Cold War in a Country Garden

by Lindsay Gutteridge

  What was all the camera and binoculars and radio paraphernalia for? The backroom boys would like a field test of the equipment, Dilke would have to report on it on his return.

  And the space-fiction seats? It would be a rough ride.

  “The whole bloody thing sounds like a rough ride,” growled Dilke. “What’s it all for? Why is it important to bug this Marshal Volsk?”

  “I don’t think I should go into that, Captain Dilke,” Price said wearily. But he grudgingly explained: for some years top military men of Communist central Europe— Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania—and Russia—had held secret annual meetings; M.I.5 had had little interest in these meetings till this year when they learnt that General Fok Sing was to attend. General Fok Sing was in command on the border between China and India; M.I.5 were interested in the reason for his being at a meeting which had, till now, been routine and localized.

  “You mean they’re setting up an invasion?”

  “I don’t mean that at all, Captain Dilke, we are merely interested in the meeting.”

  Because he was to be this year’s chairman, Volsk would be present when any important matters were discussed: the transmitters would beam every word spoken by him and to him directly back to London.

  They heard a closed-mouth yawn. “I am sure everything will go well, Captain Dilke. If you need more information you can speak to me here, if you radio from Europe please set it on “scramble”. You and your men have my best wishes, and I’m sure I speak for the whole department.”

  “Major Price.”

  “Yes, Captain Dilke?”

  “I’ve been deceived.” Dilke’s voice was bitter but resigned.

  There was a long hiss of silence.

  Olsen grinned. “Good night. The poor bastard must be properly done in.”

  2

  They fastened their harnesses when the container was picked up, dozed during the Channel crossing and woke when the car roared up the incline from the car-ferry into Ostend.

  “Sounds like a Volkswagen,” said Henry. “I once had a Volkswagen…” They looked at him expectantly. “I called it Otto,” he smiled.

  They spent three days eating, drinking well and listening through the half-opened door to the conversation of the two agents. They were a business-like pair, driving in shifts and with little to say about the scenery. As they passed over each border the man put his mouth near the box and stage-whispered the information to them— he had taken to smoking Gauloises and he sounded as though he thought he sounded foolish.

  At the dawning of the fourth day they halted—then started again—then he breathed “Rumania” on them. They shut the door, kitted up, lay in their couches and waited. The road was rough and they strapped themselves in. Dilke watched the clock. It was eight-thirty when the chattering engine slowed and the car came to a stop. They heard the click of an opening door, felt suddenly airborne, had a sensation of falling and then the box hit the road with a crash. They lay hanging in the straps at a steep angle, unclipped the harnesses, slid off the platform and went to the door. Above the idling of the engine they heard a shout.

  “Bucuresti?”

  “Înainteazâ! Înainteazâ!” a harsh voice replied.

  Dilke slid open the door; the car revved and a cloud of dust and exhaust fumes flew in. Dilke looked out; the “Move on!” man with the gravel voice was on the other side of the ploughed road looking like a refugee from the Don Cossack Choir. He had an automatic rifle over one shoulder and was squinting down the road at the receding Volkswagen. A black Alsatian on the inside of the high perimeter fence barked a surly goodbye at the back end of the car until it was out of sight, then it flopped down in the sun and rolled out a yard of wet tongue. Baggy-pants spat copiously into the road and strolled across the front of the main gates.

  After the resonance of the small chamber the silence of the open sky and flat Rumanian plains felt tangible. From far away came the sweet, meandering song of a skylairk.

  Dilke’s squad started the long hike across the road.

  It had been churned up by ox carts and tank traffic till it was like a miniature battlefield. They crossed rough valleys littered with the spilled maize trash from carts, avoided the stagnant lakes of diesel oil and hills of dung till eventually they came to the roadside. Here the grass was cropped short but inside the fence it grew rampant. An insect track brought them to the heavy wire fence, woven into a diamond mesh. The metal was rough, giving hand- and foot-holds, and they scrambled up a steeply angled strand till they saw, above the swaying grass stalks, a high grey shed.

