by Adam Hall
‘Q-15,’ I told him.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know.’ He began fiddling with the set until he got the station identification bleep sorted out from the squelch. After a minute he got a successful series of nines in three blocks and told him I was waiting. It was now close on 10:00 hours in London and it was just conceivable that Egerton was sitting in at Signals: his standard practice when there was something big breaking was to stay with it until, three or four in the morning and then come in again about noon, but the Rome objective was dead and standard practice might no longer apply, 999-999-999.
Rumori leaned over the set, shifting the band-spread and watching the carrier needle to get the signal as pure as he could. All they were doing at the moment was keeping us open with the mission identity sequence: 9 was for Kobra.
Egerton had possibly told them to call him in if they got anything from Rome, but they wouldn’t wait until he’d driven all the way to Whitehall from his place in Richmond: they’d only keep us hanging around if he were already in his office.
The arpeggios come faintly from below, both hands now, 999-000-000.
Control at console.
Perched on the packing case with his long legs dangling and his eyes wandering vaguely around the room. He is one of the few directors who sit in at Signals and respond at only one remove: through the scramble encoder. The others use their yellow telephones and demand memoranda in duplicate, according to the rules. Egerton doesn’t do it for the benefit of his executives in the field: it’s just that underneath his remote and donnish appearance he runs at very high voltage and likes to be close to the action. As a spin-off advantage his executives feel more comfortable because the exchange is a lot faster and we know there won’t be any confusion, send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance, so forth.
2829-7476-0198…
Rumori cleared his throat and glanced round at me to see if I looked all right. I nodded and we began reading the signals as they came off the integral unscrambler. The voice we were listening to wasn’t Egerton’s because he didn’t have the skill or experience to choose fast abbreviations and pick out routine phrase patterns to suit the messages, but some of Egerton’s personal signature was coming through and I could tell he was worried.
There was another thing I noticed.
8387-9817-9166.
An encapsulated summary of the info they’d received from Fitzalan. Then they asked me to talk and it didn’t take me long: I hadn’t been able to identify Heinrich Fogel with absolute certainty in visual terms but yes it was his face as I remembered it and yes the cranial scar was there. From the way he got clear of the airport I had recognized his thought patterns and I would go further towards identification on that score. Message ends.
Wanted to know if I required further medical treatment, whether I would ask to withdraw on physical grounds, whether I felt the Rome phase was terminally abortive, so forth.
No, no and no.
Then Egerton began talking again through his signaller and I began listening a little harder because the other tiling I’d noticed was the tone of his phrases: he was diffident (‘would the executive feel prepared’), persuasive (‘assuming a developing potential for the mission’) and specious (‘the Direction would fully understand if the executive opted for replacement in the field with all immediacy’).
These windy phrases had been designed by their lordships in Admin, but most of them had been chosen so that their initial letters could be transferred straight into numerals and shot through the scrambler at high speed. At the receiving end we habitually decode into the original phrases but what Egerton was telling me now was that he was desperate for me to remain in action because he was lining up something very big for me.
The specious bit was typical of Egerton. At this stage I could honourably tell London that there was nothing else to do out ‘here and they hadn’t got a mission assembled for me yet so I wanted to come in and do something more interesting. But the brief signal 7372 - the Direction would fully understand if the executive opted for replacement in the field with all immediacy - is normally used when there’s a wheel coming off in a shut-ended situation and the poor bastard can either get out or get killed. Egerton had thrown me the 7372 as a sly attempt to persuade me by an obvious association of ideas: if I’d got cold feet at this stage he was willing to replace me.
For a brilliant man he can be sometimes naive: he knew damned well I could see through that signal. But naiveté is emotional, gut-think and not brain-think, and the thing that came through so clearly was that he was desperate to keep me running. Desperation, too, is emotional.
‘Oh Christ,’ I said softly, ‘that bloody Egg.’
Emilio Rumori half-turned his head, ‘Excuse me?’
‘Don’t send that,’ I said.
But you can come full circle, you know.
Listen: if I did come in because there was nothing to do in Rome and there wasn’t a mission lined up for me, I could never be certain that London believed those were my reasons. They’d be justified in believing that when you’ve been shot at and gone through a tanker explosion and come out with head injuries you’re liable to get cold feet.
My feet can get as cold as the next man’s. I’m in this trade to prove myself. I’m frightened of pushing things to the point where they might blow up, so I push things to the point where they might blow up, to prove I’m not frightened.
Egerton knows this and this was what he was working on and the whole thing was coming full circle: maybe he wasn’t so naive. Maybe this was pure brain-think: he knew the one thing that could persuade me to stay in the field - an implication of cold feet. And to a certain degree it could even have some truth in it because that craven little organism was still making its voice heard in the dark roaring of the aftershock that was keeping one hand on the banisters: it didn’t want any more tankers on fire; it wanted to go home now.
I said to Rumori:
Tell them I’ll stay in the field.’
‘Yes.’
‘Ask for directives.’
‘Yes.’
