Gerald Seymour - A Line in the Sand

She sat in the car, in the silence, in the dark, and her mind wafted between her two contrary worlds: Farida Yasmin or Gladys Eva. He would now be making the final checks on his rifle and would be smearing mud on his face. She shuddered, and tried to pray to his God, her God, to protect him. When she tried to pray, she was Farida Yasmin Jones. The man was guarded. Under her sweater, she was running her fingers over the skin of her stomach, as he had caressed the bird's feathers, as she had stroked his hair. The man was guarded with guns. It was the first moment that she had considered the realities of the guards, the guns. She thought of him shot, bleeding. As her fingers moved faster, pressed harder, she was Gladys Eva Jones. She thought of herself, waiting and alone. She thought of the boots on his neck where her fingers had been, and the pools of blood. Soon, he would be moving off, tracking beside the marshes towards the lights of the village.

Geoff Markham had crossed the orbital motorway and was coming through the dirty sprawl of east London's streets. Littelbaum had slept on the open road but the jerking drive through the traffic had wakened him, and he talked.

"Pathetic, really, a sign of age, that I cannot climb a narrow staircase without a palpitation. I'm fine now, I'm warm, and I've had my necessary sleep. I owe you an explanation why a hundred miles driving out of London, a quick climb of the church tower, and a hundred miles drive back has not been a waste of your time."

Markham stared into the weaving mass of cars, vans and lorries, in heavy concentration.

"I am not a criminologist, or an academic, most certainly not a clinical psychologist. I detest those shrinks who charge fat fees for profiling. I am simply, Mr. Markham, an ageing soldier of the Bureau. I have been in Tehran and Saudi Arabia for the last twenty years of my working life. I said, because I know those places and those people, I could smell him. It's not vanity, it's the truth."

Markham drove past the brightly lit shop windows festooned with bargain stickers and kept his silence. He had noted that not a word of sympathy had been expressed by the American for Frank Perry and his family, as if there were no room in the job for compassion.

"My tools of trade, Mr. Markham, are intuition and experience and I value them equally. Actually, there is little that's complicated. We are told he is late thirties. He would have been eighteen or nineteen years old when the Ayatollah returned from exile. Then comes the war with Iraq. The military are not trusted, the principal fighting is given to the fanatical but untrained youth of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. They fought with a quite extraordinary and humbling innovative ness and dedication. They made up the rule books of combat as they went along. Any man, given the responsibility for a mission of this importance or the importance of the bombings in Riyadh or Dhahran, would have come through that route."

He saw the men who carried the clusters of shopping-bags and the women who pushed prams, and the voice in his ear dripped the story of a world they would not have comprehended. Markham would be joining the great uncomprehending masses because he did not believe he had the ability to affect events.

"Most of life is a linked chain. Think about it the Iranians could not match the quality of the Iraqi weaponry that had been provided by the Western powers. They had to learn to improvise and fight where that hardware was least effective. They chose the most unpromising ground. You won't have heard of these battles, Mr. Markham, but they were of primitive ferocity. Fish Lake and the Jasmin Canal, the Haur-al-Hawizeh marshes, the Shatt-al-Arab waterway and the Faw peninsula. The battleground for the best of the Revolutionary Guard Corps was water and reed-banks. By choosing to fight on such hostile and difficult territory, they nullified the sophisticated equipment of their enemy, and that's why I had to climb to the highest point, the vantage-position. I am not ashamed to say it, I was on my hands and my knees, petrified. I surveyed the battleground, and all I could see was water and marshes. It's where he would be, it is why I said it was like I could smell him… Don't waste fuel by sending up helicopters with infrared, the Iraqis did that, and don't waste people's time by commissioning aerial image-intensified photography, they did that as well. He will be hiding there and an army wouldn't find him. But he has to come out, Mr. Markham, and then, God willing, you shoot him."

One day, before the end of the week, he would tell Littelbaum, insist on it, that he was Geoff, that he was a colleague and not a stranger. He didn't know whether the formality of the American was old-world Iowa courtesy, or the patronizing talk of a veteran to a youngster. But, as the bright lights of the city reflected up into his eyes from the roadway, he listened to every word and believed them. He thought the American brought as much soul to the business as he did when he played a board game with Vicky. It was, actually, distasteful, and near to being disgusting.

"You are a polite man, Mr. Markham. You haven't interrupted my rambling and polite enough to humour me by driving slowly. But if you had been less polite you would have interrupted to ask the question that is most pertinent. What sort of man is he? Let me tell you, he is a child of the revolution. When you were chasing girls, Mr. Markham, he would have been on the barricades facing the bullets of the Shah's Army. When you were studying at college, he would have been learning to survive against heavy artillery barrages and mustard-gas bombing. When you were playing at war in Ireland, he was killing with expertise in the harsh environment of Saudi Arabia… He will be a man who has never known youth, gaiety and mischief, as you have. He will be a man without love."

Ahead of them was the Thames House building, and the light was going over the river.

"It's been a grand day. I've said all I can my part in this is about played out. Would the Tower of London be open tomorrow? My Esther would be properly upset if I didn't send her some photographs of London history. There's not a lot of history in west Iowa… I won't be going down there again, not till it's finished. I don't believe in second-guessing the experts. It's in their hands now, the people with the guns. Remember what I said, a man without love, a man who won't walk away… I'll go down again if there's a body to view. I'd like that, if it can be done inside my schedule."

Markham swung the car down into the basement car-park. He turned off the ignition and stared to the front, before turning to face Littelbaum.

"Can I ask something, no, several things?" he said briskly.

"Haven't I given you the chance? I'm sorry. Fire away."

"It may sound like an idiotic question, Mr. Littelbaum, but do you think you change anything? Do you believe you do anything that's honourable and worthwhile? Do you care about people? Have you ever considered walking away and picking up work where there's something finite at the end? Is it a decent job?"

Markham looked into the American's old eyes and saw the light flash in them.

"That tells me you're thinking of bugging out… It's not for me to offer persuasion either way, but I don't think you're the sort to drop out. I've been through the bad times when it's just filing paper and getting a cold ass in a surveillance stake-out, and there's no big picture to tell me it's worthwhile. I've done that. I hung on in there. I got a grip and I hauled myself up, and I thought whining was poor sport. I believe in what I do. I think I serve my country's interests. There's plenty of places back where I come from that have banks and real-estate offices and insurance companies where I could have gotten work and I think it would have been slow death. But I'm a selfish man and I love what I do, and I aim to keep doing it… If they threw me out tomorrow I might just go find a veterinary surgeon and ask him to put me down. I can't think, Mr. Markham, of a better thing that a man can do than to serve his country and not have it bother him that no one knows his name and no one will ever learn what he did."