Spy Story

Chapter Fifteen

If you measure power and success by the time taken to move in comfort to or from a city centre — and many use that criterion — then the next couple of hours was the pace-setter by which all London's tycoons and politicians must measure themselves.

The police car stopped outside The Terrine at one forty-five. 'Mr Armstrong?' He was a man of about forty. His coat was unbuttoned and revealed a police uniform that had been tailored to put the top button high. His shirt was white linen, its collar fastened with a gold pin. Whoever he was₃ he didn't have to line up on parade each morning and be checked by the station sergeant. The driver also was wearing a civilian coat, and only his blue shirt and black tie suggested that he was a constable.

'Perhaps,' I said. I held the newspaper over me to keep the rain off.

'Colonel Schegel's compliments, and we are to take you to Battersea. There is a helicopter waiting to connect with the airport.' He didn't get out of the car.

'Do you come with a book of instructions?'

'I beg your pardon, sir?'

'Why would I want to go to London, airport… Why would anyone?'

'It's something to do with this restaurant, sir,' he said. 'It's a Special Branch matter. I was just the neatest available spare bod.'

'And if I don't want to go with you?'

'The helicopter has been there an hour, sir. It must be urgent.' He looked up at the sky. The rain continued.

'Suppose I was afraid of heights?'

He began to understand. He said, 'We were just told to bring you the message, and give you a lift if you wanted it. As long as you identify yourself, that will get me out of trouble…' He lifted a hand awkwardly to show that he had no instructions about collaring me.

'O.K.,' I said. 'Let's go,' He smiled and unlocked the passenger door for me.

The helicopter was a museum piece: a Westland Dragonfly painted in the Royal Navy livery of dark steel blue. There were no roundels on it, and no lettering except for a civil registration number painted no larger than the 'Beware of the Rotor' sign at the back.

The pilot's appearance was similarly discreet. He wore military flyer's overalls, with maggots of cotton outlining clean patches from which the badges had been removed. He was in the left-hand seat by the time the car was parked, and as I climbed aboard the main rotor was spinning The noise of the blades, and the old piston engine, inhibited conversation. I contented myself with looking out at the tall chimneys of Fulham making billowing white gauze curtains that closed across the river behind us. We passed over Wandsworth Bridge, keeping to the course of the river, as the safety regulations specify for everyone except royalty.

From the private aircraft park at London Heathrow, the same pilot took a Beagle Pup, Within an hour of leaving Marjorie outside The Terrine I was over Rugby at eight thousand feet and still climbing. We were heading north-west and, according to the gauges, sufficiently fuelled to get to the last landfall of the Outer Hebrides. The map on the pilot's knee bore an ancient wax pencil mark that continued in that direction and ended only on the margin. Now and again he smiled and stabbed a finger at the map and at the Plexiglass, to show me the Mi Motorway, or the dark-grey smear on the horizon behind which Coventry coughed. He offered me a cigarette but I declined. I asked him where we were going. He slid his headset back off his head and cupped his ear. I asked again but he shrugged and smiled as if I'd asked him to predict the outcome of the next general election.

A winter's sun was a carelessly sprayed yellow patch on the hard cumulus clouds that were building up over Ireland. Liverpool — and a Mersey crowded with ships — slid beneath our starboard wing, and ahead the Irish Sea glittered like a cheap brass tray. Flying over the ocean in single-engined light planes could never become a pleasure for me but the pilot smiled, pleased to get clear of the Control Zone and reporting areas, and off the confluence of airways through which came traffic jams of commercial jets. He climbed again, now that he was no longer forced down under the lanes, and that comforted me.

I studied the map. This aircraft's electronics were primitive. Flying V.F.R. meant he'd have to put it down before dark. The huge shape of the Isle of Man was only just visible in the gloomy ocean to port. He was not going there, nor to the airport at Blackpool, which we'd already passed. The fuel needles were flickering and still we maintained the same course that we'd steered since Castle Donington. It would be the chin of Scotland, or beyond that its nose, drooped down into the Western Isles. After the peninsula of Kintyre our track would be past the Scottish mainland. Then there were just the Islands and the Atlantic and eventually, long after the last drip of fuel had sounded the final beat of the little engine, Iceland. It had to be an island or a piece of peninsula. I just hoped that it would come over the horizon soon.

'The only way to guarantee privacy, old chap,' said Toliver. He replenished my tumbler from a decanter of malt whisky. 'The grass strip and the landing stage were built in 1941. This peninsula and the neighbouring islands were taken over by the military. Some were used for testing biological warfare stuff. Anthrax was the most persistent… won't be safe for a hundred years, they say. Ours was used for training secret agents: the big manor house, the high cliffs, the ruined villages — there was a good sampling of landscape.'

