Hostage (2 page)

Well, here is the successor to the dinosaurs – a running ape which can question its motives and use paw and pencil to resolve them. I will assume for the moment that all I wish to record for future reference is the marked element of risk in this operation which seems unwise and out of character.

The daylight voyage of June 1st was safe enough assuming there were no witnesses to the hijacking, but the day of June 2nd must have been anxious if the real arms dealers turned up on the beach shortly after
Chaharazad
had sailed and found an inexplicable empty truck. I suppose we counted on delay in discovering what had actually happened and the time it takes to search the emptiness of the sea.

According to the papers the cruiser has vanished, though she was bound to call somewhere to refuel. Obviously the hijackers sank her the same night after landing their prisoners, themselves going secretly ashore in the dinghy and sinking that too – not difficult if they opened the bilge cock, lashed the tiller and gave her a push with the engine running.

From the police point of view the coaster is the weakest link in the chain. It’s not all that hard to find a captain with a carefully selected crew who will take on clandestine cargo so long as he is convinced that foolproof arrangements have been made for smuggling it into its destination; but the convincing is easier than the organisation on shore. I hope we expected all this excitement and are one imaginative jump ahead of port security officers. Fortunately the blindfolded Lebanese can give no information about the size of the ship.

The destination cannot be Italy or farther along the coast of North Africa, for the
Chaharazad
could reach either as easily as Paxos. Then Spain, France or Germany? In all three countries the national committees would have undertaken the job themselves, claiming to be more experienced. So England seems the most likely. All merchant shipping sailing from the eastern Mediterranean at the right time will be under suspicion, with the closest watch on the coast of Northern Ireland. In fact Magma has only a very limited interest in those religious fanatics.

Clotilde visits me tomorrow, but there is little hope of getting any hint from her. She sometimes carries security too far, not realising that it is unwise for a Group Commander to arouse too much curiosity in the cell leaders. I think that as a woman she feels she should show herself a more severe disciplinarian than any man. But God knows I’ve no complaint of her efficiency! When she sent me to Paxos her orders were detailed and precise. I knew exactly what I was to do and nothing of why I was doing it. A fault on the right side. I couldn’t even have invented a reasonable story under torture.

Her procedures are never unnecessarily complicated. Because she visits me openly, the cell believes she is my girl friend and I am sure none of them suspect that she is in fact the Group Commander. In their eyes she is a natural and romantic mate for their leader – a tall, handsome creature who would manage to look desirable even in uniform. Actually I find her too overpowering. I would not have been tempted even before my prison sentence. Since then I have been celibate as a priest, merciless to myself, compassionate towards all believers.

Clotilde instructed me to call a meeting of my cell and explain to them a change of policy. There would be no more attempts to release prisoners by the taking of hostages or other threats.

It has always seemed to me that there is a logical flaw in the taking of hostages. Kill your hostage and that’s the end of you by gunfire or life imprisonment. Don’t kill your hostage, and what the hell is the good of him?

There is also the difficulty of finding any sure home for a rescued partisan. We have been too successful. The communists now are as frightened of us as the rest, all vaguely suspecting a unity behind the diversity of terrorists. Undoubtedly we are about to reach deadlock when no state will accept prisoners released by blackmail and no aircraft carrying such passengers will be allowed to land.

Given a threat sufficiently impressive, it might be possible to insist that the prisoner should live freely wherever he or she wished without leaving the country. I asked Clotilde if she thought that point worth discussion.

‘Live as a pariah? Avoided by the public and watched by the police?’

‘We could do what was done for me – change of appearance and identity.’

‘It was new and difficult. You were a specially important case. The ideal solution is to become so powerful that we never have to release prisoners because none is arrested.’

‘We are bound to lose some.’

She made no comment, would not be drawn and refused to argue. I avoided any awkwardness by asking whether the shipment had arrived safely.

She looked through me, still on her guard, as if my question had not been a mere change of subject but had some connection with this business of avoiding arrest.

