by Len Deighton
Spy Story
( Harry Palmer - 5 )
Len Deighton
An attempted murder, the defection of a highly placed KGB official, and an explosive nuclear submarine chase beneath the Arctic Ocean seem to have little connection to one another. But they are the sparks that propel Pat Armstrong — also known as Harry Palmer — into the heart of a brutal East-West power play.
And when Armstrong returns to his own apartment — where someone who looks and dresses just like him has taken up his identity — we are drawn into the world of spies and counterspies, plots and counterplots, that is Len Deighton's unbeatable trademark.
Len Deighton
Spy Story
SPY STORY — the new spy thriller by the author of The Ipcress File, An Expensive Place to Die and other bestsellers once more establishes Len Deighton as the true king of the genre.
'This is a vintage Len Deighton thriller… Too laconic for an old-fashioned cliff hanger, Mr Deighton yet produces a sort of dispassionate cerebral excitement which like the polar ice itself, is nine-tenths submerged and all the more menacing for that'
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
'Fascination of war games, authentic thrills of chase and capture, and our hero's jokey approach to love, life and his colleagues can't disguise the true horror of what he's doing. Impressive'
Sunday telegraph
'The dialogue has a freshly fired flavour and the Realpolitik a way-out plausibility… The tone may be realistic but the spirit is essentially up-beat and romantic. Behind the flip cracks and the technology, the spirit of Buchan stirs again'
THE GUARDIAN
'SPY STORY gets closer to what Kipling called The Great Game of international espionage than any fiction of recent years. Some of the details about underwater monitoring are certain to raise eyebrows, if nothing more, in the Pentagon and the Admiralty'
DREW MIDDLETON, Military Editor, New York Times
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to acknowledge the help and assistance of Major Berchtold, U.S. Army (retired), and the staff of the Institute of War Studies, London, and in particular the permission given for the inclusion of extracts and quotations from the Institute's previously unpublished confidential reports and private papers. All such extracts are subject to full copyright protection provided by the Berne Convention and the Copyright Act of 1956. No part of these extracts may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or stored in any form or by any means, either electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
'But war's a game, which, were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at.'
William Cowper, 1731 — 1800
Chapter One
As each bound ends, units cease to be operative until commencement of next bound.
RULES. ALL GAMES. STUDIES CENTRE. LONDON
Forty-three days without a night: six pale-blue fluorescent weeks without a sniff of air, sky, or a view of the stars. I drank in a cautious half-lungful of salty mist and smelled the iodine and seaborne putrefaction that seaside landladies call ozone.
H.M.S. Viking, a deep water anchorage in western Scotland, is no place to celebrate a return to the real world. The uninhabited islands, a mile or more out in the Sound, were almost swallowed by sea mist. Overhead, dark clouds raced across the water to dash, themselves upon the sharp granite peaks of Great Hamish. Then, in threads, they tumbled down the hillside, trailing through the stones and walls that had once been a Highland croft.
There were four submarines alongside the one from which I emerged. Out at the anchorage were more of them. The lash of the westerly wind made them huddle close to the mother ships and their crooning generators. The yellow deck lights were visible through the grey mist, and so were the flocks of gulls that screamed and wheeled and shrieked as they fell upon the kitchen garbage.
The wind brought gusts of rain, whipping up crested waves that awoke the subs. Underfoot I felt the great black hull so ain against its moorings. The brow tilted. Stepping from the edge of each horizontal fin to the next was easier if I didn't look down.
Now the next hull groaned, as the same wave sucked and gurgled at its bow. The forecast had been reasonably right for once: overcast, low cloud, drizzle and wind westering. The rain scratched at the slop-coloured sea and crept into my sleeves, boots and collar. My rubber shoe slipped but I recovered my balance. I shook the water off my face and cursed pointlessly.
'Steady on,' said Ferdy Foxwell behind me, but I cursed again and built his name into one of the inversions.
