The Partridge Kite

by Michael Nicholson

  The container came up gently. It broke the surface with only the slightest rustle as water ran off its edges. Just as gently it submerged again and all that could be seen was a large square shadow just below the surface of the sea settling itself.

  Arcs from the foredeck of the tug lit the area above and a dozen or more underwater units lit from below. Frogmen passed in and out of the lights like slim black sharks, always on the move, one shadow slowly, smoothly dissolving into the next.

  Except for the lapping of water around the tug and the wash of the tide on the rocks nearby, there was no other noise. There was no wind and no moon and, except for the black shapes below, no other evidence of living things.

  The tug, a large 11,000 horsepower Ulstein, was anchored in the shelter of what is named on the charts as Great Crebawethan, one of a handful making up the Western Rocks which jut out of the Atlantic on the south-western approaches to the Isles of Scilly in the Duchy of Cornwall. There is nowhere more desolate or primitive in the British Isles south of the Scottish Islands. The sea here is the graveyard of centuries of straying or drunken sailors. Jack Tars who’d misread or couldn’t read the charts, or perhaps hadn’t heard the lookout’s cry above the wind or the noise of a brawling lower deck.

  Great Crebawethan is only a hundred yards across, black and brown rock, speckled with the nests of gulls, cormorants and guillemots, and is surrounded by what looks on the charts like a scattering of pebbles. It lies somewhere midway between the Island of St Agnes and the Bishop Rock lighthouse a mile and a half to the south-west. Years ago, civilian and Royal Navy divers came here hunting for the wrecks of a lost British Fleet. A hundred and twenty feet down they went, picking around the seabed for the doubloons, ducats and silver caskets the flagship Association was carrying in its hold before the Retarrier Ledges and the Gilstones ripped it apart and let the cold Atlantic in. The divers took what they could until their patience and air ran out.

  Occasionally other divers would come, less ambitious men, turning over the rocks below for lobsters.

  But now the seabed had been thoroughly scoured and the last lobster to try to quench the insatiable appetite of the French had long been caught. No one came here any more.

  Which was why the tug and its deadly container were anchored here now.

  Despite the tide and the strength of the currents that moved with it, the stainless-steel cube, forty-five feet in all dimensions, had remained safe and secret, held by steel chains, under water now for ten months.

  Tonight was time for it to move, and the divers who had secured it to the seabed then had now begun to unshackle it, pulling away the clams and limpets, unlocking the steel chains and hawsers and reconnecting them to the tug, ready for the journey.

  By seven o’clock on a rising tide, the tug raised anchor. Gently it began moving out of the shelter of rocks as shags and gulls lifted their heads from their nests to watch it go. The tug took the strain of the tow, the chains and hawsers became taut, shivering along their length with the dead weight of the black shadow just below the surface. And above the rocks, looking west, the occasional flight of red from the light on Bishop Rock.

  Within twenty minutes the tug and its container were underway, out of Crebawethan Neck and into the open sea. The wind was a north-easterly, and it began to snow again . . . gusts of it at first, swirling about the deck of the tug and spinning off into the sea. Then with the bow directly into the wind, the snowstorm promised by the BBC’s weather forecast began.

  The snow was falling so thick that neither the bow nor stern of the tug could be seen from the wheelhouse. Only the green phosphorous light of the radar scanner lit the faces of the crew inside.

  An hour later, as the tug passed south of Melledgan Rocks, on a heading of 094°, the storm passed on as suddenly as it had come. The container, raised a foot or so out of the water by the pull of the tow, was now covered in snow, turning rapidly to ice. It looked at the end of its steel links like an immense, perfectly square sheet of glittering ice, planing across the black sea.

  The sky was now clear and although there was no moon the lights of ships passing to and from the most crowded sea corridor in the world could be seen and counted quite easily.

  They were on a constant course and averaging a steady six knots. By midnight they would see the light on Wolf Rock at the entrance to the English Channel. There they would wait for instructions to proceed by radio, from CORDON’S local Area Director at her country estate on the Lizard Peninsula.

