скачать книгу бесплатно
She frowned. ‘You didn’t lose anything when you were out there did you?’
‘Everything intact and in full working order, ma’am.’ I saluted gravely. ‘It’s just that I’ve never been any good at it. A Chinese psychiatrist once told me it was because my grandfather found me in bed with the Finnish au pair when I was fourteen and beat all hell out of me with a blackthorne he prized rather highly. Carried it all the way through the desert campaign. He was a general, you see, so he naturally found it difficult to forgive me when it broke.’
‘On you?’ she said.
‘Exactly, so I don’t think you’d find me very satisfactory.’
‘We’ll have to see, won’t we?’ She was suddenly the lass from Doncaster again, the Yorkshire voice flat in the rain. ‘What do you do with yourself – for a living, I mean?’
‘Is that what you call it?’ I shrugged. ‘The last of the dinosaurs. Hunted to extinction. I enjoy what used to be known in society as private means – lots of them. In what little time I have to spare, I also try to write.’
She smiled at that, looking so astonishingly beautiful that things actually stopped moving for a moment. ‘You’re just what I’ve been seeking for my old age.’
‘You’re marvellous,’ I said. ‘Also big, busty, sensuous…’
‘Oh, definitely that,’ she said. ‘I never know when to stop. I’m also a lay-out artist in an advertising agency, divorced and thirty-seven years of age. You’ve only seen me in an artificial light, love.’
I started to slide down the side of the car and she got a shoulder under my arm and went through my clothes.
‘You’ll find the wallet in my left breast pocket,’ I murmured.
She chuckled. ‘You daft ha’p’orth. I’m looking for the car keys. Where do you live?’
‘The Essex coast,’ I told her. ‘Foulness.’
‘Good God,’ she said. ‘That must be all of fifty miles away.’
‘Fifty-eight.’
She took me back to her flat in the King’s Road, just for the night. I stayed a month, which was definitely all I could take of the hub of the universe, the bright lights, the crowds. I needed solitude again, the birds, the marshes, my own little hole to rot in. So she left her job at the agency, moved down to Foulness and set up house with me.
Oscar Wilde once said that life is a bad quarter of an hour made up of exquisite moments. She certainly gave me plenty of those in the months that followed and that morning was no exception. I started off in my usual frenzy and within minutes she had gentled me into making slow, meaningful love and with considerably more expertise than when we had first met. She’d definitely taken care of that department.
Afterwards I felt fine, the fears of the hour before dawn a vague fantasy already forgotten. I kissed her softly under her rigid left nipple, tossed the sheets to one side and went into the bathroom.
A medical friend once assured me that the shock of an ice-cold shower was detrimental to the vascular system and liable to reduce life expectancy by a month. Admittedly he was in his cups at the time but I had always found it an excellent excuse for spending five minutes each morning under a shower that was as hot as I could bear.
When I returned to the bedroom Sheila had gone, but I could smell coffee and realised that I was hungry. I dressed quickly and went into the sitting-room. There was a log fire burning on the stone hearth and she had her easel set up in front of it.
She was standing there now in her old terry towelling robe, the palette back in her left hand, dabbing vigorously at the canvas with a long brush.
‘I’m having coffee,’ she said without turning round. ‘I’ve made tea for you. It’s on the table.’
I poured myself a cup and went and stood behind her. It was good – damn good. A view from the house, the saltings splashed with sea-lavender, the peculiarly luminous light reflected by the slimy mud flats, blurring everything at the edges. Above all, the loneliness.
‘It’s good.’
‘Not yet.’ She worked away busily in one corner without turning her head. ‘But it will be. What do you want for breakfast?’
‘I wouldn’t dream of disturbing the muse.’ I kissed her on the nape of the neck. ‘I’ll take Fritz for a walk.’
‘All right, love.’
The brush was moving very quickly now, a frown of concentration on her face. I had ceased to exist so I got my hunting jacket from behind the door and left her to it.
I have been told that in some parts of America, Airedales are kept specifically to hunt bears and they are excellent swimmers, a useful skill in an area like Foulness. But not Fritz who was Sheila’s one true love, a great, shaggy bundle in ginger and black, amiable to a degree in spite of a bark that could be heard half a mile away. He had ceased to frighten even the birds and was terrified of water, objecting to even the mildest wetting of his paws. He romped ahead of me along the rutted grassy track and I followed.
