The Falklands Intercept

by Crispin Black

  XXII

  King’s Parade, Cambridge

  From his seat in the Pizza parlour Jacot could see her walking along King’s Parade. He could tell she had not been to Cambridge before. She was smiling. Parts of the university city had that effect on outsiders. Seeing King’s Chapel and the Senate House for the first time with the hint of the river and “The Backs” behind was like walking in St Mark’s Square for the first time. It was impossible not to be impressed and cheered by the achievements, aesthetic sense and standards of those who had gone before. Monica swayed deliciously on her long legs.

  ‘There’s no code in the text. Nothing to decrypt as far as we can tell.’ She shrugged one of those peculiar French shrugs. An acceptance of the way things were or the limitations of the way things could be. Englishmen kept a stiff upper lip – Monica had quizzed him on what exactly the phrase meant. Welshmen grinned with resignation. Frenchmen and women shrugged.

  ‘There is a lot of data in the file, but of a routine navigational and metallurgical nature. We are not qualified to pronounce on its accuracy although we have had the arithmetic and angles checked by the mathematicians and scientists at the Institut Polaire Francais and they seem to add up. As far as they go anyway. The lone metallurgist on the staff is beside himself with excitement. Don’t worry they won’t reveal the details of the paper to anyone. We don’t think there are any strange messages embedded in the text. It would appear that your Captain Scott’s fate may have been crueller even than he believed at the time.’

  ‘Oh well, it was worth a shot.’ Jacot took a mouthful of his spicy pizza. ‘I have to say though even if there is no code embedded in the paper its conclusions are extraordinary. You wouldn’t understand the impact as a Frenchwoman, but if what Verney and Pirbright wrote stands up to inspection it means that Scott not Amundsen reached the South Pole first. Imagine if it turned out that after all the French had won the Battle of Waterloo.’

  ‘My history books at school always suggested that we did. Quite why the Emperor then had to go into exile and spend the rest of his life on an obscure English rock in the South Atlantic was never explained.’ Monica ate a slice of her pizza and then held a forkful of her salad in the air creating a sense of expectation. She used the fork to emphasise what she was saying.

  ‘There is just one more thing. After the main text, which is uncorrupted, there are a few random words. Again we have no idea what they mean and there is no further text beneath them. Something about basins and oils and a date, 24 May 2015. Some other stuff too which you might want to mull over. Very odd. It’s as if General Verney was keeping his household accounts on the file. But they are separate from what went before. It looks as though they were a part of a bigger file which has now disappeared. We are not sure, cannot be sure, but there are apparently ways of working it out and tell tale signs according to our signals people. Whatever was in the file was encoded originally – a strongly protected code with a twist. C’est un fichier cadavre.’

  ‘What exactly does that mean?’

  She ate the salad on her fork and smiled again. ‘Well obviously in English it means a corpse computer file. I know, I know, your French is up to that. You got there before me Dan. A corpse computer file is one that dies when it is moved or hacked into. There are lots of different types of varying sophistication. Some die suddenly when they are moved others merely start to degrade or decompose when they are moved from their home location. There you are.’

  ‘Hang on. Hang on Monica. That’s all very well, but what sort of people use these files or understand how they work?’

  ‘Anyone who can afford to pay for some clever computer types. Anyone who has data that they are so keen to protect that if it does get stolen or decrypted it self-destructs. Some criminals use them to store data so that if the stuff is found by the authorities it can’t be used as evidence – financial records or records of drug shipments are often guarded in this way. The FBI would not have been able to put Al Capone on trial for tax evasion, or is it avoidance, it always confused me in the vocabulary tests, if his financial records had spontaneously combusted once the Feds got their hands on them.

  ‘I must admit our people are puzzled. The uncoded information is dynamite for the Antarctic studies people. The coded stuff seems really low-grade.’ She shrugged again. ‘There’s more to tell. I think we need another glass of wine first. Then why don’t we go for a walk on the famous “Backs”? My briefers waxed lyrical about them but I have yet to see them.’ She fixed her eyes on his. The look wasn’t entirely professional. ‘No one will be able to listen in.’