‘Not yet,’ she replied. ‘Your cell should be ready for orders at any time.’

The fundamental rule is to limit the knowledge of any operation to a single cell whenever possible; so I expected we might be engaged in the landing of the crate and was glad to hear that we should be. I admit that action is a drug. All the same I enjoy it. I must have been wholly misplaced as a lecturer in sociology, always a little bored by my own influence. If ten years ago I had accepted without question the obscenities of capitalist mass democracy instead of loathing them, I might now be a young major in the Army. What a devastating thought!

Clotilde often accuses me of being battle-happy. She herself is detached as any general sending hundreds to death; but the general wouldn’t have much success unless a satisfying number of them were battle-happy. However, her reading of me may be right. It is to be expected after guerrilla courses in Jordan and North Korea – which really taught me no more than basic tactics – and the more valuable short spell in Uruguay to learn how those tactics could be applied to urban conditions.

‘Before Paxos I did not know that we were strong at sea,’ I said.

A competent navigator there must have been. It looks easy enough to hit Paxos by sailing due north from Benghazi, but allowances must be made for wind and currents. An amateur yachtsman, staying safely out from the islands, would very likely miss Paxos altogether.

‘We are strong in Glasgow, Liverpool and Hamburg.’

All of them hotbeds of communism. I asked her if they had much success in infiltrating our cells.

‘Not since two were found drowned,’ she replied.

It is not very difficult to spot a communist. He or she has it all pat but is inclined to pretend enthusiasm for urban guerrilla activity in Russia or Eastern Europe. The time for that will come when their police states show signs of breaking down under their own weight. Only then can Magma launch the New Revolution and see that the mad economy of the west does not take the place of state capitalism.

Clotilde left soon afterwards. I would have liked to ask her what on earth the Libyans thought they were up to with all that unnecessary publicity but I may already have given the impression of wanting to know too much. I hope to God I shall be told enough if my cell is to be responsible for landing or concealing the arms. The ingenuity of the Action Committee and their exact working out of every detail command my fascinated admiration although they do occasionally overlook the human element, cheerfully assuming that a devoted partisan is superhuman. And sometimes he is. Well, it’s my job as a leader, I suppose, to lay out the pieces for the chess masters and see that the legs under the table do not give way.

A successful operation, though I am appalled by the expense of it. I know that we are in funds and I suspect that we, not the Ulster Defence Association, pulled off the Midland Bank job in Dublin; but how the Action Committee work out what is value for money and what is not defeats me.

I was told that the freighter – a rather larger ship than my fleeting impression of her – was bound for Cardiff with currants and wine and that she carried the crate as deck cargo. On the night when she entered the Bristol Channel it would be lifted off her directly and quickly by helicopter and carried to the waiting lorry.

Clotilde ordered me to take one of my partisans and drive an open truck to a lane near Kentisbury on the high grassland of Exmoor, arriving at 11.15 p.m. Two hooded landing lights should be turned on and off as soon as the sound of the helicopter was heard. The load would be slung beneath it and lowered directly on to the transport. We had only to unhook the cable. It was considered most unlikely that there would be any traffic in the lane during the few minutes of operation, but we should be supplied with Devon County Council notices of ROAD CLOSED to be planted at both ends. When the crate was on board we were to drive to Blackmoor Gate where the truck would be taken over by another team. A third member of my cell with a car should be stationed near the cross-roads so that my party could be driven home.

It was a journey of about two hundred miles from London, so I started early in the afternoon in case of delay. It was as well that I did, for the petrol feed gave trouble. Fortunately I had Mick with me who is a competent mechanic. He had been an International Marxist in the north-east, specialising in industrial sabotage. He once told me that he had been bored by the futility of it, that our industrial workers were as mischievous as a band of monkeys. All they wanted was to thumb a collective nose at management. They had never given a thought to the New Revolution – beyond cheering any mention of any revolution – and they supported Labour as enthusiastically as their football team; its job was to win. The idealist in Mick was disillusioned – unreasonably, I think. The picture he drew was that of a healthy, hearty, sly and cynical society waiting to be presented with an ideal worth working for.

