by Len Deighton
After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school – first to the St Martin’s School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. His mother was a professional cook and he grew up with an interest in cookery – a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the Observer and in two cookery books. He worked for a while as an illustrator in New York and as art director of an advertising agency in London.
Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book, The Ipcress File. Published in 1962, the book was an immediate success.
Since then his work has gone from strength to strength, varying from espionage novels to war, general fiction and non-fiction. The BBC made Bomber into a day-long radio drama in ‘real time’. Deighton’s history of World War Two, Blood, Tears and Folly, was published to wide acclaim – Jack Higgins called it ‘an absolute landmark’.
As Max Hastings observed, Deighton captured a time and a mood – ‘To those of us who were in our twenties in the 1960s, his books seemed the coolest, funkiest, most sophisticated things we’d ever read’ – and his books have now deservedly become classics.
Other Books By Len Deighton
FICTION
The Ipcress File
Horse Under Water
Funeral in Berlin
Billion-Dollar Brain
An Expensive Place to Die
Only When I Larf
Bomber
Declarations of War
Close-Up
Spy Story
Yesterday’s Spy
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy
SS-GB
XPD
Goodbye Mickey Mouse
MAMista
City of Gold
Violent Ward
THE SAMSON SERIES
Berlin Game
Mexico Set
London Match
Winter: A Berlin Family 1899–1945
Spy Hook
Spy Line
Spy Sinker
Faith
Hope
Charity
NON-FICTION
Action Cook Book
Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain
Airshipwreck
Basic French Cooking
Blitzkrieg: From the
Rise of Hitler to the
Fall of Dunkirk
ABC of French Food
Blood, Tears and Folly
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
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First published in Great Britain by
Jonathan Cape 1963
HORSE UNDER WATER. Copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 1963. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2009
Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978 0 586 04431 5
EPub Edition © JUNE 2011 ISBN: 978-0-00-734301-0
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* Foreign Office Intelligence Unit, part of M.I.6.
* Permanent Secretary of the Treasury: Head of the Treasury and therefore holds the title ‘Head of H.M. Civil Service’.
* Financial Secretary to the Treasury, who deals directly with the Prime Minister and directs the Treasury to implement decisions of the Government.
* ‘Friends’: jargon for employees of M.I.5, which is not run by the military (in spite of the title) but by an offshoot of the Home Office.
* C-SICH: Combined Services Information Clearing House. Part of the Ministry of Defence’s Joint Intelligence Agency. It is a funnel through which all British and Commonwealth intelligence matter is sorted, filed, and distributed. The commercial organizations (which have men to steal secrets from their competitors and safeguard their own) furnish a great volume of matter to C-SICH.
* Central Register: a collection of dossiers on two million people including foreigners. Central Register is run by M.I.5.
* Director of Naval Intelligence.
* Construction of the network to ensure that one detected person doesn’t lead to another.
* Places where messages are deposited so that collector and depositor do not come face to face.
† Method of checking network.
* Seat: A Fiat produced in Spain under licence.
* See Appendix 4.
* Assessment Boards judged the claims of Allied ships and aircraft in the matter of U-boat sinkings. They were remarkably accurate.
* Patriotic songs.
* Madrid numbers commence with an ‘M’.
* All jobs requested have R.I. codes and are then given D of C (Difficulty of Completion) code. A low R.I. (i.e. not very important job) will be attended to if it gets a low D of C (i.e. if it’s easy to do). Similarly a high D of C job requires a high R.I. to get it approved for action.
† Rue Valéry: Interpol.
* Code translation: Black: third of most urgent priority signals; Student: agent or employee; Flat: dead or presumed dead; Scissors: violence.
† D (Defence) notice: censorship directive to newspapers on various security matters.
* Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory, Cardiff.
* Red glasses were worn by lookouts to accustom their eyes to night vision before they went on watch.
* German version of Davis Escape Gear.
* See Appendix 1.
* See Appendix 2.
* In 1956 Ivor Butcher had been a Home Office telephone tapper. He overheard some information which he promptly sold to three different embassies. He was fired from his job, but the laugh had been on the Home Office. In a way it was this incident that revived the Strutton Plan in my mind. Now Ivor Butcher lived by hanging around and offering hospitality to foolish people with access to secret, or semi-secret, information.
† Breaking and Entering, i.e. burglar.
* Mets (slang): Metropolitan Police.
* See Appendix 6 for more detail.
* Large numbers (of years in prison).
* Treasury Department, U.S.A., controls Narcotics Bureau and Secret S
ervice. In 1959 in Naples, where she lived with her parents (her father was R.N. attached to NATO), she had been recruited into the department. The endless round of parties she attended made her a useful ear for the Narcotics Bureau.
* See Appendix 5.
* A Portuguese political prison on the equatorial island, Santiago, 300 miles off the coast of Africa.
* These buoys were dropped into the ocean by German ships and planes during World War 2. Every twelve hours they came to the surface and transmitted a radio message. The message was a reading from the meteorological gear inside it. In this way the German met. service prepared forecasts based upon a large number of weather reports without sending ships or aircraft anywhere near.
* P.I.D.E.: Internal Police for the Defence of the State, i.e. Secret Police.
* Sc.Ad.C.: Scientific Adviser to the Cabinet.
* Air Pass: interception radar (air-to-air and air-to-ground).