CONDITION BLACK MASTER Read online

  Desmond didn't mind the banter . . . Not a bloody sound in the back bar of the pub to mix with the God-awful noise of the juke box. Old Brennie looking at his flies, Fran at the smoke-stained ceiling, Billy and Zap in their beer and caught in mid-sentence, Zack in his fag packet, Kev rooted with the handful of coins he was going to feed into the jukebox, Johnny blushing because he was the youngest and the one who always ended with the rap.

  He saw the feathers on Fran's jersey. He didn't care, bigger game around than pheasants off the estate, and she'd only be making 75 pence a bird off old Vic, and that was plucked.

  He knew them all. They were the flotsam of the village and they were the strength of the village, they were the heart of it . . .

  He saw the young man.

  He saw the young man, and then behind the young man he saw the stooping figure with the heavy-frame spectacles and the curled black hair receding and the sports jacket that was a half size too small. He saw the young man.

  The young man gazed back into his face. Every last one of them other than the young man seemed to cower away from him, even Fran who was wild was back on her heels. Not the young man.

  He saw the tan. He saw the short-cut fair hair. He saw the eyes that were bright with anger at him. There was no fear in that face. He had seen the photograph.

  They had shown it him the first day that he had been assigned to the posting in the village up the lanes. It had been a good photograph.

  He saw the metalled handle of the pistol bulging out from the young man's belt.

  He looked into the face of Colt.

  The jukebox died.

  The silence suffocated the back bar of the pub.

  He knew it was Colt.

  Desmond had been to the Ashford Police Training College. At Ashford they taught a young constable how to look after himself if he were trying to break up a fight outside a pub at closing time, how to intervene in a domestic row, how to tackle a fleeing thief.

  He had been good on unarmed combat. Not firearms, though, they didn't teach firearms. Guns were for the zombie men who guarded the Northern Ireland politicians who had their gentry farms in the county, and for the squads that were detailed to protect the Royals when they came to open a new annexe in the hospitals of the local market towns. He knew sweet nothing about confronting an armed man. He was into the back bar, halfway across it towards the bar counter. Couldn't just turn, not on his bloody heel, like nothing had happened, and walk out. At the Police Training College they had said that if guns were involved then there were no heroes required, whistle up on the radio and get scarce till the professionals arrived. He had no radio. He could not turn back for the door. He saw the hand of Colt on his hip and close to the handle of the pistol.

  No, he wasn't a hero . . . It was his instinct for survival.

  He was a vertigo man on the cliff top.

  He lunged.

  If he had not tried to prise out the truncheon from his slim hip pocket as he went forward . . .

  If he had watched both hands and not the pistol handle in Colt's belt . . .

  He was launched when he knew that the heel of Colt's hand

  . . . not the pistol, not the bullet. . . was the threat.

  Razor fast, the heel of the hand, rising at his throat.

  There was the ripple shock through Colt's wrist and the length of his forearm. The heel of his hand took the centre point of the police constable's neck. And the policeman went down. He did not stagger or topple, he went down like a dropped sack of potatoes.

  There was the gasp, in unison, all around Colt.

  It was not what he had wanted to do. He had not wanted to shoot the American who was stumbling in confusion across the path of the fusillade aimed at a man who wrote vitriol from abroad against the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council.

  Nor had he wanted to break the bones and the faces of two army deserters coming in desperation to a camp site to steal a jeep. Nor had he wanted to throttle the life from the gross bum boy who had tried to roll a backpacker sleeping rough alongside the road to Freemantle. He stood rock still, and his weight was forward on the balls of his feet as if the police constable still offered a threat to him.

  They all stared at him.

  He looked into the faces of old Vic and his Fran, and old Brennie, and of Billy and Zap, and Zack, and Kev and Johnny.

  He saw their fear, and he saw the terror that collapsed the face of Dr Bissett who backed away to the far corner of the back bar.

  The words came . . .

  "Christ, you screwed it now."

  " N o call for that."

  "What you done that for?"

  " W e live here, Colt . . . "

  He stood his ground. He was the one who never panicked. He was the one who would never be taken. He stood straight and tall and the police constable was prone at his feet. He saw the shoulders of the police constable heave up as the spasm muscles tried to find breath for the lungs down the passage of the damaged windpipe. He was 200 yards from his home. Running, like he could run because he was fit, he could have gone to the front door of his home, the Manor House, in a half of a minute.

  He heard the creak of the door behind him . . . Zap gone.

  Had he come to the village for money? Had he come home to see his father the one last time, and to see his mother who was dead for the one last time? There was the movement to his right flank. Pathetic bastards. The dross of the village, gone nowhere, met nobody, seen nothing . . . Kev sneaking through the door.

  Bissett whimpered, like a dog waiting to be kicked, he thought, in the far corner of the bar.

