Читать книгу The Harry Palmer Quartet - Len Deighton - Страница 35

[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Irksome regulations seem to impede your progress, but do not be impulsive. Chances to meet lots of new exciting friends.]

Of the next twenty-four hours I probably spent about fourteen with the Brigadier, although doctors and psychiatrists gave me the usual working over. That same evening we were back in his office. There was plenty of hot coffee and plenty of toasted bacon sandwiches. The Brigadier poured himself his sixth cup in half an hour and broke the long silence.

‘You’re marked down on my dossier, Colonel, with three stars – like Michelin it’s the highest rating we use. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re good at your job, it means that you are a three-star potential danger to us. As far as I’m concerned though, it’s a rough guide to the fact that you are a skilled investigator. Now I don’t claim to be that. I’m just the feller they send to places like this to check the barbed wire for moth holes. You tell me you didn’t signal to that Russian submarine on Thursday night. I want to believe you. OK. Thread up my information and show me your movie, mister.’

I appreciated that the old man was being even nicer than his role demanded, especially considering that he was sure I had connected his nice new tower to his nice new electric line, and made a cinder out of one of his policemen.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m not convinced that the submarine didn’t fire its own flare,’ I said.

‘Don’t get really smart with me, sonny, it’s obvious that it did.’

‘OK. So why does there have to be an agent working here at all?’

‘Look at it this way, sonny, we monitored the signal for one thing …’

‘I keep asking you what sort of signal but you won’t tell me!’

‘The one you sent, sonny, the one you sent … because you’re …’ he searched for a word, ‘just dirty, just dirty.’ He flushed in embarrassment at his outburst and began cleaning his spectacles. ‘I’m too old for your sort of war, I suppose …’

A good agent follows up any debating advantage, especially when it’s a continuation of his life that’s the subject of discussion. I said, ‘I thought we were pretending that I’m innocent for the purposes of this short interrogation.’

He nodded and said, ‘The signal was high-speed electrical impulses. Just as Morse can be sent in such high-speed bursts that long messages can be transmitted in seconds, recorded, then read slowly later, so the scanning of a TV picture can be sent. Last night a camera-transmitter, small enough for one man to carry, was directed towards the mountain, and no matter how much the camera was joggled about, the speed of the impulses transmitted clear pictures.’

‘Just as a slow-motion movie would be less subject to camera shake,’ I said, just to sound intelligent.

‘Exactly,’ said the Brigadier, who had no doubt that I had used this equipment the night before and was just sending him up.

‘But last night was really dark. Could it have got pictures in that light?’

‘I shouldn’t really tell you but since we’ve started this comedy …’ He lit a cigar from the ivory box. He lit it with a match as a connoisseur does a good cigar, he rolled it in his mouth, then removing it he exhaled and studied the bright red ash ‘… our boys are not really sure: perhaps the high-speed impulse gives an unprecedented aperture enough to photograph in the dark. If not, perhaps the submarine put an infra-red searchlight on to the cloudbase for reflected light. It would be invisible to human eyes of course.’

‘Then …’

‘Then why the flare? Yes, it’s a contradiction, the flare, but with a zoom lens, one that would change its focal length, at an extreme length, the sort of thing they use at ball games, the light transmitted would be very little. But with the flare and the high-speed transmission, it would be possible to get very close-up pictures of the mountain. Probably the flare was triggered automatically by the reception apparatus as soon as the “picture”, so to speak, was too dark. The camera was held on to the mountain by an electro gyroscope controlled by a compass set to the correct bearing.’

‘They don’t leave anything to chance, do they?’ I said. He gave me a sour look. I went on, ‘It’s a wonder they couldn’t do without the flare, then no one would have known about any of it.’

‘Not at all, we monitored the whole thing as I keep telling you. I’ll demonstrate if you like. You won’t do anything silly, will you?’ the old man asked. ‘Because …’

‘I’m not under-rating you, sir,’ I said.

‘Swell,’ he smiled. ‘Nor I you,’ and carried on. ‘Obviously the party last night was because of what we were doing on the mountain. I don’t have to tell you that.’ I tried to look like a man who knew, but in reality kicked myself for being fooled so easily. A party: I should have suspected that it wasn’t that social here. I wondered if Dalby knew that secret experiments were planned for that night of the garden-party. The Brigadier had been there perhaps to make sure we were. It all made sense now. I guessed that it was the neutron bomb that they were about to explode.* The information we had been given about it being a Uranium 238 bomb with a SUVOM trigger had been true but on the night of the party a team of people had been ‘crash programmed’ into the explosion area to modify the bomb. Without a break in the conversation I said, ‘You mean the insertion of the neutron device?’

He nodded.

‘What did you do, a ’copter shuttle from the flat top?’

‘Something like that,’ the Brigadier said, with a smile like a scythe.

He wheeled a metal trolley to the centre of his office. He began to talk as he threaded up the 16mm projector that stood on it.

‘We have infra-red cameras on towers monitoring the road and the shipping channel. Some towers are manned, most are remotely-controlled. Each camera transmits on the same frequency and the receiving apparatus shows …’ He threaded the last loop of the big crackle-finish grey machine, and closed the metal gate. The desk lamp went out and a grey scratched rectangle of light fell across the wall as a screen rose into position with a soft purring sound. 15. 14. 13. The large leader numbers gave place to the hastily processed film.

The Brigadier continued ‘… shows the pattern as a distorted map of the side of the island.’ The screen was dark except for a white worm-shape that came into the frame from the bottom centre, moving upwards. ‘That’s your car,’ the Brigadier said. I guessed that it was a composite of Dalby’s car and my car but said nothing. As the short white worm-shape got to the top of the screen there was a horizontal flip across the screen.

The Brigadier said, ‘That was when the manned tower was connected to the electric cables. That camera went out of action then, of course, but luckily we have overlap on the camera fields. Now you see.’ The white worm had shrunk to a dot as my car halted, and suddenly the screen became a confusion of very intense horizontal bands of varying widths and intensity. ‘That’s the high-speed TV transmission; so fast that we are getting hundreds of TV pictures per frame.’ The bands became darker now. ‘Somewhere here the flare went off.’

Apart from the small white dot made by my Lincoln the screen was quite black.

‘Egg beaters.’ The two helicopters came in from the side of the frame; they were quivering little blotches. I watched them return to my car and circle round it. So far the film had shown me nothing of which I was not already aware. But the film lab had been very thorough, they had spliced on the end of the film the incident of my arrest: Two cars coming down the road from the top of the screen, one up into the frame from the bottom. Now I had learnt something. This equipment showed a distinct difference between one car and two. I knew that Dalby had made that journey a few yards ahead of me along the highway. It meant that Dalby had found a way of making his car entirely invisible to the radar defences of the island.

It was easy to understand the small slip of paper I’d found in the cranberry box now. The VLF radio wavelength was a standard method of speaking to submerged submarines. The compass bearing was to set the electro gyroscope on the camera. My only luck in the whole deal was in not putting that slip in my pocket.

Furthermore the TV transmission was required because a neutron bomb is not one big flash like an H-bomb, it is designed to hang over a city, bombarding it with neutrons. Only pictures of its progress would be any use. A still picture would reveal little or nothing.

The next day they showed me the black metal twisted parts of the HSTV unit. The big heavyweight handles were less twisted than the thin metal casing. They showed me photos and stuff. It seemed they’d got a pretty fair set of finger-prints off the unit. They were mine, of course. I’d never touched the damn thing, but I didn’t doubt that everyone was being sincere.