Yesterday's Spy

Chapter 29

I watched the tub-train as it trundled away from my hiding place. There was enough light now to see that this track was entirely new. The air-doors at the end of them were also new. The train, with its strange subterranean aviators, thudded through the air-doors with a flash of lights and a shrill call of its whistle.

I waited a long time before extricating myself from my hiding place. When I was sure there was no one following them, I made my way along the track to the air-doors. I opened them and stepped through quickly.

The air-door shut behind me with a muffled bump, and cold night air hit me in the face like a custard pie. I was standing on a ledge, some twenty feet up one side of a vast underground cavern. It was about fifty yards across, and just as deep, but it must have been well over one hundred yards in length. Suddenly I realized that the roof was the sky, and I recognized it as the Tix quarry where I’d hidden for two nights and days of the war. But far more astonishing than the man-made hollow was the huge black metallic egg that completely filled it.

It was smooth and symmetrical, elegant and futuristic like those storage tanks that the oil companies depict on the covers of their annual reports, when shares have tumbled. On an airfield, perhaps I would have recognized it more quickly, but only when I saw its whole shape against the starry sky did I realize that the quarry was being used to house an airship.

An airship. Melodie Page had died after sending us the postcard photos of the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg, and it had been too obvious to see. Not that this was a giant rigid, like those airships of the ’thirties. This was no more than a blimp, of the sort I’d seen drifting over the cities of Europe and America advertising drink and cigarettes. This, then, was the consignment of engine parts, heavy-duty fabrics and plastics, and hydrogen or the plant to manufacture it — hence all those ‘No Smoking’ notices in Arabic.

Lacking a proper mooring mast, its nose was tethered to the shovel of a rusty excavator, and dozens of ropes held the restless shape down, close upon the floor of the quarry. The Dacron envelope had been roughly covered with matt black paint, and the gondola had been modified for freight-carrying. The engine nacelles were fixed to each side of the gondola. One engine had a servicing platform still in position. Three mechanics were bending over it, clanking spanners. They stood upright and exchanged looks of satisfaction.

As I was looking down upon them, one of the mechanics signalled to someone at the pilot’s controls, in the gondola. The engine started with a bang. It roared and came up to full revolutions, before being throttled back to a steady tick. They let it run for a couple of minutes, and then cut it. The quarry was silent, except for the generator that powered the lights and tools, and, from behind me, the faint hum of the fans in the mine.

I still had the P .38 in my hand, and my first impulse was to fire into the gas envelope, but there was little chance that such pin-pricks would do it any great damage: Also it would be dangerous. I was still thinking about it when a voice said, ‘Put it down, Charlie!’

I looked round, but I could see no one, apart from the mechanics who were displaying the same sort of interest in the voice as I was. It was Champion’s voice and it had come from a loudspeaker — or several loudspeakers. His voice echoed as the sound of it travelled back from the farthest loudspeaker and bounced off the gas-filled envelope and the quarry walls.

‘Put it down, please!’ A bird fluttered fearfully and flew across the airship. I still did not move.

‘I have a marksman here. The gallery behind you is sealed, and there is no way out of the quarry, except up the cliff side.’

I looked at the sheer sides of the quarry from which his voice still reverberated, and I put my pistol back into my belt.

Champion took his time, crossing the bottom of the quarry and climbing the crude steps to the ledge where I’d emerged from the mine gallery. I suppose I would have been equally cautious, or perhaps I would have shot first and parleyed afterwards. But Champion climbed up the steps, smiling his tired old smile and smacking the quarry dust off the knees of the grey, multi-zippered flying-suit he was wearing.

‘You cost me fifty francs,’ he said. ‘I bet you’d get Schlegel to come in.’

‘You knew we were out there?’

‘No, no, no. First thing we knew was that the cage was left at the bottom. We guessed then. Someone had got in. You and Schlegel, was it?’

‘And a couple of battalions of CRS.’

‘You wish!’ said Champion. ‘Well, we probably have Schlegel too, by now. You got through the road block but I brought them close in afterwards. They’ll phone down to me.’

‘I’m way ahead of you, Champ,’ I said.

‘Don’t tell me you thought of the airship.’

‘No, that was a surprise. But I knew that whatever it was it would be here.’

He walked to a door built into the cliff at one end of the ledge. It was his control room. Inside, there were a couple of chairs, and the control console for launching the airship. There was a battery of telephones, an intercom, and six small TV screens that provided a view of the airship from each direction. Champion indicated a chair and sat down at the console. The little control room was glass-faced, and before sitting, he lifted an arm to the mechanics below us, to tell them that all was well.

‘Why here?’ he said.