'At least the navy is on time,' said Ferdy. There was an orange-coloured Ford on the jetty. The door opened and a slim man got out. He was wearing a Burberry and a tweed hat but I knew he'd be the British naval officer from the police office. He bent it his head against the rain. The armed U.S.N. sentry at the end of the gangway poked his head out of his shelter to check the pass. I recognized the officer as Frazer, a lieutenant. He made his way along the slippery walk towards us, stepping across the gaps with commendable agility.
'Let me take that.' He extended a hand, and then smiled in embarrassment as he noticed that the shiny metal case was padlocked to a shoulder-chain under my coat.
'Help Mr Foxwell,' I said. 'He never fastens his.'
'Neither would you if you had any sense,' puffed Foxwell. The man squeezed past me and I had a chance to look down at the oily scum, and smell the diesel, and decide that Ferdy Foxwell was right. When I reached the brow — the horizontal fin — of the next submarine I rested the box and looked back. The young officer was bowed under the weight of Ferdy's case, and Ferdy was stretching his arms to balance his two hundred pounds of compact flab, teetering along the gangway like a circus elephant balancing on a tub. Six weeks was a long time to spend in a metal tube, no matter about sun lamps and cycling gear. I picked up the case loaded with spools and tape recordings, and remembered how I sprinted across these brows on the outward journey.
A red Pontiac station wagon came along the jetty, slowed at the torpedo store and rolled carefully over the double ramps. It continued along the front until turning off at the paint shop. It disappeared down between the long lines of huts. The curved huts were shiny in the rain. Now there was no human movement, and the buildings looked as old as the black granite hills that shone rain-wet above them.
'Are you all right?' Frazer asked.
I shouldered the wet case as I started down the companionway to the jetty. The hatch in the sentry hut slid open an inch or two. I could hear the radio inside playing Bach. 'O.K., buddy,' said the sailor. He slammed the hatch shut as a gust of wind hammered the hut with rain.
There was a panel van behind the Ford. A bad-tempered Admiralty policeman grumbled that we were two hours late and about how the Americans couldn't make tea. He scowled as he signed for the cases and locked them in the safe in the van. Ferdy shot him in the back of the head with a nicotine-stained finger. Frazer saw the gesture and permitted himself a thin smile.
'Perhaps a tot?' said Frazer.
'I wish I had your job,' said Ferdy Foxwell.
Frazer nodded. I suppose we all said that to him.
There was the clang of a steel door. I looked at the nuclear submarine that had taken us to the Arctic and back. We civilians were always permitted to leave first. Now there was a deck party assembling forward of the conning tower, or what I'd learned to call a sail. They faced several more hours of work before the sub's second crew arrived and took her to sea again.
'Where is everyone?'
'Asleep, I shouldn't wonder,' said Frazer.
'Asleep?'
A Russian sub came down through the North Channel and into the Iri
sh Sea on Wednesday morning… big panic — hunter killers, sonar buoys, County Class destroyers, you name it. Yards of teleprinter. Seventy-two hours of red alert. We were only stood-down last night. You missed the pantomime.'
'They were frightened it was going to put guns ashore in Ulster?' Ferdy asked.
'Who knows what?' said Frazer. 'There were two Russian intelligence trawlers and a destroyer off Malin Head, too. You can see they'd be worried.'
'So?'
'We stopped Class A Radio traffic for five and a half hours.'
'And the sub?'
'They tracked it out past Wexford yesterday afternoon. Looks like they were just taking our pulse.' He smiled as he unlocked the door of his car. It was well cared for, and all dressed up in black vinyl, Lamborghini-style rear-window slats, and even a spoiler.
'They're tricky bastards!' said Ferdy resignedly. Hs blew on his hands to warm them. 'Who said something about splicing that damned mainbrace?'
Frazer got into the driver's seat and twisted round to unlock the rear doors. 'It might have been me,' he said,
I reached under my oilskin coat and found a dry handkerchief to polish the rain off my spectacles. Frazer started the car.