Toliver smiled. Once, many years before, in the sort of electioneering invective that endears politicians to all of us, his opponent had called Toliver a 'talking potato'. It was a cruel taunt, for it made one notice the small black eyes, receding hair and oval face that were part of his otherwise boyish features.

He smiled now. 'What I'm about to tell you comes under the contract. You understand me?'

I understood him well enough. Every time I signed that damned Official Secrets Act I read the fine print. I nodded and turned to look out of the window. It was dark but there remained a watery pink sky in the west, with a pattern of trees drawn on it. Beyond them, I knew the aircraft was pegged down tightly against the chance of winds that came off the Atlantic with a sudden and terrible fury. But I could see more reflected in the leaded v/indow than I could see through it. The flames flickered in the open hearth behind me, and men were seated around it drinking and speaking softly so that they could half listen to the words that Toliver spoke to me.

'It's too late to leave,' I said. 'You'd have to be damned inhospitable for me to want to face a take-off in this… and positively hostile before I'd brave the water.'

'Splendid,' said Toliver. 'That's all we ask. Take a look at what we're doing — no less, no more. Should you want no part of it — no hard feelings.'

I turned away from the window. This sober Toliver was a different man from the one I'd seen the other night at Ferdy's. It had become understood between us that the dinner party was not mentioned, nor the traffic accident that might, or might not, have come after it. 'It will make a change,' I said.

'Exactly. Nice of Colonel Schlegel to let us steal one of his best people… even for a couple of days.' Toliver touched my elbow and. turned me to face the other men in the room.

Among them I recognized Mason. I also saw the tall policeman who had been at number eighteen that night. The others called him Commander Wheeler. They were all talking softly together but the words flared up a little in good-natured argument.

'… worse in a way — more insidious — pop music and nancy-boy actors.'

'And most of the big international concerns are American-based.'

'No doubt about it.'

'You can't separate them.' It was the tall man speaking. 'Ecology — as they persist in calling it, God knows why — trade unions, big business: all in league, even if unwittingly so.'

'Growth,' said Mason, as if they'd had this argument before and each knew his lines.

'The unions want money for the workers, this forces a policy of growth on the government, so industry pollutes the earth. It's a vicious circle and all of them too stupid to break it.'

'It all comes back to the voter.'

'Yes, it does,' said Mason regretfully.

They were robust types, with quiet voices that here and there retained a trace of Yorkshire or Scotland. I looked for some strong common denominator in the group and was irritated with myself for finding none. Their clothes were well-fitting tweeds and cords, with the leather patches and frayed cuffs so often affected by prosperous Englishmen. The group suggested to me some provincial dining club, where ambitious young men drank too much wine, and agreed that the workers would be better off without trade unions.

'You get these damned Huns reunified and you'll start to see what's what,' said Wheeler.

'Who will?' said Mason.

'Everyone,' said Toliver. He couldn't resist joining their conversation, even though he'd been about to introduce me. 'East Germany is largely agricultural. It will knock agriculture for sis, and their shipbuilding will close the rest of our yards, mark my words.'

'It's going to turn Europe upside down,' said another man.

'The Yanks are behind it,' said Wheeler. 'God knows what kind of a deal they are cooking up behind the scenes with the Russians.'

'This is Pat,' Toliver announced. 'Pat Armstrong — works at the Studies Centre and…' Toliver appraised me with a quick glance up and down, '… a man who knows how to look after himself if I'm any judge. What?' He looked at me quizzically.

'I play a dangerous game of billiards,' I said.

There were half a dozen of them, aged from middle twenties up to Toliver. Their common interest: could have been anything from chess to yachting. I was unsure whether Whitehall was behind them, or just turning a blind eye their way,

'Commander Wheeler,' said Toliver putting an arm around Wheeler's shoulder. 'Our guest would probably like to be put into the picture.'

'And he's cleared for Top Secret stuff, is he?' said Wheeler. He was a tall man, with the kind of ruddy face that comes with those dual benefits of sea-faring: open air and duty-free drink. He had this deep flag-officer voice, and he bit down hard on his Latin roots. 'You probably know as much about Rear-Admiral Remoziva as we do,' he said.

Toliver smiled at me and patted my shoulder. 'I think Armstrong would agree that the Rear-Admiral would be a strategic asset for us,' he said.

'He's not here then?' I said.

