Redcap

by Philip McCutchan

  CHAPTER ONE

  The road convoy from the north lumbered in through the gates, halting briefly for the police check. Moving on, the leading vehicle drew up at the jetty and a corporal of Sappers jumped down from the cab, walked back to inspect the big crate which was lashed down to the articulated trailer. As the truck carrying the armed infantry detachment pulled in behind, the corporal went over to a small group of men standing in the lee of the customs shed.

  Singling out a soldierly-looking civilian, the corporal halted in front of him and gave a swinging salute.

  “Reporting as ordered, sir. Convoy all correct.”

  “Thank you, corporal. No trouble on the way?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good.” The civilian turned abruptly, spoke in a crisp voice to an overalled party of Royal Engineers. “Right, you men. Get the crate aboard quickly now.”

  Men moved towards the vehicle and began casting off the lashings.

  The convoy had arrived alongside the ship in Tilbury Docks at 3:18 p.m. precisely, in a steady drizzle which soaked into the men along the jetties, ran in little rivulets between the coils of rope and the bundles of straw packing and lids of crates which littered the dockside, dropped down on the roof of the customs shed to spread its aura of English gloom, soaked into the weeds and the scrubby, coarse tufts of grass which grew between the rails of the sidings, made even the great new liner’s shining paintwork dull and damp and depressing as she waited there to go out across blue water into the blazing Indian Ocean sun.

  Under this drizzle a crane, travelling on its greased rails and towering above even the immensely high sun-deck of the 50,000-ton New South Wales, edged into position on the dockside and sent down its steel hook to grab the slings. Once the crate was in the slings and was being lifted aboard into the liner’s specially prepared Number One hold, the soldierly-looking civilian seemed edgy. This man had about him an indefinable touch of the Eighth Army, which may have been simply an association of ideas resulting from the fact that he was decidedly sand-coloured and was not unlike a younger edition of Field-Marshal Montgomery; now he walked up and down in a kind of staccato fashion, his face turned anxiously upward at the crate swinging high into the air.

  When the crate was over the hatch and going down into the hold he went up the gangway into the liner’s huge side.

  The few members of the ship’s company who happened to have nothing to do and were therefore goofing along the rails, noticed that the crate was marked, in black stencil: MACHINE PARTS. It carried several red-painted admonitions for careful handling, and it was addressed to the Australian Army’s Eastern Command in Sydney.

  As soon as the crate was properly stowed, the liner’s Chief Officer saw the hatch-covers of Number One secured, and soon after that the tugs came alongside, the shore gangway was lowered, and the great bulk of the ship—first nuclear-powered liner to sail under the British flag—drew slowly away. She came astern into the basin and turned, then headed towards the locks to edge out into the London River and for the first time go alongside the Landing Stage ready to embark her passengers.

  Next day, still under the same penetrating drizzle and lowering sky, the special trains from St Pancras drew into Tilbury Riverside station and the outbound passengers milled through the passport inspection and into the customs hall. One of the First Class passengers was a heavily built man with curiously penetrating eyes. He was balding and pasty and flabby, expensively dressed and with a taste for well-cut silk shirts and loud ties. His passport showed him as a Swedish subject. His name was given as Sigurd Andersson, his profession as refrigerator salesman. Because this was a special voyage there was a tight security net over it, and the immigration officials were being more than ordinarily careful; but Sigurd Andersson was used to this kind of thing and Ms papers were impeccable, so he had no trouble.

  After the passengers were all aboard and men were standing by to send the last gangway ashore, the Master of the New South Wales, together with the river pilot, climbed slowly to his high navigating bridge, which towered over the Port of London Authority’s building and, with the huge hull, blocked out Gravesend from the Tilbury Landing Stage. Shortly after he had got there, his Staff Commander reached the bridge to report.

  “All visitors and officials ashore, sir. All gangways gone, crew correct and embarkation completed.”

  Sir Donald Mackinnon nodded, his square, weather-toughened face strangely troubled. He said curtly, “Right— thank you, Stanford.” For a moment the eyes of the two men met; a look passed between them and then the Captain said, “Here we go, Stanford.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sir Donald seemed about to add something else, but instead he turned away abruptly and spoke to the pilot. He asked, “All ready?”

