Colonel Butler's Wolf (22 page)

“Hmm … “ The Vice-Chancellor nodded to himself uneasily. Then he drew a deep breath and straightened his massive shoulders: King Hrothgar had been warned, and had taken note of the warning. “Well, I think we’d better join the natives in that case.”

“It looks as if King’s are giving us a run for our money for once,” said Polly, craning her neck over the group before one window.

“A run?” A slender, dandelion-haired young man made way for her. “They’ve got us licked this time, Polly—it’s that boyfriend of yours. And he’s about to give us the coup de grace—watch!” Butler followed the pointing finger through the open window. The light was failing fast and the morning’s cold wind had risen again—it ruffled Dan’s straw coloured hair wildly, but without diminishing his fierce concentration as he stooped over the ball.

“Beowulf!”

“I beg your pardon?” Butler bent his head towards Klobucki.

“There’s our Beowulf—Beowulf, son of Ecgtheow, son of Hrethel. He sure looks the part, anyway.”

Butler looked at the American suspiciously, and then back at McLachlan.

“Probably more Viking blood in Dan than Anglo-Saxon, when you come down to it,” Klobucki went on appraisingly. “But it’s the same stock, I guess.”

“Aye,” Butler growled uneasily. But who was
Grendel?
he caught himself thinking.

Anglo-Saxons and Vikings and Romans—it was all damn nonsense, and he was letting it throw him simply because it was strange to him. Trolls drumming their feet on the roof indeed! There were no trolls—but there were cold facts to be related into meaning.

There was a shout of triumph from the croquet lawn. McLachlan straightened up with a yell of triumph, brandishing his mallet like a battle-axe.

The trick was to get the facts in the right order. The trouble was that there were no facts before Adashev had met Smith-had met Zoshchenko, damn it—in the museum at Newcastle. And even that had been an undeserved bit of luck due to a tip-off from that defector in the KGB’s British section.

There was a ripple of clapping and applause around him.

Audley had failed. Months in the field, with Richardson and God only knew how many others, and he had failed to establish one worthwhile fact—
that
was the incredible thing.

Someone bowled a croquet ball towards Dan, who took a wild swing at it, missed, straightened up, caught Butler’s eye at last and waved at him, smiling.

The one sure thing was—The one sure thing!

“Richardson!” Butler shouted across the terrace.

Richardson sauntered over towards him casually.

“Steady on,” he murmured, looking carefully away from Butler. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be on shouting terms with me, you know.”

“Where’s Audley?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea, Colonel.”

“Get in touch with him. Tell him I have to see him.”

“I don’t know that I can—hullo there, Polly!” Richardson waved gaily. “I have my cover to think of.”

“I’m not asking you—I’m ordering you,” Butler grated. “You’ve got no cover.”

Richardson flicked a quick glance at Butler, then coolly looked at his wristwatch as though Butler had asked him the time. “Right,” he murmured. “And would there be anything you’d like him to know?”

Polly was coming towards them.

“Tell him—damn it, tell him we aren’t the cat. We’re the mouse.”

AFTER FIFTEEN HUNDRED
years of neglect the Roman defenses at Boghole Gap were still formidable: they were like belt and braces attached to self-supporting trousers.

In any age the long, reedy lake and the treacherous bog on either side of the causeway would have been a sufficient obstacle to a regular military assault. But after those hazards the cliffs of the crag line themselves rose sheer, making the approach not so much difficult as impossible, so long as there was a corporal’s guard of pensioners on the Wall, which the Romans had built along the crest regardless of all these advantages.

Butler shook his head in admiration. The tattooed Picts must have been spunky little devils if they’d ever attacked here; it would have been no joke with rocket-assisted lines, and smoke and a full range of support weapons.

Probably they never had—and probably that was why the Romans had run the causeway northwards here, straight through the Boghole milecastle. In peacetime it would have been a well-defined customs post, while in time of trouble it would have been an easily-defended sally-port for flying columns of Dacians and Lusitanians from the fortress less than a mile to the south of it.

