The Partridge Kite (22 page)

The voice she listened to was calm now but she was suddenly shocked by it. A voice she had known and listened to for twenty years, since it had first whispered endearments that evening in the broom cupboard opposite the cellar stairs.

Now she stood in an icy, stinking public callbox and heard a voice she no longer recognised. And as she listened she slowly, very slowly, began to understand. And slowly, just as slowly, realised that in the space of just over sixty minutes she had lost everything.

The voice explained it all. Explained how she had panicked, how two men had deliberately and cleverly made her panic, how so much had now been put at risk, how she, one of the Organisation’s most efficient and dedicated members, had jeopardised a vital element in the plan, may have put Headquarters itself at risk.

Of course! She saw it now, clinically explained by the toneless, loveless voice.

Of course they knew it was she. Having spotted the container last night, Christ knows how, a black container in a black sea in the middle of a black night, it was only a matter of time before they found the frequency. A simple DF would give them the coordinates. Of course they knew the transmitter was in Trewythian House and as long as the tug replied to the check calls every half hour its course could be plotted accurately.

But why should they come to her, whatever their disguise? Why did they show their hand? What they know finishes Lady Joanna but as long as the tug keeps radio silence from now on, the sinking operation will be completed before the fog clears and they’ll never know where the container went down.

Except, the voice explained, that Lady Joanna had broken the system. Except that she telephoned a forbidden number, just as they’d hoped she would. That’s why they showed themselves, to make her run. They want CORDON and the container but they want CORDON first and most urgently. They want to get closer to CORDON, and Lady Joanna in her panic had now shown them the way. It wouldn’t have mattered if her call hadn’t been answered - it didn’t matter that they were talking now. Once Lady Joanna had dialled the number, they had it. Most certainly they had it now.

The anger had gone from the voice. Now there was only despair. Lady Joanna felt suddenly detached. The telephone, the kiosk, were no longer real. Every noise, even the slightest patter of the snow on the kiosk windows, echoed. It was like marijuana again. The two white eyes of the Volvo’s headlamps lit up the torn Post Office memoranda stuck to the tiny lattice window on the door. Her eyes drifted across the obscene graffiti scrawled on the walls wherever the pervert’s pen had found space.

The voice began to speak again but stopped at the first syllable. Lady Joanna’s lover and friend had nothing more to say. So after twenty years the woman at the other end simply said, ‘Goodbye.’

Such a short word to end such a long association. It had been unique, as all love affairs are, providing so much, satisfying so many demands, turning fantasy into sometimes shocking sensual practice, giving comfort, always relief, on tap for one or both at all times.

‘Goodbye,’ Lady Joanna answered her back, but already she had gone. Only the telephone signal purred in her ear, evidence that for the first time in her life she was alone. She had imagined many endings but never this. Romantic goodbyes, crazily hysterical perhaps, impassioned or intellectually detached. But always banal and quite impossible.

She dropped the receiver. It swung like a dead grey fish from its black plastic line. She walked slowly through the falling snow to the Volvo, her face white, her eyes empty.

She drove off towards the sea, not purposely but because the car just happened to be facing that way. The snow now covered the windscreen and was rapidly turning to ice. Her fingers fumbled for the windscreen wiper switch but it was too late. The blades skated across the ice on the glass. She stared ahead and instinctively followed the headlamp beams which lit up the tall hedgerow on either side of the narrow track.

She could still smell stale tobacco, still feel the cold wetness of the telephone, still hear that simple Goodbye. It was a word she had never, in her lovely lucky life, really heard properly before, because other goodbyes had never ever mattered before.

The wipers now screeched across the windscreen but she didn’t hear as the Volvo barged through the short wooden staves bordering the car park and plunged over the cliffs on to the rocks and sea two hundred feet below in Caleon Cove.

The twelve-year-old son of an unemployed labourer returning to the council houses after a night on the fruit machines saw the telephone hanging in the kiosk as he went in to make his routine nightly check for stray coins. With two hands he pulled the instrument by its cord from the wall and threw it with all his strength along the road.

‘Fuck the bloody bastards…’ he shouted at the top of his voice. ‘Fuck them all.’