"Not yet,' said Toliver. 'But very, very soon.'

Wheeler said, 'The simple fact is, if the Admiral doesn't get a kidney transplant: within, the next: eighteen months, he'll be dead a year after.'

'And he can't get that in the Soviet Union?' I asked.

'The Admiral is an able statistician,' said Toliver. 'They started a kidney unit in Leningrad a year ago last July. They are capable of it, yes. But in London we've done thousands of such operations. Ask yourself what you'd prefer.'

'And he'd defect?'

'To live?' said Wheeler. 'A man will go to great lengths to live, Mr Armstrong.'

I suppose I sniffed, or grunted, or made some other noise that fell short of the enthusiasm that Toliver expected. 'Tell me why not,' said Commander Wheeler.

'It's possible,' I agreed. 'But peasant family to Soviet nobility in one generation is quite a jump. They've plenty to be grateful for. One brother is planning a new town near Kiev, the elder sister chairing the Copenhagen talks, and getting more publicity than. Vanessa Redgrave…'

'The Admiral is not yet fifty,' said Wheeler. 'He has a lot of life ahead of him if he's wise.'

'We were also sceptical at first,' said Toliver. 'If the emphasis hadn't been placed upon proving death…' He stopped and looked apologetically at Wheeler. 'But I'm getting too far ahead.'

Wheeler said, 'We divided the problem into three separate tasks. The safest place for the transfer was obvious from the start. There's only one place where we can guarantee security. He can fly a helicopter. We will rendezvous with him at a prearranged place on the pack-ice of the Barents Sea and bring him back by submarine.'

'British submarine,' said Mason.

'A Royal Navy nuclear submarine,' said Toliver. 'If the Yanks got wind of it they'd spirit him away to America and that's the last we'd see of him.'

'Next,' said Wheeler, 'there is the problem of holding him for debriefing…'

'And you thought of the War Studies Centre,' I said.

'Well, it's bloody marvellous, isn't it?' said Wheeler. 'War-game his debriefing, and put nato resources against him.'

'And programme the computer to his reactions,' said Toliver.

'Dangerous,' I said.

'Not as a war plan — just into the data bank,' said Toliver.

'And what about Schlegel?' I asked.

Wheeler frowned. 'That's set us back a month or more — but he'll be posted elsewhere. It was finally fixed today.'

'And the Rear-Admiral will become Pat Armstrong?' I said.

'Sorry about that,' said Toliver, 'but you are about the right build and you'd just vacated the flat. We never guessed for a moment that you might go back there.'

'It's quite good,' I admitted.

'Only for a few weeks.,' said Mason. The tenancy of the flat and all the necessary personal documentation.is in your name. There will be no trace of a new person at the Studies Centre. We've gone to a lot of trouble. Getting that damned kidney machine up those stairs and into the flat next door to your old one… I damned near got a hernia. And then when they told us you'd gone back there, and you still had your old key. We got chewed out for that, I'll tell you.'

'And what happens to me?' I asked. 'Do I go back and take over Northern Fleet?'

'I say,' said Wheeler, pretending to take it seriously, 'that would really be a coup, wouldn't it?' They all laughed.

'We should have told you right at the beginning,' said Toliver. 'But our rule is to check out security before information is passed. Foxwell swore on a stack of bibles that you were a sound proposition. But a rule is a rule. Am I right?'

'And the restaurant and the girl — Miss Shaw — how does that fit in? I thought you were holding the Rear-Admiral there at one time.'

'We know you did,' said Wheeler. 'You're quite a bloodhound.'

'Miss Shaw is the daughter of one of my oldest friends,' said Toliver, 'and she's turned out first class. It's been beastly for her…'

Mason said, 'We needed a body — a dead body — to leave at the rendezvous, to make the helicopter crash look right.'

Toliver said, 'And it has to be a body with a diseased kidney. It gave us problems, I can tell you.'

'Hence the cold room at The Terrine,' I said. I didn't tell him that Marjorie had recognized him at the mortuary.

'And damned tricky,' said Mason. 'Must be in a sitting position so that we can leave it in the wrecked helicopter.'

'Ever tried to dress and undress a stiff?' One of the others said.

'You try and get a pair of trousers on a sitting corpse,' said Wheeler, 'And you might agree that it's the next most difficult thing to doing it standing up in a hammock.' They smiled.

Toliver said, 'Sara stitched every bit of that uniform together on the frozen body. She's quite a girl.'

