The Veteran (27 page)

The hippie did not get far. He was halfway from the arch leading to the channel and the exit of blessed relief at the far end when two uniformed customs men stepped into his path. Polite of course. Deadly polite.

“Excuse me, sir, would you mind stepping this way?”

The Canadian exploded with rage.

“What the hell is this all about, man?”

“Just come with us, sir.”

The Canadian’s voice rose to a shout.

“Now wait a fucking minute. Thirteen fucking hours on a plane and I don’t need this shit, you hear?”

The queue behind him stopped as if shot. Then, in the manner of the British when someone is creating a scene, they tried to look the other way, pretend it was not happening, and continue to shuffle forward. Hugo Seymour was among them.

The Canadian, relieved of both his small and large haversack, still shouting and protesting, was hustled away through a side door to one of the search rooms. The shuffle resumed. The cream-suited businessman had almost made the exit arch when he too was intercepted. Two officers blocked his path and two more closed in behind.

At first he appeared not to realize what was happening. Then, beneath his tan, he went ashen grey.

“I don’t understand. What seems to be the problem?”

“If you would just be kind enough to come with us, sir.”

He too was led away. Behind the one-way mirror Bill Butler sighed. Now, the big one. The end of the chase. The cases, and what they contained.

It took three hours, in two separate suites of rooms. Butler flitted between them both, growing ever more frustrated. When the Customs take luggage apart, they really find it all. If there is anything to find. They had both haversacks emptied and searched to the linings and the frames. Apart from several packs of Lucky Strikes there was nothing. That did not surprise Bill Butler. Decoys never carry anything.

It was Hugo Seymour who stunned him. They had the hide suitcase through the X-ray machine a dozen times. They measured for hidden compartments and found nothing. The same with the crocodile attache case. It yielded a tube of Bisodol antacid tablets. Two of these were crushed and the powder chemically tested. The tests revealed antacid tablets. He was stripped, clothed in a paper one-piece, and his clothes X-rayed. Then, naked, he was X-rayed himself to see if he carried any packages internally. Nothing.

Around ten o’clock, fifteen minutes apart, each had to be released. Seymour was by then loudly threatening legal action. Butler was not fussed by that. They usually did. That was because they had no idea of the real powers of Customs and Excise.

“You want them tailed, boss?” asked his gloomy Number Two.

Butler thought about it and shook his head.

“It was probably a bum steer. If they are innocent patsies, we’ll be following them for nothing. If they are not so innocent, I doubt if the controlling brains behind the Bangkok run will contact them before they have spotted the tail. Leave it. Next time.”

The Canadian, the first to be released, took the airport coach into London and checked into a seedy hotel near Paddington. Mr. Hugo Seymour took a taxi and went to a far more expensive hostelry.

Just after two p.m. four men in various London streets received phone calls. Each was standing, as arranged, in a public phone booth. Each was told to report to an address. One of them made a call himself, then left for the rendezvous.

At four p.m. Bill Butler was sitting alone in his car outside a block of serviced apartments, the sort that could be rented by the week, or even the day.

At five past four the unmarked Transit van he had been awaiting drove up behind him and ten members of his Knock team spilled out. There was no time for briefing. The gang could have a lookout posted, though after watching for thirty minutes he had seen no lace curtain shift. He simply nodded and led the way through the doors of the block. There was a front desk but no-one manning it. He left two disappointed men to watch the lift doors and led the other eight up the stairs. The flat was on the third.

The Knock does not stand on ceremony. The rammer took off the door lock with a single smash and they were in: young, eager, very fit, adrenalin high. But no guns.

The five men in the rented drawing room put up no fight. They sat there, looking sandbagged by the suddenness and unexpectedness of the incursion. Butler came in last, very much the man in charge, while his team delved into inside pockets for identification. He took the glowering American first.

Later voice tests would show it was he who had made the call denouncing the Canadian hippie decoy to the Customs hotline at Heathrow airport. The grip by his side contained six kilograms of what would turn out to be pure Colombian cocaine.

