A Line in the Sand

by Gerald Seymour

  He pushed up from the table and went to the window. The dining-room window was next on her list for net curtains. He stood back from the glass and peered out. He could see the neat homes, the tended gardens, the shop, more homes, and then the village hall with waste ground at the back.

  It had been raining earlier and the road glistened; there was thin sunshine now but the rain was threatening from the sea. At the end of the road, on the corner, was the pub. From the window he could see only the end gable of the building. He counted eighteen houses on the left side, between the house and the pub, and the parked cars, and fifteen on the right side, with the shop... At the shooting range they used was Hogan's Alley, a row of plywood houses, and in front of them were derelict gutted cars. Behind the plywood and in the cars were cardboard shapes that could jump into vision. When to fire, when not to fire, was the reason for Hogan's Alley. They used 'simunition' there, paint-tipped 9mm plastic bullets. The target might have a weapon or be holding a baby against her chest. No escape when walking Hogan's Alley: hold the fire and the instructor would tell you drily, "You're dead, mate, he got you." Fire too soon and you'd be told, "You killed a woman, mate, you're charged with murder." The road, the houses, the parked cars, was Hogan's Alley, all the way to the pub.

  She came into the dining room and brought him a mug of coffee.

  "That's very kind of you, Mrs. Perry, but you didn't have to."

  "I was doing one for myself. You're going to the pub?"

  "That's what Mr. Perry wants, so that's what we're going to do."

  "It's not about a drink, it's about finding his friends."

  "I appreciate that."

  "He has to have his friends."

  "Yes."

  She was close to him. He could smell the scent and warmth of her and could see the worn-down strain at her eyes. It was always worse for the women. She held a handkerchief in her hand, pulling and worrying at it. Had he put his arm around her shoulder then her head would have gone to his chest and he thought she would have wept. It was not his job to offer comfort. He thanked her for the coffee and began to make the arrangements to visit the pub at lunch-time.

  They were at the last stages of the discharge of the crude. The weather at the offshore jetty was too fierce to permit his crew to work with paint rollers on the superstructure and hull plates of the tanker. The master's crew were employed on small maintenance jobs in the accommodation block below the bridge and in the engine housing; unnecessary work, but something had to be found for them. The master's greater concern, more than finding work for his crew and occupation for his officers, was the failure of the people in Tehran to provide him with a time for sailing. He still expected to leave the waters of the terminal port that night, but the coded confirmation had not reached him. The man who had gone over the side of his tanker was never far from his thoughts. It was not possible for the master to believe this man was blocked. He demanded of his radio technicians that they maintain a watch through every hour of the day. He waited.

  "Hello can you put me through to Theft Section, thanks... Hello, who's that?... Tracy, it's Gladys yes, Gladys Jones. I've still got flu. Yes, that's what I heard, a lot of it about. I'm not coming in, not passing it all round.. . Yes, bed's the best place. Can you tell them in Personnel? Thanks .. . What? .. . Police? .. . What sort of police?.. . What did they want?... Thanks, Tracy, it'll just be something silly... Thanks... I'll sort it when I've got rid of the flu... No, I'm not in trouble... "Bye..."

  She pocketed the handkerchief through which she had spoken to give the sound of illness to her voice and put down the receiver of the payphone. A woman beat her knuckles impatiently on the glass screen beside her. She felt faint, worse than if she had influenza. Detectives had been in that morning, a Saturday morning when only a half-strength staff worked till lunch-time, had searched through the drawers of her desk and asked where she was. If they knew her name they would know, also, her car. She staggered away from the payphone, barging past the woman. She had been told there were four detectives. She was an intelligent young woman, she could assess the scale of the crisis that faced her.

  But it did not cross the mind of Farida Yasmin that she should run, hide and abandon him. He needed her.

  Martindale kept the Red Lion in the village.

  He was a brewery tenant, and every penny of cash ever saved by him and his wife was now sunk in the pub, along with the bank's overdraft. It had been a mistake. The mistake had been in coming to the village on a warm, crowded August day two summers back, seeing the visitors parading on the beach and queuing for ice-creams at the shop, and believing that he could do profitable trade where his predecessor had failed. He had thought the market was in visitors wanting cheap meals and fruit machines. But last summer it had rained in torrents and the visitors had stayed away. It had been their dream, through all the years they'd owned a corner news agent in Hounslow, to have a busy, pretty pub on the coast. Now the dream was going sour, and the bank manager wrote more often.

  His winter trade was entirely local not gin and tonics, not sherries, not whiskies with ginger, but the brewery's beers and lagers, on which the mark-up was least profitable. He had enough locals to make a darts team, and they came in wearing their work clothes to prop themselves against his bar. If he alienated his few regulars, he would not be able to meet the brewery's dues and keep the bloody bank off his back.

  He quite liked Frank Perry.

  Martindale owed Frank Perry. Frank Perry had helped him sort out, at minimal cost, the central-heating boiler in the cellar. If he'd gone to the trade it would have been maximum expense. The far side of the bar, the previous night, the talk had been of Frank Perry, the school and the policemen with guns.