  Dilke got out the aerial photograph to plot a route. In the picture there were two arc lights hanging over the camp gates but when they looked along the fence they could see no electric cable.

  He pocketed the photograph. “Let’s find that cable.”

  It was twined down the gatepost and snaked off through the grass like a smooth Macadam highway. They climbed on to it and in two hours were in the shadow of the building. Beside the huge metal-framed shed stood a small brick outhouse. The cable went into it and from inside came the “buff, buff, buff, buff” of a generating engine.

  It was mid-morning. Two giant mechanics in army dungarees sat in the sun with their backs to the shed wall: one with his eyes closed and a burnt-out cigarette between his lips; the other, with a tin mug on the ground beside him, turned the pages of a letter.

  The micro-men watched. The reader read his letter slowly three times then raised the mug to his lips. He spat out a mouthful of tea and shot the rest of the liquid into the road with a grunt. The sleeper awoke, relit the yellow stub and they stood up and sauntered into the shed.

  Dilke and his companions slid off the black cable on to the shed’s concrete surround. They walked across the path on which the mechanics had rested and came to the entrance into which they had vanished.

  It was a vehicle repair shop. Beyond the sunlight which streamed into its wide entrance the gloom of the interior was lit by a single bulb and a streak of light from a distant doorway.

  The aerial photograph had shown more buildings beyond the shed. The shortest way to them was diagonally across the shed to the door. Its floor was equal to the combined areas of Dilke’s garden and the allotment, it would be like a ten-mile journey. Inside the shed several Bistrita tanks were backed up against the wall on the right. Within the entrance was an inspection pit with a staff car parked over it. Beyond the pit was the servicing area: a battery-charging unit and a long metal bench that disappeared into the shadowy interior.

  “Let’s go!” Dilke gave it an American inflection. As they approached the staff car the great head of a mechanic appeared above the edge of the pit. He squinted up into the chassis of the car—a brown cigarette stub nipped between his lips—pushed a grease gun against a nipple, then pumped the gun. Black grease oozed out of the bearing and fell in a thick dollop on to his brow. He expelled the cigarette with a Rumanian obscenity, took the grease on his thumb and transferred it to the edge of the pit where it sat like an enormous black slug. When they reached the end of the pit Dilke looked back; the greaser had finished; he squatted at the bottom of the great canyon, a monster illuminated from below by his inspection lamp.

  They travelled north-west with the battery chargers on their left, and the vast shadowy plain before them. The smells of the countryside were replaced by the smells of petrol, oil and grease, of burnt metal and caustic acid. On a bench high above them a row of vehicle batteries were on charge, with huge dials registering their amperage. Straw-wrapped glass containers of acid and discarded battery cases stood beneath the bench. The plain was littered with boulders with gleaming green-and-white facets.

  “Keep away!” Dilke warned when Henry walked closer to examine one. “It’s ammonium chloride!”

  A crack in the concrete floor started under the battery bench and went as far as they could see to the north. The wide ditch was filled with acid and a vapour rose from it which stung their eyes and nostrils.

 
They retreated and looked for another route. High overhead a twelve-foot steel girder, supported on foot-high ammunition boxes, bridged the ditch. The lid of the nearest box lay open and they climbed its inclined plane on to the girder which stretched, a smooth causeway, into the distance. With the high steel wall of the L-section girder on their left and the shed floor stretched out below them they set off.

  They crossed above the reeking ditch. From the bridge they could see it winding over the concrete plain; acid had crystallized along its edges and, in the distance, had spread in a brittle film across the floor.

  They were jubilant.

  They walked quickly along the wide girder and had almost reached the middle when they heard the sound of footsteps and the scrape of metal on metal.

  They stopped. Three hundred millimetres ahead a huge hand came over the wall and gripped the girder. It was dirt ingrained and nicotine stained, with bitten-down nails and grazed knuckles.