Foulness – Cape of Birds, the Saxons called it and they were here in plenty. I have always had a liking for solitude and no more than fifty-odd miles from London, I rotted gently and in the right place for it. Islands and mist and sea walls to keep out the tide, built by the Dutch centuries ago. Creeks, long grass, stirring to change colour as if brushed by an invisible presence, the gurgle of water everywhere and the sea creeping in like a ghost in the night to take the unwary.
The Romans had known this place, Saxon outlaws hidden here from the Normans, and now Ellis Jackson pretended for the moment that this was all there was.
In the marshes autumn is the saltings purple and mauve with the sea-lavender, the damp smell of rotting vegetation. Birds calling constantly, lifting from beyond the sea wall uneasily, summer dead and winter yet to come. Gales blowing in off the North Sea, the wind moaning endlessly.
Was this all there was – truly? A bottle a day and Sheila Ward to warm the bed? What was I waiting for, here at the world’s end?
Somewhere in the far distance I heard shooting. Heavy stuff from the sound of it. It stirred something deep inside, set the adrenalin surging only I didn’t have an MI6 carbine to hang on to and this wasn’t the Mekong Delta. This was a grazing marsh on the tip of Foulness in quiet Essex and the shooting came from the Ministry of Defence Proof and Experimental Artillery ranges at Shoeburyness.
Fritz was somewhere up ahead exploring and out of sight. He suddenly appeared over a dyke about fifty yards ahead, plunged into a wide stretch of water and swam strongly to the other side, disappearing into the reeds.
A moment later, he started to bark frantically, a strange new sound for him that seemed to have fear in it. There was a single rifle shot and the barking ceased.
Birds lifted out of the marsh in great clouds. The beating of their wings filled the air and when they had passed, they left an uncanny stillness.
I ran into the mist calling his name. I found his body a minute later sprawled across the rutted track. From the look of things he had been shot through the head with a high velocity bullet for most of the skull had disintegrated. I couldn’t really take it in because it didn’t make any kind of sense. This wasn’t a place where one found strangers. The Ministry were tough about that because of the experimental ranges. Even the locals had to produce a pass at certain checkpoints when leaving or returning to the general area. I had one myself.
A small wind touched my cheek coldly, there was a splashing and as I turned something moved in the tall reeds to my right.
North Vietnamese regular troops wear khaki, but the Viet Cong have their own distinctive garb of conical straw hat and black pyjamas. Many of them still use the old Browning Automatic rifle or the MI carbine that got most American troops through the Second World War.
But not the one who stepped out of the reeds some ten or fifteen yards to my right. He held what looked like a brand new AK47 assault rifle across his chest, the best that China could provide. Very probably the finest assault rifle in the world.
He was as small as they usually were, a stocky little peasant out of some rice field or other. He was soaked to the knees, rain dripped from the brim of his straw hat, the black jacket was quilted against the cold.
I took a couple of cautious steps back. He said nothing, made no move at all, just stood there, holding the AK at the high port. I half-turned and found his twin standing ten yards to my rear.
If this was madness, it had been a long time coming. I cracked completely, gave a cry of fear, jumped from the track into the reeds and plunged into the mist, knee-deep in water.
A wild swan lifted in alarm, great wings beating so close to me that I cried out again and got my arms to my face. But I kept on moving, coming up out of the reeds on the far side close to the old grass-covered dyke that kept the sea back in its own place.
I crouched against it, listening for the sounds of pursuit. Somewhere back there in the marsh there was a disturbance, birds rising in alarm. It was enough. I scrambled over the dyke, dropped to the beach below and ran for my life.
Sheila was still at the easel in front of the fire when I burst into the cottage. I made it to a wing-backed chair near the door and fell into it. She was on her knees beside me in an instant.
‘Ellis? Ellis, what is it?’
I tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come and there was real fear in her eyes now. She hurried to the sideboard and returned with a glass of whisky.
I spilled more than I got down, my hand shaking as if I was in high fever. I had left the door open behind me and it swung to and fro in the wind. As she got up to close it, there was the patter of feet.
She said, ‘There’s a lovely old boy and mud up to the eyebrows.’
Fritz padded round to the front of the chair and shoved his nose at my hand.
There had always been a chance that this would happen ever since Tay Son. The psychiatrists had hinted as much, for the damage was too deep. I started to cry helplessly like a child as Fritz nuzzled my hand.
Sheila was very pale now. She pushed my hair back from my brow as if I were a small untidy boy and kissed me gently.
