The Partridge Kite

by Michael Nicholson

  Much the same public nonchalance was witnessed after the military blockade of the docks at Merseyside, Southampton, Hull and Cardiff. All, it was said by Ministry of Defence PRs, essential military exercises at a time when East-West relationships had sunk to their lowest ebb in twenty-five years; at a time when the daring of the international terrorist and the sophistication of the weapons he was using had reached a new high.

  It was, as one celebrated defence correspondent wrote in The Times, as if ‘Ordinary Mr and Mrs Britain were taking an extraordinary pride in seeing their armed forces flexing their muscles, no matter what the discomfort to themselves. They are delighted at the spectacle of what is, after all, a very efficient military machine, going through its paces, even if it means sitting six hours in a traffic jam or doing without imported sugar for a week because of it.’

  The common view was expressed by a London cabbie in a quick television news street interview on the day a Royal Marine Commando unit closed the Thames with a barricade of pontoons from Greenwich Pier to the Isle of Dogs.

  ‘It’s just nice,’ he said, ‘to watch the only bunch of professionals we’ve got left in this bloody country.’

  Far from damaging their image, the Services found they could do no wrong and experienced a phenomenon quite new to them in peacetime - increasing public popularity.

  There was, of course, much concern expressed in Parliament and other clubs. There was much written in the Press questioning the need for such spectacles, spelling out the cost in pounds and pence, suspicious of the motives. Some years before. Lord Chalfont in The Times of 5 August, after one army exercise at LAP, wrote under the title:

  COULD BRITAIN BE HEADING FOR A MILITARY TAKEOVER?

  Some of the more imaginative propagandists of the far Left have suggested that the recurring appearance of troops and armoured cars at London Airport are rehearsals for the day when the Chiefs of Staff are installed at Number 10 Downing Street and the machine-guns appear at street comers.

  Although this may seem a more than unusual overheated fantasy, it would be wise to recognise that more and more people in this country, many of them men and women of impeccable Liberal instincts, are beginning to contemplate seriously and not without some satisfaction the possibility of a period of Authoritarian rule in Britain.

  Many similar stories had appeared in other newspapers since then.

  There was another development which raised the question of the political independence of serving members of the British Armed Forces. A number of articles appeared in the respectable dailies, following these exercises. Three lengthy and well-argued pieces were published in The Times, four more in the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs and two more in the Spectator. All were written by senior ranking army and air force officers and signed by them. Another less publicised article, encouraging political involvement by serving members of all ranks, appeared, unsigned this time, in Monday’s World, the quarterly magazine of the Right-Wing Monday Club.

  Mr John Lee, Labour MP for Birmingham Handsworth, said he planned to question the Attorney General on whether this article constituted an offence under the Incitement to Disaffection in the Armed Forces Act.

  A Ministry of Defence spokesman said the identity of the officer who’d written in Monday’s World had not been discovered. The spokesman also said he did not know whether disciplinary action would be taken against the other officers who were in breach of well-known army regulations.

  There was much talk about the disaffected in high public circles. The opinion leaders looked about them for public disquiet but found surprisingly little. So they became uneasy themselves because of that.

  Other men, high and low, began to sense something new, and thought they could see a pattern emerging. Some were encouraged and elated, experiencing a sense of relief that something was at last on the way, something they had been preparing themselves blindly for.

  But others felt a dreadful sense of hopelessness. Much was being hinted at now, loudly and in the open, and those sensitive to the slightest change in the country’s mood began for die first time to see reality in what had always been a vague threatening impossibility.

  Despair felt the first trickle of fear at its edges.

  Professor Linklater’s bouncers had strength; they had finesse.

  The polite, well-dressed, soft-spoken well-accented young men, watched by the bleached-skinned professor, had gone beyond what was necessary. A long way beyond.

  They had damaged McCullin in all those places it wouldn’t show; in all those places, as it happens, that the body is most sensitive.