I said, ‘Remember that day we were caught by that German spot-check at St Tropez, and the German guard shot at the kid who stole the chickens?’

‘I remember.’

‘You told them we’d found the Renault on the road. And then, after we’d watched them taking the car away, you phoned the police station, and said there was a Renault with RAF escapers inside, going to a safe house in Nîmes.’

Champion smiled.

‘I was pretty impressed, Steve,’ I said. ‘The cops followed those German soldiers in the Renault. They followed them all the way to Nîmes … stake-outs, checks … mobiles … all kinds of stuff …’

‘And meanwhile we put Serge Frankel, and his junk, into the submarine at Villefranche,’ said Champion. He frowned.

I said, ‘Afterwards you said, “Make the deceit do the work”. I remembered that last week.’

He nodded.

I said, ‘You deliberately let us suspect the manifest. You let us think you’d go to all kinds of trouble to get some mystery cargo into position in Germany. While all the time the trucks were loading at Marseille docks — loading this airship, envelope folded and engines crated — and then you drove here and unloaded.’

‘It worked,’ said Champion.

‘Like a conjurer — you told me that: make enough sly play with your left hand, and they won’t even look at your right one. You made them look at your empty trucks and see loaded trucks, because that’s what they wanted to see.’

‘It worked,’ repeated Champion.

‘Almost,’ I said.

‘You didn’t discover it,’ said Champion, ‘you sensed it. No plan is proof against a hunch.’ He grinned. ‘You told me there was no place for hunches any more. So perhaps we are both yesterday’s spies.’

‘It had crossed my mind,’ I admitted.

‘And …?’

‘You’re going to have to kill me, Steve. And that’s another hunch.’

He looked at me and wiped his moustache. ‘We’ll see, Charlie.’

‘You don’t teach an old dog new tricks, Steve. You know it, I know it. Let’s not kid around, at least you owe me that. There are thoughts I might need to have, and things I might have to do.’

‘Like …?’

I shrugged. ‘Like getting out of here!’

He looked at me and smiled wearily, like the governor of Devil’s Island indenting for more shark food. ‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ he said. ‘We’ll work out something. How’s the boy?’

‘Billy’s fine. We’re going to build a plastic model of the Cutty Sark before he goes back to school.’

‘You sent him back to Caty.’

‘That’s it,’ I said.

‘It will make no difference in the long run,’ said Champion. ‘The important fact is that he’ll grow up with a bit of money in his pocket.’

‘The money you’ll get for this caper?’

Champion nodded. ‘If my old dad had left me a bit of money, it might have worked out differently.’ He reached inside his flying-suit and found the big gold pocket-watch I remembered from the old days. He held it up to show me that it was all his father had left him. Or perhaps it was just Champion’s way of checking what the time was.

‘Inconsiderate of your old man,’ I said. ‘Not to sell out.’

‘Thirty-five years teaching in Egypt,’ said Champion. ‘Scrimping and saving to send me to school, and the only time he ever hit me was when I didn’t stand up for “God Save the King”.’

‘What an incurable romantic he must have been, Steve. Old fools like that can never match the wits of realists like you.’

Champion stared at me. ‘That’s not cricket, old pal.’

‘I thought we were all-in wrestling,’ I said.

‘You have to learn cricket and all-in wrestling, if you are the only boy at Sandhurst who plays cricket in second-hand togs.’

‘And that kind of resentment spurred you on to get all the prizes.’

‘Perhaps,’ admitted Champion. ‘But don’t ask me to say thank you.’ He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, as if wiping away a bad taste. ‘By God, Charlie, you’re a working-class boy. You know what I mean.’

‘I know what you mean,’ I said, ‘but I am not planning to deliver an atomic bomb to back up the demands of the Trades Union Congress, or the Monday Club.’

If he detected a note of irony in my remark, he gave no sign of it. ‘Shells, atomic shells!’ He obviously hoped that this distinction would bring about a change of my attitude. ‘I wouldn’t get involved in nuclear bombs — not accurate enough. But atomic shells are tactical, Charlie. They can be put into a vehicle park, or a dump — no fallout, and very tight destruction pattern.’

‘You’ve been reading too many of those Staff College appreciations, Champ,’ I said. ‘Save the rationalization for your memoirs: what are they paying you?’

‘They’ll cross my hand with silver,’ he admitted.

‘Thirty pieces?’

‘Thirty billion pieces, if I ask for it. And every currency in the world, Charlie. When we needed money to fight starvation, disease and poverty, Europe couldn’t be bothered. But when they had to start walking to the railway station … then they put their hands in their pockets!’ All the time the airship moved restlessly, rearing up suddenly to the limit of its mooring ropes, and then being hauled down again by the ground crew at each end of the quarry.

