Redcap

by Philip McCutchan

  And they were something like seven hundred miles out from Fremantle when the trouble came.

  It was just before a stop for a late supper, and it was dusking, and the drivers were tired, looking forward to a spell. The sun was a red and hazy blob low down behind them and men’s voices, the voices of men determined to keep their spirits up, were droning out the latest hit tune. They were travelling through a deep cutting and going downhill between high rock faces in some of the most barren, desolate country that Shaw had yet seen. They were going a little too fast, maybe, for the kind of terrain—sheer weariness had taken the edge off their carefulness somewhat. They had just rounded a corner when all three men in the cab of the leading vehicle saw the deep crater ahead.

  Shaw and Francis shouted a simultaneous warning.

  The driver snarled, “Jeez, you think I haven’t seen, eh?” Already thick tattooed brown wrists were swinging at the wheel, a foot had rammed the brakes hard on. But the lorry had struck a patch of loose surface, and she slid forward on locked wheels, rasping and slithering over grit and fine dust, unable to get a hold.

  The driver hauled the wheel over harder, swearing between his teeth, sweat starting out all over him. The vehicle swerved across to the right, almost skirted the hole, and then the left hand wheels slid over the edge. The lorry lurched heavily; Shaw and Francis went flying in a heap, sprawling across the cab with the driver’s heavy body on top of them. They heard an ominous snapping twang from behind, and then a crash, and splintering woodwork. The Major unlatched his door and it dropped open. Cursing luridly, he fell out into the crater. As he scrambled to his feet and climbed up to the roadway, Shaw got out as well, gave the driver a hand. They were only just in time. Almost as soon as they were clear the lorry slid deeper into the hole and nearly fell on to its back. The crate crashed off, cannoned into the rock face and split wide open. Its ballast poured into the road . . . sand, pig-iron, straw packing, odds and ends of chucked-out ship’s gear.

  Francis looked in amazement, jerked a hand towards the wreckage. “You see that?” he asked.

  Shaw nodded grimly. “I know. I’ll explain later. There’s . . ."

  Just then the shooting started from the top of the cutting. Dust kicked up around them. One of the M.P.s gave a yell, and blood streamed from his head. A bullet zipped through the sleeve of Shaw’s shirt, went on to take the driver in the neck as he emerged from the crater. He tried to pull himself up, failed, gave a groan and slithered back, fingers scrabbling at the dirt, and then lay still, his mouth falling open. Shaw ran for cover behind the broken lorry and fired back almost blindly, into the sunset, at black shapes. The soldiers from the truck behind had also opened fire by this time and the figures outlined on the top of the cutting vanished after a further volley.

  A few shouts floated down.

  Shaw ran out, called to Francis. “We can get up there—ahead there.” He pointed along the track. “It looks as though it slopes down to meet the road.”

  Francis gave a quick glance, shouted an order. The troops streamed along the road for about a hundred yards with Shaw and the Major leading, then climbed the slope lifting to the high ground which formed a kind of plateau through which the cutting ran. Ahead of them four men were beating it, flat out, not stopping now to use their guns.

  They were running towards a helicopter.

  Francis roared out an order and automatic fire stuttered out, ripped across towards the running men. One of them dropped and stayed there; a burst of fire came from the helicopter, lead pumped into the body—presumably to ensure that the man wouldn’t talk. The machine was already off the ground and hovering low as they raced for it, and immediately they were aboard it was up, up and away quickly, rising high. As the Military Police hopefully maintained a now useless fire, the helicopter reared above them, turned, and flew off in the direction of Sydney, well out of range all the while.

  Shaw felt sick at heart; after all his wonderful ideas about this fake crate, he’d gone and mucked it and now the game was given away. As he came to the man they’d hit, he knelt and turned him over. There was a pool of blood soaking into the ground beneath the man and he was quite dead. Shaw, noting that he was a European, ran through his clothing, looking for papers. But there was no identification, nothing beyond the usual, purely personal, stuff—stamps, a little money, a newspaper cutting of a girl in a bikini, another cut-out, this time from a colour magazine, also of a near-naked girl. Shaw examined everything carefully. On the back of the colour cut-out he found a scrawl which read: Ling’s 4.30.

