Читать книгу Horse Under Water - Len Deighton - Страница 18

Joe MacIntosh drove me out to one of the married-officer accommodations along Europa Road past the military hospital. It was 3.45 a.m. The streets were almost empty. Two sailors in white were vomiting their agonizing way to the Wharf and another was sitting on the pavement near Queen’s Hotel.

‘Blood, vomit and alcohol,’ I said to Joe, ‘it should be on the coat of arms.’

‘It’s on just about everything else,’ he said sourly.

After we’d had a drink Joe promised to brief me in the morning before he went on ahead. I slept.

We had breakfast in the mess and the water supply wasn’t quite as salty as I remembered it. Joe filled in some of the details.

‘We have been hearing about this counterfeit paper money for some years; it’s being washed up out of the sea.’

I nodded.

‘I’ve made a little sketch map.’

Joe opened his wallet and pulled out a page of a school exercise book. On it was drawn a shaky tracing of the south-western quarter of the Iberian peninsula. The Straits of Gibraltar were in the bottom right-hand corner. Lisbon was near the top left. Small mapping-pen crosses had been inked in along the coastline. The 100-kilometre stretch between Sagres (on the extreme south-western tip) and Faro curved, in a 100-kilometre-long bay. Trapped into the curve like bubbles were most of Joe’s little marks.

Joe began to tell me the arrangements he had made. ‘The nearest town to the wreck is Albufeira, here …’ Joe hadn’t changed much from the tall, muscular, Intelligence Corps lieutenant who came to Lisbon as my assistant in 1942. ‘… This is a list of all the wrecks that have happened between Sagres and Huelva and …’ Scores of young Intelligence Officers came to Lisbon in ’41 and ’42, all anxious to spend one strenuous week bringing the Axis to its knees. Mostly they fell prey to the simplest little security traps we set or they got into arguments with Germans in cafés. We hooked their new boys and they hooked ours, and old timers (anyone who had spent more than three months there) exchanged sardonic smiles with their enemy opposite number over thimbles of black coffee. ‘… using an Italian civilian frogman with whom I have worked before. He is perhaps the best frogman in Europe today. If you stop overnight in the town I have marked I’ll phone him to meet you there. Code word: conversation. I’ll be going by another route.’

‘Joe,’ I said. Through the window I could just see Mount Hacho on the North African mainland across the clear air and sunny water of the Straits. ‘What have you been told about this operation?’

Joe slowly brought a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, took one and offered them.

‘No thanks,’ I said. He lit his own and then put away his matches. His hands moved very slowly but I knew his mind was working like lightning.

He said, ‘You know the Wren with the rather large …’

‘I know the one,’ I said.

‘She’s the cipher clerk,’ Joe said. ‘I was chatting her up the other day when I noticed a clip-board with carbons of all the messages I’ve sent from here to London over the last two months. They all had BXJ in the corner. I’d never heard of that priority before, so I asked her what it was.’ He dragged on the cigarette. ‘They are sending all our signals traffic to somebody in London for analysis.’ Joe looked at me quizzically.

‘Who?’ I said.

‘She’s only the clerk,’ Joe said, ‘it’s the signals officer that redirects them, but she …’ He tailed off.

‘Go on.’

‘She’s not sure.’

‘So she’s not sure.’

‘But she thinks it goes to somebody c/o the House of Commons.’

I signalled for some more coffee and the Spanish waitress brought us a big jug. ‘Have some coffee,’ I said, ‘and relax; it’ll all work out.’

He gave me a shy Li’l Abner smile. ‘I wanted to tell you,’ he said, ‘but it sounds so unlikely.’ We went down to Andalusian Cars in City Mill Lane to pick up a grey Vauxhall Victor for me and a Simca for Joe. He started out for Albufeira and would be there before evening. I had some things to attend to in Gibraltar and my journey would be in two hops.

It was still the same squalid town that I remembered from wartime. Huge barrack-like bars with everything breakable long since removed or broken. Accordion music and drunken singing, red-necked military policemen bullying fat soldiers, thin-lipped army wives weaving among the avaricious Indian shopkeepers on the sun-bright pavement. The secret of enjoying Gibraltar, a ship’s doctor had once told me, is not to get off the boat.