Yesterday's Spy (29 page)

‘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.

‘And do you know what I say?' said Schlegel for the tenth or eleventh time.

‘You say “crap”,' I replied. I was tired. As I wiped a hand across my forehead I smelled my scorched clothes and my scorched hair. And I looked at the burns on my hand.

‘Don't go to sleep on me,' said Schlegel. ‘There's a whole slew of paperwork for you to finish before you sack out. Yes, that's right: I say crap. And if it wasn't for Dawlish being so soft, I'd have your arse in a sling.' He nodded to me, and scowled at the same time. ‘I wouldn't let my own mother come out of the other side of this one unscathed.'

‘I believe you, Colonel,' I said.

‘Well, now we can see why the girl sent that picture postcard of the Zeppelin. She got on to it too early for Champion's liking. But how could you be sure it was filled with
hydrogen
? No one fills blimps with hydrogen any more.'

‘Helium is too difficult to get.'

‘Helium would have left you looking pretty damned stupid, fella,' said Schlegel. ‘Non-flam helium would not have burned. That would have left you with egg on your face. It would have given Champion a big laugh, and you a tail filled with lead.'

‘You would have preferred that, perhaps,' I said.

‘I would have preferred that. No perhaps about it.'

He picked up a newspaper that had just arrived by messenger. The headline said, ‘Gas Leak Kills Twelve', with a subhead that said it had happened at a ‘remote chemical plant' owned by Tix Industries. Schlegel held the paper up and flicked it with the back of his hand, so that it made a loud noise. ‘A lot of trouble went into getting us that newsbreak the way we wanted it,' he said.

Schlegel opened a new box of cigars and selected one. He didn't offer them to me. ‘Atomic shells!' said Schlegel. ‘Would it interest you to know that Champion had not even
tried
to dig a passage to the artillery school?'

I didn't answer.

‘You pleading the Fifth Amendment?' said Schlegel. ‘Or did you just go to sleep? The whole thing was a bluff. And you fell for it …' He shook his head sadly. ‘Do you realize what you did?'

‘OK,' I told him. ‘It was a bluff. But let me tell you what kind of bluff it was. Champion was going to fly that blimp to North Africa – there's no doubt about that.'

‘So what?'

‘He would have claimed to have stolen atomic shells.'

‘And the French would have denied it.'

‘And which of them would we have believed?' I asked him.

‘I would have believed the French,' insisted Schlegel primly.

‘Well, the Israelis might
not
have believed the French. And if you were the Israeli negotiators at the treaty talks, perhaps you'd have had your doubts, too.'

‘And lost out in the negotiations, you mean?' Grudgingly, Schlegel conceded an inch to me. ‘Champion wouldn't put his head on the block just to provide psychological advantages for those goddamned Cairo politicians.'

‘He wasn't putting anything on the block,' I said. ‘It was an aircraft, registered in Cairo, flying over France without permission. Who was going to press the button?'

‘Nukes in French air space … and the Quai d'Orsay in a panic … ? Champion would be taking a big risk, I'd say.'

I said, ‘Champion knew they'd phone the artillery commandant and find that there were no atomic artillery shells missing. They sign those things in and out, every shift: a thirty-second response.'

Schlegel didn't answer.

I said, ‘All along, I was puzzled by the way that he let us know it was going to be a nuclear device. I wondered why he didn't try to disguise the
object
of the operation as well as the
method
.'

Schlegel nodded. It was beginning to get through to him. ‘He did it so that you would strong-arm me into alerting every damn official in
NATO
. When the Egyptians claimed to have got a nuke, there were going to be a lot of our top brass saying where there's smoke there's fire.'

‘It was a neat idea, Colonel,' I said. ‘And since we were going to keep on denying that any kind of bomb had been stolen, Champion could come back and live in France, get Billy again, and even go to London for his stamp auctions.'

‘Knowing that any attempt to hit or hassle him would look like a confirmation that he'd got the damned thing.' Schlegel nodded a grudging concession to Champion's cleverness. ‘The only thing he didn't figure was that the Melodie Page kid would put the boot in.'

‘And that I would put the boot in, too.'

‘Umm,' said Schlegel. He rubbed his chin. He'd not shaved for forty-eight hours and his suit was filthy from poking around in the embers of the fire.

Out of the window, I could see Nice railway station. It was dusk, and the lights were on. Facing it was the Terminus Hotel. Once this had been a fashionable place to stroll and to sit, but now the great hotel was dark and empty, its windows dirty and its fine entrance boarded up. I remembered the café, with outdoor tables and fine cane chairs. I'd been sitting there, that day in that war so long ago. I'd waited for Champion, and seen him arrested by the Germans as he emerged from the station. He knew exactly where I would be, but he didn't look in my direction. Steve was a pro.

Now Steve was dead. The hotel was dead, and the café was gone. The chairs and tables were replaced by a corrugated iron hoarding. Upon it there was layer upon layer of posters, advertising everything from Communist Party candidates to go-go clubs and careers in the Foreign Legion. Across them, someone had daubed ‘Merde aux Arabes' in red paint.

‘Are you listening?' said Schlegel.

‘Yes,' I said, but I wasn't.

As one of the key themes at the heart of
Yesterday's Spy
is identity, I decided that a masked, anonymous German soldier would dominate the cover. That he appears German, from his uniform and the official stamp is not in doubt – but his identity is hidden, and by extension his true allegiance. The disguising black panel offered a neat frame in which to sit the title of the book, which I have reproduced in a typewriter font that would have been commonplace during the war.

On each front cover of this latest quartet, I have placed a photograph of the eyes of the bespectacled unnamed spy, in this instance superimposed with an oscillograph to represent audio surveillance, which would have been one of the many weapons in the arsenal of the Guernica network. The fact that I have reversed the image is a further nod to the switching of sides carried out by double-agents.