final stages of its death-grip strategy, you could sometimes hear gunfire in the distance. Gunfire was wonderful for focusing the minds of scampering diplomats. The smell of burning tyres even better.

  Now they are back in the ambassador’s office and Zoh is midway through the second iteration of her telling off.

  Through the reinforced glass of her windows, behind Zoh’s bobbing, chattering head, Lamayette can see the first security lights flick on. Dusk is approaching. And soon the whole panoply of security measures designed to separate Pakistan from the embassy is brilliantly lit. The concrete ramparts, the reinforced crash barriers and the many miles of slick razor wire.

  I could really go with a smoke right about now, thinks Lamayette, dropping from one thought to another. In fact, breaking open a fresh pack of Luckies feels like an imperative; certainly it counts for a hell of a lot more than listening to Nancy Zoh. Long legs or no long legs. He crash-bangs into her monologue. ‘Look. Madam Ambassador . . .’

  Lamayette feels the nicotine twitch getting stronger, moves his weight from one foot to another. ‘. . . I’m here because you asked me. We’re all busy, you’re whacking off on this and that, so I’ve gotta ask, what does any of this have to do with me?’

  Zoh looks a little stunned. Her lips part just a bit in shock. She moistens them with a slow touch of the tongue.

  The ambassador rises slowly from behind her massive desk. Fifty-two years old. Sharp nose and hungry eyes. Dark blonde hair tied back tightly in a bun. In fact tied back, or tied down, seems to say a lot about her. She’d spent a lifetime playing at something she wasn’t. That was Lamayette’s pop-psychology view of things. Passed her realtor’s licence in ‘89, married a geriatric husband in ‘91, buried him two years later and was worth fifty million by ‘95. Fifteen years fund-raising on the West Coast and here she was, serving at President Hannah’s pleasure in Islamabad.

  It was the first time anybody could remember Pakistan being a non-career appointment. But that was the point, President Hannah had his surrogates intimate to the relevant Senate committees. If a patronage appointment is good enough for Canada, Brazil or the United Kingdom, it’s good enough for our new friends in Islamabad. It sends a signal. It’s how the great democracies respect one another.

  She stabs a button under a telephone set and starts again with the deep eye contact. Lamayette, standing on the other side of the desk, feels a charge in the air, like they’re about to go seriously off-manual. ‘When I started selling houses, we had a term for people like you. The butt-rubber. The worst kind of vendor. Like a dog with a sore ass, he glides over the carpet in front of everybody else, itching himself, expressing his anal glands, thinking only about himself. Nobody else matters. Big smile on his dumb face even while everybody else in the room is flat-out horrified. Shocked. Revolted. Maybe even laughing at him behind his back. I used to hate clients like that. No matter what you do . . . no matter how fast you move to discount . . . nothing, nothing is going to close that deal now.’

  Lamayette makes a mental note to check whether it was only male dogs that did this sort of thing. There was a lot of ‘he’, ‘his’ and ‘him’.

  ‘Now, you can try to get awfully upset with a dog. But he’s got no social code. No sense of what is politic or not. You on the other hand, Mr Lamayette, should know better. Your fascin ation with this General Ali Mahmood Khan . . .’ she shakes her head gravely ‘. . . You see how it is: We’re trying to close the deal on Pakistan. Help them rebuild the social fabric of their country. Empower free media, celebrate the independence of their judiciary, energise a responsible civic society . . . and there you are rubbing yourself all over this General Khan business.’

  Lamayette likes the analogy enough to stay silent, and in his place. Butt-rubber. He’d been called many things in his life but never that. He could see her point. How terrible it must be to have constructed such a wonderful fiction about democratic renewal and then have him lumbering through it. Telling inconvenient truths.

  The ambassador moves around the table, past the framed picture of her embracing President Hannah at his inauguration ball, and the one with her paw in that of the late Benazir Bhutto’s. She leans comfortably against the edge of the desk. She’s wearing a pair of cream-coloured ballet flats. Off-duty shoes. ‘You’re gonna need to learn that lesson.’

  Naughty talk. That Van Halen song, ‘Hot For Teacher’, screeches in Lamayette’s mind. Visions of schoolboys and long-legged tutors dancing in their gymslips. He knows he should be more respectful, but, really, this is getting way too preposterous. He’s only here because she is good to look at. But now she’s lecturing him. She. Nancy Zoh. The woman who uses people with real work to do, embassy staffers, to wrap her personal presents, get her pictures framed, to go shopping on her behalf. Talk about an Innocent Abroad. ‘You’re going to be teaching me . . . what exactly . . . home staging skills for the successful realtor?’

