Mambo (22 page)

10

Norfolk

It was shortly after ten a.m., some two hours since the attack. Ambulances came and went in utter confusion along country lanes built for horses and carts. Spectators from nearby villages stood beneath umbrellas and some macabre souls took photographs, despite the entreaties of military policemen. Physicians in wet white coats, an Anglican priest, a group of taciturn military investigators, the inevitable reporters, the general ghouls attendant on every bloodletting – it was a crowded circus, and Pagan, whose chest pain flared despite a recent ingestion of Pethidine in the fast car from London, was filled with several feelings at the same time, all of them cheerless.

Rain fell bleakly. Foxie had his collar turned up and looked like a gambler praying for a winner in the last race of a long, losing day.

“I'm angry,” Pagan said quietly.

When Frank's words emerged like sand through a clenched fist, Foxworth knew Pagan was going into his dragon-like mode. Even the way his breath hung on the chill wet air suggested fire. The business in the hotel last night with the Cuban-American woman and the man known as Rafael Rosabal, who had turned out to be a member of Castro's government, was another problem. Something there cut deeply into Frank, and Foxie wasn't sure what. Pagan had reacted oddly to Foxie's information about Rosabal, as if he were pretending not to listen at all. Was the woman an old love, a potent ghost still? Foxworth was a tireless observer of the signs in Pagan's personal landscape, and he'd developed an ability to read most of them – and even love a number of them – but every now and then Frank vanished inside himself and became camouflaged at the heart of his own terrain. Now was one such moment.

“We have half the police force of the country looking for Ruhr – and he pulls this off anyway,” Pagan said. “A fucking cruise missile!”

A savage little pulse worked in Pagan's jaw. “You know what makes it even worse? We've got a couple of eyewitnesses among the soldiers who saw his face clearly before he put on his gas mask. You know what that means? He wanted people to
see
him. He wanted to be
noticed
. He's like a bloody actor who just happened to do a quick stint in the sticks here. He wants audience appreciation even in the miserable provinces! Jesus Christ! The man's bored with all his years of anonymity and now he's got a taste of fame and he loves it. Vanity, Foxie. He's suddenly got theatre in his blood. I want him. I want that bastard.”

Foxie surveyed the team of experts that was sifting through the wreckage of the two helicopters. Here and there, in ditches, under trees, hidden by long grass, lay bodies that hadn't yet been taken away. It was a sickening scene. Foxie thrust his hands in the pockets of his raincoat and thought how infrequently he'd seen Frank Pagan this upset. Sirens cut through the rain, flashing lights glimmered feebly. It was a miserable day with a grey sky that might last forever.

“The missile didn't have a warhead,” Foxworth remarked. A small consolation. “Without the nuclear hardware it's only a bloody twenty-odd foot cylinder of metal.”

“With dangerous potential,” Pagan said. He was watching a soldier being raised on a stretcher; the boy's leg was missing below the knee. Pagan turned his face to the side. There had been a royal battle in this quiet spot whose only usual violence was that of an owl setting upon a fieldmouse, talons open, a quick dying squeal by moonlight.

An official limousine approached the crossroad and squeezed with some authority between parked ambulances. Martin Burr got out followed by the Home Secretary, Sir Frederick Kinnaird. Both men made their way over the damp road to where Pagan stood.

Pagan had no great fondness for the Home Secretary, nor any specific reason for his dislike except that he was not enamoured of politicians in general. They inspired in him the same kind of confidence as used-car salesmen. Vote for me, my Party has been driven only by an old lady and then only on Sundays and never more than thirty miles an hour. Burr did the introductions. Hands were duly pumped. Burr opened a small umbrella and shared it with Sir Freddie. This made Pagan conscious of his damp woollen overcoat and Italian shoes that leaked rainwater.

“Is it as ghastly as it looks?” Freddie Kinnaird asked.

It was on the tip of Frank Pagan's tongue, a mischief; he wanted to say
No, it's been a lovely party but we've run a bit low on the canapés, Freddie, my old sunshine
. But he merely gestured toward the demolition site.

“A cruise missile was taken, I understand,” Kinnaird said.