‘It’s going to be all right, Ellis. Just trust me.’
The telephone was in the kitchen. I sat there, clutching my empty whisky glass, staring into space, tears running down my face.
I heard her say, ‘American Embassy? I’d like to speak to General St Claire, please. My name is Mrs Sheila Ward. There was a pause and then she said, ‘Max, is that you?’ and closed the door.
She came out in two or three minutes and knelt in front of me. ‘Max is coming, Ellis. He’s leaving at once. He’ll be here in an hour and a half at the most.’
She left me then to go and get dressed and I hung on to that thought. That Max was coming. Black Max. Brigadier-General James Maxwell St Claire, Congressional Medal of Honour, D.S.C., Silver Star, Medaille Militaire, from Anzio to Vietnam, every boy’s fantasy figure. Black Max was coming to save me as he had saved me, body and soul, once before in the place they called Tay Son.
FORCING HOUSE NUMBER ONE (#ulink_6d5c94de-0288-5c49-b3d8-ff99bdae8487)
2 (#ulink_a43b4f58-fae0-510f-a7d2-5783376024d2)
On a wet February evening in 1966 during my second year at Sandhurst, I jumped from a railway bridge to a freight train passing through darkness below. I landed on a pile of coke, but the cadet who followed me wasn’t so lucky. He dropped between two trucks and was killed instantly.
We were drunk, of course, which didn’t help matters. It was the final link in a chain of similar stupidities and the end of something as far as I was concerned. Harsh words were said at the inquest, even harsher by the commandant when dismissing me from the Academy.
Words didn’t exactly fail my grandfather either, who being a major-general, took it particularly hard. He had always considered me some kind of moral degenerate after the famous episode with the Finnish au pair at the tender age of fourteen and this final exploit gave him the pleasure of knowing that he had been right all along.
My father had died what is known as a hero’s death at Arnhem during the Second World War. My mother, two years later. So, the old man had had his hands on me for some considerable time. Why he had always disliked me so was past knowing and yet hatred is as strong a bond as loving so that when he forbade me his house, there was a kind of release.
The army had been his idea, not mine. The family tradition, or the family curse depending which way you looked at it, so now I was free after twenty-odd years of some kind of servitude or other and thanks to my mother’s money, wealthy by any standards.
Perhaps because of that – because it was my choice and mine alone – I flew to New York within a week of leaving the Academy and enlisted for a period of three years in the United States Army as a paratrooper.
It could be argued that the jump from that railway bridge was a jump into hell for in a sense it landed me in Tay Son, although eighteen months of a different kind of hell intervened.
I flew into the old French airport at Ton Son Nhut in July, 1966, one of two hundred replacements for the 801st Airborne Division. The pride of the army and every man a volunteer as paratroopers are the world over.
A year later, only forty-eight of that original two hundred were still on active duty. The rest were either dead, wounded or missing, thirty-three in one bad ambush alone in the Central Highlands which I only survived myself along with two others by playing dead.
So, I discovered what war was all about – or at least war in Vietnam. Not set-piece battles, not trumpets on the wind, no distant drum to stir the heart. It was savage street fighting in Saigon during the Tet offensive. It was the swamps of the Mekong Delta, the jungles of the Central Highlands, leg ulcers that ate their way through to the bone like acid and leeches that fastened on to your privates and could only be removed with the lighted end of a cigarette.
In a word, it was survival and I became rather an expert in that particular field, came through it all without a scratch until the day I was taking part in a routine search and destroy patrol out of Din To and was careless enough to step on a punji stake, a lethal little booby trap much favoured by the Viet Cong. Fashioned from bamboo, needle-sharp, stuck upright in the ground amongst the elephant grass and smeared with human excrement, it was guaranteed to produce a nasty, festering wound.
It put me in hospital for a fortnight and a week’s leave to follow, which brought me directly to that fateful day in Pleikic when I shambled around in the rain, trying to arrange some transportation to Din To where I had to rejoin my unit. I managed to thumb a lift in a Medevac helicopter that was flying in medical supplies – the worst day’s work in my life.
We were about fifty miles out of Din To when it happened, flying at a thousand feet over paddy fields and jungle, an area stiff with Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regular troops.
A flare went up suddenly about a quarter of a mile to the east of us. There was the burnt-out wreck of a small Huey helicopter in the corner of a paddy field and the man who waved frantically from the dyke beside it was in American uniform.
