‘Listen,’ said Wilt. ‘Right now where I’ve got a structural failure is in the zip on my trousers. Something’s got caught in it and it’s stuck.’
‘Which side?’ asked the engineer.
‘Which side is what?’ demanded Wilt.
‘The … er … thing that’s stuck in it?’
Wilt peered down at the zip. In the confines of the toilet it was difficult to see which side anything was. ‘How the hell would I know?’
‘You pulling it up or down?’ continued the engineer.
‘Up,’ said Wilt.
‘Sometimes helps to pull it down first.’
‘It’s already bloody down,’ said Wilt allowing his irritation to get the better of him. ‘I wouldn’t be trying to pull the fucking thing up if it wasn’t down, would I?’
‘I guess not,’ said the engineer with a degree of bland patience that was even more irritating than his desire to be helpful. ‘Just the same if it isn’t right down it could be the thing …’ He paused. ‘Mr Wilt, just what is it you’ve got in the zip?’
Inside the toilet Wilt stared dementedly at a notice which not only instructed him to wash his hands but seemed to suppose he needed telling how to. ‘Count to ten,’ he muttered to himself and was surprised to find that the zip had freed itself. He’d also been freed from the unwanted helpfulness of the engineer. A crash of breaking glass had evidently disturbed the man’s blandness. ‘Jesus, what’s going on?’ he yelled.
It was not a question Wilt could answer. And by the sound of things outside he didn’t want to. Somewhere a door burst open and running feet in the corridor were interspersed with muffled orders to freeze. Inside the toilet wilt froze. Accustomed as he had recently become to the hazards seemingly inherent in going to the lavatory anywhere outside his own house, the experience of being locked in a cubicle with a hit squad of Anti Perimeter Penetration men bursting into the building was new to him.
It was fairly new to the engineer. As the canisters of Agent Incapacitating hit the floor and masked men armed with automatic weapons broke through the door he lost all interest in the problems of Wilt’s zip and headed back into the lecture hall only to collide with the navigator and the PX clerk who were dashing the other way. In the confusion that followed Agent Incapacitating lived up to its name. The PX clerk tried to disentangle himself from the engineer who was doing his best to avoid him and the navigator embraced them both under the illusion he was moving in the other direction.
As they fell to the ground Lieutenant Harah loomed over them large and quite extraordinarily sinister in his gas mask.
‘Which of you is Wilt?’ he yelled. His voice, distorted both by the mask and by the effects of the gas on their nervous systems, reached them slowly. Not even the voluble engineer was able to help him. ‘Take them all out,’ he ordered and the three men were dragged from the building gurgling sentences that sounded as if a portable recorder with faulty batteries was being played under water.
In his cubicle Wilt listened to the awful noises with growing apprehension. Breaking glass, strangely muffled shouts and the clump of boots had played no part in his previous visits to the airbase and he couldn’t for the life of him imagine what they portended. Whatever it was he’d had enough trouble for one evening without wishing to invite any more. It seemed safest to stay where he was and wait until whatever was happening had stopped. Wilt switched off the light and sat down on the seat.
*
Outside, Lieutenant Harah’s men reported thickly that the hall was clear. In spite of the eddies of gas the Lieutenant could see that. Peering through the eyepiece of his gas mask he surveyed the empty seats with a sense of anti-climax. He had rather hoped the infiltrator would put up a show of resistance, and the ease with which the bastard had been taken had disappointed him. On the other hand he could also see that it had been a mistake to bring in the assault dogs without equipping them with gas masks. Agent Incapacitating evidently affected them too. One of them was slithering about the floor snarling in slow motion while another, in an attempt to scratch its right ear, was waving a hindfoot about in a most disturbing manner.
‘Okay, that’s it,’ he said and marched out to question his three prisoners. Like the assault dogs they had been totally incapacitated and he had no idea which was the foreign agent he was supposed to be detaining. They were all dressed in civilian clothes and in no state to say who or what they were. Lieutenant Harah reported to Glaushof. ‘I think you better check them out, sir. I don’t know which son of a bitch is which.’
