Cold War in a Country Garden

by Lindsay Gutteridge

  The creature paused momentarily—they crouched down —then it crossed the track and ran swiftly on, its battalion of legs swinging rhythmically. The sound of its movements came in fits and starts till it faded and was overlaid by the sound of the returning breeze.

  Dilke released a long-held breath and became aware of the heavy beat of his heart. The wind chilled his sweating body. He wiped his nose with a nervous gesture and stared at Olsen’s dim features.

  “I don’t like it, Mat!” Bill Olsen’s voice was edgy.

  They went quietly on up the hill, keeping in the shadow and looking often behind them. From the crest of the hill they saw before them the looming bulk of the shed, in half an hour they would be home. They stepped on to the track to start the run downhill. On the wind came the pungent smell of centipede. The big square head and the first ten segments of the centipede’s body lifted from the shadows at the side of the track. The sight and smell transfixed them. Its glittering eyes looked down on them, the legs of the monster swam in the air, then it dropped with a crash and attacked.

  Dilkes switched on the torch and the beam speared it in the eyes, the multi-lenses flashed like cut-glass and the brute sheared away, its yellow segments flashing by in the torchlight. A gust of body odour and the smell of carrion swept over them, Bill Olsen shouted, “Look out! Hit him!” The beast had looped round and attacked again.

  Olsen shot it in the head and Dilke pumped two bolts into the racing body. It was more than thirty millimetres long and the first half went stiffly into the air, the paired legs racing madly, then it fell and exploded into huge convoluted writhings. Dilke was swept off the track by the lashing tail and skidded amongst the carrots on his back, he jumped to his feet and they both raced on towards the looming hut. Behind them the noise of the dying centipede faded into the distance. They climbed the Kremlin wall in the dawn light.

  Henry stood on the edge of the platform. “Charlie’s dead,” he said.

  Dilke entered the chamber. The blue blankets had been thrown off the bed. The dead man lay at attention. He was dressed in his R.A.F. shirt, his naked legs stiff, his bruised feet together. Dilke sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress groaned, intensifying the silence; the man who had laboured so noisily for breath lay still. He looked faintly supercilious, as if he had private thoughts which he would not share.

  Dilke breathed in deeply and exhaled wearily; he took the small bottle of green two-tone capsules between thumb and forefinger and stood it deliberately on the edge of the bed frame, then got slowly to his feet and left the chamber.

  They buried Charlie in the afternoon. They carried him up on to the roof of the box then lowered him on a rope down the side which leaned inwards to the ground. The body was trussed in a blanket and it spun sluggishly in the air as Dilke paid out the rope. Olsen waited below and took it across his shoulders when it touched the ground. They followed him down the length of the shed and under the door. It was a blustery day with fractious changes of sun and cloud. Olsen stepped over the edge of the vacant ant lion crater and carried the body in a sliding walk down to the bottom of the hole. He straddled the body and dug with his hands at the fine rubble and the sloping surface of the crater slid down and covered the corpse. Olsen struggled up to his companions on the rim of the crater, the wind caught at the disturbed dust and spun it out of the hole and into their eyes. They stood and looked down; then, almost absentmindedly, Bill Olsen raised his crossbow with one hand and fired it. The wind, blowing across the front of the shed, caught the bolt and carried it sideways into the garden. It fell away and vanished into the carrot tops.

  The radio call rattled as they climbed the Kremlin wall to the ledge. It stopped before they could answer it and Dilke raised his eyebrows at the lateness of the call. Then he rang head office.

  Major Price was rather testy; he had been ringing for an hour. He had a message from on high; they were to be picked up the following day at noon and were to go on a mission. They were to bring Wallis with them.

  “Sergeant Wallis died last night, Major Price.”

  Price expressed his regrets.

  “Bring only your weapons, Captain Dilke, all the other equipment will be supplied. The transporter will be on the window seat at twelve hundred hours. Lord Raglen will brief you.”

