The Glory Boys

Insignificant, finished. Famy heaved him once again upward so that he could observe the hurt he had inflicted, and more practically to see that the ribbons of blood had not passed on to the overalls. These he stripped off, twisting the body, lifting it, pushing it so that he could slip the garment down its length and over the shoes. It had been a hot day, and the Indian wore only a singlet – deep-stained now – and pants underneath, not clean and with their own faint smell that competed with the urine stains on the floor.

He left the body still kneeling but with the head deep in the pan. An obscenity, but necessary to remove totally the horror of the face and the damage that he had brought to it. In the breast pocket of Mohan Singh's overalls he found the small, plastic-coated polaroid card, read the name of the man he had executed in the cause of Palestine, and looked at the photograph, unrecognizable from the smashed features of the man he had killed. Three minutes later, now wearing the overalls, he climbed up over the dividing wooden wall and into the next cubicle. He hurried across to the washbasins, scrubbed his hands in liquid soap to rid himself of the few blood-spots that rested there, then checked in the mirror that the turban was straight and still fastened. His bag was where he had left it, under the basins.

Out in the corridor Famy glanced at his watch. If the Jumbo were on time it would be landing in three hours and forty minutes. There would be another sixty minutes of refuelling. He had far to go, each step more hazardous than the last. And he had killed for the first time, the first time in his short life. There had been men who had slumped in his gunsight in the lecture hall, but they were different – abstract, unconnected. This was with his own hands, using his own strength, his own will. It had been the irreversible step, and he had taken it.

TWENTY

It had been four years since the British had first awoken, and then tardily, to the threat confronting their premier airport. The familiar continental backdrop of patrolling troops and armed para-military police on the runways and in the terminals had been thought just another European eccentricity, until the Guards and their armour had deserted Windsor and rolled into Heathrow for the first time. Many had seen that as an erosion of something peculiarly British, a departure from a way of life long established, a further weakening of the nation's aloofness from the violent habits of its neighbours. But times changed, and the troops came more often, the frequency of their alerts reducing the bizarre appearance of their initial arrival. And the British Airports Authority, the managing body for the 2700 acres of billiard-flat grass and concrete that played host on a summer's day to close on a thousand aircraft, had called its charge a 'national defence priority', and written in an annual review of the 'formi-dable tasks posed by the new warfare' of terrorist attack.

Familiarity, though, dulled the fascination of the armed men, the excitement died its death. Twenty million passengers came and went each year, and few could boast to their friends of having seen a rifle, a semi-hidden pistol handle at the hip of a policeman, let alone a light tank.

So on this Wednesday there was again a refreshing novelty about it all, and enough sunshine to bring out the crowds. Those who were flying arrived earlier than they otherwise would have done. Those landing lingered in the anticipation of an event. Around the army, the work of the airport continued uninterrupted; but ears were cocked listening for sirens and gunfire, and above all the ceaseless drone of uninformed and ceaseless rumour.

The turban felt strange and unfamiliar on Famy's head.

Not that it was heavy or ill-fitting, but as a constriction, the mark and uniqueness of an identity that he had not fully taken over. The overalls were right, loose and baggy, presenting no pressures on the shape of his body, and masking the rifle now pinioned, barrel down, in the belt at the front of his trousers. It was one of the small pieces of advice that they had given to him: secrete a barrelled weapon in the very front of your body. The hands always search at the sides, examine the flanks. The grenades would have been harder to dispose of on his person had the Indian not carried the small, yellow lunch box in the pocket of his trousers. The V40S wrapped well in the greaseproof paper that the nameless and faceless wife packaged round her man's food.

Famy walked toward the security check-point between the two giant structures that formed Terminal Three.

'Departures to Right', 'Arrivals to Left', and straight ahead the pendulum bar, unmistakable in its red and white message, with the notice slung beneath, large and decisive,