‘Wilt,’ said Glaushof, glaring at the gas mask, ‘his name is Wilt. He’s a foreign employee. Shouldn’t be any difficulty recognizing the bastard.’
‘All Limeys look the same to me,’ said the Lieutenant, and was promptly rewarded with a chop across his throat and a knee in his groin by Captain Clodiak who had just recognized her sexist assailant through his gas mask. As the Lieutenant doubled up she grabbed his arm and Glaushof was surprised to see how easily his second-in-command was swept off his feet by a woman.
‘Remarkable,’ he said. ‘It’s a genuine privilege to witness –’
‘Cut the crap,’ said Captain Clodiak, dusting her hands and looking as though she would like to demonstrate her expertise in karate on another man. ‘That creep said a sexist remark and you said Wilt. Am I right?’ Glaushof looked puzzled. He hadn’t recognized ‘son of a bitch’ as being sexist and he didn’t want to discuss Wilt in front of the other women. On the other hand he didn’t have any idea what Wilt looked like and someone had to identify him. ‘Maybe we’d better step outside to discuss this, Captain,’ he said and went out the door.
Captain Clodiak followed him warily. ‘What do we have to discuss?’ she asked.
‘Like Wilt,’ said Glaushof.
‘You’re crazy. I heard you just now. Wilt an agent?’
‘Incontrovertible,’ said Glaushof, pulling brevity.
‘How so?’ said Clodiak, responding in kind.
‘Infiltrated the permeter with enough radio transmitting equipment hidden in his car to signal our position to Moscow or the moon. I mean it, Captain. What’s more it’s not civilian equipment you can buy in a store. It’s official.’ said Glaushof and was relieved to notice the disbelief fade from her face. ‘And right now, I’m going to need help identifying him.’
They went round the corner and were confronted by the sight of three men lying face down on the ground in front of Lecture Hall 9 guarded by two incapacitated assault dogs and the APP team.
‘Okay, men, the Captain here is going to identify him,’ said Glaushof and prodded the PX clerk with his foot. ‘Turn over, you.’ The clerk tried to turn over but succeeded only in crawling sideways on top of the engineer, who promptly went into convulsions. Glaushof looked at the two contorted figures with disgust before having his attention distracted even more disturbingly by an assault dog that had urinated on his shoe without lifting its leg.
‘Get that filthy beast off me,’ he shouted and was joined in his protests by the engineer who objected just as strongly though less comprehensibly to the apparent attempts the PX clerk was making to bugger him. By the time the dog had been removed, a process that required the efforts of three men on the end of its chain, and some sort of order was restored on the ground Captain Clodiak’s expression had changed again. ‘I thought you said you wanted Wilt identified,’ she said, ‘Well, he’s not here.’
‘Not here? You mean …’ Glaushof looked suspiciously at the broken door of the lecture hall.
‘They’re the men the Lieutenant told us to grab,’ said one of the hit-squad. ‘There wasn’t anyone else in the hall I saw.’
‘There’s gotta be,’ yelled Glaushof. ‘Where’s Harah?’
‘In there where you –’
‘I know where he is. Just get him and fast.’
‘Yessir,’ said the man and disappeared.
‘You seem to have got yourself a problem,’ said Captain Clodiak.
Glaushof tr
ied to shrug it off. ‘He can’t have broken through the cordon and even if he has he’s going to burn on the fence or get himself arrested at the gate.’ he said. ‘I’m not worried.’
All the same he found himself glancing round at the familiar dull buildings and the roadways between them with a new sense of suspicion as though somehow they had changed character and had become accomplices to the absent Wilt. With an insight that was alarmingly strange to him he realized how much Baconheath meant to him; it was home, his own little fortress in a foreign land with its comfortable jet noises linking him to his own hometown, Eiderburg, Michigan, and the abattoir down the road where the hogs were killed. As a boy he had woken to the sound of their squeals and an F111 screaming for take-off had the same comforting effect on him. But more than anything else Baconheath with its perimeter fence and guarded gates had been America for him, his own country, powerful, independent and freed from danger by his constant vigilance and the sheer enormity of its arsenal. Squatting there behind the wire and isolated by the flat reaches of the Fens from the old crumbling villages and market towns with their idle, inefficient shopkeepers and their dirty pubs where strange people drank warm, unhygienic beer, Baconheath had been an oasis of brisk efficiency and modernity, and proof that the great US of A was still the New World and would remain so.
