“How was the exercise?”
“Same as ever, boss; a bloody cock-up. Got fucking soaked in a turnip field and then half sodding drowned in a river. And, of course, none of the bleeding officers knew where we were or what we were bloody doing. I tell you, mate”—this was to Micky—“if the Russkies ever do come, they’ll fuck through us like a red hot poker going up a pullet’s arse.”
“It’s not surprising, is it?” Micky asked, “when most of our soldiers are as delicate and fastidious as your good self?”
“There is that,” Terry laughed. “So what are we doing?”
“Nick’s nervous,” Micky said dismissively as we walked to the car.
I told Terry that I was indeed nervous, that I was meeting this American girl, and it was just possible, but extremely unlikely, that she might threaten my boat if I didn’t agree to do whatever she wanted, and so I would appreciate it if Terry sat on Sycorax until Micky and I got back to the river.
“Nothing’s going to happen.” Micky accelerated back on to the motorway. “You just get to sit on a bloody boat while it gets dark outside.”
Terry, eating the first of his cold bacon sandwiches, ignored Micky.
“So what will these buggers do? If they do anything?”
“Fire,” I said. Jill-Beth had hinted at arson, and it frightened me.
A hank of rags, soaked in petrol and tossed into the cockpit, would reduce Sycorax to floating ash in minutes. If I turned Jill-Beth’s pro-posal down, which I planned to do, Sycorax would be vulnerable, and never more so than in the hour it would take me to get back from our rendezvous to the river. That fear presupposed that Jill-Beth had already stationed men near the river; men whom she could alert by telephone. The whole scheme seemed very elaborate and fanciful now, but the fear had seemed very real as I had brooded on it during the weekend. Yassir Kassouli was a determined man, and a bitter one, and the fate of one small boat on a Devon river would be nothing to such a man. The fear had prompted me to phone the Sergeants’ Mess from the public phone in the Norfolk village. I’d left a message and Terry had phoned back an hour later. I’d told Angela I’d been talking to Jimmy Nicholls about anchor chains and, though I had hated telling her lies, they seemed preferable to explaining the complicated truth. Now, with Terry’s comforting solidity on my side, I wondered if I had over-reacted. “I don’t think anything will happen, Terry,” I confessed, “but I’m a bit nervous.”
“End of problem, boss. I’m here.” Terry slumped in the back seat and unwrapped another sandwich.
We reached the river two hours later and, as Micky waited on the road above Bannister’s house, I took Terry down through the woods and behind the boathouse to Sycorax. I saw two of Mulder’s crewmen preparing Wildtrack II in the boathouse, ready for tomorrow’s outing when she would be the camera platform for Sycorax’s maiden trip. I assumed, from their presence, that Mulder must have returned from his victorious Mediterranean foray, but I did not ask. I looked up at the house, but could see no one moving in the windows. I thought of Bannister sleeping with Angela tonight and an excruciating bite of jealousy gnawed at me.
The tide was low. Terry and I climbed down to Sycorax’s deck and I unlocked the cabin. I did not tell him about the hidden Colt, for I didn’t want his career ruined by an unlicensed firearm’s charge.
“Any food, boss?” he asked hopefully.
“There’s some digestive biscuits in the drawer by the sink, apples in the upper locker and beer under the port bunk.”
“Bloody hell.” He looked disgusted at the choice of food.
“And you might need these.” I dropped the two fire-extinguishers on the newly built chart table. Sycorax might lack a radio, pump, anchors, log, chronometer, compass, loo and a barometer, but I’d taken good care to buy fire-extinguishers. She was a wooden boat and her greatest enemy was not the sea but fire. “And if anyone asks you what you’re doing here, Terry, tell them you’re a mate of mine.”
“I’ll tell them to fuck off, boss.”
“I should be back by nine,” I said, “and we’ll go over the river for a pint.”
“And a baby’s head?” he asked hopefully.
“They do a very good steak and kidney pudding,” I confirmed.
If there was one certainty about this evening now, it was that Sycorax was safe. Kassouli would need an Exocet to take out Terry Farebrother, and even then I wasn’t sure the Exocet would win.
I limped back up through the woods and got into Micky’s car. We went north, threading the maze of deep lanes that led to Dartmoor.
I was silent, wondering just what we had got ourselves into, while Micky was ebullient, scenting a story that would splash itself across the headlines of two nations.
We climbed up to the moor. Low dark cloud was threatening from the west and I knew there would be lashing rain before the evening was done. We left the hedgerows behind, emerging on to the bare bleak upland where the wind sighed about the granite tors.
We were over an hour early reaching the village pub in the moor’s centre where Jill-Beth had said she would meet me. Micky took me into the pub’s toilet where he fitted me with the radio-microphone.
It was a small enough gadget. A plastic-coated wire aerial hung down one trouser leg, a small box the size of a pocket calculator was taped to the small of my back, and the tiny microphone was pinned under my shirt. “I’m going back to the bar,” Micky said, “so they don’t think we’re a couple of fruits, and you’re going to speak to me.” He had the receiver, together with a tape-recorder, in a big bag.
To hear what was being recorded he wore a thin wire which led to a hearing-aid.
The device worked. After the test we sat at a table and Micky gave me instructions. The transmitter was feeble and if I went more than fifty yards away from him he’d likely lose the signal. He said the microphone was undirectional and would pick up every sound nearby so I should try and lean as close to Jill-Beth as I could. “You won’t mind that, will you?” Micky said. “You fancy her, right?”
“I used to.”
“Fancy her again. Get in close, Nick. And keep an eye on me. If I can’t hear what she’s saying I’ll scratch my nose.”
“Is this how we trap one of the world’s richest men?” I asked.
“With nose-scratching and toy radios?”
“Remember Watergate. It all spilt out because some CIA-trained prick couldn’t tape up a door latch. You are suffering from the delu-sion that the world is run by efficient men. It isn’t, Nick. It’s run by constipated morons who couldn’t remember their own names if it wasn’t printed on their credit cards. Now, what are you going to say to her?”
“I’m going to tell her to get lost.”
“Nick! Nick! Nick!” he groaned. “If you tell the birdie to fuck off, she will. She’ll do a bunk and what will we have? Sweet FA, that’s what we’ll have. You have to chat her up! You have to go along with her, right? You’ve got to say all the things she wants you to say, so that she says all the things we want her to say. Especially, my son, you have to ask her just what Kassouli plans to do out there. Is he trying to knock Bannister off? Or is he just trying to scare the bastard? Got it?”