the windscreen had a clouded mark at the base, nearly dead centre. Thumb to the switch, push the switch. The finger back to the trigger.
Holding the tube steady, ducking it back into the fine of sight because the kick of the tracer round had lifted the aim fractionally. Squeezing a second time on the trigger… and the blast, and the recoil, and the white heat flash roaring behind him, behind his crouched shoulder. A shudder of light that moved from the muzzle of the tube at a speed of 235 metres in a second, and the range was less than forty metres.
The explosion on the front of the Mercedes, the copper slug of the warhead driven into the body of the car, and the debris scabs following it, and the car rocked back, and lifted, and the first flicker of fire… What he had waited for. The car burned, and the road was in confusion.
'Move yourself, Eshraq.'
The shout in his ear, and his hands still clasped the tube, and the voice was faint because his ears thundered from the firing.
'Get yourself bloody moving.'
And the officer was dragging at his collar, and snatching the tube from his grip.
'You don't stand around to watch, you move as if all the demons in hell are on your tail, and about half of them will be.'
The officer had flung the tube aside, and Charlie was on his feet. He saw for one last time that the smoke billowed from the armoured personnel carrier target. He ran. He was bent low, and he ran for more than 100 yards up the shallow slope of the hill and away from the officer and the sergeants and the three discarded tubes and the target. He ran until he reached Park.
At his own pace the officer walked to him.
'That wasn't bad, Eshraq.'
He was panting. The excitement throbbed in him. 'Thank you.'
'Don't thank me, it's your skin that's on offer. You have to move faster in the moment after firing. You do not hang about to congratulate yourself on being a clever kid. You fire, you drop the tube, you move out. You were wearing ear protectors, no one else in the target zone will be and they will be disorientated for a few seconds. You have to make use of those seconds.'
'Yes, understood.'
'You won't have realised it, time goes pretty fast, but you were four seconds and the rest between the rifle aiming round and the missile discharge. Too long. The target today was stationary, that's kids' play.'
'Inside an armoured Mercedes…?'
'I'd rather not be the passenger. The LAW 80 is designed to take out main battle tanks up to 500 metres. No car, whatever the small arms protection, has a chance. Don't lose any sleep over that. Are you happy?'
'I will remember your kindness.'
'Just give my love to the Ayatollah…'
Charlie laughed, and he waved. He walked away and Park followed him. He thought Park was like the labrador dog that Mrs Furniss had owned when the girls were still at school, and which had been detested by Mr Furniss. He thought the officer was great, because there was no bullshit about the man and he had given him the depth of his experience, and freely.
He reached the jeep.
'I am going back to London, are you coming with me?'
'Those are my instructions, that I stay with you, but I've my own car.'
He heard the tang of dislike in the brittle voice. 'Then you can follow me.'
'I'll do that.'
'I'm going to my flat.'
'I know where your flat is.'
'I'm going to my flat and I am going to take a shower, and then I am going out to dinner. I am going to have a very good meal. Perhaps, you would care to join me?'
He saw the snarl on Park's face, his face was almost amusing.
'I'll eat with you because I have to be with you, and I'll pay my own share. So we understand each other -1 don't want to be with you, but those are my orders. I'll tell you where I'd like to be with you. I would like to be sitting alongside the dock in Number Two, Central Criminal Court, and I'd like to be there when a judge puts you away for fifteen years.'
Charlie grinned. 'Perhaps you'll win some other ones.'
He had stayed in his room all afternoon, and when Henry had come to the door and knocked and told him that supper was ready he had said that he had no appetite and that he would skip the meal. It had been late when he had come down. He had been driven downstairs by his growing loneliness that had become keener as the light fell over the trees in the garden.
They were in the drawing room. For that time of year it was unusual for it to have been so cold, and Mattie stayed close to the fireplace, which was idiotic since there was no fire, but he felt the chill of his loneliness and he could not shrug the warmth back to his mind. Henry wasn't communicative. It was as though he was watching the clock, had decided that Sunday evening was his free time and that the debrief would continue in the morning. Henry had brought him a whisky, sat him in a chair with back editions of the Illustrated London News and Country Life, and returned to the study of a brochure advertising holidays for ornithologists. He craved to ask the question, but Henry was far from him, lost in the Danube's marshes. He held the drink. He hadn't spoken to Harriet, not since the phone call that was their reunion, three quick minutes, and stiff lips, and both too gushing because they were too old and too regimented to have cried down the lines, and he wouldn't speak to her again, not until this was over.
Harriet would have known what he should do. And equally certainly Henry would turn down any request that he call her.
Oh yes, he'd do it politely, but he'd do it. Carter had a calculator out, and must have been adding up the damage because just after he had made the final punch a frown ploughed his high forehead. Mattie saw that Henry did nothing by accident. He also realized that for all his seniority at Century, here he was subordinate. Old Henry Carter, Century's vacuum cleaner for gathering up the odds and sods of administration, was running the show, and had determined that Mattie Furniss would be left through that evening to sweat.
Henry smiled. Melting butter. A wrinkled choirboy's smile, such innocence.
'Too damned expensive for me. It'll be the Fens again.'
Mattie blurted, 'Eshraq, Charlie Eshraq… he was due to go back inside. Did he go?'
Henry's eyebrow lifted. Deliberately he put down the calcu- lator and closed the brochure. 'Any day now, going in the next few days… I must say, it sounds as if he's taken on more than he can possibly chew.'
Mattie thought a knife could have been sharpened on Henry's voice.
'He's a fine young man.'
'They're all fine young men, Mattie, our field agents. But that'll keep till the morning.'
The Director of the Revolutionary Centre for Volunteers for Martyrdom was still in his office because on many evenings the office doubled as his bedroom. He was in an easy chair and reading a manual of the US Marine Corps on base security procedures, and he was happy in the discovery that they had learned nothing, the authors of this study.
They took coffee, thick and bitter, and with it was served orange juice. They were two men of cultures that were chasms apart. The Director had spent six years in the Qezel-Hesar gaol in the times of the Shah of Shahs, and he had spent six years in exile in Iraq and France. If a young Mullah who was a rising star had not offered the investigator his protection, then, in great probability, the Director would have used the pistol, holstered and hanging from a hook behind his door, on the back of the neck of the one time S A V A K man.
The investigator spoke of a watch that was now maintained on a barber's shop in the Aksaray district of Istanbul. He told of a man who would come to the shop. At the back of the shop, Charlie Eshraq, the son of the late Colonel Hassan Eshraq, would collect forged papers that he would use when he came back into Iran. He asked a great favour of the Director. He said that he would have this Eshraq under surveillance from the moment that he left the shop. His request was for a small force of men who would be in position on the frontier to intercept Eshraq at whatever crossing point he used. Would he come over at a crossing point? Of course
– and the investigator had researched the matter – because of the weight of the armour-piercing missiles he was known to be bringing and their packaging he would have to come by road. He asked for the service as if he
