by Len Deighton
‘NOTES FOR WARGAMERS’. STUDIES CENTRE. LONDON
When there was a game in progress, the Studies Centre became a different sort of place. The mess served forty lunches and there wasn’t even standing room in the upstairs bar. My new job as Schlegel’s personal assistant meant that I spent a great deal of time in the Control Room looking down from the balcony to the War Table. Also I was one of the few people permitted to visit both Blue Suite and Red Suite while the game was in progress.
Ferdy and his five deputies were in Red Ops in the basement. His conference room adjoining it was seldom used unless a real crisis occurred. Ferdy liked to be in the darkened Ops Room watching the Visual Display Units and arguing with the plotters. Even then he got bored sometimes, and would invent complex disputes just so that Schlegel would send me down there to sort it out. Not that there was ever an outward sign of the pandemonium that was in the staff’s minds. Even in Blue Suite on the first day they were cool calm and collected, reading data print-outs or asking for clarification from one of the Technical referees.
Like the opening moves in a chess game, the first few bounds were predictable. The knight’s opening – and its offensive-defensive posture – was directly comparable with both sides putting their nuclear subs up close to the coastal cities of the enemy. For such a move inhibited attacks on them (for fear the submarine’s atomic missiles would be triggered by depth charges and their cities destroyed). Pulling the bishops out through the gaps could be likened to the fighting for the northern coastline of Arctic Norway, for the Russian Navy needed ice-free ports to utilize its full surface fighting strength in the Atlantic.
The winter struggle for ports below the drift-ice limits was more a matter of luck than judgement. The invasion of Norway by Russian land forces was not designed by Red Suite. Ferdy had to read it off the big computer. Its progress depended upon strategic games played by NATO and USN at other places and other times. A Russian air-supplied move through the long finger of Finland that pointed at Tromsö leaves the naval arm to pursue its own war. But an amphibious bid for the port of Narvik relegates the submarines to defensive roles and puts Red Suite into the intricate business of ice-breaking, Northern Route patrols, convoy escorts; and it means devoting all the air to defensive umbrellas.
Ferdy was lucky; the current strategic theory was that Sweden and Finland would resist an overland movement, and this centred the fighting too far east to drain Northern Fleet resources. Ferdy breathed a sigh of relief when he read the Land Forces report off the teleprinter.
He offered me one of his best cigars. I waved it away. ‘I’m trying to stop.’
‘Bad timing,’ said Ferdy. He carefully cut the Punch Suprema and offered one to the American submariner who was acting as his aide. ‘A stogie, kid?’
‘No thanks, comrade.’
Ferdy puffed gently as the cigar started to glow. ‘And I’ll want air recce and the exact limit of the drift-ice.’
‘We’ve got that,’ said the submariner.
‘We’ve got the seasonal average. I want it exactly.’ He scribbled a request for the air reconnaissance and a clerk typed it onto the teleprinter that was connected to Schlegel’s Control Balcony.
‘The forecast is two miles with a four thousand foot ceiling,’ said the weather clerk.
The clerk at the teleprinter waited for Control to reply before reading off the answer. ‘They are giving us two Be-10 Mallow flying boats, out of Murmansk.’
Ferdy ran a red chinagraph pencil across the map, making a line to divide the White Sea from the Barents Sea at its narrowest place. The clerk at the teleprinter took the Be-10’s punch card and asked the computer the arming details of the jet flying boats that Ferdy was going to use. They were equipped with rockets, homing torpedoes and depth charges. Ferdy nodded and passed the print-out to the submariner.
‘Put them up earliest,’ said Ferdy. He turned to me. ‘Schlegel will bring that cloud down and write those flying boats off, you see.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Ferdy. That weather comes off the computer, you know that.’
Ferdy smiled grimly.
I’d continued to use the personal locker in the Red Ops, more because clearing it might have offended Ferdy than because it was very convenient to me. I went through into the narrow locker room and let the door bang closed behind me before switching on the lights.
