Hullo Russia, Goodbye England

by Derek Robinson

  She had half a glass of white wine. She drank a little, and looked at him curiously. Seriously. Then she drank the rest and gave him the glass. “Does that often work?” she asked. “Kicking down the door and throwing hand grenades?”

  “Blame it on the sweater.” What the hell.

  “Why? Why not blame it on your balls?” She was calm. And slightly amused.

  “Hey, hey. You’re jumping several stages ahead.”

  “Hey, hey, no I’m not. I’m just stopping you from doing what every man does when he fails to score. He blames the woman.”

  Silk raised his hands. “Okay. I surrender.”

  She ran a finger along his jawline. “Cleancut. I like a man with a cleancut face. Come on, let’s take a stroll.”

  He walked beside her. “Is this wise? You hardly know me.”

  “Oh, I know you. I should have married you, ten years ago, when you were still fairly sober.”

  “You’re confusing me with...”

  “Yes, I am. Anyway, he’s dead. Drunk as a skunk, drove flat out, hit a bridge, end of story. Hullo, Millie.” She waved to a friend. “Sings like an angel, cooks like a Borgia,” she told Silk. “Avoid her dinners. They’ll kill you.” She led him behind the summerhouse and through a garden gate. “Where are we going?” he asked. He didn’t care; it was just something to say. They turned right. “Deadman’s Acre,” she said. “Good view.”

  “Another fatality. You’re dangerous to know, aren’t you?”

  She didn’t laugh, or smile, or reply. Got that wrong. Silk said to himself. This is not going well.

  They walked in silence. When she spoke, her voice was different: slack, easy, almost thinking aloud. “Thank God I’m out of there. I hate crowds, and crowds of artists are the worst, all those fragile egos, all that bullshit... I can’t take the noise. I was ready to go and hide in the cellar when you turned up, bellowing like a wounded buffalo. Who are you, anyway?”

  Silk explained.

  “I’ve met Zoë,” she said. “Ball of fire. Not like me. Slow burner, me. I used to be a model, fairly successful, I knew how to switch on and switch off. I could sparkle when I wanted. Still can, briefly. Brought you running, didn’t I?”

  “Did you? Can’t remember. It was ages ago.”

  At last she smiled. “I know the signs. I’m thirty-two, Silko. Men have been falling in love with this face of mine since I was fifteen. Face and figure. Love at first sight, that’s what they think, silly bastards. They don’t know me. How can they? So it always ends in tears. Not my tears, hell no, don’t blame me for my looks. You wouldn’t enjoy it if women kept falling in love with you at first sight, would you?”

  “I might.”

  “Twice a week? Year round?”

  “That might be rather a strain.”

  They reached Deadman’s Acre and admired the view. Blackbirds sang. Swallows stooged about the sky. One plunged and soared in something like a corkscrew. Hard work, and all to catch a few bugs. But beautiful.

  They walked back. He found that her name was Tess Monk. She lived in an old farmhouse, alone. She taught music for a living and worked part-time in a shop for another living. “That’s where the sweater came from,” she said. “You want us to meet again. I can tell by the way you’re chewing your lip.”

  “Well, I’ve always wanted to learn the saxophone.”

  “You’re lying. And I don’t teach the sax. I teach the cello.”

  “That was my second choice,” he said.

  * * *

  On the way home, Zoë said. “I bought a painting of a tree, very ugly, but the artist’s wife is pregnant again.”

  “Everyone needs a hobby,” Silk said. “Talking of which, I took your advice. I’m going to learn to play the cello.”

  “Golly. Who’s teaching you?”

  “A nice old widow-lady. Tess Monk.”

  “Oh, her. She’s batty. No, that’s unfair. She lives in a world of her own. I asked her to join Artists Against The Bomb and she said she was against artists. In her experience, they had lousy judgement and bad breath and ninety percent could be A-bombed and the world would be a better place.”

  “Damn right.”

  “Damn silly.”

  “What if you got Laurence Olivier on your soap box? Why should I do what he says? He’s just an actor. Hasn’t got a brain of his own. Why should anyone buy his opinions?”

  “I’d have him in a flash, if I could.”

  “Just shows that Tess Monk was right.”

