The Partridge Kite (17 page)

‘Video recordings of the newsflashes and explanation speeches for television news bulletins have also been recorded. The speech itself, which lasts eleven minutes, will appear on the BBC’s 12.45 p.m. news and at one o’clock on UN’s ‘News at One’. Both channels’ bulletins will be concerned wholly with the news of our actions and there’ll be progress reports from throughout the country. The staffing and fronting of television news bulletins will be done by our members. You will notice on the same Appendix Eight the names of broadcasters, well known I’m told, who if not already members have shown, according to Area Directors, their readiness to comply.

The occupation of the radio and television studios at White City, Lime Grove, Alexandra Palace, Wells Street and Euston and the Regions is scheduled for 0012 hours when only night security staff are on duty. Separate arrangements have been made for BBC Bush House.

‘Newspapers, if I need to remind you, do not publish on Christmas Day. Many, after Christmas Day, will never publish again!

‘So communication for this one day is by radio and television and when you have completed your reading tonight I think I shall have convinced you that the takeover and control of both will be quick and complete.

‘Please oblige me by a thorough reading of the brief in front of you and be ready with any queries or apparent contradictions for computer examination by ten tomorrow morning when we next meet.

‘I will have ready for you by then System 403, which will dispense with any final doubts you might have about the reaction and role of the non-committed among Her Majesty’s Armed Forces and Police on Christmas Day.

‘Good-night, gentlemen!’

They stood as the Chairman moved his chair back. He bowed his head, acknowledging their respect, turned and began his walk away from the table and the fire, the whole length of the room, towards the door at the far end. The door to his own suite of offices and living apartments. They watched, without speaking, without looking at each other.

The Chairman was within a yard of the door when a brilliant blue light began flashing above it. It indicated his telephone was ringing, his own telephone, the only direct outside line in the house.

He glanced at his wristwatch and smiled. The timing was exact: the call from Professor John Hamilton Linklater giving his CORDON Alert from the hall in London Area Three.

Four names now ringed in red, not exactly in the order his machines had forecast, but well within the time limit they had set. The plan he had helped devise and they, his computers, had accepted was working to schedule. Better than he hoped for but exactly as the machines had predicted. They were never wrong. They corrected the instant they faulted. The time lapse between their mistakes and corrections was not within the measurements of the human mind. Their masters never knew their mistakes.

He looked down again at the names on the list between the leather covers. How often, he wondered, during the past eight years had he been close to disaster. Many times his own failings, perhaps merely a hesitation in a moment of major decision, had angered him. It had always been his biggest fear that however disciplined his mind, however ordered his daily planning, a human failing would frustrate the final aim. Every human decision suggested inevitable failure.

His strength was his machines. They had programmed, scanned and shown the way. How could man fail armed with such intelligence? How could he?

How sad, he thought, that a country’s destiny should be decided by fifteen machines.

Whenever he went down to see them in their insulated, anaesthetised temperature-regulated room, the image he had was always the same. The brains of Heidegger, Einstein, Russell, enclosed in formalin, sitting squat on the polished tiled floor taking their life from the three-core power cable that ran to a thirty-amp wall socket, like oxygen or plasma lines in an intensive care unit.

The tickle in his throat began again, the walls of his trachea constricted. He could feel his pulse hitting the sides of his neck. He began coughing very softly and his right hand searched for the little silver casket in his pocket.

He knew the signs. When it began this early it would stay with him all night. There would be no sleep. He felt a wave of despair, anticipating the long hours, listening to the wind, regularly and monotonously looking at the luminous dial of the alarm clock on the bedside table. Reliving some part of his life in the drowsy bouts of semi-sleep between the coughing.

But worst, as his mind began to clear in the early morning, the anticipation of what was soon to begin, the sense of dread, and the regret, even sadness, that it had ever been necessary.

His mind, or rather his senses, heard the noise long before his ears registered and confirmed.

He walked to the window, quickly for an old man in the darkness of that room, and pulled the curtains a foot apart. As he did so, almost as if he’d cued it, an area below the first- floor window lit up. It was now snowing fast outside but the area was clear of snow and the arc lights around it shone brilliantly through the falling white. Men began moving on the perimeter.

The helicopter hovered just this side of the cedars, level with the Chairman’s eyes. Its nose was turned to the right facing the windsock and heaving slightly this way and that, buffeted by the wind, was lowered slowly until it settled with a jolt on to the tarmac square.

Even before the gyro brakes had been applied the doors nearest the house opened. Three men, covered in heavy overcoats and scarves, jumped down and were lost to the Chairman’s view as they ran to the house below him.

He let the curtains fall, turned and looked across to the fire and the symbol of CORDON spotlighted on the wall above. It was ten minutes to midnight. The helicopter pilot had made good time, considering the appalling conditions.

Francis Sanderson had returned sooner than expected, but no matter. After seven days away, the defector was safely
back.

Saturday, 18 December

The convoy split at the roundabout just before the tunnel. One half, with thirty-two Ferret Scouts cars, seventeen Saracens and twelve Saladins, heavily armoured with Brownings and 76 mm guns, moved right, changing to low gear as they climbed the steep incline that took them to the edge of runway 28 Right. The second, containing exactly the same number of vehicles, turned left and began fanning out in the direction of Customs and Police buildings that ran parallel to the A4, the old Great West Road.

Through the darkness and the lightly falling snow a green Aldis could be seen at the side of the airfield, close to the British Airways engineering sheds. Two long flashes, three short, repeated at five-second intervals. The young captain in the leading Ferret radioed back to his commanding officer who was sitting in a communications caravan in the car park of the Lady Bedford public house two miles away.

‘Bravo Alpha, Foxtrot One and Two reporting all clears green vector three-one at 0012 hours.’

