Understrike (3 page)

“
‘L’ will be in New York tomorrow: delivering the July code corrections. But it’s ridiculous, he doesn’t know a conning tower from a cowslip ...”

“
Aren’t called conning towers any more. Not in nuclear submarines,” said the Chief sharply. “Called sails. Anyway, shouldn’t have really thought it mattered if he couldn’t tell a WREN’S brassière from a quarantine flag. Thing is, he’s an experienced operator. Don’t see why we can’t use him.”

“
Oh, Boysie’s all right,” said Mostyn uncertainly. “Only, well, you know he’s inclined to be on the careless side.”

“
Good great Nelson’s braces, the fella’s only got to sit in a fornicatin’ submarine and look at a pulsatin’ radar screen.”

“
He’ll have to write a report.”

“
You can help ‘im with that, can’t you? Blast it, fly ‘im back here as soon as it’s all over. He tells you what he saw and you put it in the right lingo. Damn it man, he’s a godsend. Probably get on with the Yanks like a pig in a mire. Can’t understand why you’ve lost faith in the bloke. Saved all our bacon with the
Coronet
thing.”

“
Well ...” Mostyn’s mind had subsided into a picture of Boysie full fathom five behind the armoured hull of a nuclear submarine. When you knew Boysie you were naturally conscious of the hundred and one things that could go wrong. The dream progressed with astonishing rapidity. Now Boysie had got up from his radar screen to be sick, or pee, or something; his hand had accidentally touched a button, and the
Trepholite
had gone blazing up out of the blue Pacific to land flaming on New York—in the rush hour. Mostyn was beginning to sweat. Why was it that Boysie always did this to him? It was bad enough in the old days, but since that last bit of trouble even the most simple job given to Boysie brought Mostyn out in the singing terrors.

The
Chief sliced cleanly into the daymare: “Gettin’ nowhere, so I’m goin’ to give you a direct order. ‘L’ is over there. Right? If ‘L’ don’t go on to San Diego as our bleedin’ observer, then I shall have to send you. Right?”

Mostyn
groaned internally, “As you say, sir. Right.” His intuition told him that neither this day nor those immediately following were going to be particularly good. “I’ll set up a contact for briefing in New York and cable San Diego and Boysie,” he said wearily. “I expect they’ll arrange for a courier to take him down there. But if he does manage to louse it up, then I’m not going to take the responsibility. This is being done under your direct orders, sir.”

“
Ah!” said the Chief. “Where’s that fat-arsed girl with the tea?”

As
Mostyn got to the door, the Chief called out, “Do me a favour, will you.” Mostyn turned. The Chief was looking suddenly older and his bright little eyes were strangely watery. “Fix up a wreath for Dudley,” said the Chief quietly. The two men looked at one another in mutual understanding. Mostyn nodded and went out.

*

Back in his office, Mostyn pressed the buzzer for his secretary, ordered tea, and sent her down for the photostats of Dudley’s briefing for the
Playboy
firing trials. The documents ran into six foolscap pages of opaque jargon, from which the Second-in-Command gleaned nothing fresh about America’s latest nuclear-powered launching pad. From the statistics at the end of her sea trials,
Playboy
was very fast and, on paper, an admirable ramp for the
Trepholite
—
a
missile about which there were no statistics, only rumours carried back and forth by worried-looking Naval Attachés. And if these ruddy-faced, preoccupied young men from the Admiralty were anything to go by (Mostyn contemplated), the
Trepholite
was the supreme deterrent. Literally the last word. So the firing trials from its undersea emplacement were of considerable importance to everyone’s peace of mind.

The
final page outlined the duties of Special Security’s observer, and with it came hope. Boysie would be one of eight experts—and inexperts—who had to sit sober on board
Playboy
while the Weapons Officer lit the blue touch paper (metaphorically speaking). It was also heartening to see that the
Trepholite
would be fired “cold”—without its holocaustic warhead. Perhaps the Chief was right. Even though this was far from Boysie’s usual line of country, he couldn’t really get into any trouble. As for the report, well the American boys would feed him a certain amount of data and, if the worst came to the worst, the Department could, with a little subtle persuasion, always get their grubby hands on a copy of the Admiralty observer’s report before Boysie wrote his. The important thing was they should have someone from the Department actually there in the flesh; and, whatever else you could say about Boysie, he was very expert in the flesh.

