Rules of Engagement Read online

  Rules of Engagement

  Graham Hurley

  © Graham Hurley 2012

  For

  Tom and Jack

  Double Tops

  The earth also was corrupt before God.

  And the earth was filled with violence.

  Genesis vi, 11

  On mourra seul.

  Pascal, Pensées, 211

  I am not sure that releasing all of the

  forces which have been kept frozen for

  up to seventy years is going to be something

  the rest of the world will welcome.

  Professor E. J. Hobsbawm

  4 February 1990

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prelude

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Prelude

  Gillespie, years later, remembered the moment when the RSM shook the photographs out of the buff manila envelope and spread them on the desk. The photographs were black and white and on the back they carried the stamp of the Military Police photographer. They were blow-ups from the original negs, but the grain was fine and the detail was excellent.

  The RSM had pushed a couple of the photos across the desk towards Gillespie. McMullen lay where he’d fallen, a night’s growth of stubble on his chin, his mouth slightly open, gravel scrapes on his cheek, a neat black hole where his left eye had once been. Something wet and dark had pooled on the dusty tarmac beside his head. A chalk circle ringed the spot where they’d recovered the single bullet.

  In the absence of any comment from Gillespie, the RSM had leaned slowly back in his chair and arched one eyebrow. At the time, Gillespie had interpreted the movement as interrogative, the beginnings of that long process which might well prove inconclusive but would doubtless return Gillespie to civilian life. Only later did he realize that it was a quiet gesture of applause. Clean shot. Extreme range. Difficult conditions. Terrible light.

  After a while, in total silence, the RSM had tidied the photographs into a neat pile and slid them back inside the envelope. He’d sealed the envelope, made a note in pencil on the top left-hand corner, and laid it carefully to rest in the adjutant’s wire basket. Then he’d leaned back again, looking Gillespie in the eye. His voice, edged with regret, had the tone of someone saying goodbye.

  ‘Shame you’re such a difficult bastard …’ he’d murmured, ‘we might have done something here.’

  One

  Five and a half years later, on July 11th, the US Navy nuclear submarine George F. Kennan left King’s Bay, Georgia on America’s eastern seaboard. In almost total darkness, she slipped quietly down the Intracoastal Waterway, and disappeared into the Atlantic Ocean.

  Nine days later, she took up station at a set of co-ordinates 120 nautical miles off Hammerfest, near Norway’s North Cape. There, she lurked for weeks on end, her systems idling, every moving surface specially quietened, her crew stepping softly from station to station in their blue lint-free overalls.

  The men worked shifts, six hours on, twelve hours off. They watched dials, monitored the passive sonars, annotated logs, and listened curiously to the thrum-thrum of distant Soviet submarines as they pushed west through the Iceland Gap. Off duty, they played video games, kept diaries, studied for exams, leafed through old copies of Sports Illustrated, and thought surprisingly little about the 80 megatons of nuclear incandescence tipping the fat D5 missiles in the belly of the boat.

  The Navy did its best to relieve the boredom. There was a vast library of videos – movie classics, old ball games, National Geographic doccos – and a good voyage would include a number of first-release feature movies. The night the reactor blew, as it happened, was the night the EO had elected to première Rocky VI. Sylvester Stallone was still in training on the Acapulco waterfront when the three-colour alarms began to blink the length of the hull.

  Within an hour and a half, the Kennan was wallowing on the surface of the Barents Sea, the fire in her reactor finally under control, her power shut off, her systems largely dead. The 170 metre hull made an interesting addition to the long range radar screens in the hardened bunkers on the Kola Peninsula, and Soviet reconnaissance aircraft were climbing into the clouds west of Murmansk as dawn began to break.

  At about the same time, in Washington, the President was awakened with the news. He nodded, yawned, rubbed his eyes, and reached for the telephone. The National Security Council was already in semi-permanent session over the crisis in Scandinavia and the Baltic Republics. NATO reinforcement of Europe was virtually complete. The last thing the Free World needed was a crippled Trident missile submarine drifting towards Soviet territorial waters. He lifted the phone to his ear, and punched a single button. A voice answered at once.

