The Gun Seller

  'You know I'm right,' I say. The helicopter that comes here, you know what it's for. What it's going to do. You have to tell them.' I take a few more steps. 'Tell them what has happened, and why they're going to die. Use your vote.'

  But Murdah is spent. His chin is down on his chest, and his eyes have closed again.

  'Murdah . . . ' I say, and then stop, because someone has made a short, hissing sound. It's Bernhard, and he is standing still, looking down at the roof, his head cocked to one side.

  'I hear it,' he says.

  Nobody moves. We are frozen.

  And then I hear it too. And then Latifa, and then Francisco.

  A distant fly in a distant bottle.

  Murdah has either heard it, or believed that the rest of us have heard it. His chin has lifted from his chest, and his eyes are wide open.

  But I can't wait for him. I walk over to the parapet.

  'What are you doing?' says Francisco.

  'This thing is going to kill us,' I say.

  'It's here to save us, Ricky.'

  'Kill us, Francisco.'

  'You fucking shit,' screams Benjamin. 'What the fuck are you doing?'

  They're all watching me now. Listening and watching. Because I have reached down to my little tent of brown grease-proof paper, and laid bare the treasures therein.

  The British-made Javelin is a light-weight, supersonic, self-contained surface-to-air missile system. It has a two-stage solid-fuel rocket motor, giving an effective range of between five and six kilometres, it weighs sixty-odd pounds in all, and it comes in any colour you want, so long as it's olive green.

  The system is made up of two handy units, the first being a sealed launch canister, containing the missile, and the second being the semi-automatic-line-of-sight-guidance system, which has a lot of very small, very clever, very expensive electronic stuff inside it. Once assembled, the Javelin is capable of performing one job supremely well.

  It shoots down helicopters.

  That's why I'd asked for it, you see. Bob Rayner would have got me a teasmaid, or a hair-dryer, or a BMW convertible, if I'd paid the right money.

  But I'd said no, Bob. Put away those tempting things. I want a big toy. I want a Javelin.

  This particular model, according to Bob, had fallen onto the back of a lorry leaving an Army Ordnance depot near Colchester. You may wonder how such a thing can happen in the modern age, what with computerised inventories, and receipts, and armed men standing at gates - but, believe me, the army is no different from Harrods. Stock shrinkage is a constant problem.

  The Javelin had been carefully removed from the lorry by some friends of Rayner's, who had transferred it to the underside of a VW minibus, where it had stayed, thank God, the course of its twelve hundred mile journey to Tangier.

  I don't know if the couple driving the bus knew it was there. I only know that they were New Zealanders.

  'You put that down,' screams Benjamin.

  'Or what?' I say.

  Til rucking kill you,' he yells, moving closer to the edge of the roof.

  There is a pause, and it's filled by buzzing. The fly in the bottle is angry.

  'I don't care,' I say. 'I really don't. If I put this down, I'm dead anyway. So I'll hang on to it, thanks.'

  'Cisco,' shouts Benjamin in desperation. 'We've won. You said we've won.' Nobody answers him, so Benjamin starts his jumping again. 'If he shoots at the helicopter, they will kill us.'

  There's some more shouting now. A lot more. But it's getting harder to tell where the shouting is coming from, because the buzz is gradually turning into a clatter. A clatter from the sun.

  'Ricky,' says Francisco, and I realise that he is standing right behind me now. 'You put it down.'

  'It's going to kill us, Francisco,' I say.

  'Put it down, Ricky. I count to five. You put it down, or I shoot you. I mean it.'

  And I think he probably does mean it. I think he really believes that this sound, this beating of wings, is Mercy, not Death.

  'One,' he says.

  'Up to you, Naimh,' I say, adjusting my eye to the rubber collar on the sight. 'Tell them the truth now. Tell them what this machine is, and what it's going to do.'

  'He's going to kill us,' screams Benjamin, and I think I can see him leaping around somewhere on my left.

  'Two,' says Francisco. I switch on the guidance system. The buzzing has gone, drowned out by the lower frequencies of the helicopter's noise. Bass notes. Beating of wings.

  'Tell them, Naimh. If they shoot me, everybody dies. Tell them the truth.'

  The sun covers the sky, blank and pitiless. There is only sun and clatter.

  'Three,' says Francisco, and suddenly there's some metal behind my left ear. It might be a spoon, but I don't think so.

  'Yes or no, Naimh? What is it to be?'

  'Four,' says Francisco.

