(2005) Rat Run (56 page)

The voice droned.

He remembered Iyad, the true friend, who had given up his life that time could be bought, a proven fighter who never bragged. On their journey there had been long hours between them of valued silence.

'You must be thinking, Dean - natural you would -

can Ricky Capel keep his mouth shut? You have no worries. Back home, we got police and they don't get a sniff on me. Up where I am, and I reckon I'm big enough, we have the spies that are supposed to go after high-value targets - they got bugs and tracker sensors and cameras so bloody small you can't see them. What they haven't got is me. Why? Because I'm sharper than them. They've never had me . . . Never been charged. All of that lot queuing up, after me because I'm a high-value target, and they haven't ever been able to lay a charge against me. I was in once, three years back, and was held for forty-eight hours, and a good half of that was in the interview room. I never said nothing. Four sessions, maybe six hours each. I took an eyeline on the floor and one on the ceiling, one on the table, one on the door. I said nothing, never spoke, but had a different eyeline each time. You should have seen them, Dean, and they were going fucking spare, believe it . . . You can rely on it, I don't talk, and I don't reckon you would - it's why we're friends, can depend on each other.'

In his mind, irritated by the voice, he recalled codenames given him and addresses too sensitive to be written down, and the words of the Book that he would use and the responses that would be made.

'You want to know anything, Dean, about sensors and bugs, cameras and audio, or phones - me, I never use them - then I'm your man to ask. I got a guy, clever little sod, and I pay him well, and he's ahead of their game - better than the spies. I know everything they put against me and how to block it. Didn't have an education but I'm not stupid - you've seen that. I aim to stay safe and anyone who's my friend will stay safe. It's why we've got the boat coming. An old trawler flogging around the fishing banks and putting in to port often enough for it to be familiar, clever that.

You're all right with me.'

He thought of the places he had been - while the voice nagged at him - and of the young men and the young woman, all martyrs, whom he had sent out on the road to Paradise, and their cheerfulness to him and their gratitude that they were chosen, and he had been long gone from Taba, Cairo and Riyadh when their pictures were put in newspapers with the images of what they had done.

'What I like about you, Dean, is that you show respect for me. And I'm telling you, it's two-way. I don't mean respect because I'm a big man. Most who give me respect back home, it's because they're frightened of me. Men I do business with, most of them, they give me respect because of fear. I'm not afraid of you, you're not afraid of me, but there's respect because we're equals and friends. Right now, when I get back there's a matter of respect - it's disrespect - to be sorted. That old bastard, Rahman, he didn't give me it, and he has a nephew, a flash little prick, and he's ready for a lesson in respect. Off the boat and I'll be working on i t . . . I got my cousins, I got people who watch my back, and will watch it when I sort out disrespect...'

He suggested, softly and soothing, that it might be the right time to make the radio link with the boat, and reached out, took a cold hand and squeezed it in reassurance - because he was the equal of Ricky Capel, his friend - and felt no guilt at the deceit.

'If you didn't know it, the weather out here is foul,'

Harry shouted at the microphone. The trawler shook, then cascaded into the trough. Walls of water climbed higher than the wheel-house windows, then hit a solid, ungiving mass, and the
Anneliese Royal
seemed to stop. 'About as foul as I've known it.'

For a moment she was dead in the sea and lurched to port. He clung, white-knuckled hands, to the wheel, and for endless seconds she seemed to go over, then the stabilizers dragged her upright. But at the limit of the trough a wave made a cliff face and she collided with it. He heard the boy, his grandson, cry out behind him in stark fear. Now Harry saw nothing beyond the windows as sheets of spray covered them, and rivers of the damn stuff would be sluicing on to the decks, weighing her down, and he could hear the roar of the weather and the engine's howl, and the distorted voice of Ricky Capel, and the questions coming more frantic . . . When was he going to be there? What time? Why so long? A rogue wave could come as one in ten or one in a hundred. A rogue wave could not be ridden by a trawler.

