The Secret Servant hm-1

by Gavin Lyall

  "Was he positively vetted?"

  "No, just the standard procedures when he got into armaments, and topped up from time to time. He never got above junior management and he wasn't in anything really sensitive. He was… born in York. No university, just Sheffield Polytechnic. Engineering, he did quite well. National Service in the Royal Tank Regiment-" George, ex-cavalry, gave a small grunt, just as Maxim had expected. Agnes ploughed on; "-became a corporal, then he was a management trainee at BSA, he got married in…" It was a drab, dull list of facts that got fewer and less important as Farthing grew older, until, with a cutback in defence spending, his last employer dumped him on the street.

  "It sounds," George said, "as if today was the high point in his life."

  "How far have we got?" Maxim asked.

  "Four years ago. There's nothing after he left the arms business. Despite what some people think, we don't keep files on everybody in the country."

  George asked: "What about Canada? If he was there long enough to buy a suit he must have had a job. They wouldn't let him stay, otherwise."

  "He wasn't working in any defence industry. The Mounties would have vetted him and asked us what we knew."

  "Unless your people lost the letter."

  "Unless our people lost the letter," Agnes agreed calmly.

  George made a noise that could have been apologetic. "And no connection with Professor Tyler?"

  "There's no hint of it. Farthing seems to have spent his working life in the north, and Tyler's always lived in the south, hasn't he? Cambridge and London?"

  "Yes. Where the bloody hell are our drinks?" George leant round sharply and almost butted the steward in the stomach. With dreadful precision, the old man put down the glasses in the wrong places, flooded George's whisky with too much water and went away.

  "Just ain't yer night, is it, me ole china?" Agnes said. "Cheers."

  George took a vast mouthful of his drink. "I want those four years filled in."

  "There's two ends to the business," Agnes said.

  "I know. Harry's taking the other one."

  Maxim looked up. "Am I?"

  "He mentioned the anti-tank mortar trials, didn't you say?"

  "Yes, he said that-"

  "I know. They aren't secret, but they aren't news either. There hasn't been anything in the papers."

  "He'd still have friends in the arms business."

  "That's probably it. Tyler's going to watch a demonstration by the development unit at Warminster on Monday. You'd better go, too. Get onto Sir Bruce and have yourself fixed up as Tyler's temporary ADC. And when you're with him, listen."

  "That's all?"

  "I don't know." George looked uneasy. "And guard his back. Where there's a drill grenade there might be a real one…"

  5

  Just past Andover, they overtook a convoy of Bedfords and Land-Rovers.›From the back seat of their own chauffeur-driven car, Maxim watched the dull black-and-green vehicles, feeling an unexpected pang of pleasure. Absurd, but it was partly a sense of coming home: Salisbury Plain, ringed with Army camps, covered in ranges, and with Stonehenge seemingly shunted off into one corner, was home to any infantryman.

  Professor Tyler commented: "Familiar country, I imagine."

  "I'd take a penny for every pace I've marched across Wiltshire. Were you here in the war?" Maxim wasn't sure whether to call Tyler 'sir' or 'professor' or just 'John', as Tyler himself had suggested. So for most of the journey he hadn't called him anything.

  "Only for a few weeks," Tyler said. "When we were winding up for D-Day. I did most of my training in Cumberland, before I went to Africa."

  "I remember."

  Tyler turned to look at him and asked in his serious deep voice: "Have you really read The Gates?"

  "I read it when I was at school. Only in paperback, I'm afraid, sir. It might even have been one of the reasons I joined the Army. " The 'sir' had slipped out naturally: now he was talking to a famous soldier. And not flattering him, either. The Gates of the Grave, in particular its chapters on Tyler's adventures with the bearded land-pirates of the Long Range Desert Group working deep behind Rommel's lines, had hit young Harry Maxim like a star shell. This was war as every schoolboy wanted it to be. But unlike most other schoolboys, Maxim had gone on to re-live Tyler's experiences. Now he too had driven armed trucks across hostile deserts, had lifted land-mines with his own hands, had shot his way out of ambush.

