Colonel Butler's Wolf

by Anthony Price

  So sure, it was true that he was here on the Wall to do Audley’s dirty work, because Audley’s reputation in university circles must be preserved for the future.

  But before the future there was a present problem to be solved.

  “ … It’ll appeal to your military mind. Did you ever serve in the north of England?”

  “I was at Catterick for a while.”

  “Only just the north. Northumberland and Cumberland —they’re the real north, where the Wall runs. We’ll save the best bit for the third day. You can send your bags ahead to Castleshields and walk the stretch from Milecastle 34. Then you’ll be at the house in time for tea … “

  Butler watched the hire car out of sight before turning towards the rough pasture at the side of the road.

  There was not going to be anything to see at Milecastle 34, he could read the Ordnance Survey map of the Wall well enough now to know that.

  But it was 0910 and at 0915 he was due to start walking westwards along that red line on the map. And whether he got the feel of it or not didn’t much matter, because that wasn’t the object of the walk. At least he knew that if he understood little else.

  Trouble was—when it came to it, it wasn’t so easy to be a stalking horse (or was he decoy-duck or Judas goat?): it was remarkably difficult not to remember his training, consciously to keep his eyes away from the back of his neck. In fact it was not just difficult, it was damned impossible.

  There were two of them and they took point in turn.

  One, the medium-sized older one, had a reversible three-quarter length overcoat, not really quite the most suitable garment for wall-walking, no matter which side out; the other, distinctively tall and gangling, at least looked like a hiker, with his green hooded-windcheater and khaki rucksack.

  Possibly—no, almost certainly—there was a third man out of sight, driving slowly back and forward along General Wade’s road, which had left the line of the Wall just before Milecastle 34. There might even be others for all Butler knew.

  But of these two he was certain; it was their bad luck that the wind was so piercing today that it had driven everyone else indoors, or so it seemed. Even the traffic on the road away to the south seemed light for a Friday morning, with few private cars and only a spatter of lorries and army vehicles to be seen.

  Carefully he kept his pace steady. He mustn’t test them with variable speeds, or awkward delays, or little tricky detours; mustn’t notice that they set the rooks flapping from the copse in the last hollow or sent the jackdaws sailing out of the cliffs. Mustn’t do a damn thing except follow his itinerary to the letter.

  In the end he began to follow it in spirit too, not so much from inclination as from the necessity of occupying his mind with something.

  Audley had been right about this land he had entered at 0915. Hitherto the line of the Wall had run through neutral territory, first in the sprawl of Newcastle, then over rolling farmland, and more recently through the poorer upland pastures. Across such terrain one military engineer’s line was as good as any other’s.

  But now he had come to a place which God had landscaped to be a frontier, with wave after wave of rising crags, their cliffs always rearing to the north.

  And along those crags the Romans had built their Wall.

  But it was more than a mere wall, this Wall, he saw that now. For here at last, here and now, he could relate what he knew to what he saw. It mattered not at all any longer that the famous line was often no more than a few courses high, or a mere jumble of stones buried in the turf, or even nothing at all. Here undoubtedly there had been a great wall, with all those turrets and forts he had read about. Even when he couldn’t see it he knew it was there.

  And yet at the same time he knew—and knew it as these academics could never know, he told himself—that this was not the true wall.

  The true wall was made of men.

  In its day there had been half-trained frontier guards here, little better than customs officers, on the Wall itself. But the real strength of the Wall would have been in those tough, long-enlistment regiments in the fortresses, which the books described stupidly as “auxiliaries”, but which he guessed had been the Gurkhas and Sikhs of their day, those Dacians and Lusitanians.

  And for them the Wall itself would have been a mere start line.

  Indeed, the world hadn’t changed so much as people imagined. Life up here would have added up to the same endless quest for information which he knew so well, and peace would have depended on the ability of the Wall’s intelligence officers to smell out trouble in advance.

