The secretary, who had vanished, reappeared with three cups of coffee on a tray. It was all very civilised.
When the secretary had taken himself off again the Ruler said, ‘Mr. Taverner, your Foreign Department, will have explained to you what I require. Will you do it?’
Until that moment, Hugo would have said that he had not made his mind up. To his surprise he found himself saying, in matter of fact tones, ‘I’ll do my best.’
‘Excellent,’ said the Ruler. As though this was a prearranged cue, the bedroom door on the other side of the suite opened and a boy came out.
‘Allow me to introduce you to my son, Hussein.’
Hugo got up and shook hands ceremonially with Hussein. It was difficult to judge his age. Hugo put him down as sixteen and found out later that he had over-guessed by a year.
The boy was wearing a Norfolk jacket and gaberdine trousers. His black hair was long, but no longer than that of an English boy of his age. He took his jacket off, hung it over the back of a chair, and said, ‘Would you think it great cheek, Mr. Greest, if I asked you to take your coat off?’
(Could this be some custom of the Trucial Coast? Equivalent, perhaps, to removing one’s shoes when entering a mosque?)
Hussein walked round behind Hugo, and said, ‘It was
not
a trick of the camera, father. It is true. Look at those fine muscles in the shoulders and the back.’
‘Really,’ said the Ruler, ‘this is no way to treat a guest. He is not a horse, to be judged by his points. Put your coat on at once and sit down.’
‘They said it was done by cameras and trick lighting. I knew it was not true.’
‘Hussein has been taking a course of physical exercises to develop his own muscles,’ said the Ruler. ‘So far he has succeeded only in splitting three shirts.’
Hussein said, ‘I saw this yesterday. Do you think it might be any good?’
He showed Hugo a page which had been torn from an American magazine. It showed a prodigious man, stripped to the waist, his fists clenched and his arms slightly bent, a posture which brought his pectoral muscles into convenient relief. Beside him drooped a thin man, with match-stick arms and a protuberant stomach.
‘
Once I was like that
,’ said the caption.
It seemed to be an advertisement for a chest expander.
‘I know which of those two men I’d back to live to a happy old age,’ said Hugo.
‘You think it is no use, then?’
‘None of those implements are any good. They develop one particular set of muscles, at the expense of all the others. When I had to put on a bit of muscle myself, for the close shots, the producer sent me along to a gymnasium. I thought it would be full of wonderful gadgets, too. I was very disappointed when the instructor told me that all I had to do was to lie on my back, hook my toes under a bar, and raise my trunk a hundred times. After a few weeks of that, he produced an old bell-bar, the sort of thing weight-lifters use, but not at all heavy. I had to bend down and pick it up a hundred times. That was all there was to it. Incidentally, if you try those two exercises, do them in the right order or you’ll damage yourself.’
‘The picking up I understand,’ said the boy. ‘But lifting your trunk – how was that done? You say you hooked your toes
under
a bar. If we moved that table against the wall—’
‘No,’ said the Ruler.
‘It would only take a minute.’
‘No, Mr. Greest is here to talk business. Serious business. I have asked you to be present because it may concern you one day. Now, sit down, and behave yourself.’
Hussein sat down. On the Trucial Coast it seemed that children occasionally obeyed their parents.
‘I will tell you, Mr. Greest, just what I have it in my mind to do. You must be aware of the advantages of our geographical position in Umran. We are the central point of the hegemony of the Gulf. The fulcrum of its power. Our position is similar to that of your country at the time of your first Queen Elizabeth. In size and in population you were small. In spirit and opportunity you were great. Is that not true?’
The comparison was absurd. But the words, spoken by this large, virile, strikingly handsome person did not seem absurd. Sparta. Carthage. Venice. Tiny states had swayed the world before. When the mighty powers were in equal balance the smallest weight could tip the scale.
‘And why was your Queen Elizabeth so great? I have studied your history books, Mr. Greest. I know the answer. She had a fighting navy, and she was not afraid to use it. The second consideration, you understand, is the most important of the two. It is no use having a loaded pistol in your pocket if you dare not take it out and fire it. That is the position with the western nations today. Their imposing armaments, their bombers, their submarines, even their long-range artillery are all built to carry nuclear weapons which they dare not use. That is why a handful of ragged guerrillas were able to make a long nose at the American might in Vietnam.’
