Uncle Target Read online

  CORONET BOOKS

  Hodder and Stoughton

  Copyright © 1988 by Gavin Lyall

  First published in Great Britain in

  1988 by Hodder and Stoughton Limited

  Open market edition 1988

  Coronet edition 1989

  British Library C.I.P.

  Lyall, Gavin, 1932-Uncle target I. Title 823’.914tF]

  ISBN 0-340-48841-7

  The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without either the prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence, permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-34 Alfred Place, London WC1E 7DP.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain for Hodder and Stoughton Paperbacks,

  a division of Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.,

  Mill Road, Dunton Green, Sevenoaks, Kent TN13 2YA.

  (Editorial Office: 47 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP)

  by Cox & Wyman Ltd., Reading, Berks.

  Photoset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk.

  1

  Since terrorism had become normal, there were police No Parking cones along the streets outside every London barracks, but a guard sergeant who recognised Agnes Algar let her drive in and wait on the edge of the square itself. When it was past midnight, he brought her a mug of tea and chatted, in a confident but stilted way, because she was an officer’s girl-friend, not a wife.

  At last a Land-Rover drove in followed by a Bedford truck, and parked neatly side-by-side some yards away. Two soldiers got out of the Land-Rover, carrying an array of haversacks and weapons, and she knew one of them must be Major Harry Maxim yet for a moment couldn’t tell which.

  That brought a little twinge of isolation, realising that she had never seen him in his camouflaged uniform, slung about with packs and webbing that he would wear if he ever went to the war he had spent his life training for.

  Then she saw him stretch, cat-like, within the baggy combat clothing, recognised the gesture and saw, or thought she saw in the lamplight, the lean concave face with its uncommitted smile, and then another gesture as he checked the set of his beret, one he must have done thousands of times and she had never seen before, and she felt isolated again.

  Other soldiers were clambering stiffly out of the back of the Bedford, and the sergeant who had been with Maxim began giving orders in a roaring whisper.

  ‘Don’t stamp about, lads, your mates are trying to get some kip. Forester, organise the signals kit. The rest of you …’

  When he had finished, a voice asked: ‘How did we do, sir?’

  ‘Terrible,’ she heard Maxim answer. Td rather have a troop of Girl Guides.’

  ‘So would I,’ another voice said. ‘Just bring ‘em to me, one by –‘

  ‘Knock it off,’ the sergeant growled. He turned to Maxim, saluted, asked: ‘Carry on, sir?’

  ‘Carry on, sergeant.’

  ‘Good night, sir.’

  ‘Good night, sergeant.’

  How dreadfully formal, she thought; surely they can’t fight wars – even exercises – with such rank-conscious politeness. Then she remembered that she knew nothing about fighting anything but a secret war, and that the sergeant was just pulling them together in their weariness, reminding them that two days of ‘playing soldiers’ was over and they were back in the Real Army of a London barracks.

  The group tramped away towards the still bright-lit barrack blocks and she lost sight of Maxim again, until he became the one heading towards the officers’ quarters. It annoyed her once more not to recognise instantly the man who so happily shared her bed, and she glowered at the barracks that was the Army she shared him with. And swore slightly that she would never marry him and It. If he ever asked her, damn him.

  Then she felt childish and got out of the car to wait

  Underneath the lamplight By the barrack gate …

  and grinned because she had never seen herself in the Lili Marlene role, though her life in the Security Service had brought odder ones. Maxim came out wearing plain clothes and carrying a tote bag of, probably, dirty shirts and underclothes that he would insist on running through her machine himself and then even ironing himself.

  He grinned at her, hugged her, and said: ‘You shouldn’t have waited. But thanks. How are you? Did you hear anything about Jordan?’

  One day, one night, she might get in her own query about his day before he asked his own questions. Good old Harry: don’t ask about me, I’m all right, just tell me about yourself and the world … she had come prepared.

  She drove off. ‘I’m fine, Jordan isn’t. There’s still growl-ings on their frontier with Syria and the 17th, I think it was the 17th, armoured brigade –‘

  ‘It would be. They should never have formed that one.’

  ‘It’s revolted and declared the Aqaba district an independent republic.’

  ‘Have they got the town itself?’

  ‘They seem to have got it cut off. I honestly don’t know more than that.’ There were things in both their lives they couldn’t tell each other, but in an odd way that made them closer, because they were both keepers of certain keys. But this time, Agnes was out of her depth; Maxim had far ‘more inside knowledge of the military situations in the Middle East than she had.

  ‘Rumour by radio,’ he said. ‘Start broadcasting that something’s happened and it has happened … Oh well, I’m running an HQ unit in London District.’

  ‘And how did it run on Salisbury Plain these last two days?’

  ‘We ran the Land-Rover into a ditch and had to sort out its steering, that’s why we’re late, sorry about that. But they’re good, they’re bloody good.’

  ‘I heard you tell them so.’

  In the passing flicker of street lamps, she saw his quiet smile. ‘They Knew what I meant.’

  ‘If you say so … When you all got out you all looked, well, tired but terribly tough, and all the same. At first I couldn’t pick you out.’