  He scraped open the bolts on the front door, against which the rain lashed, and waited for his Saturday lunch-time drinkers.

  "I'll look ridiculous."

  Davies said firmly, "In matters of protection, Mr. Perry, please do me the courtesy of accepting my advice."

  "It weighs half a ton."

  "Mr. Perry, I am asking you to wear it."

  "I can't."

  "Mr. Perry, put it on."

  "No."

  Meryl exploded, "For Christ's sake, Frank, put the bloody thing on."

  They were in the kitchen. The boy, Stephen, was in the shed with Paget and Rankin, out in the garden. It would be worse if the kid heard the parents rowing. Davies held the bullet-proof vest.

  "What does it matter what you bloody well look like?" she added.

  "Put it on."

  His principal took off the anorak and scowled, but he'd been chastened by the fury of her outburst. She turned, went out, crashed the door shut after her and they heard her stamping up the stairs. His principal dropped his head and Davies slipped on the vest. It was navy blue, kevlar-plated, and the manufacturers said it was proof against a handgun's bullets, flying glass and metal shrapnel. It covered Perry's chest, stomach and back. Davies pulled the Velcro straps tight and fastened them. She came back in, carrying a grotesquely large sweater. Perry was foul-faced, but she just threw it at him. Davies kept a wry little smile hidden because the sweater fitted comfortably over the vest.

  "And what about you?"

  "What I do, Mr. Perry, is not your concern."

  "I hope you find them," Meryl said.

  "Find what?"

  "What you're looking for I shouldn't expect too much."

  Perry led, followed by Davies.

  He held his radio up to his face and told Paget and Rankin that he was leaving the location in the company of Juliet Seven. Through the front door, the wind and rain whipped at them. They walked briskly. The house was now a gloomy bunker, and he thought it was precious for his principal to get out of it. Davies's eyes raked each of the front gardens to his right and left, and the parked cars. Since he had given the instruction, the unmarked mobile had gone up and down the road seven times between the house and the pub. It was what it took to get a man his Saturday lunch-time drink
. They had started at walking pace, then they jogged. Davies held the hem of his jacket so that his Glock in the waist holster would not be exposed. The rain came on harder, and they ran. Going to the pub was an idiotic, unnecessary risk.

  Before he had left the bed-and-breakfast, a call to the duty officer had told him they were now categorized as threat-level 2: The principal is confirmed on a death list, the enemy intend to kill the principal; the security co-ordinator does not have the method or the time at which the attempt will be made. Davies knew it by heart.

  He had done protection officer on threat-level 2 years back when he had guarded the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, but he had never been with a principal categorized as threat-level 1. As they sprinted across the car-park in front of the pub, he was thinking that it would be worse for her, left behind in the bunker, lights out, curtains drawn.

  They reached the porch. Davies used his sleeve to wipe his face, then smoothed his hair. He heard laughter from inside, and canned music.

  In front of him, the principal stiffened momentarily, as if gathering his nerve, before shoving open the door.

  A man was leaning against the bar, talking. Perry said, almost diffident, "Hello, Vince."

  Another younger man at the bar stopped laughing.

  "All right, then, Gussie?"

  Another man, older, was perched on a stool.

  "Good to see you, Paul."

  Round the corner was a larger bar with more drinkers. Davies wasn't concerned with them. He stared around him at the fruit machines, tables and chairs, reproduction photographs in sepia tint on the walls and bits of ship brass, the smoking fire burning wet logs. The story had stopped, and the laughter; the older man held his glass against his privates and beer was frothed on his lip. The landlord was a skinny, whey-faced weasel with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. Davies thought it a pitiful place. Everything around him was fake. He noticed a chair at the side of the bar, away from the drinkers, where he could face the door and also see round the corner.

  "What's it going to be, Mr. Davies?"

  "Orange juice, thanks."

  He eased down into the chair.

  The west Middlesex whine of the landlord's voice cut the silence.

  "Before you go asking, I'm not serving you. Far as I'm concerned, the sooner you turn round and get back out of here the better."

  "Oh, yes, very funny. Mine's a pint, and an orange juice, thanks." Perry was fishing for coins in his pocket. Davies glanced down the blackboard on which was chalked the menu for the day -sausage and chips and peas, burger and chips and peas, steak and chips and peas... "I'm not having you in here it's within my rights. I'm not serving you."

  "Come on, a pint and an orange juice."

  "You want it spelled out? I am not serving you. I've my custom to think of. That man with you, he's carrying a gun. I'm not having that on my premises, and I'm not having you. Got it? Bugger off."

  Davies stood up from the chair, saw the stunned shock spreading on his principal's face and the cold hostility of the men he'd called Vince, Gussie and Paul, and the landlord's smirk. His principal clenched his fists and the blood flushed his cheeks. Davies kicked back his chair and strode towards the bar. He caught his principal's sweater and propelled him out through the door, left it open, let the rain spatter in. He heard the laughter behind him.

