Redcap

by Philip McCutchan

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, as to your cover-story, just in case you need one, that’s simple. You’re going out as a plain naval officer on a normal exchange basis for duty with the R.A.N. That’s all been faked up with the Navy Board in Melbourne to-day. Right. Any questions?”

  “I don’t think so, sir.”

  “All right, then.” Latymer got up. He said, “Carberry’s waiting for you now, you’d better go straight down. Usual background stuff.” He accompanied Shaw to the door, looking grave. “Well—good-bye and good luck. You know what’s in the balance now, and from now on it’s up to you. We’ll be relying on you—all of us, Shaw.”

  “I’ll do my best, sir, of course,” Shaw said, feeling inadequate. Then he turned and left the room. He went down to Captain Carberry’s section in the basement, where he had a long session with the man who was known as The Voice. That deceptive man—Carberry, the man who always seemed to boom out in exclamation marks rather than just speak, the man whose voice was so oddly bigger and plummier than his thin, dried-up body. Full of bonhomie, inane-sounding, a guffawing ass—on the surface only. Underneath, the best brain in the Outfit. Carberry explained in technical detail the whole principle of REDCAP.

  Shaw, slightly baffled by science, asked: “What about the signals themselves—the ones that put REDCAP into operation? Do they change at regular intervals?”

  Carberry gave his booming laugh. “Oh, great Scott, no! Good heavens! They don’t change at all. Look, old boy, I’ll explain again.” He leaned back in a cloud of pipe-smoke. “The operating signals are no use to anybody except the MAPIACCIND operating staff, the boys who actually have REDCAP in their possession. So it’s just a once-for-all setting. Same with the frequencies—each country has its own, and it remains constant. That’s not to say the signals aren’t fearfully secret—of course they are, just as a normal precaution! Actually, there’s only the two copies in existence. One’s always with the MAPIACCIND H.Q. in Geneva, and the other’s for actual operational use, the one they’ll refer to if they ever want to transmit. Temporarily, that one is with Colonel Gresham, and he hands it over to the Commandant at Bandagong when he delivers REDCAP.”

  “Uh-huh. Would Lubin know what these signals are?”

  Carberry put his finger-tips together pontifically and gazed up at the ceiling. “Our information,” he said, “is that he would not. No one person was allowed to get the whole picture complete. It was this way: after Lubin had built the set in such a way that it could operate on any combination of letters, the Secretary-General of MAPIACCIND had a little lucky dip in private! What I mean is, old boy—he selected the actual three-letter groups and these were then set by another radio expert—our own man, actually, a Professor MacGregor. And he made the settings on the stockpiles, too.”

  “Fair enough. Thank you . . . and now, what about photographs? Have you got one of Lubin?”

  “Yes.” Carberry went over to a filing cabinet, pulled out a deep drawer, foraged about for a moment, then brought out a photograph. Shaw looked at it, memorized it carefully. Lubin could have altered—either by nature or cosmetics— since this was taken, but the physical structure would remain: a short, skinny man, puny. As to the rest . . . thick grey hair, dome-shaped head, clean-shaven, bad teeth, big ears . . . almost a typical man-in-the-street’s idea of an egghead, but so much of the adornments and appendages could be given a new look.

  Carberry came round the desk, glanced over his shoulder. He said, as though confirming Shaw’s own thoughts: “Genuine, dyed-in-the-wool egghead, guaranteed harmless in himself. Rumour has it he’s rather a retiring sort of chap. Tell you something, old boy. It’s the lads behind Lubin that you’ve got to break through! They’re going to be the tough nuts.”

  Shaw said thoughtfully, “I’ve just an idea you’re dead right. By the way, have you a photo of Karstad, just in case?”

  Carberry lifted his shoulders sadly. “We never had one of Karstad, I’m sorry to say. Bad—but there it is! Didn’t you meet him once, though?”

  “I saw him, that’s all. I can hardly remember him now. I didn’t actually meet him, and he didn’t see me at all.”

  Carberry’s laugh boomed out. “Probably just as well, old man, probably just as well!”