  What mischief were the troublemakers in the northern tribes hatching? Had their harvest been dangerously bad or dangerously good—were the young warriors restive because of hunger or idleness?

  And that, exactly, was what he and Audley were engaged in now: there were troublemakers loose and the young men were restive.

  Butler sighed. The historians seemed agreed that the Wall had been an expensive failure. Certainly it had been breached disastrously three times in three centuries.

  Yet twice that had been because of the treachery of Roman governors who had stripped it of men to pursue their continental ambitions, and only once—as far as he could see— had its own intelligence system failed.

  Once in three hundred years—once in ten generations—did not seem to him so very disgraceful. For how many other times had the system met the challenge and won?

  That was the bugger of this game: you only won in private and always lost in public!

  … Vercovicium—or Borovicium, if you prefer—one of the Wall’s showplaces and full of things to see, like the regimental loo where the arses of the Frisian Light Cavalry and Notfried’s German Irregulars were bared many a time. Keep to the time schedule closely here and ponder whether there’ll be any tourists to gape at British Army latrines in India fifteen hundred years from now …

  There were people at Vercovicium, the first he had seen since Milecastle 34, though they had come along a track from the main road, instead of along the Wall as Butler had done.

  Not that they were enjoying themselves: it was all very well marching along the Wall, but the wind made cold work of sightseeing on that hillside and they were hunched and pinch-faced against it.

  Follow the schedule exactly.

  So here, probably, Audley had set up the cameras to snapshot his followers—if he hadn’t already identified them.

  Obediently Butler traversed the ruins and toured the little museum, deviating only to purchase a postcard of three heavily cloaked little Celtic goddesses to send on some future trip to his own little goddesses at Reigate.

  By the time his orders allowed him to leave, his mood had cooled with his body, allowing doubt into his mind again.

  But maybe Vercovicium was a place for doubting; how many times in the blinding white winters and broiling, shimmering midsummers had the officers of the Army of the Wall doubted the Emperor’s wisdom in not letting General Gnaeus Julius Agricola complete the conquest of Scotland when it had been almost within his

  grasp?

  In the end it came down (as it always did) to the only philosophy a soldier could afford: you take your pay and try to make some sense out of your orders in the faint hope that there was any in the first place. But you keep your powder dry just in case.

  Maybe it was the place. But certainly the further he left Vercovicium behind, the better he felt again, with steady marching transforming the chill of the fortress into a comforting warmth.

  The Wall ran firm and true here, shoulder high—even though the damn fools of engineers had sited some of the turrets and milecastles with shameful disregard for elementary defensive sense.

  But it was the countryside itself which was irresistible now, tricky, uncompromising and beautiful.

  There would have been game worth hunting here, four-legged as well as two-legged: deer in plenty, the big Red Deer that was now only rich man’s sport; and bear for danger —they’d prized the Ca
ledonian bear highly enough to send it all the way to the Colosseum at Rome.

  And wolves, above all thousands of wolves! When the tribes to the north were licking their wounds and the southern taxes had all been collected, then would be the time of the great wolf-drives, not only to make the roads halfway safe in the winter, but also to keep the horses in condition and the men on their toes. That would be the life.

  But now there were only the jackdaws sailing out of their nesting places on the cliffs, and the invisible curlews calling to each other, and a solitary heron stalking along the shrinking margin of the lough far below. The long wars of extermination down the centuries had put paid to the bears and the wolves as well as the Romans and the Picts.

  Or perhaps not all the wolves.

  He came strongly down the Peel Crags and began the longest climb of all, up towards Winshields, high point and halfway mark from sea to sea.

  But first there was a road to cross, the only one to break the line since beyond Carraburgh, miles back. There was a gaggle of Army vehicles by the roadside under a thin screen of trees; a Landrover, a couple of personnel carriers and a big radio truck. He remembered now that he had seen a similar procession tearing up the main road as he had left Homesteads. Somewhere inside the truck a nasal voice was intoning figures in the traditional clipped tones of R/T operators the world over.