But he didn’t really know why.

Lady Joanna was right in one thing at least. The sinking went ahead exactly as planned, long before the fog lifted.

Guided by charts, echo sounder and a helmsman who had been fishing in these waters for over forty years, the tug moved slowly through the fog, around the Peninsula, hugging the coast as protection against radar from any unfriendly ships, and moved north towards Falmouth Bay. Barely moving, the container in tow just below the surface now, it edged past the Manacles to Polnare Cove, and then, feeling the rolling swell of the open sea change to the sharp lapping of protected waters, it turned west. The only sound, other than the slap of water against the hull, was a dull muffled foghorn somewhere.

At twenty minutes to eight in the icy black night, the tug and its cargo moved into Helford River.

The faces in the wheelhouse began scanning the fog, watching for a triangle of red lights that would signal the end of the long and seemingly uneventful journey.

They had just passed the ferry crossing between the Passage and Helford when they saw it, twenty yards ahead and slightly to the right. The powerful arc light on the tug’s masthead flashed once in recognition. Only once. It lit up a long broad fibreglass dory. Its outboard gurgled and the red lights moved off, the tug now almost at its side. They rounded a sharp jut of land covered in oaks and then passed through a sudden dense curtain of fog that hid Porth Navas Creek, a broad gully of water that led off the river on the far right bank.

The same divers who had released the steel cube from its moorings at Great Crebawethan Rocks the night before slipped quietly into the smooth black water of the creek and secured a new set of steel chains to it.

Slowly and silently, despite its size and extreme buoyancy, it was pulled down by the chains, a system of underwater pulleys and the diesel winch on the shore to the bottom of the creek to rest with the conger eels and Coca-Cola cans.

The tug’s crew and the team of divers transferred from tug to dory and moved with the high tide further up the creek to Porth Navas and the cars waiting to take them out of Cornwall and to safety.

Only the helmsman stayed aboard. As carefully as he had come into Helford River he took the tug out again, and at a few minutes before nine o’clock, four hours after Lady Joanna had panicked and three hours after she died, the helmsman scuttled his boat, placing a four-minute detonator to ten pounds of explosive in the engine room, within a mile of August Rocks.

He was already forty yards away rowing the pram dinghy tender towards Parsons Beach, just south of Mawnan, when he heard the muffled explosion. He stopped rowing, feeling the drift of the tide towards the shore, and watched the tug immediately keel forward. He counted to himself approximate seconds and had reached fifteen when he saw the flash of the brass propellers and the gush of water racing to the centre where the tug had been.

He sat there listening to the moaning foghorn, shivering in the cold, looking for flotsam to break the surface. But none did. Everything had been properly locked in the cupboards, everything that might float properly secured. The job was at last completed and they had profited from the discipline imposed.

He pulled back the sleeve of his oilskin to show his wrist- watch. Three minutes ahead of schedule. His masters appreciated that kind of timing. He smiled and began pulling towards the shore. Within half an hour he too would be on his way out of Cornwall.

During the next forty-eight hours a succession of tanker- lorries, painted white and advertising the name of a famous West Country dairy, would park in the narrow lane that led to the Creek, sideways to the lower remote end of the golf course. In turn they would connect to a four-inch-diameter hose that came out of the water.

Occasionally a motorist, maybe a fisherman, would scratch the paintwork of his car, squeezing between the tanker-lorries and the hawthorn hedge, but there was no other commotion. It was after all quite normal and within the law for the dairy to pump its waste products, its fats, infected, substandard or sour milk into the sea on the ebb tide.

Conservationists protested, of course, but sour milk was after all the least offensive of all the things the Cornish Sewage Authorities gave to the sea for disposal.

But these were not normal tanker-lorries. They did not, for a start, belong to a dairy. And they were not pumping from tank to sea but from sea to tank.

The drivers did not know what it was that was filling their tankers. But they realised it must be deadly poisonous or infectious. There was no other way to explain the protective methods employed. The sealed rubber suits, the rubber boots, gloves, face masks and breathing pads. And the rigid discipline.