He selected 938 and 635: Executive prepared to continue mission. Please brief as fully as possible. It wasn’t accurate because we hadn’t got a mission yet and a -full briefing is only possible with a director in the field, but Rumori had picked the two phrases with almost no hesitation and got them through and the saving of time was vital. The whole idea of this method of sending is that you can put through quite a lot of information before the opposition starts getting on to you with a mobile D/Fing unit. There might not be a unit within miles but we always assume it’s next door and for this reason the communication between two first-class signallers resembles championship table tennis: the ball seems to vanish because it’s going so fast.
276-412-398.
Routine stuff: Proceed solo — prepare to rdv — report arrival.
me long: I hadn’t been able to identify Heinrich Fogel with absolute certainty in visual terms but yes it was his face as I remembered it and yes the cranial scar was there. From the way he got clear of the airport I had recognized his thought patterns and I would go further towards identification on that score. Message ends.
Wanted to know if I required further medical treatment, whether I would ask to withdraw on physical grounds, whether I felt the Rome phase was terminally abortive, so forth.
No, no and no.
Then Egerton began talking again through his signaller and I began listening a little harder because the other thing I’d noticed was the tone of his phrases: he was diffident (‘would the executive feel prepared’), persuasive (‘assuming a developing potential for the mission’) and specious (‘the Direction would fully understand if the executive opted for replacement in the field with all immediacy’).
These windy phrases had been designed by their lordships in Admin, but most of them had been chosen so that their initial letters could be transferred straight into numerals and shot through the scrambler at high speed. At the recei
ving end we habitually decode into the original phrases but what Egerton was telling me now was that he was desperate for me to remain in action because he was lining up something very big for me.
The specious bit was typical of Egerton. At this stage I could honourably tell London that there was nothing else to do out here and they hadn’t got a mission assembled for me yet so I wanted to come in and do something more interesting. But the brief signal 7372 - the Direction would fully understand if the executive opted for replacement in the field with all immediacy - is normally used when there’s a wheel coming off in a shut-ended situation and the poor bastard can either get out or get killed. Egerton had thrown me the 7372 as a sly attempt to persuade me by an obvious association of ideas: if I’d got cold feet at this stage he was willing to replace me.
For a brilliant man he can be sometimes naive: he knew damned well I could see through that signal. But naiveté is emotional, gut-think and not brain-think, and the thing that came through so clearly was that he was desperate to keep me running. Desperation, too, is emotional.
‘Oh Christ,’ I said softly, ‘that bloody Egg.’
Emilio Rumori half-turned his head, ‘Excuse me?’
‘Don’t send that,’ I said.
But you can come full circle, you know.
Listen: if I did come in because there was nothing to do in Rome and there wasn’t a mission lined up for me, I could never be certain that London believed those were my reasons. They’d be justified in believing that when you’ve been shot at and gone through a tanker explosion and come out with head injuries you’re liable to get cold feet.
My feet can get as cold as the next man’s. I’m in this trade to prove myself. I’m frightened of pushing things to the point where they might blow up, so I push things to the point where they might blow up, to prove I’m not frightened.
Egerton knows this and this was what he was working on and the whole thing was coming full circle: maybe he wasn’t so naive. Maybe this was pure brain-think: he knew the one thing that could persuade me to stay in the field - an implication of cold feet. And to a certain degree it could even have some truth in it because that craven little organism was still making its voice heard in the dark roaring of the aftershock that was keeping one hand on the banisters: it didn’t want any more tankers on fire; it wanted to go home now.
I said to Rumori:
Tell them I’ll stay in the field.’
‘Yes.’
‘Ask for directives.’
‘Yes.’
He selected 938 and 635: Executive prepared to continue mission. Please brief as fully as possible. It wasn’t accurate because we hadn’t got a mission yet and a full briefing is only possible with a director in the field, but Rumori had picked the two phrases with almost no hesitation and got them through and the saving of time was vital. The whole idea of this method of sending is that you can put through quite a lot of information before the opposition starts getting on to you with a mobile D/Fing unit. There might not be a unit within miles but we always assume it’s next door and for this reason the communication between two first-class signallers resembles championship table tennis: the ball seems to vanish because it’s going so fast.
276-412-398.
Routine stuff: Proceed solo - prepare to rdv - report arrival.
Then they said where.
Cambodia.
‘Get it again,’ I said.
He asked for a repeat. You can’t make a phrase out of a name-place, so they’d sent Kmbdia. Now they put it in full: 26358193.
‘Are you reading?’ Rumori asked me. His narrow dark head had been turned to look at me because I was sitting on the floor now with my eyes half closed.
‘Yes.’
They stayed on the air for another six or seven seconds and he only asked for two repeats. Contact was to be made at the British Embassy with the second cultural attaché and I was to retain my cover: I would be in Phnom Penh to liaise with a Berlin correspondent of Europress in an attempt to get the final stories from wealthy merchants fleeing the capital. By the phrasing I suspected that the Berlin correspondent of Europress was probably a replacement for Heinrich Fogel, because Europress doesn’t actually exist and this presented the man as a shadow figure and the only shadow figure around would be in the opposition: I was proceeding solo and wouldn’t have a local director. But reading between the lines of a signal exchange that’s taking place in one-second flashes can be difficult and I shut my eyes and let it go.
