A Line in the Sand

by Gerald Seymour

  Vicky was with a girlfriend at aerobics, and then they would be going on for a pizza. The books, they'd have cost her a small fortune, were on business management, self-expression, leadership and finance he'd have gone down to a library and borrowed, if he'd had time. He tried to remember what she had told him. For the interview he was Geoffrey. not Geoff, his father was in banking, not a high-street deputy manager out on his neck last year with downsizing, his mother organized one of the princess's causes, wasn't a two-days-a-week helper in a charity clothes shop; he was ambitious, he carried ambition round in wheelbarrow loads... But the thoughts strayed back to Frank Perry. There had been enough of them in Ireland, bloody-minded Presbyterian hill farmers, running beef stock over poor land, doing evenings in the part-time military, who were threatened by the Provos' policy of ethnic cleansing. The obstinate old beggars had stayed put and taken a sub-machine-gun out in the tractor cab when they went to muck-spread, wouldn't have considered quitting and running. He'd admired their courage.

  What Vicky had drilled into him... He wanted responsibility. What Geoffrey Markham wanted more than anything was the responsibility of handling the investment of clients' savings.

  Nothing rash, but the careful placing of their money and the safeguarding of their pension schemes. He was not frightened of responsibility. Nor, if the markets slumped, of crisis.

  And Geoff Markham couldn't cling to the interview's strands. Always bloody damn frightening when a player went missing, and Yusuf Khan was missing like he had been bloody frightened in Ireland when a Provo player disappeared and they had no word, had to wait for the Semtex to detonate or the blood to drip on the pavement and they had lost the trail of the girl who was the only associate thrown up by Rainbow Gold.

  Wavering back with his concentration... And he expected to work hard, play hard, had always believed physical fitness went hand in hand with psychological stability weekend hiking, after-work weights and tennis... He was to decline the offer of a drink, old trick, with a friendly refusal, and he was to be polite but not smarm deference... And they shouldn't know it was the only shortlist interview in his locker. He was to wear the new tie she'd bought him, and his best suit but he could take the jacket off if they suggested it, though not loosen the tie. And be sure to thank them for fitting him in during a lunch-hour... The interview was the next afternoon and he couldn't read the pages in front of him, or remember what she'd told him .

  Rainbow Gold was gone cold on them. Without this job there was no home for him and Vicky, no bright ambitious future. An armed protection officer was at Frank Perry's home.. Of course Geoffrey Markham wanted a career in banking.

  It might have helped relieve the frustration of his work if Markham had had a really good friend at Thames House. It had been better in the early days when the probationers had hung around together and made a social life inside their own restricted, secretive clan. He had no friends now. The probationers who had lasted were dispersed in the building and inter-Section friendships were discouraged. The society was a mass of hermetically sealed cells; it was not appropriate for East bloc personnel to fraternize with Irish or narcotics personnel loose talk followed, the old hands said. The former friends were married off anyway, had babies and didn't go to the pub after work but hurried home. He'd taken Vicky to one insider dinner party, which had been a disaster:

  she'd thought the men were under-achieving and the women were little mice. Actually, thinking about it, the Fentons of Thames House were the lucky ones. They had no expectation of changing the world and used the system as a personal fiefdom for fun and entertainment. Set around with rules, regulations and procedures, Geoff Markham believed himself a small, irrelevant cog. He would never matter and never be noticed. He wanted out.

  He jolted awake at the sound of Vicky's key in the apartment door.

  At the end of his twelve-hour shift Bill Davies handed over to DC Leo Blake, checked him through the inventory, took him over the camera controls, the radio channels and the chart with the red lines marking the infrared beams.

  "How is he?"

  "Fine, so far."

  "And her?"

  "She's not spoken, not a bloody word."

  "Come again his call sign?"

  "He's Juliet Seven."

  "Bit light-handed, aren't we?"

  "Maybe, maybe not."

