Around the cleared desk, telephones were ringing and two women were trying to stem a tide of chaos. Outside the office, in the wide tarmac yard, the giant lorries with their trailers were starting up and manoeuvring towards the main gate. Each time the office door opened for a shouted query from a driver, the owner broke off from his lecture to Ms Manning. Willet had the safe door unlocked and pulled it back.
‘If he was here, right now, Gus would be taking care of the Hamburg consignment, which is up the spout because the bloody Germans have filed the wrong customs declaration – can’t be late because that lorry’s got to get back, off-load, then be in Birmingham for a machinery pick-up for Milan – and in Milan there’s a factory on short time because they haven’t got that machinery, and I’m on a penalty if I don’t meet the schedule. I’ve two drivers off with flu, genuine, not skiving, but I’m shuffling the others round so that our supermarket contract doesn’t suffer. I’ve another lorry off the road with gearbox trouble, perishables to lift out of Barcelona, three lorries in the queue at Dover because the bloody French are on strike… and an empty bloody desk where my transport manager should be sitting.’
Willet took the papers from the safe, stacked them neatly beside his knee and began to read.
‘I may own the bloody place, own the lorries, own the bloody overdraft, but I don’t run this office. Be in hospital with a coronary if I had to. Gus runs it – or ran it until three weeks back. He said he wanted to go to Turkey with one of the drivers. That’s agricultural equipment spares going out, and denim jeans coming back. Said he wanted to understand better the drivers’ problems – but he didn’t come back with the jeans. In Ankara, he off-loaded himself… God knows what he was up to, because he’d stowed gear under the seat that wasn’t shown to Customs. He told the driver he’d make his own way home. I’ve not had sight or sound of him since.’
‘What was the gear?’ Ms Manning asked crisply.
Willet, on the floor with the papers, could have answered.
The owner snapped, ‘It was a rucksack, the driver said, and a long carrying bag. The driver said it was camouflaged. It was smuggled so God alone knows what was in it. If Customs had found it, Christ… Didn’t say where he was going, how long he’d be. The least of my problems right now. My problems are pressure, and no bloody transport manager here to sort them.’
‘Good at his job, is he?’
Willet, shuffling through the papers, speed-reading them, didn’t think she understood her capacity to sneer a question.
‘Are you good at your job? If you’re half as good at your bloody job as he is then my taxes are well spent. Course he’s bloody good. Pressure doesn’t faze him, not like me.
There can be fuck-ups from bloody Edinburgh to Eastbourne, from Cardiff to Cologne, and he soaks them up. I don’t get tantrums or shouting from Gus, I get the fuck-ups sorted. He doesn’t bawl out the girls, doesn’t shout at the drivers. He sits there, where your arse is, and sorts it. He does it on his own. Calm – just what I’m not… So, get out of my hair, and leave me to keep this shambles on the road.’
At the bottom of the papers on the floor was a sixteen-page colour sales brochure.
Willet slipped it into his briefcase and replaced the other papers in the safe, swung the door closed and turned the key on it.
The owner didn’t see them out. He had a telephone at each ear, the secretaries were trying to attract his attention, and a driver and a grease-stained mechanic were hovering at his shoulder. Willet followed Ms Manning from the dreary little office and they left behind them the confusion, and the girlie calendars sent out by the tyre companies.
‘What a dreadful man,’ she said.
‘Pays the taxes, doesn’t he, for our salaries?’
She gave him a savage, disdainful look. He wondered how she’d survive the slash-throat world of private enterprise. They paused as a juggernaut drove past them. The tang of the diesel seeped into his nose.
‘We’re wasting our time,’ she said. ‘We’re wasting it on a damn fool idiot with a death-wish.’
‘You’re wrong.’
‘Really? Then enlighten me.’
They were walking towards her car.
Willet said, ‘We are not wasting our time. We are evaluating Peake’s capabilities as a sniper. That’s what we’ve been briefed to do and that’s what we’re doing. We are learning. We do not yet know what those capabilities are. If he doesn’t have those capabilities, then yes, he is a damn fool, who will be killed. If he does have them, the horizons change.’
The sneer was back. ‘One man? No way.’
They were at her car. Willet stood in front of the door, blocking her.
‘A sniper can change the course of a battle – no other soldier has so much influence.
I’ll tell you what a sniper can do. A brigade-size manoeuvre I was at on Salisbury Plain
… the acronym is TESEX, that’s Tactical Evaluation and Simulation Exercise. All the weapons have the capability to fire a laser beam, and every man has a device on his uniform that’ll register the laser. A rifle shoots the laser and if there’s a hit the device bleeps. With me so far? A brigadier, a high-flier, was in charge of the attack side of the exercise, been planning it for weeks, probably months. The defending force, commanded by a colonel with a proper sense of humour, pushed a sniper forward towards the brigadier’s command post. It was going to be a three-day exercise and the brigadier thought it would notch him up to major-general level. Five minutes into the first of the three days, the sniper “shot” the brigadier. The old bleeper went
… all the planning out of the window, all the promotion hopes dumped. The brigadier shouted, “This can’t happen to me,” but the observer controller told him it could and it had. He yelled and argued, didn’t make any difference. “Do you know who I am?” was his last throw, and the observer controller told him, “Yes, you’re a casualty and you’re going into a body bag, sir.” The attack failed.’
He stepped aside. She unlocked the door.
‘It’s a ridiculous story – just men playing kids’ games.’
‘Actual war, that’s the same game. It’s what he can achieve if he’s good enough, which is why Peake is worth learning about. Cheer up, things are looking rosy: we’re going to have a day at the seaside.’
‘Do you have anything I should know about?’
Both of them were too long in the trade to posture a courtship ritual, like peacock and hen; they wouldn’t waste each other’s time.
‘What are you looking for?’
Isaac Cohen lay in the bath, his flabby stomach protruding from a sea of soapsuds.
Caspar Reinholtz had seen the helicopter land, as it always did on that date of the month, had looked through the windows of his offices as the Mossad man went from the American living quarters to the bathhouse with a towel over his arm. The Israeli’s controller would arrive at Incerlik in the next half-hour and then Cohen would be beyond reach.
‘The woman, the advance, anything that I haven’t got.’
‘They took Darbantaq.’
‘Figured they would.’
‘And didn’t give themselves the burden of prisoners.’
‘Predictable.’
‘Right now they’re hitting Tarjil.’
‘That’s a nut you could break your teeth on.’
If their masters in Langley or Tel Aviv had known of the contacts between Isaac Cohen and Caspar Reinholtz there would have been an immediate order that they be discontinued. Relationships between the Mossad and the Agency were scarred by suspicion. But it was hard enough in the field without letting the bickering of their masters prevent a casual exchange of information.
‘Tarjil wasn’t reinforced.’
‘That’s taken care of.’ Reinholtz sat languidly on the toilet seat beside the bath.
Cohen’s smile of understanding widened. He used the sponge on his chest. ‘The armour hasn’t moved out of Kirkuk.’