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“Then come, Harry,” she said.
“Three minutes,” said the voice on the phone. Sir Harry Marriott replaced the receiver. Down below, his car was waiting for the five-hundred-yard drive. It was 8:11 A.M.
The kidnappers were four in number. The gunman, who now sat in the passenger seat, stuffed the Skorpion down between his feet and pulled off his woolen ski mask. Beneath it he still wore a wig and a moustache. He pulled on a pair of heavy-framed spectacles with no glass in them. Beside him was the driver, the leader of the team; he, too, had a wig, and a false beard as well. Both disguises were temporary, because they had to drive several miles looking natural.
In the rear the other two subdued a violently fighting Simon Cormack. Not a problem. One of the men was huge and simply smothered the young American in a bear hug while the lean and wiry one applied an ether pad. The van bounced off the track from the reservoir and settled down as it found the blacktop lane toward Wheatley, and the sounds from the rear ceased as the U.S. President’s son slumped unconscious.
It was downhill through Littleworth, with its scattering of cottages, and then straight into Wheatley. They passed an electric milk van delivering the traditional breakfast pint of fresh milk, and a hundred yards later the van driver had a brief image of a newspaper delivery boy glancing at them. Out of Wheatley they joined the main A.40 highway into Oxford, turned back toward the city for five hundred yards, then turned right onto the B.4027 minor road through the villages of Forest Hill and Stanton St. John.
The van drove at normal speed through both villages, over the crossroads by New Inn Farm, and on toward Islip. But a mile after New Inn, just beyond Fox Covert, it pulled toward a farm gate on the left. The man beside the driver leaped out, used a key to undo the padlock on the gate—they had replaced the farmer’s padlock with their own ten hours earlier—and the van rolled into the track. Within ten yards it had reached the semi-ruined timber barn behind its stand of trees which the kidnappers had reconnoitered two weeks earlier. It was 7:16 A.M.
The daylight was brightening and the four men worked fast. The gunman hauled open the barn doors and drove out the big Volvo sedan that had been parked there only since midnight. The green van drove in and the driver descended, bringing with him the Skorpion and two woolen masks. He checked the front of the van to make sure nothing was left, then slammed the door. The other two men bailed out of the rear doors, hefted the form of Simon Cormack, and placed it in the Volvo’s capacious trunk, already fitted with ample air holes. All four men stripped off their oversized black track suits to reveal respectable business suits, shirts, and ties. They retained their wigs, moustaches, and glasses. The bundled clothing went into the trunk with Simon, the Skorpion on the floor of the Volvo’s backseat under a blanket.
The van driver and team leader took the wheel of the Volvo and waited. The lean man from the back placed the charges in the van and the giant closed the barn doors. Both got into the back of the Volvo, which now cruised to the gate leading to the road. The gunman closed it behind the car, recovered the padlock, and replaced the farmer’s rusted chain. It had been cut through but now hung realistically enough. The Volvo had left tracks in the mud, but that could not be helped. They were standard tires and would soon be changed. The gunman climbed in beside the driver, and the Volvo headed north. It was 7:22 A.M. The ACC Ops was just saying “Jesus.”
The kidnappers drove northwest straight through Islip village and cut into the arrow-straight A.421, taking a ninety-degree right turn toward Bicester. They drove through this pleasant market town in northeast Oxfordshire at a steady pace and along the A.421 toward the county town of Buckingham. Just outside Bicester a big police Range Rover loomed up behind them. One of the men in the back muttered a warning and reached down for the Skorpion. The driver snapped at him to sit still and continued at a legal speed. A hundred yards on, a sign said WELCOME TO BUCKINGHAMSHIRE. The county line. At the sign the Range Rover slowed, slewed across the road, and began unloading steel barriers. The Volvo kept motoring and soon disappeared. It was 8:05. In London, Sir Harry Marriott was picking up the phone to Downing Street.
The British Prime Minister happens to be an extremely humane person, much more so than her five immediate male predecessors. Although able to stay cooler than any of them under extreme pressure, she is far from immune to tears. Sir Harry would later tell his wife that when he broke the news her eyes filled; she covered her face with her hands and whispered, “Oh, dear God. Poor man.”
“Here we were,” Sir Harry would tell Debbie, “facing the biggest bloody crisis with the Yanks since Suez, and her first thought was for the father. Not the son, mind you—the father.”
