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The Partridge Kite

Page 14

by Michael Nicholson


  The oak strip flooring shone brilliantly with two centuries of beeswax polishing. Heavy dark blue brocade curtains hid the tall windows and the primitive landscape outside.

  The six men sat at one end of the room close to the Adam fireplace and the blazing logs.

  It had been snowing hard and non-stop for two days and two nights.

  Snowdrifts in the grounds around the house were in places thirty feet high. In the past forty-eight hours the wind had changed direction, north-east to east, turning the drifts this way and that until they stood like man-made pyramids, perfectly shaped, impenetrable. Cedars and pines ringed the house, their branches heavy with snow. Occasionally when the wind gusted, the snow would glide slowly off the boughs and crash fifty feet down.

  The house in the forest was only a ninety-minute flight by jet from one of the busiest capitals in the world. But in midwinter it was as isolated from London as North Cape.

  Since Wednesday, when the first snowstorm began, the house had been completely cut off. The nearest public road was fifteen miles away. The single track that led off it to the house was buried deep. The snow and the north-easterly had made CORDON Headquarters a fortress.

  It would have been impregnable if an area, thirty yards square, was not cleared by flamethrowers at regular two- hourly intervals, day and night, for the helicopter to land.

  The Chairman looked down at his notes and began reading aloud to his Directors.

  ‘I have indicated in the briefing in front of you the main areas of resistance. By resistance I mean physical, violent opposition. Take note in particular of those universities, polytechnics and teacher training colleges typed in red. In the far right column you’ll see the strength of our military contingents on call locally. Hopefully the siege mentality of students will work to our benefit, and fewer military than the maximum available will be needed.

  ‘As you are aware, an intensive research programme during the past three years has indicated that opposition in the main concentrations of labour will be, at the very most, passive. But again you’ll see that on computer advice in those listed mines, docks and factories, again typed red, certain precautionary measures will operate under the direction of our members inside, with physical assistance from our military if needed.

  The most recent data we have from the computer’s national scan is most encouraging. It gives to within half a per cent an identical conclusion to the same scan done twenty months ago. Our support is constant. The map on Appendix Four shows you the geographical breakdown of that support in the main industrial areas.

  ‘You are already aware, as of Tuesday’s briefing, of the situation in Ulster. I think you’ll agree with me that the degree of support shown amply rewards the efforts we have made there over the past few years.

  ‘We know of course the areas of greatest physical opposition, where the coloured immigrant population is most concentrated. We are talking here about immediate response opposition.

  ‘The data set out in front of you shows the areas of greatest danger to us . . . where we can expect the most violent immediate reaction.

  ‘You will see that the computers have given a priority rating to certain areas which will need our most urgent attention. Note also that the machines have split the danger. The West Indian settlements will erupt first and most violently, but it will be the Asian settlements that will cause the most extended problems, partly from their numbers, partly from their nature.

  ‘On the far right column there is listed alongside each area the number of military we will employ to cope.

  ‘The method of control we have at last agreed on and the computers this afternoon gave their final consent. The green wallet in your folder contains details of that control.

  ‘I know from our Computer Tone and resistance data that some of our Area Directors have expressed criticism of these methods. Some thought it too drastic. I have heard very reasonable arguments against it on the grounds that it might appall the mass of British people, make hostile the very people we shall depend on most for our support.

  ‘However, I am informed that this criticism has not developed into opposition. Drastic though these measures are, there is no alternative, and we shall carry them out as planned.’

  The Chairman looked up from his notes but there was no expression on his face. He was not looking for endorsement from the five around him. He was not waiting for them to speak. He expected no comment.

  He began coughing very softly, mouth closed, the slight noise coming from the back of his throat, like a stifled grunt. He took a small silver container from his pocket - it might have been a snuffbox - and stirred white powder from it into a glass of water in front of him. It always helped. It wouldn’t cure. There was no cure.

  It was impossible to guess his age. All the Directors watching him, listening to him, knew his military and political career well enough. But then, in a week’s time when his name became known throughout the world, so would many people remember. They knew little about him that wasn’t already listed at length in Who’s Who.

  Except his age, which had never been published.

  He was an unlikely Revolutionary. His hair was now grey but the hairs on the backs of his hands and wrists were still ginger. His skin was tanned though he hadn’t been out of Britain in fifteen years. He wore dark blue-tinted spectacles at all times. Only these five men had ever seen him in the eight years he had lived in the house. And they had never seen his eyes.

  He was a tall big man, powerful, and he showed his strength in the way he walked. It showed in the infinite control of his muscles in any movement, however small, like the lifting of a glass. It was hard to imagine him missing a step or dropping anything by accident. It was difficult to imagine him doing anything by accident.

  He took care with everything he did, the way he dressed, the way he spoke, the way he thought. He had self- sufficiency in his strength and in his discipline, which was why he adored his computers and why he loathed them. Without them, what was about to happen could never have been. And without him they would have no mind at all.

