Mambo Page 17

  “We have half the police force of the country looking for Ruhr – and he pulls this off anyway,” Pagan said. “A fucking cruise missile!”

  A savage little pulse worked in Pagan’s jaw. “You know what makes it even worse? We’ve got a couple of eyewitnesses among the soldiers who saw his face clearly before he put on his gas mask. You know what that means? He wanted people to see him. He wanted to be noticed. He’s like a bloody actor who just happened to do a quick stint in the sticks here. He wants audience appreciation even in the miserable provinces! Jesus Christ! The man’s bored with all his years of anonymity and now he’s got a taste of fame and he loves it. Vanity, Foxie. He’s suddenly got theatre in his blood. I want him. I want that bastard.”

  Foxie surveyed the team of experts that was sifting through the wreckage of the two helicopters. Here and there, in ditches, under trees, hidden by long grass, lay bodies that hadn’t yet been taken away. It was a sickening scene. Foxie thrust his hands in the pockets of his raincoat and thought how infrequently he’d seen Frank Pagan this upset. Sirens cut through the rain, flashing lights glimmered feebly. It was a miserable day with a grey sky that might last forever.

  “The missile didn’t have a warhead,” Foxworth remarked. A small consolation. “Without the nuclear hardware it’s only a bloody twenty-odd foot cylinder of metal.”

  “With dangerous potential,” Pagan said. He was watching a soldier being raised on a stretcher; the boy’s leg was missing below the knee. Pagan turned his face to the side. There had been a royal battle in this quiet spot whose only usual violence was that of an owl setting upon a fieldmouse, talons open, a quick dying squeal by moonlight.

  An official limousine approached the crossroad and squeezed with some authority between parked ambulances. Martin Burr got out followed by the Home Secretary, Sir Frederick Kinnaird. Both men made their way over the damp road to where Pagan stood.

  Pagan had no great fondness for the Home Secretary, nor any specific reason for his dislike except that he was not enamoured of politicians in general. They inspired in him the same kind of confidence as used-car salesmen. Vote for me, my Party has been driven only by an old lady and then only on Sundays and never more than thirty miles an hour. Burr did the introductions. Hands were duly pumped. Burr opened a small umbrella and shared it with Sir Freddie. This made Pagan conscious of his damp woollen overcoat and Italian shoes that leaked rainwater.

  “Is it as ghastly as it looks?” Freddie Kinnaird asked.

  It was on the tip of Frank Pagan’s tongue, a mischief; he wanted to say No, it’s been a lovely party but we’ve run a bit low on the canapés, Freddie, my old sunshine. But he merely gestured toward the demolition site.

  “A cruise missile was taken, I understand,” Kinnaird said.

  Pagan noticed Kinnaird’s black coat with the slick velvet collar; an exquisite silk tie went well with his striped shirt, made for him in Jermyn Street, no doubt. Kinnaird said something about how the missile had been on its way to Tucson, Arizona, there to be destroyed under the terms of the Russian-American treaty. He spoke in a drawling way, as if his every word were precious, to be lingered over. Now and again he shoved a strand of thin, sandy hair out of his eyes.

  Pagan said, “We assume the missile was driven to an airfield nearby and flown out. There are about half a dozen airstrips in this vicinity left over from World War Two, most of them private flying clubs now. I’ve got men checking them out. If the missile hasn’t been flown from the area, it wouldn’t be too hard to hide. An underground tunnel, a warehouse, a bus garage.”

  “To where could the missile be flown?” Kinnaird asked.

  “Anybody’s guess,” Pagan said. “I hope we’ll have an answer soon. The RAF has been conducting an air search, but since they haven’t told us anything, it means they don’t have a thing to report. Otherwise they’d be crowing.”

  Kinnaird said, “I understand one would need a fair-sized transport plane to carry the missile. Surely that shouldn’t be too hard to spot.”

  Foxworth replied, “And it wouldn’t be, except for two things, Home Secretary. The rotten weather and the fact that there’s an enormous amount of air traffic in this part of the world. London’s only one hundred miles away, and the pattern of traffic there and throughout the Home Counties in general is horrendous. The system is overloaded.”

  “Why steal a missile without a warhead anyway?” the Home Secretary wanted to know.

  Nobody had an answer to Sir Freddie’s question. Rain fell on Burr’s black umbrella. The Commissioner asked, “What about the dead terrorists?”