  The girder swayed beneath them. A black metal helmet with an acre of smoked glass in its front loomed over them. An acetylene cutter appeared with a needle-point of blue hissing from its nozzle. The hissing point roared into a billowing yellow flame then diminished to a slim blue-green tail.

  The cutter took a tentative bite at the edge of the girder then moved steadily across the roadway before them. A fountain of sparks went up into the roof and showered down like meteorites. The glare and the roar blinded and deafened them; the stench from the burning steel choked them. They crouched in the angle of the girder to shelter from the hurtling white-hot boulders. The metal was incandescent where the torch cut into it, fading to straw yellow, dull red and purple. The dull colours advanced down the road towards them. Olsen gave a yell and they turned and ran through the hail of boulders. There was an echoing clang of metal falling on concrete, the windy roar stopped, the torch-flame blipped, the only remaining sound was the singing of cooling steel. They ran till they reached cold metal then stopped and looked back.

  Their bridge was gone.

  They stared at its glowing end. “That’s buggered that!” panted Olsen.

  He pulled off his boots and examined their smoking soles. “Jesus, Mat,” he said fervently, “I thought we’d bought it!” He stood up, danced his toes on the cold steel, then slung the boots around his neck.

  “Let’s move before he comes back for the rest of it,” said Dilke. They stood on what had been the middle of the girder and as they could see no way down they trudged back to their starting point and descended to the floor.

  They stood for a minute at the foot of the box, undecided about their next move. A head appeared from the turret of a distant tank, shouted “Yakov!” then disappeared. Yakov left the bench at which he was working, climbed on to a tank track and looked down into the open turret. A starter motor whirred and coughed then coughed again.

  “I think we’d be better taking the back roads,” Bill Olsen waved at the shadows beneath the workbench. “It might be safer. They’ve only got to move out a tank when we’re in the middle of the floor…”

  Dilke stared at the tanks, and at the mechanic who had pulled down a block and tackle from a pulley in the roof and was feeding a chain into the tank’s interior.

  “Yes. All right, Bill, let’s do that.”

  They turned from the open floor and walked under the battery-charging bench. They passed an old rubber glove and an acid-encrusted funnel. A litter of straw lay on the floor and they crawled under and over its criss-crossed stalks till they came to a clearing. Their view of the mechanic was now obscured but they heard the steady rattle of chain as he hauled something out of the tank.

  They crossed the clearing into the shadow of the workbench. A pair of torn dungarees, stiff with grease, rose in a series of folds before them. They climbed till they reached the summit. Overhead, like the roof of a colossal railway terminus, was the underside of the bench, its thick timbers supported on a heavily strutted metal frame. A long perspective of dusty webs hung in great loops and skeins: an aerial graveyard for ten thousand gnats. Beneath the webs lay a black country, a floor littered with lost and discarded objects, all coated with a film of grease to which dust and strands of cotton waste adhered.

  They descended the slopes of denim and made a way through piles of debris: gigantic spark plugs, rusting pliers and broken hacksaw blades.

  Progress was slow and by late afternoon they had travelled only halfway down the shed.

  A shallow lake of sump oil barred their way. They stepped on to its yielding, pitch-like surface and walked warily across it. As Henry leapt from the lake to firm ground his foot broke through the skin and he sank to mid-calf in the viscous fluid. They scraped off most of it, then Bill Olsen cut a strand from a mountain of cotton waste and teased out its fibres to make a coarse brush. This removed most of the residue and they sat by the lakeside and rested. Henry wiped his hands on his tunic and distributed slabs of chocolate. While they ate he touched Olsen’s arm and pointed to a huge black shape above them; roughly triangular, it reminded Olsen of the giant manta rays he had seen in the Persian Gulf. Suspended amongst the hanging webs it swayed in a rough hammock at the end of a tangle of filaments. It was a moth, swathed in web and embalmed in the ubiquitous coating of grease.

  “I’m surprised to see any insects in this stinking hole,” growled Olsen.

