Bolt Action

by Charlie Charters

  She beams. ‘NORTHCOM. Operation Noble Eagle. We got us two planes aloft in double-quick time, just like the manual says. Sidewinders, or whatever they’ve got, are primed. So we remain ahead of the curve, be in no doubt about that. Now that we have some time, let’s make sure we get this decision right.’

  There’s nodding on this point around the table; even President Hannah looks relieved, while the Secretary of State holds up a hand, asking to be excused, to take another call in one of the booths.

  ‘You must excuse me, Mr President, if I crab sideways a little to get to my point . . .’ Unseen, on the video links from the two air force VIP planes, both the vice-president and Defense Secretary roll their eyes. Braddock has a proverb or hee-haw story for every occasion. They call it ‘slow-playing’ in the South. Makes them think you’re dumb.

  ‘Now, my daddy rose to be chief judge on the Fifth Circuit, the pinnacle of a good and proper career in the law. But he never forgot his first client, back when he started out in private practice in Nacogdoches, Texas. It was 1936, and as a token of thanks this Chinaman gave him a piece of bamboo with some itty-bitty carved characters. Said it would bring good luck to my daddy in his chosen vocation. He kept it in his office his whole life. And you know what the writing meant . . . ?’ She swivels her little glasses around the room, peering intently, and, of course, nobody knows. ‘. . . them little Chinese words said, “Though The Sword of Justice Is Sharp, It Will Not Slay The Innocent”.’

  A few puzzled faces. ‘And what’s your point?’ asks the president, hopefully.

  ‘Mr President, this is a capital case. The highest standards of evidence must apply, because people will die today because of the things you do, or don’t do. Yet in all we have listened to this morning, only two things need our utmost attention. Motive . . . I see motive, how hateful America is, how we are disbelievers, kuffars, and need to be punished. And I see opportunity. Just like in Nine/eleven, this plane’s cockpit has been commandeered. Same modus operandi, we can hear that much from the calls made by the passengers. They’re terrified. The flight crew aren’t responding to calls from within the plane, or from air traffic controllers. Probably they’ve been killed. We know that the flight has not maintained radio contact for at least two hours . . . two hours. And that’s hardly likely to be simple equipment failure. The goddam thing was only delivered by Boeing . . .’ she glances at her notes ‘. . . in March of ’08.’

  President Hannah pulls irritably at the knot of his red-and-white striped tie. ‘But where does that leave us in terms of the law? We can’t just be making it up as we go along. How would that look to the rest of the world?’

  ‘Mr President, if the plane was twenty miles out and closing, we wouldn’t be playing this pretty little game, this moot-court session. Remember, the time we have is a blessing. Let’s not turn it into a curse . . .’

  ‘The law, Jenna-Lee . . . please.’ This from the video link with the silver-haired, silver-moustachioed Defense Secretary, flying back from Elmendorf Air Force Base, near Anchorage, Alaska. ‘No homilies about frogs in downpours, and walking in tall cotton. Just tell us about the law.’

  ‘Anticipatory self-defence.’ Braddock smiles grimly, turning to the monitor showing the image of the Defense Secretary juxtaposed with that of the vice-president. ‘The law is clear, Mr Secretary . . . and I say this too, not only is the law clear, it is also clearly on our side. I’m surprised at you, Mr Secretary. I would have thought you would know that self-defence is the first law of nature.’

  Hannah had been looking towards one of the navy aides standing by the door, making signals like, has it suddenly got hot in here? He senses the friction developing and cuts quickly away from this. ‘Perhaps, just so we are all on the same page, you could tell us about this. Your read on anticipatory self-defence.’

  ‘My pleasure . . .’ and to the surprise of those listening, sitting in a state-of-the-art communications centre, all manner of spaceage technologies at work, decrypting voices, encoding data and bringing in satellite feeds from the other side of the world, the Attorney General walks her audience back to 1837. A time of muskets and cutlasses, and a scrap between Britain and the United States over a speck of land in the middle of the Niagara river, just above the famous falls. A thousand rebels, fighting British dominion in Canada, were using Navy Island as a base for their raids, and they were being supplied by Americans crewing an American ship, the Caroline. One night, says Braddock, even though Washington was trying to be scrupulously neutral in this matter, the British commandeered the Caroline when she was tied up at a landing on the New York state side of the river. The Royal Navy set the ship alight and let her drift downstream, over the falls. Two were killed, including a cabin boy.