  The noise is big now. As big as the sun.

  'Kill it,' says Francisco.

  But it isn't Francisco. It's Murdah. And he's not saying, he's screaming. Going mad. He is ripping at the handcuffs, bleeding, shouting, thrashing, kicking grit across the roof. And now I think Francisco has started shouting back at him, telling him to shut up, while Bernhard and Latifa scream at each other, or at me.

  I think, but I'm not sure. They have all begun to disappear, you see. Fading away, leaving me in a very quiet world.

  Because now I can see it.

  Small, black, fast. It could be a bug on the front of the sight.

  The Graduate.

  Hydra rockets. Hellfire air-to-ground missiles. .50 cannons. Four hundred miles an hour, if it needs to. One chance only.

  It will come in and pick its targets. It has nothing to fear from us. Bunch of crazy terrorists with automatic rifles, popping away. Couldn't hit a barn door.

  Whereas the Graduate can punch a whole room out of a building with one press of a button.

  One chance only.

  This fucking sun. Blazing at me, burning out the image on the sight.

  Tears started in my eyes from the brightness of the picture, but I held my eye open.

  Put it down, Benjamin is saying. Screaming it in my ear, from a thousand miles away. Put it down.

  Jesus, it's fast. It jinks along the rooftops, maybe half a mile.

  You fucking shit bastard.

  Cold and hard on my neck. Somebody is definitely trying to put me off. Pushing a barrel through my neck.

  I'll shoot you dead, screams Benjamin.

  Remove the safety cover, and flick down the trigger. Your Javelin is now armed, gentlemen.

  Choking on the shot.

  Put it down.

  The roof exploded. Just disintegrated. And then, a fraction of a second later, the sound of the cannon fire. An incredible, deafening, body-shaking noise. Chunks of stone flew up and sideways, every piece as deadly as the shells that caused it. Dust and violence and destruction. I winced and turned away, and the tears ran down my face as the sun let me go.

  It had made its first pass. At incredible speed. Faster than anything I'd seen, anything but a fighter. And its turn was unbelievable. It just dropped an elbow and spun. Flat out one way, spin, flat out the other. Nothing in between.

  I could taste the fumes from its exhaust.

  I raised the Javelin again, and as I did so, I saw Benjamin's head and shoulders thirty feet away. The rest of him, fuck knows where.

  Francisco was screaming at me again, but this time it was in Spanish, and I'll never know what that was about.

  Here it comes. Quarter of a mile.

  And this time I really could see it.

  The sun was behind me now, rising, getting up to speed, shining its full force on this little black bundle of hatred coming towards me.

  Cross-wires. Black dot.

  Flying a straight course. No evasion. Why bother? Bunch of crazy terrorists, nothing to fear from them.

  I can see the pilot's face. Not in the sight, but in my mind. From the first pass, the image
of the pilot's face has come into my mind.

  Let's go.

  I pulled the trigger, firing up the thermal battery, and braced myself as the first stage motor shoved me back towards the parapet with the force of the missile's launch.

  Newton, I thought.

  Coming in now. Fast as ever, fast as anything, but I can see you.

  I can see you, you fucking shit bastard.

  The second stage motor ignited, kicking the Javelin forward, keen and eager. Let the dog see the rabbit.

  I just hold it. That's all I do. Hold it in the cross-wires.

  The camera in the aiming unit tracks the flare from the missile tail, compares it with signals from the sight - any mismatch, and an error correction signal is sent to the missile.

  All I have to do is hold it in the cross-wires.

  Two seconds.

  One second.

  Latifa's cheek had been cut by flying masonry, and it was bleeding badly.

  We sat in Beamon's office, and I tried to staunch the wound with a towel, while Beamon covered us with Hugo's Steyr.

  Some of the other hostages had got hold of weapons too, and they were scattered over the room, peering nervously out of the windows. I looked around the room at the nervous faces, and suddenly felt exhausted. And hungry. Ravenously hungry.

  There was some noise in the corridor. Footsteps. Shouts in Arabic, and French, and then English.

  Turn that up, will you?' I said to Beamon.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the television, where a blonde woman was mouthing at us. The caption underneath said 'Connie Fairfax - Casablanca'. She was reading something.

  Beamon stepped forward and twisted up the volume.

  Connie had a nice voice.

  Latifa had a nice face. The blood from her cut was starting to thicken.

