World War 2 Thriller Collection

by Len Deighton

  The teleprinter clerk read off the computer material as it came on the print-out. ‘Hunter-killer submarines searching square fifteen …’

  ‘What have I got in hunter-killer subs?’ Ferdy asked the operator.

  ‘Only the Fleet Alerted ones at Poliarnyi, and the ones at Dikson.’

  ‘Damn,’ said Ferdy.

  ‘You must have known what would happen, Ferdy,’ I said. ‘You’ve had your fun but you must have realized what would happen.’

  ‘There’s still time,’ said Ferdy.

  But there wasn’t time. Ferdy should have stuck to the usual procedure of hitting the electronic surveillance submarine first. They were the subs that we used for our listening posts to set up the game in the first place. Ferdy knew better than anyone in Blue Suite what they could do, and why the rest of the US missile fleet depended upon them. There were two of them now, positioning the others for the missile attacks on Moscow, Leningrad and Murmansk, while the subs with the more sophisticated MIRV knocked out the missile silos, to lessen the retaliation upon our Western cities.

  ‘Are you going to play it out for Doomsday?’ I said. But if Ferdy intended to go for maximum destruction without caring about winning the war, he didn’t intend to confide in me about it.

  ‘Bugger off,’ said Ferdy. If he could find which of the US subs had the MIRVS, he might still pull off a freakish win. For the Polaris subs firing from the seabed up through the ocean or the ice aren’t accurate enough for targets smaller than a town. The MIRV was Ferdy’s real danger.

  ‘It’s all over bar the shouting, Ferdy. You can fiddle around for a week of game-days but you’ll need uncanny luck to win.’

  ‘Bugger off, I said,’ said Ferdy.

  ‘Keep your hair on,’ I told him. ‘It’s only a game.’

  ‘That Schlegel is out to get me,’ said Ferdy. He got to his feet. His giant frame could only just squeeze between the console and the game array panels.

  ‘It’s only a game, Ferdy,’ I said again. Reluctantly he gave a little grin to acknowledge the feeble standing joke of the War Studies Centre. If they ever give us a badge or a coat of arms that will be on the scroll beneath it.

  I watched Ferdy as he ran his fingertips over the Arctic map. ‘There is another trip scheduled for us next month.’

  ‘So I hear,’ I said.

  ‘With Schlegel,’ said Ferdy archly.

  ‘He’s never been to the Arctic. He wants to see it all working.’

  ‘We will have only been back a month by then.’

  ‘I thought you liked the long trips.’

  ‘Not with bloody Schlegel, I don’t.’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘I’ve waited a week to have my library permit renewed.’

  ‘I waited a month last year. That’s just old English bureaucracy. That’s not Schlegel.’

  ‘You always make excuses for him.’

  ‘Sometimes, Ferdy, you can be a little wearing.’

  He nodded repentantly.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ said Ferdy. He was a curiously lonely man, educated to feel at home only with the tiny world of men who identified his obscure Latin tags, tacitly completed his half-remembered Shelley and Keats and shared his taste for both the food and jokes of schooldays. I was not one of them, but I would do. ‘Hang on for five minutes.’

  The Tote – the computer’s visual display – changed rapidly as he fingered the keyboard.

  We were playing a modified number five scenario: the Russian ASW (Northern Fleet) had twenty-four hours of ‘war imminent’ to neutralize the Anglo-American subs on Arctic station. In this case the scenario opened with a MIRV sub one hundred miles north of Spitzbergen. If Blue Suite got that – or any of their missile subs – much closer to Murmansk, Ferdy would not be able to attack them without a risk that the resulting explosion would wipe out his own town. This was the basic tactic of the twenty-four-hour game: getting the Blue Suite subs close to the Russian towns. Ferdy playing what Schlegel called ‘madman’s checkers’ could never pay off.

  ‘They think it’s all over down there, do they?’ Ferdy said.

  I said nothing.

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Ferdy.

  There was a double long flash on the phone. I picked it up.

  ‘Schlegel here. Did you bring the Mediterranean Fleet analysis?’

  ‘It wasn’t ready. They said they’d put it in the satchel with the stuff for the library. It’s probably there now. I’ll get it.’

