Keeping close to the wall, I moved out of the light into the gallery that seemed still in use. Its walls were wet, and there was the steady drip of water, its sound magnified by the narrow confines of the tunnel. For illumination there was only the dim yellow glow of a few safety lights, recessed into wired and armour-glassed fittings. The line of bulbs showed me the inclines and curves of the workings, but there was not enough light to prevent me stumbling into pot-holes and falling over outcrops of rock. More than once, I went ankle-deep into the syrupy liquid that the dust and water made. Times without number I barked my shins and ankles upon the uneven sides of the gallery. There were rats everywhere: pairs of tiny green lights that stared at me, before disappearing with a scamper of feet that sometimes disturbed the litter of paper and tin cans.
I was a hundred and fifty yards along the gallery when I heard the train start. I looked around for somewhere to hide. The dim wall lights glinted on the sides of the gallery. I could see no recesses or cross-cuts ahead, and I’d certainly not passed anywhere that could conceal a man.
The sound of the train grew louder. I guessed that it was pulling a train of empty tubs, for there was a metallic rattling as the trolley wheels bounced on the poorly made track. It moved slowly, and as it turned the curve the diesel loco and its driver obscured the safety lights. I pressed myself flat against the wet rock-face.
The train was only fifty yards away by now, and its noise was almost deafening. I sank down on to my knees, and then went flat. It was a gamble, for if they did spot me, I’d have no chance to defend myself. I turned up my collar to hide the whiteness of my neck, and tucked my hands out of sight. The locomotive roared close to my ears, and its diesel exhaust scorched my arm. One of the tubs had been left in the inverted dump position. The edge of it struck my arm. I bit back an involuntary yell, and then the noise of the train overwhelmed my gasp of pain.
I remained still for several minutes after the train passed. When I got to my feet again, it was out of sight, although I could hear its rumble as it crossed the junction at the shaft landing. I heard voices, too, as the driver exchanged greetings with someone. The winding gear started again.
I moved forward, and this time I kept the gun in my hand. Now I heard other voices from the distant shaft landing. There were lots of men, and even my lousy Arabic was enough to tell me that a new shift of workers was coming on duty.
I hurried forward. Behind me I could hear the voices of the men as they climbed aboard the train. There were curses, and cheers, and the unfunny jokes that men exchange at moments of tension. The men’s voices were amplified by the narrow mine workings, and for a moment I panicked. I ran forward, hammering my fist against the rock, and desperately praying for any small niche in which to hide. My prayer was answered and I groped my way into a low tunnel that gave off the main gallery. It was wide, but there was so little head-room that I was almost bent double. I realized that it was not a gallery: it was a working face. I stumbled, banged my head and fell heavily. I felt the blood trickle down the side of my cheek and reached out to help myself to my feet. It was then that I touched the chilly surface of a steel rail. The tracks ran along this working, too. I went cold with fear. I realized that the train – filled with the workers – would not return along that same gallery down which I’d seen it go. The mine would be sure to work a one-way system, so that the unloaded trains could complete a circuit, to return the empty tubs to the work-face.
The train was coming up this road to meet me.
I turned and ran along the tunnel, now crouched even lower to avoid hitting my head. To my left there was the ancient conveyor and to my right what had once been the working face. The face was not flat, like a wall, it was an endless series of ‘rooms’ eaten out of the rock. Some of them were no more than a few feet wide, while others were just a black void. But that side of the workings was closed off with wire fencing. Several times I almost lost my balance as I tripped upon the loose uneven surface. I grazed my hand on the sharp edges of the conveyor-belt, with all its pulleys and rollers. Growing panicky, and ever more careless, I blundered into a wooden pit-prop and momentarily was knocked senseless. I doubled up over the conveyor, and heaved deep breaths that took the sharp dust deep into my lungs.
I looked back. The tunnel shone yellow. The driver was using the headlight on the locomotive. When it turned the corner this time, they surely must see me.
