Gerald Seymour: Kingfisher

'You're a hard man,' the driver said, and they both laughed. 'What did you think about sending him back then, squire?"

' I don't know,' said Charlie. 'I just don't know.'

'Keep it tight, you Foreign Office people, don't you?'

' I don't mean that. I'm not avoiding you. I just don't know.'

'Served him right,' said the front passenger. 'If he doesn't like it he should have stayed at home.

Should have watched his telly.'

'You're right,' said the driver. "Course you're right. But doesn't make it any nicer. Not sending him back there. Different if he was a Yank or something, but where he's going, then, that's different, that's something else.'

The car sped on, taking Charlie back to what he knew. His home. His family. His office and his work. Going back to all that was familiar where his attitudes would not be cuffed by a boy half his age. Going back to all that was safe and secure. He wondered what Parker Smith would say.

Probably be a sherry on the house, and a slapped back and the word that he'd done the section's name a power of good, and didn't we always know you still had your balls in the right place, and be making damn certain you don't get pinched again by 'operational' after all this.

' I didn't ask you, squire, but where did you see him – in the cells?' the driver, bored with the quiet, had decided to resurrect the conversation.

' I saw him on the plane,' said Charlie.

"I thought it was the SAS blokes that took him off."

' I was on before them,' Charlie spoke woodenly, without pride, claiming no victory.

'You were the FO guy then?' The front passenger had turned eagerly in his seat, excited, something to tell the lads back in the pub behind the Yard if they made London before closing.

'Were you the one that pulled the hostage clear, then went on board and wrapped it up?'

' I was on board when it ended.'

'Jesus-that must have been something, quite something, when he blasted and all that, when all the heavy stuff was flying about. He shot the girl himself, didn't he?'

'Yes,' said Charlie. He looked at his watch, another hour at least. Felt the noose tightening.

'And the Israeli, he was killed then, was he? When the Jew fired on the girl?'

Where would he be now? High over the north German plains, or perhaps beginning to hear the descent of the engines, the lowering of the undercarriage, feeling the gusting turbulence as the air brakes were applied. Wonder whether they're talking to him, or whether he's just a parcel of bloody freight.

'Shut up, Bill,' said the driver, and as an afterthought that ignored Charlie's presence. 'Pack it in. The poor sod's had enough on his plate today without having to go through it all again with us.'

They talked among themselves for the rest of the journey. Only once did they break into Charlie's private world, when they asked him where he wanted to be dropped. He told them that Waterloo Station would do very well, and that was where they left him. They stayed in the car as he walked across the concourse fumbling in his pocket for a return ticket stub he had bought the previous morning. When he was past the barrier and disappeared through a door of the first carriage of the Woking train, they went on their way.

'Funny sort of blokes you find in the spooks,' said the front passenger as they headed across Westminster Bridge. 'You've done well. If we can find somewhere to park the motor we should be able to get a fast one down.'

The report from the Ambassador in London lay on the Israeli Prime Minister's desk. It was a clinical and well- presented document, devoid of emotion and attempting merely to set out the circumstances in which the hi-jacking of Aeroflot Flight 927 had ended. There was a brief description of the death, such as the facts were known, of Lt Col. Arie Benitz and as much information as the diplomat could muster on the British thinking that had led them to fly the one survivor of the terrorist team back to Russia. The Prime Minister was more amused than surprised that his representative had chosen the word 'terrorist'. He could reflect that there had been a time, less than three decades ago, when the word had held a respectability now long since discarded. Back in the days of the Haganah and Palmach, the days of Jewish struggle against the British, then there had been no stigma to the label.

But what was in a word? Terrorist or freedom fighter or urban guerrilla were only labels to express the international community's displeasure or acclamation for the men who fought the hidden wars, who belonged to the lonely and unrecognized armies, who shunned the safety of the big battalions. But it was a dangerous thought, impossible beyond the privacy of his office. He could not permit himself to express such a view outside the stout, wooden door, because that would mean acknowledgment of the Palestinians who in their puny groups likewise attempted to overthrow the accepted authority.

His last duty that night was to telephone his Minister of Information. There should be no government reaction, either attributable or non-attributable by any of the Ministry's spokesmen about the events of the day at Stansted. It was to be regarded as an affair between Britain and the Soviet Union, that was to be the line taken, and any other suggestions should be treated with non-committal answers.

It had been a difficult and trying day for them all, he thought, and his plans that had seemed at best difficult and at worst unfeasible had ended without success. And lost to them was a man they could ill afford to be without. Hard to find again another like the young Benitz. His secretaries were long since gone, and he switched off the lights of his room and of the outer office before walking out to where the bodyguards lounged in the corridor.

You win a few, you lose many, that was what he had learned since he had moved into the office at the end of the north corridor on the third floor.

At his morning meeting the Foreign Secretary was told of the night's developments.

He was briefed on the exchange of Isaac at the least used and least observed checkpoint between West and East Berlin. The cipher teleprinter messages from the Foreign Office men of the transaction being carried out without any unseen difficulties and in strict accordance with the mutually agreed planning. He was informed that the Russian Ambassador had sent a message of congratulation to the British govern- ment, thanking them on behalf of the Supreme Soviet for the firm stand that had been taken in the maintenance of the rule of law. There was nothing in the text to bring him to assume that the prisoner would face any penalty other than death. This did not distress him: he knew the habits of the Soviets sufficiendy to believe that the fate of the boy would be decided and executed swiftly and without recourse to the beating of drums. He had read two of the day's morning papers in his car on the way to Whitehall, and asked his private secretary if there had been hostile reaction to the Foreign Office statement in those that he had not yet seen.

'Not really, sir. Bit of a quibble in some about the speed of things. But nothing openly antagonistic in the leader pages. They all carried a very good wire picture from the Italian ANSA agency – showed the wife of Franconi, the Italian who was killed, in tears with her children round her. Difficult for Fleet Street to conjure up much of a row when they have a sriap like that to use alongside. Seems to me it all went off rather well.'

' I think we sometimes preoccupy ourselves too much with public reaction,' the Foreign Secretary said. 'Every now and then they want a good, firm decision, and that's what we gave them.'

' I doubt if the Israelis are that pleased.'

'Not our concern, young man. We're not elevated to these lofty climes to please the people of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. They've shouted long enough and loudly enough about the need to teach these people a lesson-and quite right too- they've complained at the softness and the lack of resolution in the West to hi-jacking. Well, we've shown them what we can do…'