  She had been well-trained, briefing rapidly and in a way that Jacot could understand quickly. One of their people had had a quick look round Charlotte Pirbright’s rooms, courtesy of the now ever-reliable Chief Inspector Bradshaw. Yes, they had been searched by a team probably with an intelligence background. More importantly, the toxicology tests had come back from Strasbourg. Inconclusive. The samples were not good.

  She did not look that disappointed thought Jacot. Her eyes were glistening with excitement.

  ‘But about an hour ago I received an email from a DCRI man in Papeete.’

  ‘As you know Gilles Navarre sent one of the swabs out there. Again it’s not a good sample but our man in Papeete had a long conversation with one of the lab technicians at the Government Laboratories. Again the sample quality was not great but the lab guy has had a lot of experience with food poisoning and dodgy fish in the South Pacific, and there is definitely a tiny, tiny amount of Saxitoxin in the sample. It’s possible that there may have been cross-contamination but he’s fairly sure. I got our man to check the label on the swab – it’s from Verney’s nose.’

  Once Monica had briefed Jacot further they left the restaurant and walked through King’s College crossing the Cam by the college bridge. Monica didn’t talk much initially. She was too occupied admiring the view. Once in the cover of the trees they talked for a further five or so minutes. Monica made some notes in a small notebook. Jacot seemed keen to make sure that she had got various details right and read over her notes at the end of their brief conversation. Then he took both of her hands in his. She stroked the top of one of his silk gloves and then they both laughed, kissed each other and parted. Monica walked quickly away in the direction of the station. Jacot started on his way back to St James’ but turned and watched her until she was out of his sight.

  XXIII

  North Carolina State University Library,

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina

  A blue van with Georgia plates parked outside the library of the North Carolina State University at Chapel Hill. A very plain young woman with very thick spectacles got out of the van and went inside. She showed her student identification to a welcoming lady at the desk– she wasn’t studying at the Chapel Hill Campus but she was a fully accredited student of the State University of North Carolina. She wanted to have a look at back copies of the student newspaper from the 1970s. Informed that they were now all stored on microfiche she looked surprised and confused. But the librarian showed her to the microfiche room and gave her a short lesson in working the microfiche machine before returning to her post at the desk out front. The very plain girl then spent nearly half an hour looking at images through the viewer – without her glasses on. She worked quickly and methodically. The short lesson she had just received must have been good – or maybe she knew what she was doing all along. There was no one else in the room but annoyingly for other users of the library they could hear the very loud music being streamed through to her iPod earphones, which also seemed to make a rather odd humming noise. Just as a couple of them were about to make a complaint to the librarian the plain and unremarkable girl with no make up and thick spectacles got up from her desk and returned the spool of microfiche she had been using to the desk. She had a funny accent – Cajun maybe.

  A week later the library was evacuated early one evening, just after dark, as all the fire alarms went off at once. The loc
al firemen and the police were nonplussed as no sign of any fire was discovered. At least there had been no damage, although the library had been empty for nearly an hour.

  *

  The offices of the News Observer,

  McDowell Street, Raleigh, North Carolina

  A few days later at the offices of the News Observer, the newspaper serving the academic towns of Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Durham, reporters had a frustrating morning after the pressroom experienced multiple computer failures. The whole news operation was paralysed. Experienced reporters could do little other than look out of the window. When they got really fed up they ventured out to the coffee shop on the other side of McDowell Street, passing a dusty brown van with Arkansas plates – not unusual in the state – annoyingly parked just outside their offices. After hours of investigation the in-house computer geeks could not fix the problem. And then suddenly everything was all right again. No one could work it out. One bright spark suggested there may have been a virus in the newspapers digitized historical records recently converted from microfiche at great expense.

