Sunstrike_The next gripping Commander Shaw thriller

by Philip McCutchan

  She shrugged, her eyes on the mirror again. “Just chance, really. Plus a hunch.”

  “Hunch?”

  Her face was white again. She said, “I’d better tell you right away, I suppose. I was engaged to be married … maybe hunch is the wrong word. My fiancé’s name was Redward. It was two years ago. Perhaps you know …”

  “Okay,” I said quickly. “I’m sorry, Miss Mandrake. I didn’t know him, but of course I remember. He had guts and he was a big loss.” I remembered only too well: Derek Redward had been assigned by Max to a job in Czechoslovakia: eight days after leaving Britain his body had been found, set into a concrete-mixer on a building site. I understood very well indeed. I changed the subject. I asked, “Is that tail still with us?”

  “Yes. A blue Volvo.”

  “Uh-huh. Just now I said the one thing I wanted was a lead.” I looked at the clock on her dashboard — my watch had succumbed to falling bricks. It was early, but not that early. I’d been incarcerated all night plus; thank God I’d been unconscious nearly all the way through. I said, “I want a second thing, and it’s a stiff whisky. They’ll be open before we make the M4. Let’s just see what happens, shall we?”

  “Max said —”

  “Bugger Max. I’m the field boss. You drive, I’ll watch for pub signs.”

  3

  The blue Volvo was being very, very discreet: Miss Mandrake, whose Christian name I had by now discovered was Felicity, was unable to see the driver himself in her rear-view mirror clear enough for an identification. He never came up that close, but was mostly two or three cars behind — brilliant, for London driving. Right on opening time and a little way short of the M4 entry I saw a pub ahead. It wasn’t up to much but it would do. I warned Miss Mandrake to flick in. She flicked and slowed, and turned into the parking space. We were the first customers. The Volvo went on past. Myself, I didn’t look but Miss Mandrake said she’d managed a glimpse and the driver hadn’t turned his head at all.

  “Nationality?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Not Oriental, anyway.”

  “White?”

  “Purest white, Commander.” She gave me a sideways look. “No tail alter all, maybe?”

  I said. “Time will tell. It’s true we don’t have to be the only car heading out of Woolwich for the M4.” We got out; I followed Miss Mandrake to the saloon bar and sat her in a corner by a goldfish bowl while I got the drinks. She’d opted for coffee, as a matter of fact, but it wasn’t ready yet so she settled for a Cinzano. A sober girl; what she thought of me drinking a double whisky and not much water on the job, I don’t know. Anyway, I felt I deserved it after last night. I carried the drinks across and had just put them on the table and was bringing out cigarettes when a man came into the public bar, into which you could see from the saloon, and stood waiting to be attended to. He ordered a half of lager, and remained in situ to drink it. He didn’t appear to be watching, but he could hardly have missed us. I knocked my packet of fags to the floor and bent to pick it up again. As I did so I whispered to Miss Mandrake, asking if the man was the Volvo driver. She whispered back that she wasn’t sure but he could be. Resuming my seat, I drank the whisky and we chatted about nothing in particular. Across the bar, the man drank his lager while the landlord polished glasses. I felt better for the whisky but decided we were gaining nothing by being there. I said, “Let’s be on our way, Felicity,” and out we went. As I shut the door, I looked back. The man had vanished, leaving an empty glass, froth-streaked. There was no sign of him as we got into Miss Mandrake’s car. When we drove off for the motorway we passed a side street, and there was the Volvo, parked and facing our way, with a man behind the wheel. Checking her mirror, Miss Mandrake reported a few minutes later that the Volvo was back on station, three cars behind. That seemed a clincher, but I couldn’t be too sure about the man. We moved on to the M4 and headed fast for the West. The Volvo was still being cleverly driven: when there was no slip road immediately ahead, it overtook us, doing well over seventy in the fast lane; but, before a slip road loomed up, there he was, back in the middle lane for us to catch up and be nicely watched in his mirrors. I picked up Miss Mandrake’s AA handbook. She’d told me I was being holed up in the village of Avebury in Wiltshire, and that meant exit 15 on to the A345 for Marlborough — way ahead yet. I pondered, and into my thoughts broke the girl’s voice, crisply.

