“And then,” the American said when the laughter had died away, “our guy walked right into your act.”
“That’s right,” the Englishman said. “That was Nelson, Nelson …” And it was this name, which Leonard was to hear again, that brought the group to the full awareness of its transgression. The conversation turned to sport.
Another time, a different group of tunnelers, vertical as well as horizontal, were comparing notes. The purpose of nearly all the stories Leonard heard was to entertain. The Americans recounted how they had had to shovel their way through the runoff of their own cesspit. Again there was loud laughter, and an English voice said to more laughter, “Digging through your own shit, that just about sums this business up.” Then one of the American sergeants told how the sixteen of them, all hand-picked for the job, had been made to dig a practice tunnel in New Mexico before they started in Berlin. “Same kind of soil, was the idea. They wanted to figure out the optimum depth and check out if there was going to be any kind of slump on the surface, so we dug—” “And dug, and dug …,” his friends joined in. “After fifty feet they had all they needed for the best depth, and there was no slump. But would they let us stop? You want a picture of futility? It’s a tunnel in the desert, from nowhere to nowhere, four hundred and fifty feet long. Four hundred and fifty feet!”
One conversation the diners had frequently concerned how long it would take the Russians or the East Germans to smash through into the tap chamber, and what would happen when they did. Would the operators have time to get clear, would the Vopos shoot, would there be time to close the steel doors? There had once been a plan to install incendiary devices to destroy classified equipment, but the fire risks were thought too great. On one matter everybody was agreed, and Glass confirmed this too. There had even been a CIA study. If the Russians ever did break in, they would have to keep quiet about it. The embarrassment of having their top military lines tapped would be too great. “There are silences and silences,” Glass had told Leonard. “But there’s nothing like the great Russian silence.”
There was another story Leonard heard several times. Its form changed only slightly with the retelling, and it worked best on newcomers, on people who were not yet acquainted with George. So in mid-February it was often heard in the canteen. Leonard first heard it while he was waiting in the queue. Bill Harvey, the head of the Berlin CIA base, a remote and powerful figure whom Leonard had never even glimpsed, occasionally visited the tunnel to check on progress. Because Harvey was conspicuous around Berlin, he came only at night. On one occasion he sat in the backseat of his car and overheard his driver and the GI beside him complain about their social life.
“I’m getting nowhere, and boy, am I ready for it,” said one.
“Me too,” said his friend. “But George is out there every afternoon, screwing by the fence.”
“Lucky George.”
The men at the warehouse were supposed to be kept in relative isolation. There was no telling what they might divulge to a fräulein in a moment of weakness. The extent of Harvey’s anger when he arrived that night depended on the storyteller. In some versions he simply asked to see the duty officer; in others he stormed into the building in an alcohol-driven rage and the duty officer quivered before him. “Find this asshole George and get him out of here!” Inquiries were made. George was in fact a dog, a local mongrel adopted as the warehouse mascot. In further elaborations, Harvey was supposed to have responded with face-saving calmness. “I don’t care what he thinks he is. He’s making my men unhappy. Get rid of him.”
At the end of four weeks Leonard’s great task was over. The last four tape recorders to be fitted with signal activation were packed into two specially constructed cases with snap locks and canvas straps for extra security. The machines were to be used for monitoring purposes at the head of the tunnel. The cases were loaded onto the cart and taken down into the basement. Leonard locked his room and wandered down the corridor to the recording room. It was lit by hooded fluorescent lamps and was large, but not quite large enough to accommodate comfortably the 150 machines and all the men who were working around them. The recorders were stacked three high on metal shelves and arranged in five rows. Down the aisles there were people on their hands and knees tracing power cables and other circuits, and stepping over and around them were others with spools of tape, in and out trays, numbered signs and gummed paper. Two fitters were drilling into the wall with power tools, preparing to secure a twenty-foot-long set of pigeonholes to the wall. Someone else was already gluing pieces of card with code numbers under each compartment. By the door was a head-high pile of stationery and spare recording tape in plain white boxes. On the other side of the door, right in the corner, was a hole in the floor through which cables dropped down into the basement, down the shaft and along the tunnel to where the amplifiers were about to be installed.