  For that very reason, he had never dared re-read the book. He was frightened that he might find giveaway hints that showed Tyler had faked or exaggerated parts of it. You don't always want to meet your first love twenty years later.

  "Do you know why I wrote that book?" Tyler gave one of his little grunt-chuckles. "To finance my first divorce. Well, at least it did that. But if you're thinking of an academic career, don't ever write anything that sells well. That book kept me out of any Cambridge job for years. Hell hath no fury like a Senior Common Room seeing somebody actually make some money by publishing." He chuckled again and hunched himself down into a shabby-expensive plaid overcoat. "Are those pullovers as warm as they're supposed to be?"

  Maxim was wearing the everyday Army dress of a green 'woollie-pullie' – it was the first time he'd been in uniform for weeks – and carrying a combat jacket of Disruptive Pattern Materials (the Army's abbreviation of 'camouflage') which had a pistol in the side pocket. He didn't know if Tyler knew about that.

  "They're pretty good. I think they're very closely knit."

  "I suppose I'm growing old, but all these pullovers and combat kit jackets – you call it DPM, don't you? – it makes the Army seem rather casual."

  "I hadn't thought that 8th Army set any very high standards of dress in its time, sir?"

  "Good Lord, no. All those corduroy bags and suede brothel-creepers, and Monty with two badges in a Tank Regiment beret he wasn't entitled to wear… This country's always had a tradition of making the word 'uniform' quite meaningless when applied to military clothing. But at least there was a pretence of trying. Twenty-five years ago you couldn't go through a mainline station without seeing dozens of soldiers and airmen, all in their walking-out uniforms or whatever it was called."

  "I remember."

  "Now we forbid people to wear uniform when travelling, or after tea, or.. I suppose defence was still popular in those days…"

  "But it's a thin DPM line of heroes when the guns begin to shoot."

  Tyler didn't answer and perhaps hadn't heard. He had turned away to watch the damp plain drifting past outside. Or perhaps something far further away.

  Like most Army camps, Warminster barracks is a collection of unnaturally clean buildings of all ages and sizes laid out at random: a model railway village set up by a child too young for model railways. The commandant of the School of Infantry gave them a drink and chatted to Tyler throughout lunch, then passed them on to the lieutenant-colonel in command of the development unit itself.

  So far, Maxim had met nobody he knew personally, but the Army grapevine had made sure everybody knew about him, once they'd heard that he would be shepherding Professor Tyler. Several officers who had never met Jenny said they were sorry to hear of her death. Maxim was growing a mental scar tissue, finding phrases to fend off commiserations that nobody really wanted to make. But suddenly, when they were drinking coffee in the ante-room, he felt a flush of anger.

  God damn it, is having my wife killed the only memorable thing I've done in this Army?

  It was a relief to get out into the damp cold air again.

  The firing point was up on the edge of the plateau, a bleak exposed area where no commander would ever set up his mortars for real. But it gave a view of the target area, and visitors liked to see two bangs for the price of one. There was a small but permanent plank grandstand for them, already nearly filled with senior officers, including the RAF and Navy.

  Maxim and Tyler chose gumboots from neat rows laid out for spectators, and clumped across the grey winter grass that loo
ked dry and brittle even when it was squishy-wet under foot. Two of the senior officers came down to shake Tyler's hand and a sergeant appeared with an expensive camera and started taking pictures.

  At that, Maxim decided that Tyler couldn't have been safer locked up in the Bank of England, and faded back to talk to one of the organising officers, a Gunner major called Tom Shelford, and the first one Maxim could really say he knew. They'd worked together in Germany.

  Shelford had the outdoors face of a farmer, ruddy, chubby and cheerful. "What are you doing with the mad professors, Harry? I thought you were something don't-touch-me-there in Whitehall these days?" He tapped the side of his nose conspiratorially.

  "I'm just standing in as Tyler's ADC for the moment." Maxim hoped that sounded good enough.

  "Nice work if you can get it. A bugger about Jenny, wasn't it?" He chattered on before Maxim could reply. "I don't know why everybody seems to think that when the cavalry gave up horses it took to tanks. It simply traded down to dogs." A small group of cavalry officers was squelching across to the grandstand, each with a perfectly groomed and disciplined golden retriever or red setter at his heels.