  “No, Silko. It just shows that your brain is away with the fairies, like hers. And you’ll never learn the cello. I’ve heard you sing. You can’t carry a tune in a bucket.”

  “It’s only a hobby,” he said. “Nothing serious. Like your hobby of dropping little hints about Vulcan operations. You said the four-minute warning begs a large question, but you never explained what that meant.”

  “Glaringly obvious. Look at the Vulcan. Look at Blue Steel. Now ask yourself why the Americans keep their B52s armed and flying around the clock, every day of the year. If you can’t work it out, you don’t deserve to know.”

  “Look,” he said. “Cows eating grass. Isn’t that amazing?”

  They reached The Grange. She packed a briefcase and changed her clothes. The sun was setting as he drove her to Lincoln and saw her onto the London train. Then he drove to the farmhouse where Tess Monk lived. “You again,” she said.

  “I passed a pub. The Mason’s Arms. Thought you might like to go for a drink. Maybe a pickled egg. Packet of nuts.”

  “You’re full of wild ideas.” She shut the door and took his arm.

  ROCK THE PYRAMIDS

  1

  “Our information is that she has been an undesirable influence on him,” Brigadier Leppard said. “Possibly subversive. Even seditious.”

  “All in twenty-four hours?” Skull said. “My God. It almost makes you feel proud to be British.”

  They were standing at the bar of the Bum Steer. It was lunchtime, and only a couple of tables were occupied. The place was, as always, dark.

  “Twenty-four hours isn’t enough?” Leppard said. “It’s a day too long for the US Air Force. Captain Black was shipped home last night.”

  “That’s fast.”

  “You bet your sweet life. My God, it almost makes you feel proud to be American.”

  Skull ate some peanuts. “I’ve known her for years. She’s an MP, independent yes, but unpatriotic? Unthinkable.”

  “Our Intelligence guys are trained to think the unthinkable. Like thinking that your Mr Profumo, Harrow and Oxford, Secretary of State for War, might be bedding Miss Christine Keeler while she was bedding Captain Romanov, naval attaché at the Russian Embassy.”

  “Not simultaneously.”

  “You only have his word for that. And the man did lie to your House of Commons... Look, Skull: we have our own rotten apples, nobody denies that. So we don’t want to make a big production out of this. The Silks are your problem. We’ll file it and forget – provided it doesn’t happen again.”

  “What did happen, exactly?” Skull asked. “And who says?”

  The barman was out of earshot, but still Leppard lowered his voice. “Your people. MI5. No details. They referred to Mrs Silk’s links with CND and said her influence on Captain Black was... I can’t remember the exact words.”

  “Contrary to good order and discipline, I expect. That’s what we always say when we’re on a slightly sticky wicket.”

  “Anyway, he’s gone.”

  “What will happen to him?”

  “There’s always a need for good men in the Aleutians.”

  Skull shuddered. “Have you got time for another?” He signalled the barman. “How’s Operation Ortsac coming along?”

  Leppard pretended to look alarmed. “Never heard of it. Doesn’t exist. Routine manoeuvres. Unimportant. Postponed. Cancelled. How did you know?”

  “My dear Karl...” The drinks arrived. “You can’t have a US fleet, wit
h a few infantry divisions and half the Marine Corps in landing craft, all charging around the Caribbean under an umbrella of warplanes, and expect to keep it secret. Everyone in Florida knows.”

  “It’s probably over by now.”

  Skull asked: “Who came up with the name Ortsac, which even I worked out is Castro backwards?” Leppard swigged his drink, looked at his watch. “It was never meant to be secret, was it?” Skull said. “You’re putting on a show, practising huge amphibious operations, all to frighten Castro. You’re rattling your Yankee sabres.”

  “Well, I’ve got to get back to base. We must do lunch sometime.”

  “If Kennedy keeps threatening to go to war, somebody might start believing him,” Skull said.

  “Castro’s flat broke,” Leppard said, smiling. “And getting broker every day.”

  2

  In 1956, Britain, France and Israel connived at a secret plan to invade Egypt. Israeli forces would advance towards the Suez Canal. Britain and France would then attack, claiming that they were separating the combatants and so safeguarding the Canal. In fact the whole bogus operation was an excuse for punishing the Egyptian President Nasser because he had nationalised the Canal. The British Prime Minister, Eden, said Nasser was a new Hitler of the Middle East.