Leonard was at the warehouse for almost a year before he understood the operating system in the recording room. The vertical diggers were scraping their way upward to a ditch on the far side of the Schönefelder Chaussee in which three cables lay buried. Each one contained 172 circuits carrying at least 18 channels. The twenty-four-hour babble of the Soviet command network consisted of telephone conversations and encoded telegraph messages. In the recording room only two or three circuits were monitored. The movements of the Vopos and the East German telephone repair crews were matters of immediate interest. If ever the tunnel was about to be discovered—if the beast, as Glass sometimes called the other side, was ready to break in and threaten the lives of our people—the earliest warnings would come over these lines. As for the rest, the taped telephone conversations were flown to London and the telegraph messages to Washington for decoding, all in military planes, under armed guard. Scores of workers, many of them Russian émigrés, toiled in small rooms in Whitehall and in the temporary huts that littered the way between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.
Standing by the entrance to the recording room on the day he finished, Leonard was concerned only to find himself a new job. He teamed up with an older German, one of Gehlen’s men, whom he had seen on his first day driving a forklift. Germans were no longer ex-Nazis, they were Maria’s compatriots. So he and Fritz, who had once trained as an electrician and whose real name was Rudi, stripped wires and made connections at junction boxes, and fitted protective covers over power lines and secured them to the floor so that no one would trip on them. After an initial exchange of first names, they worked in comradely silence, passing the wire-strippers between them and making encouraging grunts whenever one small job was complete. Leonard took it as a sign of his new maturity that he could work contentedly alongside the man Glass had described as a real horror. Rudi’s big fingers with splayed ends were swift and precise. The afternoon lights came on, coffee was brought. While the Englishman sat on the floor with his back against the wall, smoking a cigarette, Rudi kept at it and refused refreshment.
In the late afternoon people began drifting away. By six Leonard and Rudi had the room to themselves, and they worked faster to complete a final set of connections. At last Leonard stood up and stretched. Now he could allow himself to think again of Kreuzberg and Maria. He could be there in less than an hour.
He was fetching his jacket from the back of a chair when he heard his name being spoken from the door. A man too thin for his double-breasted suit was coming toward him with his hand extended. Rudi, who was on his way out, stepped aside and called “Gute Nacht” to Leonard over the stranger’s shoulder. Leonard had his jacket half on and was returning the goodnight as he shook the man’s hand. During this little flurry, Leonard was making the automatic, barely conscious appraisal of manner, appearance and voice by means of which one Englishman decodes another’s status.
“John MacNamee. We’ve got someone fallen sick and I’ll be needing another pair of hands at the tunnel head next week. It’s all clear with Glass. I’ve got half an hour now if you want me to show you around.”
MacNamee had buck teeth, and very few of them—little pegs set far apart, and rather brown. Hence the slight lisp in a delivery from which the Cockney had not been fully expunged. The voice was almost chummy. A refusal was not expected. MacNamee was already leading the way out of the recording room, but his authority was lightly worn.
Leonard guessed that this was a senior government scientist. A couple of them had been his teachers at Birmingham, and there were one or two in and around the G.P.O. research laboratory at Dollis Hill. Theirs was a special generation of unpretentious, gifted men, brought into prominent government service in the forties by the necessities of modern scientific warfare. Leonard respected the ones he had met. They did not make him feel clumsy and short of the right word the way the public-school boys did—the ones who would not speak to him in the canteen and who were all set to rise through the hierarchies of command by dint of a reasonable grasp of Latin and ancient Greek.