An
hour later, Mostyn came to the conclusion that Boysie’s presence in San Diego would simply be nominal. A couple of quick gins at the club on his way home should soon dispel the tiny lone butterfly that fluttered angrily at the back of Mostyn’s conscience. Again he buzzed his secretary, and began to fill in a set of cablegram forms: one to the Chief of US Naval Security, North Island, San Diego; one to his opposite number at the Pentagon; one to their undercover man in New York (a personality unknown to all departments of US Intelligence, including the CIA. Such is the trust of allies): and one to Mr Brian Oakes, passenger on board the
Queen
Elizabeth
. Mostyn sealed each of the buff forms in a separate envelope, initialled them and added the requisite code designations. The first two were marked
Top
Sec
A
; the latter couple
Sub
-
Text
:
Normal
.

His
secretary, a bouncily efficient girl with undisguised false breasts, carried the forms up to the top floor and handed them to the Duty Cypher Officer. In the Cypher Room—where, behind double metal doors, Britain’s secrets and clandestine orders are filtered out in a jumble of letters—the daughter of a retired Major-General translated Mostyn’s scrawl into the required coding series. Boysie’s cablegram remained almost as Mostyn had written it:

RETURN
PASSAGE POSTPONED STOP DELIVER ORDER AND AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS REFERENCE OPENING NEW SALES AREA STOP BRANCH MANAGER TO CALL AT YOUR HOTEL STOP DO NOT ACKNOWLEDGE STOP REGARDS UNCLE

Boysie
’s cablegram was handed to one of the trainee cypher operators. He left the building ten minutes later and within half an hour telephoned the message through the ordinary GPO channels from a Paddington number. Boysie’s instructions were off on their journey to the
Queen
Elizabeth’s
radio room. On arrival, the cablegram lay in the delivery tray—with seven other freshly-received personal messages—for half an hour before being popped into its little crested envelope and hurried down to Cabin B236. From the moment it left Mostyn’s hand to the time Boysie hurriedly tore it open at least twelve people had seen its contents.

*

They got Khavichev out of bed around two-thirty in the morning. He gave three sets of orders over the scrambler telephone in his night office and went back to bed. The time had come and it could not have happened at a more judicious moment. Tomorrow there would be much to do. The organisation had to be foolproof.

*

Just before they woke him, in the villa on the outskirts of the city. Vladimir Solev had been dreaming of the dark Ukrainian girl who had been his guest on the previous evening. At first he thought it was her hand on his shoulder, shaking him up from the warmth of sleep. But it was his staff instructor. He was to be in the briefing room in one hour. He would be going on a journey and there would be further orders on arrival. The situation—his instructor told him, sitting on the bed like a sick visitor—was fluid. But there was little doubt that the training was going to be put to the test. His glorious moment would soon come.

Vladimir
Solev—Boysie Oakes’ double—felt his stomach rise. He heaved noisily, and quite effectively, into his handkerchief.

*

Boysie read the cablegram twice. Once, standing by the wash basin, where he had just been completing his morning shave when the steward arrived with the white envelope on a silver tray. Again, slumped—a quivering, boneless jelly in his armchair after croaking “No reply” in the wake of the departing flunkey. Boysie could understand why those Old Testament kings used to exterminate bearers of bad tidings. He had taken an almost homicidal dislike to the wretched man who had delivered this Boysie-changing slip of paper.

Unlike
Solev, Boysie had no use for his handkerchief. For ten minutes he retched out his fear into the basin—moaning in anguish and accidentally upsetting a bottle of
Floris
89 toilet water on to the cabin floor where it left a damp circle of fragrance which later caused the cabin steward to raise his eyebrows a little higher than usual. Boysie had not felt like this for months. His hands were shaking; his bowels seemed to contain a small electric mixer, turned to top speed and operating a dough hook; his heart was thudding audibly under the sea island cotton vest; and his throat felt as though someone was titillating his uvula with a cotton-wool swab.