  So the policewoman who found him unconscious propped up in a sitting position, shortly after midnight in an alley off Great Queen Street WC2, thought he was either drunk or drugged. But then, having called for transport by radio, she smelt his breath and lifted his eyelids. . . and was convinced he was neither. She concluded he was an epileptic or a coronary.

  Tom woke up in a small clinic in North Ealing, tucked up in one of the few remaining private pay beds reserved for Government ministers, senior Trade Union officials and similar among the nation’s privileged.

  Fry sat a yard away, cold tea and toast on the breakfast tray on the floor at his feet. Tom focused on Fry’s fresh round face.

  His head felt very light and full of fantasy. Whirling colours, like many pots of paint, stirred rapidly in a pool of white spirit, became a giant Catherine wheel, exploding at the edges, sparks hitting his face. Tom felt a shock of pain in his groin and, feeling the gorge rise, turned his head to be sick in the white enamel bowl Fry had nestled into the pillow at his side.

  Fry wiped Tom’s lips with a paper tissue.

  ‘No lasting damage, Tom,’ he said quietly. ‘Doctors’ promise. They’ve got a drug, Xylocaine. Within a couple of hours the pain will have gone completely . . . it’s a kind of local anaesthetic.’

  ‘You mean they’ve frozen my balls?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No more fucking?’

  Fry coloured. ‘No, Tom! Not until you’re better.’

  ‘Can I get up?’

  Tonight - maybe early this evening. I doubt if you could walk a yard at the moment.’

  Tom looked down his nose to the bed. A frame under the light duvet raised what little weight there was above his middle.

  He had expected them to be rough last night, but not like this! They had carried on hitting him long after he had told them all they had wanted to hear. Long after he had heard Linklater make his telephone call. They had done it out of hate, which in its method and thoroughness was quite new to him.

  He knew something of torture. He had administered mild forms of it himself. Frequently, he had been witness to protracted sessions in Ulster years ago. Never in the interrogation rooms had it upset him, the relentless, clinical, slowly mounting infliction of pain, hesitating just short of shock. The military interrogators he’d watched then had stopped at very little to get what they wanted. But they did stop once the man in the chrome wrist clamps began talking to the military stenographer at his elbow.

  It was different last night.

  And now, with the memory of the pain and Linklater’s hysterical meeting swirling in his mind in separate and distorted images, he knew he had touched something of the reality of the New Order, The Linklaters and the Mostyns, the Curran-Prices and Haigs were not fighting for a return to the Old Order of things, the benevolent, sometimes compassionate, feudalism of Great Britain half a century or more ago. They were not contesting Socialism, or Communism or Unionism or any other Leftist-ism, so that they could bring Britain back to the world of Bertie Wooster and Elsie and Doris Waters.

  No, he thought, CORDON can never take us back now. It has to go forward. It’s the only way it can destroy its Opposition. Has to outpace everything that has gone before. If intrepid Socialism must eventually be taken over by the hard Reds then CORDON’S ne
w order, the Reactionaries, the Order of the Right, could only succeed with a totalitarianism far more absolute than anything Moscow or Peking or Hanoi had ever dreamt of.

  If it wasn’t, how could it survive? How could it stop the old Opposition of the Left coming out of the holes again? What had Sanderson called it? ‘Monopolistic Greyness’. He’d seen the vision all right. No wonder he’d been terrified. Fry got up quietly to leave.

  ‘Don’t go. Fry, I’m not asleep. It’s just that my head feels like Niagara Falls and I think I’ve got someone else’s brain.’ ‘The doctors said you might have mild hallucinations . . . I shouldn’t worry.’

  ‘I’m not worried. Fry . . . except that someone’s going to come in soon and take their brain back again. Christ! I’ve just had my first original thought in years.’

  He began to laugh but the contraction in his stomach muscles spread pain the length of his body.

  ‘Did it work last night?’ he asked, once Fry had finished wiping his lips clean a second time.

