1.The Man With The Red Honda

The man had hidden among the long grass for some hours. He had taken his position on his belly against the damp ground as the sun had come up just after five. With a glance about him to make sure that he had not been seen and that he had covered his tracks, he furtively left the warming tarmac and slipped into the thick undergrowth at the side of the road.

He had actually arrived at the scene at four o’clock and parked his red Honda PC50 fifty yards away behind a closed shop. From the plastic carry box (which he had made himself from empty lychee crates) that rested on the rear parcel tray, he took a worn canvas bag that contained a bottle of Sprite, a tin of rice and fish and a homemade wooden box with two crudely attached switches upon it. He knew that up was off and down was on. If he worked from left to right, they would be switched in the correct order. Along with that he had two lengths of wire and another round flat tin, a bit like the old movie reel tins, that weighed about ten pounds. It was packed with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. He had not made the bomb, but had been given clear instructions on how to assemble it once at the scene.

The spot had been chosen because the road, as many roads were on the island, was full of potholes. A new one appeared each day. Occasionally someone would come along and fill it with loose gravel that had been spat from the other pot holes. Whichever happened to be the worst was the one that was filled. It had also been chosen because it was a part of the regular route.

He laid the tin into the pothole and covered it thoroughly with stray macadam, then used more of the gravel to disguise the wires that led from the road to his resting place in the long grass, some fifteen feet away. Cyclone Eve had been kind enough to leave debris in her petulant, destructive, one hundred and ten mile an hour wake, so he embellished the area with some stray palm leaves; nothing too elaborate, just enough to divert suspicion from the tiny scar of loose gravel that ran across the road towards the grass. He was aware that fifteen feet was probably not far enough, but if he could come away from this with no more than impaired hearing, he would be grateful.

At six o’clock an old man had come out of his corrugated iron house, spat chestily and lit a cigarette. He had then got on his rickety black bicycle with rust-stained mudguards, and moved unsteadily up the road, past the pothole, without a second glance.

It was now seven-thirty. Henry Luchooman, a Manchester United supporter and devotee of George Best, checked his watch for the twentieth time in as many minutes. He reached out and took a sip of flat, warm Sprite from the green bottle that he had balanced on a small bump among the grass. He wanted some rice, but felt that he would vomit if he even smelled the food. He was all tension. He only had to wait for fifteen more minutes. That was nothing. He had known about this for days, and those days had ticked by remorselessly as he went about his business with this heavy burden upon his shoulders. He had lived in a permanent state of anxiety, constantly aware of every sight and sound around him, paranoid to the point of convincing himself that he was being followed, suspicious of the slightest creak or lingering footstep. He had gone to work in the local government office and had to force himself to focus upon his work, to gaze into the minutiae of each task simply to distract himself from the fear-tinged excitement that wormed within him.

It wasn’t that he was without conviction, far from it. This had been his idea. He was the driving force behind it. He had battered those in the group into submission with his demagogical rants, whispered harshly in the half light of his dilapidated home that had been flattened by the wrath of Eve at New Year and rebuilt by the end of the next day. His hands had bled in the rebuilding, his tears had fallen onto his dusty feet, but he had persevered with the fanaticism of one with nothing to lose and all to gain. In this war, this war, not an insurrection, not a revolt, not a childish rebellion against the heavy-handed motherland across the sea, in this war, he would take all his frustrations and failures and desires and his distaste for colonial oppression and rebuild his world in the same way that he had rebuilt his house. If he failed, another would come after him and another after him, if necessary until the island was empty of people left with a stomach for war.

The knot in his stomach tightened even at the thought of food and he felt bile rise into the back of his throat. He felt the acid burn his gullet and swallowed.

In the distance he could hear a car. Many cars had passed and none of them had been significant. None had had that distinctive growl that he had grown to know so well; none of them made the same rumble against the gravelly road; none of them reached that point at just before seven forty-five.

He put his hand upon the revolver that had laid at his side like a faithful dog these past few hours. It was a six-round Enfield No 2. He knew this gun well, had grown used to the warmth of the wooden handle, the slightly nauseous smell of the gun-oil, the ten and quarter inches of steel that, in his hands, could kick-start the revolution. The Continental bomb had been nothing. The Port Léon shootings had been nothing. This was what mattered. This was what would make them stand up and take notice of this insignificant little man in his blue, heel-worn flip-flops, filthy beige trousers and faded red T-shirt.