Nevertheless the Roman military engineers (a corps apparently accustomed to obeying all orders to the letter) had taken no chances in the gap itself: for twenty-five yards on each side of the causeway’s junction with the milecastle, they had laboriously scooped out the standard fighting ditch. Now half-full of fetid, green-scummed water, it was still clearly discernible on either side of him now as he reached the Wall.

By contrast the milecastle itself had come down sadly in the world. The fine ashlar stonework—Christ, what stonemasons the men had been!—still stood almost shoulder-high, but the old gateways were plugged with a depressing jumble of hurdles, old iron railings and barbed-wire, festooned with trailing knots of wool.

Butler found a foothold and heaved himself up and over the stonework. He had plenty of time in hand before Polly Epton and the American came to this spot for the start of the hare shoot, so there was no call for undignified haste. From here to Ortolanacum was no more than a light infantryman’s five-minute march, on the good firm going of the old military road.

But he could no longer fool himself by pretending to study this historic ground through a soldier’s eye: the moment of decision was almost at hand and after a night’s sober reappraisal he was still uncertain of the better course—whether to settle the account now, cutting both profit and loss, or whether to raise the stakes by waiting and watching a little longer.

There was no text-book answer—there never was and there never would be—to this hoary intelligence dilemma. You acted or you waited according to your instinct and your experience, knowing that each time the only measure of your prudence would be the outcome. That was the name of the game, and when it started worrying you too much it was time to quit while you still could.

Ortolanacum lay clear ahead now, a confusion of mounds and stones and low, grey-weathered walls, like a half-disinterred skeleton in the level between the two rising shoulders of the crags.

But not really a confusion; nothing these Romans did was ever confused—even the fortress’s ridiculous defensive site was simply their assertion that it was built to house attackers, not to shelter defenders.

And built, too, to that logical, invariable plan which Handforth-Jones found so dull, but which in its day meant a man could ride from Arabia to Scotland and still find the same welcoming pattern of barracks waiting for him—and could give his report to someone waiting for him there in the same Headquarters building, where Audley was waiting for him now.

“Hullo, Butler,” Audley said equably. “A bit chilly this morning.” He nodded towards the 12-bore. “Going shooting?”

Butler looked down at him. “Aye, for my supper.”

“For—?” Audley raised a mocking eyebrow. “Not for one of Gracey’s famous dinners?”

“Aye.”

“My dear fellow! You must have made a considerable impression on him. He doesn’t cook for just anybody, you know. He—“

“You got my message?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“We’ve got it all wrong.”

“Yes, I know.”

Butler felt the back of his neck taughten under the raised collar of the donkey-jacket.

“Not quite all of it, actually. Just some of it,” said Audley.

“How long have you known?” Butler kept a tight rein on his temper, listening to the bitter end without interrupting.

“What I’ve just told you?” Audley shrugged. “Not very long. But I suspected they’d set this student business up just for our benefit, even before you made your report yesterday. And when they put Alek on view for me to identify—then I was certain. After that it wasn’t so very difficult.” He smiled. “Eden Hall and Oxford—it was all there once we knew what to look for, as I’ve just said. You saw it for yourself in the end, too.”

Butler stared at him, balanced between irritation and admiration.

“What made you suspicious—at the start?”

“My dear Jack,” Audley waved airily, “it was a great little nightmare of Sir Geoffrey Hobson’s, but that’s all it ever was. It wasn’t like the Russians—Theodore Friesler said so, and you said so, and I couldn’t find one bit of real evidence to back it—“ Audley’s voice hardened suddenly “—and I don’t make that sort of mistake.”

“Then what the hell was all that rigmarole on the Wall yesterday?”

“Rigmarole?” Audley shook his head. “Say rather that was just Adashev and I playing chess with each other. I needed to give him the chance of telling me what he wanted me to know.”

“Why?”

“Because this student thing is for real, too, Jack. It’s not a blind—even a new boy like Adashev didn’t reckon he could draw off my attention from the real thing with an imaginary operation. The real thing stood a chance only if the diversion was real too.”

Butler nodded grimly. “I take it you know what the real diversionary target is now.”

“If I was a betting man I’d bet on it. The coastal missile range.”

“But yesterday you said it didn’t fit, not well enough anyway.”