  "At least," Shelford said, "they used to have their brains in their arses; now they're somewhere down around their knees. D'you want to know what you're going to see this afternoon? A load of balls, that's what. You need a point-target weapon for anti-tank work, not a barrage…"

  His running commentary ran on as two teams from the demonstration battalion charged out from a ring of vehicles parked in the background and started assembling the competing mortars – one American, one French. The field telephone jabbered and sergeants called out fire orders – quite unnecessarily, since both teams could see their target and had known what it would be for days past.

  The mortars began to fire with deep metallic chunks, setting up puffs of blue or orange smoke around a battered old Centurion tank, lopsided and half sunk in the turf 1500 metres away. The RAF and Navy spectators lifted their binoculars to watch the fall of shot; the Army looked blasй. Tyler seemed to be making polite small talk, but turning his head to watch each smoke-burst with a perfect sense of timing.

  "The trouble is," Shelford said, "that tanks don't just sit there, they move. How can you correct fire?"

  "It could have a tactical influence." Maxim slipped comfortably back into the argument about weapons and tactics that is as basic to army life as brown Windsor soup. "If you know that tanks could be knocked out by…"

  "You've got to have terminal guidance, infra-red, laser, even magnetic…"

  "But if you could just frighten off the armoured personnel carriers…"

  "Mind, infra-red would only home onto a burning vehicle, a complete waste…"

  "You have to choose between fragmentation and penetration."

  "Dropping mines ahead of a tank, now there…"

  A large man with cropped grey hair and wearing a short coat in a lumberjack tartan came up behind them. He had vivid blue eyes, a very coarse grainy skin and a bald eagle on his shoulder couldn't have made him more American. The eyes flickered from Maxim's cap badge to the crown on his shoulder to the parachute wings just below, taking in all the information going in one sweep.

  He stuck out a hand. "Good afternoon, Major. I'm David Brock, Seddon Arms." Back among the parked vehicles was a heavy, unlabelled, American camper truck.

  "Harry Maxim." They shook hands and Brock waved at Shelford, who said: "Hi, David."

  "Anything I can tell you about our wonder weapon?"

  "I'm not buying, just browsing."

  "Sure, but you could be shooting, one of these days." Brock had the easy manner of a man who is always selling but always in low gear. "Tell me, was that Professor John White Tyler who came up with you?"

  "That's him."

  "I heard his lectures at Princeton when I was doing a graduate year. He married a girl there… I don't think it lasted. Are you baby-sitting him?"

  "Just temporarily." It had been a jolt to realise that Brock, who looked a fit fifty-five year-old, must really be some ten years younger.

  "Is it all right with you if I go and say hello?" Brock asked.

  "Of course."

  "Once the war's over, I'll try and get him to take a cup of coffee with us in the caravan. Would you join us?"

  "Where he goes, I'm supposed to."

  Brock smiled and trampled off to the grandstand.

  "Nice guy, that," Shelford said. "But he's on a hiding to nothing here."

  "What's going to happen, then?"

  Shelford looked at him curiously. "I thought you'd have known already. Politics."

  "Nobody tells me anything."

  "I'd assumed Tyler was here just for a laying-on of hands… well, for what you're about to receive, be truly thankful. The buzz is that you're going to get the French mortar stuffed down your throat, base-plate and all."

  "Is it all that much better?" *'No," Shelford said. "I just imagine this is Be-Nice-To-The-French year. But I don't know why."

  Seddon Arms' camper truck was fitted out like a stateroom on a millionaire's yacht. The furniture and wall panelling were a gentle golden beech with a matt finish, the chairs and sofa covered in a baggy cream leather, the carpeting went from wall to wall. The only hint of merchandising death was in the tinted prints of early ironclads along the walls. Even with eight or nine people aboard, it didn't seem crowded.

  Maxim found himself cornered by Brock's aide-de-camp, a bright young man whose glance was always wandering, looking for a glass he could refill.