  ‘In a way, yes! Linklater did telephone just as we thought. But then the most extraordinary thing. We monitored the 405 exchange the moment he stopped speaking, which I timed at 2153 hours. He made the call an hour and forty minutes later at 2333 hours. He sounded very excited and upset so we can be certain he didn’t know you were coming, which backs up your theory yesterday that CORDON hasn’t sent out a general alert.’

  ‘But you got the number?’

  ‘That’s what’s so extraordinary!’

  ‘You mean you didn’t? After all that and now all this?’ Tom moaned and pushed his head back hard into the pillow. Fry leant forward and held Tom’s right forearm tight.

  ‘We got just one extra number, Tom. And we got exactly the same interference at the beginning of the dialling as we did with Mostyn’s call. We’ve compared the two recorded transmissions and they’re identical. It’s deliberate jamming, Tom!’

  ‘But that’s impossible. Not on a GPO line.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right, that’s exactly what they did say. . . not on public STD and not so precisely.’

  ‘But you got a number?’

  ‘Yes! Number 2. The jamming stopped in time to give us it and confirm the previous three numbers. So we now have 2843.’

  There was a pause. Fry looked from Tom to the breakfast tray on the floor. A thin skin of milk fat now covered the cup of cold tea. The toast was thin and hard.

  ‘They’ve given it to us, haven’t they?’ he said quietly to Tom.

  ‘Yes! Four names, four numbers. If we’d cottoned on to it sooner, Curran-Price would have given us 3, Haig 4, Mostyn gave us 8, now Linklater gives us 2.’

  ‘Two more names to go, Tom, and two more numbers.’ ‘And then what? We ring them up and say “Hullo, what time’s the takeover?” ’

  Neither man smiled.

  -‘You see what it means?’ said Fry.

  ‘I see what it means, all right. Christ! They’re actually leading us to them!’

  ‘The Prime Minister wants to know who they are and how they would try it.’

  ‘You’ve spoken to him?’

  ‘Yes, of course. He called me to the House immediately after Question Time. He and the Home Secretary have had a hammering over this army exercise at Heathrow. Everyone’s furious at it but there are a lot more who are just confused.’

  Kellick was sitting at his desk. Fry stood behind Tom’s chair, both hands on the backrest. Tom looked pale. He had had his last injection of Xylocaine at three o’clock and was due for another at seven. He wore his own heavy navy blue fisherman’s sweater and a pair of lightweight slacks bought for him by Fry on advice from the hospital doctors.

  Tom felt no pain now. Just a numbness. He had also a feeling which wouldn’t go away that he was about to vomit, like a first-time voyager standing expectant by the handrail as the ship leaves the quay.

  ‘Why confused?’ he asked Kellick.

  ‘Because although according to the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office the exercise had been cleared in the routine way, no one, it seemed, realised it was going to be so big. Do you know that over six thousand men were out last night and we didn’t know about it? Nor did a lot of other people who should have done. I tell you, it’s shaken them, including the Prime Minister.’

  ‘Well, he does know more than most about what it could mean, so he should be. Has he told the Home Secretary of Sanderson’s interview?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kellick answered, ‘but I’d have thought so. Suicidal if he hasn’t.’

  ‘Suicidal if he has. I’d have thought!’ Fry said. ‘The Home Secretary’s not known to be the most discreet man and he hasn’t exactly been an ideal advertisement recently for Temperance as far as I can gather.’

  Then perhaps he has been told,’ Tom said.

  ‘The question I was asked to put to you by the Prime Minister is, if they do exist, how will they try it?’

  ‘Like that, maybe?’ Tom pointed to the evening newspaper on Kellick’s desk, front page covered in photographs and the banner headline ARMY CLOSES HEATHROW.

  ‘A British Army coup . . . that’s absurd, McCullin, and you know it!’ Kellick’s voice grated.

  ‘I didn’t mean simply that . . . I’m not suggesting the British Army is CORDON. But it’s hard to see any nonmilitary coup succeeding if it doesn’t take some of the Service people along with it.’