'And where is the body now?' I asked. There was only a moment of hesitation then Toliver said, 'It's here, frozen. We have to be careful of what the post-mortem johnnies call adipocere. That's what the flesh becomes when immersed in water. It's got to look right for the Russkies when they find it.'

'What about the hand stitching?' I said.

'A calculated risk,' said Toliver.

'And the uniform will be burned in the crash,' said Mason.

I looked from Wheeler to Toliver and then at Mason. They appeared to be serious. You didn't have; to be living with a beautiful doctor to know that post-death discoloration was going to reveal to those same Russkies the fact that the body died full-length in a hospital bed, but I said nothing.

Toliver came round with the gin bottle. He topped up their glasses with Plymouth and put a dash of bitters into each one. Pink gins made with Plymouth. That was the common denominator, or the nearest thing they had to one: they were all ex-Royal Navy, or adopting wardroom manners with careful enthusiasm.

A message came late that night. I was told that Schlegel did not want me back in London. I was to remain with. Toliver's people on Blackstone until I was ordered to the submarine base for the Arctic trip.

I didn't believe the message. Schlegel was not the sort of man who sent vague verbal messages via men not known to both of us. But I took great care to show no sign of my disbelief. I reacted only by attempting to establish my love of the great outdoors. If I was going to get out of this place against their wishes I'd need the few hours start that only a habit of long country walks could provide.

So I hiked alone across the moorland, feeling the springy turf underfoot. I found grouse, and startled hares, and I tried the tail of Great Crag that was no more than a steep slope. I went past the pines and climbed through the hazel and birch and then bare rock, all the way up to the summit. A couple of hours of such walking gave even a vertigo-prone stumbler like me a chance to look down through the holes in the cloud, I saw the black terraces and crevices of the rock face, and beyond the gully to the loch: shining like freshly tempered blue steel. And I could see where the valley was an amphitheatre upholstered in yellow deer grass and curtained with remnants of white sea mist. I took cheese and Marmite sandwiches up with me, and found a mossy ledge amongst the ice ridges. There I could shelter and blow on my hands, and pretend I'd got there by way of the chimney and three pinnacles_;i of which the others spoke so proudly.

I polished the salt spray from my spectacles and looked seaward. It was one of the wildest and most desolate landscapes that Britain offers. A stiff wind was striking the snow-clad peak, and snow crystals came from the summit, like white smoke from a chimney.

A mile out in the ocean, a small boat made slow progress in the choppy sea. Toliver had warned that unless the boat came today there would be no fuel for the generator and no meat, either.

And from here I could see many miles inland, to where the peninsula narrowed and dead heather gave place to rock, chewed unceasingly by the sharp white teeth of the breakers. It was a place where a natural fault of the Central Highlands had crumbled under the battering of the Atlantic Ocean, so that now a moat of rough water divided Blackstone from the mainland. There, two vast bodies of water raced headlong into collision, and turned the rock-lined gap into a pit of foam.

Neither did the far bank offer a welcoming prospect. From the water, the strata tilted up to where a copse of beeches bent almost double under the prevailing winds. The slope was scotched with the black courses of mountain streams, and a drystone wall had scattered its rubble entrails down the steep incline to the seashore, where a dead sheep, rusty tins and some bright plastic jetsam had been beached by the high tide.

For those indifferent: to a north wind that numbs the ears, and damp mists that roll in from the sea like a tidal wave, the Western Isles are a magic kingdom where anything is possible. After outdoor exercise and an evening beside the open fire — a glass of malt whisky in my hand — I was beginning to believe that even the curious fantasies of my fellow guests had a logic in proportion to their enthusiasm.

That night, sitting round the scrubbed refectory table, waiting While Toliver carved the boiled pork into paper-thin slices and arrayed them upon a serving platter, there was an extra guest. He was a tall, dour-faced man of about forty-five with close-cropped blond hair, going white. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles and had a harsh accent that completed the caricature of a German general, circa 1941. He offered only a few bits of phrase-book English. He'd been introduced over pre-dinner pink gins as Mr Erikson, but his home was farther east than that, if I was any judge. His suit was dark blue gaberdine, of a cut that tended to confirm my reasoning.

Erikson's presence was not explained, and the officer's mess atmosphere clearly forbade direct questioning, unless Toliver initiated it. There was only small-talk round the dinner table, and apart from thanking Toliver for the promise of some sea fishing the next day, the stranger was silent.

'Did you have a good walk?' said Wheeler.

'To the lower ledges.'

'You can see a long way from there,' said Toliver.

'When you're not blowing on your hands,' I said.

