Mirage

by James Follett

  ‘Daniel, you’ll have to telephone your father. He’s the one with contacts. Maybe he can fix something with your Paris Embassy? If we go into Belfort, maybe we could phone from there?’

  Without answering, Daniel started the engine and drove back on to the road. He turned right at the junction and headed towards the nearby town of Belfort.

  Lucky and Robbie arrived at the junction fifteen minutes later. They stopped while Lucky frantically consulted the road map.

  ‘They’ll head south,’ he decided.

  ‘What about Daniel Kalen’s original idea in his report to ship the drawings back on the boats being built at Cherbourg?’ Robbie queried.

  ‘That would’ve gone by the board with the French embargoing the boats,’ Lucky replied after a moment’s consideration of the suggestion. ‘They’re going to head south.’

  ‘Why?’ Robbie wanted to know.

  ‘Because south is where the Mediterranean is. And the Mediterranean is that much nearer home. Savvy?’

  He swung the car left and swore as the Rover’s heavy rear end

  caused the car to slew sideways on the snow. He corrected the skid. The Rover was not an ideal car for fast motoring on winding roads in driving snow.

  46

  TEL AVIV

  Leonora was tending her kitchen garden when the telephone rang. There was a series of clicks and bangs. A voice speaking in French told the caller to insert hundred franc jetons. And then Daniel was speaking.

  ‘Daniel! How lovely to hear you. Where are you?’

  ‘Is dad in?’

  There was an urgent note in his voice. Worried, she answered: ‘No. I’m not expecting him until Friday. Why? What’s the matter?’ ‘Mother - please listen carefully. We’re in France. Belfort. We’ve got the last consignment with us because the usual shipping and forwarding couldn’t handle it. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes - I think so.’

  ‘That’s not good enough. We got the last consignment of the order—’

  ‘Yes - I’ve got that,’ Leonora interrupted. ‘You mean you have to make the delivery yourself?’

  ‘That’s exactly right. Please, mother, you must get hold of dad. We need instructions on where to deliver the order. The agents haven’t been able to pass on their instructions.’

  Leonora thought fast. She had an emergency number for getting in touch with Emil but she hadn’t used if for years. ‘Okay. I’ll try. How do I get hold of you?’

  There was a pause at the other end. ‘I can’t direct dial you from this part of France. It has to be from a PTT. I’ll call you back in an hour. Only please get hold of dad.’

  A voice broke in instructing Daniel to insert another jeton and then the line went dead. Whatever went wrong with the call caused the line to remain open. Leonora spent five minutes frantically rattling the cradle before the line cleared. She dug out her address book and called the Tel Aviv number. It was another five minutes before a woman’s voice answered. No number or extension given. Just a simple: ‘Hallo?’

  ‘I have to talk to General Kalen please. I’m his—’

  ‘Just a moment.’

  Another maddening wait. Another voice. This time a man. ‘Hallo?’

  Leonora wanted to scream. ‘I must talk to General Kalen. This is his wife calling.’

  ‘Is it urgent?’

  ‘Of course it’s urgent! I wouldn’t be using this number if it wasn’t urgent!’

  ‘I’ll check if there’s anyone of that name.’

  Leonora began to lose her temper. ‘He’s worked for you for over twenty years! How many generals have you got there, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Could we have your number please? We’ll call you back.’ The voice was infuriatingly matter of fact.

  Leonara gave her number. She was in the middle of repeating that her call was urgent when the line went dead. The telephone rang the instant she replaced the receiver.

  ‘Leonora?’ It was Emil’s voice.

  ‘Emil! Thank God. I’ve just had a phone call from Daniel. He’s in France. He says he’s got the final export consignment and that he has to deliver it himself. He doesn’t have any shipping instructions. Emil - something’s gone terribly wrong.’

  ‘I’m on my way home now.’

  ‘Please hurry, Emil. He’s phoning back in forty-five minutes.’

  Emil arrived home thirty minutes later. He tried not to show it but his face was grey with worry as he listened carefully to Leonora’s account of her conversation with Daniel. He was reassuring that everything would be all right when the telephone rang. He snatched up the receiver. It was Daniel. No mistaking the voice. He sounded immensely relieved when he heard Emil.

