The Glory Boys

'You'll do as you're bloody well told.' Hadn't expected the assault that fast.

'After last night we make the decisions.'

'You'll make the decisions when you're on that fucking aircraft…'

'We left it to you, and it was a fiasco.'

'You'll be told what's going to happen, and if you don't like it you can get out on the pavement and walk to the airport.' When Jimmy shouted the sledgehammer reverberated behind his eyes. He closed them. All so bloody daft, childish. When he forced the lids hard together he could squeeze out the pain. 'Calm yourself down for God's sake.'

He spoke like a man who wants to end the full drama of a domestic row, wants to pack it in and forget it by the morning. 'Did you sleep last night?'

Elkin shook his head. Bags big and bulged, sack full, spreading to his cheeks, high red flush beneath them, eyes above soft and watery. Been crying, Jimmy saw.

'We have the Irishman. Only leaves the one other.

Fancies himself at the airport when your man goes out this afternoon. Be out of his depth. Less chance than a chicken in Biafra. He's no hope. They'll be working out a route later in the morning, nothing for you till that gets in the pipeline. You should put your head down till then.'

Elkin walked back to his bed, sat on it heavily. Jimmy recognized he would struggle to stay awake and lose. Poor sod, doesn't rate us – and why should he? Fearful what we'll cock-up while he's kipping. And everyone so bloody tired, never known an operation when they weren't all walking round like zombies… what Jones had said, wasn't it? Stupid old bugger. Jimmy took off his coat and slung it on the floor, lifted the pistol from the shoulder-holster and pressed it into the waist of his trousers before dumping himself into a brocaded armchair. He had thought that sleep would come easily to him, pleaded for it, aware of how much faster the incapacity of exhaustion came to him as he veered between middle and old age. But the liberation was not at hand, and was made harder by the still figure of Elkin on his bed. Jimmy willed himself to follow, but without success. And his head throbbed, with the blood scarlet flashes across his vision.

Beyond the partition door David Sokarev too was asleep. Jimmy had heard no movement, no creaking of restless bed springs, and turned the door handle giving himself a few inches of vision. Like a little angel. No nightmares, the pills had seen to that. Dead to the world, blanked out, insensitive to it all. Pray the drug keeps him there. Met a man once in a pub – where you meet them all, Jimmy – in his cups, deep. Said he'd been a prison screw. Once done the death cell stint. Hadn't volunteered, the sick list had seen him on the rota, usual guys not available. Not the actual night, but the one before. And the man had slept, and they'd all marvelled, and known the news the governor had brought the previous evening.

Even slept through the shift change, and the new screws had tip-toed in. They'd let his breakfast get cold, fearful for him when the protection of sleep was gone. He'd been a crude bugger, the one who'd told him the story, but different when he spoke of this. And the more that Sokarev slept the better. Cushion him from the carry-on. Only bloody defence he had. A weak face he had, unprotected, with its old man's stubble.

And by the late afternoon Sokarev would be gone, and his hands would be washed and he'd be back with his girl, and no phone calls, and he'd retrieve the bottle. God, he wished his head would call a cease-fire. He'd be in lousy shape in the afternoon. Lousy.

Famy had studied many of the men who came into the canteen through the early and middle morning. Some he dismissed immediately as being of no use to him, others he toyed with for longer, examining their features and their build, before rejecting them too as unsuitable for his purpose.

It was gone eleven when he saw the man he wanted.

Indian, correct height, at a little below six feet. Youngish, early twenties, and not yet filled out with the obesity of his race. A turban, good because it distracted from the facial images, white and cleanly furled. A faint moustache, hardly visible, but there was time for Famy to use his battery razor and match that. White overalls, emblazoned across the left chest with the British Airways sign and, more important, specked with oil spots and smeared with grease. Maintenance. A man who worked on the engines, tended the beasts when they were tethered, had access to them when they lay crippled. And where did the work go on? At the piers, on the tarmac, on the big concreted open spaces where the aircraft sojourned. Access dominated his thinking. The need to find an identity that ensured access.

A job that provided access to the hidden and secret areas denied to ordinary civilians, the ticket behind the wire fences and the control points.

Famy left his table, and holding his bag moved across the floor of the canteen toward the table where the Sikh sat, solitary, unaware of the man who approached him.