  Only those were fooled who wished to be fooled. America was not one. Eisenhower threatened to remove support from sterling. This would have sent the pound spiralling downwards. British troops pulled out and Eden resigned. The Suez Adventure had failed miserably.

  But remnants of imperial power were still dotted about the globe. In 1962 the RAF could still use bases in Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, Pakistan, Aden, Uganda, Iraq, Cyprus, Malta, Libya. For 409 Squadron, Libya was an invaluable training area. “We’ll be taking our Blue Steel,” Quinlan told Silk. “Not armed, of course. Just for show. Just for fun.”

  They were briefed to fly a dogleg route to Malta, supposedly avoiding enemy air defences, and then via Tripoli to the far south, where the Libyan border met Chad and Niger. From there they were to fly north-east and simulate a nuclear attack on Cairo.

  “It’s a sandpit,” Silk said. “What’s so wonderful about a sandpit?”

  “It’s flat, for a start,” Tucker said. He pointed at the wall map of Eastern Europe and Russia. “Like nearly all that. You can fly from Kindrick to Warsaw or Kiev or Smolensk or Leningrad at five hundred feet and you won’t hit anything bigger than a goshawk.”

  “Tom knows his birds,” Dando said. “You don’t want to argue with Tom about birds.”

  “They like forests, do goshawks,” Tucker said. “Russia’s got forests. By Christ, do they have forests.”

  “Trees make a lousy radar picture,” Hallett said. “That’s why we’re going to Libya. Sand is worse than trees. It’s everywhere and it’s nothing. You can cross Libya at five hundred feet and not hit anything bigger than a...”

  “Long-legged buzzard,” Tucker said. “Very rare.”

  “Libya is Russia with camelshit,” Dando said. “And the sun beats down like a great brass gong.”

  “I hope you have a Plan B for when you get lost,” Silk said.

  “We shan’t get lost,” Quinlan told him. He spread a map of Libya. It was marked with red Chinagraph crosses. “See that? It’s where three U.S. Fortresses got lost in 1942 and came down. Still there. Over here, an S.A.S. patrol got caught in the open by Beaufighters, mistook them for Jerries, left burnt-out vehicles everywhere. Here, this is where a flight of ME109s ran out of fuel, silly boys. Up here: small tank battle, lots of broken ironmongery. And so on. Heaps of metal give good radar echoes.”

  “The skipper was in the Desert Air Force,” Dando explained.

  “Wellingtons,” Quinlan said. “Nice kite. Hot-air turbulence, made her shake her tail like a wet dog.”

  They went to the crew room and got into their flying kit. “If anyone has friends in Cairo, now’s the time to call them and say goodbye,” Quinlan said.

  “He always tells us that,” Hallett said.

  3

  The Blue Steel was a pilotless aircraft with a nuclear bomb in the nose, or a flying bomb with a Stentor rocket motor in the tail: they added up to the same thing. It was 35 feet long, with small delta planes at front and rear, and even smaller fins above and beneath. The Vulcan bomb-bay swallowed most of it; what showed was so sleek that it scarcely affected the aircraft’s performance.

  They were ten miles high and three hundred miles inside Egyptian air space, virtually invisible to anyone on the ground, when they made their mock attack on Cairo. If it had been a real attack, the Blue Steel would have detached and taken four seconds to drop three hundred feet and clear the Vulcan. Then its rocket motor would have fired and sent it soaring to seventy thousand feet, after which its inboard computer – stuffed with route data and constantly updating itself – would have navigated the weapon, perhaps taking an erratic course but always knowing precisely where it was. In thin air, at over twice the speed of sound, it would reach its target in four minutes. There could be no stopping it. Even in thicker air, Blue Steel would dive at a thousand miles an hour. Nobody would hear its arrival. In its nose a hydrogen bomb would be equivalent to over a million tons of TNT. The explosion would wipe out Cairo, rock the Pyramids, crack the Canal, shake all Egypt like a beaten carpet. By then, Quinlan and his crew would be far out over the Mediterranean, heading for RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, and tea. They did a jolly good tea at Akrotiri.

