Spy Story (6 page)

I smiled. That was the essence of Schlegel, as I was to find out.

‘Bring good stuff this time?'

‘I'll let you know when we see the analysis.'

‘Can't you tell when you're out there monitoring it?'

‘One trip last year they found the Russians working a new Northern Fleet frequency. The monitor leader got permission to change the cruise route to get cross-bearings. They brought in forty-three fixed-position Russian radio stations. There was talk of some kind of citation.'

‘And … ?' said Schlegel.

‘Buoys. Meteorological stations, some of them unmanned.'

‘But it wasn't you.'

‘I've always been on the cautious side.'

‘It's not a word you'd want on your fitness report in the Marine Corps.'

‘But I'm not in the Marine Corps,' I said.

‘And neither am I any longer – is that what you were about to say?'

‘I wasn't going to say anything, Colonel.'

‘Drink up. If your new stuff is anything like the analysis I've been reading, I want to War Game the results and submit them for next summer's
NATO
exercises.'

‘It's been suggested before.'

‘It's a hardy annual, I know that. But I think I might do it.'

If he was expecting a round of applause he was disappointed.

He said, ‘You'll see some dough pumped into the Centre if they agree to that one.'

‘Well, that's just fine for the controller of finance.'

‘And for the Studies Director, you mean?'

‘If we ever use the stuff we're picking up on these trips as a basis for
NATO
fleet exercises, you'll see the Russians really light up and say tilt.'

‘How?' He bit into a cigar and offered them. I shook my head.

‘How? For starters the C-in-C will recognize the
NATO
movements as their alert scheme, and he'll guess that these sub trips must be collecting! He'll hammer the First Deputy who will get the War Soviet into a froth … bad news, Colonel.'

‘You mean this is all something we should be at pains to avoid.'

‘Then you are reading me correctly,' I said. ‘They'll know for certain that we have subs on the ocean floor outside Archangel, they'll surmise about the Amderma and Dikson patrols. And then maybe they'll guess what we are doing in the River Ob. Bad news, Colonel.'

‘Listen, sweetheart, you think they don't already know?' He lit the cigar. ‘You think those babies aren't sitting on Norfolk, Virginia, taping our signals traffic from under our water?'

‘Colonel, I think they
are
sitting outside Norfolk. For all I know they are up the Thames as far as Stratford, and sending liberty crews ashore to see Ann Hathaway's cottage. But so far, both sides have kept stumm about these operations. You base
NATO
exercises on a real Russian Fleet alert, and Russian Northern Fleet are going to get roasted. And the price they'll have to pay for returning life to normal will be nailing one of our pig-boats.'

‘And you like it cosy?'

‘We're getting the material, Colonel. We don't have to rub their noses in it.'

‘No point in getting into a hassle about something like this, son. The decision will be made far above this level of command.'

‘I suppose so.'

‘You think I've come into the Centre to build an empire? …' He waved a hand. ‘Oh, sure. Don't deny it, I can read you like a book. That's what riles Foxwell too. But you couldn't be more wrong. This wasn't an assignment I wanted, feller.' The athletic Marine Colonel sagged enough to show me the tired old puppeteer who was working the strings and the smiles. ‘But now I'm here I'm going to hack it, and you'd just better believe.'

‘Well, at least we both hate lords.'

He leaned forward and slapped my arm. ‘There you go, kid!' He smiled. It was the hard, strained sort of grimace that a man might assume when squinting into the glare of an icy landscape. Liking him might prove difficult, but at least he was no charmer.

He swivelled in his chair and clattered the ice cubes in the jug, using a plastic swizzle stick with a bunny design on the end. ‘How did you get into the Studies, anyway?' he asked me, while giving all his attention to pouring drinks.

‘I knew Foxwell,' I said. ‘I saw him in a pub at a time when I was looking for a job.'

‘Now straighten up, son,' said Schlegel. ‘No one looks for a job any more. You were taking a year off to do a thesis and considering a lot of rather good offers.'

‘Those offers would have to have been damn near the bread line to make Studies Centre the best of them.'

‘But you've got your Master's and all those other qualifications: maths and economics; potent mixture!'

‘Not potent enough at the time.'