They went on through it and the wheel-house

seemed to go dark, seemed as though night came, of blackened blue and green. Then they burst clear. Light where there had been darkness and the
Anneliese
Royal
steadied and Harry knew he would not be pitched over on to the wheel-house plank floor. He loosened his hold on the wheel, and the sweat spilled down the nape of his neck and on his throat. He looked behind him, and the boy hung in misery from the rail round the wheel-house's sides, and the door to the deck had come unfastened in the impact and hammered backwards and forwards. The sea came in and cleaned some of the boy's sickness. Harry tried to smile, to find confidence for the boy, took a hand off the wheel and gestured that his grandson should get the door closed. Maybe it would be the last time he went out of harbour for Ricky Capel, maybe . . .

He depressed the switch.

'Don't know where you are, Ricky. Where I am it's force ten and gusting up to force eleven and sometimes it's cyclonic . . . Right, when are we getting there? I'm reckoning to be in the approach channel for German Bight and turning into Jade Approach at approximately twenty hundred hours local, and that'll put me off shore around twenty-two thirty - if the old girl's still holding together. It'll be a dinghy pickup, which'll be no picnic. I don't want any more radio traffic before twenty-one hundred, don't want the world to know, and I'll want a light signal from twenty-two thirty for the dinghy . . . Oh, Ricky, I'll have the guest suite ready . . . and, Ricky, I won't be hanging about, so you'll need to paddle out quick for the pickup - like I said, no picnic. Over. Out.'

'Give it to the Germans? Good God, no . . . absolutely not.'

The meeting was chaired by the assistant deputy director, Gilbert.

'Let the Germans in on the act - I can promise you

- and it will be pain and tears.'

He presided at the end of the table in a room set aside for conferences on the ground floor.

'If the bloody Germans are involved, their lawyers will demand access to every slip of paper, intelligence material, that we have. No way, not to be considered.'

Sandwiches, coffee, nibbles and jugs of fruit juice were at the side, and plates, cups and glasses had been brought to the table.

'We all know the German style. It's endless court cases, appeals that'll go into the next century, and weak-kneed determination to see it through. Forget them.'

Behind the assistant deputy director, sitting on six straight-backed chairs, was a line of stenographers.

Each was there to write up the contribution of their own man, and later it would be polished in that man's interests.

'Scrub the Germans out of it, and let us do our own thing.'

Present, four on one side of the table and facing Freddie Gaunt, were Dennis from the Security Service; Trevor of Special Branch in the Metropolitan Police; Jimmy, who was senior in the Norfolk Constabulary and would also watch over the Suffolk brief, and Bill, who did liaison between Special Forces at Hereford and Poole with Vauxhall Bridge Cross. All of them, on arrival, had chimed complaints about the short notice given them, and all had let it be known with force that they expected the inconvenience to be softened by a matter of genuine importance.

The meeting had started tetchily. The assistant deputy director had sketched through a picture of a co-ordinator, who was believed to be travelling to the United Kingdom, only
believed,
and was now probably, only
probably,
on the German island of Baltrum on the Frisian coast. The ADD had then asked: Should the German agencies be informed?

Should their help be sought?

'I think I have the general drift of opinion/ Gilbert said. 'I think you have all made clear a lack of enthusiasm for that course. Any final thoughts before we close on it?'

Dennis, of the Security Service and irritable because he had walked over the bridge from Thames House, been caught in a shower and had sodden trouser ankles, said, 'They'd flood the target area with goons, pick up this man who is
probably
there and
believed
to be significant and any chance of control is lost to us.

Look at the last two cases to go through their courts, in Hamburg and Mainz - enough said.'

'Yes, yes . . . I'd like Freddie, now, to tell us what he knows. The ball's in your court, Freddie.'

It would be, of course, a turf war. Each of them, opposite him, would fight a corner for primacy. He started with the story of a war being fought in distant mountains in a distant time. He saw a pencil twisting, a demonstration of impatience, in Dennis's hands.

'Please, could we have something of today, not of times before I was born?'

He spoke of Ricky Capel, drugs importer from south-east London, and of alliances that facilitated the movement of class-A narcotics into Britain, and saw boredom on the face of Trevor, the fidgeting at his cufflinks.