  4

  “Have you told Group Captain Pulvertaft about this?” Freddy Redman asked.

  “I thought I’d wait until I got your reaction,” Skull said.

  They were lunching at the Reform Club. Beef and oyster pie, new potatoes, red cabbage. Half a bottle of Bordeaux.

  “It’s tricky,” Freddy said. “Pulvertaft’s brave as a lion, heart in the right place, but he’s no man for the murky world of politics. Anyway, what can he do?”

  “He can’t sack Silko. Silko’s done nothing wrong.”

  “I called a pal in MI5 this morning. No joy. He said the file had been Referred Upwards. Could mean anything.” Freddy topped up their glasses with the last of the wine. “I daren’t order a whole bottle nowadays. My doctor’s an absolute bastard.”

  Skull put down his fork. “I’m a fool,” he said. “I’ve been concerned about what Silko might let slip. That’s not the problem. Silko’s too smart, and he’s heard all the lectures on secrecy. The real risk is what Zoë might do to his morale. We’re asking him to commit an unspeakable act, and she may be making him think.”

  “Nobody’s ever going to perform the unspeakable act,” Freddy said.

  “You try telling the Americans that. Not long ago they wanted to atom-bomb China. I’ve met a few US Air Force generals who are ready to turn the Soviet Union into volcanic ash and make the world free for Coca-Cola.”

  “We won’t let them.”

  “Certainly not. We’ll send a few Vulcans to wipe out New York. That should restore common sense.”

  Freddy let his shoulders slump. “Now I’m thoroughly confused. Whose side are we on? I think I’d better have a chat with Silko.”

  “Don’t believe a word he says,” Skull advised. “He takes nothing seriously. Especially total global nuclear extermination.”

  SWEDISH FOR DRAGON

  1

  “Mind your head,” Tess Monk said. “Everyone was five feet tall when they built places like this.”

  Silk ducked through the doorway. The kitchen ceiling was a little higher. Its beams were logs, and some sagged so that his hair brushed against them. The farmhouse was no bigger than a large cottage. It smelt strongly of dog. An old bull terrier got up and came over and sniffed his shoes, found nothing to eat, and padded back to the hearthrug. Silk looked around. The prevailing colour was clay, except for a dull cream baby grand. “Quaint,” he said.

  “It was a dump when we bought it. Looked as if a bomb had hit it.”

  “Hard to believe.”

  �
�Then it caught fire. That improved things a bit.”

  “You said that we bought it. Would that be...”

  “The drunk who had a fight with a bridge, yes.”

  She showed him the rest. Small sitting room full of a big sofa and wallpaper dotted with tired roses that couldn’t wait for winter to come and end it all. Stairs to a bedroom with, surprisingly, a four-poster. “Wedding present,” she said. Bathroom, with no bath and no shower.

  “Don’t tell me you stand in the rain,” he said.

  “Nearly right. I run a hose from the kitchen to the garden.”

  “In the buff?”

  “Stark naked. Sometimes the dog joins me.”

  “You should sell tickets.”

  “You can watch for a fiver.” She didn’t smile. “I need the cash. Reminds me: you said you want a cello.”

  They went downstairs, and she pulled an old, scarred cello from under the baby grand. “There’s a case for it somewhere.”

  He looked it over. “This one’s been around the block a few times, hasn’t it?”

  “Another wedding present. My father-in-law was a collector. You’ve heard of Stradivarius? He had a nephew called Cabrilloni, taught him all he knew. This cello is a Cabrilloni. Three hundred years old.” She gave it to him.

  Silk blew the dust off it and looked inside. “There’s a label here,” he said. “Joseph Parrish, Instrument Maker, Wolverhampton 1937.”

  “That’s to keep it from getting stolen. Under the label it says Francisco Cabrilloni of Naples, 1667. In Italian, of course.”

  Silk took the bow and pulled it across the strings. “Christ Almighty,” he said. The noise was like a bad cough. “Is it difficult to learn?”

  “What do you care? You didn’t come here to learn it in the first place.” She took the cello and propped it against the piano. “Let us go and test the four-poster. It is by far the best thing in this house.”