  XXIV

  National Security Adviser’s Office,

  10 Downing Street, Whitehall, London SW1

  Jacot entered Lady Nevinson’s office. She was not alone.

  ‘Daniel, meet Richard Ingoldsby from the Security Service. I don’t think you have met before. He is the head of counter-espionage.’

  Jacot shook hands with a man of medium height and bland features, plainly dressed. He would have been instantly forgettable, as indeed he was meant to be, except for the grey eyes which had a chess player’s or a preacher’s intensity – looking at you now in the present, but mainly concerned with looking far ahead – many moves ahead or ahead to a different world. Counter-espionage was one of the purest forms of intelligence work requiring a number of talents and attributes that were rarely found in combination. As a result many of its best practitioners came across as slightly odd.

  Lady Nevinson said, ‘Don’t worry Daniel, he is one of the few people we can trust. He is Magenta indoctrinated. Indeed it was Richard who first realised how deeply penetrated we were by our friends across the Atlantic. And now give us both what you have.’

  ‘Yes, well I am sorry Lady Nevinson about the recent drama.’ Jacot looked a little sheepish.

  ‘Colonel Jacot telephoned me from the Falklands, Richard, whence I had dispatched him on a tour of inspection. He reckoned he had the answer to the sudden death of General Verney. It was a dramatic night. I telephoned the Chief Constable of the Cambridge Police who kindly arrested Jacot’s chief suspect, a onetime Colour Sergeant in the Celtic Guards, and currently Fellows’ Butler at St James’ College, Cambridge. In the way of these things it now appears that it wasn’t the butler after all – your ex chief suspect in pursuit of whom you set off a major emergency. Yes, yes Jacot you were on your merry way back from Chile as special branch and various other men in mackintoshes rushed through the streets of Cambridge to arrest this Fellows’ Butler, in itself an old-fashioned term worthy of a Cluedo board, who may or may not have had a grudge against Verney about something that happened in the Falklands War thirty years ago. The Master of St James’ has taken some placating. Keeping it from the press has been difficult. And this morning the prime minister had one of his slightly cocky looks. May not have been connected, of course. And basically you have no other suspects. Maybe he did die of natural causes.’ She looked at the ceiling. ‘Please God let it be that. It would be the easiest solution.’

  She didn’t look angry. Jacot breathed a sigh of relief. Turning to Ingoldsby he said, ‘Lady Nevinson is, as always, right.’ A little humility and a little flattery went a long way. ‘It wasn’t Colour Sergeant John Jones after all. I have known him for a long time. He had a good motive dating back to the death of his brother in the Falklands War, for which he blamed Verney. Long story but not just now I think.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know how to put this but it looks as though Verney was working for the Americans.’

  ‘In a way Jacot we are all working for the Americans’, said Ingoldsby drily.

  ‘No I don’t mean involuntarily. Or helping them a little bit more than you should. Or getting your patriotic feelings for your own country mixed up with those for the American dream. I mean working for the Americans, spying for the Americans, giving them secret information and intelligence splattered with “UK Eyes Only London Only Prime Minister’s Eyes Only”. Apparently on a regular basis. And possibly, initially at least, against his will.’

  Nevinson said, ‘For God’s sake how and why?’

  ‘Well I should have thought of it myself. I was down there thirty years ago and involved in the same incident – the destruction of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, Oliver Cromwell, in a missile attack by the Argentine air force. I am sure you know the story reasonably well. Troops loaded onto a ship. Disagreement about where the ship was meant to be going. Troops don’t get off ship. For reasons which I am still not sure of the ship cannot communicate with any other ships nearby, so the dispute about where the ship is meant to be going cannot be resolved. Ship is hit by an Exocet missile. And so on. The circumstances have remained disputed and controversial ever since. But there is an aspect never covered in the official accounts that is probably relevant here. It is so long ago I had forgotten. Something based some difficult rumours which most of us thought were a kind of conspiracy theory to explain a balls up which was at the end of the day just a balls up. Murphy’s Law stretched its poisonous teeth deep into the South Atlantic and sunk them deep into us.