He laid the gun down in front of him, just to his right, where he could grab it. He twisted it an obsessive inch, all the easier for his hand to fall upon it.

The familiar rumble of the car grew louder and women in their saris and men in their filthy trousers, faded T-shirts  and flip-flops walked the edge of the road immersed in gossip, gesticulating as if something extraordinary had happened overnight and they had, just had, to spread the word. Children in school uniform, their skinny legs peeking out from beneath their black shorts, thin arms hanging loosely from paper-white, unwrinkled shirts, books in hands or slung across shoulders in satchels, green dresses swaying above clean, black sensible shoes and short white socks, made their way uncaringly along, oblivious to the wider world, to the troubles and the pains of their parents.

Now the car was fifty feet away. Henry knew that because he had heard the engine sound bounce off the wall of the shop, then fade away as the solidity of the building came to a sudden end and there was nothing else to feed the echo. Henry picked up the wooden box and flicked the left switch down. He could feel his heart pound in his chest. It beat so hard that it seemed to burrow into the ground. It hurt; it actually hurt as it bounced against his sternum in what seemed to him an irregular and breath-stealing fashion. For a moment he felt dizzy and his body was enveloped in coldness as if a spirit had just entered him. A layer of sweat rose among the thin hairs on his top lip that passed for a moustache.

The sound of spitting gravel, like wood upon a fire, grew louder until, for a split second, Henry could see the shadow of the car. This was the moment. This was the culmination of all that planning, all those heated discussions, all that nausea and restless sleep. Right now, in homes scattered across the island, men would be looking at their watches and biting their lips, intolerant to the jabber of their wives and the squealing of their children. They would have cigarettes clasped tightly between their fingers and dry lips and haunted eyes and those close enough would have their ears open for the distant thunder that was about to rent the sky.

As the shadow of the car came level with a certain piece of grass, Henry Luchooman, with fanatical certainty, flicked the second switch.

The world erupted in a filthy orange glow that cast all around it into darkness. The explosion seized the soft morning air and turned it into a fist. The fist flew, grabbed those nearby, picked them up and tossed them into the air, into walls and trees and onto the tarmac, against tin roofs. They connected like rag dolls and fell to the ground. It picked up those same tin roofs and sent them scything though the air to decapitate and amputate. The car was lifted from the ground, motor revved to the max, but with no contact on the road and the wheels spun furiously as they tried to grip something, anything, to spur them on. The car folded in upon itself, then split open and spat itself in pieces across the landscape. It became a weapon of its own as sharp, jagged debris tore free and embedded itself in buildings and in flesh, cut down people - children, mothers and fathers – without effort.

 Henry pushed his face as deeply into the grass as he could, his hands wrapped tightly around his head. He felt the tidal wave of air pass over him and thought for one moment that his skull would be crushed, his body twisted and snapped. He felt his legs lift from the ground and trail in the wake of the storm. He felt hot objects fall upon him, small drops of molten rain that fell from the thunder. He fought off the pain, said to himself it would pass, as all things passed, good and bad. For a moment he became deaf but for a whistle and a waterfall in his left ear, a tumult of sound that threatened to tear him apart.

He put out a hand and grabbed the revolver. With an effort he stood. He was disorientated and dizzy. He felt concussed as if a giant hand had slapped his face and left him reeling and insensible.

In front of him the devastation was indecipherable. There was no longer any recognisable order to the world. All form had gone. People were no longer people but lumps of meat or remnants of limbs. What had once been clothing was now singed shoddy, rags, thrown carelessly, bloodily away to land randomly upon the corners of roofs or among the trees.

The car lay twisted upon the road, its back broken, its windows shattered, it tyres flat or shredded. Flames licked at the paintwork and blistered it. Henry staggered towards it with the gun raised. The world swam before him and he was unsure if he was going in the right direction. He vomited as he walked and felt the warmth of his stomach contents hit his chest and his sandalled toes.

He narrowed his eyes and focused upon the car. He could see the driver. His head rested upon his shoulder at a ridiculous angle. The bones in his neck must have turned to jelly as the blast wave had travelled through him and turned his insides out. In the back seat was the target, the Minister for Justice, Patanjali Banahatti. The explosion had been focused upon the front of the car. The minister was still breathing. He was a bloody mess, the right side of his face torn open, his nose split and his shirt all but torn from him, but his chest rose and fell stutteringly, quickly and shallowly, as it struggled for air against the flailing shattered ribs that pierced his left lung and his stomach. Somewhere inside his mind he tried to make sense of the chaos.