Ferdy Foxwell said, 'Never mind the dollars and the cinnamon toast and grain-fed steaks… six weeks without a drink: it's positively unnatural.'
Frazer said, 'Not all the skippers are as bad as Firebull.'
Ferdy Foxwell settled back into the rear seat of the car. He was a huge man, well over six feet tall and broad enough to carry it. He was in his early fifties but still had enough, brown wavy hair to visit a smart barber once a month. But his hair was no more an advert for the barber than were his rumpled suits for his Savile Row tailor, or his curious inability to spell for the famous public school to which he'd also sent his two sons. 'A drink,' said Ferdy.
He smiled. His crooked, gapped teeth needed only gold wire to complete the image of a mischievous child.
The Admiralty van containing our tapes went at the regulation fifteen miles an hour. We followed at the same pace, all the way to the exit. It was a double compound, with a large check-point at each gate, and the wire twenty feet tall. Newcomers were always told that H.M.S. Viking had been a prison camp during the war but they were wrong, it had been an experimental torpedo testing unit. But it would have done, it would have done.
The dog handlers were drinking hot coffee in the guard tower and the dogs were howling like werewolves. The sentry waved us through. We turned on to the coast road and went down past the housing, the Officers Club and cinema. The streets were empty but the coffee-shop car park was full. The lights of the housing were lost in a flurry of sea mist that rolled in upon us. The Admiralty van continued along the coast road to the airport. We took the high road, climbing steeply up the narrow road that leads to the moors and the pass over the Hamish.
Defoliated by Iron Age farmers, the land is now good for nothing but a few black-faced sheep. This ancient tilted edge of Scotland has only a scattering of poor soil upon the hard granite that does not weather. I felt the wheels hesitate on an ice patch, and ahead of us the higher ground was grey with last week's snow. Only the red grouse can survive outdoors on this sort of moorland, sheltering under the heather and feeding upon its shoots, moving gently all the time so that the snow does not bury them.
From here the valley formed an enormous stadium, roofed by the hurrying black clouds. Halfway up its steep far side there was a huddle of grey stone cottages smudged with smoke from open fires. One of them was a cramped little pub.
'We'll stop for a drink at The Bonnet?'
'You'll not get me past it,' I said.
'My God, it's cold,' said Ferdy, and rubbed the condensation from the window to see how far it was to the pub.
'There's the one I'm going to get next year,' said Frazer. A large light-blue BMW was on the road behind us. It had a left-hand drive. 'Second-hand,' Frazer added apologetically. 'It shouldn't cost me more than a new one of these. My next door neighbour has one. Says he'll never buy another English car.'
Cars, politics or climate, for a Scotsman they were English if bad, British if good. Perhaps he sensed my thoughts. He smiled, 'It's the electrics,' he said.
I could hear it now, just a faint burr of the Highlands. It would make sense for the navy to use a local man for this kind of job. Strangers could still find a barrier of silence once the cries were left behind.
Frazer took the hairpin bends with exaggerated care. On one of the turns he stopped, and reversed, to pull tight enough to avoid the snow-banked ditch. But the blue BMW stuck with us, following patiently. Following more patiently than was natural for a man who drives such a car.
Frazer glanced in his mirror again. 'I think we should,' he said, voicing our unspoken thoughts, and Ferdy wrote down the registration number in his crocodile-covered note pad. It was a Düsseldorf registration, and even while Ferdy was writing it, the BMW gave a toot and started to overtake.
Whatever was the extent of his intention, he'd chosen his moment well. The BMW squeezed past us in a spray of powdery snow from the drift on our left, and Frazer's nervous reaction was to swerve away from the flash of light blue and the hard stare of the bearded man in the passenger seat.
The road was downhill and the ice was still hard and shiny up here on the top of the Hamish. Frazer fought the wheel as we swung round — as slowly as a boat at anchor — and slid almost broadside down the narrow mountain road.
We gathered speed. Frazer pumped the brake pedal, trying vainly to snatch at the road. I could see only the sheer drop, down where a clump of firs were wailing to catch us a thousand feet below.