Desperately, I decided to crush myself into the space between the conveyor-belt and the bench over which it ran. I got my legs inside but only the great beam of yellow light, and the noise of the locomotive, persuaded me to cram myself into a space far too small.
I held my breath as the train approached with agonizing slowness. On it there were a dozen or more men. Most of them were dressed in the same dungarees that the others had been wearing, but four of the men were differently dressed. I blinked in amazement to see that they were wearing the leather helmets and goggles of old-time aviators. And, in case I was still in doubt, each of them was nursing on his lap the heavy canvas harness and unmistakable brown canvas pack of a parachute.
29
I watched the tub-train as it trundled away from my hiding place. There was enough light now to see that this track was entirely new. The air-doors at the end of them were also new. The train, with its strange subterranean aviators, thudded through the air-doors with a flash of lights and a shrill call of its whistle.
I waited a long time before extricating myself from my hiding place. When I was sure there was no one following them, I made my way along the track to the air-doors. I opened them and stepped through quickly.
The air-door shut behind me with a muffled bump, and cold night air hit me in the face like a custard pie. I was standing on a ledge, some twenty feet up one side of a vast underground cavern. It was about fifty yards across, and just as deep, but it must have been well over one hundred yards in length. Suddenly I realized that the roof was the sky, and I recognized it as the Tix quarry where I’d hidden for two nights and days of the war. But far more astonishing than the man-made hollow was the huge black metallic egg that completely filled it.
It was smooth and symmetrical, elegant and futuristic like those storage tanks that the oil companies depict on the covers of their annual reports, when shares have tumbled. On an airfield, perhaps I would have recognized it more quickly, but only when I saw its whole shape against the starry sky did I realize that the quarry was being used to house an airship.
An airship. Melodie Page had died after sending us the postcard photos of the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg, and it had been too obvious to see. Not that this was a giant rigid, like those airships of the ’thirties. This was no more than a blimp, of the sort I’d seen drifting over the cities of Europe and America advertising drink and cigarettes. This, then, was the consignment of engine parts, heavy-duty fabrics and plastics, and hydrogen or the plant to manufacture it – hence all those ‘No Smoking’ notices in Arabic.
Lacking a proper mooring mast, its nose was tethered to the shovel of a rusty excavator, and dozens of ropes held the restless shape down, close upon the floor of the quarry. The Dacron envelope had been roughly covered with matt black paint, and the gondola had been modified for freight-carrying. The engine nacelles were fixed to each side of the gondola. One engine had a servicing platform still in position. Three mechanics were bending over it, clanking spanners. They stood upright and exchanged looks of satisfaction.
As I was looking down upon them, one of the mechanics signalled to someone at the pilot’s controls, in the gondola. The engine started with a bang. It roared and came up to full revolutions, before being throttled back to a steady tick. They let it run for a couple of minutes, and then cut it. The quarry was silent, except for the generator that powered the lights and tools, and, from behind me, the faint hum of the fans in the mine.
I still had the P.38 in my hand, and my first impulse was to fire into the gas envelope, but there was little chance that such pin-pri
cks would do it any great damage: Also it would be dangerous. I was still thinking about it when a voice said, ‘Put it down, Charlie!’
I looked round, but I could see no one, apart from the mechanics who were displaying the same sort of interest in the voice as I was. It was Champion’s voice and it had come from a loudspeaker – or several loudspeakers. His voice echoed as the sound of it travelled back from the farthest loudspeaker and bounced off the gas-filled envelope and the quarry walls.
‘Put it down, please!’ A bird fluttered fearfully and flew across the airship. I still did not move.
‘I have a marksman here. The gallery behind you is sealed, and there is no way out of the quarry, except up the cliff side.’
I looked at the sheer sides of the quarry from which his voice still reverberated, and I put my pistol back into my belt.
