Authors: Gerald Seymour
The security attache was unconcerned with the private diplomatic innuendo that had passed between the two men out of his hearing.
'What are their plans for the airport?' More important, to what had his civilian master, short of a military background, agreed?
'They have moved troops to Heathrow. Guardsmen and light cavalry. They are bringing in more police. There will be around a thousand men from their security forces, many armed, they tell me. The Prime Minister informs me that the Arab is in possession of an Mi carbine with a maximum effective range of three hundred metres. Therefore they will put an army and police cordon in position of a circle with a radius of four hundred metres around the jet-liner. There will be no admittance inside that area other than to vetted personnel, our own people, and the security men. The plane will already be loaded when Sokarev boards . . . '
'How is he transferred to the airport?'
it is the assessment of the British that a motor convoy is the best method. There are many points of entry into Heathrow, and they maintain that it would be impossible for the Arab to be correctly positioned, and knowing which one they will use. I see no reason for disputing that.
It is their hope that the demonstration of force will be so great as to deter the man until Professor Sokarev is safely in the air. After that they will concentrate on his capture.'
'So again they have not consulted us.' The attache spoke evenly, not looking at the Ambassador, watching the oncoming traffic.
'They have consulted me.'
'You are not an expert in these matters.'
'That is offensive.'
'You would not know whether there were flaws in the plan or not.'
'Where are the flaws that your experience warns you of?'
'How can I tell? How can I estimate? I had hoped to see the plans. Discuss them. Negotiate them. Be given alternatives, told of the contingency fall-backs. There is no chance of that now.'
The Ambassador was silent, thoughtful of the way he had committed himself so few minutes earlier. Career, future, promotion to permanent position in the Ministry in Jerusalem, all might rest on the agreement he had made with the Prime Minister. The attache said nothing else.
The point had been made, there was no value in returning to it. They would do their best, the British. Probably haphazard, but their best. Only they were not experts.
Europeans did not understand the Palestinian fighters, were naive in the new science of counter-terrorism. But so proud of their integrity, do determined to make their own decisions. And their own mistakes. So there had been no talk of decoys, or of helicopters, or of military aircraft. Do they comprehend the resourcefulness of the assassin who is prepared to die that he should reach his target? He doubted it.
Mohan Singh was happy at the other man's company. It was rare for him to have conversation during the early lunch-break when his shift pattern decreed he went off sooner for his food than many of his work colleagues. The stranger listened to his problems, to the description of his life and his education, the circumstances that had brought him to England, and his difficulties in finding a job as rewarding financially as the one he now held. He spoke of his family — his wife and the three small children - how they lived in two rooms at the back of an uncle's house in Hounslow, how he was obliged to send money back to Amritsar to maintain his elderly parents. He was not aware as he chattered on that the man with him spoke little, just nodded and smiled and encouraged.
There was not long, Famy knew that. Sitting at the table already for fifteen minutes, there for another fifteen before the approach. How many more before he returned to his work? High wall clock turning, not much time. And all the while the plans racing, wasp-fast, through his mind.
They had more coffee. Famy going up to the counter and collecting the two cups. His hands no longer shook, relaxed and supple now, fingers eased, pliant . . . He set the coffee cups down and inclined his head to hear again what the Indian wanted to pour out to him. He had no feeling about the clear knowledge that he would kill this man. He was as nothing. An arcade machine, activated by a coin. Not an enemy, not a friend, just a carriage to take him to his destination, to his destiny. McCoy would have done it better, but McCoy had made the sacrifice for him, and he must fulfil his trust.
The man was tedious to Famy. Grumbling but frightened to be considered in that light, without the courage to fight for what he wanted. As a carpet that complains but cannot shift itself from the trampling boots. He would die quickly, compliant with his fate. The Indian had finished his coffee, coughed and cleared the sinuses of his nose, loud and guttural.
'I must return, or I will be late for the afternoon's work.