  From Warminster they had little call to come to the village. The village was a backwater. The convoy of police cars, four of them, and nine policemen had been delayed in the yard at the back of the Warminster police station for more than 35 minutes while the numbers were made up, and while the Duty Inspector fumed at the failure of Communications to raise the local man. They came into the village. Their orders were to seal the one road running through the village at each end, and to maintain a discreet watch on the Manor House, and to do nothing if they saw the bastard because he had had a handgun at Heathrow and because the firearms unit was being helicoptered from London. They saw the police car parked beside the goalposts of the football pitch.

  The lead car stopped. The Sergeant was still examining the car when there was the thud of the footfall of the two running youths.

  "Heh, you, stop there. You seen Desmond?"

  Kev stammered, " B e in the pub . . . in there . . . "

  Oh, was he, by Christ . . . The Sergeant grimaced . . . A bloody earful coming young Master Desmond's way, using his work transport to get out on the piss, with his wile saying over the telephone that he was gone on patrol. In the pub, by Christ.

  "Thank you, son."

  Zap stuttered, "Don't be going in there . . . he's a gonner in there . . . Get in there he'll bloody kill you, like him . . . "

  "All right, young 'un, who's been killed?"

  " Y o u r copper," Kev said.

  " W h o b y ? "

  " B y Colt," Zap said.

  The Sergeant, middle-aged and heavy, ran for his car and his radio.

  He stood above the police constable.

  Again the slither of feet on the flags of the back bar and the heave of the door of the back bar. Billy and Zack gone.

  He wanted to go to his father. He wanted to sit beside the bed in which he had last seen his mother. He wanted to flop on the bed in the room that had been his. The room was the shrine to his youth. His father had told him that, after the raid by the Regional Crime Squad, after the room had been searched by armed detectives, his mother had gone into the room and restored it just as it had been when they had first sent him away to the boarding school at the coast near Seaton in Dorset . . .

  "Please, Colt, hurry . . ."

  Bissett coming across the back bar towards him.

  " . . . We have to go."

  "Shut u p . "
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br />   " T o the ferry . . ."

  "Shut up, damn you."

  "I was just trying to say . . ."

  Bissett's hand pulling at his arm. Colt dragged the fingers off his sleeve.

  "Don't touch me, don't ever cling to m e . "

  Old Brennie was on his feet, and nodding gravely towards old Vic behind the bar counter, the way he always nodded when he had supped up his beer and it was time to walk home, and he'd stop halfway down the road, like he always did, and empty his bladder into the privet hedge at the front of the comprehensive schoolteacher's garden.

  There was the bleat of Bissett's voice in his ear. "Why don't we go . . . ? "

  Because going was for ever. Going now was never to return.

  All the months in Oz, all the weeks on the big laden tanker, all the long days of the training in Baghdad and the long nights in the Haifa Street Housing Project were bearable only because there was the certainty that one month, one week, one day and one night he would return to the village and the love of his father and his mother. When he went this time, he was gone for ever, he was never to return.

  " O . K . , O . K . , " Colt said.

  He saw that Fran squatted now on the floor and that she stared into the half-obscured face of the police constable. He would finish his drink. They would remember him in the back bar of the village pub for ever and a day because he had finished his drink and then he had gone out into the night, never to return.

  He lifted the glass. Three gulps and he would finish the glass, just as he would have finished the glass in three gulps if the police constable had not walked in to warn of Zack's car and Johnny's car with the lights left on in the car park.

  Colt grinned, "Cheers, Dr Bissett."

  The Duty Inspector at Warminster gave his order. The pub was to be surrounded. All possible light was to be thrown from headlights and flash lamps at the front and rear and sides of the pub. The blue lamps on the roofs of the police vehicles were to be switched on.

  Over the radio link, he told his Sergeant, "Just keep them bottled up there, George. The heavy crowd's close to you now.

  Just keep them bottled, pray God they don't do a runner."

  There was the racing of vehicle wheels across the loose gravel of the car park, the crunch of the brakes, the beam of light cutting through the thin curtains of the back bar. And the white light was mixed with the flash of the blue, penetrating.

  Colt choked on the last swill of his glass.

  The light was over Bissett's face, white and blue, dappled like sunshine and cloud.

  His glass slammed down onto the table. He drew the Ruger from his belt and the foresight caught at the waist of his trousers and there was the rip of the material . . . He would never be taken . . . and Bissett cowered away from him.

  Fran said, " Y o u shouldn't have done it, you didn't need to hurt him . . . "

  She had her hand, rough and callused and worn and the hand that he loved, cupped under the head of the policeman. She had turned his body over as if she believed that were the way to help him to breathe.

  He felt the clammy damp of a prison cell.

  One more, one more for the road, and when he looked to the bar counter he saw that old Vic had gone. He had the gun in his hand and he advanced across the bar towards Bissett, and bissett shrank from him.

  He saw it go. Erlich saw the first flutter beats of the ghost flight.

  It was gone without sound. There was a scudding moment of moonlight, enough to catch at the wide wingspan ol the owl.

  There was the silence of the flight, then the sharp warning cry of the bird, and it was gone.

  He heard the movement of the cars down at the other end of the road through the village, and when he stood to his full height he could see, slashed by the winter trees, the lights that were white and blue.