  ‘Daniel - what happened to the couriers?’

  ‘An accident, dad.’

  ‘How serious?’

  ‘Very serious. They weren’t able to pass on their shipping instructions. What the hell do we do? Right now the goods are very perishable. We must export them from France as soon as possible.’ ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘Belfort. This is a PTT phone.’

  ‘You’ve got transport?’

  ‘Yes - our Volks—’

  ‘Okay. Okay. I don’t need to know more. Hold on a minute ...’ Aware of Leonora’s anxious eyes on him, Emil thought hard: torn between the need for secrecy and the need to convey information to his son over the telephone. ‘Listen carefully, Daniel. You remember that report you typed when you first proposed the export scheme?’

  ‘Yes - of course.’

  ‘You’re to go to the port you used when you first arrived in France.’

  ‘Understood.’

  At least Daniel had the sense not to name the port. ‘Can you be there by oh-six-hundred your time tomorrow?’

  ‘I think so, dad.’

  ‘Go to the yacht club quay with the consignment where there’ll be arrangements made for its shipment. It’s close to the town itself. But you must be there by oh-six-hundred. Not a minute later. Repeat that.’

  ‘The yacht club quay with the consignment no later than six tomorrow morning,’ Daniel repeated.

  ‘Not even a minute after oh-six-hundred,’ Emil stressed. ‘Bon voyage. Good luck,’ he hung up.

  ‘I wanted to say goodbye,’ Leonora protested.

  Emil rounded on her. For the first time in all the years she had known him she saw real anger in his eyes. ‘If this goes wrong any more than it has already,’ Emil rasped, ‘not only do we lose our son, but we endanger the lives of dozens of Israelis. Least important - my career is finished. I can do no more for Daniel. From now on he’s on his own.’

  47

  EASTERN FRANCE

  Robbie was out of breath by the time he had raced back to the Rover and fallen into the passenger seat, showering snow into the car’s interior. He had run four hundred yards to the head of the traffic hold-up, found out what the trouble was and run back.

  ‘Tree down,’ he panted. ‘Been down about thirty minutes. Men just starting to clear it. No sign of the VW. They couldn’t have come this way.’

  Lucky exchanged shouts and curses with other drivers caught in the snarl-up as he seven-point turned the Rover on the narrow road. He accelerated and had to brake hard to avoid running into a Fiat with the same idea. He mounted the verge to get past the Fiat and left blaring horns in his wake as he roared off - the Rover’s rear end snaking from the torque he was pouring into the rear axle.

  ‘Thirty minutes!’ he yelled, thumping the wheel. ‘We’ve lost thirty fucking minutes!’

  Robbie made no reply. It seemed to him that they had no chance of catching the Volkswagen now but he knew better than to communicate his thoughts to his employer. Lucky never gave up. Never.

  Lucky drove as fast as he dared on the treacherous surface. Convinced that his quarry would be heading west, he took the Vesoul road out of Belfort - the winding N19 that hairpinned its way up through the pine-clad foothills of the Massif Central, overtaking the occasional truck grinding its way
up the long incline in low gear.

  He gave a sudden exultant scream that made Robbie jump. ‘There they are!’ he yelled, pointing through the windscreen. That’s them!’

  Reading a roadmap in the pitching van gave Raquel a feeling of nausea but she finished the calculation. ‘Daniel - it’s seven hundred miles to Cherbourg.’

  Daniel looked at his watch. It was noon. ‘We’ve got eighteen hours, Rac - plenty of time.’

  ‘Not in these conditions, it’s not. And there’s a ninety-kilometre speed restriction on this thing.’

  ‘Doesn’t apply in France.’

  ‘But there must be some sort of restriction,’ Raquel persisted. ‘Every commercial vehicle has got a speed sticker.’

  ‘Raquel

  ‘And we’ve got to eat and sleep. We must have a sleep, Daniel.’

  ‘Raquel...’ Daniel’s voice was curiously strained. ‘There’s a Rover coming up behind us. That’s got to be the car McNaill said they were using.’

  Raquel twisted round. A three-litre Rover was visible through the rear door window. It was closing the gap fast. A man was leaning out of the passenger window. He was holding something ... pointing it...