  "You don't seem to have the company's name on this caravan," Maxim said.

  "We prefer to keep a low profile. It comes cheaper in trucks. When we put the company logo on side, we got anti-war nuts slashing the tyres and scratching up the paintwork." He grinned. "No kidding. It really happens. What are you drinking?"

  "Just the coffee, thanks." It was only half past four, but Tyler and some of the others were sipping champagne from tulip glasses. The only other soldier was the lieutenant-colonel from the development unit, and he was on coffee, too.

  Tyler was saying: "We just don't have your tradition of easy interchange between the academic and government worlds, that's all. In Whitehall you're still either an insider or an outsider… but at least the military look on me more as a hawk than a dove – am I right, Colonel?"

  The lieutenant-colonel smiled. "They know you've been up at the sharp end, sir."

  Brock had waited patiently. "But just what are you doing in your new job, Professor?"

  "I'm just chairing a policy review committee." Tyler gave his deep little chuckle. "It's one of those little Whitehall cactuses that only flowers every ten years or so. The chiefs of staff don't like it, but it keeps them guessing."

  "I thought," Brock said, "that you were mostly involved with nuclear strategy these days – sir."

  "That's more or less true, David-" Tyler obviously remembered his one-time student; "-but one of the main functions of the review committee is to look at the whole spectrum of defence, as one and indivisible. We've always been too compartmentalised in Europe. Our military – I'm sure you'll forgive me, Colonel-" he chuckled politely at the lieutenant-colonel; "-they tend to see nuclear warfare as a civilian affair, a matter of politics and diplomacy, nothing to do with them. What I feel we have to do is just what Herman Kahn was preaching when we were at Princeton: find the spinal cord that links your antitank mortar to the intercontinental missile, and all the vertebrae in between…"

  Tyler wasn't speech-making, Maxim realised. It was quite natural for him to talk like this, and just as natural for his audience to stand quiet and listen.

  When he had finished, Brock took a breath to ask a well-prepared question, but the young aide beat him to it: "What was your view on our mortar then, sir?"

  Brock lifted his head and flashed the boy a look as fast and sharp as a slap in the face. The aide wilted, but Tyler talked his way slowly and gently around the social blunder. The Colonel's expe
rts would, he was sure, provide the expertise since he himself was really incompetent to judge. And in any case, it wasn't his job. The review committee was to review policy, then break it down into tasks, perhaps, and then we'd have to see… Anyway, his own experience with mortars had only been with the old Stokes-Brandt types – which showed the aide he had known about such things before some people were even born.

  The poor lad's in for a royal bollocking after parade, Maxim thought. Over-selling in the face of the customer. Bad show, or its American equivalent.

  The talk decentralised again, and he was looking for a place to put down his cup when Brock touched his shoulder. "The Professor's agreed to join us in a little end-of-trials dinner party at an inn just over the hill. We've got rooms booked there, so he'll probably stay the night, but maybe you'll be looking up old friends in Warminster?"

  Perhaps there was no politer way of putting it, but Maxim had his orders. "I have to stay with the Professor, I'm afraid. Obviously not at the dinner, but if he's spending the night there, I'll have to as well."

  "You just have to, do you?" Brock's temper wasn't quite restored.

  "That's right."

  Brock suddenly grinned. "Okay, Harry. Don't worry, we'll fix you a room."

  "Next door to the Professor, please."

  6

  The hotel was an old coaching inn – most were, in that area – north of Warminster under the steep escarpment of the Plain. With its creaking corridors, low oak beams and the horse-brasses and hunting horns in the bar, it looked very English, particularly to those who weren't. Maxim changed quickly into plain clothes and went down to ring George from the phone at the desk.

  "The trouble is," he explained, "I feel I'm embarrassing him without really sticking close enough to do the job properly."

  "Well, that's hard bloody luck on both of you. You'll just have to get used to playing gooseberry and so will he. He's a national asset, now. Stick as close as you can and think of England."

  As advice, it didn't help, but Maxim felt slightly cheered. He prowled around the hotel inside and out, then found a seat in the bar from which he could cover the front door. He had the shoulder holster on under his jacket.