  ‘Navy’s blown it,’ the President announced bleakly, ‘as you’ve probably heard.’

  Gillespie awoke at five, an hour earlier than normal. For a moment or two he lay in bed. The house was in darkness. Far away, out over the sea, he could hear the whump-whump of a big helicopter. Closer, the steady drip from the overflow on the downstairs cistern. But it was several seconds before the paws began to dig into the duvet, and he felt the tickle of warm breath on his face, he realized that the cat had somehow opened the door, jumped onto the bed, and woken him up. He reached over in the darkness and fondled the soft triangle of fur beneath her left ear. The purring dropped a semitone, and the cat began to lick the tip of his nose. The helicopter receded into silence. The overflow dripped on.

  An hour later, still dark, Gillespie sat in his tiny kitchen sipping a mug of sweet tea. He was a lean, spare man, an inch under six foot, with a hollow face and a crooked smile and a grown out crew cut. He carried with him a curious stillness, and people who knew him well often talked about his eyes. They were light blue, and playful, and utterly opaque. People said it made it very hard to judge what he ever really thought. Gillespie, when it was once mentioned in conversation, had smiled and said nothing. Privately, he’d considered it a daft comment: arty, over-intellectual, and beyond comprehension. He read as many books as the next man, but the longer words were always a waste of breath.

  Now, beside the teapot on the old deal table, lay an angling magazine open at a feature article on prize cod. Gillespie scanned it carefully, noting the catch weights and the tackle details, and wondering whether he should try again at the weekend. Lately, the fishing had been lousy. He and the boy had spent day after day at sea with little or nothing to show for it.

  Sean never complained, never offered any hint that he was cold, hungry, or simply bored, but simply got on with it, an attitude that won Gillespie’s quiet applause. He had, it often seemed, limitless reserves of stamina. He kept his own counsel. He rarely got upset. Even when Gillespie and Sandra had split up, he’d simply shrugged his shoulders and said it would be OK by him as long as he could still see them both. For years, he’d done just that. Gillespie, in a complicated world, was proud of him.

  Gillespie eyed the grainy black and white photos in the magazine one final time. Big untidy men in woolly hats with shy smiles and armfuls of plump, shiny cod. Gillespie smiled, rueful, remembering his own empty days at sea, then pushed the magazine aside and padded out into the hall, shutting the cat in the kitchen with the back of his heel. He checked the message indicator on his Ansaphone. Nothing. He headed for the street.

  Outside, the cold hit him. There was ice on the windows of the cars at the kerbside: clapped-out Vauxhalls, and springless
Allegros, and his own rusty ‘S’ reg Marina estate. It wasn’t much of a neighbourhood if you were looking for a good address, but the little terrace house gave him privacy and the comfort of his own four walls, and Gillespie had never been one for lingering over the view.

  He set off down the street, running slowly at first, his breath clouding on the cold air, his arms and legs moving sweetly under the cotton flannel of his ancient tracksuit. He ran every morning at dawn, seven days a week. He’d done it since he could remember, since he first joined the Corps, and it had become part of his life. He pushed himself to the limit, running the length of the city’s beaches, five hard miles of pebbles, winter and summer. The pebbles drained the strength from his legs, but the feeling it gave him at the end, when he stopped to recover, was quite irreplaceable. It meant that nothing during the next twenty-four hours could touch him. It made him feel somehow immortal, beyond danger, beyond compromise, beyond reach.

  Gillespie turned the corner at the end of his street, and crossed the road under the shadow of the orange lamps. The city was audible around him, a low, bass hum, but the roads were still empty. He jogged the mile and a half to the seafront, gradually picking up speed until he could hear the rasp of his own breathing, and feel the first prickles of sweat at the back of his neck.

  On the seafront, he paused. A convoy of Army lorries swept past him. There were squaddies in combat gear squatting on the slatted wooden benches in the backs of the trucks. Their faces were daubed with camouflage cream, and they cradled SA80 assault rifles in their laps. They wore black berets low over their eyes, gazing at him with the kind of watchful indifference he remembered so well from Belfast.