  ‘I remember thinking, Kate, that you first bought this for a dirty joke. Should have known better – knowing what a prude you are.’

  ‘It happens to be my favourite wine and you know it is, so don’t make fun. But you are right, Tom, I am a prude.’ ‘Sometimes I’d never guess.’

  ‘My excursions into depravity are rare and have more to do with adrenalin and alcohol than you and your charm.’ ‘You have a special way, Kate, of making a man feel unique. Must have something to do with your salad days at Roedean.’

  ‘Is it chilled enough?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, sweetheart. A little warmer than your heart, if comparisons are any help.’

  Kate pretended to ignore the banter and began pouring out the wine, a Sancerre Clos de la Poussie ’72, into thick glass goblets. She drank and felt good because of it.

  ‘I must say,’ she said, looking over the rim, running her tongue along the rough edges of the cut glass patterns on the sides, ‘you are not behaving like a man with anaesthetised nether regions.’

  ‘Frozen balls, sweetheart! Bring the adjectives nearer earth. And it won’t be nether-nether land for ever, so don’t be too bloody cocksure of yourself.’

  ‘Oh, it’s a nice feeling, really, Tom.’ She sounded gay and made an exaggerated sweep round the table towards him, wine bottle in hand. ‘It’s so nice you should want me for myself, for my intellect and not just for my drab body. So nice that we can sit and talk, and to know you are listening to what I’m saying and not just wondering how soon you can have it.’

  ‘You’re a bitch, Kate!’

  ‘No! I really do mean it.’

  T still have my hands.’

  ‘Your hands might make me feel okay but they’re not going to help you. And anyway, I’m not in the mood for halfway house tonight so you can forget all about it for a change. We’ll just sit down quietly, eat my excellent stuffed aubergines, drink all my wine and talk about old times like some luvvy middle-aged couple. Let’s make out we’re celebrating our ruby wedding, Tom!’

  Tom couldn’t remember when she had been so lighthearted or so girlishly pretty. She began busying herself at the stove, humming between sips of her wine.

  Her kitchen was at one end of the long elegant sitting- room. The fresh, clinical white-glazed kitchen paraphernalia was hidden behind a screen.

  Tom sat at the oak refectory table fingering the wine bottle. He’d arrived at Kate’s flat in a panic of sorts, having remembered to make the precautionary telephone call first. He’d come straight from Kellick’s office. Kellick, he realised, was trying to bury him. Having selected and hired him, briefed him and encouraged him, Kellick was now trying to knock him down. And Tom couldn’t understand why. It didn’t make sense, but then none of it was really making sense any more.

  It had started simply enough. A bunch of cranks, neo- Nazis, neo-Fascists or whatever neo fitted, with ambitions on a near-derelict Britain. A Britain already split apart by the devolution antics of third-rate scruffy Scots and Welsh, mischievous tribesmen full of small talk made to sound big in the Gaelic tongue.

  But now it was beginning to get ahead of him. At times it seemed so real, the threat so immediate, that he felt like running up and down outside Buckingham Palace shouting ‘Wolf!’ But now, sitting in Kate’s flat, warm with her wine, comfortable in her company, CORDON seemed as real as a Disney fantasy.

  The wine w
as making him heady now. ‘No drink whatsoever’ was the last thing the doctors had shouted to him as he left the clinic. But the sight of Kate, the smell of her, fresh and warm from her scented bath, wrapped in her white bathrobe, her blonde hair still slightly wet, had made him quickly forget. Forget Linklater and bruised balls, Kellick and bloody hang gliders!

  He turned the bottle round in a circle on the table using the edge of its base as a pivot. He knew the wine well, and although he often joked about it, it meant as much to him as it did to Kate. And he remembered why.

  In the spring of 1975 he had flown out to Bangkok en route to Cambodia and Phnom Penh. He was on secondment to the British Embassy Staff in Saigon. He moved freely around South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos as a diplomat but he was in fact feeding back military intelligence. It was small-time stuff. He realised that the moment he met the members of the British Military Attaché’s staff out there. Nothing could really be that important if he had to hand it to men like that to digest and forward their analyses back to London.