‘You know how it works, Champ,’ I reminded him. ‘I didn’t come out here without leaving a forwarding address. They will soon find your hole in the ground.’

Champion turned away to look at the TV monitoring screens. There were half a dozen of them, relaying pictures from cameras set high on the cliff side, and facing down to the airship. Using these, the pilot would be able to see how much clearance he had, on every side, as the moorings were cast off and it floated upwards.

‘Helicopters, you mean?’ Champion said, without looking up from the console.

‘I don’t know what they will send.’

‘With half a dozen cookies on board with me, I don’t care what they send. They are not going to shoot me down over mainland France. Not with a cargo of nuclear explosive aboard, they’re not.’

‘And over the sea?’

‘A civil aircraft, registered in Cairo? We do sixty, perhaps eighty, miles an hour in this bladder. By the time they get permission to shoot, I’ll be over Tunis!’ His mind went back to Billy, or perhaps he had never stopped thinking about his son. ‘How could Billy adapt to Cairo? Answer me truly, Charlie. How could he?’

‘You mean you’re frightened that he might adapt too well. You’re scared in case he becomes the chief assassin for the Palestine Liberation Organization.’

‘Perhaps I am.’

‘But you’d give them the means by which to bomb themselves to power.’

‘Not the PLO …’ he waved his hand wearily, as if deciding whether to enlighten me about the distinction between the government in Cairo, and the terrorists who throw bombs into airport waiting-rooms and set fire to jumbo-jets. He decided against it. ‘Billy stays in Europe where he was born — he’s vulnerable to smallpox, malaria, cholera and a million other things.’

‘You’d be separated from him?’ I couldn’t believe it. ‘The judgement of Solomon, Champ.’

‘You didn’t say “You can’t get away with it,”’ he complained. Then we both looked up at the great black shape of the airship.

‘But you can!’ I said. ‘That’s what I don’t like about it.’

‘You can’t see it, and even with the engines running the only sound is a faint hum, like a distant car. People just don’t look up.’

‘Radar?’

‘We’re keeping well clear of the air traffic lanes. The military radar is mostly facing seawards: the stations at Arles and Digne can read inland, but we keep behind high ground.’

‘Flying low.’

‘Yes. One hundred metres or less. There’s no risk: even if some radar operator did see us … a huge blob, moving at no more than sixty miles an hour? … he’s just going to log it as what radar men call “an anomalous propagation” and everyone else calls a machine failure.’

‘You’re flying it?’

He shook his head. ‘We don’t take risks,’ he said. ‘An airline captain, qualified on 707s. He went to America and did the course, said he was going to fly it for advertising.’

‘How soon?’

He looked at his watch. ‘We’ll start cutting into the explosives store at Valmy sometime within the next hour.’

‘From the mine?’

‘We’ve dug thirty kilometres of gallery,’ said Champion. ‘We are now underneath the nuclear explosives store. Some of the most experienced mine engineers, from all the Arab states.’

‘Brought in as waiters?’

‘… and labourers, foundry workers and garbage men. All they need is an Algerian ONAMO card, and the French immigration can’t stop them.’

‘Suppose you hit an alarm system?’

‘From under the earth?’ said Champion. He laughed. He knew it was a perfect plan, and he was enjoying this chance to tell me about it.

From some tiny ledge, high up on the side of the quarry, birds began to sing: not one but a whole chorus of them.

The stars were bright, and cold air coming over the lip of the quarry was striking against the warmer airship and causing it to rear against the mooring ropes: superheat, they call it. This was the time of maximum lift.

Champion smiled.

Only the inevitable is tragic. Perhaps Steve Champion’s tragedy was born out of his obsession about providing money for his son. Perhaps it was a need to provide for his son a future at least as affluent as the boy’s mother could have supplied. Or perhaps it was simply that Steve Champion was the same romantic, desperate man that he said his father had been.

‘The money’s safe,’ said Champion. ‘Billy will never want.’

‘Wouldn’t you have chosen your father, rather than any fortune, Steve?’

‘No!’

‘Too emphatic!’ I chided him. ‘Top marks for self-deception.’

‘Well, it’s a pretty poor liar who can’t even deceive himself,’ said Champion, and, like an elderly soprano defying the critics, he gave me one of his famous coloratura smiles, and held it long enough to deserve a round of applause.

It was the smile that was his undoing. Until then, I had been listening to Steve Champion, and making excuses for him. I was trying to understand his concern about Billy, and struggling to believe that he’d spend the rest of his life separated from his son. But now somewhere far behind his eyes I saw, not bonhomie, but bravura.