  ‘You don’t have to carry books over here from the Evaluation Block. We got messengers to do that.’

  ‘A walk will do me good.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  ‘I have to go,’ I told Ferdy. ‘We’ll have that chat later on.’

  ‘If your master allows.’

  ‘That’s right, Ferdy,’ I said with a little irritation showing through. ‘If my master allows.’

  The Evaluation Building was three hundred yards down the road. There would be no important movements in the war game before the noon bound. I put on my hat, coat and scarf and took a walk through the brisk Hampstead winter. The air smelled good. After the Centre, any air would smell good. I wondered how much longer I could go on working in a project that swatted warships like flies and measured wins in ‘taken-out’ cities.

  13

  Conclusions reached by any member of STUCEN staff concerning the play are deemed to be secret, whether or not such conclusions were based upon play.

  STANDING ROUTINE ORDERS. STUDIES CENTRE. LONDON

  Evaluation looked like a converted office block but once you got inside the front door it was not at all like a converted office block. There were two uniformed Ministry of Defence policemen in a glass box, and a time clock, and a wall full of punch cards that the two men spent all day every day inspecting very closely before placing them in different racks.

  The policeman at the door took my security card. ‘Armstrong, Patrick,’ he announced to the other man, and spelled it, not too fast. The other man searched through the cards on the wall. ‘Did you just come out?’ said the first cop.

  ‘Me?’ I said.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Come out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No, of course not. I’m just going in.’

  ‘They’ve muddled the cards up again this morning. Sit down a moment would you?’

  ‘I don’t want to sit down a minute,’ I said patiently. ‘I don’t want to sit down even for a second. I want to go in.’

  ‘Your card is not in the rack,’ he explained.

  ‘What happens to the cards is strictly your job,’ I said. ‘Don’t try and make me feel guilty about it.’

  ‘He’s looking as fast as he can look,’ said the gate man. The other man was bending and stretching to look at the entry cards on the wall. As he did it he repeated ‘H I J K L M N O P’ over and over again to remind himself of the sequence.

  ‘I’m only going up to the library,’ I explained.

  ‘Ah,’ said the gate man, smiling as if he’d heard this same explanation from any number of foreign spies. ‘It’s all the same in’it? The library is on the third floor.’

  ‘You come with me, then,’ I said.

  He shook his head to show that it was a good try for a foreigner. He wiped his large white moustache with the back of his hand and then reached inside his uniform jacket for a spectacle case. He put his glasses on and read my security card again. Before we had the security cards, there had been no delays. I was a victim of some Parkinson’s law of proliferating security. He noted the department number and looked that up in a greasy loose-leaf folder. He wrote down the phone extension and then went into the glass booth to phone. He turned to see me watching him, and then slid the glass panel completely shut, in case I should overhear him.

  I lip-read him saying, ‘This card has been used once this morning and there is no exit time against the entry. This holder is …’ he turned for a better view of me, ‘… late thirties, specta
cles, clean shaven, dark hair, about six foot …’ He stopped as I heard Schlegel’s rasping voice even through the glass panel. The gate man opened it. ‘Your office want to speak with you.’

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘That you, Pat?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘What are you playing at, sweetheart?’

  I didn’t answer. I just gave the phone back to the gate man. I suppose Schlegel got my message because the gate man had no time to close the panel before Schlegel’s voice spilled over, cursing him for all kinds of a fool. The old man’s face went bright pink and he subdued Schlegel with a barrage of placatory noises. ‘Your boss says to go ahead,’ said the man.

  ‘My boss says that, does he. And what do you say?’

  ‘We’ll sort out the cards. Someone has probably walked out with the card still in his pocket. It happens sometimes.’

  ‘Am I going to have the same trouble getting out of here?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said the gate man. ‘I’ll make sure about that. You’ll never have trouble getting out of here.’

  He smiled and brushed his moustache with his hand. I didn’t try to cap it.

  There was not one library but many, like strata of ancient Troy. Deepest were foxy leather spines and tattered jackets of the original Trust donations, and then box-files and austerity bindings of the war years, and then, in layers above that, the complete Official Histories of both world wars. Only the new metal shelving held the latest additions, and much of that was stored as microfilm, and could be read only in the tiny cubicles from which came a steady clatter and the smell of warm projector bulbs.