Champion took his time, crossing the bottom of the quarry and climbing the crude steps to the ledge where I’d emerged from the mine gallery. I suppose I would have been equally cautious, or perhaps I would have shot first and parleyed afterwards. But Champion climbed up the steps, smiling his tired old smile and smacking the quarry dust off the knees of the grey, multi-zippered flying-suit he was wearing.
‘You cost me fifty francs,’ he said. ‘I bet you’d get Schlegel to come in.’
‘You knew we were out there?’
‘No, no, no. First thing we knew was that the cage was left at the bottom. We guessed then. Someone had got in. You and Schlegel, was it?’
‘And a couple of battalions of CRS.’
‘You wish!’ said Champion. ‘Well, we probably have Schlegel too, by now. You got through the road block but I brought them close in afterwards. They’ll phone down to me.’
‘I’m way ahead of you, Champ,’ I said.
‘Don’t tell me you thought of the airship.’
‘No, that was a surprise. But I knew that whatever it was it would be here.’
He walked to a door built into the cliff at one end of the ledge. It was his control room. Inside, there were a couple of chairs, and the control console for launching the airship. There was a battery of telephones, an intercom, and six small TV screens that provided a view of the airship from each direction. Champion indicated a chair and sat down at the console. The little control room was glass-faced, and before sitting, he lifted an arm to the mechanics below us, to tell them that all was well.
‘Why here?’ he said.
I said, ‘Remember that day we were caught by that German spot-check at St Tropez, and the German guard shot at the kid who stole the chickens?’
‘I remember.’
‘You told them we’d found the Renault on the road. And then, after we’d watched them taking the car away, you phoned the police station, and said there was a Renault with RAF escapers inside, going to a safe house in Nîmes.’
Champion smiled.
‘I was pretty impressed, Steve,’ I said. ‘The cops followed those German soldiers in the Renault. They followed them all the way to Nîmes … stake-outs, checks … mobiles … all kinds of stuff …’
‘And meanwhile we put Serge Frankel, and his junk, into the submarine at Villefranche,’ said Champion. He frowned.
I said, ‘Afterwards you said, “Make the deceit do the work”. I remembered that last week.’
He nodded.
I said, ‘You deliberately let us suspect the manifest. You let us think you’d go to all kinds of trouble to get some mystery cargo into position in Germany. While all the time the trucks were loading at Marseille docks – loading this airship, envelope folded and engines crated – and then you drove here and unloaded.’
‘It worked,’ said Champion.
‘Like a conjurer – you told me that: make enough sly play with your left hand, and they won’t even look at your right one. You made them look at your empty trucks and see loaded trucks, because that’s what they wanted to see.’
‘It worked,’ repeated Champion.
‘Almost,’ I said.
‘You didn’t discover it,’ said Champion, ‘you sensed it. No plan is proof against a hunch.’ He grinned. ‘You told me there was no place for hunches any more. So perhaps we are both yesterday’s spies.’
‘It had crossed my mind,’ I admitted.
‘And …?’
‘You’re going to have to kill me, Steve. And that’s another hunch.’
He looked at me and wiped his moustache. ‘We’ll see, Charlie.’
‘You don’t teach an old dog new tricks, Steve. You know it, I know it. Let’s not kid around, at least you owe me that. There are thoughts I might need to have, and things I might have to do.’
‘Like …?’
I shrugged. ‘Like getting out of here!’
He looked at me and smiled wearily, like the governor of Devil’s Island indenting for more shark food. ‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ he said. ‘We’ll work out something. How’s the boy?’
‘Billy’s fine. We’re going to build a plastic model of the Cutty Sark before he goes back to school.’
‘You sent him back to Caty.’
‘That’s it,’ I said.
‘It will make no difference in the long run,’ said Champion. ‘The important fact is that he’ll grow up with a bit of money in his pocket.’
‘The money you’ll get for this caper?’
Champion nodded. ‘If my old dad had left me a bit of money, it might have worked out differently.’ He reached inside his flying-suit and found the big gold pocket-watch I remembered from the old days. He held it up to show me that it was all his father had left him. Or perhaps it was just Champion’s way of checking what the time was.
