The Deputy Director General frowned, then the smile caught his face. 'Forgive me, I may have sounded churlish
… Good old Mattie… he's been terrific. I don't think it would be out of order for you to meet him off the plane if that's what you'd like… Director General. Again, forgive me, but I want you to understand that labelling Furniss a hero may well, will almost certainly, be somewhat misplaced. He will have talked, and this whole expedition has cost us a network. Realistically it all adds up to Dunkirk, not to the Normandy landings.'
'I'm wagering that he'll have surprised you.'
'Also, we may not have aborted our people in time. I can show you the photographs from Kermanshah when the M K O moved out and the Mullahs came back in, if you would like to see them. The hangings were photographed. Mattie getting himself captured was only one inevitable step away from a death sentence for our field agents, even, you may console yourself, if the signals to bring them out had been sent without delay.'
'They may well come out, and Mattie may well not have talked, in which case perhaps, who knows, they can go back in again.'
'We're not talking about Bond or Biggies, Director General, we are talking about one man against a very sophisticated team of torturers. We are talking about a regime that will do unspeakable things to their own people, and who won't have cared a toss what is done to a foreigner.'
The Director General said, 'I am at a loss to know what you want.'
'I would want to know whether Eshraq is compromised before we let him go back.'
'My money is on Mattie, and I'll drink to him.'
And between the three of them they killed the second bottle.
It might have been the sense of guilt that had dogged the Station Officer ever since he had left Mattie Furniss unprotected in Van, but he most certainly made wheels turn now.
From the moment that the Military Attache at the Embassy had passed on the news of the refugee Furniss falling into the hands of a patrol near the border in Hakkari province, Terence Snow had wheedled facilities from his contacts. An official in the National Intelligence Agency had earned a handsome gift.
Mattie sat beside the road.
He had a paratrooper's smock draped over his shoulders, and a medic had cleaned his feet and then bandaged them, and a colonel had loaned him a stick to help himself along.
The road was the airstrip. It ran along a shallow valley between Yuksekova and Semdinli. The road was widened and reinforced and provided a facility for fixed wing to land in all weathers, night and day, and had been built to further military operations against guerillas of the Kurdish Workers' Party.
There were lights laid out, fired by portable generators, and the area where Mattie sat was illuminated by the headlights of military jeeps and trucks. He sat on an old ammunition box. He was a source of interest to the soldiers, they were crowded behind his back, silent and watchful. They gazed at him with a fascination because they knew that he was an Englishman, and they knew that he had walked out of Iran, and they knew from the medic that the soles of his feet were cut and horribly swollen from beatings. He had lost that sense of exhilaration that had gripped him when he had stood on the ridge looking down into Turkey. He was overcome with exhaustion. Of course he was. He could still see in his mind the picture, cruelly sharp, of the Revolutionary Guards coming down the slope and the boys being escorted at gunpoint up the slope. And there was Charlie, and there were his agents.
He wanted only to sleep, and he declined food. The last food he had eaten, before the ridge, had been the boys' food freely shared with him.
The Hercules C-130 came down on to the road, a noisy and jolting landing, and the reverse thrust was on from the moment the wheels touched. The aircraft taxied towards the knot of soldiers, and when it turned Mattie had to shield his face from the flying grit thrown up from the hard shoulder by the four sets of propellors. The pilot kept the engines idling while Mattie was helped up the rear loading ramp. It was only when the aircrew had fastened his seatbelt for him that he realized that he had forgotten to thank the paratroop officers for their hospitality. He waved as the loading ramp was raised, but he couldn't tell whether they would have seen. On full power the Hercules lifted off, then banked heavily to avoid a shoulder of the Samdi Dag, then climbed for cruising altitude. They were three hours in the air. He was offered orange juice from a paper carton and a boiled sweet to help his ears during the descent to Ankara, otherwise the aircrew ignored him. They were taking him back from a nightmare, returning him to the world that he knew.
They were on a military airfield. They were parked beside an executive eight seat jet. On the jet were the roundels of red and white and blue.
The Station Officer made no secret of his emotion. He hugged Mattie.
'God, Mr Furniss, you've done magnificently well… and the Director General said for me to tell you… ' H e recited,
'Warmest personal congratulations on your epic triumph.'
'Very decent of him.'
'You came through, Mr Furniss, I can't tell you how pleased I am, how proud I am to know you.'
'Steady, Terence.'
'You're a hero, Mr Furniss.'
'Is that what they think?'
'Of course. They had the whole army out trying to catch you and you got clean through them. You beat the bastards.'
'Yes… What about my agents?'
'All I know is that the abort signals were sent.'
'But are they out?'
'That I don't know. I'm very sorry, Mr Furniss, but I've been ordered not to attempt any sort of debrief on you. That's the usual form, I suppose.'
Snow took Mattie's arm and led him to the steps of the executive jet, and a nurse came down them and took over and grabbed firmly at his arm and hoisted him on board, and when he ducked into the interior there was an R A F corporal to salute him, and through the open door of the cockpit he saw the pilot leaning sideways so that he could wink at Mattie, and give him the thumbs-up. He was strapped into a seat, back to the driver, always the way of R A F flights, and Snow was opposite him, and the nurse was peeling off the bandages from his feet, even before they took off, and there was a look on her face that suggested that no one could be trusted with medical hygiene but herself. The plane had come from Cyprus, from the Sovereign Base at Akrotiri. They roared away into the night, lifted sharply, as if the pilot would have preferred to be at the controls of a Tornado strike plane.
Terence Snow kept his silence. That was the way of things when a Service man came back from captivity. Nothing should interfere with the debrief, standard operating procedure.
When the nurse had unwound the bandages of the Turkish army medic, when she had examined the puffed, welted soles of Mattie's feet, then he saw the frown settle on her already stern forehead, and he saw the Station Officer wince. The nurse took off his shirt, tugged it off him, and her lips pursed when she saw the bruising at the base of his shoulders. The swollen feet and the bruised shoulders brought a gentleness to the nurse's fingers, and a gaze of youthful worship from the boy. He could have wiped the gentleness out of her fingers, and the adulation from his eyes. He could have told them that he was a fraud. He could have shouted inside that small aircraft cabin, going home at 550 surface miles per hour, that the Service's hero had cracked and talked.
They put down at the Royal Air Force base at Brize Norton in the small hours of the morning.
He was helped down from the aircraft and into a waiting ambulance, a lone vehicle on the huge airfield. He was driven to the Base hospital.
The Director General was waiting for him, and his hand was pumped.
'Bloody good show, Furniss. Welcome home. It's a Red Letter day for all of us.'
They ran an electrocardiogram test. They asked him for a urine sample and then put him in the lavatory where there was a bag under the seat because they required his stool to check for typhoid or dysentery. They X- rayed his feet and his chest and his shoulders. They did blood tests on him for signs of vitamin deficiency. They were brisk and methodical and quick, and Mattie saw that the form they filled in with the results of the examination and the tests was blank at the top, at the space provided for the patient's name. Over the new bandages on his feet they gently fitted plastic slippers, and they told him he should see his dentist within the next week.
The Director General was waiting for him in the reception area. He beamed at him. Mattie grinned back,