I looked down to where the ground crew was standing by on the moorings. As each completed his task, he looked towards the platform where we were standing — they were looking to Champion.

Champion’s story about cutting into the bomb store within the next hour was nonsense. They must have done it already. The shells must be aboard, and the airship ready to go. Champion’s last laugh was in keeping me talking until a moment before take-off.

No one intended to stay for another hour, or even another few minutes, if the bustle around the gondola was any indication. The mooring ropes were hitched into quick-release hooks, and the covers were now being clamped over the engine casings.

The canvas screens that extended around the rim of the quarry, to protect the airship against rock-falls, were now fully retracted. Champion leaned forward and tapped the wind gauge, but the needle didn’t move.

Champion got up and walked outside, to the open balcony. I followed him. He leaned forward to see the tall vegetation that grew along the edge of the quarry. There was no movement in it. ‘The wind is always a worry,’ said Champion.

‘There’s no wind,’ I said. I was watching him carefully now.

‘No.’ He sniffed the air. ‘You can “free-balloon” up on a night like this … start the engines when you’re in the air.’

‘Is that so?’ I said. He was thinking aloud. They would need to ‘free-balloon’ up if they were to go, without someone controlling the ascent, from this console.

‘You’ll look after the boy?’

I didn’t answer him.

‘Good,’ he said, and patted my arm.

Perhaps if I’d been listening to him more closely, or remembering old times, I would never have hit him in the sudden and impulsive way that I did. He reeled against the rail. I followed the straight right with an uppercut from my left. It wasn’t anything to write to Physical Fitness Magazine about, but Champion was already off balance. It sent him down the staircase: backwards. Even while my left was connecting, I was bringing the P .38 out of my belt. Champion landed at the bottom of the steps in a heap. He groaned, and dragged his arm from under him, but it carried no gun. Champion was too damned Sandhurst to brandish pocket guns, and his sort of tailor can’t set a sleeve to hide a shoulder holster. And anyway, Steve Champion had no trigger finger. He fixed me with a look of hatred and despair, but pain closed his eyes.

I offered a silent thanks to Schlegel for the P .38. The well-oiled safety slid to fire. There was no time to thumb the hammer back; I pulled hard on the trigger and felt the double-action. I fired, and put the whole magazine of bullets into the gas bag. The Walther twisted in my hand, as all big pistols do, but I wasn’t trying to win a prize at Bisley; I wanted only to puncture the envelope and let the hydrogen gas escape near the engine. I pushed the magazine catch, and shook the gun hard enough to bring the empty magazine out. It clattered to the floor. I banged the full magazine into place and brought it up two-handed style. These were the ones that had to hit. There was only the faintest glimpse of light on the foresight, but as it came up the engine nacelle, I squeezed the trigger. I’d known old P .38s, with worn trigger bars, to rip off a magazine like a burp-gun, but this one was a gentleman’s pistol. It was too dark to see what my grouping was like, but inside the engine cowling, ricocheting bullets were playing close-harmony tin, like a drunken steel-band at Mardi Gras.

As the hammer nose clicked on the firing-pin, I threw the gun aside, and ran for the mine entrance. I already fancied I heard the gurgle of petrol running from the punctured fuel tank. I pictured the hot engine that it would fall upon; the thought propelled me head-first through the doors. They thudded shut behind me and the sound of the fans was in my ears, until the beat of my pulsing veins drowned it out. I stumbled in the darkness but fear beats any after-burner as a means of propulsion, and I was at the far end of the main gallery when the airship’s hydrogen ignited. I knew that, in theory, an atomic shell could not be exploded by fire, but did that extend to the temperatures at which hydrogen burned?

The bang ripped the doors from their hinges, and the end of the mine gallery became a red glowing rectangle. A giant breaker of hot air picked me up and slammed me to the floor, and then did it again. I twisted my head to see what was chasing me. The patch of light was boiling whiteness. It was like staring into the sun through a square telescope. I screwed up my eyes as the main blast of heat hit me. This time the smell hit me too; not only the carbonized rubber, and the stink of hydrogen and scorched dust, but the awesome smell of burned hair and flesh. I clamped my hands over my face and found that some of the burned hair and flesh was my own. I rolled over, shouting some incoherent mixture of prayers, oaths and promises.

With the roar of the great furnace I’d created still in my ears, I crawled towards the shaft landing. Each movement was painful and the dust had been sucked up into a blinding black storm. After the first few tottering steps I knew I could go no farther.

But it wasn’t going to end like this, I told myself. A man doesn’t spend a lifetime working for that damned department, and die in a mine, without pension or gratuity. But a few minutes’ rest … that was different: a man must be allowed a moment’s rest.