  “I’m coming off early, Commander Shaw. Exit 13. I’ll lose him in Newbury.”

  “You won’t, you know. What about my lead?”

  “It’ll keep. They’ll try again, you know that. And don’t bother to say bugger Max. I’m not in a position to obey.”

  “I’ll say it all the same. I told you, I’m the field man.”

  “I heard you the first time,” she said coolly, “and I’m still coming off. It was okay as far as the pub, but not now.”

  “Secretaries don’t normally give orders to the boss.”

  “Right! My secretaryship’s just cover — Max told you that. You’re a field man, fine. I respect you, and once we’re really in the field I’ll obey orders. But just for the record, on the admin side I happen to outrank you in the organisation.”

  I think my mouth dropped open a little way. “You what?”

  “You heard,” she said, and put her foot down again. We roared ahead. I was, to a degree, flabbergasted. I knew all about the Sex Discrimination Act and I accepted the fact of women in high places, but Miss Mandrake, and never mind the awful name, didn’t look like a high-powered executive. She had too much genuine femininity. She deigned to explain a little more. “Max doesn’t give orders for fun, or had you forgotten? You’re to vanish for a while — I told you — but it’s not just that. There’s to be a rendezvous.”

  “In Avebury?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s coming?”

  She said, “He should be there already. There’s been some fast work.”

  I asked again, “Who, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Wait and see, Commander Shaw. But whoever it is … he’s not, repeat not, to be compromised. Got it?”

  I surrendered. “Got it. My lead has to wait?”

  “Maybe not for too long,” she said. I was back to pondering after that. What she’d said was true: they would try again and I had enough experience to know that to jump the gun could be dangerous if it meant flying smack into Max’s face. Obviously, this thing was going to move overseas before long, and once that happened I would be firmly in the chair and Miss Mandrake would be a long way down the table. To take a simile from my naval days: a Commander of the Seaman Branch outranked, in action or even merely afloat, a Rear-Admiral of the Supply Branch. You just didn’t allow the admin to clog up the executive. Thinking of brass, I wondered what sort of brass was being sent down into Wiltshire to meet me. One of ours, or someone from officially constituted authority? I hoped it wouldn’t be the latter: on the whole they did tend to play along with 6D2 ideas and methods but sometimes they could get up-tight and that meant plenty of stickiness all round. I suppose they had their pensions, inflation-proofed, to consider … I couldn’t blame them really, we all have to eat, but officialdom can lead to balls-ups.

  Just after exit 12 for Reading, the blue Volvo steamed up to starboard, beating it west along the fast lane as he had done before, and again as before dropped back before the next exit, which was to be ours. Miss Mandrake took the TR7 into the slip road and then the A34. The Volvo let two other cars in ahead of him, then followed. Miss Mandrake took it fast into Newbury and once she was clear of the ring road she went mad. She shot a red light, she went down a couple of one-way streets against the traffic flow and got away with nothing worse than a few oaths and some upraised fingers, wildly waggled in front of furious faces. And she went fast. It was a nightmare drive: I had no wish to be stopped by the police and waste time while it was all written down in a notebook, but Miss Mandrake didn’t seem bothered and she got away with it all. When we came out of Newbury on to a minor ro
ad there was no sign of the blue Volvo. She looked sideways at me again, an eyebrow lifted interrogatively.

  I said, “Well done.”

  She preened a little. I was glad of that; it meant she was human after all. We did some more twists and turns along country roads filled with birdsong and cow dung, keeping off the A roads unless we were forced on to them briefly by the facts of geography, and after a long while we drove into Avebury below the shadow of Silbury Hill whose origins, despite the diligent digs of the archaeologists, were still shrouded in mystery. Miss Mandrake drove into the driveway of a charming old thatched cottage modernised to the extent that it had an integral garage. She slid out and shut the garage door behind her, then beckoned me through the communicating door into the cottage itself.