Even had they seen it they would have been none the wiser. It looked unremarkable. A dull whiteish powder, like dirty talc, though much finer so that it flowed like milk under pressure. Its name would have meant nothing to them either. Beryllium Metal Powder would be known only to research chemists and those with a specialist knowledge of contaminating poisons.

Beryllium Metal Powder is ground so fine and is so light it can fall on a man’s skin and he would never know it, never see it. He would not know why suddenly his skin became covered in sores that festered and did not respond to treatment. He would not know why the smallest bruise, the slightest scratch, suddenly ulcered and grew into an expanding unhealing wound. Doctors would be unable to explain why a man should suddenly go blind with corneal bums.

The tiniest particle breathed into the lungs was fatal. Only when they were damaged beyond repair would doctors then diagnose pneumatitis and tell their patient he was slowly dying and there was nothing anyone could do to help him. They would tell him his lungs were being eaten away just as certainly as by cancer.

This is what had been stored underwater by the rocks at Great Crebawethan and towed from the Scillies to this creek in the Helford River. This was soon to be positioned in tankers at twenty-two separate locations in certain suburbs of London and the Midlands.

The drivers’ instructions had been explicit enough and their weeks of intensive training had left nothing to chance. Every one of them knew exactly the separate route each would take out of Cornwall. Everyone had been given his destination and his estimated time of arrival. He knew too, because he had done the journey in practice with empty tankers many times in all weathers and traffic conditions, that he would arrive within minutes of that ETA.

And every driver knew the emergency procedure by heart having practised it a dozen times a day in the weeks of training, so that it was now a reflex.

In each driver’s cab there was a communication paging system. He might receive messages but could not transmit back: a simple precaution to prevent the tankers being traced by any pick-up on a return radio transmission. And each cab’s page-com was on a separate wavelength so that drivers could not listen in on another’s call.

The page-com explained one aerial on the roof of the cab. It did not explain the other - a second smaller stubbier one with a condenser midway up the stem. It was the only visible part of the tanker’s fail-safe self-destruct system.

The tankers had been specially designed with two stain- less-steel skins, one inside the other . . . built like a huge vacuum flask. The inner shell held the Beryllium Metal Powder and in the space in between that and the outer shell was 400 gallons of sulphuric acid.

If for any reason the coup aborted, the computers at CORDON’S HQ would send out an ultra high frequency radio signal via relay stations along the Pennine Chain. On receipt of that signal, the self-destruct mechanism would shatter the inner shell of the tank and the powder would be drenched by the acid, making a compound known as Beryllium Sulphate. Still poisonous but no longer a powder that would scatter in the air. It would resemble mercury and was easily manageable.

Simultaneously, a six-ounce explosive charge hidden in the back of the driver’s seat would be detonated by electronic impulse, sending thousands of shrapnel fragments through the driver’s spine, heart and lungs.

In CORDON’S Headquarters it was known as system 150. It had been experimented with eight times until it was perfect, using eight tankers, eight grenades and eight unknowing volunteers. There had been no failures.

Now, by Porth Navas Creek, the drivers sat in their cabs, waiting their turn, watching the hose snake up from the mud, across the beach to the first tanker, shivering along its length like some dreadful reptile, with the pulse of the pump. None of the drivers spoke but every one of them marvelled at the planning and its precision.

The disappearance of the tug and its container angered Military Intelligence.

And when the Prime Minister, sitting with his Foreign Secretary at a Council of Ministers’ meeting in Rome, was informed of it by code, together with MI’s idea of what they thought was being transported, he thought his heart had missed a beat. Only the Italian Communist Premier, sitting directly opposite, noticed how white the old Englishman had become. Too much whisky, he thought. Too little pasta.

He also noticed for the first time the Englishman’s habit of nervously digging the retractable head of his ballpoint pen into the blotter pad on the table in front of him. Click-in, click-out. It irritated the Italian, who had long despaired of the English anyway, so he quickly opened the folder containing the agenda and concentrated on item one: the Community’s importation of soya from China as the only available protein substitute for fish now that collective greed and overfishing had sent the mackerel to join the herring, into extinction.