Spy Story (23 page)

The ledge widened. It was enough for me to quicken my progress to something like walking pace, if I pressed a shoulder to the rock. Still I could not discern the nature of the blobs that covered the cliff face like pox upon an ashen face. Even when I was only ten yards away I still could not see what was waiting in my path. It was then that an extra large breaker, a gust of air, or just my approach seemed to cause the cliff itself to explode into whirling fragments. The grey blobs were all over me: a vast colony of sea-birds, sheltering from the storm. They raised up their enormous wings, and climbed into the blizzard to meet me. Blurred grey shapes circled the intruder who had invaded these ledges to which they returned each year to nest. They dived upon me, screaming, croaking and clawing and beating their giant wings, in the hope that I might fall, or fly away.

By now I was climbing through the colony itself, my hands lacerated and bloody as I groped through the ancient nests of mud, spittle and bleached vegetation. My feet were crunching them and sliding in the dust and filth of a thousand years of stinking bird droppings.

I closed my eyes. I was afraid to turn my head as I felt the wings striking my shoulders and felt the fabric tear under their beaks and claws. I still didn't slacken my speed, even when I found enough courage to look back to where the sea-birds wheeled and jeered and fidgeted in the crevices. The wind had continued the work of destruction and now the brittle nests were shattered by the air current that roared up the cliff face, like a great flame licks a chimney, taking the colony with it and grinding all to dust.

Ahead of me I saw a bent piece of rusty tin and persuaded myself with all kinds of twisted rationalizations that the path would be easy going from this point onwards. There was still another headland to negotiate, but it was easy only compared with the journey I had already made. After that, the path sloped gently upwards until it regained the cliff edge. I sat down, hardly noticing the thorns and mud. For the first time I became aware of the fast shallow breathing that my anxiety had produced and of the thumping of my heart, as loud as the breakers on the shingle a hundred feet below me.

From here I was able to look north-west across the width of the peninsula, and I didn't like what I could see. The blizzard, which was still driving hard against the cliffs at sea level, had thinned enough for visibility to increase to a mile or more in between the flurries. If they were after me, a dozen of them could put me up like a frightened partridge. I stood up and started off again. I forced myself to increase the pace, although my tortuous cliffside journey had left me in no state to attempt records.

From this place on the clifftop, my path was mostly downhill. This world was white and a thousand differing shades of brown: bracken, heather, bilberries and, lowest of all, the peat bogs. All of it dead, and all of it daubed with great drifts of snow that had filled the gullies and followed the curious pattern of the wind. There were red grouse, too. Disturbed, they took to the air, calling ‘Go-back, go-back,' a sound that I remembered from my childhood.

Already I fancied I could see the dark patch that would be the pines at the little croft. I promised myself cubes of chocolate that I never did eat. I walked as soliders march, placing one foot before the other, with hardly a thought for the length of the journey, or the surrounding landscape. ‘All my soldiers saw of Russia was the pack of the man in front of them,' said Napoleon, as though the ignorant rabble were declining his offers of side trips to St Petersburg and the Black Sea resorts. Now I bent my head to the turf.

A shaft of sunlight found a way through the cloud so that a couple of acres of hillside shone yellow. The patch ran madly up and down the slopes and raced out to sea like a huge blue raft until, a mile or more off-shore, it disappeared as if sunk without trace. The clouds closed tight and the wind roared its triumph.

Once I knew where to look, there was no difficulty in finding the footbridge. It was a good example of Victorian ingenuity and wrought iron. Two chains across the Gap were held apart by ornamented sections of iron, into which fitted timber flooring. Shaped like stylized dolphins, smaller interlocking pieces had tails supporting two steel cables anchored into the ground at each end as supplementary supports. That, at any rate, must have been how the engraving looked in the catalogue. Now a handrail was hanging in the gully and one chain had slackened enough to let the frame twist. It groaned and swayed in the wind that came through its broken flooring, singing like the music of a giant flute.

Adapted into a fairground ride it might have earned a fortune at Coney Island, but suspended above the demented waters of Angel Gap only the cliff path behind me was less welcoming.