  It was nice, very nice. Expensively furnished: thick pile carpets, genuine antiques, shining with and smelling of polish. Sunlight glinted on copper, brass, silver. I looked through an open door into a drawing-room with comfortable, chintz-covered chairs. I saw crossed trouser-legs beneath a spread of newspaper. “Go on in,” Miss Mandrake said, and I went in ahead of her. The newspaper was lowered and I tried, and I hope I succeeded fully, to suppress a start, a shudder, and a gasp of horror. The man, who was short and stout, had no face. Virtually no face, anyway: it had been burned away by the look of it, to such an extent that there had been precious little left as a basis for plastic surgery. What was left had been sort of pushed round to one side, so that the man turned sideways to speak through a puffy lipless aperture that went in and out loosely and limply with each word, and there was no nose, just holes.

  Miss Mandrake said, “This is Commander Shaw. Dr Ludwig Ercks, from Bonn University.”

  I reached out my hand. “How d’you do, Doctor,” I said.

  “I am glad to meet you, Commander Shaw.” The English was perfect though the accent was heavy. He’d had to fumble around a bit to meet my fingers but the handshake was firm. Dr Ercks didn’t look me in the face — there were no eyes. But I could tell from the voice and the handshake that he would once have had a steady look. He went on, “You are startled by my appearance — everyone is. Please do not feel concerned that I know this. I have learned to live with it since it was done to me.”

  “An accident?”

  “A deliberate one, Commander, acid thrown into my face and allowed to burn until the damage was past repair.”

  “By whom?” I asked.

  “By Professor Nodd. Please sit down, Commander Shaw.”

  I sat near him. I didn’t know what to say without sounding false, or hearty, or too bloody sorry, or just plain horror struck. So I said nothing, and he continued calmly, filling me in with a few concise sentences. It appeared he was, like Nodd, a professor of physics and had held an appointment at Cambridge at the same time as Nodd, and that it had been he who had first suspected Nodd’s loyalties and had filed a report with the authorities. Later, in Germany, Nodd had caught up with him and had taken his revenge after luring him to a broken-down tenement building awaiting demolition — shades of my last night’s ordeal! — and then leaving him in his agony until he found his way out and contacted help.

  I asked, “Why are you here now, Dr Ercks?”

  “To help,” he answered. “The reports that have reached London have reached also Germany. I contacted in person your Foreign Office yesterday afternoon and offered my services, and this evening I was told that I should speak first of all to you.”

  “I see. And your services are?”

  “Much knowledge of Professor Nodd. A knowledge of what he was working upon in Cambridge, some years ago now —”

  “Out of date?”

  The face shook in a negative. “No, I think not. What he was working upon has become very relevant today, and I see a link. There is no certainty, you must understand, but the link is strong in my view.” Ercks paused, and when he resumed his voice was earnest and even beseeching. “Nodd must be stopped, Commander Shaw. He must be found and taken into custody and brought to trial before he perpetrates the most terrible crime against all humanity upon earth!”

  I said, “He’ll be looked for, I promise you. I bring no guarantee of success, though. Have you any idea where he might be. Dr Ercks, apart from the Candar Islands which seem at present the most likely bet?”

  “No, as to his whereabouts I cannot offer help. I have heard nothing of his physical movements since he was in Germany. My help is only to do with his work.”

  “Yes,” I said. “What was he working on. Dr Ercks?”

  Ercks said, “Nodd’s qualifications were in the field of physics, of course, but he had a great interest in chemistry, and it was what one might call his spare time researches that are the link between then and now — that is, as I see it.”

  “Go on,” I said, and caught Miss Mandrake’s eye. She was looking tense, though it was unlikely she knew what was to come. When it did come, it sounded innocuous to me, but I’m no chemist and the word didn’t mean much at first.

  Ercks said, “He was working on freans … that is a Du Pont trade name for chlorofluorocarbons, and we usually call them freans.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. It may have been unintelligent, but it did represent my reaction.