  As he ducked behind the truck one of the rear doors swung open and a long, swarthy face beamed down at him—a grinning, familiar face set unfamiliarly between a dark beret and a combat jacket.

  “Spot on time, sir—David said you would be! Hop up smartly now, but give us your titfer first if you don’t mind.”

  A brown hand tweaked Butler’s deerstalker from his head before he could protest at the indignity.

  “The one thing we couldn’t get a double of—would you believe it?” said Richardson, cramming the hat on the head of a second man, a civilian who pushed wordlessly past Butler and was away across the road before he could articulate the words rising in his throat.

  “F—what—?”

  It was himself walking away from himself!

  Richardson’s hand was on his shoulder, propelling him into the confined space of the truck, between banks of equipment. He had one last glimpse of himself—a blurred look of navy-blue donkey-jacket, brown breeches and high-laced boots, stained khaki pack, all now surmounted by the much-loved deerstalker—disappearing over the wall across the road on the path up towards Winshields Crag.

  “Not so bad, eh?” Richardson’s long brown face was split by that characteristic good humour of his. “The front view’s not quite so convincing close up, but from here on we’re making damn sure no one gets that close. They can get their eyeful from afar … But in the meantime we must make ourselves scarce just in case. So we must squeeze down the other end—Corporal Gibson!”

  “Sir?”

  “Message transmitted?”

  “Sir!”

  “Bang on! Now I’m going to leave the doors open so Korbel can peek inside, but I want you in the way if he gets too inquisitive.”

  “Sir.”

  “Korbel?” Butler growled. “Peter Korbel?”

  “You know him?” Richardson beamed, nodding. “Poor old Korbel’s doing this stretch, yes. He picked you up at where’s it—Housesteads. Took over from a new chappie by the name of Protopopov, believe it or not—Protopopov—tall chappie with long arms like an orangutan. Long legs too, so he kept up with you nicely, whereas Korbel’s been having a hell of a time ever since he twisted his ankle at Castle Nick. ‘Fact we got quite worried about him in case he lost you completely—that wasn’t in the script at all, you know. Even David didn’t reckon on that.”

  Richardson was relatively new to the department, a product of one of Sir Frederick’s university forays, but already he was on familiar terms with Audley, Butler noted disapprovingly. But then, they were joined by the freemasonry of rugger, he remembered—they’d played for the same London club, or something like that.

  He grunted irritably, dismissing the triviality from his mind; it was no business of his how Audley conducted himself with his underlings. More to the point, this underling knew very much better than he did what was now going on and what was intended.

  Richardson reached up and slid open a narrow grill in the side of the truck, applying his eye to an inch crack of daylight.

  “But he’s coming along very nicely now. He should be just about right to get his reward if he keeps up that pace.” He closed the grill. “But if you don’t mind we must take cover now, sir. If you get down on the floor here you’ll be nicely out of sight.”

  Butler wedged himself down in the shadow of a jutting section of transmitting equipment, thinking furiously. Korbel was pretty small beer, a bit of Ukranian flotsam that had been left high and dry by the Second World War only to be picked up and recruited by his ex-fatherland after ten blameless but unrewarding years of freedom in the West. It had never been satisfactorily established whether it had been belated patriotism or blackmail, or sheer desperation, that had turned him into an enemy, but in any case he had never graduated beyond fetching and carrying and watching so that it had never seemed worthwhile picking him up. Butler had never met him or crossed his path, but he had watched the sad, moon-shaped face age and sag, creasing with stress-lines, in a whole succession of photographs taken over the years and exposed to him by routine in the periodical rogues’ gallery sessions.

  But now his face in its turn had been exposed to the near-pensionable Korbel and the spidery Protopopov—and now Korbel was hurrying after the latest in the line of false Butlers to get his reward up on the crag.