  “Yes, Captain, all ready now.”

  The Master gave an order. Engine-room and berthing telegraphs clanged; the pilot, walking into the bridge wing, gave a signal to the tugs and water boiled up below their counters. The last links gone, the New South Wales, superluxury flagship of the Australia and Pacific Line’s fleet, moved very slowly off the jetty as the tugs pulled ahead, the great hawsers coming up bar-taut and dripping with river-water and rain; she moved slowly out into the stream on the first leg of her maiden voyage. As the crowds lining the long gallery above the Landing Stage sent up a subdued ripple of cheering, and waved handkerchiefs at departing friends and families, and smiled through tears, the great liner’s deep-noted siren boomed out her first melancholy farewell to England; then she drew away faster into the broad, grey-brown bosom of the London River under the forlorn ’Tilbury drizzle. A little later the ship—gigantic, tiering deck on deck, with one great streamlined buff funnel, and green boot-topping to set off her cream-coloured hull—moved down river under her own power as the Captain gave a quiet order and the A.E.I.-John Thompson direct water-boiling nuclear reactor, deep inside her structure, passed life to her shafts. She came down past Shellhaven, a giant among the minnows, bound for the Nore and away across the world for Sydney Heads and the Pyrmont quays, carrying well over three thousand souls.

  And her peculiar cargo . . .

  The Captain’s face, as he stared out ahead from his bridge, was still troubled, still anxious. God alone knew how trying a maiden voyage could be at the best of times. And Sir Donald Mackinnon had never carried so vital a cargo as now lay snugly secured in his Number One hold, a cargo upon which the world’s peace might basically depend; his mind ran ahead of his ship, ran ahead of the dreary London River to the grey-green of the Channel, ran along blue water to the Leeuwin, along the stormy stretches of the Great Australian Bight. The sooner he picked up the Sydney pilot, the better.

  Sir Donald Mackinnon had never, in forty-five years of seafaring, been the kind of man who scared easily.

  But this time he was frightened of his cargo.

  Back at the Stage, when the liner had drawn away, it seemed as though a mountain had moved, a city gone to sea; it left a naked look, a stripped feeling in the hearts of the port officials and the Line’s directors and the V.I.P.’s who had watched her go. There was a buzz of feverish conversation among the ordinary God-speeders, those who had come to bid friends and relatives good-bye and wanted now to hide their loneliness beneath a veneer of gaiety and light-heartedness; there was an exhalation of relief from the highly placed officials, glad the great ship had begun her active life without a hitch. But a V.I.P. from Whitehall, a square man with a scarred face who was known as Mr Latymer and who had come down specially from the Admiralty but who, for the purposes of Press reports, had come merely as a private guest of the Minister of Nuclear Development, made only one remark. He made it in a nautical snap to an Undersecretary of State from the Ministry who was standing near him. He said, “Well—she’s aw
ay. I only hope to God nothing goes wrong—that’s all. Until she gets there, she’s our responsibility. All the way.”

  Then he pulled his raincoat up around his ears and turned away abruptly, walked quickly back into the covered way, ran down to the station and out to a waiting official car.

  The Chief Steward and his leading hands were moving about below decks carrying lists of cabin numbers and nominal rolls of their men. Their eyes, jealous of the good name and efficiency of their particular sections, peered and darted. They seemed keyed up, nervy. It hadn’t taken the crew long to sense something about the Company’s flagship that they didn’t quite like, something odd in the air. They didn’t know quite why, they just knew. They felt it; orders, for some reason, were everywhere being given snappily and obeyed grudgingly as though every one was on edge, a gradual process filtering down from the top. It wasn’t that she was going to be what seamen call an unhappy ship; it was just a feeling of uncertainty, of vague alarm almost, of unwillingness to leave U.K. this time. And throughout the ship, in galleys and store-rooms, engine-rooms and messes and cabins, lounges and bars and working alleyways, the older hands in particular went about with set faces, glumly, and few men smiled. Maybe it would wear off once they cleared Finisterre, they thought.

  Or maybe it wouldn’t.