  The rain ran on Perry's face. He seemed dazed and in shock.

  "I thought he was a good man ignorant, a bore, but a good man.. . Jesus, I just don't believe it."

  Davies said, "Let's get the hell out."

  "Can't credit it, the bloody man.. . When I was low, last night, didn't think I could get lower, Blake said I should ask for the Al Haig story."

  "When you're further down, that's when you'll get the Al Haig story."

  They were standing in the middle of the road. Away ahead, wipers flailing, headlights on, was the unmarked car. There was a sign, Public Footpath, to the left. Davies took the principal's arm and headed for it. They walked between the banks of nettles and brambles, stepping over the dog shit, towards the rumble of the sea. They crossed a wooden bridge. The rain was in his hair, in his eyes, wg~ighting his jacket, wrapping the sodden trousers against his legs. He radioed the Wendy house and told them they were going to the beach.

  The marshland began a thousand metres to his right. They scrambled up the loose, tumbling stones of the sea wall, clawing their way to the top into the teeth of the wind and the rainstorm. The tide was out. The pebble- and shell-pocked beach ran down to the sea in front of them. Beyond the tide-line were the white crested waves, then the shroud of the mist. His principal shrugged his arm clear. They walked together. The rain plastered his hair across his forehead, and Davies shivered in the cuffing cold of the wind.

  His principal stopped, faced the sea and the emptiness, sucked the breath into his lungs and shouted, "You bastards, you fucking bastards! I thought you were my friends."

  "What did he do?"

  "Why do you need to know?"

  "I have to know what he did, and the consequences of it, otherwise I cannot evaluate the reality of the threat."

  "Didn't anybody tell you what the end game was?"

  "Nobody's told me, and nobody's told him."

  Geoff Markham drove. It had taken an hour of the journey to clean the detritus from his mind. Only when they were out on the open road did he begin to push.

  "Why ask me?"

  "I believe, because you are here, that you were a part of it."

  "You need to know?"

  "Unless I know, Mr. Littelbaum, I cannot do my job."

  The American sighed.

  "It's not a pleasant story, Mr. Markham. It's about greater and lesser evils."

  One of the room's walls was covered by the big-scale maps.

  The largest showed western Iran's seaboard, the Gulf, the eastern coastline of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. A second map showed a city plan of Bandar Abbas and the road going west-north-west, past the docks, past the Hotel Naghsh-e Jahan, towards Bandar-e Khoemir. Tilted against the opposite wall were two display-boards on which were pinned the photographs of selected personnel from the bogus petrochemical plant. Although it was early on a bright morning the blinds of the room's windows were drawn. Hanging in front of them was the blown-up satellite photograph of the manufacturing plant. They waited. They had received the call from the airport, which told them he had arrived safely off the flight. They smoked, sipped coffee and nibbled at biscuits. In the room were two men and a woman from the Secret Intelligence Service, three Americans representing the Agency and the Bureau and the military, and the two Israelis. They waited for him to be brought to the discreet back door, normally used as an entry and exit point for kitchen staff and vetted cleaners. If it had not been for the most recently received intelligence briefings, none of the men and the one woman in the room would have countenanced the plan that was now set in place. They made desultory conversation. None would willingly have given such a pivotal position in the plan to a low-grade engineering salesman, but it was accepted that the choice was not theirs. He was the access point. Only he could tell them whether the plan could be launched or should be aborted. They waited in the room, just as officers of the Israeli Mossad waited in secrecy in the American huts of an Egyptian airbase with the pilots who would fly them south, just as the officers and crew of a United States Navy fast patrol boat waited off the Emirates port of Shaijah. All of them waited for the arrival of the one individual who could give them the information required to launch or abort. He was led in. He was wan, strained, swaying on his feet with tiredness. His hands trembled as he gulped orange juice.

  They all knew the risk he had taken. They let his nerves steady. He was sat in a chair and he told them, in a stumbling monologue, all that he knew about the restaurant, about the bus, about the invitation list to the celebration meal. When they had finished with him, teased out of him the precious information on which the plan depended, he was taken out by Penny Flowers
to be told of the new life offered him. After he was gone, after the final assessment of his information, the cypher messages were sent and the mission was launched.

  "What do you mean the "greater evils"?"

  "Try the missile programme."

  "Five years ago yes? how far along that line were the Iranians?"

  "We were getting a mess of reports on the warheads but all contradictory, on when they'd be ready with nuclear, chemical and microbiological. We could handle that, live with it."

  "Explain that, Mr. Littelbaum."

  "We thought we had a little time, but not with missiles."

  "They weren't contradictory on the missiles?"

  "Very clear, very precise. Without missiles, warheads don't count. They were up to speed with the missile programme, maybe two years away."

  "You cannot launch a warhead until you've a missile."

  "Go to the top of the class, Mr. Markham. We needed to buy the time, to slow the programme. But the installations are underground, bomb-proof, have air defence, with an army round them."