  Later, as the plain black car turned down the Mall and headed through the night along the wide, deserted thoroughfare past Buckingham Palace bound for Heathrow, Shaw found himself thinking back and wishing Latymer hadn’t said what he had about relying on him. For some reason or other, that kind of remark always made him so terribly aware of his own shortcomings, his inadequacies. Reluctantly almost, in the back of that comfortable car, he felt for the hard reassurance of his Service revolver, handy in the shoulder-holster beneath his plain grey worsted jacket.

  He felt he’d be needing that again before long. . . .

  The car swept up to the airport. Shaw got out and said good-bye to Thompson, who drove off. As Shaw walked quickly into the building, a man with a bowler hat and a brief case who had been sitting in a chair reading the Evening Standard folded up his newspaper and got to his feet. Taking a cigarette from a silver case, he watched unobtrusively as the baggage for the Naples flight was collected together. Then he strolled about aimlessly and when Shaw had disappeared he went away towards a telephone kiosk. Four pennies dropped into the box metallically . . . clang, clang, clang, clang.

  The man thought, and he smiled faintly as he thought it, that they sounded like four separate knells of doom—if doom could be said to come four times. Maybe one of them would be for the man he’d just seen joining the Naples plane . . . himself, he was only one of many minor operatives, so he couldn’t make any guesses as to who the other three might be for.

  Within a few hours a carefully worded cable was received in the radio office of the New South Wales and was sent down to the heavily built man who had embarked at Tilbury.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  At eight o’clock in the morning Shaw was looking down through the cabin windows as the airliner began to lose height, circling to touch down at Capodichino. He saw the fabulous city and environs of Naples rushing up below him, the city fringing the deep blue water of the bay; beyond, Vesuvius reared into the sky, its summit issuing faint trails of smoke as Shaw watched, trails which lost themselves in a clear sky. It was a wonderful morning; Shaw had managed to snatch an hour or two of much-needed sleep during the flight, and he felt refreshed and invigorated as, shortly after, he bent his tall frame through the doorway and stepped out of the airliner, stepped into brilliant sunshine which was as yet not so strong that it took away the clear freshness of the morning.

  Some eighty minutes after completing the entry formalities, Shaw was at the Naples air terminal. From there he walked along to the Australia and Pacific Line’s agents in the Via Roma, where he was told that the New South Wales would enter the bay at 8 a.m. next day, land her transit passengers at the Maritima Stazione for a day’s sight-seeing, and then embark the Naples contingent at 3 p.m. After that he collected his gear from the air terminal, left some of it at the Maritima Stazione, and then walked along the waterfront to his hotel.

  Shaw spent that day looking around the city, strolling along the hot, busy, opulent streets interspersed with depressing slum alleys, going casually into bars and eating-places, keeping his senses well on the alert. And, as he had suspected, this was in vain.

  As Latymer had said, it was just a vague chance that he might pick up something in Naples and it was no good getting worried because he’d failed to do so. Nevertheless, as he walked back to his hotel, Shaw began to feel the utter hopelessness of his job. To look for one man who might in point of fact be anywhere in the triangle China-England-Australia was a pretty large assignment.

  Next day at 3 p.m. Shaw was at the Maritima Stazione and going aboard the ship. The liner’s deck seemed to loft over the embarking passengers like a skyscraper as they crossed the telescopic gangway from the jetty into the great side with its rows of port
s. Shaw, as he went through the gunport door into the foyer, felt himself at once enfolded in an atmosphere of luxury and efficiency, a scene of controlled bustle.

  There was the familiar ship-smell, the familiar background noise of ventilating systems at work, of forced-draught blowers, a noise which at first beat on the ears and then became just one more of many ship-noises. A line of white-jacketed stewards waited to take the Naples passengers’ hand-gear and lead them to their cabins, up or down spotless, gleaming staircases, and along cabin corridors in whose decks one could see one’s own reflection. Shaw was only just aboard when a man came forward to take his grip; but not before he had been peremptorily barked at by the Chief Steward, who was standing just inside the gunport. Shaw glanced briefly at the Chief Steward, wondered if that order had been really necessary.