Bravo Alpha sat in front of a heater fan and sipped cocoa from a vacuum flask. He gave only a double break in transmission, pressing the Speak button twice in answer. Four hundred and eighty-eight vehicles now surrounded London’s Heathrow Airport, the busiest international airport in the world. Another twenty-five communications and command vehicles were stationed around it at strategic points.

Police patrols in the streets surrounding the airport boundary halted traffic, providing information and lighthearted comfort to the uncertain and the cautious who had waited and watched the dark khaki shapes trundle through the night.

In various local police headquarters senior policemen sat side by side with senior army officers. Men moved magnetised coloured blocks to new positions on the wall-maps behind them.

Operation SKYDIVE was the twenty-first exercise of its kind in two and a half years, the twelfth in as many months. But none had been as large as this. Thousands of men were involved tonight and a great deal of patient explanation and contorted public relations would most certainly be necessary tomorrow. Flights would be delayed or cancelled, tempers and money would be lost. Traffic on the filter roads from the M4 motorway would stay put as troopers went through the motion of searching every car boot and engine compartment for a SAM 7 or its equivalent.

Many of the senior officers on duty tonight had their own doubts that the explanations usually meted out to the Press would work this time. After all, how many times must an airport be alerted to the possibility of a terrorist attack? And what number of terrorists, Arab, Irish or Anarchist, could possibly demand the arrival of four hundred and eighty-eight armoured cars?

In the opinion of many a policeman and soldier on patrol in the ice and snow or sitting in the comfort and warmth of the neon-lit operations rooms, tonight’s ‘do’ was too incredible to be convincing. Someone had pushed their luck just a little too far this time. There couldn’t ever be another one like this.

They were wrong. But only a handful of those employed tonight knew it. There would be another. Just one more. This was a dress rehearsal of part of the big show in seven days’ time - on Christmas Day.

Very similar exercises had been taking place throughout the country during the past year. All major civilian airfields with a runway longer than eighteen hundred yards had seen them. At Birmingham in May and at Glasgow in July various units of the British Armed Services had staged two quite spectacular events. In Birmingham, with a full National and Provincial Press Corps invited, the legendary July ’76 Israeli raid on Entebbe had been repeated. A Royal Air Force Cl30 transport plane had been accidentally destroyed by fire and three soldiers had been killed in a premature explosion. Much was made of the disaster. But what surprised everyone, when the inevitable public debate and post-mortems were over, was how easily and without hassle the British public had accepted it all - including the Service Chiefs’ explanations.

Much the same public nonchalance was witnessed after the military blockade of the docks at Merseyside, Southampton, Hull and Cardiff. All, it was said by Ministry of Defence PRs, essential military exercises at a time when East-West relationships had sunk to their lowest ebb in twenty-five years; at a time when the daring of the international terrorist and the sophistication of the weapons he was using had reached a new high.

It was, as one celebrated defence correspondent wrote in
The Times,
as if ‘Ordinary Mr and Mrs Britain were taking an extraordinary pride in seeing their armed forces flexing their muscles, no matter what the discomfort to themselves. They are delighted at the spectacle of what is, after all, a very efficient military machine, going through its paces, even if it means sitting six hours in a traffic jam or doing without imported sugar for a week because of it.’

The common view was expressed by a London cabbie in a quick television news street interview on the day a Royal Marine Commando unit closed the Thames with a barricade of pontoons from Greenwich Pier to the Isle of Dogs.

‘It’s just nice,’ he said, ‘to watch the only bunch of professionals we’ve got left in this bloody country.’

Far from damaging their image, the Services found they could do no wrong and experienced a phenomenon quite new to them in peacetime - increasing public popularity.

There was, of course, much concern expressed in Parliament and other clubs. There was much written in the Press questioning the need for such spectacles, spelling out the cost in pounds and pence, suspicious of the motives. Some years before. Lord Chalfont in
The Times
of 5 August, after one army exercise at LAP, wrote under the title:

COULD BRITAIN BE HEADING FOR A MILITARY TAKEOVER?

Some of the more imaginative propagandists of the far Left have suggested that the recurring appearance of troops and armoured cars at London Airport are rehearsals for the day when the Chiefs of Staff are installed at Number 10 Downing Street and the machine-guns appear at street comers.

Although this may seem a more than unusual overheated fantasy, it would be wise to recognise that more and more people in this country, many of them men and women of impeccable Liberal instincts, are beginning to contemplate seriously and not without some satisfaction the possibility of a period of Authoritarian rule in Britain.

Many similar stories had appeared in other newspapers since then.

There was another development which raised the question of the political independence of serving members of the British Armed Forces. A number of articles appeared in the respectable dailies, following these exercises. Three lengthy and well-argued pieces were published in
The
Times
, four more in the
Daily
and
Sunday Telegraphs
and two more in the
Spectator.
All were written by senior ranking army and air force officers and signed by them. Another less publicised article, encouraging political involvement by serving members of all ranks, appeared, unsigned this time, in
Monday’s World,
the quarterly magazine of the Right-Wing Monday Club.

Mr John Lee, Labour MP for Birmingham Handsworth, said he planned to question the Attorney General on whether this article constituted an offence under the Incitement to Disaffection in the Armed Forces Act.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman said the identity of the officer who’d written in
Monday’s World
had not been discovered. The spokesman also said he did not know whether disciplinary action would be taken against the other officers who were in breach of well-known army regulations.

There was much talk about the disaffected in high public circles. The opinion leaders looked about them for public disquiet but found surprisingly little. So they became uneasy themselves because of that.

Other men, high and low, began to sense something new, and thought they could see a pattern emerging. Some were encouraged and elated, experiencing a sense of relief that something was at last on the way, something they had been preparing themselves blindly for.