HOME RUN

by Gerald Seymour

  Mattie told himself that he was going for the wall in the back yard, he was going and he wasn't stopping. If they were going to stop him then they were going to have to shoot him.

  The kitchen was behind him. He had passed through the door and he would have been silhouetted in the doorway. He didn't know a way of going through a doorway, from a lit room and out into darkness, without throwing shadows.

  The back yard, beyond the kitchen, was the only area outside the villa that he had seen, and he knew there was a high wall. If there was one guard outside then the likelihood was that he would be at the front, by the gate, but that was the area of chance.

  He went on tiptoe across the yard. He had never heard a dog, and he didn't think there was a dog there. The Major had said that dogs were the nightmare of the escaper, but he hadn't heard a dog, not a guard dog nor a pet dog. He went for the wall. He went for the wall where there were the bullet marks in the concrete blocks. If they caught him, if they brought him back, then it would be at the wall that his life would end. He reached up. The palms of his hands and his fingers could just reach the top of the wall.

  A terrible pain when he pulled himself up. In his shoulders and his upper back and down to the cage of his ribs. The hurt was from the times that he had been on the hook in the cellar.

  He struggled to get his feet off the ground, and he scrambled with his knees to give him purchase up the wall. There was a moment when he had his head and his shoulders above the summit of the wall, and then he was balancing on his chest and the pain was excruciating. He could see into a street, and he could see low bungalows.

  There were the headlights of an approaching car. The lights played on the centre of the road and lit up the walls of the buildings, and the lights were rushing closer to the wall of the villa, surging towards Mattie who was high on the wall and working to swing his legs on to the top of the concrete blocks.

  Behind him, through the open kitchen door, came the signature music of the end of the news broadcast. He knew the music because most days at Century he listened to the recording picked up at Caversham. He thought that if he fell back from the wall then he would never find the strength again that had carried him to the top of the wall, and the music at the end of the broadcast told him there would in a few moments be guards in the kitchen. He had his elbows over the top of the wall, and he ducked his head as low as was possible, and his legs dangled, and the blood and the pain roared in his feet. He waited for the lights to pass, and it seemed to him impossible that the lights would not search him out for the driver. So bloody long. He seemed to hear the shouting in the kitchen, and the stampeding of feet, and he seemed to feel the hands grabbing at his knees and at his ankles and dragging him down.

  The lights passed.

  Quiet behind him, grey shadow ahead of him.

  He heaved himself up and on to the wall. He levered one leg across. He rolled, he slid and fell.

  Mattie tumbled eight feet from the top of the wall and down on to the weed verge at the side of the road, and he was winded.

  Go for it. It would have taken more than the breath being knocked from his lungs to hold him. He was up and he ran.

  He did not know where he was running. Distance was the name of the game. He hobbled down the street, away from the prison gate. Mattie ran for survival and running was risk.

  He did not know whether there was a curfew in Tabriz, and if there was a curfew then at what time it started. He didn't know where in the city he had been held. He only thought he was in Tabriz.

  He ran until the stitch cut into his belly lining. When he aaw a cafe, benches outside, chairs and plastic topped tables inside, he had slowed and crossed to the far side of the road.

  Where there was a shadow he tried to find it, and he had to skin his eyes to peer ahead of him, hard because his head was shaking from the exertion of running, because it would be fatal to be running and not looking and to barge into a patrol of the Revolutionary Guards.

  He ran for a full five minutes. He was 52 years old, and he thought that he had run a mile. He had run on back streets, and he had heard laughter and shouting from inside small homes, and he had heard the voice of a radio announcer inciting verses from the Qur'an.

  When he rested, when his legs and his wind had died, he crouched in a concrete storm drain.

  Grab any luck that begs to be taken, the Major had said at the Fort. Luck is earned. Luck doesn't show itself that often, and if it's not grabbed then it's gone. He thought of Harriet, and he thought of his girls. The first time this day that he thought of his women tribe at home. They would have expected it of him, and it's for you, my darlings, that I run. No other beacon for Mattie.

  A car pulled up in the street, ten paces from him. The driver took a parcel from the back seat of the car and carried it into a house. The engine was left running.

  The driver made a gift of a car to Mattie.

  Out of the storm drain, into the car. At first very gently away, hardly changing the beat of the motor. And once round the first corner, then he really went at it. He had not driven so fast since the year before he was married, since he had owned the Austin Healey Sprite. No sports car, this, but the bloody thing went, and he drove like there was no tomorrow, and probably there wasn't. He drove away out of the town, until he was surrounded by darkness, and then he stopped and axed the lights. He found a map in the glove compartment.

  He was, by his best calculation, between 150 and 200 miles from the Turkish frontier, and by the grace of God, the stars were clear and bright and he was on the north-west edge of the town that he thought must be Tabriz.

  The three guards who had been in the house placed the blame in entirety on those two men who had taken no precautions to defend themselves. . . . The investigator would have done the same in their position, in his position he would do the same.

  The investigator was told that there had been a period of fifteen minutes between the time that the food had been carried upstairs, and the discovery of two comrades, dead in the prisoner's cell.

