The redheaded bowler was a wiry six foot two. He used a long run-up and his final arm action was like a runaway cartwheel. His first delivery was pitched a little short and the ball fizzed past the batsman’s startled head. Quinlan misjudged the catch and the ball sped to the boundary. “Four byes,” Pulvertaft announced. “That’s four runs to you,” he explained to the non-striking batsman.
The man was impressed. “Keep swingin’, pal!” he shouted to his team-mate. “We got four runs already. This game is in the bag!”
“Four runs is scarcely a winning score, old chap,” Pulvertaft said mildly. “You should aim for a hundred, at least.”
“Yeah, yeah.” The American glanced sideways at the umpire. He’d heard about the famous British sense of humour. Also their famous love of understatement. How could a hundred runs be understatement? Babe Ruth never scored a hundred runs in a whole season. He gave up.
At the other end, the batsman assumed the classic baseball stance: knees well bent, bat held shoulder-high. He swung and missed. The ball thudded into his exposed ribcage and he collapsed onto his stumps. “Out, I’m afraid,” Pulvertaft said. “Awfully bad luck.” To the bowler he murmured: “You can take it easy now, I think.” The man nodded. But a shark does not relax when it scents blood in the water.
The new batsman hit his first ball for six. The next ball ricocheted off a bump in the pitch and struck his left kneecap with a sound like a mallet hitting a tentpeg. A jeep was sent to collect him.
“They really shouldn’t drive across the playing surface,” Pulvertaft said. “It’s very bad form.”
The third American batsman had learned from his team-mates’ experience. He stood well away from the stumps, too far away to hit or be hit. His first ball knocked all three stumps into a cocked hat. “No ball,” Pulvertaft said.
“What was wrong with it, sir?” the bowler asked.
“The batsman wasn’t ready. I’m sure there’s a rule about that.”
The bowler added a yard to his run-up, and again the stumps went flying. “No ball,” Pulvertaft said.
The bowler didn’t bother to ask why. He spent a little time polishing the ball. “Is everyone ready?” he asked. This time he bowled underarm and hit the stumps.
“Oh dear,” Pulvertaft said. “I had the sun in my eyes.” But the batsman was already walking away.
After three overs, the Americans had scored seventeen runs and lost nine wickets, five of them Retired Hurt. “We’ll take tea soon, I expect,” Pulvertaft said.
Word of the carnage in the cricket match reached the baseball game just as the home team was due to bat. Jakowski called his men together. “Change of plan,” he said.
The RAF players knew something of baseball. They had seen it played in movies. They had watched their opponents warming up and had noticed how the pitcher, especially, made the ball fly as straight as a bullet. So the first man at bat was surprised to receive slow and harmless lobs. He even managed to mis-hit the third offering. “Run, you feckless idiot!” Renouf shouted.
He ran, stumbling over his bat until he remembered to drop it. By then a fielder had scooped up the ball. His bullet-straight throw smacked into the runner’s legs, and he fell. “Don’t bloody stop!” Renouf bawled. The man got up, lurched forward, and another fielder hit him again, this time on the ass. But he stumbled into first base. Jakowski was fielding there. “Fearfully sorry about that,” he said. “The ball must have slipped, or something.”
After that the Americans allowed every batter to run, while the ball raced between fielders like tracer, bouncing off the runners, who fell, and rose, only to fall again. Nobody was tagged out. Eventually the bases were loaded. All the runners were bruised and limping. One man, who had been trapped by lethal switch-hitting between second base and third, was bleeding from the head.
Renouf had seen enough. “Match abandoned,” he told Jakowski. “I don’t know what your damned game is, but it’s over.”
“According to you, it was rounders,” Jakowski said. “Or was that all balls?”
There was no flying, so the control tower was empty apart from the duty officer. Skull took Karl Leppard and a bottle of dry white wine onto the roof. They settled into canvas chairs. The sounds of sport down below were faint.
“I took part in a fairly highpowered seminar on our fragile world, recently,” Skull said. “Without mentioning your name, I suggested the hot spots most likely to ignite: the Congo, Persia, and Cuba. Nobody agreed.”
“I’m surprised. Persia. Full of gung-ho Arabs? Sitting on a sea of oil? Russia next door?”
“The Shah is a staunch ally of the West.”
“Sure,” Leppard said. “And a bloody tyrant in his spare time. He won’t last. Oil means trouble. Russia likes trouble.”
“Perhaps. But the Congo is different. Black Africans don’t want blue-eyed white men from Omsk telling them how to live. As for Cuba…it’s a backwater.”
“Castro pissed off the Kennedys.”
“You mean the Bay of Pigs?” Skull topped up their glasses. “More of a brawl than an invasion. A monumental cock-up by a mob of over-excited Cuban exiles. Why should Kennedy care? He wasn’t involved.”
“Wasn’t he?”
“Well, that’s what your man at the UN said. I saw him on television. Nothing to do with the US, he said.”
“He lied. Kennedy inherited the plan from the Eisenhower administration. Could of killed it, didn’t. Cheap way to lose Castro, Kennedy thought. Bay of Pigs was pure CIA. Money, arms, training, ships – all CIA. Exiles supplied blood. Blood and bullshit. Castro knew they were coming. So now the Kennedys hate him.”
“Dear me.” A pigeon landed on the parapet. Skull threw the wine cork at it and missed. The bird was unmoved. “Why Cuba?” he asked. “It’s nothing. Drop it in the middle of Texas and nobody would even notice.”
“It’s Communist.”
“The Cubans like it that way. What happened to freedom?”
Leppard was amused. “Old man Kennedy didn’t spend fifty million dollars buying the Presidency for Jack so that Castro could spoil the view.”
“Well, he can’t buy Cuba. And surely Jack’s not going to send in the Marines. They’d end up sitting in foxholes for ever, while the natives sold them exploding cigars. The Kremlin would love that.”
“Uh-huh.”
Skull got up and strolled to the parapet. The pigeon shuffled away from him but did not fly. It knew its rights. Sunlight warmed the baseball game and the cricket match, but it was against a backdrop of dark cloud. Skull raised his head and sniffed, and smelt rain on the way. “Drink up,” he said. “We’re about to get drenched. Cricket has that effect on weather.”
Silk ambled along the taxiway, walking not quite straight because he was one-eyed. Didn’t matter. Plenty of room. The track was wide enough for a Vulcan. It led him away from everyone. Good, he thought, let the rest of the squadron be nice to the Americans, not me, I’m fresh out of niceness… Sod it, now I’m even thinking like a Yank…
“Women.” He was surprised by the sound of his voice, but why the hell not? Hearing the word helped him focus on his problem. “Devious,” he said. “Greedy.” Was that going too far? “Look,” he said, “she knows I got this Vulcan job so as to be near her, to give the marriage a second chance. I get the damn job, stroke of luck, and she can’t wait to bugger it up with her rant-and-rave politics! Then I drive all the way to bloody Bristol, just to make sure she knows the score, and bang, she clobbers me. If that’s love, you can…”