Gerald Seymour - At Close Quarters

Lebanon, the Beqa'a, was totally unsupportable. It was the end of the world.

"I do not understand how this could have happened."

The Prime Minister drew doodle faces on a pad and kept silent.

The Foreign Secretary warmed, "Only at this moment of failure am I for the first time informed of a clandestine adventure into Lebanon. At no stage was I consulted, but for the record I'll tell you what my advice would have been: forget it, that's what you'd have been told. My opinion was not asked for, and where do we find ourselves? We sent in two operatives. One is now captured and presumably pouring his heart out in Damascus. The other, untrained, will be blundering around in the Beqa'a, a headless chicken with capture inevitable. Prime Minister, have you any remote idea of the damage that will be done to British interests in the Middle East and in the Gulf when Crane and Holt are paraded in open court in Damascus? Years of hard economic endeavour, years of patient diplomacy, will have been undone by this folly. It goes without saying that I shall be forced to consider my position as a member of Her Majesty's Government."

"It stood a good chance of success," the Prime Minister said bleakly.

"Ah, success… success is different, success is all important, but we do not have success. We have instead a mission so ill-prepared that even the basement of the White House would have blinked at it."

"If the brute had been killed… "

"If, Prime Minister, if… but one is captured and the other is certain of capture. It is a disaster, and a perfectly avoidable disaster, had you chosen to confide in your colleagues."

"We had to show our strength, the strength of the free world against terrorism."

"Your concept of strength is different to mine. I cannot see that I can be of further help to you."

The Foreign Secretary pushed back his chair. He swept his papers, and his map of Lebanon, into the mouth of his attache case. He stood.

"Then get out," the Prime Minister said. "If all you can offer is the threat of your resignation, just go."

The aide who took the record wrote furiously then slapped shut his notepad, buried it in an inner pocket.

The Foreign Secretary led out his team.

For a long time the Prime Minister sat bent at the table, digesting the loneliness of the room.

And no comforting face. Only the prayer that the young man, Holt, was running, running hard, from that Godforsaken place that was the Beqa'a.

As Crane would have done it…

Everything that Holt could remember.

The light was going down. Below him the shadows of the tents lengthened. He saw the first figures emerging from the tents, as if in the coming coolness their rest time was complete.

He shared the rock overhang with a small lizard. The reptile showed no fear of him. He thought there was a cheerfulness about the lizard, as he would have said there was a cheerfulness about the chaffinches and the robins that came to the lichen-covered bird table on the lawn of his parents' home.

He had cleaned the rifle. He had pulled the 4 x 2 cloth through the barrel, pulling from the bolt end, according to Crane's bible, because to pull from the muzzle end was to risk damaging to a fractional extent the precision of the rifling. He had pulled back the bipod legs and adjusted them so that each was calibrated to the same length. He edged the anti-flash extension to the barrel out through the scrim netting. He took from Crane's Bergen a plastic water bottle and pushed the bottle out under the netting, and then tipped its mouth so that the water ran onto the rock and dirt that was below the muzzle. He saw the dribble of the water, and the colouring of the ground. According to Crane's bible, wet ground under a muzzle reduced the chance of a dust puff at the moment of firing when the bullet and the gases burst from the barrel. A dust puff, youngster, can give away the firing position.

As Crane would have done it…

He had a degree in Modern History, and his special subject was 1653-58, when Oliver Cromwell was Lord Protector of the Commonwealth. He was an entry into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office through the diplomatic service "fast stream". He was a Third Secretary with particular interest in the political development and sociological movements inside the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He was on his belly and watched by a lizard and under a rock overhang on the other side of the hill. He was considering whether he could put a 7 mm Remington Mag bullet into a five inch diameter target at a thousand yards.

Holt saw the tent flap move. He reached for his binoculars. Holt saw Abu Hamid step clear of the dark opening of the tent. He watched Abu Hamid yawn and stretch and spit.

He looked for the length of the shadows. He tugged his watch up from under his shirt. Holt thought that the sun was still too high, that he must wait for a minimum of another half an hour.

Zvi Dan said, "From what we've pickcd up on the monitoring they've lifted Crane to Damascus."

Martins asked, "Will you get him back? In an exchange?"

"Alive? If he is alive? Not for months, years, and then only if we have a jewel to trade. We don't have such a jewel. Dead? If they have killed him? They extract a high price. The last time we sent them back a swarm of prisoners, we had in return three coffins, in one was the wrong body, the other two were filled with stones. Does that answer your question?"

From the bed Martins looked up at Major Zvi Dan.

"Nothing on Holt?"

"They haven't caught him, we would have heard.

They know Crane was not alone, they have set blocks further south, nearer to the border."

"Thank you, I appreciate your telling me."

"It is too late to be angry," Major Zvi Dan said.

Abu Hamid had not slept. He had lain on the camp bed and had watched the radio. The radio would tell him what fate awaited him.

He thought that the radio would have told if they had found the body of Margarethe Schultz. He could see her in his mind, and he could see on her breast the crimson flash of the flower that he had laid there. He felt no guilt. He thought that what he had done was justified. He thought that what they would do to him would also be justified. Of course, he would not be arrested.. Of course, he would not go to the El Masr gaol. Of course, he would not be driven to a small square at dawn and be dropped from a gallows beam. What they would do to him, what would be justified, was that they would send him ashore on the beaches of Israel.

In his spider handwriting on a food carton he had written the names of the ten. He walked through the camp. He sought out each of the ten. They were those who would stand at his side. They were those who would protect him.

He would never be taken.

He heard the first bickering argument flare behind him. One had not been chosen, one had been chosen.

The imbeciles did not even know for what they were or were not chosen. But already the argument. When he had spoken to the ten men, he drifted towards the cooking area, and gave encouragement to the pressed volunteer who would prepare their food, and he kicked more wood onto the fire and spluttered in the surge of smoke.

It was a bargain.

Jane was no part of the bargain. Nor was his country, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The bargain was with Crane, for his being taken and for the freeing of the hostage prisoner. That he would fire a sniper rifle for the first time in his life, try to get into five inches diameter at a thousand yards, no longer had anything to do with vengeance or pat-riotism. He would fire for Noah Crane, miserable old goat. He would use the rifle for Crane who had a disease in the retina of his shooting eye. He would not walk away from Noah Crane.

He saw the smoke surge up from the fire. He watched the smoke climb and then curve where the wind took it.