Gibraltar Road

by Philip McCutchan

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A cold wind knifed through Shaw’s body as he stood on deck off Ushant, comfortably dressed in an old leather-patched brown tweed jacket, eyes stinging with the salt, enjoying it, and breathing deeply as the cruiser headed south into the Bay of Biscay and the gathering storm. He appreciated the heave of a deck beneath his feet, the gale ruffling the greying brown hair into a curling mop sticky from the salt in the atmosphere, while white clouds streaked out across a clear blue sky above the tumbling, swooping water.

  All last night Shaw had lain queasily, stretched out in his bunk as the Cambridge met the beginnings of the bad weather. Having no duties to perform, nothing to make him get on his feet, was a bad thing really. It had been nine hours of sheer misery, a misery of listening to the groans and creaks of the ship as she cut through the seas and took green water over her fo’c’sle-head, of listening to the wind’s shriek and the mounting rollers battering at the scuttle-glass beyond the deadlight’s steel, of watching his dressing-gown float out into the compartment from the hook behind the door, fall and then rise again until it stood almost at right angles, hovering there until the next slow drop back to remain unnaturally pressed against the woodwork. Bodily the bunk bore him upward, heaving hard into the under-side of his body and then dropping him with a swooping shudder which made the stomach pain worse. Nine hours, and then Shaw got up. He got up unsteadily, his face a pale green, hair rumpled and sweaty, and a foul taste in his mouth, his body cold with hunger and the fatigue which results from the constantly changing muscular efforts necessary to keep one’s body safely in a leaping bunk.

  It was that sensation of hunger that made Shaw realize he was better. He washed, dressed, and went out on deck. He’d be in time for breakfast in the wardroom after a good blow. He stood there for a while, out on the quarterdeck, refreshing himself and blowing out the fug of the cabin and the shore, liking the keen wind and the tearing, white-capped waves which hit the ship and slopped aft from the fo’c’sle, or were whipped into spray by the mounting gale. Now that he’d got his sea-legs he could start to enjoy this heaven-sent interlude. The Cambridge was no destroyer, and her motion, though she rolled a lot, was quite different from what he recalled of those war-time North Atlantic days—slower and much more stately.

  During breakfast Shaw’s mind went back to his recent interview with Captain Carberry—The Voice. Carberry, as usual, had done him proud. Carberry had put him right in the picture regarding recent developments in Spain—politically and diplomatically and topographically, bringing Shaw’s own knowledge right up to date. Carberry had warned him of a tightening up by the carabinero section of the Guardia Civil on the Spanish side of the La Linea frontier post, of a markedly increased antipathy towards British subjects entering from Gibraltar. He had put Shaw wise to the best ways of getting through both the Spanish control and the British Lines beyond the North Front if he should want to enter Spain incognito to pick up information about Karina’s intentions. Carberry had told him more about Don Jaime, and about that Malaga contact, Domingo Felipe, who could, Carberry had said, be picked up any evening in a certain one of the numerous bars in Torremolinos; this Felipe would be briefed meanwhile by other contacts in Spain, round Barcelona way, so that he would be able to make himself known to Shaw. Because of this, Carberry had strongly advised Shaw to make a point of contacting Jaime if he did enter Spain, and thus get himself within the ambit of Domingo Felipe. Carberry had provided Shaw with documentation to cover every foreseeable contingency—including a Spanish workman’s day pass from La Linea into Gibraltar. All these papers were now in a plain package in the Captain’s safe. And in Shaw’s baggage as the old cruiser pushed on south for the Straits was a set of Spanish workman’s clothing which was so genuine that it carried even the sour smell of unwashed hombre—dirty, sand-coloured corduroys, faded blue shirt, black beret. They could come in handy.

  Carberry had given Shaw a photograph of Mr Ackroyd, too, so that he could identify the little man, if necessary, before he’d managed to wangle a properly casual meeting; and he’d told him quite a lot about Mr Ackroyd, and the full story of Project Sinker.