  I started with the Northern Fleet but I would have found him even had I selected all the rear-admirals, and worked my way through them alphabetically. None of the microfilm up-datings were of much interest but there were new pictures. This was the man who wanted to be me.

  Remoziva, Vanya Mikhail (1924– ) Kontr-Admiral, Commander: Anti-Submarine Warfare Command, Northern Fleet, Murmansk.

  The Remoziva family provided a fine example of revolutionary zeal. His father was a metal worker from Orel, his mother a peasant from Kharkov who’d moved farther east when the Germans occupied vast areas of Russia from the Bolsheviks, by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Of their family of seven children, two daughters and three sons survived. And what children they were; not only a rear-admiral, but Piotr, a professor of zoology; Evgeni, a sociologist; Lisaveta, a political analyst; and Katerina, the second daughter, who had been an assistant to Madame Furtseva, the first woman to reach the Presidium of the Central Committee. The Remoziva family sounded like the Ferdy Foxwells of the workers’ soviets.

  The compiler had done a thorough job – even if most of his data were cross-referenced to Central Registry – and he had included the sociologist’s order of Alexander Nevsky, the three amputated fingers of the zoologist – yes, I wondered that, too – and the kidney trouble that was likely to cost the Rear-Admiral his promotion to the First Deputy’s office.

  I went through the sheet on which was listed Remoziva’s career. He owed much to Admiral Rickover, US Navy, for the American decision to build nuclear submarines – armed with Polaris missiles – was the best thing that could have happened to Remoziva. It was a nuclear rags to riches story. When the keel of the Nautilus went down, in 1954, he was a Starshii Leitenant, sitting around in the Coast Defence Department of Northern Fleet, desperate for even a staff appointment with Naval Artillery. Suddenly his anti-submarine work in the war is taken out and dusted off. He immediately regains his wartime rank. Northern Fleet ASW trumps even Baltic Fleet ASW, now that the US Navy is sailing under the Arctic ice. Remoziva gets a senior staff job. Khrushchev pushes for a nuclear submarine fleet, and by 1962 the Leninskii Komsomol has also been to the North Pole under the ice. From being a forgotten by water in a neglected arm, Northern Fleet’s ASW staff are the élite of the Russian armed services. No wonder it was difficult to find a photo in which Remoziva wasn’t smiling.

  I returned the material, and picked up the analysis that Schlegel wanted. I checked out past the smiling men in the glass box and took the papers back to the Centre. I dumped them into the reception guard and then strolled through to Saddler’s Walk to have a quiet cup of coffee.

  There, a Georgian façade had been newly adorned with red and black stripes, and its name, ‘The Anarchist’, painted in gold letters. It was another of those art, coffee and non-chemical coleslaw hang-outs that sprout, bloom and die. Or worse, survive: a crippled commercial travesty of the original dream.

  Che and Elvis shared the walls. The coffee cups were folk-art and the potato salad cut with loving care. It was a bright dry day, the streets were filled with woolly-hatted Australians, and delicate men with nervous dogs. Some of them were sitting around here drinking coffee. Behind the counter there was a girl anarchist. She had heavy-rimmed spectacles and a pony-tail tight enough to make her squint.

  ‘This is our first week,’ she said. ‘There is a nut cutlet free for everyone.’

  ‘The coffee will do.’

  ‘There is no charge for the nut cutlet. It’s a way of getting customers to see how delicious a vegetarian diet can be.’ She picked up a slice of the pale grey mixture, using plastic tongs like an obstetrician. ‘I’ll put it on the tray – I’m sure you’ll like it.’ She poured out the coffee.

  ‘With milk – if that’s allowed.’

  ‘Sugar is on the table,’ she said. ‘Natural brown sugar – it’s better for you.’

