Gavin Lyall: The Crocus List

Miss Tuckey had been cornered by half a dozen of the others in the angle of one of the bastions, and Maxim drifted over. They had got her on to the topic of assassination.

"But couldn't you use it to provoke reprisals, to getpeople worked up about the occupation?" That was 'Gremlin' (also a Major, but with the bounce of recent promotion and the smug Calvinism of a Gunner).

"Oh, don't you worry"-Miss Tuckey had to use her classroom voice against the wind-"an occupying power always behaves badly enough without any prompting. If you cause more reprisals the population will probably blame you for making things worse."

"Would you say that it was never a good idea, then?" 'Heracles' asked (not quite Guards, Green Jackets maybe).

"Not never, but the circumstances have to be very special. You have to be very aware of the profit and loss." She paused and pushed her napping silk scarf down into her golfing jacket. "Have you ever heard of Philippe Henriot? He was the Vichy French Minister of Information and a broadcaster. A very prominent collaborator. The Resistance got him in Paris in early 1944. That didn't cause much trouble because he was only French, and it probably did a lot to put off other collaborators. The one that people really argue about was Heydrich; you've heard of him?"

"SS, number two to Himmler."'Gremlin' again.

"That's right. And for counter-intelligence he was a lot better than Himmler; London ordered him killed because he was tracking down our networks. That was in Czechoslovakia in 1942. After that, the SSshot about three thousand people; it was why they destroyed the village of Lidice. Now, you can argue that Heydrich would have done as much as that himself, if he'd lived. He really was a most vile man. But if only they could have made his death seem like an accident we'd have been spared all that and still had him out of the way."

"It wouldn't be easy."

"You're right, it wouldn't. These people are always heavily guarded and their movements are kept secret. But do you see the difference between the two? Henriot had to be seen to be assassinated, as an example-but it could have been any collaborator of equal prominence. With Heydrich we had to getthat man, that cog out of the machine, but it would have been better to make it seem by chance. You do really need great awareness with assassination."

Maximsensed the discontent, almost disappointment, in those around him. Miss Tuckey was also looking round the group and grinning mischievously and he- suddenly saw why. They had come up here to learn techniques and she was trying to teach them attitudes. They wanted to know about sabotage, booby-traps and silent killing. She wanted them to learn silent living.

"Never mind," she said cheerily, "you've got this afternoon on the range, haven't you? You'll enjoy yourselves there."

And indeed they did, enthusiastically returning to tangibles with the study of those foreign weapons most likely to be available to guerillas: Russian and American. They learned, stripped, reassembled and finally fired the AK-47, AKM and M16 rifles, plus one precious example of the new AK-74, then on to the PKM and M60 machine-guns and lastly to the short range for the M3A1 submachine-gun and a clutch of pistols including the Makarov. They ended with bruised shoulders and scratched hands, greasy, soaked in the smell of gunfire and yelling through their deafness, but feeling like real soldiers again and having given away a lot about their backgrounds. Maxim spotted only one other who already knew the weapons as well as he did, but assumed he was spotted in return; although he had made deliberately bad groups with the guns he knew best, it was impossible to be wilfully stupid with a loaded weapon.

In their private mess, the Intelligence Officer had just handed out a 'Secret' folder of news the press wasn't supposed to know, or Int Corps' interpretation of things the press had got wrong. He hovered watchfully as they passed it around. The stories in Continental papers about the Archbishop of Canterbury's relationships with choirboys had been backtracked to a small Italian magazine, a known starting-point for KGB disinformation. It was, Int Corps concluded with a sniff, a crude and hasty reaction to the Archbishop's speech supporting the status quo in West Berlin: Moscow over-reacting to religion yet again.

The commander of the Soviet air division in Afghanistanhad been replaced following the shooting down of the Iranian airliner; it was now believed the airliner could have been hijacked by left-wing Iranians who were trying to escape to Russia.

A Blowpipe anti-aircraft missile, part of a batch en route to Thailand, had gone missing. Int Corps thought it was more likely to be the IRA than Moscow.

"Bang goes one of our choppers in Armagh," observed 'Bluebeard' (a Captain, probably an Engineer).

"Ifthey hit it." That was 'Gremlin' again.

"I thought it was rather accurate?" Maxim provoked innocently.

"It's as good as the training. We put our chaps through seventeen hundred simulated firings before they get to the real thing." 'Gremlin' blithely confirmed that he was a Gunner. "You start getting worried when they pinch a simulator as well."

"That's a relief." The Int Corps officer caught Maxim's eye and smiled; Maxim tried to look friendly but puzzled.

Maxim's sister had been quite right in claiming that the Army has secret plans should there be a nuclear attack on Britain. That is hardly surprising: the military is expected to have plans for every possibility and, naturally, such plans are kept secret. But the slant of the orders might have surprised even Brenda-or perhaps confirmed her worstconvierions.

Like most people, she had assumed that the Army is ultimately controlled by Parliament, just like the Post Office and pub opening times. It is not, not quite. Look at the Army List and you will see that the Commander in Chief is the Monarch (the same is true of the Navy and Air Force). The reasons go back to Parliaments who wanted no responsibility for an Army after they had seen what Cromwell did with his, but the fact remains three centuries later the Army's allegiance is to the Crown and the-unwritten-British constitution, and if the Army ever thought that Parliament was behaving unconstitutionally…

Of course, it won't come to that. But the point is that the Army needs no Parliamentary approval to plan for a duty that antedates even politics by several million years: survival. Any idea of 'taking over' when Parliament is radioactive rubble is largely irrelevant. The Army does not want the job of running Britain; it simply wants to survive.

For a start, there is no question of blocking the main roads out of London and other cities. There might be some point in keeping such roads open, but that is accepted as impossible. If millions of car-owners decide they will be incinerated if they stay put, then no threat of machine-gunning them will make any difference. They will block the roads for themselves, so the Army looks elsewhere for its own survival.

The embryo of that survival is the Gold List: the key personnel-almost all military and almost all men-from the Chiefs of Staff and their Secretariat, the Joint Planning Staff, Joint Intelligence Staff, Joint Admin/Logistics Staff and equivalents from each armed service. Given enough warning, the Gold List will quietly melt away from London by road, in small groups. Hardly anybody will notice: they are not public figures.

But if there is not enough advance warning, then Operation Playpen will begin. Playpen is (or will be) an area of roughly one and a half square miles in central London. It is bounded on the east and south by the river, and completed by a line running along the King's Road, Grosvenor Place and The Mall, the main bastions of its perimeter being Chelsea Hospital, Buckingham Palace and the Old Admiralty and War Office buildings at the top of Whitehall. Londoners are accustomed to a military presence, usually ceremonial, but seldom stop to think just how concentrated that presence is. Playpen encompasses the Chelsea, Duke of York's and Wellington barracks, with the Hyde Park Household Cavalry barracks just a few hundred metres outside the perimeter; in all, purpose-built accommodation for nearly four thousand troops and much of their equipment, and that ignores the military hospitals and several smaller Army establishments inside the ring.