"The Conduct of Major Maxim" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lyall Gavin)

Chapter 2

With a proper sense of His responsibilities, God had provided a vivid blue-and-white sky that quite obviously wasn't going to leak a single drop of rain on the crisp rows of Volvos, BMWs and Rovers parked around the playing-field in the valley. After all, as the vicar had argued in his prayers the previous Sunday, if thefêtewent well they should not only be able to pay off the final cost of re-roofing the vicarage, but have something left over to relieve famine in East Africa. It was the best bargain he had been able to offer God in months.

Harry Maxim knew nothing about the vicarage roof and not much more about starvation in East Africa, but he was reasonably familiar with the ceremony of the English county turning out in its best weekend clothes to buy cucumber sandwiches for a Good Cause. He drifted down the avenues of gossip between the stalls and marquees, a slim man in his middle thirties with shortish fair hair and a concave face that had hard lines running down around the hopeful smile that he had decided was the proper expression for the occasion.

To the experienced military eye – and there are usually plenty of those, both male and female, at a Kent villagefête- he didn't look particularly like an Army major, but nor did he look not like one. If they thought about it at all, theyjust concluded that, with his loose-cut olive blazer, he couldn't belong to one of the Very Best regiments and wondered who had invited him. It didn't occur to them – and why should it? – that if you sometimes have to wear a shoulder holster, loose jackets are very useful.

However, that afternoon Maxim was quite unarmed. He bought himself a cup of tea and miniature sausage roll, then thumbed through a stack of old 78 records, hoping for a black Brunswick label that could be an early Duke Ellington. He hadjust given up hope when the loudspeaker said somethingjovial about seeing the future defence of the country was in good hands and there was a volley of shots from the cricket pavilion. Maxim joined the tide as it flowed that way.

Two sections of Cadet Force schoolboys with long hair straggling from under their berets were attacking the pavilion across the cricket field; the actual wicket was roped off so that the attack had to split unrealistically around it. They moved in the classic pairs, one firing while the other lumbered forward in a zigzag run-at least when they remembered the boy sergeant's constant exhortation to: "Keep one foot on the ground!" He was aged about sixteen, with a dark angry face and a uniform that fitted.

Then somebody tried to throw a smoke candle while lying down, and sent it wild. Orange smoke billowed up from the bald but still sacred turf of the roped-off wicket and a unanimous gasp of horror came from all round the field. The battle stopped dead.

The boy sergeant stepped over the rope, kicked the candle clear and stepped back looking angrier than ever. "You stupid cunts," he raged in a penetrating undertone, "just lying there like stuffed pricks…"

"Roger,"said a lady in a wide hat just in front of Maxim, "did that boy say what Ithought he said?"

"Probably didn't know what it meant," grunted Roger, who had cropped grey hair and a deep tan. Then he caught Maxim's glance and smiled. "But he'll need to get his biology sorted out before he's much older."

"Roger,"Mrs Roger said.

The attack began again. The light machine-gun section waved a rattle from the flank, the pavilion fell to a frontal assault and two prisoners were roughed up with obvious sincerity. The loudspeaker congratulated the professionalism of the 'young warriors', the crowd clapped and wandered away, and the boy sergeant went on looking angry as he herded the platoon across toa Land-Roverparked at the corner of the field.

There, an adult sergeant in a Paratroop beret took over andinsisted on all the rifles being properly cleaned and all the unfired blanks handed in, including the ones that had been 'forgotten' so that they could be experimentally toasted on a kitchen stove.

Maxim hung back until the last cadet had scurried off to the tea tent, then the sergeant swung round with a sharp salute and a broad grin.

"Good afternoon, sir. Glad you could make it." He clinked the brass cartridges and shook his head, still grinning. "They think you were born yesterday. They never think you might have been a cadet yourself. "

They shook hands. "Jim, I didn't expect to find you cradle-snatching."

"Just part-time I'm working for my father-m-law. He's got the garage over on the main road." Jim Caswell nodded at the steep green slope behind the church "Goodjob?"

"It could be. Mostly desk work, but…" He was a solid-chested man, a little shorter and younger than Maxim, but with the ageless middle-aged look that long-serving sergeants acquire. Caswell would be serving still but for a permanently stiff left arm that came from drivinga Land-Roverover a Claymore mine while 'advising' on anti-guerilla tactics in Abu Dhabi. The Army would have kept him on – but no longer with a Paratroop cap-badge.

"You seem to be getting across the language all right," Maxim commented.