  Davies crawled out of the driver's seat, and wished his colleague a good night, with a wry smile. He saw Blake already pulling up the arm rest in the centre of the back seat.

  In the small hours, and Davies couldn't blame him, Blake would be cuddled up with the cold grip stock of the H&K, what the trade called the Master Blaster. Davies had been promised that the next day he would be given a realistic threat-level assessment, but Blake, who was going to be alone through the night, wasn't waiting for it.

  He drove back towards the bed-and-breakfast and the room where he would use one twin bed for the night and Blake would use the other for the day, and he'd have to square that with Mrs. Fairbrother, lie his way out of it. He'd have a shower, then find a pub in another village for his supper. It made it a proper bastard when there wasn't a decent threat-level assessment.

  The master hugged him, gripped the thick rubber arms of the wet suit, kissed his cheeks and pressed against his life jacket The second officer and the engineer officer flanked him. He had not seen them since he had come aboard fifteen nights before. While he was kissed, the master went again through the timetable of the drop-off and the schedule of the pick-up.

  He broke free, stepped into the Zodiac inflatable and settled on its floor of smoothed planks. The whole craft was only four metres in length and he crawled forward so that the engineer officer had the space at the back beside the outboard engine. The engineer officer reached out to him, squeezed his arm and said that the wind was growing, which was good.

  It was good, too, he had been told, that they were able to make the drop-off from the tanker when it was fully loaded and lower in the water. The master and the second officer turned the wheel of the crane, and the cable was drawn up further on the drum. The four ropes from the inflatable to the cable hook took the strain, then lifted them. The pilot, on the bridge with the navigation officer, would have no view of the stern deck and the crane, and what the crane lifted.

  They swayed up above the rail and then the crane's arm lurched them out into the darkness. They clung to the holding ropes of the inflatable. He had no fear. He was in the hands of his God, ten metres above the water. If the crude holds had been empty, it would have been a 21-metre drop.

  They went down the black-painted cliff of the hull slowly. The tanker was now past the Bassurelle light ship, close to the sand ridge that divided the Channel into the northern and southern traffic-separation schemes, and under the monitoring watch of the radar at Dover Coastguard to the west and Griz Nez Traffic to the east. The tanker, on the pilot's direction, would hold steady course and steady speed at 14 knots and would arouse no suspicion from the men who watched the sweep of the radar screens. They bounced on the water, sank as the sea splashed over their feet, and surged up. As the cable tension slackened, the moment before they were dragged along and then under, the engineer officer unfastened the cable hook from the ropes. They were clear. The cable swung loose over their heads and clattered against the plate steel of the hull. They were tossed in the white foam water of the engine's screws and he did not understand how they were not dragged down into that maelstrom. The tanker ploughed on, a great bellowing shadow in the night.

  He had been told that it was good when the wind increased and the swell was greater, and that British seamen used the word 'poppling' to describe such waves. He knew the English language, had learned it from his mother, but he had not known that word. When the sea pop pled it was impossible for the men watching the radar screens to see the signature of a craft as small as a four-metre inflatable. The outboard engine coughed to life at the second pull. Three kilometres back, they could see the lights of a following shi
p. The bow rose from the water as their speed grew.

  They crossed the sand ridge. Higher waves there, more spray slashing them.

  They approached the westerly funnel of the traffic-separation scheme. There was a line of navigation lights ahead. The engineer officer throttled back, paused and meandered. The inflatable was lifted, fell, and corkscrewed in the waves before he was satisfied. He was like a kid crossing the wide freeway road going south out of Tehran for Shiraz or Hamadan, but waiting for the gap in the traffic, then running. The engine screamed, they bounced forward.

  They went for the darkened space of the beach between the lights of New Romney and Dymchurch, near Dungeness. He could have gone by plane or ferry or on the train through the tunnel, but that would have exposed him to the gaze of immigration officers and security policemen. No papers, no passport photographs, no questions, no stamps. He saw, ahead, the white ribbon of the surf on a shingle shore.

