The 92nd Tiger Read online

  He squeezed his way slowly back to the bar, and Larrimore watched him go. A professional himself, he knew exactly what Hugo was up against. His reputation and fame were great, but they were very flimsy. They rested on one successful series. To the public, he was the Tiger. The hero of ninety-one half-hour episodes. Easy to view, and easy to forget. The steep bit of the road lay ahead. The road that led to real stardom. Top billing, a choice of good parts, the centre table at the Garrick Club, the New Year’s Honours. Between these delectable uplands and the deceptive foothills of television popularity there was a great gulf fixed. A gulf full of hero’s friends and heroine’s fathers, comic uncles, wedding guests and second murderers.

  Hugo arrived back with most of the drink he had been carrying still in the glasses. He said, ‘You look bloody solemn all of a sudden, Geoff.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about life.’

  ‘A mistake. Keep your mind firmly on fantasy. It’s the only safe course. Cheers!’

  One of the group standing near them had been staring at Hugo for some time. He was a thick-set, red-faced character with sloping shoulders and a barrel of a chest. He said, ‘Well, well, well. Do my eyes deceive me, or is it the old Tiger himself?’

  He edged his way forward until he was standing shoulder to shoulder with Hugo, who put down the drinks he was carrying, and smiled politely.

  ‘I always wanted to meet you. I seen those things you do, like karate and things like that, and I often thought, I bet he fakes ’em. I bet the other chap falls down. Right?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And I thought to myself, suppose he came up against someone his own size and weight. Someone like me, frinstance. Who’d win then, frinstance?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ said Hugo.

  ‘Care to try?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘Yellow as well?’

  One of the man’s friends said, ‘Lay off. Cliff. You’re tight.’

  ‘Not too tight to take a poke at this big phoney.’

  The swing came so slowly that Hugo had no difficulty in avoiding it. The only thing it upset was the table. As the glasses on it hit the floor, the landlord and one of his assistants arrived, splitting the crowd like tanks going through undergrowth. They got the red-faced man by an arm each, holding him with one hand behind the elbow and the other by his collar, which they twisted, until they choked him. Then they ran him to the door. A path opened before them. One of the bystanders opened the door. The red-faced man disappeared through it with a lovely crash. The landlord came back, and said, ‘I’m sorry about that, sir. Get that broken glass swept up, Ted. We don’t want anyone hurt. I’ll fetch you two more drinks.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Hugo. ‘We’re going.’

  When they got outside the red-faced man had disappeared.

  Larrimore said, ‘Do you often get trouble like that?’

  ‘Every now and then,’ said Hugo. He sounded very tired suddenly.

  The house he shared with his mother was on the river above Richmond. She had the ground floor, on account of her legs, and he had the rest of it. It was a nice house, with a garden down to the river and a view of Eel Pie Island, and was worth three times what he had given for it five years before.

  When he got there, all the ground-floor lights were out, and he let himself in quietly. On the hall table there was a single letter, which must have come with the afternoon post. The envelope was buff, and square, and he thought at first that it was a tax demand, but it wasn’t.

  The letter inside was from the Foreign Office, Whitehall, and dated that day.

  It invited Mr. Hugo Greest to call at the Foreign Office on the following afternoon, at two thirty, if convenient, and ask for a Mr. Taverner.

  Chapter Two

  Mr. Taverner of the Foreign Office

  There were three grey-haired ladies. They sat, like judges in the Court of Appeal, side by side at the broad counter which blocked one end of the spacious entrance hall. Behind them frosted-glass windows obscured what would otherwise have been a view of Downing Street. From the wall on their left a gentleman in full court dress looked down.

  (Fine film set, thought Hugo. A party of terrorists set out to kidnap the Foreign Secretary. Three of them leap the counter and overpower the secretaries. In the film they would be younger, of course, and much prettier—)

  ‘Can I help you?’ said the central lady sharply.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Hugo. ‘I have an appointment with Mr. Taverner. The Arabian Department.’

  ‘Fill out this form, please.’

