by Peter Cave
Martin shook his head slowly. ‘It’s not something you’ll be able to read about in the Sunday papers,’ he murmured.
Mallory nodded thoughtfully to himself. ‘Yeah, that’s what I figured,’ he said as he took Martin’s hand in a firm handshake. ‘Well, I hope they do the job you wanted them for – whatever that is.’
Martin stepped aside as the American pushed past him, directing his attention to Randy, who was standing uncertainly a few yards from the bus, staring towards the cluster of villas. He looked slightly worried.
‘Forgotten something, Mr Havilland?’ Martin asked.
Randy looked at him morosely. ‘It’s just that I expected Selina to say goodbye,’ he murmured. ‘But I haven’t seen her all morning.’
The observation stirred something in the back of Martin’s mind. It was odd, he realized suddenly, but he hadn’t seen the girl that morning, either. And it certainly seemed strange that she should not wish to bid farewell to Havilland, after the closeness of their friendship. He called over to Bailey, posted outside the villas.
‘Corporal, have you seen Miss Tsigarides this morning?’
‘She’s not here, sir,’ the Marine shot back, adopting a more formal tone in front of civilians. ‘She went into Samos Town early yesterday evening and didn’t return. I thought you knew.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ Martin said distractedly. He turned back to Randy, his face apologetic. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Havilland, but I had no idea that Selina had other business to attend to.’
The young man looked bitterly disappointed. Bending to heft up his suitcase, he trudged miserably towards the bus and climbed aboard as the driver started the engine.
Martin watched the bus as it disappeared into the olive grove and began to wind up the hill away from the villas. He turned back towards the villas, trying to push any doubts about Selina’s disappearance from his mind. There were far more important things to worry about. It was going to be a busy day.
Selina had not returned by the time dusk began to fall, but by then Martin had already ceased to concern himself about her. Her presence was, after all, no longer strictly necessary. Her job was done, and she had already set in motion all the elements of cooperation with the Greek authorities. The homing beacon was already in place on the Russian freighter and transmitting a clear signal on a frequency which the Russian naval ships would have no reason to monitor. The girl had served her purpose, and once his team was on its way in a matter of a few minutes now, there would be nothing more that anyone could do anyway.
Martin checked his watch. It was just after 9.45. He strolled outside, staring out across the beach. The top crescent of the sun was still visible above the gaudy red and orange mirror of the sea. In another two minutes it would have sunk below the horizon, and night would start to close in. It would be a good night, he thought with a sense of relief. The skies had been clear all day, with a moderate if occasionally gusty wind blowing steadily from the east. The moon had entered a fresh cycle only three days earlier, so bright moonlight would not be a problem. All in all, conditions for the mission were about as near perfect as he could have hoped for.
The men who would be going on it were still sleeping. After a last, frenzied training session in the morning, Martin had ordered all of them to their quarters, with instructions to get as much rest as they could. They would need it. Martin thought about waking them, then took another look at the setting sun. There was a while yet, he thought. He could send Bailey, who was guarding the Flying Lawnmowers, back to shake them out. Having been dropped from the mission proper, he would probably welcome the opportunity to join in his companions’ traditional bullshit as they psyched themselves up for the job ahead.
Martin began to walk briskly towards the headland, taking in great lungfuls of the cool evening air. Back in one of the villas a telephone rang, but he ignored it.
Martin had been right about the moonlight. The pale silver crescent in the dark sky threw down just enough gentle illumination to give reasonable close-range visibility, but the greater mass of the Aegean stretching out to the purple line of the horizon remained a black and featureless carpet.
The only thing no longer fully in their favour was the wind, which had become distinctly more gusty in the last half hour, veering slightly towards the north. Striking the prominence of the headland at that particular angle, it created irregular, swirling updraughts which curled up over the rim of the cliff, plucking at the flaccid wings of the waiting microlights and making them flap quite noisily. Martin had already changed the take-off position from the original site in an effort to compensate, but conditions would still make for a particularly tricky launch. The pilots would have to make very sure they were well clear of the edge before opening up their engines, lest a sudden side gust sent them cartwheeling back against the side of the cliff.