  “What’s this all about? How long will the mission take?”

  “I’m afraid I can tell you no more, Captain Dilke. Lord Raglen will be speaking to you.”

  “We have done a lot of work on a survival manual, it’s not yet finished but you’d better have what we’ve done.”

  “Don’t worry about that now, Captain, this is more important.”

  “Thank you, Major Price.”

  “When you get aboard the transporter you can contact me on the radio you’ll find there.”

  “Thank you, Major Price.”

  PART THREE

  1

  On the way to the rendezvous they came to where Dilke and Olsen had been attacked by the centipede. A trail of kicked-up earth led off the track into the grove. Henry was curious, and they followed it; in its agony the wounded beast had ripped up small plants and bitten chunks out of the tall carrots. A whiff of putrefaction came to them on the wind and at a little distance they saw the centipede lying in the shadows, twisted round the trunks of the carrots. Its head and most of its body was swollen with corpse gas; but a section had collapsed; a dozen meat ants had made a way into the long tunnel of its body and were burrowing into it like pigmies into a dead elephant. The ants were preoccupied with their mining, but the men remained at a distance and after a while they moved silently away.

  The silver sphere in the middle of the window seat shone in the midday sun. It was as big as a tennis ball and from the entrance at its base came a deep hum. They entered the door, climbed a ramp and came up on to the floor. The inside of the transporter was almost filled by a gyroscope; its central column five millimetres thick, its heavy flywheel a spinning blur. The ends of the column turned in bearings in the floor and ceiling. A circular couch went round the perimeter of the chamber, the floor was carpeted in red. A radio transmitter lay on the couch and Dilke told Price that they were aboard.

  After half an hour they felt a lurch as the container was picked up, then the erratic movements of the car in which they travelled were translated by the container’s gyroscope into vertical movements. Henry, who was revising his notes, discovered that he had no stomach for this mode of travel and he stretched out on the couch and closed his eyes.

  At last they felt a thud as the ball was grounded and the turbulent movement ceased.

  Dilke rang Department 7a. Price answered.

  “What do we do now?”

  “Lord Raglen should be here within the hour, at around eighteen hundred hours. I’ll let you know when he has arrived. Take the radio with you when you see him, he may want to talk to you.”

  “I have brought Sergeant Wallis’s papers and I’ll leave them in this chamber. I will also leave our notes, will you please have them typed for when I get back?”

  Time passed; the hypnotic humming of the gyroscope imperceptibly lowered in tone; the three men lay looking up at the spinning flywheel; Olsen fell asleep.

  Price rang at about twenty hundred hours. He sounded jumpy. “I’m afraid there is a hold up, Captain Dilke, Lord Raglen will be late; he has gone on to the House of Lords, it might be midnight when he gets back.”

  Bill Olsen lay with closed eyes; “What about some grub?” he called.

  “We’ll need something to eat and drink,” said Dilke. “I didn’t know we’d be waiting this long.”

  “I’m sorry, Captain, but you’ll have to hold out until after your briefing. Lord Raglen may be back sooner than I think…” Price prevaricated. Olsen turned his head to Dilke, opened his eyes very wide and mocked him with a smile.

  “… you’ll have a meal later,” continued Price ,“a big stock has been laid in for you. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything.”
The line went dead.

  The gyroscope revolved more and more slowly; the flywheel was no longer a smooth blur and they could see the imperfections of its painted surface as it spun above them. The whine died away leaving only the sighing of disturbed air; the centre column turned more and more slowly until at last the rumbling from the ball-race in the middle of the floor ceased. The huge, gleaming column came to a stop.

  The only sound came from Bill Olsen’s grumbling belly.

  Price rang to say—rather breathlessly—that Lord Raglen had left the House.

  Fifteen minutes later he told them to leave the chamber for their briefing. They walked down the ramp and left the transporter.