Hugo said, ‘I understand, your Highness, that you have a people of high fighting spirit. But have you arms for them ? Conventional arms, I mean.’
The Ruler, who had been standing, now came and sat beside Hugo. On the table between them he laid a sheet of paper. It was ruled with faint blue lines, and looked as though it had been torn from a cheap writing pad.
He said, ‘It shall be your first assignment, Mr. Greest, to buy us what we require.’
‘He wants you to do what?’ said Mr. Taverner. ‘Go shopping for him. This is the list.’
Rifles (Magazine and automatic)
Medium and Heavy Machine Guns 3.5”
Bazookas Mortars – 2” and 4”
Light and Medium Artillery (Ranges up to 25,000 m. On mobile mountings)
A.A. Guns
Anti-tank guns
Ammunition for all the above
Helicopters (Personnel and load carrying)
Tracked Engineer and Signalling equipment
To be sufficient for a Brigade of 2,000 men divided into two motorised battalions of 600 men each with artillery and engineer support and a helicopter detachment with ground crews.
Mr. Taverner looked at the list thoughtfully. He said, ‘It’s going to cost a fair amount of money. Has he got it?’
‘I gather that part of it’s all right. He’s had some news from Umran. Something about a mineral strike.’
‘Has he, though,’ Mr. Taverner made a small note on the pad in front of him. He seemed more impressed by the minerals than he had been by the armaments.
‘Did he tell you what mineral had been found?’ Mr. Taverner recollected his diplomatic training and added, ‘You mustn’t tell me if you heard it in confidence, of course.’
‘I couldn’t tell you anyway, because I didn’t recognise the name. It wasn’t one I’d heard before.’
‘Wolframite or Scheelite?’
‘Nothing like that.’
‘I see.’
‘What I want to know is, where am I going to buy this lot? It doesn’t seem to me the sort of thing you could get at Harrods or Selfridges.’
There’s no difficulty about that,’ said Mr. Taverner sadly. ‘In fact, once the news gets about that you’re in the market for arms, and are prepared to pay cash, the difficulty will be keeping the sellers off. If I were you, I should start with the Crown Agents.’
‘I think we should be able to manage most of that,’ said Major Gilliland.
‘You mean you keep that sort of thing in stock ?’
‘We don’t keep anything in stock. When we get an order we buy what we can. Mainly from the Ministry of Supply. Bits and pieces from other places.’
‘And do you get many orders as big as this?’
The Major smiled faintly, and said, ‘Last week I had to find two destroyers.’
‘Good heavens,’ said Hugo. ‘I’d no idea this sort of thing went on. Where does it all come from? I suppose we finished the last war with a mass of stuff we didn’t need, is that it?’
‘It’s not only the ending of a major war, Mr. Greest. Weapons go out of fashion almost as quickly as ladies’ clothes. Take those rifles. If you were after .303 Lee Enfield No. 4s, or American M.I. Garand carbines or AR-10s, we could let you have them at once and at a reasonable price. We could even get you M-14S or AR-15s. If, on the other hand, you were looking for something up to the moment like an M-16 Armalite or a Russian AK-47, we’d have to shop round for it, and it would cost you a lot of money.’
Observing the blank look on Hugo’s face he said, ‘You’re new to this game, aren’t you?’
‘To me,’ said Hugo, ‘a rifle is a thing which I remember, vaguely, from my school days. It was brown, it was oily, and it was infernally heavy. It had a bolt at one end and a knob to fix a bayonet on at the other. It was called, I think, a service rifle.’
‘And a very good weapon it was,’ said the Major, with the first Spark of enthusiasm he had shown. The trouble is that weapons nowadays have become too sophisticated altogether.’
‘Any help you can give me, technical or otherwise, will be gratefully received.’
Then you’ve had no experience of weapons since your school days?’
‘I’ve handled a lot of small arms. But they were carefully plugged Lugers and Birettas. And when I pulled the trigger the noise was made by a sound-effects man.’
‘I see. Well, it’s something of a jungle you’re stepping into.’
‘So Taverner said.’
‘Taverner?’
‘He’s the man at the Foreign Office who sent me here. He said that as soon as it was known that I was in the market for arms, I’d have a crowd of people on my neck.’