When we were about thirty feet up, a couple of heavy machine guns opened up from the jungle no more than fifty yards away and at that range they couldn’t miss. The two pilots were wearing chest protectors, but it didn’t do them any good. I think they must have both died instantly. Certainly the crew chief did, for standing in the open doorway in his safety belt, he didn’t have a chance.
The only surviving crew member, the medic, was huddled in the corner, clutching a bloody arm. There was an MI6 in a clip beside him. I grabbed for it, but at the same moment the aircraft lifted violently and I was thrown out through the open door to fall into the mud and water of the paddy field below.
The helicopter bucked twenty or thirty feet up into the air, veered sharply to the left and exploded in a great ball of fire, burning fuel and debris scattering like shrapnel.
I managed to stand, plastered with mud and found myself looking up at the gentleman on the dyke who was pointing an AK47 straight at me. It was no time for heroics, especially as forty or fifty North Vietnamese regular troops swarmed out of the jungle a moment later.
The Viet Cong would have killed me out of hand, but not these boys. Prisoners were a valuable commodity to them, for propaganda as well as intelligence purposes. They marched me into the jungle surrounded by the whole group, everyone trying to get in on the act.
There was a small camp and a young officer who spoke excellent English with a French accent and gave me a cigarette. Then he went through my pockets and examined my documents.
Which was where things took a more sinister turn. In action, it was the practice to leave all personal papers at base, but because I had only been in transit after medical treatment, I was carrying everything, including my British passport.
He said slowly, ‘You are English?’
There didn’t seem to be much point in denying it. ‘That’s right. Where’s the nearest consul?’
Which got me a fist in the mouth for my pains. I thought they might kill me then, but I suppose he knew immediately how valuable a piece of propaganda I would make.
They kept me alive – just – for another fortnight until they found it possible to pass me on to a group moving north for rest and recuperation.
And so, at last, I came to Tay Son. The final landing place of my jump from that railway bridge into darkness, a year and a half before.
My first sight of it was through rain at late evening as we came out of a valley – a great, ochre-painted wall on the crest above us.
I’d seen enough Buddhist monasteries to recognise it for what it was, only this one was different. A watch tower on stilts at either side of the main gate, a guard in each with a heavy machine gun. Beyond, in the compound, there were several prefabricated huts.
Having spent three days stumbling along on the end of a rope at the tail of a column of pack mules, I had only one aim in life which was to find a corner to die in. I tried to sit and someone kicked me back on my feet. They took the mules away, leaving only one guard for me. I stood there, already half-asleep, the rain drifting down through the weird, half-light that you get in the highlands just before dark.
And then an extraordinary thing happened. A man reported dead by the world’s press came round the corner of one of the huts with three armed guards trailing behind him, a black giant in green fatigues and jump boots, Chaka, King of the Zulu nation, alive and shaking the earth again.
Brigadier-General James Maxwell St Claire, the pride of the Airborne, one of the most spectacular figures thrown up by the army since the Second World War. A legend in his own time – Black Max.
His disappearance three months earlier had provoked a scandal that had touched the White House itself for, as a Medal of Honour man, he had been kept strictly out of the line of fire since Korea, had only found himself in Vietnam at all as a member of a fact-finding commission reporting directly to the president himself.
The story was that St Claire was visiting a forward area helicopter outfit when a red alert went up. One of the gun ships was short of a man to operate one of its door-mounted M60’s. St Claire, seizing his chance of a little action, had insisted on going along. The chopper had gone down in flames during the ensuing action.
He changed direction and crossed the compound so briskly that his guards were left trailing. Mine presented his AK and St Claire shoved it to one side with the back of his hand.
I came to attention. He said, ‘At ease, soldier. You know me?’
‘You inspected my outfit at Din To just over three months ago, sir.’
He nodded slowly. ‘I remember and I remember you, too. Colonel Dooley pointed you out to me specially. You’re English. Didn’t I speak to you on parade?’
‘That’s right, General.’
He smiled suddenly, my first sight of that famous St Claire charm and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘You look bushed, son. I’ll see what I can do, but it won’t be much. This is no ordinary prison camp. The Chinese run this one personally. Forcing house number one. The commander is a Colonel Chen-Kuen, one of the nicest guys you ever met in your life. Amongst other things, he’s got a Ph.D. in psychology from London University. He’s here for one reason only. To take you apart.’