  One of the passengers seemed ill at ease also. As the New South Wales made her majestic progress down the river, the soldierly looking man’s jerky walk carried him, like a marionnette on a piece of string, round the high promenade decks. Every now and again he glanced in through the big windows of the sumptuously furnished lounges on the veranda deck. Sometimes he stopped to lean over the teakwood rail, as though taking a last look at home. And then he was on the move again, going into the squares which formed the landings of the stairways leading down inside the great vessel, walking along cabin alleyways whose decks shone like glass with much hard polishing, glancing in at the doors of the panelled tavern bar with its red-topped stools and little friendly tables, keeping on the alert and finding his way around unfamiliar surroundings so as to acquaint himself perfectly with the lay-out. He wasn’t here to enjoy himself, and as he thought of what his charge was he felt an inward glow of quiet happiness that he of all people had been given so vital a job in connexion with something that lay so very close to his own heart.

  And, in his first-class stateroom on A deck, the heavily built man called Sigurd Andersson began to unpack his gear. From between layers of silk shirts and tropic wear he took a square metal box which had heavy suckers on its base, suckers constructed from a very special heat-resistant substance made to a new formula. He looked around the cabin for a while and then climbed on to a chair and got busy with a screwdriver, opening up an inspection-plate in the ventilator shafting which ran through the compartment. He took great care not to scrape the paintwork. Removing the plate, he pushed the box in, keeping its suckers clear of the sides of the shaft, for this was to be only a temporary hiding-place; he fixed it firmly into position with adhesive tape, making sure it was secure against any movement of the ship, and then he screwed the plate back into position. He examined it critically, was satisfied that no one would ever know it had been tampered with.

  After that he lit a cigar and finished his unpacking. Later he went along to the tavern bar, where he sat on one of the high stools and, full of bonhomie, asked the barkeeper to join him in a whisky-and-soda. He let it be known, casually, that if the barkeeper should hear of anyone wanting a game of poker, then he, Sigurd Andersson, was their man. And he appeared to have plenty of money.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Thirty-six hours later, in the very early hours of the morning, the softly insistent burr-burr of the closed line from the Admiralty broke into the peace of a flat in Eaton Square. It broke into Latymer’s sleep and he was awake on the instant. He was always very near the surface, from force of long habit; and before the third ring he had the light on and the receiver cradled against his cheek. As he’d stretched out, the silk pyjamas had fallen away from his forearm, and the skin grafts, similar to those on his face and chest, showed as irregular patches on the hair-covered flesh.

  He said curtly, “Latymer. Yes?”

  A voice said, “Hold the line, sir, please.” Then, slightly off, it said: “You’re through, Paris. Go ahead now.” There was a click and a plopping sound and then, as the Admiralty exchange sealed the ‘hush’ connexion, Paris came on the line.

  The voice was tense, clipped. “Shaw here, sir, speaking from the Embassy. Urgent message concerning REDCAP.”

  Latymer started a little, checked a sudden exclamation, but his voice was still quiet as he said, “Good morning, Shaw. Go ahead.”

  He listened for just over a minute while the brief, compressed report came through from Commander Shaw in the Faubourg St Honore. Then he asked, “You’re quite certain of this?”

  “Yes, sir, absolutely. And I think it’s vital.”

  “Very well. That’s good enough for me.” After that Latymer was silent for another fifteen seconds, thinking fast. At the end of that time he said softly, “Listen, Shaw. Return to London and report in person. Soonest possible. Bring the women, drop them at your flat on the way and leave Thompson with them—he’ll meet you at the airport with a car. That is all.”

  Latymer reached out and depressed the receiver-rest, jiggled it down and up a couple of times. Then he said, “Get me Miss Larkin’s private number. Quickly.” He was half out of bed now, tapping thick, stubby fingers impatiently on the bedside table as he waited for his confidential secretary to come on the line. “Ah—Miss Larkin . . . Latymer here. Get to the office as soon as you can. I’ll be there ahead of you. Before you leave, check the time of the next B.E.A. into London from Paris and then ring Scotland Yard.

  Personal message to the Assistant Commissioner, ‘B’ Department. There’ll be a car meeting that plane at Heathrow, and I’d like it given a clear road through to the Admiralty. That is all.”