'I hardly think, Freddie, that we have been dragged round here for a lecture on how cocaine and heroin end up on our streets. We're supposed to be flushing out al-Qaeda operatives, not mincing round the drugs problems.'

He talked of a trawler that was, in foul weather,
somewhere
out in the North Sea, and said that he thought it would be used for a rat run across the water and back to British shores, and saw the first light of interest settle in the eyes of the Norfolk policeman, as if everything said before had been dross.

'Well, there's your answer. Seems simple enough to me, Freddie. I've excellently trained firearms officers ready to be deployed, and so have Suffolk. We're not yokels out there. We have experience, we've done the exercises. We follow the trawler, radar and all that, back over the North Sea, and we have my people -

and Suffolk's - on standby along the coast. Soon as they're ashore we've got them. Open-and-shut business. Not that we need it, but do you have any more for us?'

He said that the trawler did not have a regular home port, and he could not promise where it would come into harbour, and the Special Forces liaison, Bill, seemed alerted to the opportunity. All of the others round the table wore suits, but this man had obviously reckoned his different status should be recognized by his faded cord trousers and heavy cable-knit sweater.

'With the greatest respect to our country cousins, I don't think this is up the street of Norfolk and Suffolk.

This is a job for us. I'm putting my weight behind a joint team, Hereford and Poole - which keeps both of them happy - and taken to sea tonight in a coastguard cutter, or anything that's got the legs on a trawler, and an interception in international waters. It's the sort of operation that should be left to professionals, and that's us. We're discreet and dynamic . . . It's for Special Forces, my people. I really don't think there's room for debate.'

He described the island. He talked of Polly Wilkins, out on the dunes, who would give a warning when the trawler came inshore. With some pride, Gaunt spoke of the achievement of this young woman, on her first overseas posting, and of the doors she had prised open since a fire and a death in Prague. He saw overplayed incredulity snap at Dennis's face.

'Am I hearing you right, Freddie? Are you telling us that you have, on the ground, in a situation of this importance, a rookie? A slip of a girl just off your induction course? Is that it? I'll say it to your face, Freddie, if this all goes sour, and it's down to your young woman's failure, I would not imagine - as far as government service goes - your feet'Il touch the ground. You'll be out on your arse, Freddie, and damn well rightly so. It is, and I'm sorry to say it, a cavalier road you're following. Not that it's for me to criticize the actions, procedures and operational decisions of a sister organization but I reckon it hard to credit that we're going to be dependent on the skills of one young woman, a rookie, a raw recruit.'

He ploughed on, led with his chin. He had learned well, at the break-up of his old unit, that when dogs circled him he could expect no help from his own, no protection from the assistant deputy director. He anticipated the sneers and inevitable derision. But, without enthusiasm, he described Polly Wilkins's companion on the island, and his past, the information he had provided. When he drew breath a babble broke round him - after the quiet and the shock.

'Are you levelling with us? You've dragged in a bloody vagrant for back-up?'

'Am I getting this correctly? A man who is disgraced with the stain of cowardice in the field has been taken on to your pay-roll?'

'Are you short of bodies, or just a sense of priorities? What's going on here, Freddie?'

He shuffled together his papers. Everything except the photograph of Anwar Maghroub went back into his briefcase. The case was his pride and gave him the small sense of belonging to the Service, little enough of it. It had been bought for him by his wife on his first birthday after their marriage. A technician down in the basement of a former building had, for cash in hand, put the gold stamp of
EIIR
on the case's flap

- worn and faded now, the edges were curled from use. He felt old, tired and useless, and each barb of their contempt had hurt a little more than the last...

but the worse hurt was that he had not defended with resolve the efforts of Polly Wilkins and the man with her on the far-away dunes. He said, with a trifle of dignity, that he did not think he could be of further help.

'Well, that's it, then. Most grateful to you, Freddie,'

the assistant deputy director intoned. 'I'm sure that the comments of colleagues were in no way meant as personal, not as reflections on your very satisfactory summary of where we are . . . That's the past. Our concern now is where we should be in the future, the next few hours.'