  “We’re still working on ID,” Pagan replied. “We’ve got four of the buggers. Two died in the assault. Another two inside the chopper.” He was impatient suddenly. He was very fond of Martin Burr, and admired him, but he disliked the way Big Shots drove up from London to ask what progress had been made when it was damned obvious that men were bleeding to death and ambulances slashing through the rain and the whole scorched, smoking landscape looked as if a meteor had struck it.

  “Rather fond of helicopters, aren’t they?” Freddie Kinnaird said. “What do we know about this one?”

  Pagan had one of those quirky little urges to unbutton his overcoat and show Sir Freddie that, contrary to anything he might have read in the tabloids lately, there was no Superman costume under his shirt. He restrained himself and said, “We’re running checks. We know it was a Cobra and the markings had been painted black. Beyond that, nothing yet. We’re working on it. We assume it was the same aircraft used in Shepherd’s Bush. But that’s just an assumption, and practically worthless.” Pagan had a difficult moment keeping anger and bitterness from his voice. The idea of a second chopper attack, and the sheer murderous arrogance behind it, rattled him.

  “Sorry, by the by, to hear about your gun wound. Bloody tragic business in Shepherd’s Bush.” There was the famous Kinnaird touch, palm open on Pagan’s shoulder, a slightly distant intimacy, as if between nobility and the common man there might be only the merest suggestion of physical contact. It was all right for their lordships to fuck the serving wenches but not altogether good form to become too intimate with the footmen.

  Pagan walked toward the wreckage of the Cobra. The dead terrorists were covered with sheets of plastic, under which charred faces might be seen opaquely, as if through filthy isinglass. Men with protective gloves picked through debris cool enough to handle. Pagan watched for a moment. From a mess such as this, hard information would emerge only slowly – a fingerprint here, an engine identification number there, maybe a scorched photograph in a wallet. It would take a long time for this chaos to yield anything useful.

  Now Foxie approached the smoking rubble in a hurried way. “Just got a message from a place called St Giles, Frank. It sounds quite interesting. It’s only a few miles from here.”

  “I’d welcome anything that gets me the hell out of here,” Pagan said.

  “I’ll fetch the car,” and Foxie was gone again, nimbly skirting the small fires that still flickered here and there in the gloom.

  The airfield beyond the hamlet of St Giles had once been a run-down place, redolent of robust pilots with waxen moustaches dashing off in Spitfires to defeat the Hun, but the old hangars had been painted bright blue and the control tower refurbished in a similar shade. Somebody had taken some trouble and expense to tart the place up. A red windsock flapped damply. A sign attached to the tower said East Anglia Flying Club in bright letters. Small planes, chained to the ground for protection against the wind, were scattered around the edges of the runway.

  Foxworth and Pagan got out of the car. It was a dreary open space, exposed to the elements. A thin wet mist had formed in the wooded land beyond the hangars where a group of men stood around a Range Rover. Pagan walked the runway, Foxie following. At a certain point, Pagan stopped and kneeled rather cautiously to the tarmac, dipping his finger into a slick of fresh oily fluid; it was some kind of hydraulic liquid, viscous and green, rain-repelle
nt. He wiped his hands together and walked until he reached the copse of beech trees.

  Three men stood near the blue Range Rover, the doors of which hung open. Pagan recognised Billy Ewing, the Scotsman who worked at the SATO office in Golden Square. The other two were uniformed men, probably local. Billy Ewing, who had a small red nose and blue eyes that watered no matter the season, had a handkerchief crumpled in the palm of one hand as he always did. He had allergies unknown to the medical profession. His life was one long sniff.

  “We haven’t touched a thing, Frank,” Ewing said in a voice forever on the edge of a sneeze. “It’s just the way we found it.”

  The Rover was hidden, although not artfully concealed. Whoever had stashed it here between the trees had done so in haste, or else didn’t give a damn about discovery. Pagan looked inside. Boxes of cartridges lay on the floor, a discarded shotgun, two rocket launchers, three automatic pistols; quite a nice little arsenal. He looked at the instrument panel. The vehicle had clocked a mere three hundred and seven miles. It still smelled new.