‘But Foxwell fixed it?'

‘He knows a lot of people.'

‘That's what I hear.' He gave me another fixed stare. Foxwell and Schlegel! That was going to be an inevitable clash of wills. No prizes for who was going to buckle at the knees. And what with all this lord-hating stuff … Ferdy wasn't a lord, but he'd no doubt do for Schlegel's all-time hate parade until a real lord came by in a golden coach. ‘And Ferdy fixed it?'

‘He told Planning that I'd had enough computer experience to keep my hand from getting jammed in the input. And then he told me enough to make it sound good.'

‘A regular Mr Fixit.' There was no admiration in his voice.

‘I've earned my keep,' I said.

‘I didn't mean that,' said Schlegel. He gave me the big Grade A – approved by the Department of Health – smile. It wasn't reassuring.

From the next room there came the shouts of children above the noise of the TV. There was a patter of tiny feet as someone screamed through the house, slammed the kitchen door twice and then started throwing the dustbin lids at the compost heap. Schlegel rubbed his face. ‘When you and Ferdy do those historical studies, who operates the computer?'

‘We don't have the historical studies out on the War Table, with a dozen plotters, and talk-on, and all the visual display units lit up.'

‘No?'

‘A lot of it is simple sums that we can do more quickly on the machine than by hand.'

‘You use the computer as an adding machine?'

‘No, that's overstating it. I write a low-level symbolic programme carefully. Then we run it with variations of data, and analyse the output in Ferdy's office. There's not much computer time.'

‘You write the programme?'

I nodded, and sank some of my drink.

Schlegel said, ‘How many people in the Studies Group can write a programme and all the rest?'

‘By all the rest, you mean, get what you want out of storage into the arithmetic, process it and bring it out of the output?'

‘That's what I mean.'

‘Not many. The policy has always been …'

‘Oh, I know what the policy has been, and my being here is the result of it.' He stood up. ‘Would it surprise you to hear that I can't work the damn thing?'

‘It would surprise me to hear that you can. Directors are not usually chosen because they can work the computer.'

‘That's what I mean. OK, well I need someone who knows what goes on in the Group and who can operate the hardware. What would you say if I asked you to be a PA for me?'

‘Less work, more money?'

‘Don't give me that stuff. Not when you go in to do Ferdy's historical stuff for free nearly every Saturday. More money maybe, but not much.'

Mrs Schlegel tapped on the door and was admitted. She'd changed into a shirt-waist dress and English shoes and a necklace. Her dark hair was tied back in a tail. Schlegel gave a soft low whistle. ‘Now there's a tribute, feller. And don't bet a million dollars that my daughters are not also in skirts and fancy clothes.'

‘They are,' said Helen Schlegel. She smiled. She was carrying a tray loaded with bacon, lettuce and tomato toasted sandwiches, and coffee in a large silver vacuum jug. ‘I'm sorry it's only sandwiches,' she said again.

‘Don't believe her,' said Schlegel. ‘Without you here we would have got only peanut butter and stale crackers.'

‘Chas!' She turned to me. ‘Those have a lot of English mustard. Chas likes them like that.'

I nodded. It came as no surprise.

‘He's going to be my new PA,' said Schlegel.

‘He must be out of his mind,' said Mrs Schlegel. ‘Cream?'

‘There's a lot more money in it,' I said hurriedly. ‘Yes, please. Yes, two sugars.'

‘I'd want the keys to the mint,' said Mrs Schlegel.

‘And she thinks I've got them,' explained Schlegel. He bit into a sandwich. ‘Hey, that's good, Helen. Is this bacon from the guy in the village?'

‘I'm too embarrassed to go there any more.' She left. It was clearly not a subject she wanted to pursue.

‘He needed telling,' said Schlegel. He turned to me. ‘Yes, clear up what you are doing in the Blue Suite Staff Room …' He picked a piece of bacon out of his teeth and threw it into an ashtray. ‘I'll bet she did get it from that bastard in the village,' he said. ‘And meanwhile we'll put a coat of paint on that office where the tapes used to be stored. Choose some furniture. Your secretary can stay where she is for the time being. OK?'

‘OK.'