  He looked up, asked: “Ling’s. Could that mean anything special, I wonder?”

  Francis frowned, scratched his head. “Doesn’t mean anything to me, that’s certain.”

  “Uh-huh. . . .” Shaw rubbed his nose with a forefinger. “Could be a Chinese name, couldn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Francis agreed, wonderingly. “So what?”

  “Oh—nothing.” Shaw stuffed the papers back and stood up. The dead man had the appearance of a hobo, was probably just a strong-arm tough who didn’t amount to much, and the chances of identification would be about nil.

  Francis said, “Hey, wait a minute, though.” He snapped his fingers. “It’s come back—only Ling’s I know, it’s a restaurant in King’s Cross, in Sydney. If you don’t know the Cross, well, it’s kind of the Soho of Sydney. And Ling’s is Chinese.”

  “I see.” Shaw’s heart quickened. “This could be a clue, in that case.”

  Francis stared, pushed his bush hat to the back of his head. He asked, “Clue to what? Why, it looks just like a note of a date, doesn’t it? Could be meeting a girl-friend there.”

  The dead man didn’t look the sort who met girl-friends at restaurants of the kind Ling’s sounded like, but Shaw said, “Yes, could be. Perhaps that’s all it is.”

  “Look, what really goes on?”

  “Sorry, I can’t go into details. I dare say you’ll find out before long. Don’t ask me any more, there’s a good chap.” He clapped Francis on the shoulder. “Anyway, I was right about the attack! And now there’s only one thing to do— I’ve got to get to Sydney fast.” He nodded towards the spot where the helicopter had been. “That lot’ll have seen the crate—if they hadn’t, they wouldn’t have gone so fast, you can take my word for that. So now they know—and so do you—"

  “Know what, for Pete’s sake?”

  Shaw snapped, “That REDCAP’s due for discharge in Sydney after all! So far no one else knows that, except the people immediately concerned of course. Now, can you get a message through to Bandagong with the truck’s wireless? I’ll have to warn them at once that we’re back where we started."

  Francis said, “Sure. And I reckon Bandagong’ll give you a plane into Sydney if it’s that urgent, Commander. So we’d better just carry on for there in the truck.”

  “Right. Let’s go, then.”

  They ran back, down into the cutting, took a look at the wreckage. The lorry was obviously incapable of being righted without mechanical equipment and would have to be abandoned for the time being. Francis decided to get the crater filled in—there would be just room to squeeze the command truck through between the lorry and the side of the cutting. While the men got busy with shovels and bare hands, tearing down earth and stones to fill the hole and give the truck clear passage, Shaw got a wireless message passed to Bandagong asking the authorities to advise Sydney that any fresh attack would now either be switched back to the liner or would take place when the genuine REDCAP was en route from Sydney. There was no point now in keeping up the pretence and so, in the absence of any common code, the carefully-worded message went en clair.

  Some three hours later the bodies of the army driver and the other man had been buried in shallow, rock-marked graves and the hole had been filled; the truck started up, squeezed through the gap over the rubble edging carefully past the articulated vehicle. After that they drove through the night, and in the light truck they were able to make much better speed; aft
er seventeen hours’ almost continuous hard driving they came into the outer perimeter of the Bandagong area at 5 p.m. next day. And soon after that they rolled up sweaty and covered in a layer of dust and dead weary to an Australian sentry outside a post guarding the beginning of the final stretch of road into the closed area.

  As their truck stopped, Francis leaned out through the window and showed his pass. He said, “Special party entering MAPIACCIND territory.”

  “Right you are, sir.” The sentry waved them on, walked alongside as they started off slowly. “You’ll be checked again at the entrance to the station. Been there before, have yer?”

  Francis shook his head. “No, son.”

  “Go easy then, Major. They’re trigger-happy, those bastards.”

