Kingfisher

by Gerald Seymour

  Tried to blot it out of his mind, the thought of the small jet landing at Templehof, West Berlin.

  The waiting car and the few courtesies that would be exchanged. Bundled into the back seat of one in the convoy that would not be at the front nor the back, but would be sandwiched against any

  intervention - not that there were men and women in that city who could even have begun to organize a rescue attempt. Play it by the book, wouldn't they? Because that was easiest, the simple and tried way, and that said five cars for maximum security. Through undefined channels that existed for communication word would be sent that the prisoner was on his way, and a time of arrival would be given. Half an hour, not more at the speed the cars would travel and the column would be at the checkpoint. Barriers would be raised and two groups would meet in the centre of a barren, floodlit road. Brief handshakes and the package handed over. Won't be your checkpoint, Charlie, too public; one of the remote ones, just in case anyone should witness the exchange, ask why, and have no bugger there able to answer. Wondered whether he'd struggle, the boy Isaac, whether he'd be pleading? Didn't think so, wouldn't be his style. He'd be thinking about you, Charlie, stands to reason. Thinking as he stepped forward and alternated captors, thinking why Charlie hadn't fired, thinking of it as the new hands held him. They'd spin on their heels and there'd be a new fleet of cars and a new airport divided from the first by the gorge of ideology, and the wall and the mines and the wire. Should have known, shouldn't you, Charlie, should have seen through the crap they gave you? Would have done if you weren't so bloody stupid. And if you had known would it have been different? Would the boy have been obliged?

  Can't blot it out, can you, Charlie?

  The air traffic controllers were less susceptible to his feelings than the cleaning ladies had been. Had to shift now, reopening the airport, needed the chair, all the holiday flights queueing up, Faro, Malaga, Naples, Valletta, Crete. And it was outside regulations f o r an unauthorized person to remain in the control tower. Mustn't keep the vacationers waiting any longer, sir, put them to enough inconvenience as it is. Polite enough about it, but they wanted him out, and left him in no doubt as to their priorities. None knew who he was, different shift coming on, and some reckoned after they'd seen him through the door that he'd been drunk.

  Below a police control post was being dismantled. Charlie put his head round the door, stopping the conversation, cocking the heads inquisitively, and asked whether there was any transport going to London.

  ' I've been with the Foreign Office people here,' he said.

  There'd be a car in about fifteen minutes, Special Branch, he could go with them. He should wait in the canteen, and they'd fetch him when they were ready to leave. So he passed the time with a cup of cooling coffee in front of him till the summons came.

  They drove fast and without talk for the first hour along the All, out through Bishop's Stortford, hammering along the deserted road. It was the driver who broke the long silence.

  'Did you see the little bugger?' he asked chattily, un- involved, wanting to start the dialogue.

  'Yes,' said Charlie.

  "Didn't look much, did he? Like we could have had him for breakfast'

  They usually are,' said Charlie. Oncoming headlights lit up the faces of the driver and his companion beside him, relaxed, at ease with themselves.

  ' I saw him in the cells,' the driver said. 'Meek as they come. Reckon I'd have been going spare if I'd been in his shoes, going back home to face the music and all that. Fair old reception he'll have when they get their hands on him.'

  'Yes,' said Charlie.

  'Wouldn't care to be in his pants. Shitting myself I'd be.*

  Too right,' the front passenger chimed.

  I don't know why we didn't bump him off on the plane. Would have been the easiest thing. His mate's bought it, the girl's dead, could have finished the whole bloody thing then and there. Save the old RAF a mess of trouble. Did you see what he went in? Only a bloody executive jet, like old Onassis, the real red carpet treatment. No, they should have shot him on board.'

  'You can't just do that,' the front passenger said. 'It's not as simple as that. We have to show we are prepared to stand up to this business. And the best way to stamp it out is to pack the blighters off home again, let them sort it out there. We don't owe the little rat anything, not a thing. Cost a fortune, this business. Cost the life of the Italian, and he had damn-all to do with what this mob are shouting about. Italian, right? So how does he get his pecker into the state of the Jews in Russia? Doesn't, does he? All he'd done is buy a ticket for a plane flight. You've got to sit on these people. Sit on them hard, that's the way you end it So the Russkies give him a rough time? Well, that's his problem, not the rest of the world's. Should have thought about that first.'

  'You're a hard man,' the driver said, and they both laughed. 'What did you think about sending him back then, squire?"

  ' I don't know,' said Charlie. 'I just don't know.'

  'Keep it tight, you Foreign Office people, don't you?'

  ' I don't mean that. I'm not avoiding you. I just don't know.'

  'Served him right,' said the front passenger. 'If he doesn't like it he should have stayed at home.

  Should have watched his telly.'

  'You're right,' said the driver. "Course you're right. But doesn't make it any nicer. Not sending him back there. Different if he was a Yank or something, but where he's going, then, that's different, that's something else.'

  The car sped on, taking Charlie back to what he knew. His home. His family. His office and his work. Going back to all that was familiar where his attitudes would not be cuffed by a boy half his age. Going back to all that was safe and secure. He wondered what Parker Smith would say.