There were eight lockers there, one for each of the Ops Room staff, and a couple of spares. Mine had a Playboy nude stuck on the door, a legacy from its previous owner. The erotic effect was not enhanced by the portrait of Beethoven that Ferdy had carefully matched and pasted over the head of it. Or by the football boots that some unknown collage artist had added a week later. By that time, there were not many people who didn’t know whose locker it was. So now that the corner of the door had been bent at right angles with a blunt instrument, and the contents ransacked, I was inclined to take it personally.
‘My locker’s been forced, Ferdy.’
‘I noticed that,’ said Ferdy.
‘Thanks a lot,’ I said.
‘Shouting won’t help things,’ said Ferdy.
‘How’s about letting me in on what will help things,’ I said.
‘Is anything missing?’ the American boy asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not as far as I can see.’
‘Well, there you are,’ said Ferdy.
‘I’ll toddle,’ I said.
‘You’ll tell Schlegel I want weather?’
‘I’ll tell him,’ I said. ‘But he’ll get it off the computer like I told you.’
‘You put some weather on the line,’ said Ferdy. ‘Or don’t bother about dinner tonight.’
‘You don’t get out of it as easy as that,’ I said. ‘See you at eight.’
Ferdy nodded. ‘Now we’re going to put some sonobuoys into the Kara, and we’ll start a search with the Mallow flying boats. Take a good look at the weather reports and then place them.’
The young American submariner had removed his uniform jacket and now he loosened his tie. He pushed the plastic markers that were the Russian flying boats along the line of the ice-limits. The ocean, which had always seemed so empty to him, was now a network of detection stations and seabed sonar. The flying boats were the most effective weapon of all, for they could land on the water and lower their detectors into it to get beneath the anticline of the layered water. Then they could bring out their short-range Magnetic Anomaly Detectors to confirm that it was a big metal sub down there, and not just a whale or patch of warm water.
‘What about the ice-limits?’ the boy asked.
‘Forget it – bang your flying boats down wherever you want them to start the search.’
‘On the ice?’
‘They’ve got wheels – either the ice is thick enough to take the weight of them or they’ll float.’
The boy turned to me. ‘Did the Russians ever do that?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But it would certainly change the tactical maps if it was possible.’
‘It’d shake up the electronics,’ said the boy. ‘It’s about forty tons of airplane – she’d be a thin scattering of rivets and radio tubes if you did that with her.’ He held the plastic marker in his hand, hovering above the deep water channel where the attacking US submarines would probably turn to reach the Russian coastline.
‘Place those damned markers,’ said Ferdy. ‘This is a war, not a safety week.’
‘Jesus,’ whispered the boy, and now he was out there in the freezing ocean with those two Mallows, laden with ASW equipment, right over him. ‘There’s just no place to hide if you do that.’
It’s a rare event that I’m home early enough to worry about the parking regulations. Marjorie was even earlier. She was already dressed up and ready to go to Ferdy’s dinner party that evening. She was relaxed and beautiful and determined to mother me. She made a big pot of coffee and added a plate of Florentina sticky cakes to the tray placed within arm’s reach of my favourite chair. She
offered to put her car in the lock-up so that there would be room for mine on the meter. And before she went to move both cars herself, she told me for the third time that my suit was laid out on the bed and there was a clean shirt in the top drawer. And she was beautiful, clever and she loved me.
The bell rang only two minutes after she’d gone downstairs. I chuckled in that patronizing way that men do when women forget keys, can’t open a tin or stall in traffic. ‘Put your door-keys on the same ring …’ I said, but when the door was open far enough, I saw two men in black overcoats and one of them carried a burnished metal case that might have contained soap samples.
‘No thanks,’ I said.
But the sort of sales course these two had graduated from had ‘no, thanks’ as the first lesson. They were heavyweights: with big hats that bent the tops of their ears over, and the sort of teeth that went up in value whenever paper money slipped. They lowered their shoulders. I had the door almost closed when four hundred pounds of animal protein split the facing board almost without pause and sent me pirouetting down the hall.