  I sipped the coffee. From my table near the window I watched two parking wardens clobber a delivery van and a Renault with French plates. It made me feel much better. I brought out my notebook and wrote down that biographical note on the Rear-Admiral. And then I listed all the things that puzzled me about the changes to my old flat. I drew an outline picture of Rear-Admiral Remoziva. Then I drew a plan of the old flat and included the secret ante-room with the medical machinery. When I was a kid I’d wanted to be an artist. Sometimes I thought Ferdy Foxwell only tolerated me because I could pronounce Pollaiuolo, and tell a Giotto from a Francesca. Perhaps I was more than a little envious of the half-baked painters and hairy bohemians that were always in evidence up here in Hampstead. I wondered if I might have been one of them under different circumstances. It was while I was doodling, and thinking about nothing of any consequence, that some subconscious segment of my brain was dealing with the mix-up at the entrance to the Evaluation Block that morning.

  I put down my pen and sipped the coffee. I sniffed it. Perhaps it was acorns. Behind the soy sauce was propped a pamphlet advertising ‘Six lectures in modern Marxism’. I turned it over; on the back someone had pencilled, ‘Don’t complain about the coffee, you might be old and weak yourself some day.’

  Suppose that the two gate men had not been so far wrong. Suppose that I had been in the Evaluation Block once already that morning. Ridiculous, but I pursued the notion. Suppose I had been drugged or hypnotized. I decided to discount both those possibilities for the time being. Suppose my exact double had been there. I rejected that idea too because the men on the door would have remembered: or would they? The card. Those gate men seldom bothered to look at faces. They checked the card numbers against the rack and against the time-book. It wasn’t my Doppelgänger that had been through the gate: it was my security card.

  Before I got to the door another thought occurred to me. I sat down at the table and took out my wallet. I removed the security card from its plastic cover and looked at it closely. It was exactly the right shape, size and springiness for sliding up the door catch of my locker. I’d used it to force the lock dozens of times. But this card had never been used for that purpose. Its edges were sharp, white and pristine. This wasn’t the security card I’d been given, someone else had that. I was using the forgery!

  That disturbing conclusion got me nowhere. It just made me lonely. My world wasn’t peopled by charming wise and influential elders, as Ferdy’s world was. My friends all had real worries:
like who can you get to service a new Mercedes properly, should the au pair have colour TV, and is Greece warmer than Yugoslavia in July. Yeah, well maybe it was.

  I looked at my watch. This was Thursday and I’d promised to take Marjorie to lunch and be lectured about my responsibilities.

  I got to my feet and went to the counter. ‘Ten pence,’ she said.

  I paid.

  ‘I said you’d eat the nut cutlet,’ she said. She pushed her spectacles up on her forehead to see the cash register better. Damn, I’d eaten the wretched thing without even tasting it.

  ‘You didn’t like the coffee?’ she asked.

  ‘Is this anarchist’s coffee?’ I asked the girl.

  ‘Grounds enough for arrest,’ she said. I suppose someone had said the same thing before. Or maybe they thought of the joke and then built the coffee shop around it.

  She passed me the change. Alongside the cash register there were half a dozen collection boxes. Oxfam, World-Wildlife and Shelter. One of the tins had a hand-written label with a Polaroid photo fixed alongside it. ‘Kidney Machine Fund. Give generously for Hampstead Sick and Elderly.’ I picked up the tin and looked closely at the photo of a kidney machine.

  ‘That’s my pet charity,’ said the girl. ‘Our target is four machines by Christmas. Going all the way to the hospital every week or so is too much for some of the old ones. They can have those machines in their own home.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ I put my change into the tin.

  The girl smiled. ‘People with kidney trouble would do almost anything for one of those machines,’ she said.

  ‘I’m beginning to believe you’re right,’ I said.

  14

  Attacker. For the purposes of the assessment the ‘phasing’ player, who brings his unit into range, is called the attacker. The player against whom the unit is brought is called the defender.

  GLOSSARY. ‘NOTES FOR WARGAMERS’. STUDIES CENTRE. LONDON

  The loneliest place in the world is the entrance hall of a big hospital. The huge and elaborate Victorian palace in which Marjorie worked was a maze of cast-iron staircases, stone arches and decorated paving. From these pitiless materials, whispers echoed back like the endless thrash of a furious sea. The staff were inured to it. They clattered past in white coats, smelling of ether and hauling trolleys which I did not dare examine. By the time Marjorie arrived I needed medical reassurance.