  “Aerosol propellants. They are of two kinds — hydrocarbons and fluorocarbons. The former are extremely flammable and thus are chiefly used with aerosols containing water-based products. The fluorocarbons are for use with flammable products, and are also used in the making of plastic foam, also as refrigerants. It is the fluorocarbons with which we are now concerned, Commander Shaw.”

  Ercks went on expounding: things fell into place in my mind. For a while the newspapers had been full of it, so had the BBC, though, as ever, the general public at any rate in Britain had erased it from memory once the media had dropped it. Over the last few years aerosols — those using fluorocarbons as propellants, I supposed — had become suspect in the United States and a year or two ago the state of Oregon had started the ‘anti’ ball rolling by banning the sale of fluorocarbon-based propellants in aerosols within its boundaries. Others had quickly followed suit. Why? Again the press had supplied the answer: fluorocarbons were indestructible, at least until ultra-violet broke them down and produced chlorine atoms. As they stood, or as they were propelled, they rose in clouds into the atmosphere above us, then into the stratosphere. Once way up there, things happened: in the stratosphere ozone was produced by the action of ultra-violet solar radiation on the oxygen molecules. Once produced, the ozone absorbed much of the UV radiation from the sun, which could be biologically harmful on earth, causing skin cancers and affecting the functioning of natural ecosystems in ways that were still largely a closed book. Also, ozone absorbed a certain amount of solar and terrestrial infra-red radiation, contributing thereby to the energy balance of the earth-atmosphere system that determined the earth’s temperature. Ozone was pretty important to us. And when the chlorofluorocarbons, or freans, met the ozone-layer-filtered UV light out of the sun, the nasty chlorine atoms were released. The theory, unproven as yet, was that these chlorine atoms might affect the ozone layer, thin it out, and the ozone layer was earth’s sole protection against the full force of the sun’s immensely powerful UV radiation. We couldn’t afford to do without it. If the ozone layer went, then so did all of us upon earth. Just burned up, like Max’s description of the Candars, only much more so. Of course, it would take the devil of a long time for all the aerosol propellants seriously to affect the ozone layer; but Ercks’s theory was that Professor Nodd might, for nefarious purposes within the ambit of WUSWIPP, be speeding the process.

  I whistled. I said, “But Nodd’s human too. He needs to live, I suppose.”

  “Yes. But there is the new dimension, is there not? Only the Candars are affected.”

  I remembered my conversation with Max: the testing-ground theory, and a beam. Could these fluorocarbons, I asked Dr Ercks, be beamed on to a single spot above the earth? He didn’t know the answer to that one bu
t believed it might well be possible. A temporary hole, he said, might perhaps be made in the ozone layer so that a directionalised dose of UV could strike selected spots, although such a hole could be fairly quickly filled again as a result of winds and other turbulence unless the concentration was mighty high and strong. He added that although ozone was produced photochemically in the high tropical stratosphere, it was transferred polewards by atmospheric motions and accumulated in high concentrations near the poles thus the high latitudes filtered out more of the UV and in consequence decreased the risks as compared with the low latitudes around the Candars. Conversely, of course, any interference by Nodd with the ozone layer would release much more UV in the high latitudes than in the low ones, which put the developed nations at greater risk.

  “What about the earth’s movement, its rotation round its axis?” I asked. “How does Nodd cope with that?”

  Ercks shrugged. “You must remember that the earth carries its atmosphere with it,” he said, “but I admit the problem of the sun’s relative position at different times and seasons. Nodd, however, is a brilliant man and a dedicated one, both to his work and his politics. A method may have been found. If so, there is great danger. If he goes too far, if he grows too ambitious, the damage might be of such an extent that it will become irreversible.”

  “But a dedicated chemist … surely he’d have that well in mind, Dr Ercks?”

  There was another shrug. “So often in the minds of men politics override prudence and caution. And a scientist is forever pushing forward. Many scientists are imprudent men in any case, their egos blinding them to the environmental damage done by their work.”