Mirage

by James Follett

  ‘A problem?’ Daniel queried. ‘Surely all we have to do is deliver them to our embassy in Geneva so that they can be sent home in the diplomatic bag?’

  ‘No,’ said Avrim firmly. ‘For one thing our Swiss diplomatic mission is much too important to get it involved in this sort of operation - we’re handling goods not processing intelligence. For another, the Swiss security police are certain to keep all embassies under continuous surveillance - especially ours. Anyone making regular deliveries is going to be followed back here, maybe even stopped before they got into the embassy.’

  ‘Okay. So whatever method we use to deliver the large drawings, we’ll have to use for the films?’

  Avrim gave an enigmatic smile. ‘Exactly. And at the rate Albert is bringing us drawings, I estimate that we’ll have to make one delivery every three months.’

  Daniel frowned. ‘Even with all the piece part drawings on film, they’re going to be sizeable consignments.’

  Avrim thought for a moment. ‘You know the Mirage, Daniel. At this rate, how long do you reckon before we’ve got all the drawings?’ ‘Six to nine months at a guess.’

  Avrim sucked pensively on his teeth. He picked up one of the parcels of repacked large prints and weighed it thoughtfully in his hand. ‘Shit... we’ve got a real problem on our hands.’

  ‘Storage is no problem,’ Daniel pointed out. ‘We can spread the parcels out in the loft. Distribute them evenly so as not to overload the ceiling rafters. No sweat.’

  ‘The drawings aren’t doing any good stuck here .... Your mother’s going to have to go home to report back on the problems to her go-between in person. It’s too involved to do over the phone.’ Daniel grimaced. ‘You try persuading her to go home.’

  ‘I’ve tried.’

  ‘Well, try again.’

  Despite her earlier objections, Leonora eventually saw reason and agreed to return to Israel to report the matter to Emil. As far as she and Daniel were concerned, Emil was the go-between. Only Avrim knew Emil’s real identity.

  20

  March 1969

  It was still too cold to use Cinderella’s outside tables, therefore the bar was packed as it had been virtually every lunchtime throughout the winter.

  Daniel was serving drinks when an attractive-looking couple entered the bar. They started in a booth and gradually worked their way on to the bar-stools as they became vacant. They were young. Very dark. The man, a rugged outdoor type; the girl, pretty with bobbed hair. They talked in low voices. Sometimes kissing. Staring into each other’s eyes, oblivious of their surroundings. They were still there when the last customer had left. Daniel cleared his throat loudly. ‘We’re closing now, sir.’

  The young man glanced round and offered a hand. ‘Hi. I’m Jack - this is my fiancee, Katra. We’re on a touring holiday from home.’ Daniel froze. The stranger had spoken in Hebrew. Katra was smiling shyly at him. Sensing a trap, he asked: ‘Where did you say you were from?’

  ‘Good old Tango Alpha,’ said Jack cheerfully in English. ‘You must be Daniel? Do we qualify for a free drink? Compatriots and all that?’

  ‘Jack! Katra! ’ Beaming broadly, Avrim entered the bar and put his arms around the couple. ‘You made it! Are we glad to see you. Aren’t we, Daniel?’

  ‘Are we?’

  Raquel appeared. Avrim made the introductions. ‘Old colleagues of mine.’ He kissed Katra and grabbed her hand and examined a sparkling engagement ring. ‘Hey. Is this for real?’

  ‘It’s for real,’ Katra confirmed, laughing. ‘As from last month.’ Avrim smiled. ‘The best cover is no cover. So what brings you to Switzerland?’

  ‘A Glendale motorcamper,’ Jack replied. ‘French plates. It’s outside. Come and take a look.’

  That night the five of them formed a human chain passing parcels of drawings from the loft, down the stairs, and out to the smart motorcamper that Jack had reversed into the alley. Altogether fifty parcels were loaded into the motorcamper - close on a tonne of drawings. The last item aboard was a bag containing the five hundred rolls of film that Avrim had processed. Jack checked the tyres and increased their pressures. ‘Specially strengthened suspension,’ he explained.