  Hugo studied the pink form. Some of it was easy. His name? He could do that. And the date. But what about ‘Nature of business’?

  ‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘that I’ve no idea what the nature of my business is.’

  The central lady looked at him with increased suspicion. She said, ‘You must have some idea.’

  ‘I’m afraid not. You see, I got a letter asking me to call. Mr. Taverner didn’t say what it was about.’

  ‘That’s very unusual,’ said the right-hand lady.

  ‘Perhaps you could ring him up, and ask him what he wants to see me about. Then I could put it on the form.’

  ‘We can’t do that,’ said the left-hand lady. ‘If you weren’t told what you were here for, it’s probably confidential, you see.’

  It was deadlock.

  The right-hand lady, who seemed to be the most helpful of the three, had an idea. She said, ‘Why don’t you put “business”?’

  This seemed a neat solution. The Bench considered it and concurred.

  In the space opposite the word ‘Business’, Hugo wrote down ‘business’. The form was then passed back over the counter, approved by the Court of Appeal, and handed to a veteran of the Crimean War who had hobbled up.

  ‘Follow me, sir,’ said the veteran.

  Hugo followed him. Into a lift, out of the lift, along a short passage, into a much longer passage. The veteran was in no hurry. After a hundred years of combat he had come to rest, in this dim but comfortable mansion, full of enormous faded portraits, lined with cupboards full of documents which were once secret, topped by bookshelves of unreadable and unread reports. The ghosts of an imperial past moved softly ahead of them, prowling down the corridors, lurking in the galleries, whispering in the shadows.

  A long time later they came to a door. The veteran knocked at it, and a polite voice bade them enter. The veteran entered, laid the pink form on the edge of the desk, saluted and withdrew, closing the door softly behind him.

  ‘So glad you could come, Mr. Greest,’ said Taverner. He was tall, and thin, and appeared to be dressed for a funeral. ‘Let me take your coat.’ He took Hugo’s raincoat and suspended it from an apparatus like a small gallows which stood behind the door. Whilst he was doing so, Hugo took stock of the room.

  It was a narrow room; so narrow that in its original design it might have been a passage. A strip of Turkish carpet covered some of the floor. The rest was brown linoleum. A tiny coal fire smouldered in the old-fashioned grate. The furniture was waiting-room mahogany. It was not at all his idea of an appropriate room for the head of the Arabian Department. A television producer, even on a minimum budget, would have rejected it out of hand.

  ‘You must have been surprised to get my note,’ said Mr. Taverner.’

  ‘Well, I was a bit.’

  ‘It’s not a very usual situation. The fact is, that I have a rather unusual proposition to put to you. I thought it would be easier if I explained it to you personally. You’ll certainly need time to think about it. It’s so unusual that I shouldn’t be at all surprised if you rejected it out of hand.’

  His tone of voice suggested that not only would he be unsurprised, he would actually be glad if his proposition was rejected. Hugo said, ‘Let’s hear about it before we turn it down.’

  ‘I have to offer you the post of military adviser to the Ruler of Umran.’

  ‘Come again.’
<
br />   ‘Umran, in the Persian Gulf. I don’t expect you’ve heard of it. Not many people have.’ Mr. Taverner unfolded himself from behind his desk, moved across to the wall, and pulled a cord. A map descended from a mahogany pelmet.

  ‘There it is,’ he said. ‘It needs a large-scale map to show it at all. It’s the very tip of the peninsula. Its nearest neighbour is Ras-al-Khaima.’

  Hugo peered at the map with interest.

  ‘All that green bit, on the right,’ he said. That’s Muscat and Oman, isn’t it?’

  ‘The Sultanate of Oman. It changed its name after the palace coup last year.’

  ‘And those bits down there?’

  ‘Umm al-Gaiwain, Fujaira, Ajman and Sharja. They’re all Independent Trucial Shaikhdoms. Interesting places. They live in hopes of striking it rich when oil is discovered.’

  ‘And Umran?’

