Horse Under Water

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by Len Deighton

After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school – first to the St Martin’s School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. His mother was a professional cook and he grew up with an interest in cookery – a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the Observer and in two cookery books. He worked for a while as an illustrator in New York and as art director of an advertising agency in London.

  Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book, The Ipcress File. Published in 1962, the book was an immediate success.

  Since then his work has gone from strength to strength, varying from espionage novels to war, general fiction and non-fiction. The BBC made Bomber into a day-long radio drama in ‘real time’. Deighton’s history of World War Two, Blood, Tears and Folly, was published to wide acclaim – Jack Higgins called it ‘an absolute landmark’.

  As Max Hastings observed, Deighton captured a time and a mood – ‘To those of us who were in our twenties in the 1960s, his books seemed the coolest, funkiest, most sophisticated things we’d ever read’ – and his books have now deservedly become classics.

  Other Books By Len Deighton

  FICTION

  The Ipcress File

  Horse Under Water

  Funeral in Berlin

  Billion-Dollar Brain

  An Expensive Place to Die

  Only When I Larf

  Bomber

  Declarations of War

  Close-Up

  Spy Story

  Yesterday’s Spy

  Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy

  SS-GB

  XPD

  Goodbye Mickey Mouse

  MAMista

  City of Gold

  Violent Ward

  THE SAMSON SERIES

  Berlin Game

  Mexico Set

  London Match

  Winter: A Berlin Family 1899–1945

  Spy Hook

  Spy Line

  Spy Sinker

  Faith

  Hope

  Charity

  NON-FICTION

  Action Cook Book

  Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain

  Airshipwreck

  Basic French Cooking

  Blitzkrieg: From the

  Rise of Hitler to the

  Fall of Dunkirk

  ABC of French Food

  Blood, Tears and Folly

  Copyright

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

  The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Harper

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

  Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by

  Jonathan Cape 1963

  HORSE UNDER WATER. Copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 1963. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2009

  Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978 0 586 04431 5

  EPub Edition © JUNE 2011 ISBN: 978-0-00-734301-0

  About the Publisher

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  http://www.harpercollins.co.uk

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  * Foreign Office Intelligence Unit, part of M.I.6.

  * Permanent Secretary of the Treasury: Head of the Treasury and therefore holds the title ‘Head of H.M. Civil Service’.

  * Financial Secretary to the Treasury, who deals directly with the Prime Minister and directs the Treasury to implement decisions of the Government.

  * ‘Friends’: jargon for employees of M.I.5, which is not run by the military (in spite of the title) but by an offshoot of the Home Office.

  * C-SICH: Combined Services Information Clearing House. Part of the Ministry of Defence’s Joint Intelligence Agency. It is a funnel through which all British and Commonwealth intelligence matter is sorted, filed, and distributed. The commercial organizations (which have men to steal secrets from their competitors and safeguard their own) furnish a great volume of matter to C-SICH.

  * Central Register: a collection of dossiers on two million people including foreigners. Central Register is run by M.I.5.

  * Director of Naval Intelligence.

  * Construction of the network to ensure that one detected person doesn’t lead to another.

  * Places where messages are deposited so that collector and depositor do not come face to face.

  † Method of checking network.

  * Seat: A Fiat produced in Spain under licence.

  * See Appendix 4.

  * Assessment Boards judged the claims of Allied ships and aircraft in the matter of U-boat sinkings. They were remarkably accurate.

  * Patriotic songs.

  * Madrid numbers commence with an ‘M’.

  * All jobs requested have R.I. codes and are then given D of C (Difficulty of Completion) code. A low R.I. (i.e. not very important job) will be attended to if it gets a low D of C (i.e. if it’s easy to do). Similarly a high D of C job requires a high R.I. to get it approved for action.

  † Rue Valéry: Interpol.

  * Code translation: Black: third of most urgent priority signals; Student: agent or employee; Flat: dead or presumed dead; Scissors: violence.

  † D (Defence) notice: censorship directive to newspapers on various security matters.

  * Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory, Cardiff.

  * Red glasses were worn by lookouts to accustom their eyes to night vision before they went on watch.

  * German version of Davis Escape Gear.

  * See Appendix 1.

  * See Appendix 2.

  * In 1956 Ivor Butcher had been a Home Office telephone tapper. He overheard some information which he promptly sold to three different embassies. He was fired from his job, but the laugh had been on the Home Office. In a way it was this incident that revived the Strutton Plan in my mind. Now Ivor Butcher lived by hanging around and offering hospitality to foolish people with access to secret, or semi-secret, information.

  † Breaking and Entering, i.e. burglar.

  * Mets (slang): Metropolitan Police.

  * See Appendix 6 for more detail.

  * Large numbers (of years in prison).

  * Treasury Department, U.S.A., controls Narcotics Bureau and Secret S
ervice. In 1959 in Naples, where she lived with her parents (her father was R.N. attached to NATO), she had been recruited into the department. The endless round of parties she attended made her a useful ear for the Narcotics Bureau.

  * See Appendix 5.

  * A Portuguese political prison on the equatorial island, Santiago, 300 miles off the coast of Africa.

  * These buoys were dropped into the ocean by German ships and planes during World War 2. Every twelve hours they came to the surface and transmitted a radio message. The message was a reading from the meteorological gear inside it. In this way the German met. service prepared forecasts based upon a large number of weather reports without sending ships or aircraft anywhere near.

  * P.I.D.E.: Internal Police for the Defence of the State, i.e. Secret Police.

  * Sc.Ad.C.: Scientific Adviser to the Cabinet.

  * Air Pass: interception radar (air-to-air and air-to-ground).

 

 

 


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