  “You’d be surprised where insects get, Bill. There is a species of fly which starts life in the crude oil around South Californian oil rigs and which lives nowhere else.”

  Dilke had left them to look for a way ahead and he shouted and waved from a hill of iron filings. Rust had welded the filings into a solid red mass and they ran up it and joined him.

  Beyond the ridge a big yellow box lay in a hollow. Dilke smiled at their startled faces as they read the words: TIGARI DE PRIMA.

  The transporter! It had sunk into a bed of rusty filings and the card was soaked with water. They approached it and Henry touched the mould which spread over its side and smelt the smell of decomposed card. There was no door into it. It was an old pack, discarded months before, a mechanic’s oily thumb-print marked its surface.

  During the afternoon they heard the men working on the tank engine and the bench creaked when a heavy weight was lowered on to it, disturbing a shower of particles from above.

  But now the clink of spanners and the sound of drilling stopped.

  Yakov sang in the Italian style, full of heart and excessive vibrato. They heard the sound of giant feet receding then the crash of a closing door and the workshop was silent.

  Olsen checked the time. “Clock-watchers!” he said.

  “No Stakhanovites, they,” murmured Henry.

  The light had so diminished that they stumbled over the rubbish in their track, so they left the shelter of the bench and travelled in the open. Here the floor was swept clean and the tools left lying at the end of the day were polished bright with use.

  The area near the bench was smooth but beyond it heavy tanks had created a desolate landscape of cracked concrete, and the clay droppings from their tracks littered the floor.

  Their way to the shed door was across this area of ravines and clay mountains.

  This was the most arduous part of their journey; they followed the edges of ravines, scrambled across valleys filled with rubble and made detours around cliffs of dried mud. In the fading daylight it was difficult to keep a sense of direction and they sometimes crossed and re-crossed the same area. At last the only light came from the single bulb high in the roof; the night sky was framed in the open end of the shed.

  Slowly, within the silent shed, a pervasive sound grew, a murmuring, singing sound, which came from above.

  To Dilke and his companions the vast interior was a black universe. They turned up their faces and stared into the darkness, blinking at the fixed yellow star with its whirling constellation of insect satellites.

  The volume of sound fluctuated, its timbre became harsher, a groaning note insinuated itself and grew loud
er. There was a sharp report—then silence.

  The three men stared at each other.

  From another direction the sound began again and built up to its climax. But now it was overlaid by a counterpoint of other noises until it seemed to come from everywhere, from nowhere, from within their heads, from outer space.

  The great shell of the building was cooling in the night air. Its skin of sheet metal bolted to steel contracted minutely. The cosmic groans of stresses building up and of tensions suddenly released continued as the men walked on in the dim light. The noise faded as the structure adjusted to the night’s temperature. A last sharp crack echoed down the shed, then there was only the sound of their footsteps and the tapping of moths hitting the high lamp.

  A huge clod lay in front of them, moulded into a block by the tank track from which it had fallen. They climbed it to get a better view of the way, and from the top they saw before them the dark line of a hose-pipe leading to a tap by the door. They descended, hurried across a rough plain and got on to the pipe with difficulty. Olsen scrambled up from Dilke’s shoulders, then he pulled up Henry and they both dragged up Dilke. The hose-pipe was grooved along its length and they walked in file in the top groove. Dilke’s eyes wearily followed the undulating path which swept in big curves to right and left. Henry walked like an automaton, Olsen in stolid silence.

  At last the pipe rose in a steep curve before them. Water leaked from the tap and ran down the groove in which they walked; they drank from the stream then jumped to the floor. The pipe had brought them to within a few hundred millimetres of the great door. A strip of cloth which had been used to bandage the leaking tap had fallen to the ground.

  They had not slept for almost eighteen hours and they crawled into a fold of the cloth and lay down.

  The silence in the shed was almost complete. Only the moths orbiting the bulb moved. The men dozed, disturbed occasionally by stunned moths crashing comet-like to the floor—but finally they were lulled to sleep by the soft flutter of wings.