He managed to get off half a dozen pictures before the doors slammed shut, the boom as they met rumbling across the airfield. Girling shoved the camera back in his suit and retraced his footsteps to the crew room.
As he went downstairs, he could hear Rantz giving someone a hard time on the telephone. When he reached the room at the end of the corridor Rantz had established that there was a flight out that afternoon. He reserved two seats and hung up.
‘That’s fixed,’ he said. ‘We’re on a flight to Northolt. I’ll make sure someone forwards your kit from Marham tomorrow.’
‘Perfect.’
Rantz glanced at the wound on Girling’s hand.
‘What the fuck’s that?’
Girling was sheepish. ‘For a moment, back there, you had me worried.’
He thought Rantz was going to laugh, but he didn’t.
‘You and me both,’ he said.
CHAPTER 3
The lift doors opened and Girling stepped into the newsroom.
‘Ah, Tom.’ Kelso glanced at his watch. ‘Good of you to join us. Still in one piece, I trust.’
Girling threw the briefcase on his desk. He nodded to Kelso, who seemed to have avoided any trace of a sun-tan from his holiday, then sat down and turned on his PC. He looked over his computer screen at the clock and saw Kieran Mallon wince. It was close to eleven thirty.
Kelso wouldn’t want to hear about the rigours of his journey from Machrihanish, how he’d been unable to fall into bed until four that morning. The trip south had been made in an ancient propeller-driven Devon. The rickety plane’s turbulent passage through the night cumulus had sent at least one naval officer scuttling for the heads.
From Northolt, Girling headed straight home. It was a long and expensive taxi journey to his flat.
Kelso wasn’t interested in long journeys and late nights. He cared only about the magazine hitting the news-stands every week with the best damned stories his editorial budget would buy. As he was liable to remind the staff, it didn’t matter how good the story was if the subs didn’t get the words. The week was drawing to a close and there were pages to fill.
‘Meeting in five minutes,’ Kelso said, looking over the top of his glasses. ‘You’re just in time to tell us what pearls you scooped from the mouths of our death-defying RAF friends.’
Kelso swivelled on his heels and strode back to his office.
Girling went over to the coffee pot. He looked at the four-day-old stains at the bottom of his mug, thought about washing it out, then poured the coffee anyway.
Mallon turned his chair. ‘How was World War Three?’
‘Don’t talk to me about it,’ Girling said. He took a sip. ‘Your coffee doesn’t get any better.’
Mallon smiled. He was ten years younger than Girling, more or less straight out of Queen’s University, Belfast, apart from one stint on a local paper. ‘You should try washing the cup now and again.’
Girling managed a smile. His whole body ached from lack of sleep. He had never even heard the alarm clock.
‘So, who won?’ Mallon pressed. ‘Us or them?’
‘The truth is, they’re worried there’s no one left to fight. The Warsaw Pact’s gone, the Iraqis are all in. Who’s left?’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ Mallon said. ‘For as long as there have been people on God’s Earth war’s been top of the hit parade.’ He grinned. ‘And we’re just the boys to write about it.’
‘Hell of a way to earn a living.’
‘Better than working,’ Mallon said. ‘Talking of which, what did you pick up?’
In his mind’s eye Girling saw the Ilyushin trundling into the hangar.
‘Not much. Just some stuff on low flying; a few facts and figures.’
Girling pulled his pad from the briefcase and started flicking through the pages for the notes he had made during Exercise Stalwart Divider. ‘Oh, and something on Concorde.’
‘What’s that got to do with a NATO war game?’
‘It can wait till the news meeting.’ Girling returned to the jottings in his notepad.
‘That’s all well and good, but I want the Beirut story,’ Mallon said.
Girling only half heard. ‘Beirut?’
‘So far, Kelso’s gone for all the safe, old hands. Moynahan, Gilpatrick, Stansell… I know I could do a better job than Moynahan, for Christ’s sake. He spends most of his time in the Press Club.’
‘What about Beirut?’
Mallon looked at him disbelievingly. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Kieran, I haven’t seen a paper or heard the news for three days. News blackouts. World War Three, remember?’
‘Sounds more like World War Two.’
Across the large open-plan office, the rest of the editorial staff were filing into the conference room for the news meeting that doubled as Kelso’s end-of-week address. Girling and Mallon picked up their coffees and headed in the same direction.
‘Well?’ Girling prompted, as they walked over. ‘Beirut?’
‘Two days ago, a bunch of lunatics, probably PLO or something, hijacked a jumbo at Dubai and flew it on to Beirut. They’re holding, among several hundred others, a high-ranking group of American diplomats. Poor bastards were part of the Gulf peace initiative, on their way back to Washington to report on the cease-fire.’
‘What’s the latest?’
‘All quiet. Negotiators are still trying to make contact.’
‘And what does Kelso see in it for us?’
Mallon shrugged. ‘He wants to dig up dirt, find out what’s really going on behind the scenes. He’s relying on us to put one over the competition. He’s really got it in for the Sundays at the moment. Ever since he got back from holiday.’
‘Sounds like the big boys are squeezing his nuts.’
After the early summer redundancies, the magazine was under pressure to recapture its flagging circulation. Lord Kyle and the board were leaning heavily on Kelso to produce results, or face the consequences.
Girling closed the door behind them. About twenty of the editorial staff were positioned around the table, with Kelso in his customary place at the head. Girling pulled up two chairs, offering one to Mallon.
Kelso was a heavily built Scot in his early fifties with a gruff face hidden for the most part by a straggling beard. Behind his half-moon tortoiseshell glasses he had eyes that were black and bottomless. Shark’s eyes.
‘Right, what have we got?’ Kelso asked, turning to the news editor.
Jack Carey reeled off a number of issues that had been put to bed on the magazine’s early pages. Most were pretty familiar: the US Primaries, Russia’s offer to cut a third of its submarine fleet, again, Pakistan’s covert nuclear weapon tests, a serial killer on the loose in Berlin, more Gulf news and the gas pipeline explosion in Syria.
Though not a new magazine, Dispatches was very much Kelso’s baby. His curriculum vitae was a litany of famous newspaper names. He was an editor of the old school and held to his principles. As the papers themselves had moved from central London and the old Fleet Street had all but died, Kelso had been approached to mastermind the relaunch of Dispatches. In his five years as editor he had built up a strong reputation for hard-hitting news. Kelso didn’t like the present situation at all, and he didn’t care who knew it.
Kelso turned his attention to the page-plan. ‘OK, we’ve got fifteen pages that still need filling.’ He turned to Girling. ‘Tell us about this war game of yours, Tom.’