  Billy Ewing coughed and said, “An old geezer who was illegally fishing a local stream says he heard a bloody great roar this morning and when he looked up he saw – and here I quote – ‘a monster hairyplane near a half-mile long’ rising just above him. Scared him half to death, he says. If you need to talk to him, Frank, you’ll find him at a pub in St Giles where he went to take some medication for his fright.”

  As he listened to Ewing, Pagan reached inside the rear of the vehicle. Lying across the back seat was a wine-coloured scarf of the kind worn by schoolkids as part of a uniform. He removed the scarf. A small threaded motif ran through it, the stylised letters MCS. The last two might have stood for Comprehensive School.

  “What do you make of it?” Foxie asked.

  Pagan didn’t reply. An odd little feeling worked inside him, something vague moving towards the light, but as yet indefinable. He held the garment to his nose. There was a fading scent of rose.

  “Belongs to a girl,” he said. “Unless boys are wearing perfumes these days.”

  “You’ll find a few,” Ewing remarked in the manner of a philosopher resigned to paradoxes. “It’s a funny world these days, Frank.”

  “What’s the scarf doing in this particular car?” Foxworth asked.

  The feeling coursed through Pagan again, creating an uneasiness. “My guess is Ruhr left it there deliberately,” he said.

  “Why? You think he’s thumbing his nose at you, Frank?”

  Pagan gazed through the beech trees. Ruhr’s disturbed mind, the surface of which Pagan had barely scratched during their interviews, seemed to present itself in a solid flash of light, like a hitherto unknown planet drifting momentarily close to earth. “It’s possible. I think he’s got himself a bloody hostage and wants me to know it. He likes the idea of turning the screw.”

  Pagan shrugged; how could he know for sure? The flash of light had gone out and Ruhr’s mind was once again a darkened planetarium. “Let’s find out what MCS stands for,” he said. “Then call in the fingerprint boys and have them go over this car.”

  Foxworth shivered as the wind rose up and roared through the beech trees, tearing leaves from branches. He wasn’t happy with this deserted airfield, or the spooky beeches, or the girl’s scarf. Nor was he exactly overjoyed to see Frank slyly swallow another painkiller, which he did like a very bad actor, turning his face to one side and smuggling the narcotic into his mouth.

  “Keep an eye on things here for a while, Billy,” Pagan said.

  “Will do,” the Scotsman answered, and sneezed abruptly into his hankie.

  Pagan and Foxworth walked back to their car. The red windsock filled with air, rising quickly then subsiding in a limp, shapeless manner.

  Cabo Gracias a Dios, Honduras

  The mid-morning was infernally humid; even the sea breezes, sluggish and sickly, couldn’t dispel the stickiness. The man who stood on a knoll overlooking the ocean wore very black glasses and a battered Montecristo Fini Panama hat; he carried an aerosol can of insecticide with which he periodically buzzed the mosquitoes that flocked constantly around him.

  The man was Tomas “La Gaviota” Fuentes, a Cuban-American whose nickname, The Seagull, came from his amazing ability to fly seaplanes. Storms, whirlpools, hurricanes – Fuentes flew and landed his planes regardless. He had a madman’s contempt for whatever inclement weather the gods sent down.

  Fuentes looked along the beach, watching a score of fighter planes come in pairs at 1500 feet, then drop to 1200, at which point they strafed the sands, firing at bulls eyes painted in the centre of white banners. The planes, a mixture of Skyhawks, Harriers, and F-16s gathered from a variety of locations, used the inert practice ammunition known in the trade as blue slugs. Many of the banners remained undisturbed as the aircraft completed the run and veered left. Then fifty amphibious craft, each containing fifteen armed men, rolled with the tide towards the beaches. Every day the men practised wading ashore, hurrying over the sands to the cover of trees, where they disappeared swiftly and quietly.

  La Gaviota took off his hat and cuffed sweat from his brow. This place was the asshole of the world. He turned away from the beach and strutted towards his large tent. Despite the fan powered by a generator, stifling air blew in self-perpetuating circles; hell wasn’t, as a certain clown of a French philosopher had claimed, other people. Real hell was a canvas tent in a Central American republic surrounded by hungry dung-flies as big as wine bottles.

  He poured himself a cold beer from an icebox and gulped it down quickly. He was a big man and all muscle; even the way his forehead protruded suggested an outcropping of muscle rather than bone. Each of his hands spanned twelve inches and he wore size thirteen army boots. He crumpled the can like tissue paper and turned on his radio, which was tuned to a country station beamed out of El Paso. It wasn’t great reception, but better than nothing.