By the light coming through the hall window I could see them better. One – a swarthy man, with a neatly trimmed beard and pigskin gloves – I’d seen before. He had been in the passenger seat of the blue BMW that had tried to force us off the Great Hamish road.
It was this one that tried to bear hug me now, and put his face low enough for me to elbow. He avoided the full force of it only by twisting his head, while I put my foot on his instep with enough force to make him grunt. He reeled back into his friend but my victory was short-lived. All three of us knew that I’d stand little chance if they backed me into the larger space of the lounge. They paused before the head-down charge, then together they gave me the sort of treatment that had worked so well on the door panels. My feet left the ground and I went right over the back of the sofa. As I came into land on the carpet, I took with me the coffee tray, cakes and a blizzard of flying chinaware.
I was still full length as the clean-shaven one came wading through the debris. I was only just fast enough to ensure that his big, black, well-polished military boot, with its lace double knotted, nicked my ear, instead of carrying away the side of my head.
I rolled away from him, raising myself up on my knees. I grabbed the edge of the rug and fell forward again still holding it. With one foot still raised he was in the perfect pose. He went over like a brick chimney. There was a thud as his head hit the glass front of the TV, and a blast of song as his sleeve went down the controls. For a moment he didn’t move at all. On the screen there were singing glove puppets, brutally compressed and repeated across the screen in horizontal slices.
The bearded one gave me no time to admire my handiwork. He came at me even before I was fully upright. One hand was ready to chop and the other was looking for a wristlock. But the judo man is off balance at the time he makes his grab. I jabbed him hard. It was enough to make him step back a pace and yell, although it might not have been had I not been holding the brass-plated fire-tongs that Marjorie’s mother had given us for Christmas.
But I hadn’t crippled either of them. I’d just slowed them a little. Worse, I’d come to the end of my surprises: they were wary. The fellow under the TV was already back on his feet and he was staring at the flickering strips of glove puppet as if fearing for his vision.
Then he turned and they came at me from different sides. ‘Now let’s talk,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard about hard-sell techniques, but this is ridiculous.’
The bearded one smiled. He was dying to put his world-famous right cross on me. I could tell that from the way he was drawing the diagrams of how he’d do it. I taunted him twice, and then came in early to make him throw it. I took it on the forearm and it hurt like hell but not as much as the right jab I hung on his jaw.
He slewed as he fell, revealing the bald patch on his head. For a moment I felt ashamed, and then I thought maybe Joe Louis and Henry Cooper had bald patches, too. And by that time the other one was slamming short body punches into my ribs and I was making noises like an old concertina that had been dropped on the floor.
I punched him off, but baldy came behind me and took my left wrist with enough enthusiasm to make my nose touch my knees. And suddenly the whole world was sliced into horizontal slices and singing like glove puppets, and I could hear this voice shouting, ‘What did I tell you in the car. What did I tell you in the car.’ It was a very angry voice.
It wasn’t Marjorie. It was a broad-shouldered elderly Soviet security Colonel named Stok. He was waving a pistol and threatening to do terrible things to his friends in Russian.
‘He attacked us,’ said the hairy one.
‘Get to work,’ said Stok. The bearded man picked up the metal case and went with it into the next room. ‘And fast,’ said Stok. ‘Very, very fast.’
‘There will be trouble,’ I said.
‘We thought you both got into the car,’ said Stok.
‘You’d better get new glasses before you trip off World War Three.’
‘We hoped you would be out,’ said Stok. ‘It would have been simpler.’
‘It’s not complicated this way,’ I said angrily. ‘You let your gorillas out of their cage, oil your gun, rough up the citizens, break the furniture often enough, and soon life will be as simple here as it is in the Soviet Union.’
Through the door I could see the two men getting drills and a hammer from the metal case. ‘They’ll find nothing here,’ I told Stok.
‘There is a conspiracy,’ Stok said. ‘A Soviet official is threatened.’
‘Why not tell the police?’
‘How can we be sure the police are not the ones arranging it?’