  He’d said, booming out his exclamation marks, “It really is something big, old boy—the Old Man’s perfectly right! They’re blasting away the rock in some of those caves below Arrow Street, which runs along the top of the east face. It’s quite well advanced already! They’re making the caverns big enough to take these nuclear-powered subs, you see, and use the Rock itself as a kind of underground port, fully protected from the air—”

  “Even against H-bomb attack?”

  “We-ell, yes. As near as one can possibly hope, anyway! Can’t think of anywhere else on God’s earth where they’d have a better chance—put it that way!”

  Shaw had agreed with that. Under those millions of tons of living rock, beneath that great towering natural edifice, they would be pretty secure. Carberry had continued, “In time, as I dare say you’ve been told, there’ll be other refueling bases, but that’s very much in the future—they take a longish while to establish, and Gib’s our great white hope for the next few years! You can imagine the security—officially it’s being given out that the project’s concerned with providing safe berthing facilities for ordinary surface craft— the smaller escorts and anti-submarine vessels and so on— in time of war. All the people working on it are hand-picked, but even they don’t get the whole picture, and all the area is heavily screened by security police, while the labour’s provided by specially graded volunteers from among the dockyard mateys in the home ports.”

  Shaw nodded. “The Old Man said something about that.”

  “Now, what you might call the hub of the whole thing is in that power-house leading off Dockyard Tunnel, where this man Ackroyd has his infernal machine! He’s due to demonstrate it soon after you arrive, and we’re all keeping our fingers crossed that it’s going to work! It’s what you might call a dicey do, that machine, and Ackroyd’s last test wasn’t very satisfactory. An entirely unexpected defect cropped up. ’Course, it’s been dealt with, but I don’t care for the sound of it, old boy!”

  “How’s that?”

  Carberry had bunched his lips and examined his fingernails for a moment; then he’d looked up, and his voice had become tauter, less plummy after that, and Shaw had known he was going to tell him something fairly startling. Carberry had that technical mind—unlike Shaw—and knew what he was talking about.

  They approached the Straits a day or so later under a cloudless blue early-morning sky and a hot sun which warmed away the chills of the outward run in a grateful glow of penetrating heat which made Shaw sweat into his thin suiting of tropic-weight cloth.

  Shaw watched the coast slip past the cruiser’s port side. Cape St Vincent, on the south-western tip of Portugal, faded astern, and after that Cape Trafalgar brought him the first sight of Spain. Then Tarifa, and they were in the Straits, with Cires Point, in Spanish Morocco, to starboard, Gibraltar riding high into view, vast and rocky, looming above Carnero.

  By courtesy of the cruiser’s captain, Shaw was on the bridge as the Cambridge turned up for Algeciras Bay.

  Captain Hugo Kent-Thomas was a vast bull of a man; the eyes, small and rather glittering, seemed sunken and lost in an expanse of red-leathery skin above the rolls of pink, bristly flesh which overlapped the stiffly starched high neckband of his white uniform. Legs apart, hands clasped behind his back, he stood and took up most of the available room in the fore-part of the navigating bridge, a solid chunk of opaqueness round which navigator and officer-of-the-watch had to peer as best they could. Owing to the weather, Kent-Thomas had been up there nearly all the time since leaving Portsmouth, and when he hadn’t been there he’d been snatching an hour or two of sleep. He’d taken such meals as he’d needed on the bridge. The result had been that he’d had no time to yam with Shaw except very briefly just after the agent had embarked, and once even more briefly when they’d met on deck at sea. He was making up for thi
s lack of hospitality by giving Shaw the freedom of his bridge now.

  His voice rumbled out. “Well—there you are, Shaw.” A heavy arm made a sweeping gesture towards Gibraltar. “Safe delivery of the all-important Admiralty Inspector—and won’t they be pleased to see you! Gib’s all yours now.” He sighed, memory of his soaking hours on that bridge still too fresh. “Wish I had your job, Shaw.”

  Shaw didn’t comment.

  “Damn-all to do and all day to do it in—what?”

  Shaw answered that with a laugh. “Don’t underestimate the Admiralty civilian, sir. I’ll probably find I’ve got to do a fuller day’s work than ever I did when I was in the Service.” (That ‘when I was in the Service’ came off his tongue quite easily, Shaw was glad to note.)