  ‘Umran had what you might call a mixed economy. As you see, it is less than fifty miles across the straits to Iran.’

  ‘The Gibraltar of the Persian Gulf.’

  Mr. Taverner considered the expression, repeating it silently to himself.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You might call it that. It was not the political significance of its position that I was considering when I mentioned its nearness to Iran, although that has important implications. What I meant to imply was that its proximity to the mainland on the other side made it a natural entrepot for smuggling. Gold smuggling in particular. Its other principal source of income was the striking of new and remarkable issues of postage stamps. There is one set in which the head of the Ruler was printed upside down which is in demand by philatelists all over the world.’

  ‘You say that these were its sources of income. Do I gather that they have now struck oil?’

  ‘They have not actually struck it. Like all those states, they have sold exploration concessions to hopeful prospectors. Sometimes the same concession several times over. But there are now more exciting possibilities. A company called Metbor, who drill for hard minerals in most parts of the world, are examining a number of trial borings in Umran at the moment.’

  ‘What do they expect to find? Gold. Silver. Copper.’

  Mr. Taverner pursed his lips, and said, ‘Yes, that sort of thing.’

  ‘He’s lying,’ said Hugo to himself. ‘Or giving me half-truths.’ The moment had come to ask the question. It had to be asked sooner or later.

  ‘Why pick on me?’

  Mr. Taverner smiled faintly and said, ‘As you may imagine, this was the first question which we asked. We were very willing to assist the Ruler and we had available a number of most suitable candidates. Men who had spent a good deal of time in that part of the world, with experience in the services or in diplomacy. We compiled a short list of six of the most promising, and invited the Ruler to interview them and select one. He rejected them.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘All of them, and without even seeing them. He wanted you.’

  ‘He must be mad.’

  Mr. Taverner appeared to be considering the point very carefully. He said, ‘Not mad. Romantic. He is a student of television. He has observed you, on a number of occasions, dealing with difficult and dangerous situations. He feels – and there we must agree with him – that there is likely to be no shortage of difficulties and dangers in Umran in the near future. And he has decided that you are the man he would like to have with him.’

  ‘I suppose he realises that success on the screen is a lot easier than success in real life.’

  ‘Subsconsciously, I think he does. But your repeated triumphs—how many by the way?’

  ‘Ninety-one.’

  ‘Yes. Ninety-one. They have had a sort of cumulative effect. He even has the impression, which he gained from an incident in which you temporarily impersonated a drunken Arab camel driver, that you speak fluent Arabic. We tried to explain to him that you would have been coached in the few words you had to speak, and that this was the extent of your knowledge.’

  ‘If you explained that to him, you were off beam.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I haven’t always been an actor, you know. In fact, I came to it comparatively late. I studied Oriental languages at Cambridge. When I left, my first job was as secretary to the late Professor Emil van der Hoetzen. I expect you’ve heard of him?’

  ‘Indeed, yes.’

  ‘I spent three years with him in the Middle East. Mostly under canvas in the desert near Homs. I won’t say that I became a classical Arabist, but I was quite capable of holding my own in a slanging match with a camel driver.’

  ‘I see. Well, that certainly makes a difference.’

  ‘But not very much?’

  ‘Frankly, no. To handle the problems which are bound to arise we should have wished that you had had some diplomatic training. Or, failing that, some military experience would probably be useful. You were too young to have been in the war, I suppose?’

  ‘Much too young. But why would military experience have been useful? Are you expecting a war in those parts?’

  ‘Not a world war. But a private war. Yes. In fact, I should say there are more excuses for starting a private war in that particular area than anywhere else in the world. Iraq and Iran are still capable of going to war over the Shatt-al-Arab. There are endless causes of dispute over the median lines which divide the continental shelf. In the old days when the sea bed only produced pearl oysters it was tricky enough. Now it produces oil. Iraq covets Kuwait. Saudi Arabia wants the Buraimi Oasis. And finally – there are the Tumbs.’

  ‘The islands which Iran grabbed.’