  His reward … Butler lent back uncomfortably against his pack. All he had to do was to ask Richardson, and Richardson would dutifully tell him that everything was going according to plan—Audley’s plan.

  A crafty plan, without doubt, full of elaborate twists and turns. But a sight too twisty and elaborate for Butler’s taste.

  The primary aim was to identify the opposition—no bonus for that conclusion, it was inherent in his instructions—because the enemy’s strength and quality must always be a valuable pointer to the importance of the operation. And with all the advantages of a well-prepared battlefield and apparently unlimited equipment that aim ought to be attainable.

  But being Audley’s the plan included a deception: Peter Korbel’s reward was to be deceived about something.

  “Your man, sir—he’s just crossed the road.” The stocky Signals corporal murmured, deadpan. “He’s limpin’ a bit, but he’s goin’ like the clappers,”

  Richardson stood up and peered through a crack in the grill on the other side of the truck.

  “So he is, Corporal—so he is! Bloody, but unbowed. I think he’ll make it now, you know. You can send off the all clear then, and tell ‘em we’ll rendezvous according to schedule.” He turned back to Butler. “You know what we’ve got for him up there? Not up there, actually—he’s waiting down in Lodham Slack valley, just before Turret 4ob: Oliver St John Latimer in person!”

  Butler frowned. Oliver Latimer was one of the more orotund of the resident kremlinologists in the department—a man with whom Audley was notoriously at odds too.

  “Hah!” Richardson’s teeth flashed. “I thought you’d take the point! David don’t like Oliver—and Oliver don’t like David. Which is why David has had Oliver dragged all the way up here from his fleshpots in the Big Smoke just to confuse poor old Korbel. Two birds with one stone—just like David!”

  Just like Audley. That was true enough, thought Butler grimly: the man was too shrewd to go out of his way to settle his private scores but could never resist settling them in the line of duty if the opportunity presented itself. Young Roskill had said as much from his hospital bed only a few days before.

  But Latimer was the private bird; it was Korbel who mattered, and Protopropov, and whoever was behind them.

  “He wants to find out if you’re meeting anyone on the Wall, se
e,” continued Richardson, “and we didn’t like to disappoint him. So we’re giving him Latimer, and with a bit of -luck that’ll set their dovecotes all aflutter, specially if they’ve got a line on David, because they’ll know David and Latimer aren’t yoked together, see—“

  “I see perfectly well.” Butler cut off the string of mixed metaphors harshly. “For God’s sake, man, let’s get on with the job. Let’s get moving.”

  The Russians had followed him, and Audley’s men were no doubt pinpointing the Russians. It was an old game, and the trick of it was still the same: you could never be quite sure who was outsmarting whom—who was the cat, and who the mouse.

  XII

  CORPORAL GIBSON SWUNG the big signals truck between the stone uprights of the farm gate, round an immaculate army scout car which was parked beside a Fordson tractor, and backed it accurately into the mouth of the barn.

  A stone barn, Butler noted through the gap in the grill— everything in this countryside was in stone, and judging by the recurrent shape of the stones most of them had first seen the light of day under a Roman legionary’s chisel: the Wall, away on the skyline at his back, had been this land’s quarry for a thousand years or more.

  The rear doors swung smartly open from the outside and Butler looked down on his reception committee.

  “Ah, colonel!” Audley began formally.

  The Royal Signals subaltern at his side stiffened at the rank instinctively, and then relaxed as Audley ruined the effect with a casual gesture of welcome. “Come on down, Jack! We’ve only got about half an hour, and a lot of ground to cover. And you too, Peter. Everything according to plan?”

  Butler sniffed derisively. According to plan! It was a sad thing to see a man like Audley take pleasure in the shadow of events rather than their substance.

  “Like a dream.” Richardson swung out of the truck gracefully behind. “Korbel went up Winshields like a lamb, apart from his limp.”

  “Good, good.” For a fearful moment Butler thought Audley was going to clap him on the back, but the movement changed at the last instant to a smoothing of the hair.