Henry went to the shattered window.

‘Minister,’ he said in English. ‘Open your eyes, Minister.’ The Minister’s eyes opened, purely as a reflex to the sound. They looked unsteadily at Henry. ‘You are hereby sentenced to death for treason against the people of this island, for coercion with the colonialist enemy and for the oppression of the freedoms and illegal imprisonment of my brothers and sisters in the Liberation Movement. I state this in English, the language of your treacherous heart.’

Henry fired a single shot into the minister’s head. The minister did nothing but cease to exist. Henry stared at him, at his half-open and unseeing eyes. He had expected more. He was proud of the speech he had made, that he had run over and over in his head, but he had somehow expected more.

He moved away from the car and walked as quickly as his shaken body would allow to the shop where he had parked his moped. He closed his eyes to the devastation. It was irrelevant. It was war. War had no rules. This was an absurdity that man had developed, that war should have boundaries, like a bloody game of cricket. No. You were either in a war or you weren’t and, if you were, then there were no rules. Everyone was expendable, a target, complicit, women, children, friends, comrades; there was no room for emotion.

He walked behind the shop and climbed onto his bike. He wasn’t sure if he could ride it he felt so disconnected, so light-headed, but the sound of the tiny engine brought him focus. He twisted the accelerator and bumped across the uneven ground onto the road. After five hundred yards, Henry Luchooman turned off the main road, onto a dusty track between high stalks of sugar cane and disappeared.

2.The Sound Of War

Mike Ward heard the explosion. It came across as no more than muffled, distant thunder, but experience had taught him the difference between the rumble of charged particles ten miles up and the vicious bite of explosive into the ground and its brutal echo into the sky.

He went outside immediately and climbed onto the flat roof of the bungalow in Sussex Close, on Maravaya island’s old naval base. The solid blue sky and the single white hot eye of the sun, even so early in the day, were reflected dully in the silver paint that covered the roof. There were old footprints in the paint, like those left by the dinosaurs in mud, where the paint had melted in the heat as people had worked on the roof and forever left their mark.

Ward gazed towards the horizon, to the South East, from where he was sure the sound had come. Sure enough, in the distance, a thick black rope of smoke rose towards the sky, unfettered by winds, puffed up and blotchy from the fierce heat below and within. He surmised it to be on the road between Vasca and Culedipe, some four miles away. He put his hands across his chest and imagined the chaos that lay beneath the dark doom-laden genie that billowed into the clear sky. He had been there the night the bomb had gone off in Vasca. He had seen the death, the limbs, the unidentifiable remains, the front of the Continental Hotel that gaped at the night like a slack, toothless mouth. He had known that that would not be the end of it. It never was. Despite the death of those responsible, there was always a queue of others willing to take their place, the fanatics, the gullible, the lost and lonely, the alienated outsiders striving for a voice in a loud and unsympathetic world.

He took a 555 State Express cigarette from the packet in his shirt pocket and lit it. He bought them because he liked the packet. Like all the cigarettes here, they were as rough as a woodman’s chin, but he had grown to like the harsh bite in the back of his throat and the satisfying feeling of actually inhaling something.

As he descended the roof, the maid appeared in the short driveway from around the high bamboo hedge that surrounded his small bungalow.

‘Quest-ce que c’est, monsieur?’

Ward shrugged. ‘Je ne sais pas, Alice.’ He hung momentarily from the car port roof, then dropped down to the ground. He brushed the dried up moss and Cyclone Eve debris from his hands. ‘I don’t know. There is some smoke, but other than that…’

Alice looked at him with a sideways glance which told him that she knew he wasn’t telling the truth. ‘I heard it, Monsieur Mike. Something went bang.’ She spread her fingers in dramatic fashion and mimed the mushroom of an atomic cloud. There was no humour in her eyes. They were flooded with uncertainty and fear.

‘I don’t know,’ repeated Ward. ‘Perhaps a car crash.’

Alice shook her head and walked into the house. ‘C'est le son de la guerre,’ she whispered loudly, almost afraid to share what she knew to be the truth.