  Raquel peered inside. The bunks were covered in parcels and they were even stacked in the shower. ‘What the hell will you do with them all?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh that’ll be easy,’ said Katra. ‘We’ll find a quiet place to camp tonight, and then we start work repacking them. You’d be surprised what we can hide behind trim panels and under the floor.’

  ‘What about your route home?’ Daniel wanted to know.

  Jack grinned and held the front passenger door open for Katra. ‘Best you don’t know,’ he said, climbing behind the wheel and starting the camper’s engine. ‘Just remember that Customs are usually more concerned about what comes into their countries rather than what goes out. See you in a few weeks when you’ve got another cargo for us.’ He revved the engine and let in the clutch. Daniel, Raquel and Avrim watched the camper’s tail lights reach the end of the alley and turn on to the road. Getting rid of the parcels was a major responsibility lifted from their shoulders.

  Had they seen the camper leave from the front of the bar, they would have seen a Citroen DS pull out from the kerb some three hundred yards back and set off in the direction the camper had taken.

  Ten days later, Daniel received a postcard from Haifa: ‘All home safe and sound. Everyone delighted with our souvenirs. Be seeing you again when the winter sports season is over. Jack.’

  21

  CHERBOURG

  Despite a raw north-easterly gusting across the harbour, a small group of locals gathered on the swing bridge to watch the fast attack craft as it swung to port and headed towards its mooring jetty by CMN’s slipway.

  Brigadier Lenny Errol slid open the wheelhouse’s side door and returned the friendly waves. ‘You’re right, Joe,’ he commented to Joe Tyssen. ‘They are on our side.’

  ‘The whole town’s with us, sir.’

  ‘You’d better call me Lenny.’ He opened the Saar boat’s throttles slightly and listened with satisfaction to the muted burble of the four finely-tuned diesels.

  Lenny Errol was Emil’s obvious choice to organize the breakout of the Cherbourg boats. He was a reservist who had willingly left the running of his powerboat business in Haifa to his brother for the duration of the operation. Lenny was a dedicated powerboat freak. His idea of fun was having his ankles and neck sprained in a Group One offshore powerboat race - the pre-World War Two sport that had been recently revived by the British Daily Express with their gruelling Cowes to Torquay race, arguably the toughest course in the world.

  Lenny lived and breathed powerboats, much to the chagrin of two successive wives, both of whom had presented him with ultimatums: them or powerboats. Lenny had weighed up the pros and cons and taken the obvious decision. Consequently, the opportunity to skipper a fleet of five fast attack craft on what promised to be the ultimate offshore powerboat race of all time was one that he jumped at. From Emil’s point of view, Lenny was the perfect choice; not only for his sailing abilities, but because he was a good organizer and shrewd forward planner.

  It was the need for careful forward planning that occupied Lenny’s thoughts as he brought the forty-metre boat alongside CMN’s quay where other members of the team of Israeli technicians were waiting to catch mooring lines. Even after one brief run, Lenny had learned the feel of the boat to the extent that he could use the torque from the propellers to kick the boat sideways towards its mooring. Four of the five boats had been launched. The fifth was still under construction.

  ‘Handles well, eh, Lenny?’ said Joe proudly.

  ‘Like silk,’ Lenny agreed. ‘The others are the same?’

  ‘Nothing much between them.’

  Lenny grunted and glanced down at the four fuel gauges which were hovering a needle’s width above the empty mark. Mindful of a possible Israeli plot to steal the boats, the naval authorities had
instructed Marcel Aliott - CMN’s manager - that the boats were to be allowed no more than one thousand litres of diesel oil at a time when taken out for sea trials. A thousand litres was just enough fuel for a thirty-minute high speed run - which the boat had just returned from.

  ‘Okay, Joe,’ said Lenny, easing the master throttle lever back to a tick-over. ‘Get stuck in.’

  Joe and another Israeli engineer dropped down through a hatch into the engine room and pulled back the sole plates that gave access to the main diesel tanks in the bilges. They quickly recalibrated the sensors so that the fuel gauges read zero even though there were at least fifty litres in each tank.