  ‘People getting killed. Boats on fire . . . You can imagine the hoo-haa and the outrage,’ says Braddock. ‘The militias fixin’ to give some payback. But in all the talking that followed, it was the British that prevailed. Anticipatory self-defence, it became known as. In common parlance, we might talk about the lesser of two evils, whereby an action is justified if a country can demonstrate, now listen to these words, a “necessity of self-defence, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation”.’ She is quoting by heart.

  It becomes clear how well Braddock has slow-played her audience when she withdraws a small, typed index card from the inside of her bound file. She has gloriously long, ruby-red nails, and she clicks one with her thumbnail repeatedly, as she readies for the hammer blow.

  ‘This is what was agreed on. I’m going to read the actual legal words that have become the bedrock test of that principle. As I read this, Mr President, imagine your predecessor, Martin Van Buren, one hundred and seventy years ago, dealing with the Caroline affair, just as you must deal now with your own wayward, rogue craft . . .’ and she clicks her thumbnail one last time, loudly, before starting.

  ‘“It must be strewn that admonition or remonstrance to the persons on board the ‘Caroline’ was impracticable, or would have been unavailing; it must be strewn that daylight could not be waited for; that there could be no attempt at discrimination, between the innocent and the guilty; that it would not have been enough to seize and detain the vessel; but that there was a necessity, present and inevitable, for attacking her, in the darkness of the night, while moored to the shore, and while unarmed men were asleep on board, killing some, and wounding others, and then drawing her into the current, above the cataract, setting her on fire, and, careless to know whether there might not be in her the innocent with the guilty, or the living with the dead, committing her to a fate, which fills the imagination with horror.”’

  There is a long silence in the room. The timelessness of the incident is eerie, the need for swift action, the commingling of the innocent and guilty, and above all the imperative of doing something that fills the imagination with horror. Eerie, yet also strangely comforting that leaders have travelled this awful path before, faced these terrible choices. And, perhaps most importantly, that significant legal precedents have been constructed to save everybody’s blushes.

  The floor is still hers. ‘Mr President . . . we’re not talking here about a ketch tied up for the night. This is a Boeing 777, aimed right towards us at six hundred miles an hour.’ The Attorney General lowers her glasses to the table, rubs the bridge of her nose. ‘I think if we are being truthful with ourselves, we all know there is only one course of action here.’

  On board PK412

  The screaming reverberates up and down the length of the plane. The sort of screaming you get on a roller-coaster as they winch you up the ramp. Nothing has happened yet . . . but all your senses shout that the end is nigh.

  General rule of thumb, people in a hijacked plane don’t like to see the plane that is going to shoot them down scoping out their target from thirty feet above the wing, weapon racks groaning with missiles.

  Tristie Merritt shakes Salahuddin, whose face is glued to one of the first-class windo
ws, his face a mask of anguish. ‘Captain, captain . . .’ suddenly worried as she touches his shoulder that she is breaking some kind of unspoken taboo, ‘he’s just filming us. Look at the guy. He’s holding a camera.’

  Slowly he cocks his finger in the direction of the Super Hornet, speaks very thoughtfully. ‘That is the fighter that is going to shoot down my jet. The plane I am in command of.’

  ‘Perhaps, possibly, who knows, Captain.’ She has to raise her voice, shout now, against the cries from elsewhere. ‘But he’s not going to do it now. This is just reconnaissance. Get on the horn, please, calm everybody down. We’re not in the endgame. Not yet anyway.’

  Unfortunately, before Salahuddin can get to the PA system to offer calming words, the navy pilot jumps his fighter from one side of the Boeing to the other, so a second bout of screaming kicks off. Each side of the plane setting off the other, like panicky teenagers.

