Gerald Seymour - A Line in the Sand

"What's it going to be, Mr. Davies?"

"Orange juice, thanks."

He eased down into the chair.

The west Middlesex whine of the landlord's voice cut the silence.

"Before you go asking, I'm not serving you. Far as I'm concerned, the sooner you turn round and get back out of here the better."

"Oh, yes, very funny. Mine's a pint, and an orange juice, thanks." Perry was fishing for coins in his pocket. Davies glanced down the blackboard on which was chalked the menu for the day -sausage and chips and peas, burger and chips and peas, steak and chips and peas… "I'm not having you in here it's within my rights. I'm not serving you."

"Come on, a pint and an orange juice."

"You want it spelled out? I am not serving you. I've my custom to think of. That man with you, he's carrying a gun. I'm not having that on my premises, and I'm not having you. Got it? Bugger off."

Davies stood up from the chair, saw the stunned shock spreading on his principal's face and the cold hostility of the men he'd called Vince, Gussie and Paul, and the landlord's smirk. His principal clenched his fists and the blood flushed his cheeks. Davies kicked back his chair and strode towards the bar. He caught his principal's sweater and propelled him out through the door, left it open, let the rain spatter in. He heard the laughter behind him.

The rain ran on Perry's face. He seemed dazed and in shock.

"I thought he was a good man ignorant, a bore, but a good man… Jesus, I just don't believe it."

Davies said, "Let's get the hell out."

"Can't credit it, the bloody man… When I was low, last night, didn't think I could get lower, Blake said I should ask for the Al Haig story."

"When you're further down, that's when you'll get the Al Haig story."

They were standing in the middle of the road. Away ahead, wipers flailing, headlights on, was the unmarked car. There was a sign, Public Footpath, to the left. Davies took the principal's arm and headed for it. They walked between the banks of nettles and brambles, stepping over the dog shit, towards the rumble of the sea. They crossed a wooden bridge. The rain was in his hair, in his eyes, wg~ighting his jacket, wrapping the sodden trousers against his legs. He radioed the Wendy house and told them they were going to the beach.

The marshland began a thousand metres to his right. They scrambled up the loose, tumbling stones of the sea wall, clawing their way to the top into the teeth of the wind and the rainstorm. The tide was out. The pebble- and shell-pocked beach ran down to the sea in front of them. Beyond the tide-line were the white crested waves, then the shroud of the mist. His principal shrugged his arm clear. They walked together. The rain plastered his hair across his forehead, and Davies shivered in the cuffing cold of the wind.

His principal stopped, faced the sea and the emptiness, sucked the breath into his lungs and shouted, "You bastards, you fucking bastards! I thought you were my friends."

"What did he do?"

"Why do you need to know?"

"I have to know what he did, and the consequences of it, otherwise I cannot evaluate the reality of the threat."

"Didn't anybody tell you what the end game was?"

"Nobody's told me, and nobody's told him."

Geoff Markham drove. It had taken an hour of the journey to clean the detritus from his mind. Only when they were out on the open road did he begin to push.

"Why ask me?"

"I believe, because you are here, that you were a part of it."

"You need to know?"

"Unless I know, Mr. Littelbaum, I cannot do my job."

The American sighed.

"It's not a pleasant story, Mr. Markham. It's about greater and lesser evils."

One of the room's walls was covered by the big-scale maps.

The largest showed western Iran's seaboard, the Gulf, the eastern coastline of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. A second map showed a city plan of Bandar Abbas and the road going west-north-west, past the docks, past the Hotel Naghsh-e Jahan, towards Bandar-e Khoemir. Tilted against the opposite wall were two display-boards on which were pinned the photographs of selected personnel from the bogus petrochemical plant. Although it was early on a bright morning the blinds of the room's windows were drawn. Hanging in front of them was the blown-up satellite photograph of the manufacturing plant. They waited. They had received the call from the airport, which told them he had arrived safely off the flight. They smoked, sipped coffee and nibbled at biscuits. In the room were two men and a woman from the Secret Intelligence Service, three Americans representing the Agency and the Bureau and the military, and the two Israelis. They waited for him to be brought to the discreet back door, normally used as an entry and exit point for kitchen staff and vetted cleaners. If it had not been for the most recently received intelligence briefings, none of the men and the one woman in the room would have countenanced the plan that was now set in place. They made desultory conversation. None would willingly have given such a pivotal position in the plan to a low-grade engineering salesman, but it was accepted that the choice was not theirs. He was the access point. Only he could tell them whether the plan could be launched or should be aborted. They waited in the room, just as officers of the Israeli Mossad waited in secrecy in the American huts of an Egyptian airbase with the pilots who would fly them south, just as the officers and crew of a United States Navy fast patrol boat waited off the Emirates port of Shaijah. All of them waited for the arrival of the one individual who could give them the information required to launch or abort. He was led in. He was wan, strained, swaying on his feet with tiredness. His hands trembled as he gulped orange juice.

They all knew the risk he had taken. They let his nerves steady. He was sat in a chair and he told them, in a stumbling monologue, all that he knew about the restaurant, about the bus, about the invitation list to the celebration meal. When they had finished with him, teased out of him the precious information on which the plan depended, he was taken out by Penny Flowers to be told of the new life offered him. After he was gone, after the final assessment of his information, the cypher messages were sent and the mission was launched.

"What do you mean the "greater evils"?"

"Try the missile programme."

"Five years ago yes? how far along that line were the Iranians?"

"We were getting a mess of reports on the warheads but all contradictory, on when they'd be ready with nuclear, chemical and microbiological. We could handle that, live with it."

"Explain that, Mr. Littelbaum."

"We thought we had a little time, but not with missiles."

"They weren't contradictory on the missiles?"

"Very clear, very precise. Without missiles, warheads don't count. They were up to speed with the missile programme, maybe two years away."

"You cannot launch a warhead until you've a missile."

"Go to the top of the class, Mr. Markham. We needed to buy the time, to slow the programme. But the installations are underground, bomb-proof, have air defence, with an army round them."

"Enter Juliet Seven."

"He gave us the way in. We couldn't reach the hardware, so the option we had was with their personnel."

The director was in the front of the bus, a double seat to himself. Behind him sat the project managers, the scientists and the foreign engineers. He was relaxed and felt a sense of happy satisfaction. Behind him he heard the gentle, joking banter of the men who had made possible the advancement of Projects 193, 1478 and 972, and the babble of Farsi, Russian, Chinese and the North Koreans' dialect. It was a worthy occasion, the retirement party for his colleague who controlled Project 972, and he had personally taken time to oversee the arrangements in the restaurant, down to the detail of the menu that would be served and the music that would be played. He rocked contentedly in his seat. He had believed, ever since his education in mechanical engineering at Imperial College, London University, that a happy team was a productive team.