'Bastards, bastards,' mumbled Frazer. Ferdy, flung off-balance, grabbed at the seat back, the roof and the sun visor, so as not to grab at Frazer and kill us all.
There was a thump as the rear wheel struck some stones at the road edge, and the tyres for a moment gripped enough to make the differential whine. Frazer was into bottom gear by now, and at the next patch of stones the car whimpered and ceded to his brake pedal enough for him to narrow the angle at which we were sliding. The road was more steeply downhill and the low gear had not slowed us enough to take the steep bend ahead. Frazer hit the horn in two loud blasts before we hit the banked snow that had collected around the edge of the hairpin, like piped icing round a birthday cake. We stopped with a bang of hollow steel, and the car rocked on its suspension.
'My God,' said Ferdy. For a moment we sat still. Praying, sighing or swearing according to inclination.
'I hope you're not going to do that every time someone tries to overtake,' I said.
'Just foreign registrations,' said Frazer.
Frazer started the engine again. Gently he let in the clutch and the car waddled out of the drift. He took the middle of the road, and at no more than twenty-five miles an hour we went all the way down to the bridge and up the next climb all the way to The Bonnet.
He pulled into the yard there. There was a crunch of gravel and a soft splintering of ice. The BMW was already parked but none of us remarked upon the way its driver had nearly killed us.
'I'm not sure I'd enjoy it,' said Frazer, talking of the voyage but studying our faces as if to see the effect the near-accident had had on us. 'I'm a destroyer man myself…like to keep my head above water.'
I would have described Frazer as an office-boy, but if he wanted to play Long John Silver it was all right by me.
'Peace time,' pronounced Ferdy, 'a submarine trip north is no different to trailing Russians round the Med in an intelligence trawler.'
'In winter the Med's a damned site rougher,' I said.
'You're right,' said Ferdy. 'As sick as a dog, I was, and I could see that Russian cruiser as steady as a rock all the time.'
'Your second trip, wasn't it?' asked Frazer.
That's right.'
'Well, you chaps never do more than one a year. It's over and done with, eh?'
'Are you buying?' Ferdy Foxwell asked him.
'Then it'll be small ones,' said Frazer. The wind b it into us as we stepped from the car but there was a fine view. The hills at the other end of the valley obscured the anchorage, but to each side of the summit I could see the Sound and the mist-shrouded islands that continued all the way to the grey Atlantic breakers. The wind sang in the car aerial and tugged at the chimney smote. We were high enough to be entangled in the fast moving underside of the storm clouds. Ferdy coughed as the cold wet air entered his lungs.
'All that air-conditioned living,' said Frazer. 'You'd better take your briefcase — security and all that, you know.'
'It's only dirty underwear,' said, Ferdy. He coughed again. Frazer went around the car testing each door-lock and the boot too. For a moment he looked down at his hand to see if it shook. It did, and he pushed it into the pocket of his trench-coat.
I walked across to the BMW and looked inside it. There was a short oilskin coat, a battered rucksack and a stout walking-stick: a walker's equipment.
It was a tiny cottage. One bar; a front parlour except for the warped little counter and flap scorched by cigarettes aid whittled with the doodles of shepherds' knives. On the whitewashed walls there was a rusty Highlander's dirk, an engraving of a ship in full sail, a brightly shone ship's bell and a piece of German submarine surrendered in May 1945. The landlord was a shaggy-h aired giant, complete with kilt and beer-stained shirt.
There were two customers already drinking, but they had taken the bench near the window so we could stand around the open peat fire and slap our hands together and make self-congratulatory noises about its warmth.
The beer was good: dark and not too sweet, and not crystal clear like the swill that the brewers extol on TV. The Bonnet's had flavour, like a slice of wheat loaf. Frazer knew the landlord well but, with the formality that Highland men demand, he called him Mr MacGregor. 'We'll have another fall of snow before the day's through, Mr MacGregor.'