Ward said nothing. Whatever he said, he would not win. He would either stoke the fires of her fear or leave her feeling patronised. He did not want to do either. They parted in the hallway, she into the small kitchen at the front of the bungalow, Ward into the lounge at the back. He went to the veranda (which was really no more than a raised and covered patio but, as they said, a veranda is grander) and sat on one of the two deep wicker chairs that looked out over his tiny garden. It was peaceful. At night he could hear crickets and the bellow of frogs from the pool at the local Special Mobile Force base. They gathered there at night to sing and rested in the day, playboys all.

So, it was on. The platitudes and period of grace that followed the shootout at the old sugar mill, when everyone thought the episode had been put to rest and the rebellion ended, was over. Alice was right. War had begun.

Ironically, sadly, it had never been intended. The repulsive stench of Harish Gole, that revolting self-serving Machiavelli who had stirred the islanders up, still hung in the air. He had done what he had done to meet his own ends. There had been no place for rebellion in his mind, for the elevation of others, merely the use of innocent and inflamed passions to lend grist to his mill. Yet he had awakened within those innocents, those good-hearted people, a dormant resentment, a volcanic potential, which had failed to be contained in the wake of the earthquake that rocked the foundations of this small island nation.

Damn, he thought. He had come halfway across the world for a bit of peace and quiet, to escape a feckless wife and the enemy of memory and he had walked into a war.

Still, it wasn’t his war.

His last book had been written, finished, dispatched and published and, by all accounts, was selling well from Brighton to Bradford to Boat of Garten. He was fine. The articles he had done about the island for the National Geographic had done very well and had generated more work and a reprint in various forms of one particular article (about the famous Island Pigeon) all over the world.

Now he had started, indeed broken the back of, his next book and was most definitely on a winning streak. No punch up in the Indian Ocean was going to ruin that for him.

He heard the phone ring in the hallway, then heard Alice’s voice as she answered. ‘Hello? Oui. He is here. Moment.’

Ward heard the drag of her flip flops against the lounge carpet.

‘Monsieur Mike,’ she said breathlessly. Her face was beaded with sweat from whatever she had been doing in the kitchen. ‘It is for you.’

It always amused Ward when she said that. He wasn’t sure quite who else it could have been for.

He craned his neck towards her. ‘Who is it, Alice?’

‘The High Commissioner, Monsieur.’

Ward rolled his eyes. ‘Tell him I’m dead,’ he said through clenched teeth.

The red Mazda RX3, which Ward had bought from the departing ex-pat prison governor a few months ago, took the climb into Flora with ease. The 1.6 litre Wankel rotary engine made light work of anything the island could throw at it though, like all cars on the island, it was a constant victim of the uneven roads. There was no Mazda dealer on the island and it worried Ward that, when the suspension finally snapped like an osteoporotic spine, he would be left with no more than either scrap metal or an enormous bill.

It hadn’t actually been the High Commissioner himself on the phone, it had been his number two, an obsequious little man named Anthony Fitzgerald, who liked, to Ward’s horror, to be called Fitz. For that reason alone, Ward called him Tony. It made him purse his lips and narrow an eye and forced him to repress the need to correct. Ward had met him a couple times at socials when he had slipped the HC leash and had found him greasy in the extreme. The High Commissioner himself he had managed to avoid, but if Fitzgerald was any indication of the new standards...

Ward didn’t like Fitzgerald for these simple reasons, but he also disliked him for the insanely petty reason that he was Caddy’s replacement. Despite his treachery and double-dealing and the harm he had done, Ward had liked Caddy tremendously. He had had a joie de vivre that so many lacked in these serious times of shortages and Cold War; he took you as he found you and would do pretty much anything for you. His betrayal had stung, deeply, but Ward wished he had not died. Ward wished that he had lived long enough to ensure that the hideous, fawning Anthony Fitzgerald had instead been transferred to the darkest Congo or the outer reaches of Burma.

Ward turned the Mazda through the gates of the British Embassy. He had sworn he would not come back here. He felt a coldness run through him and a dew of sweat spangle his top lip. He could see Caddy dead upon the steps, the two SMF men with their rifles held at their shoulders as they fired upon the foolish man. He could still feel his own helplessness and confusion and, worst of all, his own fear. It was something he would have to get used to. We are all born heroes until that moment when the truth stutters your breath and flutters your heart, then you realise that you are the same as everybody else and you loathe yourself for it. He had grabbed Rose and run. He had not dived upon Caddy and swiftly disarmed him as his own myth envisaged. He was human and he felt shame for that.