“Mr. Salvatore Bono, I am arresting you on a charge of conspiring with others to import into this country a banned substance ...”

When the formalities were over the man from Miami was cuffed and led away. Butler took the hippie next. As the surly Canadian was being taken out Butler called after his colleagues:

“My car. I want to talk to that one.”

Mr. Hugo Seymour had changed out of his silk suit and into tweed and slacks better adapted for an English day in late January. The second decoy. He, too, relieved of the block of fifty-pound notes totalling £10,000 that he had received for his role in the operation, went quietly. Butler turned to the remaining two.

The consignment was on the table between them, still in its carrying case, as it had come through Customs. The false bottom had been ripped out to reveal the cavity beneath, in which lay sylthane bags that, after verification, would reveal two kilograms of Thai White heroin. But the decals of Scoobydoo and Shaggy were plainly visible.

“Mr. John Higgins, I am arresting you on a charge of importing, and of conspiring with others to import, into this country ...”

The dutiful citizen had to be escorted to the bathroom where he threw up. When he was gone Butler turned to the last man, the organizer of the Bangkok dope run. He sat staring bleakly out of the window at the London sky, a sight he knew would in future be minimal.

“I’ve been after you for some time, chum.”

There was no reply.

“A nice scam. Not one decoy but two. And trotting along behind, avoiding the fracas in the Green Channel, innocent Mr. Higgins with his dumpy wife and charming little daughter.”

“Get on with it,” snapped the middle-aged man.

“Very well. Mr. Harry Palfrey, I am arresting you ...”

Butler left his last two men to scour the rented flat for any trace of evidence that might have been thrown away in the seconds when the door came down, and descended to the street. He had a long night of work ahead of him, but it was work he would enjoy. His Number Two was at the wheel of his own car, so he slid into the back beside the silent Canadian.

As the car drew away from the kerb, he said, “Let’s get some things straight. When did you first learn that Seymour was your partner in this double bluff?”

“Back there in the flat,” said the hippie.

Butler looked thunderstruck.

“What about the conversation in the middle of the night by the lavatory door?”

“What conversation? What lavatory? I had never seen him before in my life.”

Butler laughed, which he seldom did.

“Of course. Sorry about what they did to you at Heathrow, but you know the rules. I couldn’t blow your cover, even there. Anyway, thanks for the phone call. Nice one, Sean. Tonight the beer’s on me.”

LEGEND HAS ALWAYS HAD IT THAT NO WHITE MAN SURVIVED THE
massacre of the men under General Custer at the Little Bighorn, 25 June, 1876. Not quite true; there was one single survivor. He was a frontier scout, aged twenty-four, name of Ben Craig. This is his story.

IT WAS THE KEEN NOSE OF THE FRONTIER SCOUT THAT CAUGHT IT FIRST: THE FAINT AROMA OF
woodsmoke on the prairie wind.

He was riding point, twenty yards ahead of the ten cavalrymen of the patrol scouting forward of the main column down the western bank of Rosebud Creek.

Without turning round the scout raised his right hand and reined in. Behind him the sergeant and the nine troopers did the same. The scout slipped from his horse, leaving it to crop the grass in peace, and trotted towards a low bank between the riders and the creek. There he dropped to the ground and crawled to the crest, peering over the top while remaining hidden in the long grass.

They were cramped between the ridge and the bank of the stream. It was a small camp, no more than five lodges, a single extended family. The teepees indicated Northern Cheyenne. The scout knew them well. Sioux teepees were tall and narrow; Cheyenne built theirs wider at the base, more squat. Pictographs showing hunting triumphs adorned the sides and these too were in the Cheyenne manner.

The scout estimated the camp would contain between twenty and twenty-five persons, but the half-score of men were away hunting. He could tell by the ponies. There were only seven grazing near the lodges. To move such a camp, with the men mounted and the women and children, folded teepees and other baggage on travois there should have been almost twenty.

He heard the sergeant crawling up the bank towards him and gestured behind him for the man to stay down. Then the blue uniform sleeve with the three chevrons appeared beside him.

“What do you see?” said a hoarse whisper.