  ‘Daniel! He’s—’

  The heavy calibre slug punched through the thin metal. One of the parcels immediately behind Daniel’s seat kicked into the air.

  ‘Get down!’ Daniel yelled. He yanked Raquel’s head forward so that she slipped off the seat.

  Another slug hammered into a parcel.

  Daniel accelerated but he knew with a sick feeling that the van’s performance was no match for the Rover. He yanked the wheel left and right. The van slewed. The Rover was overtaking. They were entering a cutting fringed with pines and ugly outcrops of rock.

  ‘They’re coming past us!’ Raquel yelled.

  Two more shots cracked out but didn’t seem to hit the van.

  Daniel stamped on the brakes. The Rover’s bonnet surged level with his side window. In the mirror he caught a glimpse of a man’s head and shoulders hanging out of the passenger window, aiming a gun down at the tyres. Although Daniel’s van lacked the performance and road holding of the Rover, he did have a significant advantange: his reflexes were those of an experienced fighter pilot. He wrenched the wheel towards the Rover. There was a harsh, grating scream of metal on metal. The instant the Rover’s bonnet dropped back, he slammed into second gear, hauled on the handbrake and wrenched the wheel away from the Rover. The violence and suddenness of the manoeuvre induced a deliberate rear wheel skid in the van that would have produced a spectacular 360-degree spin had the Rover not been in the way. The parcels hurled themselves against the rear door, adding their momentum to the force of the Volkswagen’s rear-end swipe as it cannoned into the Rover. Daniel wrestled with the wheel to bring the wildly bucking van on to course, therefore he didn’t see what happened after the driver of the car lost control. He steadied the van in time to negotiate a hairpin and put his foot down hard as the road straightened.

  Raquel surfaced and eased herself back on to the seat. ‘What happened?’

  ‘He suddenly took to the country,’ Daniel replied grimly. ‘I think we’ve lost him.’

  Raquel peered through the rear window at the empty road. The snow was easing up. ‘I think I nearly lost my breakfast,’ she commented.

  ‘We haven’t had any breakfast.’

  ‘Did you use to fly like that?’

  The sudden relaxing of tension made Daniel laugh. He was about to follow Raquel’s repartee when there was a sudden, ominous ignore-me-and-I’ll-cause-trouble knocking-noise from the Volkswagen’s transmission.

  The soft ground under the thin carpet of snow saved Lucky’s and Robbie’s lives when the Rover launched itself off the road like a V1 leaving its firing ramp. The heavy car gouged into the soil so that it came to rest with its bonnet pressed against a pine tree of a size that suggested that it would have come off best had the Rover not stopped. For once Lucky didn’t swear when things went wrong. He whipped the gear lever into reverse and revved. The rear wheels spun impotently, making a curious flapping noise that spelt trouble.

  Robbie got out. ‘Rear tyre ripped to buggery,’ was his cryptic report.

  The two men set about changing the wheel and made the discovery that the designers of the three-litre Rover had dropped the classic design clanger of all time. To avoid taking up boot space, they had mounted the spare wheel on a wind-down carrier under the boot. Consequently, in the case of a rear wheel puncture, the Rover’s already low ground clearance made it virtually impossible to lower the carrier. Also, when they tried jacking the car up, the jack merely sank down into the soft ground while the car remained put.

  This time Lucky swore.

  48

  VESOUL, EASTERN FRANCE

  Daniel walked briskly out of the Credit Lyonnaise clutching a fistful of one thousand franc notes and walked the two hundred yards along the main street, resisting the temptation to break into a run.

  It was 2.00pm. Six hundred and fifty miles and sixteen hours to go.

  He walked smiling into the showroom of the Citroen garage where Raquel was chatting in English to the owner. He kissed Raquel and fanned the money out on the owner’s desk. ‘There we are. Plus an extra thousand francs for your mechanic if he can have the car ready in thirty minutes.’

  ‘It will be ready,’ the owner promised, beaming as he counted the money. ‘The Ami is only a year old. In perfect condition. Just a few checks.’ He turned his beam on Raquel. ‘To be given such a Christmas present, madame - he must love you very much.’