  ‘Correct. But they are not only the islands. Not by any means. In fact there is a chain of tiny islands – sand-spits really – off the coast of Umran. You spoke a moment ago of Umran being in the same position as Gibraltar. Can you visualise the sort of difficulties which might arise if the Straits of Gibraltar were somewhat wider and there were a number of uninhabited islands in the middle?’

  ‘It sounds tricky, certainly. By the way, who owns these islands?’

  ‘According to us, Ras-al-Khaima. According to Iran, Iran. And now the Ruler of Umran has himself staked a claim. It is based, as far as we can make out, both on physical proximity and on archaeological grounds. He claims to have discovered the tomb of the founder of his family, the Ferini, on the largest of them.’

  Hugo said, ‘I can understand that there might be a shooting war between Iran, who have, I understand, got a sizeable army, and one of the western powers, if they chose to stick up for – which was it? – Ras-al-Khaima. But I can’t quite see tiny little Umran making an impression on either side. How many of them are there?’

  ‘At the last census, about eight thousand. But that was five years ago. There are probably ten thousand by now. It’s not the numbers that matter. It’s the people. The Al Ferini are desert Arabs. Their male children are taught to handle firearms at an early age. If they are provoked they will shoot. They are fighters.’

  As Mr. Taverner said this he gave a very tiny sigh. His one window looked out over a corner of Horse Guards Parade. The rain, which had been threatening all morning, had started to come down hard. Pedestrians were scurrying for shelter. But it was not this which made him sigh. Mr. Taverner was a member of the East India Club and in his lunch hours, when the weather was fine, he liked to walk there, across the Park, up Waterloo Place, and across Pall Mall into St. James’s Square. In the club, which was one of the last relics of the Raj, hung numerous portraits. They were portraits of men who had brought peace and progress to a warring and primitive sub-continent. Sir Henry Lawrence and Sir Arthur Phayre. The incomparable Bobs. The black-bearded John Nicholson, who had threatened to shoot his own General if he refused to order an attack. They, too, were fighters. Were there any left? Could a nation of fighters lose its martial spirit within a mere hundred years? It had happened before. Rome had gone soft in less than a century. That man in front of him. What good could he possibly achieve? He was not a soldie
r. He was an actor. Probably a pansy. Most actors were pansies, or so he understood.

  He became aware that the silence had gone on rather a long time, and said, ‘I expect you have a lot of questions you’d like to ask.’

  ‘One certainly,’ said Hugo. ‘You’ve mentioned these possibilities and dangers. Why should they worry us. We’ve cleared out of the Gulf, haven’t we?’

  ‘Politically.’

  ‘And militarily.’

  ‘Not entirely. We are retaining certain airfields as staging posts for the R.A.F., and the Navy will pay courtesy visits from time to time. Also we have agreed to continue training the Oman Scouts. Broadly, I agree. Our main forces have gone. But that is far from being the whole picture. We still have very considerable commercial interests. In spite of recent discoveries in the North Sea, nearly two-thirds of the oil available to the non-communist world comes from the Gulf. And half of it is ours.’

  ‘Then I think we were crazy to take the army away.’

  Mr. Taverner smiled his diplomatic smile and said, ‘The decision did not rest with this office, Mr. Greest. But I can tell you this. If any man, in any position, is able to use what influence he has towards maintaining peace and the status quo and allowing the oil to flow through the pipe lines and the tankers to pass freely, he would not find the Government ungrateful. Of that I am sure.’

  C.M.G., thought Hugo, maybe a K.C.M.G. Well, that would be something to show them at Television Centre. He said, ‘I’d want time to think about it.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What would you suggest would be the next step?’

  ‘I think you ought to have a word with the Ruler. He is staying at the Dorchester. Since his visit to this country is unofficial, he has registered under the name of Mr. Smith.’

  Chapter Three

  Sheik Ahmed bin Kashid al Ferini

  ‘Mr. Smith, sir?’ said the receptionist at the Dorchester, consulting a list. ‘Which Mr. Smith would that be?’

  ‘He’s an Arabian gentleman.’