The frequency of the gusts was increasing as the air temperature began to drop. It was time to go, Martin decided, before conditions deteriorated even further. He glanced over to the men, who were clustered in a tight knot beside the furthest Lawnmower sharing a last joke. He waited until a ripple of laughter signalled the punchline, then called out to them.
‘OK, it’s shake-out time,’ he announced. ‘Let’s go cut some grass,’ he added in a mock-American accent.
After a final bout of backslapping, the men moved smoothly and silently to their machines. Martin visited them each individually as they strapped themselves into their harnesses, delivering the same message.
‘Good luck,’ he said simply. Then he stood well back as four engines coughed into life, their concerted power shattering the silence of the night. For some unaccountable reason, Martin imagined a gang of Hell’s Angels revving up for a motorcycle raid. Probably not a wildly fantastic image, he thought to himself.
The take-off sequence had already been planned and rehearsed several times. Mallory’s candid assessment of each pilot’s skill was used to arrange the men in a rough order of ability, with the least competent going first. It was perhaps a rather cynical way of looking at things, but eminently practical, Martin reminded himself. With Bailey grounded because he just wasn’t good enough, he was now down to four men – already one below the minimum he had deemed necessary to see the operation through with a reasonable chance of success. If a single pilot failed to launch, it would be all over, with no need to expose any remaining men to the dangers of take-off. Martin felt his stomach contract as Graham pulled up the nose of his machine and lined himself up for a run at the cliff edge. A superb glider pilot, Graham had nevertheless found it extremely difficult to adjust himself to the Flying Lawnmower’s heavy and delayed responses.
Poised in position, the man waited, feeling the gusts of wind across his face and counting off the spaces in between. There was no discernible rhythm or sequence – the wind pattern was breaking up now into an almost constant series of squalls and eddies. There was no point in waiting any longer. Lowering the nose of the machine into a neutral position so that the main force of the wind broke evenly both above and below the wings, he threw himself forward.
A sudden and particularly violent updraught took him the second that he cleared the edge, pushing up the nose and inflating the wings with a sharp crack. The craft rose rapidly, the force of the wind blowing it back over the headland, above the heads of the other men. They could all see the danger. The nose was still dangerously high, and the craft’s engine was still on little more than tick-over. Should the wind drop suddenly, Graham was virtually in a stall position, and desperately vulnerable.
Martin brought his hands up to his face, cupping them around his mouth like a megaphone. He screamed at the top of his voice, trying to make himself heard above the din of the engines.
‘Get the nose down, man. For Christ’s sake get the nose down.’
It was unlikely that Graham heard him, but in any case he chose another way to get himself out of trouble, just as effective as decreasing his angle to the wind. He opened up the throttle, allowin
g the engine to fire up to full power. The craft bit into the wind, arresting the backwards drift and converting into an almost vertical climb. When the wind did drop suddenly, some fifteen seconds later, he already had enough height to give him a safety margin. Bringing the machine into a shallow dive, he soared out over the headland and took up a slow, lazy circling pattern some forty feet above the surface of the sea.
It was Willerbey’s turn. Although a superb natural flyer, in Mallory’s estimation, he had consistently fluffed the drop-launch technique, and remained the only member of the team who had actually made a crash landing in shallow water. He’d been lucky, for only a few seconds earlier he would have plunged nose first on to the beach, probably breaking several bones in the process.
His launch this time was no less messy. A small gust caught the underside of the starboard wing as he cleared the edge of the cliff, sending the machine lurching sideways at a crazy angle. Like Graham before him, Willerbey found himself being blown back over the headland again, but without the benefit of an updraught to give him height. He did the only thing he could, wrestling the machine round in a forty-five-degree turn and levelling off to skim parallel to the beach, his wing-tip perilously close to the cliff edge. It seemed an eternity before he was finally clear, and able to fly out over the sea to join Graham.