It has been nice . . . '
Famy interrupted. 'I have to wash my hands. You will show me the lavatory?' A stranger, helpless, needing a friend.
The Indian responded. 'I will show you. It is difficult to find if one is new here.'
They walked together down the corridor further into the building and away from the canteen. Twenty yards, perhaps thirty, and round two corners till they came to the door with the male, trousered symbol set high on it.
The Indian smiled, it is here. Not easy to find.'
His inclination then would have been to leave and walk away, but Famy spoke quickly and at the same time pushed open the door, moving inside.
'I would like to see you again. Where could we meet?'
Mohan Singh followed him. Famy was no longer listening, was taking in the lay-out, the cubicles at the far end of the long side walls past the stand-up urinals. There was a man there, nearly completed, heaving his hips to shake off the last drops. He would be gone in a moment. It was not a place that men delayed beyond their business.
At the washbasin, the water running, loud, interfering, he pretended not to hear.
'Wait a minute. Till I have finished,' he said over his shoulder. In the mirror he saw the man move toward the door, heard it slam in his wake.
Famy swept the water from his hands on to the front of his jeans and spun to face the Indian. No words now, and how many seconds before another man came in? The Indian had started to talk again when Famy's forearm, swung from far back, hit him on the protuberance of his throat, at the Adam's apple. A gurgling, choking moment of protest. Surprise in the eyes before the misting of insensibility. Famy caught him as he collapsed and pulled him, limp now and unprotesting, to the furthest of the lavatory cubicles. Then through the door into the constricted space in front of the pan. Not dead yet, not a body. But had to be killed, had to be silenced. He worked the shape in front of him so that the head faced inward and he had room to close the door behind him and fasten the catch. 'Engaged' it would say to any who came. And he would hear the door into the main corridor if it were opened and an intruder entered. That would hold him up.
He had waited all morning for his man and now was impatient.
He closed his eyes, settled himself as if in a moment of prayer, seeking the strength that now was essential, knuckles whitened, nails in his palms. He raised up the Indian's head, took the turban from it, placed it carefully on the door hook, particular not to disarrange it, aware that he would not know how to rebind it. Then he pulled the zip fastener of the overalls down to the level of the upper waist and clawed the arms of the garment from round the shoulders till it rested in a concertinaed mess on the Indian's hips. The overalls as much as the turban were too vital to be defiled if they were to serve his purpose.
And now he was ready. A fearful clarity, in slow, stopped motion. He lifted the head again and with all the force in his shoulders slammed it down on the hard polished white china of the rim of the bowl. Once, twice, three times till the bone of the skull no longer resisted the impact. Crude, irreversible damage was what he sought. He could not hold the man in the upright position any more. It slumped on to its knees, blood finding independent paths into the water held at the bottom of the pan, suffusing pinks and reds together.
There was no movement. The man had become matter.
Insignificant, finished. Famy heaved him once again upward so that he could observe the hurt he had inflicted, and more practically to see that the ribbons of blood had not passed on to the overalls. These he stripped off, twisting the body, lifting it, pushing it so that he could slip the garment down its length and over the shoes. It had been a hot day, and the Indian wore only a singlet — deep-stained now - and pants underneath, not clean and with their own faint smell that competed with the urine stains on the floor.
He left the body still kneeling but with the head deep in the pan. An obscenity, but necessary to remove totally the horror of the face and the damage that he had brought to it. In the breast pocket of Mohan Singh's overalls he found the small, plastic-coated polaroid card, read the name of the man he had executed in the cause of Palestine, and looked at the photograph, unrecognizable from the smashed features of the man he had killed. Three minutes later, now wearing the overalls, he climbed up over the dividing wooden wall and into the next cubicle. He hurried across to the washbasins, scrubbed his hands in liquid soap to rid himself of the few blood-spots that rested there, then checked in the mirror that the turban was straight and still fastened. His bag was where he had left it, under the basins.