‘In your country, you can’t,’ I said.
Stok’s mouth moved as if he was about to argue but he thought better of it. He decided to smile instead but it wasn’t a heart-warming smile. He unbuttoned his overcoat to find a handkerchief to wipe his nose. His suit was a well-cut Western one. With it he wore a white shirt and silver tie. The nervous hands and piercing eyes completed the Godfather look. ‘Five minutes, and we will be gone,’ he said.
From the next room there was a quick exchange in Russian, too fast for me to understand even vaguely. ‘The medical bag?’ said Stok to me. ‘What are you doing with a medical bag?’
‘Marjorie’s,’ I said. ‘The girl; she’s a doctor.’
Stok told them to carry on the search. ‘If the girl proves not to be a doctor we might have to return.’
‘If the girl proves not to be a doctor I might be dead,’ I said.
‘You are not hurt,’ said Stok. He walked close to me and looked at the tiny mark left by the welt of the boot. ‘It is nothing,’ he said.
‘By your standards nothing more than a good evening.’
Stok shrugged. ‘You are under surveillance,’ he said. ‘I warn you.’
‘The more the merrier,’ I said. ‘Tap the phone too if it will make you feel good.’
‘It’s not a joke.’
‘Oh! It’s not. Well, I’m glad you told me that, before I split my sides laughing.’
From the next room I could hear Stok’s two friends tapping and hammering, in pursuit of secret compartments. One of them brought him the file in which I keep a record of my expenses. Stok put away his pistol and put on his reading-glasses in order to scrutinize the sheets but I knew there was nothing there that would compromise security. I laughed. Stok looked up and smiled and put the file back on the table.
‘There’s nothing,’ I said. ‘You’re wasting your time.’
‘Probably,’ agreed Stok.
‘Ready,’ called the voice from the next room.
‘Wait a minute,’ I said as I realized what they were going to do. ‘I can explain about that – this flat belonged to a bookie. There’s nothing in there now. Nothing at all.’
I pushed Stok aside to get to the next room. His two friends had fixed our Birmingham carpet upon the wall. It covered the wall safe upon whi
ch they had affixed six small charges. They triggered them as I got to the doorway. The carpet billowed into a great spinnaker before I heard the muffled bang. There was a rush of hot cordite-smelling air that hammered me backwards.
‘Empty,’ said the bearded one; already he was throwing his odds and ends back into the metal case.
Stok looked at me and blew his nose. The other two hurried out through the front door but Stok delayed a moment. He raised a hand as if he was about to offer an apology or an explanation. But words failed him; he let the hand drop to his side, turned, and hurried out after his friends.
There was the sound of a scuffle as Frazer met the Russians on the stairs. But Frazer was no more of a match for them than I had been, and he came through the door dabbing at his nose with a blood-spotted handkerchief. There was a Special Branch man with him: a new kid who insisted upon showing me his card before photographing the damage.
Well, it had to be the Russians, I thought. There was something inimitable in it. Just like the business of forcing us off the road and then waiting in The Bonnet to show us who they were. Just like the intelligence trawlers that followed NATO ships, and the big Soviet Fleets that harassed us at sea. It was all part of the demonstration of their resources and their knowledge, an attempt to bully opponents into ill-considered action.
It was typical too that the security Colonel had arrived separately, taking no chances of being in the same car with the house-breaking tools and explosives. And that half-hearted gesture of regret – tough bastards, and I didn’t like it. I mean, you go for a dip in the municipal baths, and you don’t expect to catch sight of a shark fin.
They had all gone by the time Marjorie returned. At first she didn’t look through the bedroom door, to where the previous tenant’s safe had its door dangling and its lock shredded into wire wool. Or at paper wrappings from the explosive charges or the twists of wire and dry batteries. And she didn’t see the thick layer of old plaster that covered the bed and my suit and her dressing table. Or the carpet with its circular burn in the middle.
She just saw me picking up the fragments of the china tea service her mother had given her and Jack for their wedding anniversary.