Caswell chuckled and rubbed his moustache-a straight bar of dark hair-with his right wrist His left hand wouldn't reach that far. "That lad spent a week outm Germany with the Woofers, spent twenty quid of his own money and his folks don't have that much at all. He's all right I think we could get him." Maxim had guessed that the boy had picked up his style from real soldiers, but not that Caswell would be taking the cadets so seriously-or still calling the Army 'we'.

Alone in the corner of the field, they leant against the warm metal of the Land-Rover Caswell half-offered a packet of cigarettes. "You've still given up, have you'"

"I still dream about it."

"I've heard that. Funny." He took one himself and lit it deftly, but all one-handed "Your boy, young Chris, he's getting on okay7"

"Yes. He stays with my parents downm Littlehampton, he goes to school there. It would be impossible, just me and him in London…"

"Oh yes Nice lad "

"I think so."

The small talk petered out and Maxim braced himself for whatever the afternoon was really to be about.

"Did you know a Corporal Blagg, Ron Blagg7" Caswell asked carefully "He did a tour in Sass. I had him in Armagh. He was good with machinery, and pistols. Bit of a boxer, too, or had been."

Maxim and Caswell themselves had met on toursmthe Special Air Service. But Blagg?… You didn't forget people you'd worked with in the SAS, butit was scattered all over the world in handfuls. "Didn't know him."

"He's got a bit of a problem. "

"Yes?"

"He came to me because he couldn't think of anybody else he could really trust."

"Yes?" Maxim said again, feeling a chill in the warm day.

"I thought you might… like being where you are, you could give him some sort of advice.

"Jim, where I am these days is Number 10 Downing Street. It isn't the carefree life of Britain's Modern Army any more: I can't take a piss now without worrying if it'll cause Questionsinthe House "

Caswell nodded sympathetically. "Like, I don't know what you do there…" then waited for Maxim to tell him while Maxim waited for him to realise he wasn't going to be told anything more Eventually, Caswell went on. "I just think you ought to know what this lad says, or somebody up there should know…"

"Jim, is this chap of yours in trouble' – Army trouble?"

Caswell clutched his cigarette by his forefinger over his clenched hand, the way he always did, and let a smoke clouddrift towards the babbling tea-tents. "That sort of thing."

"He's on the trot," Maxim guessed. "Oh Christ, Jim, you can get a district court for that, aiding a deserter… no, I suppose not you, not now."

"It's a criminal offence for civilians, too."

"Good. I wouldn't like to think it was only me going to suffer. Has he been gone twenty-one days?"

"No Not yet."

There was an unofficial unadmitted rule that if you came back inside three weeks you weren'tjumped on so hard. After that time, the prosecution might argue that you'd crossed the great divide between being absent without leave, orjust a little late, and true desertion, planning to stay away for good.

Even so, the Special Investigation Branch of the Military Police would have been told, and local coppers asked to snoop into your favourite pubs and knock on your mum's door at odd hours… It was a slow, sad business, a crime without a victim, but marguably it had to remain a crime. And it could leave an indelible stain on a soldier's career.

"Why hasn't he gone back?"

"He doesn't really know his own officers. He'd only been back with the battalion a couple of months, after three years with Sass. You know how things can change."

"Where is his battalion7"

"Soltau "

"Germany'

'He came back from Rhine Army7He'll have a rough time explaining how hejust lost his way back from the Bterkeller."

Caswell smiled wearily, as if he'd heard that many times already, or even said it himself. "Yes. He wants to go back."

"Has he got woman trouble?" That was usually the reason.

"No. Not exactly that… he'll tell you."

"Jim, all I can do is try and persuade him to go back, then tell the MPs where he is if he doesn't."

"I'd like you to hear what he says. "

"You aren't doing this just because he was a good man in Armagh, are you?"

"He didn't save my life or any bullshit like that No – he's just career. A real committed soldier."

"He sounds like it, " Maxim said sourly. But even now, you still got a few, the odd ones who came into the Army on an unwritten contract that would turn the devil cool with envy They usually had no homes to go back to, they wrote no wills and made no allotments of pay, they rarely married and always made a horrible complicated cock-up of it if they did They simply did everything the Army asked of them, and expected it to be everything in return: a job, home, family, friends, and maybe six feet of regimental ground at the end of the day They had one other clause in the contract- they never deserted. They had nowhere else to go.