As for Rose, the beautiful, dark-haired, emerald-eyed haunting, spoiled, self-serving, adorable, spiteful, duplicitous, goddess Rose. He could still smell her perfume, L'Interdit, by Givenchy, which still made him want to throw up when he caught a whiff of it, could still feel her lips and hear her laugh. My God! What a screwed up little girl she had been. He almost felt sorry for her husband, poor Alec Trelawney, the pitiable, naïve fool.

Ward was surprised that there was still no one on the gates. They should have had a couple of SMF chaps checking on who went in and out, but he just drove the Mazda through the gates and onto the gravel where the pitter-patter of the stones spat like rain on the underside of the car.

He parked at the bottom of the wide steps that led to the large glass, wood-framed doors of the High Commissioner’s residence and turned the engine off.

At the top of the steps he could see Fitzgerald. The man was actually washing his hands upon the air like some Dickensian caricature. And he was sure that was a wig. It was too…perfect. He prayed briefly for a strong gust of wind to kidnap it. None came.

Fitzgerald came down the steps, a tight smile upon his face, his brown, wet eyes all over Ward, and waited, a couple of steps up, his hands rolling like tiny waves over one another, as Ward, with great reluctance, opened the door.

Fitzgerald held out a limp hand. ‘Mr Ward. Thank you for coming.’

Ward closed the car door and walked past Fitz. ‘Tony.’

Fitz followed him up in the quick, light-footed manner of a pickpocket and squeezed through the doors before Ward managed to get through. He stood before Ward and blocked his way. His right arm invited Ward to go to the right. ‘If you could wait in the front room. The HC will be along in one moment. He’s just finishing a call to the UK.’

Ward went into the large front room that was used for formal occasions. The residence was, for the island, an enormous place. When you stepped through the front door, you were greeted by a large staircase that went off to the right and left to the twenty-odd rooms that the upper floor held.

This floor held the room in which Ward now stood and beyond that a smaller family room which had been used by successive occupants as a private area. Across the entrance hall was a smaller lounge, presumably used for those more intimate private meetings and, next to that, the office where the High Commissioner carried out the work that needed to be done outside the office hours of the High Commission in Port Léon. He knew from Trelawney how important this place had been, equally as important as the Port Léon offices and possibly less prone to scrutiny by the opposition, whoever that happened to be this week. Downstairs, beyond the kitchens, he knew that there was a tight maze of corridors with rooms at all sides, most of which the public never saw. The sensitivities of the Cold War world needed concrete and steel to hide behind.

Ward lit a cigarette and went to the window, which looked out upon some well-manicured lawns and the driveway where he had left the Mazda. Between the window and the driveway was the long veranda that ran the length of the house, which was filled with the ubiquitous wicker tables and chairs. It was a delightful property and Ward thought that it had an element of Gone with the Wind about it, a good place to bring up a batch of daughters and spend the evenings upon the veranda sipping a good whisky and chatting about anything at all to a pretty, loyal and intelligent wife.

He turned away from the window. It wasn’t for everyone.

As he was about to make himself comfortable in one of the deep armchairs, he heard footsteps upon the parquet flooring in the entrance hall. The High Commissioner entered the room, his hand outstretched, a soft and genuine smile on his face and a hint of harassment in his dark brown eyes. He brushed aside a lock of loose salt and pepper fringe.

‘Mr Ward. I am so sorry to keep you waiting. Please, take a seat. I’m sure you’ll understand that things have taken a bit of a turn this morning.’

Ward sat in the chair that he had just been about to sit in when the High Commissioner had come in. It enveloped him and made him realise just how rudimentary and downright uncomfortable the furniture at Sussex Close was.

The High Commissioner sat in the other chair which was almost opposite Ward and crossed his legs. Both chairs looked inwardly. Ward’s instinct was to pick his up and turn it towards the door. He never liked to sit with his back to the door.

‘What can I do for you, sir?’ Despite himself, Ward was determined to remain courteous.

The High Commissioner held up his hand. ‘Well, you can do away with the whole ‘sir’ business for a start. If Her Majesty were here I might have to insist, but she’s not, so I won’t.’ He smiled amiably. His eyes creased as he smiled and gave away an underlying humour that was never far from the surface. Whether this was due to the job or the fact that he was naturally friendly, Ward was unsure, but he sensed the latter. ‘Is it too early for a whisky?’ He looked at his watch.

‘The sun’s up,’ said Ward.