It was nine in the morning and already burning hot. They had been riding for three hours. General Custer liked to break camp early. But already the scout could smell the whisky on the breath of the man beside him. It was bad frontier whisky and the smell was rank, stronger than the perfume of the wild plum, cherry and the torrents of rambling dog roses that grew in such profusion along the banks to give Rosebud Creek its name.

“Five lodges. Cheyenne. Only the women and children in camp. The braves are away hunting across the creek.”

Sergeant Braddock did not ask how the scout knew this. He just accepted that he did. He hawked, ejected a squirt of liquid tobacco and gave a yellow-toothed grin. The scout slid down the bank and stood up.

“Let us leave them alone. They are not what we are looking for.”

But Braddock had spent three years on the plains with the Seventh Cavalry and had had depressingly little sport. A long and boring winter in Fort Lincoln had yielded a bastard son by a laundress and part-time whore, but he had really come to the plains to kill Indians and did not intend to be denied.

The slaughter took only five minutes. The ten riders came over the ridge at a canter and broke at once into a full gallop. The scout, mounted up, watched in disgust from the top of the ridge.

One trooper, a raw recruit, was so bad a horseman that he fell off. The rest did the butchery. All cavalry swords had been left behind at Fort Lincoln so they used their Colt revolvers or new-issue Springfield ‘73s.

When they heard the drumming of hooves the squaws attending the campfire and their cooking pots tried to find and gather their children before running for the river. They were too late. The riders were through them before they could reach the water, then turned and charged back through the lodges, shooting down anything that moved. When it was over and all the old people, women and children were dead, they dismounted and raided the teepees, looking for interesting loot to send home. There were several more shots from inside the lodges when still-living children were found.

The scout trotted the four hundred yards from the ridge to the camp to examine the slaughter. There seemed nothing and no-one left alive as the troopers torched the teepees. One of the troopers, little more than a boy and new to this, was bringing up his breakfast of hard tack and beans, leaning out of the saddle to avoid his own puke. Sergeant Braddock was triumphant. He had his victory. He had found a feathered war bonnet and affixed it to his saddle near the canteen that ought to have contained only spring water.

The scout counted fourteen corpses, tossed like broken dolls where they fell. He shook his head as one of the men offered him a trophy, and trotted past the tents to the bank of the creek to give his horse a brief drink.

She was lying half-hidden in the reeds, fresh blood running down one bare leg where the rifle bullet had taken her in the thigh as she ran. If he had been a mite quicker he would have turned his head away and ridden back to the burning teepees. But Braddock, watching him, had caught the direction of his glance and ridden up.

“What have you found, boy? Well, another vermin, and still alive.”

He unholstered his Colt and took aim. The girl in the reeds turned her face and stared up at them, eyes blank with shock. The scout reached out, gripped the Irishman’s wrist and forced the pistol-hand upwards. Braddock’s coarse, whisky-red face darkened with anger.

“Leave her alive, she may know something,” said the scout.

It was the only way. Braddock paused, thought and then nodded.

“Good thinking, boy. We’ll take her back to the general as a present.”

He re-holstered his pistol and went back to check on his men. The scout slipped off his horse and went into the reeds to tend to the girl. Luckily for her the wound was clean. At short range the bullet had gone through the flesh of the thigh as she ran. There was an entry wound and an exit hole, both small and round. The scout used his neckerchief to bathe the wound with clear creek water and bind it tight to stop the flow of blood.

When he had finished he looked at her. She stared back at him. A torrent of hair, black as a raven’s wing, flowed about her shoulders; wide dark eyes, clouded with pain and fear. Not all Indian squaws were pretty in a white man’s eyes, but of all the tribes, the handsomest were the Cheyenne. The girl in the reeds, aged about sixteen, had a stunning, ethereal beauty. The scout was twenty-four, Bible-raised, and had never known a woman in the Old Testament sense. He felt his heart pound and had to break the gaze. He swung her onto his shoulder and walked back to the ruined camp.

“Put her on a pony,” shouted the sergeant.

He swigged again from his pannikin. The scout shook his head.