Of course there was a lot of data that didn’t appear in the stream of coded digits: it looked as if Heinrich Fogel were being replaced within hours of his death and it looked as if he’d been feinting his travel pattern by landing in Rome because the two places were a hell of a distance apart, considering the Kobra people were assumed to be zeroing in for a rendezvous. Further indications: Kobra now realized their operation was being surveyed (by the unnamed journalist in the Italian press) and might even be penetrated, but they weren’t intending to call the whole thing off and go to ground and come up somewhere else. London wouldn’t send me to Cambodia unless they had a strong lead, ‘ because Egerton was running this one and he didn’t like shifting his executives around like pawns. He was sitting there in Signals with the pattern spread out on the board as far as it was known: he was pouncing and missing and he’d pounced on Rome and missed Fogel and now he was pouncing on Phnom Penh and with luck I’d make a hit.
‘Shut down?’ Rumori asked me.
‘Yes.’
Q-15-000.
He cut the switch and swung the tableau of bric-a-brac into place and got off the stool and stood looking down at me with his head on one side.
‘You need medical attention,’ he said reflectively. ‘We have the services of a highly -‘
‘It’s delayed shock, that’s all. But you can get me some air tickets.’ Phnom Penh would be like a beehive someone had kicked over and the last scheduled airliners had stopped operating five days ago. ‘Get me as close as you can, all right? Then I’ll try cadging a lift on a US Air Force chopper or whatever’s available.’
‘It will be very difficult,’ Rumori shrugged.
‘It’ll be close to bloody impossible, but I’ve got to get in here. You heard what London said.’
A storm of dust whirled up, blotting out most of the airport buildings at Pochentong, and the pilot left the rotor spinning as the doors were thrown open.
‘Whadd’ya want to come back here for, buddy?’
He sat loosely at the controls, a cigar jutting out of his stubbled face and his eyes red from fatigue as the armed escorts began dropping through the doorways.
‘I’m here to get a story,’ I called back above the noise.
That right? Listen-‘ he poked a thick gloved finger at me- ‘there’s only one story about this goddam place. We’re gettin’ out, and we should’a stayed, okay? Tell ‘em that from me!’
I nodded and someone gave a yell and we all crouched, waiting. Dirt flew up fifty yards away and the debris pattered across the windscreen of the helicopter. They said the airport had been under mortar fire for the past five days, and as I dropped through one of the doorways I saw a big 3-130 standing keeled over near the end of the runway with its tail blown off. The Communists had pushed a unit within a mile and a half of Pochentong and I could feel a series of thumps under my feet as the mortars kept up their fire.
‘Okay, let’s get goin’!’ a man yelled and we spread out as we ran through the dust, half-blinded. Dirt fountained again on our left as the transport vehicles started from the main building towards the helicopter, packed with refugees. A line of US Marines were strung out towards the road, holding back a crowd of Vietnamese civilians; and blobs began darkening in the sky as the next wave of choppers came in from the carriers lying off the coast. Somewhere a siren was screaming an alert, as if no one could hear the mortars or see the earth flying up.
A military jeep was making a close turn on the tarmac with a bunch of Europeans cl
inging on, so I grabbed one of the hand-grips and got some kind of a purchase as it gunned up and headed for the roadway past the line of Marines.
‘Where’s this thing going?’
The US Embassy!’ someone shouted back.
I got a better grip and hooked one leg inside and relaxed and felt the throbbing in my head take on a slower rhythm. Maybe there’d be time to get a rest, somewhere along the line: at the moment I wasn’t physically mission-ready and if London threw me anything serious to do I didn’t know how I was going to do it.
The British Embassy wasn’t far from where the jeep dropped me off, and I walked there in the hot sun with my jacket sticking to my back and the glare of the sky in my eyes, trying to think of even one good reason for an international terrorist being holed up in this place on his way to the Kobra rendezvous. One possible answer could be that he wasn’t in fact an international terrorist: he could be any kind of contact with connections London wanted me to use. His cover was Europress but he wasn’t on the Bureau staff because they would have told me, and if he were in fact a Berlin correspondent for anyone there were possible links with Heinrich Fogel and Baader-Meinhof.
I went through the doors of the embassy, ‘Are you looking for HE?’
‘No,’ I said.
The thin youth turned away and said to the girl at the reception desk: ‘Then who was looking for HE?’
‘Pretty well everyone,’ she said, tucking a curl in. ‘He’s at lunch anyway, so you won’t get near him.’ She turned to me with a direct stare and said: ‘Can I help you?’
Td like to see the second cultural attaché.’ I dropped my Europress card on her desk but she didn’t look at it ‘Have you been hit?’
‘No. I always look like this.’ I was getting fed up.
She gave a sudden bright laugh and ducked and waited, looking away from me. Something like a wall went down, not The US Embassy still is,’ he said, ‘obviously.’ One of the files hit the floor and he picked it up, turning it the right way round. ‘We got all our people out five days ago,’