Out in the corridor Famy glanced at his watch. If the Jumbo were on time it would be landing in three hours and forty minutes. There would be another sixty minutes of refuelling. He had far to go, each step more hazardous than the last. And he had killed for the first time, the first time in his short life. There had been men who had slumped in his gunsight in the lecture hall, but they were different — abstract, unconnected. This was with his own hands, using his own strength, his own will. It had been the irreversible step, and he had taken it.
TWENTY
It had been four years since the British had first awoken, and then tardily, to the threat confronting their premier airport. The familiar continental backdrop of patrolling troops and armed para-military police on the runways and in the terminals had been thought just another European eccentricity, until the Guards and their armour had deserted Windsor and rolled into Heathrow for the first time. Many had seen that as an erosion of something peculiarly British, a departure from a way of life long established, a further weakening of the nation's aloofness from the violent habits of its neighbours. But times changed, and the troops came more often, the frequency of their alerts reducing the bizarre appearance of their initial arrival. And the British Airports Authority, the managing body for the 2700 acres of billiard-flat grass and concrete that played host on a summer's day to close on a thousand aircraft, had called its charge a 'national defence priority', and written in an annual review of the 'formi-dable tasks posed by the new warfare' of terrorist attack.
Familiarity, though, dulled the fascination of the armed men, the excitement died its death. Twenty million passengers came and went each year, and few could boast to their friends of having seen a rifle, a semi-hidden pistol handle at the hip of a policeman, let alone a light tank.
So on this Wednesday there was again a refreshing novelty about it all, and enough sunshine to bring out the crowds. Those who were flying arrived earlier than they otherwise would have done. Those landing lingered in the anticipation of an event. Around the army, the work of the airport continued uninterrupted; but ears were cocked listening for sirens and gunfire, and above all the ceaseless drone of uninformed and ceaseless rumour.
The turban felt strange and unfamiliar on Famy's head.
Not that it was heavy or ill-fitting, but as a constriction, the mark and uniqueness of an identity that he had not fully taken over. The overalls were right, loose and baggy, presenting no pressures on the shape of his body, and masking the rifle now pinioned, barrel down, in the belt at the front of his trousers. It was one of the small pieces of advice that they had given to him: secrete a barrelled weapon in the very front of your body. The hands always search at the sides, examine the flanks. The grenades would have been harder to dispose of on his person had the Indian not carried the small, yellow lunch box in the pocket of his trousers. The
V40S
wrapped well in the greaseproof paper that the nameless and faceless wife packaged round her man's food.
Famy walked toward the security check-point between the two giant structures that formed Terminal Three.
'Departures to Right', 'Arrivals to Left', and straight ahead the pendulum bar, unmistakable in its red and white message, with the notice slung beneath, large and decisive,
'Stop'. Beyond was the inner world that he had to join, the realm of the loaders and mechanics and airline personnel, passengers excluded unless they moved in their corralled herds on specific walkways. The BAA security man, blue uniform, white-rimmed cap, operated the movement of the bar from a glass-cased booth at the side. A soldier had crammed in beside him, and there was a Land-Rover behind daubed with the standard NATO camouflage parabolas. More soldiers beside the barrier itself. They were relaxed, confident, safe in the knowledge of their numbers and their firepower. Briefings had passed that down to them. Battalion commander to company commander, company commander to platoon commander, platoon commander to section leader. The word had been spread, circulated. One man was the risk. They had his picture in their minds, the description of his clothes.
An Indian in British Airways livery went no way toward fitting the requirement for vigilance and care that had been stressed on the Guardsmen. They looked in the bag, but cursorily and laughed when he asked in a voice, high-pitched by nerves, but which they took to be the flavour of his homeland, whether he should remove his turban. As they waved him through he shouted to the men in the booth.
'Good luck.'
And their smiles turned to the sneers of the young. A thousand against one. So who needed luck? With those odds half a day more and the rifles would be back in the armoury and they'd be in the pub under the castle wall.