  But it was dangerous, nevertheless. And this particular assignment would be especially so. It meant staying in Phnom Penh after the Khmer Rouge had captured it. Staying behind, hidden long enough to gauge the nature of the new regime, report who came in with them and what form the new society was to take. He would be hiding in five different houses belonging to Cambodian agents, whose loyalty, he realised, could not be relied on at the moment of final self-survival.

  Kate had been in Hong Kong, helping to patch up security arrangements before the Royal stopover in May. She flew to him immediately for the one night together before he caught the early morning Air Cambodge the following day.

  They ate in the Fish Restaurant of the Siam Intercontinental and she had ordered Sancerre. Reports of the dreadful atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge encircling Phnom Penh and the incessant rocketing of the city were in the newspapers and Kate had read them all on her flight over. And Tom, for the first time in his life, felt it was all a foregone conclusion. This unexpected meeting with Kate, the food, the wine, his flight tomorrow, the eventual Communist victory, his discovery, his death. All already written. Already moved on!

  Tom had hidden his melancholy with silly faces and bad jokes. He made Kate helpless with laughter as he chased a giant grilled prawn round the table with a headless sea-trout.

  He even allowed a ten-dollars-a-time photographer to take a picture of them both. They’d giggled together at the Polaroid badly technicolored image giving Kate a red nose and blue hair. Tom was startled by the flash, his hair ruffled, bow tie crooked, looking, as someone was much later to remark, like a second-hand car salesman caught pouring sawdust into a sump!

  Then when the label had come off the wine bottle and begun floating in the ice bucket, they had found something new to laugh at.

  He stood up unsteadily and toasted too loudly, ‘Here’s to Poussie on Ice.’ Kate had laughed and then begun crying. She’d carefully dried the label between the folds of her table napkin and held it to her lips. She gave it to Tom.

  ‘My Poussie for you, Tom. Always.’

  They had not made love that night but lay awake together holding hands, listening to the people by the poolside barbecue, and the late-night swimmers and the Thai lady pianist playing quiet Broadway hits, the sounds drifting across the lawns, choking the air with nostalgia.

  Tom had said goodbye to Kate early next morning in the hotel foyer with the bellboy and reception clerks looking on. He’d said it politely. And he’d meant it.

  After all, he wasn’t to know he would be coming back.

  Kate sat on the floor in front of the fire, Tom stretched in front of her, his head in her lap.

  She thought he had fallen asleep but he was wide awake, staring at the ceiling.

  His row with Kellick, his own newfound theories, his absurd infantile exit line as he’d left Kellick’s office flooded back. He felt suddenly depressed and out of his depth. Maybe the hospital doctors had been right and the drug that had numbed his swollen balls had lifted him away from reality. A few hours ago he thought he was beginning to see it all clearly, the plan, the strategy, the threat. But already most of it was gone.

  He desperately wanted to talk about it, to set it out clearly again as he’d done in Kellick’s office.

  He pushed his head deeper into Kate’s lap and looked up at her as she looked down.

  ‘Kate,’ he said, ‘I’m just about to break the Official Secrets Act. I’m going to tell you a story.’

  Sunday, 19 December

  It was 3.25 a.m. when Fry’s Range Rover did a U-turn at the Cenotaph and stopped ten yards from the security barrier that separated Downing Street from a silent, empty Whitehall.

  The snow crunched under their feet as he and Tom walked the fifty yards to the door marked Number 10. The lamp over it shone brightly and inches of snow capped its copper dome. The eternal policeman stood hunched in a heavy dark serge cape, standing on wooden slats to keep his toes from freezing.

  Fry showed his identity card and the policeman tapped on the door with his torch. Immediately, as if the attendant inside had been hovering, hand poised over the lock, the heavy door opened.