In Downing Street you counted the corners and priced self-interest down to six decimal places You forgot about people like Ron Blagg "All right," Maxim said "Lead me to him." It was odd how bright the day had seemed a few minutes ago "Tell me something about yourself," Maxim suggested, trying to start in low gear But Blagg immediately looked even more suspicious "You camem as aboy soldier, didn't you7" prompted Caswell.

"Yees," Blagg said reluctantly. "I joined when I was just sixteen, like."

They were standing, not sitting since there was only one chair, around the work-bench in the armoury of the village drill hall, watching Caswell sort out the afternoon's weapons It was a tiny cell-like room with a high barred window on the back wall, and it smelled of eighty years of gun oil, dust and old leather. The only light was a shaded lamp on the bench that made Blagg's face look hollow and spooky with its upward reflections.

When it wasn't looking spooky, his face was all stickmg-out bits: big ears, a jutting jaw and lower lip, heavy brows. His pale hair was cut shorter than it needed to be and he wore a uniform of faded jeans, a denim shirt and training shoes. He was only twenty-five but had spent the last nine years in the Army, which had done something to wear down a jerky South London accent "What made you choose the Army?" Maxim asked.

Blagg started an 'I dunno' shrug, then smiled quickly and slyly. "Well, you know I'm a bit of a bastard, sir. Fact is, I'm exactly one hundred per cent of a bastard. The real thing My mother, bless her whoever she is, she dumped me on the Council when I was eighteen months. They unloaded me the moment I was sixteen. "

"Did you want to stay?" Caswell asked dryly, his stubby fingers working with the precision of a pianist's as he stripped the bolt out of a rifle.

"Did I buggery," Blagg muttered.

"And you've worn the same cap badge right through?" Maxim asked.

"Yes," Blagg said aggressively, knowing the question behind the question. "Yes, all the way, except for my time with Sass."

So he hadn't been a troublemaker, shunted from regiment to regiment by commanders who didn't want to be caught holding him when the music stopped.

"Ilike the buggering Army," he added gloomily.

"But it's there and you're here," Maxim said.

After a pause, Blagg said. "Yes," then again. "Yes."

"Major Maxim can't do anything for you without you telling him the whole story," Caswell said. "And I don't think he'll be making any promises then. But he'll listen. "

Blagg chewed a speck of dirt out from underneath a fingernail. "Yes. Well… I'm with the Battalion at Soltau, I've been back with them just over two months; I had some leave and there was this course I went on… Then I met this woman, Mrs Howard. I'd met her first in Armagh, that was over a year ago. I don't think it was her real name, you know7She didn't have a wedding ring. Captain Fairbrother, he brought her along. You'd know him, sir."

Maxim nodded, vaguely recalling a thin, elegant Guards officer who had been at SAS's London end.

"Well, he took me to meet her. He said she was from Intelligence, I mean The Firm, not Int Corps. I wouldn't say she was English, she ha4 a sort of accent. Could have been German, like. She was going to meet this bloke from acrossthe border, a Mick, and she was going to have some money for him. Quite a bit. She wanted somebody to go along and make sure everything was really kosher. "

"Why you particularly?"

"Captain Fairbrother said it was because I could use a pistol. It's on my records."

"You went in plain clothes?"

"Yes, sir."

"Did you have any back-up?"

"No." Blagg's face was blank and calm. "The Captain thought it would be best withjust a man and a woman. It was real Provocountry, that. Three or four strange men, they'd have stuck out like a spare prick at a wedding."

Blagg had guts, if not much sense of self-preservation, walking single-handed into a set-up like that, without any of the real spook-craft 'Mrs Howard' would have been taught. Usually in such a job you had four well-armed mates never more than a hundred yards away.

Maxim asked Caswell: "Did you ever meet this Mrs Howard?"

"No. Never heard of her until just now. We just got the word from Command that Captain Fairbrother wanted Ron for a week or so and off he went. He didn't tell us anything when he came back." That last was a small but perhaps helpful compliment.

"And thejob went off as planned?"

"The Mick didn't turn up the first time. She said she'd have it set up again and we went back three mghts later and it was all right. That was all."

So Blagg had actually gone intwice When the first time could easily have been a rehearsal, for the other side to see how many men came along, and then three days to rig an ambush.

Blagg must have guessed what Maxim was thinking. "She said it was important, sir. And Captain Fairbrother. "

Caswell glanced at Maxim with a lift of his eyebrows and a small humourless smile, then went back to the rifles.

'I see. And d'you mean she turned up again -m Germany?"

"That's right. At Soltau."