  The flap of his tent opened just as he shut his eyes and listened to the sweet pipes of Emmylou Harris singing “Feeling Single, Seeing Double”. The visitor was Fuentes’ second in command, a lackey Harry Hurt had sent from Washington. His name was Roger Bosanquet and he was some kind of limey, with an accent you could spread on a scone.

  “They’re getting better,” Fuentes said. “They’re not perfect, but they’re improving.” Here Fuentes added the words “old bean”, which he imagined was the way Englishmen addressed one another at every level of society. His attempt at an Oxford accent was appalling. Bosanquet always responded with a polite half-smile.

  Bosanquet said, “The infantry coming ashore performed with precision. They can’t possibly be faulted. The pilots, however, were not as accurate as they should have been. They need a little more time.” He had received training at an army school in England – from which establishment he’d been expelled for reasons Fuentes didn’t know, though he had absolutely no doubt the crime was faggotry. All Englishmen were faggots. It was a law of nature.

  Fuentes made the basic mistake of seeing only Bosanquet’s manicured manners and his quiet subordination. He missed a certain hardness that lay in the Englishman’s blue eyes. Nor did he notice the determined way Bosanquet sometimes set his jaw. He consistently underestimated the Englishman, whom he considered a boniato, a thickhead. But at some other level, one Fuentes did not care to acknowledge, he envied Bosanquet his education and training. His cool. His class.

  “They don’t have more goddam time,” Fuentes said. “The clocks are running, yame, and they’re running just a little too damn fast. The aircraft are supposed to destroy Castro’s defensive positions on the beach before the landings, correct? And if they don’t, then the poor bastards coming ashore are walking into a slaughterhouse. Correct?”

  Bosanquet wiped his brow with a red bandanna. He had served with Latin Americans like Fuentes before now and he disliked their sudden passions; they were brave soldiers but lacked detachment. It couldn’t be expected, of course. Impatience and irrationality were pro
grammed into them. They loved theatrics. They threw fits. They were unpredictable. They were not, when all was said and done, Anglo-Saxon. Bosanquet, who had done many dirty deeds for Harry Hurt in his life and who was here in this stinking place to provide a counterweight to Fuentes (and make confidential reports to Harry) spoke in a reasonable way. “With a little more accuracy on behalf of the planes, everything will work out superbly.”

  “Cojones! Castro’s apes will shoot those poor bastards in the boats like coconuts on the midway,” Fuentes snarled.

  “Only if Castro’s apes get the chance,” Bosanquet said quietly. “And we don’t believe they will, do we? All we are doing here is to prepare our men for a contingency that isn’t going to arise. Besides, it keeps them from getting bored.”

  Fuentes, calmer now, mumbled and shrugged. He was into a second beer now, a Lone Star. Like all demanding leaders of men, he always thought the worst of his subordinates. They were misconceived sons of whores and yet he prayed, as any stage director will, that all would somehow be well on opening night, lines would not be fluffed, and some generous magic would inhabit his actors and raise them to the status of gods. In truth, he was reasonably pleased with his forces, but he was damned if he’d ever admit this. You didn’t go round handing out Oscars before the performance.

  He pulverised a mosquito on his green baize cardtable. He imagined squelching Fidel in just such a way: schlurp – out came the blood of Cuba.

  Bosanquet opened an attaché case that contained several cashier’s cheques and negotiable bonds. Fuentes looked at the stash for a second. He imagined depriving Bosanquet of the loot and making off into the hills, there to vanish and live a life of debauchery eating the pussy of coffee-coloured maidens. It was a temptation easily ignored. Fuentes had been in the Cuban Air Force until 1959; he’d been promoted to the rank of Major in the US Marines following some heroic feats of flying against Castro during the Bay of Pigs. But there was no way he could fit into an American officers’ mess. He looked wrong and his accented speech was rough and his manners were uncouth, which added to his resentment of somebody like the well-spoken Bosanquet who always seemed to know the correct thing to say. But you couldn’t fault Fuentes when it came to loyalty to his superiors. Besides, Harry Hurt wasn’t the kind of guy you wanted to cross. Fuentes had the feeling Hurt wasn’t acting alone, that a powerful, wealthy organisation existed around him, and Harry was just another ghost in a mighty machine.