  The sphere had been placed on the edge of the blotting-pad on Raglen’s desk. The three men walked out on to its snow-white surface. It was lit like a Siberian prison camp with the harsh glare from a low-set desk lamp. They paused with their eyes screwed up against the light, then they marched in step with their long shadows to the middle of the pad.

  A big, white shape lay on the desk next to the pad. Because of its huge size they did not, at first, recognize it as a hand. It lay palm down on the leather top, white, hairless and quite still. Its soft skin was spotted with irregular brown freckles. Its nails were surgeon clean and polished smooth. The wrist was cuffed in dazzling white and Dilke’s eyes travelled up the black sleeve to the pyramid of the body and head. He had adjusted to the scale of plants and manmade things, but the first sight of this colossal body shocked him with a new awareness of his insignificance.

  The face was dimly lit from below by reflected light from the white paper. They stared up at the swollen jowls and the shining forehead, freckled where it met the thinning sand-coloured hair. Lord Raglen’s right hand held a cigar to his mouth, poised horizontally. A trickle of smoke leaked round its butt where it was moored centrally between the fat, pouting lips, curling into the twin tunnels above. The pouchy, half-closed eyes gazed across the dark room.

  Major Price’s voice came simultaneously over Dilke’s radio phone and the desk intercom.

  “Captain Dilke and his men are ready, sir.”

  Raglen’s cigar end glowed; a billow of smoke issued from the mouth and obscured the face and hand. Out of the cloud the cigar floated away across their heads. The hand carried it into the shadows beyond the desk light and deposited it in a glass ash tray. A slow, peer-of-the-realm voice came down, carried on a gust of cigar and brandy fumes. The great moon face inclined towards them and the last of the smoke floated away like vapour across a mountain top.

  “You men are commissioned to do a job which is important to this department. I am told that miniaturization is the thing of the future. I am not convinced of this. It is your job to make a success of this undertaking: the results you get will affect my evaluation of the project and, therefore, the future of the programme. The mission is important not only for itself but also because of its wider significance.”

  There was a long silence; Dilke spoke into the radio phone.

  “I have not yet been told what we are to do, Lord Raglen.”

  The silence continued.

  Major Price’s voice came over the office intercom.

  “Captain Dilke would like to speak to you, sir.”

  “What?”

  “On his radio telephone, sir. Your ear, sir.”

  Lord Raglen’s right hand went up to his ear; a plug like a deaf aid protruded from it. He frowned and tapped the plug with his right forefinger and the thud and crackle in Dilke’s ear made him grimace.

  “Yes?”

  “I have not yet been told what the mission is, sir.”

  Lord Raglen jerked at the cord of his earpiece, the plug came out.

  “Price will tell you all that.”

  The freckled hand disappeared then reappeared in the pool of light holding a plastic dome. The transparent dome dropped over them, thudding on to the soft blotting paper; their ears popped under the pressure of the compressed air. They looked up; the roof of the dome was a magnifying lens, thirty millimetres across; in it a huge eye appeared, soft-edged at first but suddenly sharp as it descended. The shutter of the eyelid flashed as the eye adjusted its focus, then it stared fixedly down. The eye of God: tinged with yellow and fretted with blood vessels. They stared back into the void of the iris for a long minute.

  The eyelid shuttered twice, a sheet of liquid flowed across the eyeball and streamed in a line of bubbles along the lower lid. The eye receded into a blur and vanished.

  “Show over!” said Olsen.

  The magnifying dome tilted and swung away off the blotting-pad leaving them standing in a swirl of cigar ash. Lord Raglen had vanished. They heard the thud of a closing door.

  “Major Price, I am still waiting for my briefing.”

  “Behind the transporter is a cigarette box with a door in its side. If you go in you can eat and I will give you your brief later. In an hour I will ring through on the Marconi and then we can talk.”

  They looked back across the white blotting paper, past the shining sphere, and saw beyond it a dirty yellow cigarette pack. The words tigari de prima were crudely printed in curly brown lettering on the side of the pack. Beneath the horizontal stroke of the ‘T’ was an open door; through it a light shone.

