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Authors: Gerald Seymour
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where the English driver from the Embassy pool was waiting.
That was okay. He hadn't reckoned on one of the Liaison team coming down from Central London just to shake his hand, talk baseball results, and drive him back. It was a good run into the city, against the outgoing commuter traffic.
They ended up close to the Embassy in a road called South Audley Street.
The driver gave Erlich an envelope with his name and the South Audley Street address on it. Inside a glass door he was met by a security man, plainclothes, not at all talkative, probably from Kansas. He was given a key and left to find his own way up two flights of stairs.
It was a room like any other room. It was what Bill Erlich, the bachelor, was used to, clean and soulless. Inside the envelope was a note from the London-based Legal Attache. He was tied up that evening, apologies, and the rest of his team were out of town. Could Erlich be at the Attache's office at eight in the morning at the Embassy?
Erlich was alone in a city that he didn't know. He dialled Jo's number in Rome, and grew lonelier and sadder as it rang on and on, unanswered.
Colt could easily have killed him. Colt thought that "elite"
was the most overworked word in the military dictionary. He reckoned that the word elite was usually applied to those who had the best publicity machine. In the Baghdad Times, the English-language newspaper, the Presidential Guard were always written up as an elite force. They had all the kit, down to the nightscope. They had bivouacs, sleeping bags and cold-weather anoraks.
He had found the observation post two miles beyond the outer rim of the Jabal Hamrin. He had skirted it and approached them from behind. Three troopers of the Presidential Guard.
They did two hours on, four hours off. It was the first obstacle in his route from A1 Mansuriyah to Qara Tappah, and he could have ignored it, simply carried on, but that was not his way.
He had waited, motionless, until the frost had settled on his body.
The gag was across the trooper's mouth, and the pressure of Colt's knee was into the small of his back, and the sheer strength of Colt's arm took the trooper's wrists up into the blades of his shoulders.
He trussed the trooper so that he could not move his feet or his hands. On top of the gag, he forced into the trooper's mouth the trooper's own filthy handkerchief.
Where he had been a child, when the fox came at night around the barricaded chicken houses then the old bugger always scented the chicken house sides, left his stink, boasted that he had been there.
And it would amuse the Colonel to hear what he had done to the President's elite guard.
He would have a 90-minute start on them, maybe longer.
''I am afraid, Dr Bissett, thai ignoring facts does not make those facts go away."
It was a quarter past nine. It was a clear hour after Bissett would normally have been at his desk.
"Now, if we could, please, just go over the figures . . ."
He hated to be late It was the way thai he had been reared.
I
"Your salary as a Senior Scientific Officer currently runs at
£17,500. I am correct
He had heard Carol, only the week before, say that the man who delivered coal to hn house was paid £345 a week. For loading and unloading sacks of coal, and driving a lorry round the villages, that was £440 per annum more than a Senior Scientific Officer earned slaving for the defence of his country. That was the society they lived in. No account taken of intellect and value.
"Your wife does not work Don't misunderstand me, I am not implying that she should be working . . . I sometimes feel that a great many of out social problems at the moment, young people rampaging, are brought about by mothers going out to work . . . So, there is no other source of income coming into the household? Correct again?"
She had worked in the supermarket off Mulfords Hill for five and a half month-. It had been t he first time that he had really seen Sara in tears. Adam had fallen over
That was okay. He hadn't reckoned on one of the Liaison team coming down from Central London just to shake his hand, talk baseball results, and drive him back. It was a good run into the city, against the outgoing commuter traffic.
They ended up close to the Embassy in a road called South Audley Street.
The driver gave Erlich an envelope with his name and the South Audley Street address on it. Inside a glass door he was met by a security man, plainclothes, not at all talkative, probably from Kansas. He was given a key and left to find his own way up two flights of stairs.
It was a room like any other room. It was what Bill Erlich, the bachelor, was used to, clean and soulless. Inside the envelope was a note from the London-based Legal Attache. He was tied up that evening, apologies, and the rest of his team were out of town. Could Erlich be at the Attache's office at eight in the morning at the Embassy?
Erlich was alone in a city that he didn't know. He dialled Jo's number in Rome, and grew lonelier and sadder as it rang on and on, unanswered.
Colt could easily have killed him. Colt thought that "elite"
was the most overworked word in the military dictionary. He reckoned that the word elite was usually applied to those who had the best publicity machine. In the Baghdad Times, the English-language newspaper, the Presidential Guard were always written up as an elite force. They had all the kit, down to the nightscope. They had bivouacs, sleeping bags and cold-weather anoraks.
He had found the observation post two miles beyond the outer rim of the Jabal Hamrin. He had skirted it and approached them from behind. Three troopers of the Presidential Guard.
They did two hours on, four hours off. It was the first obstacle in his route from A1 Mansuriyah to Qara Tappah, and he could have ignored it, simply carried on, but that was not his way.
He had waited, motionless, until the frost had settled on his body.
The gag was across the trooper's mouth, and the pressure of Colt's knee was into the small of his back, and the sheer strength of Colt's arm took the trooper's wrists up into the blades of his shoulders.
He trussed the trooper so that he could not move his feet or his hands. On top of the gag, he forced into the trooper's mouth the trooper's own filthy handkerchief.
Where he had been a child, when the fox came at night around the barricaded chicken houses then the old bugger always scented the chicken house sides, left his stink, boasted that he had been there.
And it would amuse the Colonel to hear what he had done to the President's elite guard.
He would have a 90-minute start on them, maybe longer.
''I am afraid, Dr Bissett, thai ignoring facts does not make those facts go away."
It was a quarter past nine. It was a clear hour after Bissett would normally have been at his desk.
"Now, if we could, please, just go over the figures . . ."
He hated to be late It was the way thai he had been reared.
I
"Your salary as a Senior Scientific Officer currently runs at
£17,500. I am correct
He had heard Carol, only the week before, say that the man who delivered coal to hn house was paid £345 a week. For loading and unloading sacks of coal, and driving a lorry round the villages, that was £440 per annum more than a Senior Scientific Officer earned slaving for the defence of his country. That was the society they lived in. No account taken of intellect and value.
"Your wife does not work Don't misunderstand me, I am not implying that she should be working . . . I sometimes feel that a great many of out social problems at the moment, young people rampaging, are brought about by mothers going out to work . . . So, there is no other source of income coming into the household? Correct again?"
She had worked in the supermarket off Mulfords Hill for five and a half month-. It had been t he first time that he had really seen Sara in tears. Adam had fallen over
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