  Kent-Thomas grunted. Shaw had gathered already that he had a prejudice against pretty well all civilians. Kent-Thomas asked, “Where did you get to in the Service, Shaw? Odd we never ran across each other, y’know.”

  Shaw said, “I . . . spent a good deal of time in the Admiralty.”

  “Oh—really?” The Captain looked round, raised his eyebrows disdainfully. “What department?”

  “Just messing around,” said Shaw vaguely. He was watching the Spanish coast.

  “H’m. About all they do in the Admiralty, isn’t it—mess around?”

  “That’s right, sir.” Shaw knew well enough that such was the general opinion in the Fleet; but he thought of Mr Latymer, and Carberry, and the others in the outfit, those who had died and those who still lived a little longer . . . then, shortly before they began making in for the entrance to the inner harbour, Kent-Thomas said suddenly, “Sorry not to have seen more of you, Shaw. Pity you’ve become a damn’ civilian.” He hesitated. “We’ll be in Gib for a while . . . come aboard again for a meal and a yarn sometime if you feel like it.”

  “Thank you, sir. I’d like to do that if I’m here for long.”

  “You don’t know how long the job’ll take?”

  “No.”

  “Where d’you go when it’s done?”

  “Back to London, to mess around again, sir.” Surreptitiously Shaw crossed his fingers, wondering if he’d see London again, see Debonnair. He always wondered that, though he knew nothing was ever as bad as imagination made it. The pain started up again, cruelly.

  Half an hour later Shaw left the cruiser at the Detached Mole in the Captain’s motor-boat, headed in for the Tower Steps. In the increasingly hot sunshine, Shaw disembarked, looked up at the flag of the Rear-Admiral drooping limply above the Tower. The Rock of Gibraltar stood before him, three miles long, barely a mile across at its widest point, but high, seemingly sheer, overwhelming the buildings of the little town clustered at its foot and on the lower slopes. The Rock, continuously garrisoned by British regiments since 1704, symbol of England’s former might, one of the ancient keys to that Pax Britannica which once had kept the world in tune—the whole huge edifice speckled white and brown and dusty green in the burning heat. North and west lay the blue hills of Spain, mysterious Andalusia, land of sun and grape, passion and hot blood, of mountains, and almost inaccessible mountain-towns isolated in those high, barren hills.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Under a hot sun which brought to a head all the variegated smells of La Linea’s back streets a small, olive-skinned boy, barefoot and in rags, ran through the square to the north of the aduana, the Customs checkpoint from British territory, making towards a narrow alleyway which opened off a street beyond the Plaza Generalisimo Franco, beyond the pavement cafes and the bars and the little dark shops.

  The alleyway was close, shut in.

  The boy, accustomed to his surroundings, didn’t notice the dirt in that narrow way, the paint-peeled shutters and the rusty, crumbling wrought-iron work of the intricately patterned balconies above his dark head; the smell didn’t worry him—the indescribable smell of putrefying food and of slops thrown down into the paved strip below. A priest flitted by, pale and silent in his black habit, crow-like in the gloom of the deep canyon formed by the too close buildings; two women quarrelled vociferously outside a doorway into which a slim-waisted, effeminate man was trying to draw custom for the Exhibition—trying without success, for the busy time didn’t come until the troops and sailors from Gibraltar crossed the border later in the day to see the sights. A pretty girl leaned from a window, dreaming of the vineyards—the vineyards of Jerez de la Frontera, where her novio, her fiance, worked; a woman, older and not so pretty, called down a ribald remark to the hurrying boy beneath, and he lifted his coal-black, glittering eyes, turning his peaked little face upward to call back an even cruder one, accompanying it with a cheeky grin and a gesture of his fingers.

  Lightly—pursued by badinage, because all the alley knew his destination by now—the boy ran on.

  He ran on until he came to the end of the alley, where he knocked at the big, iron-studded door of a house which, blocking the way, made the alley into a cul-de-sac.