  He moved on behind his guide, deep into that glittering world of luxury and service, the world of the first-class section of a modern liner. As he went up the main staircase towards his stateroom on A deck, the liner’s topmost accommodation deck immediately below the main lounges of the veranda deck, he saw a man leaning nonchalantly back against a bulkhead in the square at the top, smoking a cigar. Just for a second, their eyes met and then Shaw had passed on.

  But he had an uncomfortable feeling that the man knew him and was now looking at his back. He had noticed the eyes; curiously penetrating eyes which were, in some vague way, almost familiar. The eyes apart, there was nothing in the least outstanding about the man—he was heavily built, pasty, expensively dressed, going a little bald. Very ordinary really; liners were full of such people. But all at once Shaw’s tautened nerves seemed to detect a note of unease in the customary throb of a ship . . . he looked back over his shoulder. The man had gone, and he shrugged slightly. A few moments later they reached his stateroom, a big compartment with a small entrance lobby and a private shower in a bathroom leading off it, and a square port which looked out on to the promenade deck.

  Shaw looked round. The cabin was as luxurious as he might have expected from what he had already seen of the ship, luxurious and sophisticated enough to attract wealthy men and women on holiday and business. And yet, despite the elegance, Shaw felt the beginnings of a sense of apprehension, almost a fear of the unknown . . . there was something wrong in the air, a tenseness. The steward who’d brought him along, for one thing ... the man had been perfectly attentive, but there had been a curious lack of warmth, the warmth which one learns to associate with cabin stewards in liners. The efficiency was there all right, but it was a little machine-like, glum and cold, unsmiling. The man had seemed like a soulless automaton.

  Shaw sighed and began to unpack.

  Two hours later a bugle sounded over the loudspeakers, calling the crew to stations for leaving harbour. Fifteen minutes after that the engines of the New South Wales throbbed into life, a cufuffle formed beneath her stem and she came off the pierhead and turned slowly, ponderously, headed outwards, faster and faster under the tremendous power of her nuclear reactor’s energy. She headed out of Naples Bay past Capri, and into the Tyrrhenian Sea to come south into the Mediterranean and set her course for Port Said and the Suez Canal, a mighty ship with over three thousand men, women, and children in her Captain’s charge. And—as it seemed to Shaw it must be regarded—the future of the world crated in her hold.

  And under threat.

  The first, the incredible, thing happened shortly after the ship had cleared the berth.

  Shaw was in his cabin when the tap came at his door and when the girl walked in he could scarcely believe his eyes. He said harshly, “What the devil are you doing here?” He felt his hackles rising, nails digging into his palms. He stared down at her, long jaw thrust out, face stiff with anger. Then, remembering her purposeful look back in his flat, he said with thin-lipped bitterness: “You’d planned this from

  the start, hadn’t you! You’ve no right—”

  “No right? Of course I’ve a right!” Judith Donovan’s dark eyes flashed up at him angrily. She pushed her hair away from her forehead, gave her head a determined little toss. “I can go just where I please, and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it. There.” She opened her handbag, produced a folder similar to the one Latymer had given Shaw. “Here’s the carbon of my ticket. Naples to Sydney. It’s fully paid for, and my passport’s in order.” The girl’s eyes glistened a little as she went on, “There was money in my name at the bank and there was no reason why I shouldn’t come.”

  Shaw sighed in exasperated fury, clenched his fists, relaxed them. This was a difficult young woman to get angry with, especially in the circumstances of that night in France so short a while ago. He swallowed his anger, told her to sit down. He stood over her, asked:

  “Don’t you realize this game’s dangerous?”

  “Yes, of course I do.”

  “You’ll be mucking up my chances of finding anything out.”

  She said defensively, “No, I won’t. I needn’t even know you at first. If we happen to get friendly on board . . . well, that’s quite natural, isn’t it, aboard a liner?” Suddenly, Shaw thought with a pang, she sounded forlorn again, alone and friendless. She went on, “I . . . want to be in on this all the way now, Commander Shaw. My father was going to do what he could to help, and—well, I suppose I just want to carry on, that’s all.” She looked up at him appealingly, her small, serious face framed by that darkly curling hair. “You’re not really angry, are you?”