  The engineer officer, perhaps because tension now caught him, or because there were only sparse minutes before they parted, told of how he had been on the tankers when the Iraqi planes had come after them with Exocet missiles, and of the terror on other tankers when the missiles detonated and the fireballs erupted. He said that he hated those who had helped the Iraqi fliers, and he had reached forward, with emotion, grasped the hand offered him, wished his passenger well, and God's protection. In the last minute before they reached the beach, he told the engineer officer of a birthday party at a seashore restaurant and the bus that carried the guests there, a long time ago.

  They hit the shore.

  The bottom of the inflatable squirmed on the pebbled beach. He tore off the life jacket the cold whipping his face. He slid over the ballooned side of the craft, into the water of a gentle, shelving beach. He ran forward, kicking his stride against the sea, struggling until he was clear. He heard the roar of the inflatable's engine. When he was at the top of the beach, and looked back, he saw the disappearing bow wave of the inflatable. He was alone.

  He walked forward blindly, then stopped and stood stock still against a small wind-bent tree-trunk. Seven minutes later, on the hour, as if by synchronization, the brief, twice-repeated flash of a car's headlights pierced the darkness.

  He couldn't sleep. Watched by the red eye of the alarm, he lay on his back.

  Frank Perry knew that he had to live with the past because the consequences of his former life were inescapable. There was no dusty cloth with which to wipe clear the words written on the blackboard. The past could not be erased. He had attempted it. Quite coldly, he had changed his attitudes. The salesman, Gavin Hughes, focused on work, had never noticed the people around him. He was now more temperate and more caring. He had thrown himself into the life of the small village community, had time for people and seemed to value their opinions, as if that hard-won popularity was a substitute for his past. He was, he knew it, a more decent man, and it was natural to him that he should help others with the experience of his engineering background, and cut the churchyard grass and attend meetings of the community's groups.

  But in his mind the words stayed on the blackboard, and a newfound decency was insufficient to expiate the past. A man had been sent on a long journey, had travelled with a knife or a gun or a bomb, to kill him. Those who had sent the man would not know, or care, that Frank Perry was a changed man.

  He heard the boy toss in the adjacent room, and he heard a car door opening, the sound of a man urinating, the door closing again. Meryl was silent beside him, staring at the ceiling. Like sinners, neither of them could sleep.

  Chapter Six.

  e went too fast on to the bridge and, too late, saw the twist in the road beyond it.

  Yusuf Khan had met the man, stood in awe of him. He had come out of the darkness in response to the flash of the headlights, just as the intelligence officer had told him. He had babbled greetings to the man and tried to please him with the warmth of his welcome. Nothing had been given him in return. He had been told sharply, in good but slightly accented English, that he talked too much.

  He was in a myriad web of narrow side-roads and he was lost and did not wish to show it. The first light was already a smear in the east. He went too fast over the bridge unaware of the right-hand bend immediately beyond it.

  First the man had peeled off his wet suit, then stood in his longtrousered underclothes and had clicked his fingers irritably at Yusuf Khan, who watched. He had been caught idle and felt keenly the criticism of the snapped fingers. He had dragged the newly bought clothes from the bag, and the man had cursed softly because the shop labels were still on them. Yusuf Khan had torn them off before handing them back. He had held the torch and passed the man the camouflage trousers, the tunic and the thick socks. The fact that the new boots were not laced provoked another savage glance.

  When he had set out the schedule in his mind, he had not expected that the clothes would be worn now; he'd assumed the man wouldn't be using them from the start. And he had not expected that the man would demand the opening of the tubular bag. With only the torch beam to guide him, the man had been meticulous in his examination of the weapons. He had broken open the mechanism of the launcher and examined each of the working parts~ studied them, cleaned some with the window rag from the car, and reassembled it. Because it was only a small torch beam Yusuf Khan had recognized that the man had worked virtually blind. He had leaned forward, anxious to please, held the torch closer but had abruptly been waved back. The schedule had gone.