  The door opened, and an old woman stood with a pool of darkness behind her, a faint draught blowing up the straggly white hair and sending little whirls of dust into the air. She snapped at the boy, though she knew what the answer would be:

  “Que queres, hijo—who do you want, my son?”

  “The señorita.”

  She jerked her head backward. “Come in.”

  The boy obeyed, and the old woman, who was dressed from head to foot in rusty, green-tinted black, and had a face like a nut, shut the door behind him, cutting off all sound from outside. The establishment housed many girls, but (oddly, because she was not Spanish, though no one quite knew what her nationality was) only one was referred to as The Señorita.

  Inside the house was dark and cool, though dusty and peeling and uncared for. The big outer door opened into a kind of hall, a wide tiled hall off which opened many rooms; beyond, visible through a big, high, trellised grille, was a sun-filled courtyard where a fountain played, and round the yard the house, built round this hollow square, sprouted wrought-iron balconies on which the boy caught a glimpse of some of the young ladies. A burst of high laughter came from one of the balconies, and from somewhere in the house there was a faint strumming of a guitar, and a clear young voice sang of love in ancient Spain.

  The crone took the boy up a flight of stairs and along to a door at the end of a passage. As they entered this passage the boy sniffed. A heavy, lingering, indescribably wonderful scent on the air . . . the boy didn’t know what it was called, but he had expected that smell, for he had been here before. The black eyes shone in the small pixy face. There was something in that smell that excited the senses, and it drowned the other smells of the house, overlaid its general seediness with a hint of the romance of the big world beyond the boy’s present knowing, turned the shabby, almost derelict house into a kind of fairyland in his imagination.

  The old woman knocked at the door. “Señorita?”

  The voice—low, sensual—came muffled: “Yes?”

  “The boy. He has come again.”

  “Good! If you will send him in?”

  The old woman opened the door and the boy went in. The smell of the perfume was strong now as he entered that room which, though faded and stained, and barren except for the couch, a low table and chairs, an oil-lamp, and thick velvet window-curtains, was to him rich and splendid—almost paradise. He went in with heightened colour and a queer constriction in his throat, for there was little the boy didn’t know about these things, and he knew quite well what this room was used for, and it never failed to excite

  his immature yet oddly knowing imagination. The señorita—that enigmatic woman who had come to La Linea and this house out of the blue not so very long before—was in the boy’s eyes beautiful. She was beautiful in anyone’s eyes, with that supple figure and the thick mass of hair which crowned the pale-gold oval of her face, the way she looked at men with that open invitation in her expression; but to the boy she was more than beautiful, for his eyes had seen mainly
the sad drabs of the La Linea brothels, the old crones like Madame who had let him in, the ‘sisters’ whose ‘brothers’ sold them so regularly in the streets—and only occasionally, and remotely, the prettier girls on their balconies. Never mind the señorita’s trade: that was of no account, and anyway she was different from the rest. To the boy, of course, she should have been old; instead, she had no more than the seductive bloom of maturity, of an exciting experience; and, young as he was, the hot blood of the promiscuous and yet Victorian land of surprising contrasts, and its hot sun which sent that hot blood pounding, had filled him with a romantic love for the señorita from a distant country, the señorita whom La Linea knew as Rosia del Cuatro Caminos.

  To-day all the boy could see was the mass of auburn hair on which, above a screen, the sun streaming through the window-grille cast broken bars of radiance; and two small, pale-golden hands which patted that hair into place before a glass.

  The low voice came from behind the screen: “Pablo?”

  “Si, señorita.” He stood there awkwardly, breathing a little fast.

  “Well?”

  “Señorita, the ship has entered Gibraltar. The man—the Englishman you described to me—he has come ashore and has gone to the Bristol Hotel.”

  There was a soft laugh; the hands went on patting the hair. “Well done, Pablo. Anything else?”

  “No.” The boy hesitated, wrinkling his nose. “Señorita— I think it is the man.” His black eyes looked unblinkingly towards the screen. “He is almost as you told me . . . and yet somehow he looked—different.”

  Again the low laugh; there was something else in it now, though—tenderness, perhaps, and yet at the same time a hint of cruelty. “Older, Pablo? Is that it?”