  The truck drove on for another five miles, past an airfield of the R.A.A.F., past a radar station, and then came up to a heavily guarded gateway in a high barbed-wire fence. To Shaw, the place looked very like a prisoner-of-war camp, at least so far as its boundaries went. At intervals along the wire there were high enclosures manned by guards with automatic weapons slung from their shoulders, guards who constantly swept the boundaries of the vast station with field-glasses. There were searchlights in the boxes, seach-lights which no doubt would keep the whole area floodlit by night. Ahead of the truck was a large sign reading, in several languages: DEAD SLOW. Farther along there was a pole barrier across the road.

  As they approached this barrier in bottom gear, a loudspeaker blared at them to stop.

  Mindful of what the Australian sentry had said, the driver jerked on his brakes instantly. A sentry in the grey uniform of the MAPIACCIND Field Force advanced towards them, automatic weapon held ready. Behind him, a squad of troops under a sergeant piled out from a building beside the gate and formed up in the road. The first man told the truck driver to go ahead slowly, and as the vehicle started up again he walked along beside it, shouted a peremptory command for it to stop just before the barrier was reached. As they stopped again, they were surrounded. The Major’s party-pass was examined, handed back; and then all the men were ordered out for their own papers to be checked individually by the sergeant. The truck itself was searched rigorously. There was something of a Germanic air of thoroughness about the whole proceedings. Shaw thought, as he held his rising impatience in check.

  He muttered to Francis, “I suppose all this is necessary, but. . . ."

  “But you’re itching to be airbound for Sydney?”

  Shaw said tautly, “That’s right, Major, I am.”

  Francis looked at him shrewdly but said nothing more. When all was found to be in order the men were told curtly to get back in, and one of the armed guards jumped on to the running-board. Then the barrier was lifted and they were waved ahead, told to follow the directions of their escort.

  Driving slowly in Shaw was amazed at the place which was to be REDCAP’s permanent home—if ever it got there—the place which MAPIACCIND had created out of the Australian desert. It must be about the biggest power station in the world—the biggest of all time; Shaw knew that it was planned to meet civilian needs as well as military, that it produced electricity for general consumption, like a genuine power station, as well as plutonium. In the centre of the huge area towered the four gigantic reactors, tall rectangular structures which were the core of the whole station, each with a dozen or so smaller buildings grouped around in a circle and linked to the main tower by frameworks which looked like bridges or grain elevators. The truck drove slowly past the ancillary buildings—buildings which made the place into a completely self-supporting unit: there were arcades of shops; there were sports grounds, canteens, full-scale restaurants, a theatre, bars. There were schools, and comfortable-looking staff quarters, neat bungalows each set in its own well-kept garden. It was just like a town in itself, a little chunk of culture and civilization hewn out of the desert, and it seemed to cover an area as big as a medium sized English provincial town.

  Their guide directed them towards a big building which, he told them, was the Administrative Headquarters, and they stopped at the foot of a flight of steps. Francis, telling his lieutenant to keep the men by the truck for the time being, jumped out with Shaw and they went inside a big hall.

  A hall-porter came forward and once again their papers were examined. Francis said, “I have orders to report in person to the Commandant.”

  “Very good, sir. If you will please wait a few moments?”

  For five minutes Shaw fretted and fumed in a waiting-room and then the hall-porter came in and turned them over to a messenger who led them down a long, rather bare corridor. The messenger stopped at a door at the end and tapped. They went into a high, plainly-furnished room with large windows looking out over what appeared to be the courtyard of a kind of Civic Centre. A man in MAPIACCIND grey, a young officer with a thin, dark face, came towards them. Shaw couldn’t place his nationality.

  He greeted them smilingly, politely. He said, “I am the A.D.C. to the Commandant, gentlemen. I hear you have had a troublesome journey. I am sorry. Major Francis, perhaps you will be good enough to give me a full report of all that happened?”

  He turned, went over to a desk and sat down. Francis said, “But look, I’ve got orders to report to the Commandant. I’d better make my report direct to him.”