‘It’s a competitive business. It can be a very profitable one. The leaders in the field are the Americans. I saw an estimate the other day that they had sold more than fifty billion dollars’ worth of arms since the last war. Of course a billion doesn’t mean quite the same on the other side of the Atlantic as it does here. But it’s a pretty staggering figure all the same. The American Government gets the lion’s share. They’ve got a section in the Department of Defense which does nothing but handle sales. The I.L.N.S. Very popular with the politicians. It’s the only part of the Pentagon which makes money instead of spending it.’
‘But there are private operators?’
‘Certainly. Cummins is the best known. He’s so big he’s respectable. There are others who—well—let’s say they’re prepared to cut a few corners to get their fingers in the gravy. Abacus and Target, for instance.’
‘Come again.’
‘Abacus is the Anglo-Bostonian Arms Corporation of the U.S.A. Target is Trans-American Rifle and Gun Enterprises of Topeka. And there are plenty of others. Smaller and even less scrupulous ones, right down to individual wheelers and dealers. Arms are big business in North America. I can’t swear that it’s true, but it’s commonly believed that the only reason Uncle Sam wouldn’t drop Taiwan which was really a great embarrassment to them was because the politicians were subject to such pressure from the gun lobby.’
(But Major Gilliland, Hugo thought, would not be a very promising subject for pressure. He was dry, thin and indestructible; a man from whom all superfluous fat and superfluous emotion had already been squeezed.)
‘Where do we come in the race?’
‘As arms salesmen? Difficult to say, because no figures are ever published. No reliable figures, that is. America’s certainly first, by several lengths. Then Belgium, Sweden, Italy and ourselves in a bunch, would be my guess.’
‘And does the general public know what goes on? I mean, I’d no idea—’
‘The facts have all been published.’
‘Do people approve?’
Major Gilliland smiled thinly, and said, ‘Most of my friends know what I do. I haven’t noticed any of them actually spitting.’
‘I didn’t mean that. You’re doing a job. What I meant was, ideologically. The idea of selling arms to people to kill each other with.’
‘I’ve never been able to make out what people think. At one time we believed in international arms cartels run by sinister financiers who provoked European wars for profit. It was nonsense, of course. If there’s one thing that kills international profit, it’s a major war. On the other hand, there’s a strong theoretical argument against equipping guerrillas and rebels with modern arms.’
‘Theoretical?’
‘Certainly. In practice it’s neater and kinder to kill someone with a rifle than with a panga.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Hugo doubtfully.
‘On the other hand, you could argue that to equip a state like Umran with a modern, efficiently armed, force is the best guarantee against further trouble. But you came to ask about arms, not to listen to arguments. I think the next sensible step would be for me to put you in touch with someone from Ordnance who can talk over the technical details with you. It’ll take a day or two to arrange.’
‘As long as it’s only a day or two,’ said Hugo. ‘My brief acquaintance with Sheik Ahmed suggests to me that when he wants something, he doesn’t want it tomorrow. He wants it the day before yesterday.’
‘I’ll get my secretary to fix it.’ He must have pressed a bell, because a dumpy, middle-aged lady wearing pebbles glasses had appeared in the room. ‘Give us a telephone number where we can contact you, Mr. Greest.’
After some reflection he gave them Sam Maxfeldt’s telephone number. He could visualise his mother’s reactions if someone rang up and told her that a consignment of four-inch mortars was ready for inspection.
At the moment when Hugo was leaving the offices of the Crown Agents on Millbank, Colonel Leroy Delmaison (Colonel Rex to his friends) was entering one of the flats in Inverness Mansions, which is a block of flats on the north side of the Cromwell Road.
He opened the curtains, turned on one bar of the electric fire, sank down into the shabby, chintz-covered armchair, and sighed.
He was a man to whom, in or out of uniform, the word dapper would seem appropriate. The remains of his reddish-brown hair was dressed neatly round his sun-browned shining bald pate. A reddish-brown moustache jutted, in the appropriate cavalry officer, or Dean Acheson, manner from his upper lip. The hair on each side of his face had been prolonged, and partly concealed the fact that his right ear was missing and that the right side of his face was scarred. Part of his jaw-bone was missing, too. A section, made of silver, had been inserted after the explosion which had removed his right ear.