Medusa

It seemed ridiculous on the face of it. There couldn’t be more than a hundred and fifty to two hundred men down there on the quay and the military garrison of the island I knew to be somewhere around 15,000. But if what Petra had told me was correct, the effect of the previous night’s violence had been a redeployment of the available forces, so that the towns, and particularly the urbanizations inhabited by foreign visitors, were fully protected. As a result, the men below me had not only the advantage of surprise — essential in an operation of this sort — but also the certainty that the island’s defences were thinly spread and the targets they would be aiming at that much more vulnerable. In such circumstances anything was possible.

All this passed through my mind in a flash as the vehicles moved out on to the steep road up from the port and Lennie and I flung ourselves back across the road and into the car. ‘Mahon,’ I told Petra. ‘Lights on and drive like hell.’

She didn’t hesitate. She had seen the ships, the mustering men. She swung out on to the Alayór road, her foot hard down and the elderly Beetle shaking and swaying at the rear. ‘Who are they?’ She was taking a bend fast, pines rushing at us. ‘What are you going to do?’ And when I said I had to get to the frigate, she started to argue, asking why I didn’t stop off somewhere and phone the nearest Guardia Civil post or Military Headquarters in Mahon.

‘For God’s sake! Who would believe me?’ I started to remind her then that I was suspected of complicity in the Martinez murder. ‘Anyway,’ I added, ‘they’ll almost certainly have cut the telephone wires.’

‘Alayór then. Alayór is nearer than Mahon.’

‘No, Mahon,’ I told her. It was Gareth I needed. He had all the means of communication there on board, the whole world at call. And then I was briefing her what to tell Soo after she had dropped us off at the Maritimo pontoon, who to telephone, very conscious that it would be the early hours of the morning, everybody asleep and in no mood to believe that danger was imminent.

‘You’ll have to come with me,’ she argued. ‘Even if I can get through to somebody in authority …’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to make contact with Gareth.’

But the frigate was something too remote for her to grasp, and anyway she did not want the responsibility of alerting people locally. ‘You know what they are. They won’t believe a woman. I’ll never get it across to them.’ And even when I told her she was one of the few people outside of government they would believe, that as an English archaeologist she had the standing of a scientist and therefore would be regarded as a reliable witness, she went on arguing until the crossroads came up in the headlights and I put my hand on her knee and told her to turn left for Mahon or I’d switch the engine off, drive the car myself and leave her at the side of the road.

An angry silence filled the car after she had made the turn, the road snaking through a forest of pine, with the scent of resin all-pervading, then straightening out with no sign of lights anywhere. Something flapped across the beam of our headlights, a kite probably. We reached the turn-off to Faváritx, and still nothing on the road. In fact, we did not see another vehicle until we were running into the outskirts of Mahon. Where the road curved down the hill from the main Ciudadela highway we had to wait for a small convoy of three army trucks which swung into the road in front of us, then turned off to the left, almost certainly bound for the Zona Militar barracks out on La Mola.

‘Why not try the Naval Base?’ Petra said. ‘Fernando likes you. He would believe what you told him.’

I had already thought of that. It was very tempting, the Naval Base so close we were almost at the entrance to it. But how long would it take me to get through to Perez? ‘No,’ I said. ‘Gareth is a safer bet.’ I was watching the tail-lights of the convoy climbing up the hill beside the Base, the white beam of their heads shining on the heathland scrub with its pillboxes and old stone fortifications built to stand against Napoleon. Another ten minutes, maybe quarter of an hour, and other vehicles would be rolling up that road on to the long peninsula that formed the northern arm of the finest deep-water natural port in the Western Mediterranean, and at the end of that peninsula was La Mola with its barracks and casements and those huge guns. I had absolutely no doubt that this would be one of the main objectives, La Mola being little more than an island, the neck joining it to the main arm of the land so narrow it could readily be sealed with mines, the whole garrison then cut off. ‘Keep going,’ I told her. ‘I haven’t time to argue with the Navy guard at the entrance. And Perez might be in Ciudadela, anywhere.’