  ‘Okay!’ Lenny called down on the interphone. ‘They’re all on zero. That’s great, lads.’ There was laughter in his eyes when the two men reappeared. He was enjoying every minute of this new and exciting challenge. ‘Damn me if my gauges aren’t telling me I’m sucking air!’ To undermine the irony of his comment he blipped the throttles so that the four diesels opened up briefly to a sustained roar of full power that echoed thunderously around the harbour.

  Lenny’s plan was simple; by constantly zeroing the gauges and not using all the fuel that was doled out to the boats before each sea trial, a reserve of fuel would gradually build up in the tanks over the next few weeks until they were brimming.

  That night Lenny called a conference of senior members of his team in the house he had rented near CMN in the Rue Dom Pedro. Morale was high in the team - more so with the posting home of the surly Jack Cartier. The easy-going but tough Lenny was very different. He had an eye for detail and like all good commanders, there was a touch of the showman about him.

  ‘Some operational names for the boats, gentlemen,’ he announced. ‘Saar One we’ll call Honey. The others, in order, will be called Judy, Tiffany, Pussy and Tania.

  ‘They sound familiar,’ said Walter Etzan, smiling.

  ‘I’m a James Bond fan,’ Lenny explained. ‘They’re all ladies who screwed 007. This time they’re going to screw de Gaulle.’

  Everyone laughed.

  After a few minutes’ discussion it was generally agreed that at the current rate of progress, all five boats would be ready around the middle of the year.

  ‘So what would be a good day for the breakout?’ Lenny queried, looking around the table. ‘You gentlemen know France. What’s the Frog equivalent of Yom Kippur?’

  ‘July fourteen,’ said Joe promptly. ‘Bastille Day. Not that we need worry too much. The locals are more pro-Israeli than they are pro-French.’

  Lenny chuckled. ‘Ah. But don’t forget that we have a duty to provide our local friends with a ready-made excuse for when heads start rolling. July fourteen it is, gentlemen.’

  The meeting closed with a good luck and long life toast to Israel’s new prime minister - Mrs Golda Meir.

  22

  ISRAEL April 1969

  Carl Gless of Israel Aircraft Industries delivered the Atar jet engine spare in person to the chief engineer at the Chel Ha’Avir’s Herzlia maintenance unit. He parked his one ton Commer in the underground bunker beside the test bed where a stripped-down engine from a Mirage fighter was forlornly awaiting urgently needed spares which there now seemed little hope of obtaining. There was a limit to what could be achieved by cannibalizing scrapped engines and still provide pilots with serviceable aircraft. The maintenance crews at Herzlia had reached that limit. Four of their Mirages were now permanently grounded - a figure that looked certain to rise to six by the end of the week.

  The chief engineer drained his coffee and wandered over to the van. ‘So what have you scrounged for us this time, Carl?’

  Carl jumped out from behind the wheel. Like a magician producing something extraordinary out of a hat, he threw open the van’s rear doors.

  The engineer peered inside. ‘Holy shit!’

  Lying on the floor was a beautifully machined steel alloy ring about twenty inches in diameter. The ring’s gleaming walls were perforated with myriads of neatly machined holes.

  ‘One annular combustor ring,’ said Carl proudly.

  The engineer picked up the ring and examined it critically under a bench light. The standard of machining was excellent and there was even the correct SNECMA part number stamped on a flange. ‘How the hell did you come by this?’ he demanded.

  Carl’s pleased grin broadened. ‘How do you think? We made it. Only don’t go telling anyone.’

  The engineer groaned. ‘Just as I thought. Another of your copying disasters. Now tell me the good news.’

  ‘Don’t be churlish, Leo. You try it out and let me know what you think.’

  ‘And blow my test rig to glory because you’ve used some crap alloy? I’ll tell you what, Carl - you try it out.’

  ‘No point, Leo. We’ve already tested six.’

  ‘Six!’

  ‘And all of them worked perfectly.’

  The engineer offered the combustor ring up to the stripped-down jet engine. ‘The mounting holes line up,’ he admitted grudgingly.

  Carl got back into his van and started the engine. ‘Give it a burn, Leo. Call me when you’re finished.’

  The engineer nodded. ‘Okay. We’ll monitor it from the bunkers. You pay for a new roof if it goes. Agreed?’

