Death's No Antidote

by Geoffrey Osborne

  He tossed the grenade into the room.

  Chapter Twenty

  Dingle reacted quickly, flinging himself flat — on top of the grenade. The others dived for cover behind the sparse furniture.

  Nothing happened.

  Then Dingle was rolling, snatching up the grenade; as he turned, he hurled it through the window.

  The pane shattered noisily and the pieces broke into smaller fragments on the concrete outside.

  There was a short, sudden silence; and then the rest of the glass in the window was punched inwards by the blast wave as the bomb exploded, showering the SS(O)S agent and cutting his face.

  “Jim! You all right?”

  “Yes. Must have been a fifteen-second fuse on that thing. Designed to give the user plenty of time to get away, I suppose.”

  “Fifteen seconds!” echoed Jones. “Bloody ’ell, boyo, is that all it was?”

  “Long enough for me to age fifteen years, I guess,” Ritchie butted in. He poked his head out from underneath the bed, still chewing steadily on his gum. “Is it safe to come out now?”

  “You don’t look any older,” commented Gruber, emerging from behind the wardrobe. “But I’ve gone deaf.” He wiggled his little fingers in his ears, shaking his head. “Whatever that little Chink kept in his liquor flask, it sure packed a punch.”

  Dingle was on his feet, running for the door.

  “Come on!” he shouted urgently. “The bastard’ll get away.”

  The others were close behind him when he reached the edge of the landing strip.

  But there was nothing they could do, except stand and watch helplessly.

  The earlier rain had cleared and a yellow moon rode high, outshining the stars, tarnishing their silvery glitter.

  The five men could see the black outline of the Russian aircraft, climbing steeply, its nose probing ahead, reaching for the translucent sky.

  Colonel Fu’s plane was already near the end of the runway, just about to become airborne.

  *

  C.P. leaned back in his seat, breathing deeply, feeling the pressure in his back as the powerful jets lifted him from his native soil. He looked down at the dark landscape…at the country he might never see again.

  Fear was receding now, with the white shore-line below; but a new anxiety was taking over. Was Jones right about Russia? Would he regret it later?

  No, there must be no regrets; and with Sue to help him, there would be none.

  He glanced at the girl sitting beside him, reached for her hand.

  “We’re safe, Sue,” he whispered. “We’re safe now.”

  She withdrew her hand.

  “Sue…?”

  “Svetlana. My name is Sveltana.”

  “I’m sorry. Svetlana. I’ll try to remember.”

  He reached out to her again.

  “Don’t touch me!”

  “But Sue… Svetlana! I’m…”

  “Don’t ever touch me again.”

  “I don’t understand.” He stared at her, bewildered. “We’re going to be married as soon…”

  “So! You don’t understand! I loathe you, despise you, detest you. Is that clear enough for you. Until now, you were just another job to me. Now that job is finished. It’s over. I don’t have to pretend any more.”

  Anger rose inside him. Blind, unreasoning fury. He tried to get up. The seat belt restrained him; but it couldn’t check the rage which blazed from his eyes and then seemed to explode in his brain in a scorching red ball…

  *

  The fiery red ball hung suspended in the sky for a heartbeat; then, slowly, it disintegrated, like a spent rocket on firework night. As the crippled Russian aircraft spiralled down, a second blast ripped through it.

  The five agents, standing in the orange glow of the landing lights, watched in awed fascination.

  “Poor old Seepy,” said Jones softly. “I tried to warn him; tried to make him stay, but he wouldn’t list…”

  He broke off as yet another flash lit the heavens. For an instant it silhouetted Dawes’ aircraft; then that machine too, seemed to separate into two parts as it faltered and fell, down towards the sea.

  Moments later the sounds of the explosions reached the men on the ground.

  Nick Gruber looked at his watch, a puzzled frown wrinkling his brow.

  “That’s darned funny. Those charges weren’t due to go off for another twenty minutes,” he said.

  Jones stared at him.

  “Are you trying to tell us that you put bombs aboard those planes?”

  The American nodded.

  “Sure we did. We had to do something to stop them getting away with the DNA File. It was obvious that the lousy Limey security services couldn’t prevent it.”

  “Bloody ’ell, boyo, I wish you’d told me,” Jones said, peeved. “I could have saved some of our taxpayers’ money.”

  “Whadya mean?” Jason Ritchie stopped chewing long enough to ask the question.

  “Well, Willy and I stuck some bombs aboard too, see? In fact it’s ours that went off. Limpet-type, attached to the outside of the fuselage, they were. Designed to explode as soon as the aircraft reached three thousand feet.”

  Dingle’s face was pale beneath the bloodstains.

  “While you were all going around sticking ‘destination doom’ labels on every plane in sight, did you realise that Fu Chin Chow planned to take me along as a passenger?”

  Jones ignored the question. He was still glaring angrily at Gruber.

  “And not so much of your ‘Lousy Limey security’. You want to clean up your own backyard first.

  “Red China has submarines that can fire missiles from under the sea now; the rockets have already been tested successfully. On top of that, China’s made sudden leaps forward into space and atomic power.

  “Why? Because their programme is being headed by Dr. Tsien Hsue-shen, a former top member of America’s team of rocket scientists.

  “So who’s responsible for the big security muddle that allowed Tsien to return to China with his head stuffed with America’s latest rocket secrets? Eh? Answer that, if you can.

