Giri (16 page)

“Quite.”

“Yes, sir. Tough ladies, those Japanese.”

Yes, thought Sparrowhawk, remembering how the Chihara women had died when he, Robbie and Dorian had come for them. In a lifetime of soldiering he had never seen anyone, man or woman, die with more courage. A mother and her two daughters. Ready to meet death. Death always came too early or too late. That’s how it had been with Sparrowhawk’s family and that’s how it had been in his life as a soldier. It came sooner or later, but it always came, this door of darkness, this great unknown, this tragic last act.

It always came.

N
ORTHERN ENGLAND IS A
harsh and rugged region split north to south by the mountains. To the west lie the high peaks of the Cumbrians, and to the east the windy and desolate North York moors. The natural barriers of mountains and moors form obstacles to communication and exchange; they foster provincialism and a fierce loyalty to one’s own town or village. In the north one finds a robust national patriotism, one stronger than any existing elsewhere in the British Isles.

Northern people have always been fighters. They took up swords against the Vikings and the Scots and in the War of the Roses, the long struggle between the great families of York and Lancaster for the throne of England. The Industrial Revolution began here, with children working nineteen-hour days for a penny a week in “dark, satanic mills.” Class wars between factory owner and worker found gritty and unyielding northerners on both sides, refusing to bend or compromise.

Trevor Wells Sparrowhawk was born in northern England’s key city of Manchester, in a row of cheap terrace houses darkened by smoke from steel and textile mills. His father, a schoolteacher, named him after a grandfather who was a nineteenth-century trade unionist and H. G. Wells. His mother was a seamstress and a socialist, forever opposing the capitalists who sweated northerners in unsafe foundries and factories.

While Trevor’s father gave him a lifelong love of literature, it was his mother who taught him that law and justice did not exist, that the world was governed by might or mercy.

In the north, a boy became a man at an early age. By fifteen Sparrowhawk was in his third year in the steel mills, a stocky, strong lad determined to survive. Those who didn’t survive were his relatives, friends and neighbors, dead from mine explosions, consumption, starvation, black lung. Strikes, hunger marches and massive rallies failed to prevent more dying. When Britain went to war with Germany for the second time, the dying only increased. A 1941 Luftwaffe bombing raid, aimed at Manchester’s factories, killed Sparrowhawk’s parents and two sisters, leaving him with no reason to remain in a city that had brought so much death into his life.

Lying about his age, he enlisted in the army. “Not to worry, lad,” a cheery lance corporal said to him. “It’s war and the devil knows it. He’ll make room in hell for the likes of you and me. Besides, if you’re the right sort you’ll come to love war, especially if you’re winnin’. ’Tis the excitement what matters, nothin’ else. Neither the good nor bad of it. Just the excitement.”

Sparrowhawk was never to hear a better reason for war’s appeal to him. For the first time in his life power,
a gun,
lay in his hand. The pleasure was as exquisite as reading Shelley alone by a quiet lake.

He took to soldiering with enthusiasm, excelling during training and showing a particular combination of discipline and independence that brought him to the attention of the Special Air Services Brigade, a newly formed commando unit. It was a secret and elite corps, specializing in hit-and-run raids and in pinpointing targets behind enemy lines for RAF bombers. More choosy about its recruits than any other branch of service, the SAS trained in four-man teams for the most dangerous operations of the war. Sparrowhawk’s SAS unit was shipped to North Africa, where it teamed with the Long Range Desert Group to destroy hundreds of Luftwaffe aircraft on the ground. The commandos also demolished tons of badly needed German war supplies.

Next, the SAS was sent to Sicily, France and Holland. So effective were they that Hitler ordered them hunted down and disposed of at all cost. Ensuring that SAS men who fell into German hands would face torture and certain execution. In a Normandy village a French double agent betrayed Sparrowhawk’s four-man team to the Gestapo, who cut out the tongue of one commando and broke his spine with iron bars. A second was set afire in the courtyard in front of Sparrowhawk’s cell.

But before Sparrowhawk and the remaining team member could be disposed of, a British bombing raid inflicted heavy damage on the village, flattening buildings, including the jail, and freeing the pair.

“Toddle on ahead, mate,” Sparrowhawk said to his friend. “A matter to dispose of first, then I’ll catch up to you.”