  Probably be a sherry on the house, and a slapped back and the word that he'd done the section's name a power of good, and didn't we always know you still had your balls in the right place, and be making damn certain you don't get pinched again by 'operational' after all this.

  ' I didn't ask you, squire, but where did you see him - in the cells?' the driver, bored with the quiet, had decided to resurrect the conversation.

  ' I saw him on the plane,' said Charlie.

  "I thought it was the SAS blokes that took him off."

  ' I was on before them,' Charlie spoke woodenly, without pride, claiming no victory.

  'You were the FO guy then?' The front passenger had turned eagerly in his seat, excited, something to tell the lads back in the pub behind the Yard if they made London before closing.

  'Were you the one that pulled the hostage clear, then went on board and wrapped it up?'

  ' I was on board when it ended.'

  'Jesus-that must have been something, quite something, when he blasted and all that, when all the heavy stuff was flying about. He shot the girl himself, didn't he?'

  'Yes,' said Charlie. He looked at his watch, another hour at least. Felt the noose tightening.

  'And the Israeli, he was killed then, was he? When the Jew fired on the girl?'

  Where would he be now? High over the north German plains, or perhaps beginning to hear the descent of the engines, the lowering of the undercarriage, feeling the gusting turbulence as the air brakes were applied. Wonder whether they're talking to him, or whether he's just a parcel of bloody freight.

  'Shut up, Bill,' said the driver, and as an afterthought that ignored Charlie's presence. 'Pack it in. The poor sod's had enough on his plate today without having to go through it all again with us.'

  They talked among themselves for the rest of the journey. Only once did they break into Charlie's private world, when they asked him where he wanted to be dropped. He told them that Waterloo Station would do very well, and that was where they left him. They stayed in the car as he walked across the concourse fumbling in his pocket for a return ticket stub he had bought the previous morning. When he was past the barrier and disappeared through a door of the first carriage of the Woking train, they wen
t on their way.

  'Funny sort of blokes you find in the spooks,' said the front passenger as they headed across Westminster Bridge. 'You've done well. If we can find somewhere to park the motor we should be able to get a fast one down.'

  The report from the Ambassador in London lay on the Israeli Prime Minister's desk. It was a clinical and well- presented document, devoid of emotion and attempting merely to set out the circumstances in which the hi-jacking of Aeroflot Flight 927 had ended. There was a brief description of the death, such as the facts were known, of Lt Col. Arie Benitz and as much information as the diplomat could muster on the British thinking that had led them to fly the one survivor of the terrorist team back to Russia. The Prime Minister was more amused than surprised that his representative had chosen the word 'terrorist'. He could reflect that there had been a time, less than three decades ago, when the word had held a respectability now long since discarded. Back in the days of the Haganah and Palmach, the days of Jewish struggle against the British, then there had been no stigma to the label.

  But what was in a word? Terrorist or freedom fighter or urban guerrilla were only labels to express the international community's displeasure or acclamation for the men who fought the hidden wars, who belonged to the lonely and unrecognized armies, who shunned the safety of the big battalions. But it was a dangerous thought, impossible beyond the privacy of his office. He could not permit himself to express such a view outside the stout, wooden door, because that would mean acknowledgment of the Palestinians who in their puny groups likewise attempted to overthrow the accepted authority.

  His last duty that night was to telephone his Minister of Information. There should be no government reaction, either attributable or non-attributable by any of the Ministry's spokesmen about the events of the day at Stansted. It was to be regarded as an affair between Britain and the Soviet Union, that was to be the line taken, and any other suggestions should be treated with non-committal answers.

  It had been a difficult and trying day for them all, he thought, and his plans that had seemed at best difficult and at worst unfeasible had ended without success. And lost to them was a man they could ill afford to be without. Hard to find again another like the young Benitz. His secretaries were long since gone, and he switched off the lights of his room and of the outer office before walking out to where the bodyguards lounged in the corridor.

  You win a few, you lose many, that was what he had learned since he had moved into the office at the end of the north corridor on the third floor.

  At his morning meeting the Foreign Secretary was told of the night's developments.

  He was briefed on the exchange of Isaac at the least used and least observed checkpoint between West and East Berlin. The cipher teleprinter messages from the Foreign Office men of the transaction being carried out without any unseen difficulties and in strict accordance with the mutually agreed planning. He was informed that the Russian Ambassador had sent a message of congratulation to the British govern- ment, thanking them on behalf of the Supreme Soviet for the firm stand that had been taken in the maintenance of the rule of law. There was nothing in the text to bring him to assume that the prisoner would face any penalty other than death. This did not distress him: he knew the habits of the Soviets sufficiendy to believe that the fate of the boy would be decided and executed swiftly and without recourse to the beating of drums. He had read two of the day's morning papers in his car on the way to Whitehall, and asked his private secretary if there had been hostile reaction to the Foreign Office statement in those that he had not yet seen.

  'Not really, sir. Bit of a quibble in some about the speed of things. But nothing openly antagonistic in the leader pages. They all carried a very good wire picture from the Italian ANSA agency - showed the wife of Franconi, the Italian who was killed, in tears with her children round her. Difficult for Fleet Street to conjure up much of a row when they have a sriap like that to use alongside. Seems to me it all went off rather well.'