  He came from his hiding place. He walked across the Manor House's lawn and onto the drive to the road.

  Ahead of him was the facade of the pub, bathed in warm lights.

  He walked forward. This was his war.Colt was his He saw policemen crouched down behind the opened doors of their cars, and far away in the night he heaid the clatter of a helicopter.

  He walked to the Sergeant.

  "My name's Erlich, Federal Bureau ol Investigation

  "Oh yes. Heard about you from young Desmond Young lad just told me . . ."

  "You have him in there? Colt?"

  "Right now I do. If he doesn't do a runner...''

  "You got firearms?"

  "On the way."

  "What you got to stop him running?"

  "There's nine of us."

  "Where is he?"

  "Back bar, through the side entrance, it's where he was last Erlich pulled the Smith and Wesson from the holster at his belt. The Sergeant didn't seem to want to argue. Erlich thought the Sergeant was bright, wasn't going to fuss that a Fed was on his territory, and armed. Round the corner of the building, into the glare of the light came the girl and a youth with a shaven head and tattoo work over his arms and they carried the slumped weight of a policeman. Erlich remembered him, and he remembered his cup of tea on the best china and homemade cakes. And he remembered the girl and the way that she had stared her hatred into the torch beam when she had come to take away her dead dog.

  He walked forward and the headlights threw his shadow huge against the front stonework of the pub. He could hear, mingled with the wind, the closing thump of the helicopter's rotors.

  Colt was his.

  The military policeman locked the door behind him.

  The Station Officer carried the tray into his office.

  The Swede was crouched on the low camp bed that had been made up for him, and there was a second bed against the far wall from the door. The Station Officer put the tray down on his desk.

  He took out from his pocket, where it was awkward, his P . P . K .

  pistol and laid it on the desk alongside the tray of sandwiches with the bottle of champagne.

  "Will you surrender me?"

  "Give you up? Good God, no."

  " D i d Bissett get onto the flight?"

  " H e was blocked."

  "Thank G o d . "

  "It's what you risked your life for . . . The champagne comes with warm wishes from your friends in Tel A v i v . "

  The Swede started to eat, and when he drank he coughed and then giggled his appreciation.

  He watched.

  With fast and controlled movements, Colt had the pistol cleared and the magazine out and there was the dead metal rattle of the mechanism firing, and then Colt had checked each round before feeding it into the stick magazine.

  Bissett watched.

  They were going to break out. He did not have to be told.

  They were going to run at the cordon of white and blue light, they were going to sprint for the dark shadow line beyond the brilliance of the perimeter that was strung around the pub. He heard, muffled by the thickness of the old stone walls of the building, a distant pulse of growing sound.

  All the time he was watching the sharp and more confident hand movements of Colt.

  He thought of his father and mother, of the small terraced home in the small streets of Leeds. He thought of their letters, abandoned in his suitcase at the airport. They would not have understood. He had told them so little from the time that he had first taken his appointment at the Establishment. His father and his mother were against the Bomb, they all were in that street. He had won for them no pride for working as a government scientist.

  He might as well have been a deputy manager at an amusement arcade, or running a local Radio Rentals . . . Yes, he thought they would despise him now, his mother and his father. He would never go home to greet his father on the day that his mother died. They would not have understood. It was not his fault.. He had outgrown them. They were no longer a part of his life . . .

  He watched.

  Colt had finished with the pistol, and now he crouched and undid the knots at both his train
er shoes, and he had retied the laces.

  It was not possible that Colt could not hear the coming thunder sound breaking through the windows of the back bar, permeating the stone walls.

  "It'll be all right, Colt . . . ?"

  "Why not?"

  "We're going together?"

  " O f course."

  " D o you think we can do it?"

  " N o problem."

  There was sick fear in Bissett's stomach. They would run at the lights. He would let Colt hold him by the wrist and he would cling to Colt's sleeve, and they would run.

  "What's that noise?"

  Colt said, like it didn't matter, " I ' m just going upstairs. I want a better view of the ground. You shouldn't worry, Dr Bissett.

  It's a helicopter, they'll be bringing in their heavy mob, I expect

  . . . nothing to worry on, Dr Bissett."

  " I ' m sorry about your mother, Colt, really sorry."

  "I'll be a minute, then it's running time."

  He heard the shuffle ripple of Colt's feet, and he was gone onto the narrow and twisted staircase that led out from behind the bar counter.

  And the silence in Bissett's ears was broken by the drum beat of the helicopter banking on its flight path over the village.

  He heard the helicopter put down.

  Erlich thought it sounded, from its power, a big transporter.

  They would be getting their act together at last. Armed men, and the big guys from London. He thought that they would not have room in their plan for Bill Erlich, number three from Rome, wanted for questioning in connection with the death of James Rutherford. He was in the porchway to the back bar. He had the Smith and Wesson in his hand. Held beside his ear.

  The helicopter had cut its rotors.

  He strained to hear the sound of voices, Colt's voice. He listened for the sound of movement.

  Bill Erlich readied himself for the charge through the closed heavy door.