But now Glaushof’s vision had shifted and for a moment he felt somehow disassociated from the place. These buildings were hiding this Wilf from him and until he found the bastard Baconheath would be infected. Glaushof forced himself out of this nightmare and was confronted by another. Lieutenant Harah came round the corner. He was clearly still paying for his sexist attitude to Captain Clodiak and had to be supported by two APPS men. Glaushof had almost been prepared for that. The garbled noises the Lieutenant was making were something else again and could hardly be explained by a kick in the groin.
‘It’s the AI, sir,’ one of the men explained, ‘I guess he must have loosed off a canister in the lobby.’
‘Loosed off a canister? In the lobby?’ Glaushof squawked, appalled at the terrible consequences to his career such a lunatic action seemed certain to provoke. ‘Not with those women –’
‘Affirmative,’ ejaculated Lieutenant Harah without warning. Glaushof turned on him.
‘What do you mean, affirmative?’
‘Absolute,’ Harah’s voice hit a new high. And stuck there. ‘Absolute absolute absolute absolute …’
‘Gag that bastard,’ shouted Glaushof and shot round the corner of the building to see what he could do to rescue the situation. It was beyond hope. For whatever insane reason Lieutenant Harah, perhaps in an attempt to defend himself against a second strike from Captain Clodiak, had wrenched the pin from a gas grenade before realizing that his gas mask had come off in his fall. Gazing through the glass doors at the bizarre scenes in the lobby, Glaushof was no longer worried about Mrs Ofrey’s interference. Draped over the back of a chair with her hair touching the floor and happily obscuring her face, the wife of the Chief Administrative Executive resembled nothing so much as a large and incontinent highland ewe which had been put rather prematurely through a Fair Isle knitting machine. The rest of the class were in no better shape. The astro-navigation officer lay on her back, evidently re-enacting a peculiarly passive sexual experience, while several other students of British Culture and Institutions looked as though they were extras in some film depicting the end of the world. Once again Glaushof experienced the ghastly sensation of being at odds with his environment and it was only by calling up reserves of approximate sanity that he took control of himself.
‘Get them out of there,’ he shouted, ‘and call the medics. We got a maniac on the loose.’
‘Got something,’ said Captain Clodiak. ‘That Lieutenant Harah’s going to have a lot to answer for. I can’t see General Ofrey being too pleased with a dead wife. He’ll just have to play three-handed bridge with the Commander.’
But Glaushof had had enough of the Captain’s objective standpoint. ‘You’re responsible for this,’ he said with a new menace in his voice. ‘You talk about questions you’re going to have to answer some yourself. Like you deliberately assaulted Lieutenant Harah in the execution of his duty and –’
‘Like the execution of his duty includes getting his hand up my …’ interrupted the Captain furiously and then stopped and stared. ‘Oh my God,’ she said and Glaushof, who had been preparing for another demonstration of karate, followed her gaze.
In the broken doorway of Lecture Hall 9 a hapless figure was trying to stand up. As they watched, it failed.
15
Fifteen miles away Wilt’s Escort beeped its erratic way towards Ipford. Since no one had thought to provide the Corporal with adequate directions and he had distrusted Glaushof’s assurances that he would be well protected by the Major and the men in the truck behind him, he had taken his own precautions before and after leaving the base. He had provided himself with a heavy automatic and had computed a route which would cause maximum confusion to anyone trying to cross-reference his position on their receivers. He had achieved his object. In short, he had travelled twenty quite extraordinarily complicated miles in no time at all. Half an hour after leaving Baconheath he was still only five miles from the base. After that he had shot off towards Ipford and had spent twenty minutes pretending to change a tyre in a tunnel under the motorway before emerging on a minor road which ran for several miles very conveniently next to a line of high-tension electricity pylons. Two more tunnels and fifteen miles on a road that wound along below the bank of a dyked river, and Inspector Hodge and the men in the other listening van were desperately transmitting messages to one another in an attempt to make out where the hell he had got to. More awkwardly still, they couldn’t be entirely sure where they were either.