  ' I think we sometimes preoccupy ourselves too much with public reaction,' the Foreign Secretary said. 'Every now and then they want a good, firm decision, and that's what we gave them.'

  ' I doubt if the Israelis are that pleased.'

  'Not our concern, young man. We're not elevated to these lofty climes to please the people of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. They've shouted long enough and loudly enough about the need to teach these people a lesson-and quite right too- they've complained at the softness and the lack of resolution in the West to hi-jacking. Well, we've shown them what we can do ...'

  'But it's not as simple as that, is it, sir?'

  'Of course it isn't. Quote me and I'll fire you, too damn right I will. Of course it isn't that simple. The only thing that amazes me is that more people haven't said so.'

  What also surprised him was the degree, now that it was completed, that he had enjoyed handling the crisis. True it had not been a major one, but crises and even the little ones were welcomed when you sat in high office. He would miss the briefings, and the hurrying in the corridors and the ambassadors kicking their heels with impatience outside the door. If the opinion polls were correct in their assessment of the popularity of his party then his tenure of the Foreign Office was limited in the extreme.

  He would remember these last two days. With affection.

  For an hour now the bird had been still, motionless as a statue, perched on the dark oak root that curved out from the river bank over the clear, fast-flowing water.

  Such a small body, With its disproportionate head and the winnowed brown bill that projected with benign aggression from the brilliant mass of the blue and green feathering of the head and back that in turn softened to the reddened brown of the breast. Patient and accepting no limit on the time it must spend before some unwary minnow or stickleback, held in an illusion of safety, might stray beneath the watching eyes.

  When it dived it was with a flashing, sudden movement that was too fast for the sight of the old man to follow, leaving him only with the bareness of the root and the wrinkled circling of the water that would soon be lost in the constant eddying. Gone for a second, perhaps two, till the little lungs must have been fit to explode and then the supreme moment of triumph as it broke the water, seeming to float for a moment before thrashing angrily clear of the frail spray and arching up towards the hole that the old man had found many months earlier. That was the reason he came to this place. Mingled with the colours of the bird was the tiny, flapping silver fish, frantic in its death-throes; and they were gone, predator and victim, lost to sight under the lip of the bank that was its home and where he knew the fledgelings would be waiting. Most days he came to this spot, crawling on his hands and knees into the thicket that hid him from the kingfisher's view; only heavy rain made him shelter in his hut, or the needs of hunger and a hunting expedition far into the forest would keep him away, prevent him joining the pleasure of the bird as she provided for her little ones. He would not see her for some minutes now as she would break up the meal before consigning it to the hungry throats. Perhaps the male would visit

  - that would be good reason for a further wait - a heavier, larger bird, its colours more complete and deeply accented, who would swoop low over the stream as he approached and call once in the shrill shriek that was the sign of his coming. The same sound that he had taught the young man, David, who was deep and serious and passionate in his beliefs of something that Timofey did not understand, and who needed the guns for his fulfilment.

  It was five days now since David had come. Each day Timofey had remembered him and felt a bolt of loneliness when he thought of their farewell.

  His ears were keen to the sound of approaching footsteps and when he first heard the breaking of twigs and the crackling of the parched leaf mould under the policeman's boots he had hoped that it heralded David's return. He waited for the call - silent, hidden, anxious. He had taught the boy well, till his imitation of the kingfisher was perfect But the barking of the dogs, frantic now
with excitement, the scent regained from the hut, aroused him to the danger. Timofey was old, and though his senses were still keen agility of movement was long lost. It took him an age to scramble to his feet, more time to recognize the source and direction of the threat, longer to plot which way he should run. There were voices now, lively with pursuit, and ever closer the yapping of the hounds.

  His hands were still scrabbling at the far bank of the stream when they came to the place where he had been concealed. Two dogs, large, well-fed, disciplined to attack and straining at their leashes. Four men, two of them dog handlers, the others carrying light machine-guns. All wearing the dun uniform of the Kiev militia. Stupidly, because the chance of escape no longer existed, Timofey tried to pull himself up the slippery and crumbling bank, something instinctive to so old a fugitive. Fighting upwards he fell, rose again and then subsided. Destroyed by the boy who had come, nullified when he had won Timofey's friendship, when he had taken the guns. All clear to the old man as the moss and earth filled his untended fingernails and his movements became more sluggish, more tired.

  He did not know of Isaac. He had no way of conjuring in his mind the small hunched figure in a cell corner with the bruises refreshed and alive around his face who had denounced Timofey.

  The information he had bartered would purchase Isaac a few more hours before they took him from his cell for the last time. A few more hours: that was the value of the old man's life.

  Four bullets they fired at him. Three to buckle him in the water, a fourth to be certain the job was completed.

  Deep in her hole in the river bank the kingfisher and her family waited for the screams to pass.

  Half a day she stayed there before hunger overtook her fear and she emerged again into the slanted light of the late afternoon and tripped to her perch to wait and to watch. The water beneath her was stained where the main current had not cleansed it, and though she remained till the dusk the fish did not come again.