Sir Harry had no children and had not been in office in January 1982, so, unlike the retired Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong, who would not have been surprised, he had not witnessed Margaret Thatcher’s anguish when her son Mark had gone missing on the Dakar Rally in the Algerian desert. Then, in the privacy of the night, she had cried from that pure and very special pain felt by a parent whose child is in danger. Mark Thatcher had been found alive by a patrol after six days.
When she raised her head she had recovered; she pressed a button on her intercom.
“Charlie, I want you to put through a personal call to President Cormack. From me. Tell the White House it is urgent and cannot wait. Yes, of course I know what time it is in Washington.”
“There is the American ambassador, via the Foreign Secretary,” ventured Sir Harry Marriott. “He could ... perhaps ...”
“No, I will do it myself,” insisted the Prime Minister. “You will please form the COBRA, Harry. Reports every hour on the hour, please.”
There is nothing particularly hot about the so-called hotline between Downing Street and the White House. It is in fact a dedicated telephone link, via satellite, but with unbreakable scramblers fitted at both ends to ensure privacy. A hotline link normally takes about five minutes to set up. Margaret Thatcher pushed her papers to one side, stared out of the bulletproof windows of her private office, and waited.
Shotover Plain was crawling, literally, with activity. The two men of the patrol car Delta Bravo knew enough to keep everyone else off the area and to walk extremely carefully even as they examined the three bodies for signs of life. When they saw none, they left the bodies alone. Investigations can all too easily be ruined at the outset because someone walked all over evidence that would have been treasures to the forensic people, or a big foot pushed a spent cartridge into the mud, wiping off any fingerprints it might still have contained.
The uniformed men had cordoned off the area, the whole track from Littleworth down the hill to the east along to the steel bridge crossing the Ring Road between Shotover and Oxford City. Within this area the SOCOs, scene-of-crime officers, looked for anything and everything. They found that the British SB sergeant had fired twice; a metal detector got one slug out of the mud in front of him—he had slumped forward on his knees, firing as he
went down. They could not find the other slug. It might have hit one of the kidnappers, they would report. (It hadn’t, but they did not know that.)
There were the spent cases from the Skorpion, twenty-eight of them, all in the same pool; each was photographed where it lay, picked up with tweezers, and bagged for the lab boys. One American was still slumped behind the wheel of the car; the other lay where he had died beside the passenger door, his bloodied hands over the three holes in his belly, the hand mike swinging free. Everything was photographed from every angle before anything was moved. The bodies went to the Radcliffe Infirmary while a Home Office pathologist sped down from London.
The tracks in the mud were of special interest: the smear where Simon Cormack had crashed down with two men on top of him, the prints of the kidnappers’ shoes—they would turn out to be from ultracommon running shoes and untraceable—and the tire tracks from the getaway vehicle, quickly identified as some kind of van. And there was the jack, brand-new and purchasable from any of the Unipart chain of stores. Like the Skorpion 9mm cartridges, it would turn out to bear no prints.
There were thirty detectives seeking witnesses— wearisome but vital work that yielded some first descriptions. Two hundred yards east of the reservoir on the lane into Littleworth were two cottages. The lady in one, brewing up tea, had heard “some popping noises” down the lane about seven o’clock but had seen nothing. A man in Littleworth had seen a green van go by just after seven, heading toward Wheatley. The detectives would find the newspaper delivery boy and the milk-van driver just before nine, the boy at school, the milkman having breakfast.
He was the best witness. Medium-green, battered Ford Transit with the Barlow’s logo on the side. The marketing manager at Barlow confirmed they had had no vans in that area at that hour. All were accounted for. The police had their getaway vehicle; an all-points alert went out. No reason; just find it. No one connected it with a burning barn on the Islip road—yet.
Other detectives were around the house in Summer-town, knocking on doors in Woodstock Road and its vicinity. Had anyone seen parked cars, vans, other vehicles? Anyone seen observing the house down the street? They followed the route of Simon’s run right into the center of Oxford and out the other side. About twenty people reported they had seen the young runner being tailed by men in a car, but it always turned out to be the Secret Service car.
By nine o’clock the ACC Ops was getting the familiar feeling: There would be no rapid windup now, no lucky breaks, no quick catch. They were away, whoever they were. The Chief Constable, in full uniform, joined him at Shotover Plain and watched the teams at work.
“London seems to want to take over,” said the Chief Constable.
The ACC grunted. It was a snub, but also the removal of a hellish responsibility. The inquiry into the past would be tough enough, but to fail in the future ...
“Whitehall seems to feel they may have quit our patch, don’t you see. The powers might want the Met. to be in charge. Any press?”
The ACC shook his head. “Not yet, sir. But it won’t stay quiet for long. Too big.”
