Gerald Seymour - A Line in the Sand

The door closed behind him.

He carried the bags down the carefully raked gravel drive. He stopped in the road, saw the light peeping from the curtains where she was, then turned and walked towards the village and the green. He was called on the radio and was told the stalker's report: the man had moved, was lost. He started to run.

He pounded down the road towards the house.

There was the slight scent of damp in the air as Meryl unpacked in the small bedroom.

She took from the suitcase only what she would need for that night, and what Stephen needed.

Simon Blackmore came up quietly behind her.

"She was tortured. What they did to her was unspeakable. Amnesty International members from all over the world bombarded the dictatorship with letters demanding her freedom, but above all it was her own courage that saved her life, and her determination to come back to me.~ "You make me feel small, and my own problems minuscule. Inevitable, I suppose, but already I regret leaving Frank."

"I don't think it appropriate that we start a seminar on man's inhumanity, but it's necessary that you understand us. We all have our own opinions and thank God our own consciences to drive us. Enough of that. Now, Meryl, smile, please."

She did, her first in six days.

"I'm going to talk to Luisa about antiques and gardening there's places round here where you can still get a good old table or a chest at a real knock-down price.

"And I'll talk about wine, and downstairs there is a bottle open and waiting."

"So, you've lost him."

Cox was hurrying, and for once ignored his habits: didn't go to his office first to shed his coat, smooth his hair and straighten his tie. Straight to the central desk in the work area. He had been called from dinner.

"Bloody marvelous. What else have you got?"

He was the man in charge, and he threw the responsibility of failure at his subordinates.

"Thought there were a few things I could rely on, wrong again, thought I could rely on you not to lose him."

Fenton, who had already ladled abuse at his own subordinate, Markham, squirmed. Parker kept her head down. The others at the table, white-faced, avoided Cox's eyes, except for Duane Littelbaum, who eased his shoes off the table, and laid down his Coca-Cola can.

"His advantage is small, and temporary only," Littelbaum murmured.

"He has to come to the house. If he's moved he'll come tonight. You should relax… We all get scared when it's out of our hands, you're not unique."

Cox glanced at him savagely.

"What's he got?"

Fenton dived for the book on the table, as if it were his saviour.

"What we think, from the questioning of Yusuf Khan, it's probably an RPG-7, rocket anti-tank grenade launcher. If the indications from that bedside conversation are correct then he has a weapon with a maximum effective range of three hundred metres, particularly useful at night."

The old warhorse from B Branch snatched the book from Fenton.

"It has an internally lit optical sight for night shooting, or might have the passive starlight scope. Against tanks, even a deflection shot, it'll put a five centimetre hole through around twenty-five centimetres of armour-plate. At a hundred metres it cannot miss."

Cathy Parker leaned over the warhorse's shoulder.

"It can penetrate at least twenty centimetres of sandbags, fifty centimetres of reinforced concrete, and not that it applies well over a hundred centimetres of earth and log bunker…"

"Christ…" Cox shuddered.

Littelbaum smiled and swung his feet back on to the table.

"But it has a signature, flash and smoke discharge. It's best if he fires, then you locate him and you go get him."

"If there's anyone left alive, afterwards, to get him." Cox left them, in their silence, kicked open his office door, and threw his coat on to the floor.

"It'll be tonight, he'll come tonight."

Frank Perry looked away from Davies. He sat on the floor, his body weight against the bottom of the door. Ask a bloody stupid question and get a bloody unwanted answer.

There was a small, right-angled space, between the hall and the kitchen door, protected by interior walls. The question why had Davies gone upstairs and dragged the double mattress off the spare bed and the single mattress off Stephen's bed and wedged them on their sides against the two interior walls, and made an igloo between the hall and the kitchen door? Why? He sat and cradled a tumbler of whisky, no water. He could have asked Blake and Paget as they heaved in the sandbags they'd filled. The sand and the empty bags had come an hour earlier. There had been a sharp exchange at the front gate because the delivery driver had dumped the sand and said it wasn't on his work docket to stay and help fill the bags. Perry sat with the weight of the vest on his shoulders. Davies was inserting a chair into the igloo space, a hard chair from the dining room, pushing its seat against the kitchen door, and then he draped the ballistic blanket over its back. The sandbags were already in place at the hall end of the igloo. He drank the whisky, which burned in his throat and upper stomach, the third one that Blake had poured him. He thought, pretty soon, he should go and piss.

It was better that she had gone, with Stephen. He could sense the change in the men's mood, like they'd cleared their decks. While Davies built the igloo, Blake was checking the weapons, and he'd cleared all the rounds out of the machine-gun magazines then loaded them again. There was a box on the carpet, beside his feet, with the big red cross on it and he'd been asked again for his blood group. He'd given it to them a week ago, but they'd said they were just checking and he'd heard them talking hospitals. With Meryl and Stephen gone, what had changed, he thought, was that they no longer had the responsibility for the protection of a human being. Frank Perry was an item, he was baggage, protected because of its symbolic value. He gulped the whisky. Paget and Rankin were in the hall. They were going off duty, the new shift was in the hut. What he didn't understand was that they seemed neither pleased to be going off duty nor reluctant to leave. By the time they were at the door, Paget and Rankin were already muttering about the different brands of thermal socks.

Davies said, "He's moved. We don't know where he is or where he's coming from. Would you, please, Mr. Perry, go quickly to the lavatory, then settle into the proteded space. Because he's moved we think he'll hit tonight."

Perry downed the drink, stood and slurred his laugh.

"Bit overdoing it, yes, bit over the top, yes, for one man with a rifle?"

"We don't think it's a rifle, Mr. Perry, we think it'll be an anti-tank armour-piercing rocket launcher."

Ask a bloody stupid question… He used the cover of the stones of the churchyard, those that were beyond the throw of the coloured lights from the church itself.

Valiid Hossein had the weapon tilted against his shoulder, and the barrel with the two-kilogram projectile loaded, gouged into his flesh. From the churchyard he could watch the lights of cars on the road. It was important to him to find the pattern they made. The slow-moving patrols of security men would be the same here as outside the bases of the Americans in Riyadh or Jeddah. Patrols were always predictable it was what they did. The slow cars came by, going into the village and out of it every nine minutes, with only a few seconds' difference in each journey.

From the churchyard, he slipped over a wall and into a garden. He crossed that garden, and two more. Often, at the Abyek camp, he had practice-fired the RPG-7, and it was simple and effective. He had fired it in the Faw marshes when the Iraqis had counterattacked against the bridgehead with armoured personnel carriers and the T-62 amphibious capability tanks. He knew well what it could do… He moved across two more gardens. He would have preferred to be close, so that the target man could see the blade or the barrel. It was better when they saw it, and the fear flitted over their faces. Then he felt the excitement in his groin.