  ‘You make it sound,’ Kellick said, ‘like a dreadful political fantasy novel. I’m willing to accept that there are elements within the Armed Services who might defect at the hour. . . a handful at the top and a following of sorts in the ranks. But mutiny is not a word in the British Military’s vocabulary. And I’m not talking about airy-fairy traditions, McCullin. I’m talking about centuries of careful mental conditioning. It couldn’t happen here!’

  ‘It’s not preposterous,’ Fry interrupted. ‘What prompts a military coup anywhere? It’s usually the inability of civilians to govern. We don’t really have to look back too far to find a comparison. Portugal. A disenchanted army. Fighting a colonial war in Africa, fighting political decisions at home that prevented them, they thought, from winning. Result? Military coup in Lisbon.’

  ‘Fry, you’re talking off the top of your head. This is not a political seminar. If you’re so keen on theories, maybe you’d like a transfer to an MOD Training College.’

  ‘Fry’s talking a lot of sense,’ Tom said.

  He leant forward, shifting his weight on to his elbows on the wooden armrests of his chair.

  ‘Mr Kellick,’ he said quickly, ‘today is the first day in a great many years that I have spent in bed when I haven’t either been recovering from a hangover or on my way to one.” My brain this morning felt like a large empty hall. It felt all nice and clean at the sides. It was almost worthwhile being clobbered last night just to have that feeling today.’ Kellick looked embarrassed. He hated talk like this. He wasn’t a cleric.

  ‘Two things occurred to me,’ Tom continued, ‘in between

  the jabs and the bed pans. The telephone numbers and the way we’re getting them confirms they are leading us by the nose. That’s the plan we were talking about yesterday. Remember?

  ‘The other thing is this. You say the British Army, Navy and Air Force couldn’t be involved in CORDON. I reckon you’re right. Not all the Services, not every serviceman. Not all the police, not all of Big Business, not all the country, or half of it, or a quarter . . . not even a hundredth. But what if just a little bit of them all were involved somewhere, somehow?

  ‘How many does it take to start something, anyway? All it needs is just a few people in the right places. And an IDEA! They don’t need to be convinced of total support before they begin. They just have to do a bit of homework first to make sure they’re standing on enough fertile ground.

  ‘Have you ever been to a strike meeting, Mr
Kellick? You should! It’s fascinating. Twenty thousand men or more brainwashed in the open air. See them raise their hands, then look at the faces and the eyes of the small group on the platform. It wasn’t their splendid speeches that did it. It wasn’t the argument over threepence an hour extra that won. It was their groundwork. The hard monotonous needling that had gone on for weeks, months before, in the pubs, canteens, shopfloors. The men had put up their hands to strike even before they’d left home that morning. They’d been won over already and they didn’t even know it, let alone know how it had been done.’

  ‘It’s all very fascinating, industrial relations, McCullin, but I really don’t see what you’re getting at. The Prime Minister’s serious, you know.’

  Fry’s knuckles went white, still clasping the back of Tom’s chair.

  Tom smiled the only way he knew how. Kellick took it to be a grimace which made him feel he had scored a hit.

  There was silence for ten seconds. ‘What I’m saying,’ Tom said, ‘is that we must not imagine that because there’s no evidence of support for CORDON now, it won’t be there on the day.’

  ‘But how will they do it?’ Kellick stood up and walked briskly to the window. The Prime Minister wants our opinions,’ he said.

  ‘You haven’t been listening, Mr Kellick? Or do you think it’s all nonsense?’

  There seemed no anger in Tom’s voice.

  ‘No, McCullin, it’s all very interesting and I shall pass it on, if there’s time, to those who might have some use for it. But you will appreciate I have a report to complete for the Prime Minister by six this evening. That’s in forty-five minutes’ time. So how would they do it?’

  Tom rubbed his hands together and stretched out his arms in front of him.

  ‘I’ve no fucking idea, Mr Kellick,’ he said. ‘Not the faintest fucking ideal’

  He eased himself gently out of the chair and Fry held his elbow as he walked slowly to the door.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, with the best exit line he could muster, ‘maybe they’ll use hang gliders from the top of Big Ben!’