The Major shared their dilemma. He hadn’t expected the Corporal to take evasive action or to drive – when he wasn’t lurking in tunnels – at excessive speed along winding roads that had presumably been designed for single-file horse traffic and had been dangerous even then. But the Major didn’t care. If the Corporal wanted to take off like a scalded cat that was his problem. ‘He wants an armed escort he better stay with us,’ he told his driver as they skidded round a muddy ninety-degree bend and nearly landed in a deep water-filled drain. ‘I’m not ending my life in a ditch so slow down for Chrissake.’
‘So how do we keep up with him?’ asked the driver, who had been thoroughly enjoying himself.
‘We don’t. If he’s going any place outside hell it’s Ipford. I’ve got the address here. Take the motorway first chance you get and we’ll wait for him where he’s supposed to be going.’
‘Yes sir,’ said the driver reluctantly and switched back to the main road at the next turn-off.
*
Sergeant Runk would have done the same had he been given the chance but the Corporal’s tactics had confirmed all Inspector Hodge’s wildest dreams. ‘He’s trying to lose us,’ he shouted shortly after the Corporal left the airbase and began to dice with death. ‘That must mean he’s carrying dope.’
‘That or he’s practising for the Monte Carlo Rally,’ said Runk.
Hodge wasn’t amused. ‘Rubbish. The little bastard goes into Baconheath, spends an hour and a half and comes out doing eighty along mud roads no one in their right minds would do forty on in daylight and backtracks five times the way he’s done – he must have something he values in that car.’
‘Can’t be his life, and that’s for certain,’ said Runk who was struggling to keep his seat. ‘Why don’t we just call up a patrol car and pull him for speeding? That way we can have him searched for whatever he’s carrying.’
‘Good idea,’ said Hodge and had been about to send out instructions when the Corporal had taken radio refuge in the motorway tunnel and they’d lost him for twenty minutes. Hodge had spent the time blaming Runk for failing to have an accurate fix on his last position and calling for help from the second van. The Corporal’s subs
equent route near the power lines and below the river bank had made matters still more awkward. By then the Inspector had no idea what to do, but his conviction that he was dealing with a master-criminal had been confirmed beyond doubt.
‘He’s obviously passed the stuff on to a third party and if we go for a search he’ll plead innocence,’ he muttered.
Even Runk had to agree that all the evidence pointed that way. ‘He also happens to know his car’s been wired for sound,’ he said. ‘The route he’s following he’s got to know. So where do we go from here?’
Hodge hesitated. For a moment he considered applying for a warrant and conducting so thorough a search of the Wilts’ house that even the minutest trace of heroin or Embalming Fluid would come to light. But if it didn’t … ‘There’s always the tape recorder,’ he said finally. ‘He may have missed that in which case we’ll get the conversations he had with the pickup artist.’
Sergeant Runk doubted it. ‘If you ask me,’ he said, ‘the only way you’re going to get solid evidence on this bugger is by sending Forensic in to do a search with vacuum-cleaners that’d suck an elephant through a drain pipe. He may be as canny as they come but those lab blokes know their onions. I reckon that’s the sane way of going about it.’
But Hodge wasn’t to be persuaded. He had no intention of handing the case over to someone else when it was patently obvious he was on the right track. ‘We’ll see what’s on that tape first,’ he said as they headed back towards Ipford. ‘We’ll give him an hour to get to sleep and then you can move in and get it.’
‘And have the rest of the bloody day off,’ said Runk. ‘You may be one of Nature’s insomniacs but if I don’t get my eight hours I won’t be fit for –’