  Daniel laughed and put his arm around Raquel’s waist. ‘Oh, I do,’ he smiled.

  ‘Despite everything?’ Raquel queried, not acting.

  ‘Despite everything.’

  ‘This is all in order, sir,’ said the owner. ‘The car will be ready in thirty minutes.’

  ‘We have to deliver some Christmas parcels,’ said Daniel. ‘We thought we’d do it in the Ami. Would it be okay if we left our van round the back of your premises for a couple of hours?’

  The owner gave a little bow. ‘No problem at all, sir.’

  Daniel and Raquel spent the thirty minutes in a nearby coffeebar appeasing their hunger with cakes and coffee. They would have preferred a proper meal but decided that they did not have the time.

  When they returned to the garage, the grey Ami was waiting on the forecourt. The mechanic helped them to transfer the parcels to the little estate car and explained the controls to Raquel while Daniel reversed the van down the side of the garage. The owner emerged from his office to hand over the car’s papers. ‘See you in two hours,’ he called out as Raquel pulled away. He returned to his office, wishing that all his sales were so straightforward.

  ‘Try and get some sleep,’ Raquel suggested as she struggled with the unfamiliar dashboard gearlever.

  ‘With your driving?’

  ‘Give me a few miles, but you must get some sleep, Daniel. We’ll be driving through the night.’

  Daniel found the seat’s reclining lever. He stretched out with his head resting on one of the parcels and closed his eyes. ‘Rac,’ he murmured.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I meant what I said.’

  The Ami’s dashboard clock said 3.00pm.

  At 4.00pm the Citroen garage had a delivery which necessitated the mechanic moving the battered Volkswagen van back on to the forecourt. Thirty minutes later, the Rover drove past the garage with Robbie at the wheel. He braked when Lucky yelled, and reversed. Lucky jumped out, glanced briefly at the van, and entered the showroom. Robbie saw him talking to what looked like the owner and handing him a banknote. Lucky raced back to the Rover and piled in. ‘Get going! They’re an hour and a half ahead of us in a grey Ami!’

  49

  CHAUMONT, CENTRAL FRANCE

  Raquel dreaded the towns, not because of the traffic but because it was so easy to get lost. Somehow she managed to pick her way through the urban sprawl of Chaumont wit
hout losing the erratic thread of signposts to Troyes. A mini-bus loaded with Christmas Eve revellers hurtled past, oblivious of the ugly, gleaming slicks of black ice. Its horn blared, but Daniel remained asleep. She glanced at the trip meter. One hundred and eighty kilometres from Vesoul. To convert to miles, multiply the eighteen by six. It was 6.00pm. It had taken her three hours to cover little over a hundred miles. The front-wheel drive Ami was a sure-footed little beast but even it tended to skitter frighteningly on patches of black ice. She dropped her speed. A hundred miles in three hours .... Despair spread from her stomach into her soul like a sickness.

  They had little hope of covering the five hundred and fifty miles to Cherbourg in twelve hours.

  50

  CHERBOURG

  ‘No,’ said Lenny adamantly.

  The Assistant Naval Attache looked worried. ‘But you have to, Lenny. The order came through on a top—’

  ‘I don’t care if the order was handed down on Mount Sinai!’ Lenny retorted. ‘I’m leading the boats out at oh-six-hundred tomorrow morning and we don’t stop for anything until our first refuelling position.’

  ‘Lenny, you have to!’

  ‘Look - I took on this job to get five boats home. That’s what we’ve been training for and what we’re keyed up to do and what we’re going to do. We are not stopping to pick up cargo and passengers.’

  ‘Lenny, listen—’

  ‘No - you listen. So what is this cargo, eh? Let me guess - some sort of espionage material, right? And the passengers? Spies. Okay - fine - if you’ve been up to something, I hope it’s a success, but I don’t want any part of it. So far, everything we’ve planned is morally and maybe technically legal: we’re taking boats that have been paid for. If the French do stop us, then at least all my men will be in uniform as servicemen and will be treated as such by the French. But if we’re caught with spies and sensitive material on board, then there’s a chance that all of them will be charged as spies and treated as criminals. Well, I’m not prepared to take that chance.’