Pagan noticed Kinnaird's black coat with the slick velvet collar; an exquisite silk tie went well with his striped shirt, made for him in Jermyn Street, no doubt. Kinnaird said something about how the missile had been on its way to Tucson, Arizona, there to be destroyed under the terms of the Russian-American treaty. He spoke in a drawling way, as if his every word were precious, to be lingered over. Now and again he shoved a strand of thin, sandy hair out of his eyes.

Pagan said, “We assume the missile was driven to an airfield nearby and flown out. There are about half a dozen airstrips in this vicinity left over from World War Two, most of them private flying clubs now. I've got men checking them out. If the missile
hasn't
been flown from the area, it wouldn't be too hard to hide. An underground tunnel, a warehouse, a bus garage.”

“To where could the missile be flown?” Kinnaird asked.

“Anybody's guess,” Pagan said. “I hope we'll have an answer soon. The RAF has been conducting an air search, but since they haven't told
us
anything, it means they don't have a thing to report. Otherwise they'd be crowing.”

Kinnaird said, “I understand one would need a fair-sized transport plane to carry the missile. Surely that shouldn't be too hard to spot.”

Foxworth replied, “And it wouldn't be, except for two things, Home Secretary. The rotten weather and the fact that there's an enormous amount of air traffic in this part of the world. London's only one hundred miles away, and the pattern of traffic there and throughout the Home Counties in general is horrendous. The system is overloaded.”

“Why steal a missile without a warhead anyway?” the Home Secretary wanted to know.

Nobody had an answer to Sir Freddie's question. Rain fell on Burr's black umbrella. The Commissioner asked, “What about the dead terrorists?”

“We're still working on ID,” Pagan replied. “We've got four of the buggers. Two died in the assault. Another two inside the chopper.” He was impatient suddenly. He was very fond of Martin Burr, and admired him, but he disliked the way Big Shots drove up from London to ask what progress had been made when it was damned obvious that men were bleeding to death and ambulances slashing through the rain and the whole scorched, smoking landscape looked as if a meteor had struck it.

“Rather fond of helicopters, aren't they?” Freddie Kinnaird said. “What do we know about this one?”

Pagan had one of those quirky little urges to unbutton his overcoat and show Sir Freddie that, contrary to anything he might have read in the tabloids lately, there was no Superman costume under his shirt. He restrained himself and said, “We're running checks. We know it was a Cobra and the markings had been painted black. Beyond that, nothing yet. We're working on it. We assume it was the same aircraft used in Shepherd's Bush. But that's just an assumption, and practically worthless.” Pagan had a difficult moment keeping anger and bitterness from his voice. The idea of a second chopper attack, and the sheer murderous arrogance behind it, rattled him.

“Sorry, by the by, to hear about your gun wound. Bloody tragic business in Shepherd's Bush.” There was the famous Kinnaird touch, palm open on Pagan's shoulder, a slightly distant intimacy, as if between nobility and the common man there might be only the merest suggestion of physical contact. It was all right for their lordships to fuck the serving wenches but not altogether good form to become too intimate with the footmen.

Pagan walked toward the wreckage of the Cobra. The dead terrorists were covered with sheets of plastic, under which charred faces might be seen opaquely, as if through filthy isinglass. Men with protective gloves picked through debris cool enough to handle. Pagan watched for a moment. From a mess such as this, hard information would emerge only slowly – a fingerprint here, an engine identification number there, maybe a scorched photograph in a wallet. It would take a long time for this chaos to yield anything useful.

Now Foxie approached the smoking rubble in a hurried way. “Just got a message from a place called St Giles, Frank. It sounds quite interesting. It's only a few miles from here.”

“I'd welcome anything that gets me the hell out of here,” Pagan said.

“I'll fetch the car,” and Foxie was gone again, nimbly skirting the small fires that still flickered here and there in the gloom.

The airfield beyond the hamlet of St Giles had once been a run-down place, redolent of robust pilots with waxen moustaches dashing off in Spitfires to defeat the Hun, but the old hangars had been painted bright blue and the control tower refurbished in a similar shade. Somebody had taken some trouble and expense to tart the place up. A red windsock flapped damply. A sign attached to the tower said East Anglia Flying Club in bright letters. Small planes, chained to the ground for protection against the wind, were scattered around the edges of the runway.