  Furniss had a start. More important was the fear of the guards who had survived. While they had searched the villa a full hour had passed, and only then had they summoned an ambulance. The police had not yet been informed, neither had the army, neither had the headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. They had waited for the investigator to return.

  It crossed his mind that he could do worse himself than make tracks for the Turkish frontier. But there was too much blood on his hands for him to be welcomed into asylum by the western agencies.

  It was like a wound to him, the escape of Matthew Furniss.

  He had the names of three agents, and the name of an infiltrator, nothing more. He had no detail yet on the running of Century's Iran Desk, on the collaboration between Century and Langley, on the gathering of intelligence from the British listening posts on the frontiers and the American satellites.

  He should have had hard information on the passing of information from the Americans and the British to Baghdad, and on the battle engagement instructions to Royal Navy warships on the Armilla patrol. He had taken so little, and he had promised so much to the Mullah, and the Mullah would, no doubt, have repeated these promises to his own patrons. Well, he would start again when Furniss was recaptured, as he must be. No one would shelter an English spy in Tabriz. Deep in his gut was the tremor of insecurity, the ripple of the sensation of his own vulnerability.

  When he had pieced together the story, he had himself driven to the IRG headquarters in the centre of the city. He gave the commander photographs of Matthew Furniss. He described what he knew him to be wearing when he escaped from the gaol, warned him that Furniss was armed with a pistol.

  He wrote out the messages to be sent by radio.

  He sent a terse report to the Mullah in Tehran.

  He sent a description of Matthew Furniss to the Army Command of the north-west region.

  There was no choice but to broadcast his failure over the airwaves
.

  Mattie had driven out on the Marand road. He had the map, and he reckoned the petrol tank had a minimum of a hundred miles, perhaps more. He would draw attention to himself if he speeded, and if he dawdled then he faced the greater risk of being trapped inside the gun net when the alarm was raised.

  He took the wide bridge across the Meydan Chay. He rattled past factories that had been idle for years now that the war had soaked the resources of the nation; huge unlit ghost buildings. Just after the road crossed the old railway track that had once carried passengers and exports into the Soviet Union, he swung left off the main road. Any time on the main road had been risk, and he was sure that at Marand, the high oasis town, and at Khvoy, that was a centre of agricultural production, there would be road blocks. The road blocks would not necessarily be for him, but he could not afford to be stopped when he had no papers for the car, and no papers for himself.

  The road that he chose was metalled for a dozen miles, then petered out into dirt and stone. The car took a hammering but he would not have need of it for long.

  When he was high above the northern shore of Lake Urmia, when he could see the lights of the villages where before the Revolution a good wine had been produced, he saw the road block ahead.

  Mattie recognized the block because on the road in front there was a line of tail lights, red, queueing, and he could see a torch being waved. There was a queue. It must be half a mile ahead of him. He was slowing, going down through his gears. He killed his lights . . . he pulled up to a halt. He had used his luck to make good ground away from Tabriz . . . N o choice now. It was time to walk. No way of knowing whether this was a block in position to halt him, or just there for routine. He swung the wheel hard to turn in the road.

  He hadn't reckoned they would have read the manuals. He hadn't rated that there would be a guard stumbling up from the tree thicket at the side of the road, probably been dozing, probably awakened by the scrape of the tyres on the gravel hard shoulder of the tarmac road. He switched his headlights back on and saw the guard lumbering into the centre of the road. The lights blinded the guard. The guard was old, and under his forage cap there were locks of silvered hair and his beard was down to his throat, he seemed to wave at Mattie while the car was twenty yards from him, only realized at the last moment, in time to raise his rifle, aim the barrel into the heart of the light. Mattie drove straight at the guard.

  He felt the shudder blow of the impact. He felt the heave of the bouncing wheels. For what felt many seconds Mattie's heart stopped. He drove, every second expecting a machine gun to sweep his life away. No, that was absurd. Not on this back road. And the odds were that the old man was alone.

  Should have stayed where he was, fired first, no questions.

  Perhaps the old man had children or grandchildren who had run from the guards. Past the next corner he saw a track into the trees. He turned on to it and followed it far enough to be hidden from the road and pulled the wheel hard to the left and sank the car into scrub. Out, Mattie, out. He was drained.

  He would gladly rest in this wood. Out, Mattie, the guard's in the road. Right, Major, be right with you.

  Mattie took the pistol and the map and got out. He let the dark flood into his eyes. He searched in the car and then in the boot, but there was nothing he could use. He thought of Harriet's boot, first aid kit, blanket, shovel. . . . Mattie, get on with it. Coming, Major, just checking.

  There was no sign of lights approaching. He walked cautiously towards the dark shadow in the road. The body was still. He suppressed a little jolt of regret for the old man who had not stayed in hiding and shot him as he turned. It's alright, Major, Mattie's not going soft on you. This was a good guard.

  He may be a dead guard, but he did me a favour. Costly favour, oh yes. And he hauled the body into the trees. Five yards in, rest a minute, ten yards in. Fifteen will do.

  He found the rifle. The bolt mechanism was crushed. And there were no rounds in the magazine, and not one in the spout. He carried the rifle to where the guard lay. Poor defenceless old man. If he'd had a round, you stupid cunt, Furniss, you'd be dead. Now, get the hell out of here.