  Inside, it looked like the cabin of a space-ship and smelled like a Turkish cigarette factory. To the left of the door was a wall of cupboards. Facing was a big Marconi transmitter/receiver; it was switched on and threw out a noise like discreetly frying bacon. On the right of the door was a deep, waist-high platform which curved up to the ceiling. There were three recesses moulded into the curve of the platform, lying side by side and cast in the shapes of human bodies with shoulder straps which crossed over and clipped on to broad lap straps. The platform was moulded in white polystyrene, the cupboard doors were black Formica, each one numbered in white. One of them was open: inside were racks of food containers, beneath was a refrigerator holding bottles of beer and lager. The three men assembled a feast on the platform, then lay back in their padded couches and took a leisurely supper. They dozed until Major Price came through on the radio.

  Their mission was espionage: they were to be taken overland to Rumania; they would be dropped off near a military camp and would find their way to the room of a Marshal Volsk; they would attach radio transmitters to the head of Volsk and would, then return to England.

  Dilke’s face went pale with anger. “Scott-Milne and Olsen are not in Intelligence, Major. They never agreed to this. I will not ask them to go!”

  Disregarding signs of consent from his companions he continued savagely, “And what has espionage to do with the population explosion, Major Price? Does Professor Mathis know about this?”

  The silence lasted for seconds.

  “You were on loan from the department, Captain Dilke.” Price’s voice was conciliatory. “This won’t affect Professor Mathis’s programme.”

  At last Dilke nodded acknowledgment of the signals from the volunteers.

  “It will if we don’t get back,” he grated.

  The transporter tigari de prima was stuffed with equipment for the mission. In addition to frozen foods and survival packs of glucose and chocolate there were maps, compasses, watches and three small radio transmitters— each of which was to be attached to Volsk. There was a wardrobe containing three sets of clothing, custom tailored to each man’s size, ingeniously designed to take maps, cameras, lenses, with stiff new harnesses to carry their bows, and with pouches for the miniature radio transmitters—they were meticulously thought out to the last zipped-up pocket. The clothing was made from a smooth wind-proof fabric of an almost fluorescent yellow colour.

  “Major Price. Which bloody maniac had the idea of dressing us in bright yellow? We’ll shine like glowworms in these! Has he never heard of camouflage?” Bill Olsen put in an aside, “Ask him whose side he’s on.”

  Major Price was too tired and too flustered to exert his seniority and, when Dilke pressed
him for more information about the mission, he gave—by the early hours of morning—more background knowledge than he had intended. The cigarette box was to be taken by two agents posing as a man and his wife on a car tour of Europe. They would travel by boat to Ostend, drive through Belgium, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and into Rumania. There they would drive along the road from Arad to Bucharest. Volsk was Commandant of the Rumanian Tank Exercise and Gunnery Ranges on the plains north of the Transylvanian Alps. The box would be dropped off at the roadside near the camp buildings. They must then find their way to Volsk’s bedroom and attach the transmitters to his scalp. When the mission was complete they would return to the box and radio the British Office in Bucharest and the tourists would pick them up on their return trip. The map pockets in each jacket contained identical sets of papers: a large-scale map showing the camp and the country which surrounded it, an aerial photograph showing the camp buildings within the perimeter of the army ranges, and a photograph of Marshal Volsk.

  Dilke had a lot of questions.

  When and where were they starting? In time to catch the Friday night car-ferry from Dover.

  How long would the journey last? About four days: they should be in Rumania on Tuesday.

  How would they be dropped? The agents would decide this.

  How were they to attach the transmitters to Volsk’s head? There were loops and clips which would enable the transmitters to be attached to hairs on the scalp.

  Yes, but how were they to get on to Volsk’s head? They must use their initiative.

  Why three transmitters? It increased the chances of success and decreased the risk of all the transmitters being dislodged later.