  The last of the trucks whined around a corner, and was gone, leaving a faint scent of diesel on the still morning air. Gillespie crossed the road, trying to rid his mind of the image. It was history. It belonged to a past he’d left behind. And it raised questions he’d prefer to leave unanswered. Sure, he read the papers. Sure, he knew the situation in Europe was dodgy. But squaddies? On city streets? In mainland Britain?

  The beach was empty. He jumped the six feet from the promenade onto the icy pebbles and began to tramp towards the distant brown smudge where the shingle became matted with scrub grass and finally disappeared altogether. Out at sea, silhouetted against the yellowing dawn, he could make out the long low shapes of three Type 42 destroyers. They were moving east at speed, curls of white foam arching back from the flare bows.

  Gillespie’s step faltered. Instinctively, he glanced over his shoulder, back towards the west where the deep water channel dog-legged into the harbour mouth. Emerging from the half darkness was the unmistakable bulk of one of the Navy’s three aircraft carriers. Gillespie watched as the huge ship edged cautiously out into the tideway. There were two tugs, fore and aft, and a third midships on the landward side. Gillespie frowned.

  The big ships, he knew, always negotiated the harbour mouth at the top of the tide, ensuring maximum clearance in the dredged channel. Yet one glance at the tideline told him that the flood had only just begun, giving the men on the bridge very little room for manoeuvre as they conned their way out towards the open sea.

  The light was improving rapidly now, and as the carrier grew more distinct, Gillespie picked out the three rows of Sea Harriers lined up on the flight deck. Aft of the aircraft was a gaggle of helicopters: Lynxes, Sea Kings, and even a couple of Pumas, blotched with military camouflage. Yet here, too, something was wrong. The helicopters appeared to have been stowed at random, almost as an afterthought, like kids’ toys tidied up in a hurry. Gillespie, cold now, stayed a minute or two longer, long enough to confirm that the carrier was sailing without any evident escort. Odd, he thought, as he turned and stamped the chill from his limbs, and set off once again along the beach.

  Ten minutes later, he was off the pebbles and onto the scrub grass which fringed the beach at its eastern end. Normally, he turned here and retraced his footsteps west, towards the pier, but he was unsettled now, and curious, and unresolved questions drew him on.

  Beyond the pebbles, the beach narrowed into a spit of land which formed a naturally protected anchorage on its landward side. Here, the local fishermen – professional and otherwise – kept their boats. One of them belonged to Gillespie. She was a sturdy, clinker-built 18-footer, with a small cuddy forward, plenty of deck room, and an inboard 16-horsepower Petter diesel. Gillespie had bought her for a song with the remains of his Corps gratuity, and had virtually rebuilt her over successive winters. Now she was immaculate, a strong, seagoing, working boat with enough navigation aids to keep out of trouble, and enough range to give him the solitude he needed. Apart from the boy, she was the centre of his life. Like his early mornings on the beach, she gave him peace.

  He crested the last of the dunes at the top of the beach, and paused for breath. There were maybe two dozen boats drawn up on the wet mud, lying on their bilges, waiting for the returning tide. Parked up on the single track road was a Land-Rover. It was dark blue with Royal Navy markings. One of the Naval Provost’s men, a hard-faced matelot with a revolver on his thigh, was leaning against the door of the Land-Rover. Below him, amongst the bladderwrack, stood two naval officers. One was consulting a clipboard. The other was inspecting Gillespie’s boat, peering in through the salt-caked window of the wheelhouse, shading his eyes against the low sun.

  Gillespie watched for a moment or two, and then began to jog slowly down the dune towards them. As he approached, the matelot stepped forward until he stood between Gillespie and his boat.

  ‘Yeah?’

  Gillespie looked him in the eye and nodded at his boat.

  ‘That’s my boat,’ he said.

  One of the two officers glanced up.

  ‘Mr Gillespie?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  The officer smiled.