  His stomach was empty, he had not yet touched the bread and the chicken and the rice squashed into his pocket, damp on his thigh. On his feet were plimsoll shoes. The mountains were ahead of him, dark against the night sky. He reckoned he had four or five hours of darkness left to him. He walked out of the treeline, took his bearings from the stars and began to climb.

  She had had the family row, and forgotten it.

  Her case was at the foot of the bed, and her dress was on the floor. Polly didn't care that she had stormed out of the house with her father shouting and her mother crying, and she didn't care that the dress that had cost her £199.95 was crumpled on the floor.

  His head was across her stomach, and his beard tickled at her skin, and her fingers played patterns across his shoulders.

  He had loved her and he'd slept, and he had given her the best evening she had ever had before he took her to his flat.

  He was a dream when he danced. Polly had never learned to dance, not properly, not until that night when she had been shown the magic of the tango and the rumba. She knew a bit of quick-step and she could waltz if she wasn't watched too closely. She hadn't known that she could dance as she had danced with Charlie. And the meal had been amazing, and the drink had only been champagne, and his attention had been total.

  She had forgotten the family row. She had forgotten what Mr Shabro had told her. Must have been jealous, the old goat . . .

  "Have you traced it?" Corinthian asked of his radio.

  The reply was in his ear. "As far as we can go . . . but there's a problem. Vehicle Registration say they are not permitted to give out any details on ownership of that registration. . . .

  That's all."

  "So, what do we do?"

  "Try pretending it isn't there."

  "That's daft."

  "And that's the best you're getting."

  He shivered. He hadn't the engine running so there was no heating. In the passenger seat Token was asleep, and she'd forgotten herself, or she was so hellish tired, because she had let her head slide down on to his shoulder. But he didn't rate his chances. He didn't rate them because all the skirt seemed to want to talk about was goddam almighty Keeper. In the considered view of Peter Foster, codename Corinthian, Keeper was not long of their world, stood to reason. He could not be long with them because the guy was too intense, too tied down by all the shit about winning the narcowar in Bogota, in the Golden Crescent, that sort of shit. Keeper might be the best they had, but it couldn't last. The guy ran too hard. Himself, he paced himself, he wasn't in a hurry, he did his job and he clocked up the overtime, and he thought that he might, just, grow old in Customs and Excise. Keeper wouldn't . . . Keeper was a shooting star, bloody brilliant, and then gone.

  It didn't bother Corinthian that the light was going out of the investigation, had been on the slide ever since the order had come through from the Lane that Tango One was not to be knocked. No one from Parrish downwards seemed to know what the fuck was going on, and the target was cocky enough to have gone back to his address like there had never been a problem, like importing heroin and being under ID surveillance didn't spoil his day one bit. Great looking fanny he'd with him, and a great looking bill he'd have run up at the swish joint he'd taken her. The light had gone so far down the hill, over the other side, that Keeper had gone home, been sent home, and they weren't told when he'd be back . . .

  She started. She awoke, and then she realized where her head was, and he gave her the evil eye, and she gave him the daggers. She straightened in her seat.

  "Bugger . . . I was just about to rape you," he said.

  "Oh, do piss off."

  "Quite the lady."

  "Is it still there?" She turned to look back down the street at the other car. "What's the news on it?"

  "No news is permitted on that registration."

&n
bsp; She shook her head, tried to get the sleep out of her eyes.

  "What does that mean when it's at home?"

  "It's what they tell you when the vehicle is used by either the Security Service or the Secret Intelligence Service. What confuses me is, are they watching the target, or are they watching us?"

  The radio messages, relayed from Tehran, went to military and IRG bases on the western side of Lake Urmia, and to the north. But this was wild and mountain country, an area through which a fugitive could with luck pass undetected and over which no security screen could guarantee success. The lake lies as a huge natural barrier between the Iranian hinter-land and the mountain ranges that peak at the Turkish frontier.

  The messages were in simple codes. It was not possible to send complicated enciphering to outposts such as Mahabad and Oshnoviyeh and Reza'iyeh and Dilman and Khvoy.

  The messages were plucked from the airwaves by antennae at the Government Communications Headquarters outpost at Dhekelia on the island of Cyprus.

  He was south of Dilman, too far south to see the lights of the town. Ahead of him were the mountains. His sights were set on Mer Dag, immediately across the border, his 12,600 ft beacon. He had long ago wolfed down the food that he had taken from the prison. Now he was famished. His shoes were disintegrating. He had torn off the sleeves of his shirt, and the sleeves were now bound around the plimsoll shoes to hold them together. He had walked through two complete nights, and when the sun was high, when the lake shore was at siesta, he had walked in the haze heat. All through the daylight hours he could see the summit point of Mer Dag. It was his target. . . . There was the ache of hunger in his stomach, there was a numbed death in the muscles of his legs, there was throbbing pain behind his forehead. Stick to the goat tracks, Mattie, and find water. Very well, Major. He would find water. The mountain summit floated in the moonlight ahead of him. He thought that it was too late now to fail.