  It takes some time but eventually the worst of the outcry leaches away. Only some isolated whimpering. The curtains that normally separate the two classes are tied back so everybody knows what is, and is not, going on. No secrets. The cabin crew return to plotting where everybody needs to move to.

  So. This boils down to Tristie Merritt. Her Airfone. And the telephone number of a caravan permanently parked by a beach in Northern Ireland. Mary Sweeney is the woman’s name.

  She wills herself: Let go, Tristie. Slip away . . .

  To get a voice right, you need to let go of whoever you are. Let yourself melt into the shape and feel of the character you want to become, a step through into another personality . . . but she has more than enough chewing at her mind to make that almost impossible to pull off. Tristie can feel the muscles in her throat tightening.

  Calm. Stay calm. Shoulders down. Focus. She’s sitting in the second row of first class. The blind beside her is open and a shaft of brilliant light cuts across the darkened cabin. Whiffler is sitting on the arm of the next seat, his foot up. Spellbound.

  ‘Convinced?’

  ‘Seriously, Tristie, if I closed my eyes and you spoke again, like what you’ve just been doing, I’d swear you were Kylie Minogue.’

  Well. We’ll see about that . . .

  Cranfield Caravan Park

  Kileel

  County Down

  It’s supposed to be summer, the calendar says so, but the weather hasn’t turned. The flags and pennants on the southfacing beach flutter like mad and Mary Sweeney can hear the chink-chink-chink of the halyards spinning in the wind. Sweeney shivers with the cold. Not a thing left in this life to warm the heart, the old lady would say when asked, and contemplating her present emptiness brings on the usual glance over at the table. The trophies, medals and certificates. The framed photos of smiles, love, affection. Memories of a husband, and an only child. Gone on, into the next life.

  She broods in her armchair. Alone, and left behind. A frail pensioner, peering out of the bay windows of her family’s forty-foot caravan towards the churning brown of the Irish Sea. Tightly tucked into a quilt, and a tartan rug just for good measure.

  ‘You haven’t touched your shepherd’s pie.’

  A shrug of the shoulders. ‘Not feeling so hungry today.’ And Sweeney starts to push at the one or two peas that had fallen on her lap, her fingers thin, trembling, purple with age.

  ‘Soon I shall be thinking you don’t like my food,’ chirps Laura, who’s from up the road in Newry and cleans the caravans. Sweeney’s nieces and nephews thought that they were doing a big favour by paying Laura a small fortune to look after the old lady. The plate is whisked away, and Laura clatters about in the kitchenette, making it clear she’s working hard for her money. ‘Bit of a vac coming up, Mrs Sweeney.’

  As the small round bottom of the cleaning girl moves this way and that, up and down the caravan, Sweeney resumes her vigil over the Irish Sea. Her face set grim. Every so often a bony hand reaches to part the net curtain for a closer inspection of some unexpected movement, while the vacuum cleaner moans on.

  Perhaps she had drifted off to sleep, she doesn’t know, but the next thing to happen was a gentle poke in the shoulder. Laura is standing over her, holding a handset. ‘A call, Mrs Sweeney,’ she whispers dramatically. ‘Sorry to wake you, but they said it was urgent. Almost missed it what with the noise, and whatnot.’

  Somebody calling me?

  Mary Sweeney puts the phone to her ear, full of suspicion and dark thoughts.

  The voice she hears is confident, full of bright blue skies, breaking waves and beach parties.

  ‘Mrs Sweeney . . . it’s Mary McCaraher. Calling from sunny Australia. Back on Kangaroo Island. ’The inflection rises dramatically at the end of each sentence, like a surprised question.

  ‘Mary McCaraher . . .’ Sweeney says the name with a kind of awe, holding the phone now with two hands. ‘How long has it been?’

  ‘Too long, too long,’ says the woman calling herself McCaraher, but even this lament sounds strangely upbeat in an Australian female voice.