The High Commissioner nodded approvingly and went to the drinks cabinet. ‘That is a very sensible rule, Mr Ward.’

‘Mike,’ said Ward. ‘Mike is fine.’

‘And, as I’m sure you know, I am Lawrence Stuart. Please call me Lawrie. With a W, not a U. God knows why. These are the things our parents foist upon us and they tend to stick.’

He poured two generous drinks, handed one over to Ward and sat down again.

‘You’re not daft, Mike, so I won’t assume that I’m talking to an idiot. You will have heard the noise this morning and your experience as a journalist will have told you that it was an explosion and I have no doubt that you will have seen the smoke on the road to Culedipe.’ He paused as Ward nodded. ‘I’m sure that your recent experiences with my predecessor will also make you aware that we face a rather difficult situation.’

Ward remained silent but attentive. He was waiting for the punchline. There was always a punchline with these people.

‘We think it’s the start of something big. Not just a civil war, though to all intents and purposes that’s how it will appear to the outside world, but we’re fairly certain that the USSR and the Libyans are involved. The ship that the SMF took so easily, you remember?’

Ward nodded again. The whisky was relaxing him, a bit too much. ‘The Stella Clavis wasn’t it?’

‘You have a good memory, Mike. Yes. The Stella Clavis was registered in Libya. The guns on board we have since found out came from Libya. Financial backing might well have come from the Eastern bloc. In fact, it probably did. Some of the paperwork on the ship suggested as much.’

‘The Stella Clavis was a diversion,’ said Ward. ‘That was established. The real shipment was on board a different and unidentified ship. They gave up a few guns and men in order to allow the bigger shipment to be landed. I was at the assault on the High Commission in Port Léon. I heard and saw the automatic rifles that came in. God knows what else there was, but judging by this morning’s little escapade, I’d say they managed to sneak in more than a couple of guns, wouldn’t you?’

‘Can you keep a secret, Mike?’

‘Christ, no! I’m a journalist.’

Stuart’s disarming smile slowly lit his face again, but his eyes held an iciness that stood starkly against the warmth of their brown and the good-natured creases around them. ‘I’ll risk it, I think. Gole was Russia’s man. Oh, he was also a blackmailer and a murderer, but he was Russia’s man.’

Ward sat up and eyed Stuart with suspicion. ‘How do you know that?’

‘He was recruited at Cambridge. We know that for certain.’

‘That’s not what I heard. I understood he was pretty mercenary in his attitudes and would basically sell himself to the highest bidder.’

‘Oh, that’s true too. But he was Russia’s man. There’s no doubt. He worked independently, but only with permission. If he had crossed the line, he would have been hauled back to Lubyanka and a lifetime of fun and laughter under the motherland’s suffocating wing. He was too much of a good-time-boy to risk that, so he toed the line.’

‘And how long have we known?’ Ward was infuriated that this should all come out now. How much damage could have been avoided if they had simply arrested Gole years ago or even had him killed?

‘Long enough,’ answered Stuart firmly. The line had been drawn. ‘You know as well as I do that it’s sometimes better to let things take their natural course...’

‘Like today?’ snapped Ward.

Ward sensed Stuart bristle slightly. ‘Sometimes, yes. Come on, Mike. You’ve been in war zones. You’ve seen the politics in action.’ Stuart stood up and withdrew a pipe from his pocket. He put it between his teeth, sucked on it, then went to a tin of Ogdens St Bruno Flake which lay on the drinks cabinet. He took out a rupee, twisted the lid off and began to slowly, meticulously, fill the pipe. ‘You’ve interviewed your fair share of despots in your time. Would you have ever refused the interview because they were rapists or murderers? Of course not. You would no more let your moral frills get in the way of a good interview than we would let them get in the way of stopping a greater evil. There is always something bigger around the corner. Monsters hide around corners, Mike. Big ones.’ He damped the tobacco down lightly with a finger and patted his pocket for a box of matches. With utter concentration, he lit a match, lifted it to the pipe in his mouth and sucked gently on the stem as the match burned down. Just before the flame reached his fingers, he removed it from the pipe bowl, blew it out and returned to his chair in a blue fog of smoke. Ward could tell from the well-practised routine that Lawrie enjoyed his pipe. ‘The secret, of course, is to know which monster hides around which corner. In the case of Gole, it was always the old bear. The old Russian bear.’