  ‘It was a funny time. When we landed in the Falklands we found chaos. Worse, we found East Falkland in possession of a group of military units that simply did not want us to be there. I don’t mean the Argentines either. I mean the first wave of British troops who had landed some ten days before us. They could not understand why we were needed. As things turned out they may well have been right. Other than the counter-attack by the Argentine naval air force in the aftermath of the initial landings, which was fierce and pressed home bravely, the Argies put up little real resistance. Particularly after H Jones and his paratroopers chased them out of Goose Green. That was probably the pivotal action of the war and it happened while we were still en route on the stately QE2. It was an odd feeling. We had expected to be welcomed as brothers in arms with open arms.

  ‘Anyway, it was not to be. As a result there was little organization and less help. Only competition to get away from the landing beaches and towards Port Stanley as quickly as we could. The people in charge of us decided that the quickest way of doing this was to walk, as many others had. Unfortunately it ended in disaster. We failed to get ourselves over a mountain down south – well a hill actually. We were trying to avoid being taken round towards Port Stanley by ship. It was dangerous. Much simpler to walk most of the way. Problem was we had too much ammunition and the vehicles carrying our eight mortar tubes and their ammunition – a ragbag of military and farming vehicles – broke down. So the whole thing got called off amidst considerable shambles. As a result we were taken around by ship – and the ship Jones, his brother Bryn and yours truly got onto was the RFA Oliver Cromwell. The rest is history and, as you know, why nearly thirty years later I still have to cut around the bazaar in gloves.’

  Nevinson said, ‘Go on and I think you need some whisky.’

  ‘It had always seemed to me a cock up. I have very strong views about the countdown to disaster and what actually happened on the ship. If you are ever involved in a big military disaster involving death and destruction on a fairly large scale you will find that most men, and it was only men in those days, try to do their duty within the constraints of where they find themselves and the strengths and weaknesses of their own characters. A few men are extremely brave. And a few decide to run away. That has always been the great arithmetic of military behavior. It has always fascinated me ever since. I remember the confused days leading up to the disaster but they were in the background of our own
literally burning experiences on the day.

  ‘Jones’ anger is based partly on what happened to him on the ship – mainly not being able to reach his dying younger brother. But partly, and more curiously, on something that he said happened that rain soaked night as we struggled up and then down the hills above the landing beaches. Jones is of the view that a group of officers of unspecified identity, but definitely including Verney, agreed to call the move off because they didn’t think it was a good idea. Jones overheard Verney, then a young captain, apparently talking on an unofficial radio net saying:

  “Just make it look as though they have broken down”.

  ‘I heard an amateur recording of the unofficial radio traffic from that night when I was down there last week including, after two hours or so of happy listening, a young Captain Verney saying those now infamous words. I think he was talking about the ragtag and bobtail vehicles that were trying to lug the mortar tubes and ammunition over the hill. It was a nightmare night and to be fair to Verney and any other officers, even possibly some of our own who may have been involved, the whole thing seemed pretty “Back of a fag packet” as we used to say. Poorly planned and spur of the moment.’ Jacot took a large sip of his whisky. ‘It was an absolute nightmare night all right. Remember June is the Austral winter. I have never seen rain like it – as if it was coming off the sea straight from the Antarctic. The whole affair did not last long – less than an hour in my memory – before we returned to our trenches. In a way Verney and the others were probably doing us a favour. Trouble is that one of the events that triggered our move by sea was this aborted march. Equally nightmarish, we ended up on three different ships. Some of us made it around OK but the group I was with was eventually embarked on Oliver Cromwell. Verney, as I say, may have been doing us a favour, but by pretending that the transport had broken down he was in direct defiance of the orders issued for the move. If at the time anyone had discovered he would have been court-martialled. Half a century before, he would have been shot.’