  ‘Very good. Smart come-back.’ Then the dismissive little sneer of a smile. ‘Won’t be me. I don’t care for you, Mr Lamayette, and I certainly won’t be wasting a second more of my precious time on you.’

  Lamayette rubs his thick neck. The nicotine is calling. ‘In the circumstances I’m going to say, Shit. That’s a pity. Now open your claws and let me go.’

  ‘Not so fast,’ and Zoh puts up a hand, and a bracelet of thick gold charms chinkles in the quiet of the room. ‘Just so you know how much muscle this side of the table has got. Before we started our little chat, I got a call. From a very important man.’ She mouths the word slowly, v-e-e-h-r-r-e-e, like she’s reading to a child. By the cat-got-the-cream look on her face, she could only be talking about President Hannah. Big jug-faced idiot.

  ‘Sad news. Very sad. General Stangel. Your boss. Well. I don’t want to spoil the surprise. You’ll be advised in due course, the usual TOP SECRET cable. He resigned . . .’ She pauses, looks over at a clock face that shows Washington time, nine hours behind – it was eight in the morning there, past five in Islamabad – she corrects herself. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean resigned, past tense, I meant will be resigning, future progressive tense. In about eight hours’ time.’

  Now. That was a good punch and Lamayette is embarrassed to feel himself stunned. His turn to blush, to feel the heat of anguish scorch his cheeks. The hits come at him quickly. Stangel gone. The CIA again without a real meat-and-potatoes boss.

  Jerry Stangel was a holdover from the previous administration and, by common consent, on the president’s termination list, waiting for the necessary political cover. Different folks for different strokes is the simple rationale. Hannah had pushed and chivvied his own people into a range of the most senior CIA positions, all clustered around the general, like a bear-trap, hoping the old-timer might do the decent thing.

  Stangel had been about the last guy willing to hold up a candle for Lamayette. The certainty in the CIA is that you rise and fall with your most senior friend. Now he would have nobody in that building. As in all big organisations, the faceless monkeys at the heart of the CIA have an instinct for political power, for whose mojo is rising or falling. With Stangel finally gone, the new wunderkinds would already be chopping out the pit props from under Lamayette.

  Zoh looks down at the little pale bow on each of her shoes. ‘Bad health. Poor man only has six to nine months left.’ Then to herself, an aside. ‘Testicles. I always said nothing good could come from them.

  ‘Anyway.’ She throws her head back, breathes out. ‘General Stangel leaves with the grateful thanks of the president no doubt ringing in his ears.’ Grateful never
sounded so hollow.

  Lamayette, stumbling around in his personal mental nightmare, misses that the side door to the ambassador’s office is opening. Somebody summoned up by Nancy Zoh.

  ‘Come,’ Zoh says softly, beckoning this mystery person forward. She turns back to Lamayette. ‘Now. I can’t force my people on to your team. But in this time for you of . . .’ and she makes quote marks with her fingers ‘“imminent transition”, it would be smart of you to understand that within this embassy, where we all work together and live in each other’s pockets, having a shadow who I can trust and who is working alongside you would be the responsible thing to agree to. Very smart. Especially when you know I just need to make one call . . .’

  Cue the person at the door. The staging is pure Hitchcock.

  Lamayette doesn’t notice the woman’s grey, two-button business suit, hand-tailored to hug the curves of her body. Nor the tanned face, hands and calves, evidence of serious outdoor endeavour. It’s the white silky headscarf which clings in his mind. Big time. Because fringing underneath the headscarf, just a hint, is her hair. Pure Rita Hayworth, when she was a flame-coloured redhead. The most beautiful woman in the world. Circa 1944 in Cover Girl, ‘45Tonight and Every Night and ‘47 Gilda. Even when she was filmed in black and white, Rita could do the most marvellous things with that lush red hair.

  Also, that hair spells Danger. Peril. For the first time, Lamayette can understand those kookie Arabs; why it is they celebrate by firing off AK47s, wild with delight, until the clip runs out. For that smallest second, a charge of the sharpest lust ever runs through his body. And, if he had an AK to hand, he might be firing it off into the air too. Just thinking of Rita Hayworth, and looking at the woman standing in front of him now.

  She walks forward. Young and confident. And sassy, as they used to say. Leaving the CIA chief at a loss. By rights he should be hating this woman. How could anything but trouble come from this . . . ?