‘Inconsiderate of your old man,’ I said. ‘Not to sell out.’
‘Thirty-five years teaching in Egypt,’ said Champion. ‘Scrimping and saving to send me to school, and the only time he ever hit me was when I didn’t stand up for “God Save the King”.’
‘What an incurable romantic he must have been, Steve. Old fools like that can never match the wits of realists like you.’
Champion stared at me. ‘That’s not cricket, old pal.’
‘I thought we were all-in wrestling,’ I said.
‘You have to learn cricket and all-in wrestling, if you are the only boy at Sandhurst who plays cricket in second-hand togs.’
‘And that kind of resentment spurred you on to get all the prizes.’
‘Perhaps,’ admitted Champion. ‘But don’t ask me to say thank you.’ He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, as if wiping away a bad taste. ‘By God, Charlie, you’re a working-class boy. You know what I mean.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I said, ‘but I am not planning to deliver an atomic bomb to back up the demands of the Trades Union Congress, or the Monday Club.’
If he detected a note of irony in my remark, he gave no sign of it. ‘Shells, atomic shells!’ He obviously hoped that this distinction would bring about a change of my attitude. ‘I wouldn’t get involved in nuclear bombs – not accurate enough. But atomic shells are tactical, Charlie. They can be put into a vehicle park, or a dump – no fallout, and very tight destruction pattern.’
‘You’ve been reading too many of those Staff College appreciations, Champ,’ I said. ‘Save the rationalization for your memoirs: what are they paying you?’
‘They’ll cross my hand with silver,’ he admitted.
‘Thirty pieces?’
‘Thirty billion pieces, if I ask for it. And every currency in the world, Charlie. When we needed money to fight starvation, disease and poverty, Europe couldn’t be bothered. But when they had to start walking to the railway station … then they put their hands in their pockets!’ All the time the airship moved restlessly, rearing up suddenly to the limit of its mooring ropes, and then being hauled down again by the ground crew at each end of the quarry.
‘You know how it works, Champ,’ I reminded him. ‘I didn’t come out here without leaving a forwarding address. They will soon
find your hole in the ground.’
Champion turned away to look at the TV monitoring screens. There were half a dozen of them, relaying pictures from cameras set high on the cliff side, and facing down to the airship. Using these, the pilot would be able to see how much clearance he had, on every side, as the moorings were cast off and it floated upwards.
‘Helicopters, you mean?’ Champion said, without looking up from the console.
‘I don’t know what they will send.’
‘With half a dozen cookies on board with me, I don’t care what they send. They are not going to shoot me down over mainland France. Not with a cargo of nuclear explosive aboard, they’re not.’
‘And over the sea?’
‘A civil aircraft, registered in Cairo? We do sixty, perhaps eighty, miles an hour in this bladder. By the time they get permission to shoot, I’ll be over Tunis!’ His mind went back to Billy, or perhaps he had never stopped thinking about his son. ‘How could Billy adapt to Cairo? Answer me truly, Charlie. How could he?’
‘You mean you’re frightened that he might adapt too well. You’re scared in case he becomes the chief assassin for the Palestine Liberation Organization.’
‘Perhaps I am.’
‘But you’d give them the means by which to bomb themselves to power.’
‘Not the PLO …’ he waved his hand wearily, as if deciding whether to enlighten me about the distinction between the government in Cairo, and the terrorists who throw bombs into airport waiting-rooms and set fire to jumbo-jets. He decided against it. ‘Billy stays in Europe where he was born – he’s vulnerable to smallpox, malaria, cholera and a million other things.’
‘You’d be separated from him?’ I couldn’t believe it. ‘The judgement of Solomon, Champ.’
‘You didn’t say “You can’t get away with it,”’ he complained. Then we both looked up at the great black shape of the airship.
‘But you can!’ I said. ‘That’s what I don’t like about it.’