“We’ll both dispose of it,” the commando said.

Lacking the papers and weapons, they hid until midnight, then made their way to the edge of town, to the small farm where the treacherous double agent lived. Moving from shadow to shadow they slipped into the barn to wait. They knew the traitor’s routine. Dinner, followed by Camembert cheese and apple brandy, then a trip to the barn to tend cows and a pair of horses. Hungry, filthy, red eyed from lack of sleep, the commandos looked around for weapons.

An hour later the traitor, relaxed and smoking a long clay pipe, strolled into the barn. Sparrowhawk, wielding a sickle taken from behind the door, beheaded him and stuck his head on a pitchfork. The grisly trophy was left standing in a stall and facing a mare about to foal.

“Nietzsche’s Gentlemen,” the SAS’s detractors called it. A private undisciplined collection of thugs and psychopaths quick to do the dirty work in the name of king or queen. Sparrowhawk, who stayed on with the regiment after the war, knew better. There was no more disciplined group of soldiers in the world than the SAS; its standards were so high that troopers with years of experience in other regiments failed to qualify for the SAS no matter how hard they tried.

Snobbery was another reason for the criticism; the SAS had little respect for rank, an attitude unacceptable to regular army officers in a class-ridden society. SAS officers were respected only on the basis of performance, not commission. The unit’s secrecy also lent credence to much of the criticism leveled at it. But secrecy was necessary, for the quiet wars now being fought against communism were delicate exercises in edged diplomacy and killing.

Quiet wars protected oil rights, gold mines, shipping lanes, friendly leaders. With cold efficiency, Sparrowhawk and the SAS plied their trade in Malaya, Borneo, Africa, South Arabia. It was an exciting and dangerous time and Sparrowhawk was never happier. He had found his Holy Grail, the beige SAS beret and cloth badge bearing the well-known winged dagger.

When he was thirty-five he met and married Unity Palethorpe, the sister of an SAS trooper, a shy woman one foot taller. From the beginning they loved each other deeply. She was intelligent, reserved and devoted, seeing him as heroic and sensitive. They shared a love of books, animals, Haydn and a reverence for the monarchy. “We married and lived happily ever after,” Sparrowhawk said of her, quoting Churchill’s description of his own marriage.

They had one child, a daughter Valerie, who, with her golden hair and fair skin, Sparrowhawk called his piece of the sun. He loved them both, the tall, plain woman and the little girl who delighted in wearing the decorations awarded to her father in secret and unpublicized SAS ceremonies. It pleased him that among his daughter’s first words were
“Free beer,”
the SAS recall code that drew the men back to base to pick up uniforms and equipment for a mission. But her mother stopped the child from saying
“Double tap,”
the SAS code for two shots in the head.

For Sparrowhawk the only release he needed from his work was time with Unity, the two strolling arm in arm through the woods or along a country road while he told her of the intrigues, betrayals and assassinations concocted in Whitehall’s corridors of power, to be dealt with by “Nietzsche’s Gentlemen,” often at the cost of their lives.

“You’ve got clowns in Whitehall,” he told her, “who paint their damned faces red with our blood.”

That’s when he spoke to her of those who had failed “to beat the clock,” who had been killed and their names inscribed on the SAS regimental clock tower in Hereford.

Sparrowhawk said to his wife, “I’m beginning to believe that all of life is a preparation for death. Can’t say as I like the idea. Makes God out to be a witless ass if he can’t think of a more clever ending than that.”

In his forties, Sparrowhawk, now a major, was relieved from active duty and assigned to administrative duties at SAS headquarters. Restless and ill at ease behind a desk, he soon tired of working with recruits and greeting members of Parliament on inspection tours. He was a soldier; he craved the excitement of combat. But combat was a young man’s job. Sparrowhawk endured desk duty as long as he could, for less than a year. Then he resigned to work for a London security firm composed of ex-SAS men like himself. The firm, however, went bankrupt and Sparrowhawk, with a family to support, was forced to work as little more than a hired muscle.

He served as bodyguard to arms dealers, Arab sheiks, visiting American film stars, the children of wealthy industrialists. A few British businessmen consulted him on security measures for themselves and their companies and once he served as go-between in a Rome kidnapping. He was getting older, but not richer.