  ‘Page five of your briefing notes, please. You will be relieved to see that it is the final computer printout for 0015 hours December 25th. All systems have been checked by the machines and they synchronise perfectly.

  ‘We have during the past eighteen months deliberately faulted each system in turn and at random, simulating practical blunders or losses on the day. But no matter how often we’ve tested, no matter how ingenious our cross-faulting, the systems compensated. The machines have given us permission to go ahead on schedule.

  ‘May I remind you of some items on the itinerary. The Queen and her family will still be aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia, continuing her visits to Canada. On Christmas Day, it will be anchored in the St Lawrence River.

  ‘Parliament is in Recess, but make note of the preparations we have made for Downing Street.

  ‘All Civil Service Departments will be on holiday until the following Tuesday, the 28th. The Home Office, Ministry of Defence and the Admiralty will have a small number of duty officers and security staff but they pose no real problem.

  ‘The radio transmitters will have their power cut for one and a half minutes only. It is as much time as we can spare without creating alarm in the broadcasting outputs themselves.

  ‘Those senior members of ours who will be on duty in the various BBC and Commercial Radio studios are prepared and fully briefed.

  ‘You will see what particular emphasis I have given the continued broadcasting of BBC World Service. A newsflash in all the languages broadcast during the midnight to one o’clock schedule has already been recorded.

  ‘We have discussed how essential continuity is on the various broadcasting channels, radio and television. It is vital that there should be the minimum of public anxiety in the first hours if we are to succeed. With the exception of the various ne
wsflashes, broadcast speeches and the political forum, whose members you will see listed in Appendix Eight, the Christmas Day programmes must continue just as they’ve been advertised in the various programme publicity literature.

  ‘Video recordings of the newsflashes and explanation speeches for television news bulletins have also been recorded. The speech itself, which lasts eleven minutes, will appear on the BBC’s 12.45 p.m. news and at one o’clock on UN’s ‘News at One’. Both channels’ bulletins will be concerned wholly with the news of our actions and there’ll be progress reports from throughout the country. The staffing and fronting of television news bulletins will be done by our members. You will notice on the same Appendix Eight the names of broadcasters, well known I’m told, who if not already members have shown, according to Area Directors, their readiness to comply.

  The occupation of the radio and television studios at White City, Lime Grove, Alexandra Palace, Wells Street and Euston and the Regions is scheduled for 0012 hours when only night security staff are on duty. Separate arrangements have been made for BBC Bush House.

  ‘Newspapers, if I need to remind you, do not publish on Christmas Day. Many, after Christmas Day, will never publish again!

  ‘So communication for this one day is by radio and television and when you have completed your reading tonight I think I shall have convinced you that the takeover and control of both will be quick and complete.

  ‘Please oblige me by a thorough reading of the brief in front of you and be ready with any queries or apparent contradictions for computer examination by ten tomorrow morning when we next meet.

  ‘I will have ready for you by then System 403, which will dispense with any final doubts you might have about the reaction and role of the non-committed among Her Majesty’s Armed Forces and Police on Christmas Day.

  ‘Good-night, gentlemen!’

  They stood as the Chairman moved his chair back. He bowed his head, acknowledging their respect, turned and began his walk away from the table and the fire, the whole length of the room, towards the door at the far end. The door to his own suite of offices and living apartments. They watched, without speaking, without looking at each other.

  The Chairman was within a yard of the door when a brilliant blue light began flashing above it. It indicated his telephone was ringing, his own telephone, the only direct outside line in the house.

  He glanced at his wristwatch and smiled. The timing was exact: the call from Professor John Hamilton Linklater giving his CORDON Alert from the hall in London Area Three.

  Four names now ringed in red, not exactly in the order his machines had forecast, but well within the time limit they had set. The plan he had helped devise and they, his computers, had accepted was working to schedule. Better than he hoped for but exactly as the machines had predicted. They were never wrong. They corrected the instant they faulted. The time lapse between their mistakes and corrections was not within the measurements of the human mind. Their masters never knew their mistakes.

  He looked down again at the names on the list between the leather covers. How often, he wondered, during the past eight years had he been close to disaster. Many times his own failings, perhaps merely a hesitation in a moment of major decision, had angered him. It had always been his biggest fear that however disciplined his mind, however ordered his daily planning, a human failing would frustrate the final aim. Every human decision suggested inevitable failure.

  His strength was his machines. They had programmed, scanned and shown the way. How could man fail armed with such intelligence? How could he?

  How sad, he thought, that a country’s destiny should be decided by fifteen machines.

  Whenever he went down to see them in their insulated, anaesthetised temperature-regulated room, the image he had was always the same. The brains of Heidegger, Einstein, Russell, enclosed in formalin, sitting squat on the polished tiled floor taking their life from the three-core power cable that ran to a thirty-amp wall socket, like oxygen or plasma lines in an intensive care unit.

  The tickle in his throat began again, the walls of his trachea constricted. He could feel his pulse hitting the sides of his neck. He began coughing very softly and his right hand searched for the little silver casket in his pocket.