  Another glance showed him nodding, not displeased. ‘Neither can enemy snipers, then.’

  “That’s not what I meant, you self-centred yobbo … Then I saw how young they all are, just boys, really.’

  ‘But not me? They always are young. Look at the ages on war graves sometime.’

  Then, when she didn’t say anything more, he went to sleep, cat-like both in its suddenness and its trust in her. She was a good driver, very good, but she had never had a man before who would fall asleep beside her in a car. I don’t understand this man, so how can I love him?

  Let’s just say I won’t let him go until I understand him.

  2

  Not much work was done in Maxim’s office next morning: perhaps not much was being done in any Army office where two or more officers had managed to get hold of a map of the Middle East and were plotting – from scraps of information and inspired guesswork – just what was happening in Jordan. Those who had been attached to the Jordanian Army – and there were quite a number, Maxim included – were kept answering questions or, if they chose, giving impromptu lectures that began: ‘One thing I’m quite certain of …’

  News
that somebody had been shot in a London hotel and that police were surrounding a room where there were gunmen and hostages passed almost unnoticed until it was reported that the hostages were Jordanian. Then there was a pause while they agreed that it was probably all part of the same affair, but a siege in a London hotel wasn’t as interesting as the mobilisation state of an armoured brigade, so …

  In other offices, which were actually supposed to be worrying about Jordan, the name of one of the hostages was fed into a computer which ruminated upon it and flickered back a file number. Somebody dug out the file, but most of it was ten years old. The most recent item was a single-page report dated four years before and signed by Major H. R. Maxim.

  It took Maxim a good quarter of an hour to identify himself and talk his way past the police checkpoints at the hotel entrance, at the lift, coming out of the lift at the third floor, and then at the top of the stairs onto the fourth floor. Nobody seemed to know why he was there and he wasn’t sure himself.

  The gunmen and hostages were in suite 421, which was luckily at the back of the hotel, not overlooking the street, and the police had cleared the whole floor and probably parts of the third and fifth as well. There was an incomplete barricade of tables, desks and chairs just at the top of the stairs, manned by police marksmen with pistols and shotguns; no rifles, Maxim was glad to see. A modern rifle would probably shoot through half a dozen of the hotel’s internal walls. Police listeners were in 419 and 423, bracketing the gunmen, and a forward command post had been set up in 415, a safe distance away. It was rather sad how efficient the police had had to become about tackling sieges.

  He was explaining himself yet once more at the open door of 415 when George Harbinger’s voice called: ‘Is that you, Harry? Come on in. Let him in, for God’s sake,’ and Maxim went in.

  It was the drawing-room of the suite, tall and spacious and kept furnished and decorated in the style of the hotel’s opening day before the First World War. It would have cost an arm and a leg to rent, but the hotel’s guests were, financially, octopuses.

  Now, the elegance was rather spoiled by a clump of small tables pushed together in the middle and with a street map and an architectural plan of the hotel spread over them, surrounded by policemen, wires, field telephones, radios, Norman Sprague from the Home Office, and George: tubby, slightly frog-faced and wearing his usual checked grey suit, rumpled but never shabby.

  But it was Sprague, never daring to look rumpled, let alone shabby, who reached to display his firm, cool handshake. ‘Major Maxim! How delightful to see you again – although the circumstances could be more congenial. I understand you knew Colonel –‘

  ‘Let me, Norman,’ George cut in. He introduced Maxim to two high-ranking policemen, one of them in uniform, who didn’t smile at the idea of an Army presence. ‘You knew Colonel Katbah in Jordan, right? Anyway, you wrote a report on him.’

  Maxim nodded.

  ‘He’s held hostage in 421 by at least three gunmen. We don’t –‘

  ‘Hostage for what?’

  Nobody knew. George said: ‘I may have been speaking loosely. The point is, they’ve got him and they’ve put him on the phone twice already, just saying what they told him to. To wit: if we barge in there, he gets killed along with his wife. Yes, she’s there, too. The next time he comes on, we wanted somebody he recognised to do the talking. All right?’

  ‘What about the Jordanian embassy? There must be somebody there who –‘

  ‘They should be sending somebody over, but they’re in a state of chaos since the Aqaba district revolt.’

  ‘Have the gunmen asked for anything?’

  One of the policemen said: ‘Nothing except to be left alone.’

  A junior policeman, having decided that Maxim belonged, offered him a mug of tea. A crisis in Britain wouldn’t be complete without constant mugs of tea. Maxim took it automatically.

  ‘Do you think this is a show siege, lots of TV coverage, publicity for the cause and so on?’

  ‘We don’t think so,’ the other senior policeman said. ‘We think they just intended to kidnap the Colonel and take him somewhere else. They got surprised by a security guard in the corridor and shot him. We think that was panic; he wasn’t armed, of course. Then they holed up in the Colonel’s room.’

  ‘No diplomatic squad guard?’ Maxim queried.

  ‘We weren’t –‘

  Sprague said: There was the tiny breakdown in communications between Defence and my Office over the Colonel’s visit.’ He smiled at George, who shrugged.