Williams launched quickly and reasonably cleanly in his wake, although with little grace. Finally, Donnelly took to the air, with a near-flawless copy of Mallory’s technique. With all four men safely airborne, Martin allowed himself to breathe normally again.
He watched the microlights circle in the night sky for a few moments, like a quartet of gigantic and unusually noisy bats. Then, raising a large torch into the air, he gave the signal that would send them on their way. The four flyers arranged themselves into a loose formation and turned their craft out to sea.
Martin stood motionless as the drone of the four engines gradually faded into silence. They were on their way, he thought – and they were on their own. There was nothing more he could do to help or protect them. He wondered briefly if a mother bird felt the same sense of anticlimax as she watched her fledglings leave the nest for the first and last time.
28
The telephone was ringing insistently as Martin walked back towards the villas. He stepped up his pace, pausing briefly beside Bailey, who was on guard duty and had an unspoken question in his eyes. The corporal smiled at him apologetically.
‘Sorry, sir, it’s been ringing like that for the last ten minutes, but it’s on your secure line and your door is locked.’
With a tightening feeling in his gut, Martin pushed past him and made a beeline for his private quarters. He unlocked the door, strode into the room and snatched up the receiver. His feeling of unease increased as he recognized the call signal which announced that the line was being patched through GCHQ.
‘Lieutenant-Colonel Martin?’ enquired the male operator.
‘Speaking.’ There was a brief pause.
‘This is a priority one,’ the operator announced flatly. ‘Will you please confirm that your line is secure, sir?’
Martin dropped the telephone briefly to cross to his door and lock it. He snatched up the receiver again. ‘Security confirmed,’ he snapped. Ten seconds later he was talking to the Foreign Secretary again.
The man seemed ill at ease. ‘Where the devil have you been?’ he demanded. ‘I’ve been trying to get through to you for nearly half an hour. There have been a couple of new developments and I thought you might want to delay the launch until you were brought up to date on the situation.’
Martin’s vague premonitions were now hardening into real fear. Something was terribly wrong. Unable to control himself, he let out a long, hopeless sigh. ‘It’s too late. They’ve gone, and I have absolutely no way of recalling them.’
‘I see,’ the Foreign Secretary said curtly. There was a long period of silence.
‘My men, are they in danger?’ Martin asked finally, in a tone which was both concerned and resigned at the same time.
‘Perhaps not,’ came the answer, but in a tone which lacked both confidence and sincerity. ‘We may simply be overreacting, reading more into the situation than it warrants.’
‘What situation?’ Martin asked coldly.
‘We’ve discovered what appears to have spooked the Russians,’ the politician announced. ‘Apparently the Israelis have been taking behind-the-scenes interest in our little project, and the Russians must have picked up some sort of a sniff from them.’
Martin didn’t have the faintest idea what the man was talking about. ‘What the hell have the Israelis got to do with any of this?’
‘Well, they do have rather a vested interest,’ the Foreign Secretary pointed out. ‘Most of the missiles are pointed in their direction, after all. We suspect that their intelligence service picked up on the shipment accidentally, much in the same way as our own did. Somewhere along the line, I’m afraid it looks very much as though we got our wires crossed.’
Martin felt his temper rising. ‘So this is all another cock-up by the green slime, is it?’ he demanded, meaning the Intelligence Corps.
The Foreign Secretary was instantly on the defensive. ‘Not entirely,’ he protested. ‘We’ve actually pinpointed the source of the leak to the Israelis as the merchant banker, Havilland senior.’
It was another piece of information which didn’t appear to make any sense. ‘But why would Havilland want to help the Israelis?’ Martin asked. ‘He’s not even Jewish.’
‘True, but a great many people in the world of high finance are,’ the Foreign Secretary pointed out. ‘The man may have been coerced or put under pressure of some kind. Or indeed it might simply be that he placed business higher on his list of priorities than receiving a knighthood. Absolutely no chance of that now, of course.’