Foxworth and Pagan got out of the car. It was a dreary open space, exposed to the elements. A thin wet mist had formed in the wooded land beyond the hangars where a group of men stood around a Range Rover. Pagan walked the runway, Foxie following. At a certain point, Pagan stopped and kneeled rather cautiously to the tarmac, dipping his finger into a slick of fresh oily fluid; it was some kind of hydraulic liquid, viscous and green, rain-repellent. He wiped his hands together and walked until he reached the copse of beech trees.

Three men stood near the blue Range Rover, the doors of which hung open. Pagan recognised Billy Ewing, the Scotsman who worked at the SATO office in Golden Square. The other two were uniformed men, probably local. Billy Ewing, who had a small red nose and blue eyes that watered no matter the season, had a handkerchief crumpled in the palm of one hand as he always did. He had allergies unknown to the medical profession. His life was one long sniff.

“We haven't touched a thing, Frank,” Ewing said in a voice forever on the edge of a sneeze. “It's just the way we found it.”

The Rover was hidden, although not artfully concealed. Whoever had stashed it here between the trees had done so in haste, or else didn't give a damn about discovery. Pagan looked inside. Boxes of cartridges lay on the floor, a discarded shotgun, two rocket launchers, three automatic pistols; quite a nice little arsenal. He looked at the instrument panel. The vehicle had clocked a mere three hundred and seven miles. It still smelled new.

Billy Ewing coughed and said, “An old geezer who was illegally fishing a local stream says he heard a bloody great roar this morning and when he looked up he saw – and here I quote – ‘a monster hairyplane near a half-mile long' rising just above him. Scared him half to death, he says. If you need to talk to him, Frank, you'll find him at a pub in St Giles where he went to take some medication for his fright.”

As he listened to Ewing, Pagan reached inside the rear of the vehicle. Lying across the back seat was a wine-coloured scarf of the kind worn by schoolkids as part of a uniform. He removed the scarf. A small threaded motif ran through it, the stylised letters MCS. The last two might have stood for Comprehensive School.

“What do you make of it?” Foxie asked.

Pagan didn't reply. An odd little feeling worked inside him, something vague moving towards the light, but as yet indefinable. He held the garment to his nose. There was a fading scent of rose.

“Belongs to a girl,” he said. “Unless boys are wearing perfumes these days.”

“You'll find a few,” Ewing remarked in the manner of a philosopher resigned to paradoxes. “It's a funny world these days, Frank.”

“What's the scarf doing in this particular car?” Foxworth asked.

The feeling coursed through Pagan again, creating an uneasiness. “My guess is Ruhr left it there deliberately,” he said.

“Why? You think he's thumbing his nose at you, Frank?”

Pagan gazed through the beech trees. Ruhr's disturbed mind, the surface of which Pagan had barely scratched during their interviews, seemed to present itself in a solid flash of light, like a hitherto unknown planet drifting momentarily close to earth. “It's possible. I think he's got himself a bloody hostage and wants me to know it. He likes the idea of turning the screw.”

Pagan shrugged; how could he know for sure? The flash of light had gone out and Ruhr's mind was once again a darkened planetarium. “Let's find out what MCS stands for,” he said. “Then call in the fingerprint boys and have them go over this car.”

Foxworth shivered as the wind rose up and roared through the beech trees, tearing leaves from branches. He wasn't happy with this deserted airfield, or the spooky beeches, or the girl's scarf. Nor was he exactly overjoyed to see Frank slyly swallow another painkiller, which he did like a very bad actor, turning his face to one side and smuggling the narcotic into his mouth.

“Keep an eye on things here for a while, Billy,” Pagan said.

“Will do,” the Scotsman answered, and sneezed abruptly into his hankie.

Pagan and Foxworth walked back to their car. The red windsock filled with air, rising quickly then subsiding in a limp, shapeless manner.

Cabo Gracias a Dios, Honduras

The mid-morning was infernally humid; even the sea breezes, sluggish and sickly, couldn't dispel the stickiness. The man who stood on a knoll overlooking the ocean wore very black glasses and a battered Montecristo Fini Panama hat; he carried an aerosol can of insecticide with which he periodically buzzed the mosquitoes that flocked constantly around him.