  ‘Agreed,’ Carl laughed and crunched the van into gear.

  The engineer rang Carl’s office at IAI late the following day. His voice was unnaturally calm and restrained. ‘Carl - were you kidding when you said you made that combustor ring?’

  ‘I was dead serious. I was also serious about keeping quiet. Why? How did it make out?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘We reassembled the engine and gave it a blow at fifty per cent thrust for thirty minutes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing. So we ran it flat out for five minutes. Again nothing. We’ve just finished an inspection strip down.’

  ‘And it’s okay?’ Carl prompted.

  ‘Okay?’ echoed the engineer. ‘It’s absolutely fucking bloody marvellous. When can I have six more?’

  ‘How about Wednesday?’

  ‘You’re kidding! You’ve got to be.’

  ‘You’ll have them on Wednesday. And Leo - remember those core liners you were griping about?’

  ‘What about them?’ The engineer sounded suspicious.

  Carl glanced at his production schedule. ‘You can have them at the same time.’

  For the first time in his career, the engineer was unable to think of an expletive that was suitable for the occasion.

  23

  WINTERTHUR

  Albert entered Cinderella’s, bringing an unwelcome dose of Swiss winter with him into the bar as he opened the door. He hoisted himself on to his usual barstool and glanced quickly around at the sprinkling of other regular customers who had decided that winter nights in Winterthur, which could be as dull as a party political broadcast, were best whiled away in Cinderella’s.

  Raquel smiled warmly at him. ‘Good evening, Albert.’ She reached for the rum. ‘Usual?’

  ‘Hallo, Raquel. I think I’ll have a whisky tonight.’ Daniel overheard the prearranged signal. He finished serving a customer and, with only a perfunctory nod to Albert, went out into the backyard. Albert’s car was parked in its usual place. He opened the boot with his spare key and heaved out the two parcels. They were far heavier than usual. He felt around the boot’s interior to be certain he hadn’t missed anything and carried the parcels up to the spare bedroom where Avrim was watching television.

  They now had an efficient routine for processing batches of drawings. After assigning each parcel a batch number and listing its contents, Daniel would carefully tick the drawings listed on the master parts list to ensure that every print was included for each assembly and subassembly. Albert’s system was efficient; it was rare for drawings to be missing.

  Daniel knew that there was something different about these two parcels even before he had opened them; they felt different. Just how differe
nt was revealed when he and Avrim ripped away the brown wrapping paper. The heavy packages contained only a few drawings each but the drawings were huge.

  ‘Different,’ Avrim commented, battling to unfold a print that threatened to fill the room. Daniel’s pulse quickened in the same way that it had when he had received the first parcels from Albert. These were the drawings he had been waiting for: beautifully detailed, a mass of close tolerance dimensions, they were the full-size fuselage frame drawings and main spar production prints of the Mirage. Some areas of the huge prints were devoted to development drawings. Like dressmakers’ patterns, they showed the complex shapes that sections of aluminium had to conform to before they were stamped into their finished three-dimensional shapes. All the details were there: struts, cross-braces and stringers - everything. With such drawings IAI could make a serious start on building new Mirages rather than making spares for existing aircraft. Valuable as the earlier prints were, these new prints represented a start on the expansion of the Chel Ha’Avir and, provided they could get them home, would mark the turning point for IAI in which the plant would change from a support factory for other manufacturers’ aircraft and turn them into a world-league planemaker.

  ‘Well,’ Avrim observed, ‘no way are we going to photograph these. Shove them in the roof for Jack’s next trip.’

  24

  CHERBOURG June 1969

  Tania, the last boat in the mini fleet, was launched with little ceremony although roll-out of a new boat at CMN was quite a spectacle.

  Watched by Lenny and his team, the huge electrically-operated doors of CMN’s main construction shed opened at 10.00am precisely. A few minutes later the sleek, flared bows began emerging. The yard gates swung open. CMN men with coloured paddles held up the traffic on the boulevard while the clumsy ensemble clanked on half-buried tracks across the road. With frequent inspection stops and much shouting and arm waving, the forty-metre boat and its cradle lumbered like a dinosaur seeking water across the railway tracks towards the concrete slipway.