“Yesterday it didn’t fit—because I didn’t know what I was looking for. I didn’t know I was the one who was meant to get the answer. Today’s different.” Audley paused. “Look at it this way: they let me see Alek, and Alek’s a man who needs a specific target—and a target they could rely on me identifying. And then a target I’d know the lads at Castleshields would identify too. That’s enough for even an old square like me to come up with an answer.”

“Which is—?”

“The Beast of Cazombo, no less.”

“The beast of—where?” Butler frowned.

“Cazombo. It’s in Angola, out near the Zambian border. It isn’t a name that’s been in the news over here, but in certain circles it’s known right enough. The point is that last term at Cumbria we had an MPIA guerrilla leader talk to their Free Africa Society, of which I’m an honorary vice-president. He talked all about genocide and chemical warfare, and all the other things the guerrillas accuse the Portuguese of, and by the grace of god the name Negreiros stuck in my mind—“

“Negreiros!”

“You’ve heard of him?”

“There’s a Portuguese General called Negreiros.” Butler wrinkled his forehead. “He was an intelligence major in Brussels when I was there in ‘61.”

“That’s the man. A specialist in air cavalry, and the guerrillas don’t like him one little bit. He also happens to be a link man with the South Africa general staff.
And
he happens to be leading the present Portuguese military delegation here.”

“The one there was that London demonstration against just recently?”

“Now you’re on target, like Alek. Because the Negreiros delegation is due to visit the Missile Range this afternoon at 3.30—they’re driving up from Birmingham.”

Butler whistled softly. A target indeed—ripe for a demo and riper still for a bullet.

Audley nodded. “Yes, I don’t need to spell it out, do I. But we don’t need to worry about it any more either, thank God.”

“You’ve turned it over to the Special Branch?”

Audley laughed. “Not bloody likely! As it happens, Negreiros has got a private engagement elsewhere, according to the Department, but just in case he changes his mind I’ve got ‘em to take the whole delegation down to Filton instead to see the Concorde. There isn’t going to be a missile range visit at all.”

“And Alek?”

“Alek and Adashev can fold up their tents and steal away into the night. In a day or two Latimer’s going to drop a word into the embassy pipeline that we don’t want them hanging around, but the word from on high is that we’re to play this whole thing very cool. As far as the demo goes, or whatever the lads had got planned, if they want to demonstrate against the Beast of Cazombo outside the Missile Range gate now, they’re welcome. There won’t be any scandal—that’s the password all round—no scandal.”

“Everybody goes free, you mean?”

“Everybody goes
home.
Even you, Butler—after you’ve given your lecture on Belisarius, of course. We want to keep things neat.”

Everybody?

“Except me, of course,” Audley went on, unruffled by the strange expression on Butler’s face. “I’ve got the rest of my mock sabbatical year to serve at Cumbria. Not that it’ll be any great hardship. In fact, in some ways I’ve learnt quite a lot. Having to teach Gracey’s bright young men is rather like the prospect of being hanged: it concentrates the mind wonderfully. Take this place now—“

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said ‘Take this place’.” Audley paused. “Do you know where we are, Butler?”

Butler stared at him stupidly. “Where we are?”

“This is what they called the
Principia,
Butler—the headquarters building—“

“I’m aware of that, yes,” Butler said curtly.

The big man gave him an oddly confiding sidelong glance. “Yes, I rather thought you’d know it.” He smiled. “I knew I’d got you summed up correctly. You’re a romantic at heart, no matter what you pretend to be. I know you wouldn’t let me down, here of all places.”

“I don’t see what you think I am—“ Butler began stiffly, and then reared up against the implication of it. “I don’t see what that’s got to do with—“

“Oh, but it has! It has everything to do with it.” Audley gestured over the fortress and on towards the crags. “This place has the right atmosphere for us. What it is and what it was—

Snapped rooftrees, towers fallen, the work of the giants, the stone-smiths, mouldereth ..
“

He seemed undeterred by Butler’s wooden expression. “You didn’t walk the Wall yesterday and not think about it.”

It wasn’t a question. Or rather the man was so maddeningly sure of the answer that it had come out as a statement.