  ‘We were having an argument about your Comms kit,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Decca or Navstar?’

  ‘Neither. It’s a Seavoice, with special mods.’

  ‘Oh …’ He smiled again. ‘Very original.’

  Gillespie gazed at him a moment, a number of questions forming an orderly queue in his mind. Finally he opted for the obvious.

  ‘What’s it to you?’ he said.

  The officer raised one eyebrow. ‘I thought you’d have heard.’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘Emergency Powers Act.’ He rapped the clipboard with the end of his biro. ‘We’re updating the Requisitioning List.’

  Two miles away, in the bedroom of a ninth floor flat on the seafront, Martin Goodman awoke with a long, slow yawn. He opened his eyes, ran a lazy tongue around the inside of his mouth, and peered across the room. Enough light was filtering through the heavy velvet curtains to tell him it was later than he’d wish.

  He lay still for a moment, listening to Suzanne’s breathing. She lay beside him under the duvet, her back towards him, her rich auburn hair spilling across the pillow. He touched her lightly, his fingertips tracing the soft warm line from the nape of her neck down the slope of her shoulder.

  She stirred in her sleep as he swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat for a moment on the edge of the mattress. They’d made love in the darkness only an hour or two earlier. It had been slow and wordless, gentle and deft, and at the end she’d climaxed with a low groan, and been asleep again within seconds, a smile on the pillow beneath him. People said that guilt and happiness never went together. They were wrong.

  He slipped Suzanne’s dressing gown over his shoulders, and padded across to the window. He parted the curtains, keeping his body between the early sunshine and the bed. There was a thin film of condensation on the cold glass. He wiped it clean. The view from the ninth floor was breathtaking: the rich green sweep of the Common, the long black ribbon of the road which skirted the seafront, the browns and yellows of the beach, and the chilly greys and blues of the sea, flecked with white in the strengthening breeze.

  Goodman stood at the window for a moment longer, gaz
ing out at the view. From here, the island on which the city was built made perfect sense. He could see the narrow harbour mouth, flanked by the fortifications, and then the sudden spread of the harbour itself, dotted with ferries and lighters and the anchored grey hulks of yesterday’s warships, awaiting their final tow to the scrapyard. Goodman inched the curtain wider, peering to the right, over the mass of the Naval Dockyard, with its huge cranes and empty drydocks, away inland to the low hump of the hill. At the foot of the hill was a creek which separated the island from the mainland. Working in the city, it was easy to forget that stretch of slack water, with its eager young anglers, and its three busy bridges. But it was there all the same.

  Goodman pulled Suzanne’s dressing gown tighter around him. Once, the city had depended on the Dockyard, growing outwards, street by street, century by century, until tens of thousands of men regulated their lives by the wail of the Dockyard hooter. He’d seen the old sepia prints in the city archive, thin-faced men like his own father on ancient bicycles pouring out of the Dockyard gates: flat caps, roll-ups, and the gaunt certainties of life at the bottom of the pile. They’d watched an Empire come and go, these men, unquestioning, unacknowledged, badly paid, the perfect target for disease, poverty, and – at the end of it all – the night bombing raids that had reduced so much of the city to rubble. As a kid, he’d played on the bombsites, and even when he went off to University there were pockets of the city untouched by reconstruction.

  But all that, in the exact sense of the word, was history. Because the city, his city, had finally severed its dependence on the Navy and the Dockyard. There was new money around, fresh opportunities, and a real appetite for growth. The city was hungry for its share of the good times, and the new mood had brought a succession of developers to his outer office in the Civic Centre. Sharp-suited young men with their oxblood leather briefcases and laptop computers. International consortia with addresses in Zurich and Dubai. Attentive personal assistants with names like Sally-Anne, and Ghislaine, who understood the commercial value of a certain kind of smile. And all of them keen to shake his hand, state their case, and offer the sincere assurance of total commitment. He smiled. For a still-young man from one of the meaner streets, he’d done well. Deputy Chief Executive of one of the country’s major cities. And still only 38.