  “And as for this DNA business,” Jones went on without pausing for breath, “you’ve been working at the wrong end. We can take care of security at this end — as you’ve just witnessed. But we told you before, the original leak…the leak that alerted the Chinese that C.P. was in charge of the file over here…must have come from your end.”

  “Okay, okay.” Gruber held up his hands in mock surrender. “Touché. We’ve got some men working on it in America. As for the Dr. Tsien affair, it’s probably the fault of those bums at the pickle factory…the CIA,” he added bitterly.

  “Anyway,” said Jones. “How did you find your way down here?”

  “Easy. We realised Croome-Pugglesley must be involved somewhere. Jason was following him while I checked up on the girl friend. We lost them for a while in the fog, but picked up the trail again at the dame’s place and followed them to Ponder’s End.

  “Then that guy Finn turned up. From there on it was simple. We just bugged his car. They led us here.”

  “Very neat,” said Jones grudgingly. “I’m sorry about Seepy, though. He was terrified out of his wits; didn’t really know what he was doing.”

  “Well, he won’t be frightened any more,” commented Ritchie, interrupting his chewing once more. “He’s dead.”

  “Death’s no antidote to fear,” said Jones. “It’s a permanent bloody cure — for life.”

  Epilogue

  Pot-bellied clouds hung low over Whitehall. A strong wind whipped pebbles of rain against the conference room windows.

  “You’ve seen the later editions of this morning’s newspapers, gentlemen,” said the Director. “A private company aircraft piloted by Mr. William Dawes was in collision over the Channel with a Russian aerobatics team supply plane. There were no survivors.”

  “That’s the offici
al story,” said the DI5 chief. “How long do you think it will be before the journalists smell a rat? They might spot the discrepancy in the times of take-off.”

  “We’ve put a security blackout on all information of that nature at Heathrow,” the SB Commander broke in.

  “And if all else fails, we’ll slap a D-notice on the newspapers,” the Co-ordinator added mildly. “Any bodies recovered yet, by the way?”

  “Three,” answered the Rear-Admiral (DSI). “In eluding the Chinese feller. Received a signal just before I came here.”

  Gruber and Ritchie, who had been invited to sit in on the Joint Intelligence Committee meeting as observers, leaned forward with interest.

  “Found some films on him,” the Naval officer went on. “Bein’ rushed up to London now.”

  “Excellent!” The Director gave one of his rare smiles. “All in all, a very good operation — thanks to your cooperation C.”

  “Dangerous business, to mount an operation with top secret material as bait, especially when it doesn’t belong to us,” growled the head of DI6.

  “Oh, I think our American friends are satisfied that the actual security of the DNA File was never seriously threatened, aren’t you, gentlemen?”

  “Quite sure,” lied Gruber easily. “We were never in doubt. The whole affair has done us some good, too. We received a message through our Embassy this morning, and the leak at the Washington end has been plugged. The FBI unearthed quite an active cell of Maoist workers.”

  “Excellent!” said the Director again. “We have achieved similar results here. In fact that was the whole object of the SS(O)S operation.

  “We’ve been trying to smash the Chinese ring in this country for some time.

  “As you know, after Czechoslovakia, several local Communist parties either split up or were disbanded altogether. But since then, several have re-formed, this time as Maoist groups.

  “Colonel Fu Chang-sui was over here partly to organise the filching of the DNA File.” The Director paused impressively. “But his prime motive was to coordinate these groups.

  “He already had his group leaders, or officers, established in this country. Most of them were former anti-British Communist agitators from Singapore. They organised riots there when the British Army was containing the Communist threat from Indonesia.”

  “How the devil did they get in here then?” asked the General from the Ministry of Defence.

  The Director frowned at the interruption.

  “As students mainly, General. Don’t ask me why they were allowed to stay. The ways of the Home Office are devious at times…”

  “Get back to the point,” muttered C.

  The Director glared angrily at him.

  “I will if people will stop interrupting. The point is, that when my agent, Jones, alerted us — and we in turn alerted SB — to follow Dawes yesterday…perhaps you’d like to take over from here Commander?”

  The Special Branch chief beamed with pleasure.

  “Dawes led us to a house in Camden Town where he met the Chinese colonel. There were other people there, and we didn’t take any action; just observed, as the Director requested. Late last night, when the place was empty, we raided the house. Discreetly, of course.

  “Everything was there; a complete list of all the Chinese ‘officers’ and all the Maoist sympathisers throughout the country — people like Gunney and the others who we’ve already heard about.”

  “Very nice work,” admitted C grudgingly. “What action is being taken about them?”

  “We’ve yet to decide. Either we can arrest the lot, or we can keep an eye on them. Alternatively we can infiltrate some of our own men into each group. But we can deal with that later,” he added, glancing at the Americans.

  “And of course,” the Director resumed, “we had an unexpected bonus with the uncovering of Finn and his associates, thank to Mr. Ritchie and Mr. Gruber. The Commander’s men found enough information at the Brett’s house to smash another spy ring — Russian this time.”

  A murmur of approval sounded round the table and the Americans smiled in modest acknowledgement — until Ritchie felt the glare of the General’s beady eye.

  The FBI agent’s smile vanished abruptly; he winced as he bit his cheek, and the rhythmical movement of his jaws ceased. He swallowed painfully.

  The corners of the General’s mouth twitched underneath his military moustache. Ritchie, glassy-eyed, tried to smile back.

  He wondered how long that big goddamn wad of gum would take to travel down his throat.

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