The Alamut Ambush

To talk about comradeship and friendship was inadequate; to mention affection debased it with physical undertones – though by God if it had been the army of Alexander the Great instead of Queen Elizabeth's air force, there probably would have been that too!

Harry ...

'Harry Jenkins – he was a good friend of mine in the squadron. My wing-man. He was a first-rate chap.'

Friendship is Love without his wings – was that Byron? But they had had their wings too.

'I spent several leaves at Harry's family place at East Firle, down in Sussex.'

East Firle ...

Up in the morning at cock-crow and over the hills, past the old burial mounds and down into Alfriston. On over the Cuckmere, up the hillside again, down under the Long Man, beer and pickles at Jevington. Then onwards more slowly until Pevensey Levels spread out below, along the last magnificent roll of the Downs towards Beachy Head, where the car would be waiting for them with Mrs Jenkins at the wheel. It was a golden memory.

'We used to walk a lot. I got to know the family pretty well – nice people. Harry's father had a fighter wing in '45. He's dead now.'

Dead too, thank God. All the Jenkins males were dead now, but at least the old man hadn't been the last, chafing in a house full of dummy2

women, even women as delightful as Aunt Mary.

'Oddly enough it was Alan I knew least – he was always away at school. I didn't actually meet him until just after I'd left the squadron. He'd just started with Alpha Electronics and he didn't much like 'em. And you know how Sir Frederick is always on about keeping our eyes open for talent.'

'What happened to Harry?' Audley drew him gently back to the point.

'Harry had my flight – my job – on my recommendation. He took over from me when I came to the department.'

For Roskill, read Jenkins.

'He flew into a hillside in Wales a week later.'

Carnedd Dafydd – he'd seen it from the pass beyond Capel Curig on the way to Holyhead a few months afterwards, the clouds driving like smoke across it.

'And you feel it should have been you, not him?'

'No, hardly that.' Roskill shook his head sadly.

Poor Harry! The better man by far, but never the better pilot. 'It was Harry's mountainside.'

'But your guilt nevertheless?'

'You might call it that – I don't know what else you could call it. I suppose I might feel better if I'd left the squadron for pure patriotic reasons...'

Instinctively Roskill felt that a shadow of the truth would satisfy Audley now.

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'The fact is, David, that I was rather bored with flying. Fred dangled this job in front of me – this job and a step in rank. So Harry and Alan are dead because I was bored. I know I didn't kill them – I just recommended them. And now I'd feel a lot better if I could wipe someone's eye. Silly, isn't it?'

Audley nodded slowly. 'Yes, it's silly. But I know the feeling, Hugh. It's like slashing a bed of stinging nettles when you've been stung – silly, but very satisfying.'

Roskill relaxed carefully. More by good luck than calculation he had struck the right note for Audley.

'Tell me, Hugh,' said Audley conversationally, 'how would they accept you down at – where was it – East Firle now? Do they blame you in any way?'

'Good Lord, no! They don't know I had a hand in anything. They probably wouldn't blame me if they did know, either — they aren't that sort of people.'

With his mind on a parking space thirty yards ahead Roskill's guard was momentarily down and it wasn't until he was actually swinging into the space that the significance of the question hit him.

'You don't mean – Christ, David! You're not going to ask me to go down to East Firle?'

'Someone's got to go.'

Roskill grabbed blindly for the handbrake, grappling with the implications of what appeared so obvious to Audley. That anything could have happened at East Firle, snuggled so peacefully under the Beacon, seemed not only unlikely, but unthinkable. Yet–

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'Don't play dumb, Hugh, just because you don't want to go. It has to be you, because you can go down there as a friend of the family.

You've got a perfectly innocent motive for being there. If I was spotted there our game would be up. But they may take you for granted – for a time anyway.'

'Who's 'they'?'

'That's for you to find out. Maybe nobody now. But something happened when Jenkins was on leave. Otherwise they'd have had time to set up a different sort of accident – a more accidental one.

But something happened so quickly that they didn't have time to catch up with him, remember? Something so important they had to take the devil of a risk to make sure they shut him up quickly.'