  He answered heatedly. “Of course I am! You’re being damned inconvenient and thoughtless, if you want to know what I think—and that’s putting it mildly. You deserve to be spanked within an inch of your life!” He walked up and down, stopped and swung round on her. “How did you get away? I thought my chief had put a man on you and Debonnair.”

  “Yes, he had,” she agreed in a dead tone. “But I’m used to that sort of thing and I slipped him without any trouble. They’ll only just about be ticking over that I’ve gone— Debonnair had to go away for a night and she won’t know till she gets back from her office. The man thinks I’m in the flat at Albany Street.” She turned to him impulsively. “Don’t you see? I’m not just any girl! I know this business a little. Maybe I can help. I want to.”

  “Help!” he repeated bitterly. “All you’re going to do is to draw attention to me, if there’s anybody aboard who knows you’re John Donovan’s daughter.”

  She said quietly, “They won’t know that. I’m Judith Dan-gan. The only people Daddy ever let me meet were his own friends, and they knew me as Donovan. I always went back to that name when I was with Daddy.”

  Shaw grunted. “Tell me something else, then. How did you know I was coming here?”

  She said simply, “I guessed. You see, I knew—what was aboard the liner.”

  Shaw went rigid. “You . . . what?”

  “Karstad told Daddy that.”

  “For God’s sake—how many other people know?”

  “I can’t tell you that. I expect only Karstad, and whoever he got it from. That was what Daddy told me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me all this before?”

  She gave him a quick look. “Because I meant to come, and I thought if you knew I knew, you’d find a way of stopping me.”

  Shaw’s face was white and grim now. He said through his teeth, “You’re an irresponsible little fool.” He took her arm, asked roughly: “D’you know anything else, while we’re about it?”

  She shook her head. “That’s all I ever found out. Daddy let that slip. Normally he never told me anything. But he was ... he wasn’t himself after Karstad came.”

  “Did you ever meet Karstad?”

  “No. He only came that once, and I didn’t know anything about it till he’d gone. But Daddy was in a foul temper afterwards, and—”

  “Why was that?”

  “I don’t know, he just was.” She fiddled with her handbag.

  “And—I wanted to help him, and I talked to him. Then he let it out that—
the thing—would go on the New South Wales, and Karstad had come to see him. He shut up like a clam after that—he realized pretty quick he’d had a lapse and he didn’t say any more about it till he got me to contact you in Fouquier’s some while after.”

  Shaw nodded, faced her, said grimly: “Now just listen. This is tremendously important. Are you quite sure there’s nothing else at all you can tell me—anything that may help?”

  She pursed up her lips, frowned. She said, “There’s absolutely nothing else, honestly.”

  He rubbed his nose, shrugging helplessly. That answer had sounded convincing. The girl was perfectly genuine— but what an insane little idiot she’d turned out to be! He’d better cypher a message for Latymer and set his mind at rest—if that was the word—as to where the girl was. He said tautly, “All right. And now you’d better have my cover-story—just so you don’t go and put your foot in itl”

  Shortly after the liner was past Capri, Shaw got his summons to the Captain’s quarters. He went along at once; and, as he reached the foot of the stairway leading up to the officers’ accommodation, he saw the man again, the man with the penetrating eyes. He gave Shaw only a cursory, uninterested look before going into the library. But once again memory vaguely stirred and Shaw felt just a little uneasy.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The liner’s Master—Commodore Sir Donald Mackinnon, K.B.E., D.S.O., R.D., R.N.R., senior Master of the A. and P. fleet—had dismissed his steward, and he poured the drinks himself. Colonel Gresham was up there as well, sitting in a bar of the lowering sun which came through the day-cabin’s after ports, touched Gresham’s sandiness to a growing bronze, ran on over the thick blue carpet, sparkled on brightly polished brass fittings and expensive panelling.

  Ponderously Sir Donald crossed the cabin, the sun glinting now on the gold of the four stripes on either shoulder of his white, starched uniform. He handed Shaw a glass of gin-and-bitters, looking at him from under bushy white brows as he loomed, tall and heavy, above Shaw’s chair. Like his ship, he was massive, impressive.