  He knew the signs. When it began this early it would stay with him all night. There would be no sleep. He felt a wave of despair, anticipating the long hours, listening to the wind, regularly and monotonously looking at the luminous dial of the alarm clock on the bedside table. Reliving some part of his life in the drowsy bouts of semi-sleep between the coughing.

  But worst, as his mind began to clear in the early morning, the anticipation of what was soon to begin, the sense of dread, and the regret, even sadness, that it had ever been necessary.

  His mind, or rather his senses, heard the noise long before his ears registered and confirmed.

  He walked to the window, quickly for an old man in the darkness of that room, and pulled the curtains a foot apart. As he did so, almost as if he’d cued it, an area below the first- floor window lit up. It was now snowing fast outside but the area was clear of snow and the arc lights around it shone brilliantly through the falling white. Men began moving on the perimeter.

  The helicopter hovered just this side of the cedars, level with the Chairman’s eyes. Its nose was turned to the right facing the windsock and heaving slightly this way and that, buffeted by the wind, was lowered slowly until it settled with a jolt on to the tarmac square.

  Even before the gyro brakes had been applied the doors nearest the house opened. Three men, covered in heavy overcoats and scarves, jumped down and were lost to the Chairman’s view as they ran to the house below him.

  He let the curtains fall, turned and looked across to the fire and the symbol of CORDON spotlighted on the wall above. It was ten minutes to midnight. The helicopter pilot had made good time, considering the appalling conditions.

  Francis Sanderson had returned sooner than expected, but no matter. After seven days away, the defector was safely back.

  Saturday, 18 December

  The convoy split at the roundabout just before the tunnel. One half, with thirty-two Ferret Scouts cars, seventeen Saracens and twelve Saladins, heavily armoured with Brownings and 76 mm guns, moved right, changing to low gear as they climbed the steep incline that took them to the edge of runway 28 Right. The second, containing exactly the same number of vehicles, turned left and began fanning out in the direction of Customs and Police buildings that ran parallel to the A4, the old Great West Road.

  Through the darkness and the lightly falling snow a green Aldis could be seen at the side of the airfield, close to the British Airways engineering sheds. Two long flashes, three short, repeated at five-second intervals. The young captain in the leading Ferret radioed back to his commanding officer who was sitting in a communications caravan in the car park of the Lady Bedford public house two miles away.

  ‘Bravo Alpha, Foxtrot One and Two reporting all clears green vector three-one at 0012 hours.’

  Bravo Alpha sat in front of a heater fan and sipped cocoa from a vacuum flask. He gave only a double break in transmission, pressing the Speak button twice in answer. Four hundred and eighty-eight vehicles now surrounded London’s Heathrow Airport, the busiest international airport in the world. Another twenty-five communications and command vehicles were stationed around it at strategic points.

  Police patrols in the streets surrounding the airport boundary halted traffic, providing information and lighthearted comfort to the uncertain and the cautious who had waited and watched the dark khaki shapes trundle through the night.

  In various local police headquarters senior policemen sat side by side with senior army officers. Men moved magnetised coloured blocks to new positions on the wall-maps behind them.

  Operation SKYDIVE was the twenty-first exercise of its kind in two and a half years, the twel
fth in as many months. But none had been as large as this. Thousands of men were involved tonight and a great deal of patient explanation and contorted public relations would most certainly be necessary tomorrow. Flights would be delayed or cancelled, tempers and money would be lost. Traffic on the filter roads from the M4 motorway would stay put as troopers went through the motion of searching every car boot and engine compartment for a SAM 7 or its equivalent.

  Many of the senior officers on duty tonight had their own doubts that the explanations usually meted out to the Press would work this time. After all, how many times must an airport be alerted to the possibility of a terrorist attack? And what number of terrorists, Arab, Irish or Anarchist, could possibly demand the arrival of four hundred and eighty-eight armoured cars?

  In the opinion of many a policeman and soldier on patrol in the ice and snow or sitting in the comfort and warmth of the neon-lit operations rooms, tonight’s ‘do’ was too incredible to be convincing. Someone had pushed their luck just a little too far this time. There couldn’t ever be another one like this.

  They were wrong. But only a handful of those employed tonight knew it. There would be another. Just one more. This was a dress rehearsal of part of the big show in seven days’ time - on Christmas Day.

  Very similar exercises had been taking place throughout the country during the past year. All major civilian airfields with a runway longer than eighteen hundred yards had seen them. At Birmingham in May and at Glasgow in July various units of the British Armed Services had staged two quite spectacular events. In Birmingham, with a full National and Provincial Press Corps invited, the legendary July ’76 Israeli raid on Entebbe had been repeated. A Royal Air Force Cl30 transport plane had been accidentally destroyed by fire and three soldiers had been killed in a premature explosion. Much was made of the disaster. But what surprised everyone, when the inevitable public debate and post-mortems were over, was how easily and without hassle the British public had accepted it all - including the Service Chiefs’ explanations.

 

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