There was no going back now. I thought of that trigger-happy girl – custom tailoring for cadavers, and
cuisine française
while you wait – and I shuddered. If she'd not been so keen to kill me that she'd fired from inside the greenhouse, I'd have been a statistic in one of those warning pamphlets that the Scottish travel and holidays department give people going grouse shooting.

Any kind of bridge was better than going back.

The off-sea wind had kept the cliffs virtually free of ice, but the bridge was precarious. There was only one handrail, a rusty cable. It sagged alarmingly as I applied my weight to it and slid through the eyes of the remaining posts so that I fancied it was going to drop me into the ocean below. But it took my weight, although as I passed each handrail post it paid the slack cable to me with an agonizing whinny. Without a handrail I could not have crossed, for at some places the floor of the bridge had warped to a dangerous angle. I had to use both hands and by the time I reached the other side my wounded arm was bleeding again.

I hurried up the hill so that I could get out of sight. Only when I was hidden in the copse did I stop. I looked back, at the ocean roaring through the gap, and at as much of the peninsula of Blackstone as was visible through the storm. I saw no pursuers, and I was truly thankful for that, for I could see no simple way of wrecking the bridge.

I took off the short overcoat and with some difficulty pulled my jacket off too. I'd lost a lot of blood.

It took me over an hour to do the four miles to the road. The clouds broke enough to allow a few samples of sunlight to be passed around among the trees. There were sunbeams on the road when I finally caught sight of it. Perhaps by that time I was beginning to expect a four-lane highway with refreshment areas, gift shops and clover-leaf crossings, but it was what they call in Scotland a ‘narrow class one', which means they'd filled the ditch every two hundred yards in case you met something coming the other way.

I saw the two soldiers sitting at the roadside when I was still a couple of hundred yards away. They were sheltering under a camouflage cape upon which the snow was settling fast. I thought they were waiting for a lift, until I saw that they were dressed in Fighting Order. They both had L1 A1 automatic rifles and one of them had a two-way radio too.

They played it cool, remaining seated until I was almost upon them. I knew they'd put me on the air, because only after I'd passed him did I notice another soldier covering me from fifty yards along the road. He had a Lee Enfield with a sniper-sight. It was no ordinary exercise.

‘Could you wait here a moment, sir?' He was a paratroop corporal.

‘What's going on?'

‘There will be someone along in a minute.'

We waited. Over the brow of the next hill there came a large car, towing a caravan of the sort advertised as ‘a carefree holiday home on wheels'. It was a bulbous contraption, painted cream, with a green plastic door and tinted windows. I knew who it was as soon as I saw huge polished brass headlights. But I didn't expect that it would be Schlegel sitting alongside him. Dawlish applied the brakes and came to a standstill alongside me and the soliders. I heard him say to Schlegel ‘… and let me surprise you: these brakes are really hydraulic, actually powered by water. Although I must confess to putting methylated spirit in for this trip, on account of the cold.'

Schlegel nodded but gave no sign of the promised surprise. I suspected that he'd acquired a thorough understanding of Dawlish's brakes on the way up here. ‘I thought it would be you, Pat.'

It was typically Dawlish. He would have died had anyone accused him of showmanship, but given a chance like this he came on like Montgomery. ‘Are you chaps brewing up, by any chance?' he asked the soliders.

‘They send a van, sir. Eleven thirty, they said.'

Dawlish said, ‘I think we'll make some tea now: hot sweet tea is just the ticket for a chap in a state of shock.'

I knew he was trying to provoke the very reaction I made, but I made it just the same. ‘I've lost a lot of blood,' I said.

‘Not
lost
it exactly,' said Dawlish, as if noticing my arm for the first time. ‘It's soaking into your coat.'

‘How silly of me,' I said.

‘Corporal,' said Dawlish. ‘Would you see if you can get your medical orderly up here. Tell him to bring some sticking plaster and all that kind of thing.' He turned to me. ‘We'll go into the caravan. It's awfully useful for this kind of business.'

He got out of the car, and ushered me and Schlegel into the cramped sitting-room of the caravan. All it needed was Snow White: it was filled with little plastic candelabra, chintz cushion-covers and an early Queen Anne cocktail cabinet. I knew that Dawlish had hired the most hideously furnished one available, and was energetically pretending that he'd hand-picked every item. He was a sadist, but Schlegel had it coming to him.