‘This history stuff with Foxwell, you say it's low-level symbolic. So why do we use autocode for our day to day stuff?'

I got the idea. My job as Schlegel's assistant was to prime him for explosions in all departments. I said, ‘It makes much more work when we programme the machine language for the historical studies but it keeps the machine time down. It saves a lot of money that way.'

‘Great.'

‘Also with the historical stuff we nearly always run the same battle with varying data to see what might have happened if … you know the kind of thing.'

‘But tell me.'

‘The Battle of Britain that we're doing now … First we run the whole battle through – Reavley Rules …'

‘What's that?'

‘Ground scale determines the time between moves. No extension of move time. We played it through three times using the historical data of the battle. We usually do repeats to see if the outcome of a battle was more or less inevitable or whether it was due to some combination of accidents, or freak weather, or whatever.'

‘What kind of changed facts did you programme into the battle?' said Schlegel.

‘So far we've only done fuel loads. During the battle the Germans had long-range drop tanks for the single-seat fighters, but didn't use them. Once you programme double fuel loads for the fighters, there are many permutations for the bombing attacks. We can vary the route to come in over the North Sea. We can double the range, bringing more cities under attack and so thinning the defences. We can keep to the routes and attacks actually used, but extend fighter escort time over the target by nearly an hour. When you have that many variations to run, it's worth bringing it right the way down, because machine time can be reduced to a quarter of autocode time.'

‘But if you were running it only once?'

‘We seldom do that. Once or twice we've played out a battle like a chess game but Ferdy always wins. So I've lost enthusiasm.'

‘Sure,' said Schlegel, and nodded in affirmation of my good sense.

There was a silence in the house, and the countryside was still. The clouds had rolled back to reveal a large patch of clear blue sky. Sunlight showed up the dust of winter on the austere metal desk at which Schlegel sat. On the wall behind it there was a collection of framed photographs and documents recording Schlegel's service career. Here was a cocky crew-cut trainee in a Stearman biplane on some sunny American airfield in World War Two; a smiling fighter pilot with two swastikas newly painted alongside the cockpit; a captain hosed-down after some final tropical-island mission; and a hollow-cheeked survivor being assisted out of a helicopter. There were half a dozen group photos, too: Marine flyers with Schlegel moving ever closer to the centre chair.

While I was looking at his photos there was the distant roar of a formation of F-4s. We saw them as dots upon the blue sky as they headed north.

Schlegel guessed that they were going to the bombing range near King's Lynn. ‘They'll turn north-west,' he said, and no sooner had he spoken the words than the formation changed direction. I turned back to the sandwiches rather than encourage him. ‘Told you,' he said.

‘Ferdy didn't want to give anyone the excuse to say that the machine time was costing too much.'

‘So I hear, but this historical stuff … is it worth
any
machine time?'

I didn't react to the provocation. A man doesn't give up his spare time working at something he believes not worth continuing. I said, ‘You're the boss, that's what you'll have to decide.'

‘I'm going to find out what it's costing. We can't go on eating our heads off at the public trough.'

‘Strategic Studies is a trust, Colonel Schlegel. Under its terms, historical studies were a part of its purpose. We don't have to show a profit at the end of the year.'

He pinched his nose as a pilot might to relieve sinus pressure. ‘Have another sandwich, kid. And then I'll run you down to the station for the two twenty-seven.'

‘Foxwell is a historian, Colonel, he's given quite a few years to this historical research. If it was cancelled now it would have a bad effect on the whole Studies Group.'

‘In your opinion?'

‘In my opinion.'

‘Well, I'll bear that in mind when I see what it's costing. Now how about that sandwich.'

‘No mayonnaise this time,' I said.

Schlegel got up and turned his back on me as he stared out of the window after the fading echoes of the Phantoms. ‘I'd better level with you, son,' he said over his shoulder. ‘Your screening's not through, but I can block in the plan. The trustees have relinquished control of the Studies Centre, although they will still be on the masthead of the Studies Centre journal and mentioned in the annual accounts. From now on, control is through me from the same naval warfare committee that runs the USN
TACWAR
Analysis, your British Navy's Undersea Warfare Staff School and
NATO
Group-North at Hamburg.'