To pay for private medical care for Unity, Sparrowhawk turned thief. He stole industrial secrets and church antiques coveted by a private collector and love letters being used by a New Scotland Yard detective to blackmail a homosexual member of Parliament. It was with relief that he returned to soldiering late in 1974, accepting a job with South African forces to help track down black guerrillas on the country’s northern border. The contract lasted a month, paid little and was notable only in that Sparrowhawk killed a Russian woman.

A pair of Russians were in the South African bush to gauge the amounts of black military resistance to that country’s white regime; they were serving as temporary advisers to the guerrillas when all fell into an ambush set by Sparrowhawk. One of the two Russians could have escaped, but stayed behind to help his wounded comrade. When it was apparent that neither could get away, the one who had not been wounded fought with a ferocity that stunned Sparrowhawk.

It was Sparrowhawk who finally killed him, only to learn that the determined fighter had been a heavyset woman with the slant eyes of her Tartar forebears; the comrade she had refused to leave was her husband. When she saw that he was mortally wounded, she had fought to the death rather than surrender. Sparrowhawk was impressed and disturbed by her bravery. Anyone who seemed fearless in the face of death left him uneasy.

On his return to Johannesburg he was offered five thousand pounds to escort a diamond dealer to Saigon, where the dealer was to purchase gems owned by a South Vietnamese general. The Vietnam War, which in truth had begun in 1946 with France opposing Ho Chi Minh, was winding down. American troops, per the Paris cease-fire agreement of January 1973, had been withdrawing from Southeast Asia for the past two years. A small number of military advisers remained, along with the American embassy personnel in Saigon. However, it was only a matter of weeks before the NVA, the North Vietnamese Army, would move south and take Saigon.

The general that Sparrowhawk and the diamond dealer came to South Vietnam to meet was planning to leave, but not empty-handed. Diamonds, like gold, were an inflation-proof currency.

When the diamond deal was concluded Sparrowhawk was offered more work in Saigon. With the CIA.

Ruttencutter, the slim, icy New Yorker who proposed that Sparrowhawk work for “the Company,” said, “We’ve little choice. The Paris treaty planted an international commission in this city and its people are watching us like hawks. The feeling is it’s best not to bring any more of our own people here. So we’re forced to use independents, free-lancers like yourself. You come highly recommended”

“Terribly kind of you.” In the humid monsoon weather, in sticky heat, Ruttencutter never perspired. He talked out of the side of his mouth, which Sparrowhawk found amusing.

“Means you keep a low profile,” said Ruttencutter. “Poles, French, Hungarians are hot to hang truce violations on us. Bastards spend most of their time with the bar girls. I hope they get a dose of the clap that won’t quit.”

“Not to veer off on too sharp a tangent, but what do I do in a war which appears to be nearing its end?”

“This and that. One thing and another. Specifically? Let’s say you act as a courier between here and Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Laos. Make a little trip to Cambodia. Ride shotgun on certain flights on a certain airline in which we have an interest. Join some of our people on little trips outside of Saigon.”

Sparrowhawk’s eyes narrowed. “Sounds quite scenic, actually. You’re leaving out something.”

“Which is?”

“You neglected to mention killing for you.”

Ruttencutter looked away. “Whatever will be, will be, as they say.” He turned back to Sparrowhawk. “Ten thousand dollars a month. Interested?”

Sparrowhawk gave him a concentrated look, then said: “When do we commence our association?”

Special jobs.
One involved taking part in the interrogation of Viet Cong prisoners kidnapped from villages at the CIA’s request by Robbie Ambrose and Dorian Raymond, two American SEALs who did the odd task now and again for the frozen Ruttencutter. Sparrowhawk and the SEALs formed an attachment of sorts, though neither GI struck him as a giant intellect. Robbie, however, had an appealing politeness that hid the most extraordinary capacity for violence. An amazing hand-to-hand fighter. Dorian was somewhat dimmer, with infantile dreams of sudden wealth and a taste for dissipation.

Being involved with the CIA brought all three into contact with George Chihara, an influential Japanese businessman and one of Saigon’s prime movers and shakers. Chihara was also a CIA front; the airline ostensibly owned by him was actually CIA backed and used to transport opium grown by northern tribesmen to Saigon, to fatten the bank accounts of South Vietnamese politicians and generals. Aiding the opium traffic was the price America seemed willing to pay for allies in the fight against communism.