  The A.C.D. said diffidently, “That will not be necessary. The Commandant, you understand, is a very busy man. Commander Shaw he wishes to see, but you, Major—no.”

  “But my orders——”

  Still smiling, the A.D.C. raised a hand. “I am so sorry. I too have my orders. May I have your report, please?”

  “Oh—very well, then. There’s not much to it.” Briefly Francis sketched in the events of the night before and the A.D.C. made his notes on a sheet of paper. Then he said,

  “Thank you, Major Francis. I shall have this typed for your signature, and then your job is done. You will refresh yourself and your men and then after a night’s rest you will return to your unit. We shall be delighted to entertain you in the Mess, Major.”

  “Well, thanks. . . Francis looked puzzled and put out, but he shrugged and turned to Shaw. He said, “Well, Commander, that’s that, I reckon. See you later, maybe?”

  “If I’ve got time. I’ll have to get to Sydney as fast as possible.”

  Francis grinned and stuck out his hand. “Right you are, then. Good-bye—nice to have had you along.” They shook hands, and then the A.D.C. rang for a messenger to take Francis back to the truck. He accompanied the Major to the door and when he came back he asked,

  “Commander, have you any weapon?”

  “Why, yes.” Shaw tapped his armpit.

  “Then you will please leave it here. The Standing Orders say that no one is to enter the Commandant’s private office with arms. You will appreciate, of course, that there is the question of security.”

  “Well . . . yes, I suppose so.” A little surprised, Shaw removed the revolver from its holster and laid it on a table. “That’s all I’ve got.”

  “It will be returned to you on leaving. And now—you will excuse me.” The young man came forward, ran his hands quickly—and, Shaw fancied, with some reluctance—over the agent and then stood back apologetically. “Orders,” he murmured. “I am so sorry.”

  Just a little angrily, Shaw followed the A.D.C. towards a door at the end of the room. The MAPIACCIND man knocked, threw the door open, stood aside, and announced Shaw, who walked forward to a big desk before a wide window at the end.

  A squat, thick-set man rose to greet him, stretched out a hand. “Welcome to Bandagong, Commander Shaw. Welcome! My name is Mirskov. Please sit down.”

  “Thank you, Commandant.” Shaw took a chair at the side of the desk. He coughed, said: “I’m sorry to sound pushing and impatient, Commandant, but it’s rather urgent I get to Sydney as soon as possible. . . ."

  Mirskov waved a hand. “In good time, Commander Shaw. First, there are just one or two matters which we must naturally discu
ss.”

  Shaw said crisply, “There’s not much to tell you, I’m afraid, beyond what I said in my signal from the truck back down the road from Fremantle. You’ve got that?”

  “Oh, yes, indeed—”

  “Apart from that, there’s just this.” Shaw brought out the envelope handed him by Sir Donald Mackinnon, the envelope with the MAPIACCIND seal. “That’s the list of signals. If you wouldn’t mind giving me a formal receipt, sir?”

  He handed the envelope over, and as Mirskov took it he seemed to catch his breath a little. He asked, “These are the signals—the operating signals for REDCAP?”

  Shaw nodded. “Yes. As I understand it, they were to have been handed over to you by Colonel Gresham, by order of Geneva. And these are the genuine ones.” He explained briefly about the fake set held by Gresham, adding that he believed they might have been copied aboard the ship.

  Mirskov’s eyes seemed to glitter oddly, and he said: “Indeed? Thank you very much, Commander Shaw.” He slid the envelope into a drawer and pressed a bell-push beneath the desk. He said nothing further, and almost immediately the door from the ante-room opened and a man came in.

  Shaw glanced over at the doorway, and gave an exclamation, half rising from his chair. The man was—Sigurd Andersson. Admittedly he called himself a Swedish agent, but to find him walking gaily into the Commandant’s room at Bandagong was the last thing Shaw had ever expected. When he looked back in incredulous query at Commandant Mirskov, he saw that the squat man had a gun in his hand.