Christ, thought Ward. That’s what Jimmy, his old friend at the FO had said. He had used the word ‘recruited’ when they had spoken on the phone, but it had got lost among so many other words. He’d been away from the copydesk for too long. How could he fail to notice something so obvious? Had Jimmy been giving him the heads-up? Or had it just slipped out accidentally? Maybe Jimmy had assumed that Ward knew that Gole was connected or that he would make the connection. What an idiot! What a bloody idiot! The only comfort was that, in the end, that single fact had made very little difference. Gole was still a self-serving bastard, was still a mercenary and the poor sods who had become embroiled in his game would still have died, no matter the reason.

‘Don’t feel too bad,’ said Stuart. ‘He fooled a lot of people and Her Majesty’s government has played its cards close to its chest. It has had to. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. You were invaluable in the whole Trelawney affair and perhaps should have been shown more...respect.’ He scratched at his head with the stem of his pipe, then returned it to his mouth. ‘You are however a man of the world, Mike and should by now be able to take this sort of thing on the chin. God knows, I’ve had to many a time. It comes with the territory.’

Ward understood the logic. The High Commissioner was right and there was no point in his holding some sort of childish grudge because he had not been told everything. This wasn’t the playground. Why should he have been? He was a writer on a short-term overseas stay. What the hell had any of this to do with him?

‘It’s okay,’ said Ward. ‘And you’re right. I’m angrier with myself more than anyone else.’

‘Well, don’t be. We’re all pawns. Sometimes it’s better that way. Deniability and all that.’ Stuart paused and looked at Ward through a blue haze of smoke; his eyes narrowed, perhaps against the smoke, perhaps in contemplation.

Here it comes, thought Ward. Here comes the punchline.

Stuart crossed his legs and pointed the pipe stem in Ward’s direction. ‘You served, didn’t you?’

Ward’s heart fell. He had been expecting the unexpected, but this was definitely not the unexpected that he had expected. ‘I resigned,’ he said.

‘I know. Why?’

‘Are you asking questions to which you already know the answers?’

‘Sometimes, yes, but I can’t know what was in your head.’

‘Give it a couple of years and we’ll have machines for that.’

‘Well,’ said Stuart a little testily, ‘we’re not quite there yet, so help me out, would you?’

Ward lit another cigarette and finished his drink. He went over to the drinks cabinet, refilled both their glasses and sat down again. He was trying very hard to fight his natural belligerence. He always found it difficult to accept that the shudders of the external world should have any effect upon his internal stability. He sighed deeply as if, by doing so, the weight of his breath could suppress the devil inside.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I served. As I’m sure you already know.’

‘First battalion, the Devonshire and Dorset Regiment,’ confirmed Stuart.

Ward shifted uncomfortably in his seat and took a large mouthful of the whisky. He would need it if he was going to dredge the murky seas of his memory. ‘Yes. We were posted to Cyprus to stifle the activities of the EOKA, who were looking to break away from the UK and became a part of Greece. We were involved in foot and vehicle patrols, road-blocks, business checks, ambushes, weapons searches, all the stuff we do in Northern Ireland and I’m sure will end up doing here.’

‘And?’

‘I enjoyed it. It was warm. The food was good. You got to swim in the sea without risking septicaemia or hypothermia, unlike dear old Blighty. For an eighteen year old kid who had joined the army in order to get away from the mundanity of working in Woolworths or the local government offices, it was heaven-sent.’

Ward found himself smiling at the memory.

‘So what went wrong?’

Ward’s blue-grey eyes bit into Stuart’s sunbaked, face. ‘Everything.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, I was under the rather naïve impression that we might have been wanted on the island, that we were there to improve things. That was why I joined the forces, to try and do something positive, not simply to act as scaffolding for a crumbling empire. They were childish expectations but then, I was still really a child.’

Ward put his head back in the large, comfortable chair and stared at the ceiling. He could still recall the smell of the place, the pine, the lavender and Jasmine, the souvlaki and the sea, the warmth upon his skin as they went about in shirt-sleeve order, the blueness of the sky and the mirror of the sea.

‘’We were at a road block and stopped a vehicle. It was a family, just a family, four kids, a wife and her husband at the wheel. We must have caught him on a bad day because he started mouthing off. We told him to get out of the car, but he refused. I went to open the driver’s door, but he pulled away, went through the barrier, lost his windscreen and beetled off along the dusty road. I fired a shot. The next thing I knew, most of the vehicle was raining down upon us along with bits of kids. It turned out that the boot had been full of rather sensitive nitro-based explosive. He thought we were going to do a search, got uptight and ran. He took his family with him.’