  The two of them hunker down for a long-overdue catch-up, Sweeney quickly getting into a vivid discussion about her pelvic support problems and McCaraher offering a blow-by-blow report about the men in her life, the reasons why she has not yet married, not yet produced any new little souls for the Kingdom of God. ‘Oh, Mrs Sweeney. The number of prayers I said to St Anthony that he would be the one . . .’

  Sweeney tries to console throughout. ‘I’ll light a candle for you at mass, for you and St Thérèse of the Child Jesus of the Holy Face.’ And so the conversation winds on until the Australian makes clear with her pauses and her stuttering tone that she needs more than just talk.

  ‘Now, tell me, Mary McCaraher, you’re speaking like you’ve got yourself in some bother.’

  ‘You always were too fast for me.’

  ‘You want your little slip of paper, don’t you, pet.’

  ‘Pleaassee.’

  ‘Goodness, girl, I’m surprised you lasted this long. I really am. I thought you’d be on the phone just a couple of weeks after you left. You did good holding out this long.’ And Mary Sweeney cranes around and bellows for ‘LAURA’ in a surprisingly robust voice.

  When the cleaner appears, Sweeney waves a finger at the sideboard full of trophies, the shrine to the memory of her most beloved killed by an IRA bomb at the Killeen border crossing in 1990 as they took one of the family greyhounds south, to the Dundalk races. Pride of place goes to the Queen’s Gallantry Medal awarded to both father and son posthumously. ‘That picture. The framed one. Of Mr Sweeney and Luke, with their dog Toto. Pass it here, will you.’

  Laura, a bit spooked to be touching anything on a table she’d been forbidden from dusting, gingerly passes over the heavy silver frame. Father and son in close-up, smiling their big gap-toothed smiles. Panting happily between them is Toto, a brindle-and-white Group 1 greyhound champion.

  Sweeney reaches to the back, unplugs the backboard, and digs out a tightly folded wedge of paper. ‘Here it is,’ she says into the phone, looking first at the corporate logo.

  In blue, the letters ANZ, and at the foot, 13 Grenfell Street, Adelaide, South Australia. Mary Sweeney carefully articulates the eleven digits.

  Way back, she had read the scribbled note that McCaraher sent, thanking her for the memorably happy five-week stay as a lodger when the old lady had still been living on the outskirts of Newry. At the same time, there was a favour. The younger woman was entrusting to Sweeney the only copy of an access code, so as not to be tempted to waste the little windfall she’d just banked, £20,000, locked up tight in a safety deposit box. Rainy-day money.

  Thirty-six thousand feet up – and a thousand miles west of the caravan park – Mary McCaraher, aka Tristie Merritt, quickly works on a sheet of paper to rearrange the random numbers, as she winds up the call to Mrs Sweeney.

  The 0800 freephone number represents a time in her past that was . . . past, finished. A number that she hasn’t had to call upon since her days with 14 Intellig
ence Coy, at the fag end of the ‘Troubles’. Several tours of duty back, before Iraq and Afghanistan.

  It chills Tristie to realise the huge gamble she’s about to take. With her men’s lives, with Ward 13 and those detailed plans for the Trident missile programme. Everything they’ve worked for in fact, she’s about to put on the line. Faîtes vos jeux. Red or black. Mesdames et messieurs . . . place your bets, please.

  The 0800 number is a connection right into the operational heart of MI5. Rien ne va plus . . .

  On board PK412

  Five minutes later the call is answered by a male voice, somebody who sounds like he’s been coughing up his lungs for the past week. ‘Hello.’ Hoarse and breathy. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘This is Casablanca.’ Tristie speaks carefully, knowing some world-class hardware will be scrutinising all the stresses and strains in her voice.

  ‘Casablanca, how are you? Just give me a second, will you.’ The sound of keys being struck furiously and another long wet cough. There will be various voice prompts to clarify her status. With each question there are alarm-answers as well, in case she’s being held under duress. The unique micro-tremors that represent a person as individually as their fingerprints are then rendered via an algorithm into a scored voicegram. Given three or four sentences, the computer is expected to be able to answer, Is this the real Tristie Merritt on the phone? Yes or no? with a degree of probability. Is she under duress? Yes or no? . . . and so on.