  '... issued three hours ago to CNN, by a young woman of Arab appearance,' said Connie, and then the picture cut to footage of a small, black helicopter, apparently getting into serious difficulties. Connie kept reading.

  'My name is Thomas Lang,' she said. 'I have been coerced into this action by officers of the American intelligence services, ostensibly to penetrate a terrorist organisation, The Sword Of Justice.' The picture cut back to Connie as she looked up and pressed at her earpiece.

  A man's voice said: 'Connie, weren't they responsible for the shooting in Austria?'

  Connie said yes, that was absolutely right. Except it was Switzerland.

  Then she looked down at the piece of paper.

  'The Sword Of Justice is, in reality, being financed by a western arms dealer, in conjunction with renegade elements of the American CIA.'

  The shouts in the corridor had subsided, and when I looked over to the doorway, I saw that Solomon was standing there, watching me. He nodded, once, and then slowly advanced into the room, picking his way through the wreck of furniture. A clutch of tight shirts appeared behind him.

  'It's the truth,' screamed Murdah, and I turned to the television to see what kind of footage they'd got of his rooftop confession. It wasn't great, to be honest. The tops of a couple of heads, moving about occasionally. Murdah's voice was distorted, layered with background noise, because I hadn't been able to position the radio microphone near enough to the fire-escape. But I'd have known it was him, all the same, which meant that others would too.

  'Mr Lang closed his statement,' said Connie, 'by giving CNN a wavelength of 254.125 megahertz, the VHF frequency from which this recording was made. No one has yet identified the voices involved, but it appears ...'

  I gestured at Beamon.

  'You can turn it off, if you want,' I said. But he left it on, and I wasn't going to argue with him.

  Solomon perched himself on the edge of Beamon's desk. He looked at Latifa for a moment, then at me.

  'Shouldn't you be rounding up some suspects?' I said.

  Solomon smiled a little.

  'Mr Murdah is very rounded up indeed, at the moment,' he said. 'And Miss Woolf is in good hands. As for Mr Russell P. Barnes...'

  'He was flying The Graduate,' I said.

  Solomon raised an eyebrow. Or rather, he left it where it was and dropped his body slightly. He looked as if he didn't want to be surprised any more today.

  'Rusty used to fly helicopters for the Marines,' I said. 'That's how he got involved in the first place.' I eased the towel gently away from Latifa's face, and saw that the bleeding had stopped. 'Do you think I can make a phone call from here?'

  We flew back to England ten days later in an RAF Hercules. The seats were hard, the cabin was noisy, and there was no film. But I was happy.

  I was happy watching Solomon sleep, slumped on the other side of the cabin, his brown raincoat folded behind his head and his hands clasped across his stomach. Solomon was a good friend at any time, but asleep, I felt like I almost loved him.

  Or maybe I was just getting my loving mechanism warmed up, ready for someone else.

  Yes, that was probably it.

  We touched down at RAF Coltishall just after midnight, and a gaggle of cars followed as we taxied to the hangar. After a while, the door clanged open and some cold Norfolk air climbed aboard. I took a deep breath of it.

  O'Neal was waiting outside, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his overcoat, shoulders bunched around his ears. He jerked his chin at me, and Solomon and I followed him to a Rover.

  O'Neal and Solomon got in the front, and I slid in behind them, slowly, wanting to enjoy this moment.

  'Hello,' I said.

  'Hello,' said Ronnie.

  There was a pause of the better sort, and Ronnie and I smiled at each other and nodded.

  'Miss Crichton wanted very much to be here on your return,' said O'Neal, wiping condensation off the windscreen with his glove.

  'Really?' I said.

  'Really,' said Ronnie.

  O'Neal started the engine, while Solomon fiddled with the de-mister.

  'Well,' I said, 'whatever Miss Crichton wants, she must definitely have.'

  Ronnie and I kept on smiling as the Rover swept out of the base, and into the Norfolk night.

  In the six months that followed, overseas sales of the Javelin surface-to-air missile increased by a little over forty per cent.

  THE END

  About the Author

  Hugh Laurie was born in 1959. He attended Eton and Cambridge where he was an outstanding oarsman. He read anthropology at Cambridge and was president of the Footlights, an undergraduate dramatic society whose other members included Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry. He went on to team with Fry in the television series A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Jeeves and Wooster as well as appearing in Blackadder. He has acted in films including 101 Dalmations, Sense and Sensibility and Peter's Friends. He lives in London with his wife and three children and is an avid motor cyclist. The Gun Seller is his first novel.