  The man, in the fragile light, had then turned his attention to the squat form of the rifle. Yusuf Khan had never seen a man take apart a firearm, and was amazed at the seemingly casual way that the weapon disintegrated into pieces. Each round had been examined before two magazines had been filled, and the pressure of the coil tested. By the time he had started up the car his fingers had been stiff and his legs taut, and he had lurched through the manual gears. The sausage bag with the weapons had been on the floor behind him within the man's reach as if, already, he was prepared for war, to kill. The man had leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

  He was lost, stressed, when he came too fast over the bridge and into the hidden right-hand bend beyond it. As he swerved to hold the centre of the road, the wheels failed to grip, and Yusuf Khan stamped on the brake pedal. At that moment the 5-series BMW was out of control.

  The car slewed on shrieking tyres across the width of the road. He saw the pole that carried telegraph wires. Short of it was the ditch, looming towards him in the headlights' glare.

  Yusuf Khan saw everything, so clearly, so slowly.

  Plunging into the ditch, the bonnet going down the ditch throwing the back of the car upwards the man's arms went up to cover his forehead, but he made no sound the car standing on its nose no fear on the man's face the roof of the car impacting against the telegraph pole.

  There was a wild pain in his leg, a fleeting sensation, as the car came down, crazily angled in the ditch. His skull hit the point where the roof met the windscreen.

  Blackness around him, and peace.

  His partner, Euan, would be in the shop, cleaning the floor and the windows, stocking the shelves, putting out the ice-cream sign, taking a list of the postcards that needed replacing.

  The early morning was a precious time to Dominic Evans.

  He loved his partner deeply, but he also loved the early-morning walk, on his own, out of the village and towards the Southmarsh. Left behind, in Euan's care, was his dog because the sweet little soul would disturb the glory of the early-morning's tranquillity. He was forty-nine, had come to the village and bought the shop fifteen years back with the money from his mother's estate. For twelve of those fifteen years Euan had been his partner. He thought the villagers, with their Neanderthal minds, accepted him and did not jeer at him because he had integrated carefully and made it his ambition to write down the old history of the community. Through learning the history, explaining it, sharing it, he had won acceptance, and he was discreet.
It was a good place to gain the sense of history's inevitability, to recognize the futility of man's efforts to combat the power of nature. In time the sea would claim all of it:

  everything that man had built would crumble off these soft cliffs and be lost to the waves.

  In the half-light, he walked past the narrow, silted stream that had once been a great waterway where skilled artisans built big ships. That summer, he would write a special pamphlet on the ship-building from Viking to Cromwellian times, publish it at his own expense and lecture on it to the Historical Society. But that morning, each morning for a month, history did not intrude on his thoughts.

  It was the miracle month of survival and navigation, the month when the birds completed the migration from the south seaboard of the Mediterranean and the west coast of Africa. Each morning in the dawn before the shop opened and each evening in the dusk after it closed, he went to watch for the arrival of the birds on the Southmarsh. That they came from so far, that they could find their way to this particular area of water channels and reed-banks, was truly incredible to Dominic.

  He settled on the damp ground, at his watching place. Usually he went to the Southmarsh, more rarely to the Northmarsh. There were godwits~ war biers and avocets, but they had not come from Africa, nor the shelducks, nor the geese. It was a few minutes from the time that he should return to the village and open the shop when he saw the bird he was waiting for.

  The tears pricked in his eyes, and the sight made this gentle man cry out in anger.

  The harrier flew low in tortured flight. A pair had come back to the Southmarsh three evenings before and their wing-beat after the journey of thousands of miles was firm, true; they had left the next morning for a destination further north. It was as if this bird flew on one wing.

  For all his anger, for all his gentleness, there was nothing Dominic could do to help the bird.

  It had come home, it was injured. The infection would be in the wound. It would die a starved, agonized death. He lost sight of it as it came down into the reeds.