The Fighting Man by Gerald Seymour

Author:Gerald Seymour
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Published: 2013-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

He had a full head of hair, almost white now.

He wore a well-cut toothbrush of a moustache.

Percy Martins was finely built for his years. He could easily have carried for himself the grip bag and the tackle box and the sleeve for the rods. One of the old guard from front desk trailed Martins along the corridor, bearing his burden.

A day’s fishing, midweek, was not unusual now for him.

Two young men, their jackets already discarded in their offices, ducked their heads to him, and right that they should show some bloody respect. A young woman, carrying a wrapped sandwich and a closed polystyrene coffee beaker, glowered at him, would have been of the new intake that was provincial and force-fed with education, but stepped out of his way.

He clumped into his outer office, past the bat who was now his secretary, not for long . . . unlocked the door of his small room and smiled sweetly as the man stacked his bag and his box and his rods in the corner.

His secretary brought through the signal, passed on by North American Desk.

. . . Bloody people in Washington. Bloody Americans.

Too much shit taken from the Americans, too much rolling over like a whipped cur, tail across the privates . . .

He reached for his telephone, dialled the internal number of North American Desk.

‘. . . You’re level with me. Five had a name, right? We helped Five, right? No Further Action, right? Thank you . . .’

Percy Martins would have considered himself armourplated if it came to inter-departmental argument. He was one of the few remaining of the former men of the Secret Intelligence Service. He had survived, comfortably, the weeding-out process of the new Director General. He had, now, no specific designation, no stated responsibility. He occupied an office that was flanked by Personnel (Records) and Expenditure (In House), on the fourth floor of the new building by Vauxhall Bridge; if he craned from his window, pressed his nose against the glass that could not be opened, he could just see the river. Bits and pieces came his way, things no-one else could pigeonhole, but not too many.

There had been so many who had been cleared out with the move. A scandal. Too many for the formality of even the briefest leaving parties. An utter scandal. Good men, more than twenty years’ service in, and let go on a Friday afternoon with a brown envelope on internal delivery issuing them with fifty pounds of vouchers for the Army and Navy store. Not even a clock, not any more, not even a sherry decanter. Not for ‘Sniper’ Martins, oh, no, not yet . . . The young men and women, with their good degrees, eyed him in the corridors with suspicion and yet with envy because his achievement was still talked of, grudgingly. A marksman in the Beqa’a valley of the Lebanon, controlled by Percy Martins. The shooting of a Palestinian assassin, organized by Percy Martins. The presence in

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