He
was all too familiar with the symptoms. The diagnosis was simple—stark, staring, yellow fear in a massive overdose. In the months that had passed since the Chief—via Mostyn—had taken him off the liquidating assignments, Boysie had never really allowed himself to think about possible reactions to any dangerous operation that the Department might put in his way.

Life
had been quiet, gay and good. Boysie had felt that if Mostyn ever came up with a diabolical scheme that was beyond his small, nervous, neurotic powers, he could always spin a neat excuse from his cunning mind and so slide out of the Department for good and all.

But
now it was here. Right out of the cloudless blue, the dark business of having to work near death had caught him unawares. There was no mistaking the cablegram. It could mean one thing only. An operation, of some kind, was brewing. An operation earmarked specially for Boysie. And Boysie knew, through bitter experience, that in the Department operations were dangerous. Blue funking dangerous. For the hundredth time since he had been eased into the Department, Boysie wondered how he had managed to get mixed up in the game at all.

“
Bloody hell!” he groaned to himself. “Oh bloody, bloody hell. Why didn’t I get out of it after the last little lot?” He looked blankly round the cabin which seemed despicably normal. The old cry of fear was ripping him apart: and he did not even know what the operation was. BRANCH MANAGER TO CALL AT YOUR HOTEL contained the key to unknown terrors. Boysie’s mind started to dwell deeply on the possibilities. He might easily be left waiting for this “Branch Manager” for a week or two—Mostyn had always been an inconsiderate bastard—and, to be left cooling one’s heels would only increase the nervous tension. A myriad pictures weaved through Boysie’s pregnant imagination. He saw himself being shot at by hulking great men in slouch hats and raincoats; chased over scaffolding, mountain high above the city; roped and gagged in a cellar crawling with puce spiders (at the very thought of spiders, Boysie was attacked by what looked like the rectangular twitch); pushed into a swimming bath containing a red-eyed octopus; and put to the torture by a voluptuous negress. He lingered over this last, for the negress turned out to be a diverting girl. At least it was a sign that the initial impact of fear was passing. Slowly, Boysie began turning his mind from the horrors. In their place stood the short, compact, oily, curly-haired figure of Mostyn—his immediate boss. In times of stress Boysie always took comfort in railing silently upon Mostyn. Now he railed—with a selection of oaths and curses that would not have disgraced a joint meeting of Macbeth’s Witches and the most proficient members of the Billingsgate Bad Language League.

A
few hours, and six brandies, later, Boysie stood—still in a profound state of anxiety—on the games deck. He leaned moodily against the rail, crowded with passengers eager for their first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline. Away to the left, the Statue of Liberty raised a green hand, half-aggressive, half-pleading. Boysie smiled for the first time since the cablegram had arrived. “Please, miss, can I leave the sea?” he muttered to himself, watching the statue’s suppliant arm slide past.

Downtown
Manhattan came up, rusty and grey mixed with heat-haze. The dogmatic wail of a police siren floated over the water from the West Side Highway. Up river they could see the slim skyscrapers, climbing pock-marked fingers. A broad American with watery eyes and a purple checked jacket nudged Boysie hard in the ribs and pointed to the centre of the forest of concrete peaks:

“
There it is, bud. Biggest phallic symbol in the world. The good old Empire State.”

Boysie
could see the man’s point. Even at this distance, he thought, New York looked as sexy as he had always been led to believe.

Forty-five
minutes later he stood sweating in the queue which moved, almost imperceptibly, into the main lounge, where US immigration officials sat impassively scrutinising passports. In spite of his light linen suit, voile shirt and tropical underwear. Boysie felt as though he was sitting, wrapped round with rugs, in a Turkish bath. The heat seemed to claw into his skin, wrenching the drops of perspiration from the pores by force. By the time he reached the head of the queue, Boysie felt so tired—a by-product of emotional fatigue and the strength-sapping heat—that he had consciously ceased to worry about the immediate future. His imagination was brimful of ice cubes slowly melting in a tall drink, and the exquisite chill of a cold shower, followed by soft breezes fluttering over his body, emanating from fans—preferably wielded by silk-thighed Vargas-girls.