Stuart shrugged. ‘Sounds to me like you were doing your job.’

‘No argument here. The problem was…’ Ward paused, careful in his choice of words. ‘I enjoyed it. Not in any sadistic sense, not in the sense that it brought out an underlying bloodlust, just that aroma of power. I had killed a man and his family and was being told officially that it was the right thing to do. I was given a big slap on the back and a cigar and brandy by the CO. And I lapped it up.’

‘As anyone in your position would. Come on, Mike. You were, as you say, a kid. It was all a big adventure. How many served out there? Fifteen thousand? I bet ninety percent of them were in exactly the same boat as you.’

‘I’m sure they were,’ agreed Ward. ‘But this whole power thing went to my head. I began to think that I was invincible, that I was without boundaries, that I was unaccountable. The truth is, I was. We all were. Most nights, me and a few of the boys would go out to where we knew, for certain, that there were EOKA members and either plant evidence or simply beat them to a pulp until they gave us information. Some died. That’s war though, isn’t it, Lawrie. True war can have no boundaries. Geneva? That means nothing. If you want to win, you do whatever it takes. No one ever asked where the evidence came from or why the bodies were there. They just saw it as a chance to gain a foot in no-man’s-land.’

‘So what went wrong?’

Ward squinted uncertainly at Stuart and sat forward. ‘Did you hear what I just said?’ He tapped forcefully at his chest. ‘Me. Me. I went wrong. Christ! Do you not see how many lines I crossed? How many laws I broke? How absolutely wrong I was?’

Stuart struck a match and slowly and deliberately relit his pipe, dabbing occasionally at the hot tobacco with his finger as he sucked on the stem to draw oxygen and feed the flame. ‘Honestly, no. We’ve all been there in some form, Mike. I certainly have. Do I have regrets? Of course, but they do not outweigh the goodness, the necessity, of my actions.’

‘Well, that’s where we differ, I’m afraid.’

‘So what changed?’

‘I got caught. One night, about midnight, I was in Akrotiri, up to the usual. The man we wanted was in his house. We went in the back door, crept through the house, up to the bedroom and I slit his throat. Neither he nor his wife knew a thing about it. On the way out, his kid saw me. He must have got up to pee or something. I was covered in blood from where the artery had erupted before I could get out of the way. The boy stared at me and, even though he was only six or seven years old, he knew what I had done and worse, why I had done it. He knew that his father was in the EOKA and he understood the whole concept of the struggle. At six years old. He should have been doing what any normal six year old should do; playing, mischief, stealing apples or whatever. He made no sound, he just stared and he was full of hate. I mean, full. I knew that one day he would be old enough to come for me and that all his brothers and cousins and sisters and their friends and all the next generations were there in the queue and that they would never surrender. I could see it in his eyes.’ Ward fell silent as he saw the look on the boy’s face.

‘Did you kill him?’

‘It crossed my mind, but, no, I didn’t. I came to the realisation that I was wasting my time…’

Stuart jumped in. ‘Not that you were wrong?’

Ward forced a laugh. ‘Of course I was bloody wrong! It wasn’t what I had joined up for and it wasn’t what I had wanted to become, but I suppose that wasn’t what struck me at that moment, that came a couple of hours later back at base.’ Ward drained the remains of his whisky and put the glass down on a table next to the chair. ‘Anyway, that’s that. I bought myself out and buggered off back to England where I went to uni and gained a degree in journalism.’

Stuart silently allowed what Ward had said to sink in. As he watched the High Commissioner relight his pipe, Ward realised that it had become a useful delaying tool, a chance to take a moment out and reassess.

‘How about an early lunch?’ asked Stuart.

Ward looked at his watch. It was almost eleven-thirty. Time had flown. He didn’t really want to stay. He wanted to crawl on his belly away from this place and retreat to the safe chatter of his typewriter, but if he drove now, with the whisky inside him, he knew that he would probably end up in a ditch at the side of the road and an enormous repair bill for the car, always assuming he didn’t take out a couple of innocents on his way out.

‘Did you allow me to drink too much so that I would be forced to stay for lunch?’ he asked, but this time with a smile.

Stuart blinked slowly as a rather satisfied smile played across his lips. ‘I’ll take that as a yes.’

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