  Kellick was in the hall. He looked more strained than usual. It wasn’t just tiredness. The skin on his face was stretched tight and the normal dark creases across his forehead and around his eyes were white. His jaw muscles were tensing themselves erratically, involuntarily, and there was the smallest fleck of spittle in the corner of his mouth. He hadn’t bothered to change into the clean shirt and tie he always kept hanging in the cupboard in Mrs Hayes’s office for emergencies such as this. His hair, usually immaculate, looked unnaturally flattened by his nervous habit of continually smoothing it. This was uncharacteristic Kellick. He was behind time with himself.

  ‘The Prime Minister’s waiting,’ he said. ‘And for God’s sake let him do the talking. . . the pair of you. . . speak only when you’re spoken to directly.’

  Tom’s eyes narrowed but he said nothing.

  The three followed the attendant up the cushioned carpeted stairs to the first-floor landing. Tom found it difficult to equate the expensive splendour of the inside of this house with the dull, cramped-looking exterior. It reminded him, as his hands slid along the mirror-polished mahogany bannisters, of one of those Victorian poor little rich girl’s doll’s houses: the hideously painted mock front that opened to a maze of intricate and beautifully decorated rooms, crammed from miniature cellar to bogus loft with all an underpaid craftswoman’s delicate fingers and a grudging merchant banker father could provide.

  They turned right off the landing and into a narrow passage that led, by Tom’s reckoning, to the rear of the house. The attendant opened a door at the end without knocking and stood to one side as the three men in single file, led by Kellick, walked into the room.

  ‘Fry of my Department, Prime Minister,’ he said, ‘and McCullin.’

  The greenness of the room overwhelmed Tom. He peered around him looking for the Prime Minister, following Kellick’s eyeline as he’d spoken. But he saw only the broad teak desk with its green leather top and the single brass table lamp with its green vellum shade. Beyond them he could see nothing . . . only vaguely the folds of the heavy dark green velvet curtains.

  The three men waited for an acknowledgement of Kellick’s introduction but none came. Behind them there was just the slightest movement and Tom half turned to see a small man settling himself comfortably into a chair. Knight- ley, the Prime Minister’s secretary, looked at Tom and then lifted his nose, beckoning with it towards the desk and the single source of light.

  The lamp lit up only the smallest area, and suddenly there in its centre was a hand, a right hand, the hand of an old man, white with broad blotchy freckles. The hand, holding a gold ballpoint pen, the type with a retractable head, began digging it into the green morocco leather. The three men s
tood in the darkness waiting obediently as the pen’s head went click-in, click-out, monotonously in the perfect white circle. Knightley was used to it. Tom remembered then Kellick’s same familiar habit.

  ‘What is this CORDON? How will they try it?’

  The voice above the white hand was toneless. Except for the grammar it was hardly a question at all.

  ‘Sit down,’ it continued, ‘and tell me who you think they are and what and when they will try it on.’

  ‘Prime Minister’ - Kellick’s voice - ‘you will have read my report on our progress so far and conclusions I have made. You will have seen the recommendations I have made in the light of what we now know, limited though it is. I have recommended caution. There is nothing practical we can do until we know far more about these people and more exactly what their target is. The fact that Sanderson has been taken back by them, whoever they are, makes it essential we retrace a few steps, recheck what we have until now merely assumed to be correct. I have also recommended nothing is done about Major Robert Menzies until we have established exactly what his purpose is. We leave him at Cannon Row, alert no one there for the time being, until we are more certain of his position and what, if anything, they intend him to do.’

  There was no response.

  ‘Prime Minister’ - Tom leant forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, hands clasped, ignoring Kellick’s strictures to make no initiative of his own - ‘we have established the identity of four top people involved. I’m certain we can shortly confirm another two. I’m also certain we are being led by the nose by CORDON, as part of their plan. I’ve no idea why. I just know we could never have got on to them so quickly if they hadn’t helped us.’

  There’s no doubt they know you’re on to them?’

  ‘No doubt. Prime Minister.’

  ‘So they must know that you’re also suspicious about it, too?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Is that part of their plan, too . . . that you should realise you are being led?’