We reached Blackmoor Gate at ten and I checked that the car for our return was waiting there, driven by my ever reliable Elise. She had backed off the road and it would have taken us some time to find her if she had not walked out to meet us. Although she and the car were invisible, well hidden behind a bank, she appeared nervous. A typical urban guerrilla. She could place a bomb with absolute coolness and courage, but to be alone on wild, high ground with no other companions than the soft wind from the Atlantic and the rustlings and silences of the grass were a bit much for her. I told her to drive down to Ilfracombe, have some coffee and a sandwich and be back by 11.15.

We, too, had to keep driving, for it was unwise to park in a town or the middle of nowhere and invite questions from any passing police. Our truck was pink with brick dust and marked with the name of Groads’ Construction Company. Mick noticed that the door panel and side boards could be quickly removed and substituted, changing the name and address of the firm without the necessity of repainting. He thought five minutes in a dark street or on a municipal tip would be enough.

At zero hour we were in the lane with lights out. Somebody at the top has an eye for country and, to judge by the perfect choices of this lonely upland and the Paxos cove, always does a personal reconnaissance. Open grass. High banks topped by straggling hawthorn on both sides of the lane. Not a light to be seen but the dim greying of the sky by a lighthouse beam, probably on far away Lundy.

We had a disturbingly long wait and it was after 11.30 when we heard the helicopter coming in from the northwest. At once we put out the ROAD CLOSED signs and began to flash the landing lights. That was the only risk I disapproved, but it was more apparent than real. If anyone did notice the narrow shafts against a dark background, we should be well away by the time he came up to investigate, leaving nothing behind us but a rumour to tantalise the interest of the Customs and the UFO fans.

The helicopter hovered over us, picked out the truck in its own flood lamp and lowered the crate. It was smaller than I expected and had French markings which described the contents as Graphite. We cast off the cable, gathered up signs and landing lights and in three minutes were off to Blackmoor Gate. The racket of the helicopter disappeared in the direction of the Welsh coast. I presume that there was no evidence that the pilot had ever left it. The flight across the water from, say, Swansea was about fifty miles so that he had only to account for an hour of his time which he could well do by faking engine trouble and coming down with no witness but mountain sheep.

At Blackmoor Gate a party of three were off the road with Elise. I knew none of them but two knew me, addressing me by my nom de guerre of Gil. Therefore they would not be partisans from another cell or group but members of the Action Committee. If I am any judge of faces one of them was the unknown planner. He was a tiger of a man with eyes that seemed to reflect light even when there wasn’t any and a pointed beard. His oil-stained overalls could not disguise a loose, prowling body built for endurance rather than athletics. I was sure that he, too, had had paramilitary training and would be happily at home on hilltops or at sea.

He took over command without question and thoroughly checked the truck. He was not in the least rattled when two cars passed and asked if he needed help. Meanwhile I calmed down the third man of their party – a tall, weedy fellow with strands of hair blowing out in the breeze. I thought that perhaps he came from some university as I had before the disaster and my sentence. He kept on telling me how essential it was to get away and babbled about packing as if the crate contained detonators. He evidently assumed that I knew what it did contain, and his indiscretion made it certain that he was not a member of any cell, was not trained in discipline and had never before been engaged in any active operation.

We drove away by different roads – they along the coast to Bridgwater and Bristol, my party to South Molton. I sat in the front with Elise and we allowed ourselves to admire or pretend to admire Clotilde. Elise quite rightly thinks she is the wrong woman for me but would not dream of saying so. A thousand years ago Clotilde would have made the perfect wife for a feudal baron and ridden to battle with him, the long, fair hair flowing from her helmet. I can imagine the pale, dark Elise staying at home and inspiring wistful songs from troubadours. A flame of a girl unselfishly prepared to be blown out – or up.