‘Useful for what kind of business?' I said.

Schlegel smiled a greeting but didn't speak. He sat down on the sofa at the rear, and began smoking one of his favourite little cheroots. Dawlish went to his gas ring and lit it. He held up a tiny camper's kettle and demonstrated the hinged handle. ‘A folding kettle! Who would have believed they had such gadgets?'

‘That's very common,' said Schlegel.

Dawlish waggled a finger. ‘In America, yes,' he said. He started the kettle and then he turned to me. ‘This business. Useful for this business. We watched you on our little Doppler radar set. Couldn't be sure it was you, of course, but I guessed.'

‘There's a submarine out there in the Sound,' I said. I sniffed at Schlegel's cigar smoke enviously but I was now counting my abstinence in months.

Dawlish tutted. ‘It's naughty, isn't it? We've just come down from watching him on the ASW screen at HMS
Viking.
He's moved south now. Picked up someone, did he?'

I didn't answer.

Dawlish continued, ‘We are going in there, but very gently. The story is that we've lost a ballistic missile with a dummy head. Sounds all right to you, does it?'

‘Yes,' I said.

Dawlish said to Schlegel, ‘Well if he can't fault it, it must be all right. I thought that was rather good myself.'

‘There's only a broken-down footbridge,' I warned. ‘You'll lose some soldiers.'

‘Not at all,' said Dawlish.

‘How?' I said.

‘Centurion bridge layer will span the gap in one hundred seconds, the RE officer told me. The Land Rovers will follow.'

‘And the tea van,' said Schlegel, not without sarcasm.

‘Yes, and the
NAFFI
,' said Dawlish.

‘Takes the glitter off your story about looking for a lost missile warhead,' I said.

‘I don't like Russians landing from submarines,' said Dawlish. ‘I'm not that concerned to keep our voices down.' I knew that anything concerning submarines made Dawlish light up and say tilt. The best part of Russian effort, and most of their espionage successes over a decade, had been concerned with underwater weaponry.

‘You're damned right,' said Schlegel. I realized – as I was supposed to realize – that Schlegel was from some transatlantic security branch.

‘Who are these people that Toliver has over there?' I asked. ‘Is that some kind of official set-up?'

Schlegel and Dawlish both made noises of distress and I knew I'd touched a nerve.

Dawlish said, ‘A Member of Parliament can buttonhole the Home Secretary or the Foreign Secretary, slap them on the back and have a drink with them while I'm still waiting for an appointment that is a week overdue. Toliver has beguiled the old man with this Remoziva business, and no one will listen to my words of warning.'

The kettle boiled and he made the tea. Dawlish must have slipped since I worked under him, for in those days he ate MPs for breakfast, and as for MPs with cloak and dagger ambitions – they didn't last beyond the monthly conference.

‘They said the man who came ashore was Remoziva's ADC,' I said.

‘But?'

‘Could have been a very good friend of Liberace, for all I can tell: I don't know any of Remoziva's associates.'

‘But Russian?' asked Schlegel. The sun came through the window. Backlit, his cigar smoke became a great silver cloud in which his smiling face floated like an alien planet.

‘Tall, thin, cropped-head, blond, steel spectacles. He traded a few bits of phrase-book Polish with a character who calls himself Wheeler. But if I was going to stake money, I'd put it on one of the Baltic states.'

‘Doesn't mean anything to me,' said Dawlish.

‘Not a thing,' said Schlegel.

‘Says he knows me, according to your Mason – Saracen – over there. I had to thump him by the way, I'm sorry but there was no other way.'

‘Poor old Mason,' said Dawlish, with no emotion whatsoever. He looked me directly in the eye and made no apology for the lies he'd told me about Mason being charged with selling secrets. He poured out five cups of tea, topping them with a second lot of hot water. He gave me and Schlegel one each, and then tapped the window, called the soliders over and gave a cup each to them. ‘Well let's assume he is Remoziva's ADC,' said Dawlish. ‘What now? Did they tell you?'