Down in the basement they had to stand and wait by the shaft. Someone in front of them was having difficulty finding his pass for the guard. Near where they stood, the earth piled to the ceiling exuded its cold stench. MacNamee stamped his feet on the muddy concrete and clasped his bony white hands. On the way Leonard had taken from his room a greatcoat Glass had found for him, but MacNamee had only his gray suit.
“It’ll be warm enough down there when we get those amplifiers running. It could even be a problem,” he said. “Enjoying the work?”
“It’s a very interesting project.”
“You fitted out all the recorders. That must have got boring.”
Leonard knew it was unwise to complain to a superior, even when prompted. MacNamee was showing his pass and signing for his guest. “It wasn’t so bad, really.”
He followed the older man down the ladder, into the pit. By the mouth of the tunnel MacNamee supported his foot against a railway line and bent to retie his lace. His voice was muffled, and Leonard had to stoop to hear. “What’s your clearance, Marnham?” The guard at the edge of the shaft was looking down at them. Could he possibly believe, like the sentries on the gate, that he was guarding a warehouse, or even a radar station?
Leonard waited until MacNamee had straightened and they had stepped into the tunnel. The fluorescent striplights barely dispersed the blackness. The acoustic was dead. Leonard’s voice sounded flat in his ears. “Actually, it’s level three.”
MacNamee was walking ahead of him, his hands deep in his trouser pockets for warmth. “Well, I suppose we might have to bring you into four. I’ll see about that tomorrow.”
They were making a shallow descent as they walked between the rails. There were puddles underfoot, and on the walls, where the steel plates had been bolted together to make a continuous tube, condensation glistened. There was a constant hum of a groundwater pump. On both sides of the tunnel sandbags were piled to shoulder height to support cables and pipes. A number of bags had split and were spilling their contents. Earth and water were pressing in on all sides, waiting to reclaim the space.
They arrived at a place where tight coils of barbed wire were stacked by a pile of sandbags. MacNamee waited for Leonard to draw level. “We’re stepping into the Russian sector now. When they break in on us, which is bound to happen one of these days, we’re meant to spread the wire across as we retreat. Make them respect the border.” He smiled at his little irony, revealing his pitiful teeth. They teetered at all angles, like old gravestones. He caught Leonard’s gaze. He tapped his mouth with his forefinger and spoke right into the younger man’s embarrassment. “Milk teeth. The other lot never came through. I think perhaps I never wanted to grow up.”
They continued along level ground. A hundred yards ahead a group of men stepped through a steel door and came toward them. They appeared deep in conversation, but as they came closer, Leonard realized they were making no sound. They jostled in and out of single file. When they were thirty feet away Leonard caught the sibilants of their whispers. Those ceased too as the two groups squeezed by each other with wary nods.
“The general rule is no noise, especially once you’ve crossed the border.” MacNamee was speaking in a voice fractionally above a whisper. “As you know, low frequencies, men’s voices, penetrate very easily.”
Leonard whispered “Yes,” but his reply was lost to the sound of the pumps.
Running along the tops of the twin banks of sandbags were power lines, the air-conditioning conduit and the lines from the recording room, encased in a lead sheath. Along the way there were telephones mounted on the wall, and fire extinguishers, fuseboxes, emergency power switches. At intervals there were green and red warning lights, like miniature traffic signals. It was a toytown, packed with boyish invention. Leonard remembered the secret camps, the tunnels through the undergrowth he used to make with friends in a scrap of woodland near his house. And the gigantic train set in Hamleys, the toy store—the safe world of its motionless sheep and cows cropping the sudden green hills that were no more than pretexts for tunnels. Tunnels were stealth and safety; boys and trains crept through them, lost to sight and care, and then emerged unscathed.
MacNamee murmured in his ear again. “I tell you what I like about this project. The attitude. Once the Americans decide to do a thing, they do it well, and hang the cost. I’ve had everything I wanted, never a murmur. None of this can-you-get-by-with-half-a-ball-of-string nonsense.”