‘Oh, of course,’ Martin echoed ironically. He found the Foreign Secretary’s apparent flippancy totally infuriating, under the circumstances. He had just dispatched four excellent men on what could well turn out to be a suicide mission. He ran what he had learned so far through his mind, trying to make a quick assessment. ‘So what you’re telling me basically is that the Russians probably already know we’re coming? That my men are heading straight into a trap?’
‘Not necessarily. In fact, not really likely. The last thing the Israelis want to do is to actually tip the Russians off. No, I think a more realistic interpretation of the situation would be that the Russians suspect something is going on, but have no idea how, when, or from what quarter. They are obviously on their guard, but Windswept may not be compromised to any significant degree.’ The man paused for a moment. ‘Anyway, I’m sure you will get a much clearer picture when you interrogate your Miss Tsigarides. Our information now suggests that she is in fact a double agent, working for the Israeli Secret Service.’
With that last bombshell, it finally all fell into place, Martin realized. Selina’s abrupt disappearance, the apparent closeness between her and Randy Havilland, Mallory’s missing design printout – and possibly the two incursions into the cove. She may even have had something to do with the death or disappearance of Crewes as well. Now he might never know.
Martin sighed again. ‘I’m afraid that will not be possible,’ he answered regretfully. ‘Miss Tsigarides has already flown the nest and all the civilians were returned to the mainland this morning.’
The Foreign Secretary clicked his tongue in a gesture of minor irritation. ‘Oh dear,’ he said with finality. ‘Now that is most unfortunate.’
It was the straw which broke the camel’s back. Martin felt his rage welling up, fit to burst out of the top of his head like pressurized steam. He slammed the phone back into its cradle before he blurted out something he might well regret later. Still fuming, he made straight for the whisky bottle.
29
The four Flying Lawnmowers droned onward, spaced out in a rough diamond formation about thirty feet apart and some twenty feet above the s
ea. Having skirted round the southern tip of Rhodes roughly half an hour earlier, they were now clear of the last of the Greek islands and well into the unbroken expanse of the open Mediterranean. A good twelve miles out from the Turkish coast, there was now nothing between them and the island of Cyprus, still over a hundred miles to the east.
Mallory had been right about one thing, Willerbey thought. The prone harness might be fine for an hour of gentle hilltop soaring on a summer’s afternoon; but it was bloody uncomfortable for sustained flight on a cool night over the sea. Every muscle in his body ached with cramp, and even the double skin of his neoprene wetsuit offered little protection against the seeping cold which drained away his body heat as fast as he could produce it.
It would be warmer once they ditched in the sea, he reflected. They could not have much more than twenty minutes of flying time left, and once their bodies were wet the suits could function as they were designed to, trapping an insulating layer of water between the skin and the inner layer of fabric. At least changing to the windsurfer mode would give them all the opportunity to loosen up and restore movement to their trapped and rigid bodies.
Not that the next stage would be a milk run, he realized, looking down at the turbulent surface below him. The change of waters had brought a marked difference in conditions. While the Aegean had been like a sheet of black glass, the Med was distinctly choppy, with a heavy swell and criss-crossed with the darting lines of white-topped breakers. It seemed to be getting progressively heavier the further they flew, and Willerbey estimated that they could be facing troughs of three or four feet by the time they went down.
It was not a topic he had a chance to dwell upon. Ahead of him, flying point, Graham had started to bank to port, rotating his craft into a shallow but sustained climb towards 150 feet. Staring ahead, Willerbey could see the reason. Still perhaps a mile and a half in the distance, the twinkling lights of a large ship were clearly visible. It was probably a tanker, and nothing whatsoever to do with the Russian patrol ships, Willerbey thought, but he could understand the sergeant’s caution. There was no point in taking chances. He followed the man on to a course which would give the vessel a wide berth.