  The telephone clicked off finally and Latymer got right out of bed, felt the thick, soft pile of the carpet on his toes, thrust his feet into lambswool slippers. The hard, steely green eyes were worried. What Shaw had told him was red-hot, and the more so when read in the context of certain other information which had come to hand the evening before. He found he was unusually on edge, anxious to get the full, face-to-face account of what Shaw had been doing.

  Well—he would soon find out.

  Latymer began to dress quickly.

  For Shaw, it had begun in Fouquier’s in Montmartre.

  Shaw had dined every night of his leave at Fouquier’s. Though he personally wasn’t all that keen on the atmosphere, Debonnair, whose leave from Eastern Petroleum had been arranged to coincide with his, liked dancing, and there was a certain amount of amusement to be had from watching the clientele in the alcoves, dimly lit by rose-shaded lights, or from watching the couples contorting their heated bodies so grotesquely as they stamped out the latest crazy movements on the tiny dance square. At least it was relaxing to him—up to a point. But Shaw could seldom relax; and in fact one of the reasons why he’d been going so regularly to Fouquier’s was that it was just the sort of international dive where a man like him might be able to pick up useful pieces of information, titbits which, even if they were not immediately valuable, might one day fall into place somewhere and complete a jigsaw as yet not even dreamed up; Shaw had a reputation in the Outfit for being remarkably conscientious even though for the most part he loathed the job and would have given much to have got out of the game for good. Nevertheless, this evening, as it happened, he wasn’t thinking at all about contacts or the Outfit; after ten clear days of Paris he’d been able to let go, to unwind, to free his mind of work and worry and responsibility, and for once he was genuinely relaxed. The worry-lines netted around his deep-set blue eyes—lines put there by the strain of danger and of a responsibility which at times became almost crushing—seemed to have been smoothed away to leave only the others, the clu
stered laughter-lines which appeared so engagingly when he smiled. . . .

  And then he’d seen the girl.

  She was coming towards his table, and, for some reason or other which might almost have been a premonition, the nagging pain in his guts had started up. Just like it always did at the start of an assignment, started and continued until the action began.

  “Esmonde . . ."

  Debonnair was looking at him curiously; he didn’t hear her speaking his name. She said, “Esmonde, what’s the matter?”

  He looked at her briefly, then away again, towards the girl. He said, “Nothing. Wait a moment, Deb.”

  He could have sworn he’d never seen the girl in his life—and yet there was something familiar about her. She was young and fresh-looking, with dark hair curling seductively round tiny, shell-pink ears, and she had large dark eyes, eyes which just now were obviously frightened and, as it seemed to Shaw, frightened of the two sordid men who were escorting her out. It struck Shaw that she was a little the worse for drink, and he found that out of character with the girl’s whole appearance; he guessed that this was probably her first experience of anything stronger than a glass of claret and that those two men had got her tight with just one purpose in their minds . . . her pleading look as she passed his table was directed straight into his eyes; and it went from there right into his heart. She wasn’t the sort for the sexy, prelude-to-seduction atmosphere of Fouquier’s, for the dim, overheated room filled with the thump-thump of erotic music from the scruffy three-man band sinuously snaking their hips and shoulders in one corner.

  His knee pressed against Debonnair’s under the table, and he raised an eyebrow, jerking his head backward towards the girl, who had now gone on towards the velvet-curtained door, swaying just a little and held possessively, lasciviously, too closely around her slim young body by one of her escorts.

  Debonnair said, “All right. I’ve seen.” She frowned a little and shook her head warningly, shook it so that the rose lighting was reflected in a moving mass of red-gold that rushed like fire through her fair hair and pointed up the tawny gold of her skin . . . the very look of her in that moment sent the blood pounding in Shaw’s body. She went on, “Darling, it’s probably her own fault, you know. Don’t go getting any of your chivalrous ideas. Damsels in that particular sort of distress aren’t all that uncommon in these parts, and she didn’t have to come here.” Her fingers broke the last of a bread roll, and she added with a low, gurgling chuckle: “It’s her daddy’s job anyhow.”