Leonard was flattered to be confided in. He tried to be humorous in agreement. “Look at all the trouble they take with the food. I love the way they do their chips.”
MacNamee looked away. It seemed this puerile observation drifted with them down the tunnel until they reached the steel door.
Beyond it was air-conditioning equipment banked up on both sides to make a narrow corridor of the railway lines. They edged past an American technician who was working there and opened a second door.
“Now,” MacNamee said as he closed it behind him. “What do you think?”
They had entered a brightly lit section of the tunnel that was clean and well ordered. The walls were lined with plywood that had been painted white. The railway lines had disappeared under a concrete floor, which was covered with linoleum. From overhead came the rumble of traffic on the Schönefelder Chaussee. Wedged between racks of electronics were tidy workspaces, plywood surfaces with headsets and the monitoring tape recorders. Neatly stowed on the floor were the cases Leonard had sent down that day. He was not being asked to admire the amplifier. He knew the model from Dollis Hill. It was powerful, compact and weighed less than forty pounds. It was about the most expensive item in the lab where he had worked. It was not the machine, it was the sheer quantity of them, and the switching gear, all down one side of the tunnel, stretching ninety feet perhaps, stacked head high, like the interior of a telephone exchange. It was the quantity MacNamee was proud of, the handling capacity, the amplifying power and the feat of circuitry it implied. By the door, the lead-sheathed cables broke into multicolored strands, fanning out to junction points from which they emerged in smaller clusters held by rubber clips. Three men of the Royal Signals were at work. They nodded at MacNamee and ignored Leonard. The two men passed along the array at a stately pace, as though reviewing a guard of honor. MacNamee said, “Near on a quarter of a million pounds’ worth. We’re drawing off a tiniest fraction of the Russian signals, so we need the best there is.”
Since his remark about the chips, Leonard was confining his appreciation to nods and sighs. He was thinking about an intelligent question he might put, and only half listened while MacNamee described the technicalities of the circuitry. Close attention was not necessary. MacNamee’s pride in the bright white amplification room was impersonal. He liked to see the achievement afresh through the eyes of a newcomer, and any eyes would do.
Leonard was still working on his question as they approached a second steel door. MacNamee stopped by it. “This one is a double door. We’re going to keep the tap room pressurized to stop the nitrogen leak.” Leonard nodd
ed again. The Russian cables would have nitrogen sealed within them to keep moisture out and to help monitor breaks. Pressurizing the air around the cables would make it possible to cut into them undetected.
MacNamee pushed open the doors, and Leonard followed him in. It was as though they had stepped inside a drum being beaten by a wild man. Road noise was filling the vertical tunnel and reverberating in the tap chamber. MacNamee stepped over empty sacks of sound insulation piled on the floor and took a torch from a table. They stood at the base of the access tunnel. Right up in its roof, picked out by the narrow beam, were the three cables, each four or five inches thick and caked in mud. MacNamee was about to speak, but the pounding intensified to a frenzy and they had to wait. When it subsided he said, “Horse and cart. They’re the worst. When we’re ready, we’ll use a hydraulic jack to pull the cables down. Then we’ll need a day and a half to cement the roof for support. We won’t make the cut until all the backup is in shape. We’ll bridge the circuits first and then break in and lead off. There’s likely to be more than a hundred and fifty circuits in each cable. There’ll be an MI6 technician laying the actual tap, and three standing by in case something goes wrong. We’ve one man off sick, so you might have to be in the support group.”
While he was speaking, MacNamee rested his hand on Leonard’s shoulder. They came away from the shaft to be out of the worst of the noise.
“Well I have got a question,” Leonard said, “but you might not want to answer it.”
The government scientist shrugged. Leonard found that he wanted his approval. “Surely all the important military traffic will be encoded and telegraphed. How are we going to read it? These modern codes are meant to be virtually unbreakable.”
MacNamee took a pipe from his jacket pocket and bit on its stem. Smoking, of course, was out of the question.