  ‘He was hoping to keep his visit fairly incognito; he was going down to Coventry today to visit the GTL works –you know we’ve been testing the prototype of the new MBT in Jordan?’

  ‘I heard something.’ In fact, Maxim’s ears now automatically shut off when the lunchtime or coffee break conversation turned yet again to what design the Army would choose (or have forced on them) for the next generation of Main Battle Tank.

  ‘We’re hoping the Jordanians will buy it as well, and Katbah wanted to have a look at the factory. It seems he didn’t make his visit incognito enough and somebody … so here we are.’ He nodded in the direction of suite 421.

  Maxim considered. ‘If they’d wanted to kill him, they’d just have killed him. If they wanted to get him away somewhere, they either wanted him as a hostage or to get some information out of him.’

  ‘Or both,’ Sprague said smoothly. ‘Our thinking had got that far.’

  Maxim flickered his quick defensive smile. ‘But either way, they planned on getting away themselves, so presumably still do. They aren’t on a suicide mission if they want to get some information out. Do they have an outside phone in there?’

  ‘It’s been cut off at the hotel switchboard,’ one of the policemen said.

  ‘So the next move is theirs.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Maxim settled down beside the telephone; Sprague went to find another phone to call his office, the policemen started giving orders on the field telephones and radios. George looked at his watch and took a flask from his briefcase and poured something into his tea, then offered the flask to Maxim, who shook his head. It wasn’t quite eleven o’clock.

  ‘How well do you know Katbah?’ George asked.

  ‘So-so. He’d been at Sandhurst …‘Most senior Jordanian officers had been trained in Britain; ‘… so we had something to talk about, but he’s a tank man. Mad about them. I thought he’d probably get to the top, that’s why I tried to understand what he was talking about and did a report on him.’

  ‘And you’re not mad about tanks?’

  ‘Nothing wrong with them except they’re big and noisy and smoky and smelly and cramped and attract a lot of attention.’

  ‘But the queen of the modern battlefield.’

  ‘You can capture ground with anything, even helicopters,’ Maxim quoted, ‘but you can only hold it with men.’

  It was an old argument: George’s two years of Army service had been with a cavalry regiment (whose senior officers shared Maxim’s opinion of tanks, but reluctantly accepted that they were more practical nowadays than horses), while Maxim’s career had been with a light infantry battalion and in two tours with the even more man-orientated Special Air Service.

  At that moment, his SAS past caught up with him. One of the senior policemen came away from a field telephone with his face looking sour. ‘Major, there’s somebody from the Special Air Service at Hereford wants to talk to you. He says his name’s Barney, won’t give any rank.’

  Maxim grinned and took the phone; the SAS went in for a lot of highly personalised anonymity. ‘Harry here.’

  ‘Me old chum, nice to have you on the spot. We’re setting up a little exercise here in case we have to come in and Save The Day. We’ve got the floor plan, but what sort of windows?’

  Maxim glanced at those in their own suite. ‘Double glazed.’

  ‘Ouch. Rather a lot of glass whizzing around. How about the walls?’

/>   ‘Can’t tell by looking. I’ll call you back.’

  The senior policeman got even more sour when Maxim opened a penknife and started poking through the rich wallpaper.

  ‘But,’ Maxim asked, ‘aren’t you poking microphones into the walls yourself?’

  ‘Of course we are, so why don’t you go along and ask the chaps in 419 what the walls are like?’

  Shamefacedly, Maxim got permission from George to desert his post. As he went out, Sprague came back. ‘COBRA meeting at half past,’ he told George. ‘I’m away to brief my Minister.’

  Sinister though it sounded, COBRA meant merely the Cabinet Office Briefing Room, where emergencies of this sort were discussed by ministers and others involved. The Defence minister would be there; George hurried, insofar as his figure allowed of hurry, to find the next-door phone.

  A look at the floor plan had shown Maxim that the suites along the corridor were each a mirror image of the one next along. Drawing-room (with the only door onto the corridor), bedroom, bathroom, then bathroom, bedroom, drawing-room and so on. 419’s drawing-room was next to 421’s, so that was where the team of lower-rank police and technicians had gently peeled off the flock wallpaper and picked out the plaster and mortar to set probe microphones into the brickwork.

  Maxim was surprised to hear rock music, muffled but obviously strong at its source. An inspector led Maxim back into the bedroom, away from the earphoned listeners.

  ‘Why,’ Maxim asked, ‘have we got a sound-track with this epic?’

  ‘Because they’ve read enough books and newspapers about us poking mikes through walls on other sieges,’ the inspector said evenly, ‘and they’ve got a battery radio in there. Not the usual piped hotel stuff, we got that cut off, but independent. It screws us up something splendid. Not that we’d get much from here. We’ve pin-pointed one person in the drawing-room, just through the wall, but he’s probably just there to watch the corridor door. They’ve got the hostages in the bedroom, in the middle. We’re trying to put mikes in from above and below, but it takes a while to get a floorboard up quietly. If they start shooting through the ceiling