activities were planned on a Christmas present pencil sharpener globe. 'For all the reasons I have suggested, that Tork has set out, that is quite impossible… '
'Perhaps you didn't hear me the first time. That's not a word I care for. Get yourself down to Hereford, Percy.'
Without invitation, Percy Martins heaved himself up from the low armchair. He strode round the room.
Speak now, or for ever hold thy peace. He heard his own voice, raised.
'So I go and talk to the Ministry and then to Special Air Service, and what's the first thing they'll say?
They'll say the scar on Abu Hamid's face is an inch across, they'll say how close do they have to get to identify a man with a one-inch scar on his face?'
'We've a witness, and I dare say we've got a pair of binoculars.'
Martins hesitated. 'Our witness is a diplomat, not a soldier, sir.'
'In the words of your report when you met this young man: 'I'd want him killed' – it seems to me that he would be prepared to learn to be a soldier. A further point. The witness not only saw the scar, the witness saw Abu Hamid, saw his stance, how he moved, saw him run.'
'To take a young man, untrained, into the Beqa'a, on a covert operation Sir, are you quite serious?'
'When we had Leila Khaled, Popular Front hijacker, in Ealing Police station I argued against swapping her for our airline passengers held hostage in Amman – I was overruled. When it was planned to fly a gang of Provisional IRA death merchants by Royal Air Force plane to London for a cosy chat with government, I argued against it – I was overruled. I was overruled then because I didn't have enough authority. Now I do, and the masters are going to learn how long and how ruthless our arm can be, and quite frankly, I hope they shit themselves in the knowledge.'
Martins said, 'I'll go and talk to Hereford.'
'You'll do more than that. You'll get our witness down to Albury, dust the place out, get him up to the mark. No misunderstandings, Percy, this is going to happen.'
They hadn't told her how long she had to make the rooms ready, nor how many people would be coming.
She did not know whether they would be there in a day or a week.
She had her old vacuum cleaner, and a bucket of warm water with Jeyes fluid and a mop, and three ragged dusters, and a window cleaner aerosol spray. She had four sets of sheets ranged out in the frame in front of the Aga stove in the kitchen. It would be seven months since the house in the woods outside the Surrey village of Albury had been used. She had been afraid that if the house were not used then it would be sold off and she and George would be moved on.
There was no time for George's lunch that day. She had ordered him to fill each and every one of the coal hobs, light each and every fire on the ground floor, to split more logs, to find the fault in the hot water boiler, to go into Guildford with her shopping list, and to keep his brute of a dog off the floors she had washed.
Agnes Ferguson had seen it all. What a book she could have written. She had been housekeeper for the Service safe house at Albury for nineteen years. They had given it into her care in lieu of a widow's pension.
She had kept the safe house for Eastern bloc defectors, for agents returning from imprisonment abroad while they were debriefed, for the preparation of men going into covert action overseas. It had been a long and anxious winter, and George not much company. The telephone call had seemed to breathe new life, new hope, into her that her future was assured.
'It's preposterous, no other word for it.'
'It has the sanction of the Director General,'
Martins said grimly.
'It makes no difference whose sanction it has. It just isn't on,' the brigadier said.
'Too dangerous, is that it?'
'It's not our way to duck a challenge, but nor is it our way to volunteer ourselves for a mission that has no chance of success. Understand me, no chance.'
In the mist outside the brick bungalow, Percy Martins's car was parked beside the broad base of the clock tower. When he had locked the door he had noted the names inscribed on the stone plaque under the clock face, the fatal casualties amongst the men of the 22nd Regiment, Special Air Service. Had he not been under orders he would most probably have agreed with the brigadier.
'No chance of success, I'll report that back.'
'Don't play clever games with me,' the brigadier said. A hard man, piercing grey-blue eyes. 'We have no experience of theBeqa's valley. No man in the SAS has ever set foot in the Beqa'a valley. It is, and always has been, outside our theatre of operation. We are not talking about the Radfan mountain ops of the sixties, nor about Oman in the seventies. For both of those we had first hand experience to draw upon, and we had a wilderness area to work through. In the Beqa'a we have no experience and we have no wilderness. It would take us months of reconnaissance and preparation before we could walk in there with any reasonable prospect of survival.'
'I'll convey your message.'
'They keep their hostages in the Beqa'a. The reason they are there is that their captors believe it the most secure area in Lebanon. For strangers, the Beqa'a is a dangerous, closed valley. The stranger won't last long enough to pick his nose. To be frank, and it gives me no satisfaction to say so, we wouldn't stand a prayer.'
'I'll report that you cannot be of help.'
'But I can be of help,' the brigadier said. 'I can tell you who will get you into the Beqa'a, who might quite possibly even get you out.'
Percy Martins felt the surge of excitement. A name was given He wrote the name in his notebook, and then he asked for permission to use a secure telephone.
The last light of the afternoon.
The sun was an orange orb away to his left and sliding.
It was a good time for him because the ground ahead was cooling, and the haze that had distorted his vision was gone, and his barrel was no longer warm.
His right eye, peering into the 'scope, ached. That pain behind his eye stabbed at him. The pain was nothing new to him, but it was more frequent and more acute, and that worried him.
The target was six hundred metres away. Of course he had not measured the ground. In two days and one night he had not moved in his hide except to raise his hips the few inches that enabled him to urinate into a plastic bag. He was good at measuring distance. Without his expertise at gauging a distance ahead of him then all his work would be useless. The chart in his mind told him the rate of the drop in flight of a fired bullet. He knew the figures by heart. The difference in a drop between 500 metres and 600 metres was 1.53 metres.
The difference in a drop between 500 metres and 600 metres was the height of a grown man. But he knew the distance to his target, his experience had made the calculation, and he had adjusted his 'scope sight for that distance. Beyond the target, away to the target's right, was a small fire that had been lit by a shepherd. He had watched the shepherd all day, hoping that the shepherd would keep his flock close to the stream and far from the rock slope on which he had made his hide. He was grateful to the shepherd for lighting the fire. The fire smoked right to left. The movement of the smoke enabled him to gauge the wind speed that would deflect his bullet. Another graph. His estimate of the wind speed was five miles per hour. His estimate of the deflection was eleven inches, for a target that was six hundred metres away.
It amused him, the way that sometimes the figures in his head were metric, and sometimes they were yards and feet and inches, and sometimes the thoughts in his mind were Hebrew, and sometimes they were English.
He reckoned that he was close now to the optimum moment, and so the throb of the pain behind his right eye was relegated in importance. He was old for work as a sniper. He was 48 years old, and the balance was delicately poised between his expertise at gauging the distance to the target and the wind speed, against the ache of a tired eye. On a range he could shoot well inside a melon-sized group at 600 metres. A man's head was wider than a melon. That he was not on a range made little difference to him. If he had been young, perhaps he would have been knotted in tension and he would have cramp in his leg muscles. He was not young, he was quite relaxed, and he had learned long ago to rotate his toes in his boots to beat the cramp. He was not looking for a head shot. His 'scope showed him, where the hair lines crossed, the upper arm of the target who was in profile to him. He waited for the target to turn, to face him, he waited for the hair lines to cross on the upper torso of the target.
Steady hands on the rifle. No shake in the elbow that supported the rifle. The target faced him, was