'We lose sheep up there sometimes,' said Wheeler, and gave me a nasty smile.

Erikson took the port decanter from Mason. He removed the stopper and sniffed at it. The men round the table watched him expectantly. Erikson pulled a disapproving face and instead of pouring a measure for himself he poured some for me. I nodded my thanks. I too sniffed at it before sipping some. But it wasn't the aroma of the port-wine that I smelled but the pervasive and entirely unique smell that some say comes from the nuclear reactor, and others say is that of the CO₂ scrubber that cleans the air in an atomic submarine before recirculatinj; it. This is a smell that goes home with you, stays on your skin for days, and remains for ever in your clothes, triggering memories of those big floating gin palaces.

But this wasn't the suit I'd worn on any of my trips on the nuclear subs. I looked at Erikson. The small boat I'd seen from the crag had been coming from the west — the Atlantic Ocean — not from the Scottish mainland, and it had brought this taciturn East European, smelling of atomic submarine.

Toliver was telling a story about a TV producer friend doing a documentary on rural poverty. The ending came… '… never go hungry, sir, bless your heart, we can always find a few quails' eggs.'

'Ha, ha, ha,' Mason laughed louder than any of the others, and looked at me, as if trying to will me to join in.

Wheeler said, 'Just like my chaps saying they didn't like the jam-it tasted offish. I told you that story didn't I?'

'Yes, you did,' said Toliver.

'Caviare, of course,' said Wheeler determined at least to get the punch line in.

'Jolly good,' said Mason. 'Caviare! Jam that tasted of fish. That's a good one, Commander."

'The meat came today, but no petrol,' said Toliver.

'Whose turn to get the new gas bottle?' said someone, and they all laughed. It was as if they were all working to a script that I didn't have.

I sipped at my port and took a long look at Mr Erikson. There was something unusual in his manner and at first I did not recognize what it was, for he smiled at the jokes, accepted a cigar with a polite bow of the head, and met the eyes of the other guests with the confident gaze of any man at a dinner table with friends. I reached for the matches and struck one to provide him with a light for his cigar. He murmured his thanks and, pretending to have difficulty getting his cigar going, he turned in his chair. I was sure that he'd chosen a seat next to me because he feared I would recognize his face across the table. Now I became quite certain that he'd been landed from a submarine, a Russian submarine.

'Until the fuel boat comes we'll have to ration the generator,' said Toliver. He got to his feet and fetched one of the paraffin lamps. 'Plenty of oil for the lamps, though.' He lit the lamp and adjusted the wick carefully.

'Cold-water shaving in the morning, chaps,' said Wheeler. 'Unless there's a volunteer to boil up a few kettles before reveille.'

'I'll be glad to do that, sir.' Of course it was Mason, apple-polishing himself into a state of nervous exhaustion. 'I'll set the alarm for five. That should do it, I think.'

'Good show, Mason,' said Commander Wheeler. 'That's damned sporting of you.'

They weren't satisfied just to create a self-congratulatory, and exclusively masculine, society, they were attempting to re-create one that existed only in their wishful thoughts. The I've-been-here-before feeling that all this was giving me had come undiluted from old British war films, especially those about Colditz.

'Good show, Mason,' I said, but they all glared at me. I suppose they didn't like the way I told them.

The quietness of the house, the mysterious way in which food and drink seemed to arrive without human agency, added to the mysteries of what these men called 'The Club'. In spite of the grandeur of the house itself, and of the quality of the badly worn Persian carpets and panelled doors, there was little evidence of its less spartan days. The leather sofas, the stair-carpet and the rugs had all been repaired with the same coarse grey sailcloth, and with the sort of stitches that sailors call 'dogs' teeth.' The flagstones, worn by the feet of countless ages into curious ring-like depressions, had here and there been carelessly filled with concrete. The bedrooms were cold and damp, in spite of the cheap electric fire that glowed bright only when the generator started. The blankets were thin and grey, the sheets were clean, but threadbare and rough-dried.

There was in the house no trace of femininity: no flowers, cushions, domestic animals, perfumed soaps, and virtually no pictures or ornaments.

I was not a prisoner in the house. That had been explained to me several times. I merely had to wait until the plane returned. I had the idea that any suggestion about taking the one and only bicycle or walking due east would be met with pleasant smiling affirmative-ridden explanations that meant no. So I didn't make any suggestions like that. I tried to act like a happy healthy well-adjusted human, who likes playing secret agents in an unheated Scottish castle, but who occasionally needs a nice long walk. They understood that all right: they were nice long walk sort of people.