Skydancer

by Geoffrey Archer

  ‘That’s preposterous!’ she burst out in indignation.

  ‘Of course, it is. Of course, it’s preposterous,’ Black replied softly, sitting back in the armchair and clasping his hands over his broad stomach. He smiled at her almost benignly. ‘But I have to ask these questions. I have to think of outrageous motives for people who are caught up on the fringes of espionage, and see if they just happen to fit. It’s not a part of my job that I enjoy, Mary, and that’s why I’ve come round here tonight to ask for your help. Would you like a cigarette?’

  He pulled a packet from his pocket, flipped back the lid and held it out towards her.

  She shook her head, allowing a flicker of distaste to cross her face. ‘I don’t, thank you,’ she answered crisply.

  ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

  ‘Well . . . I,’ she hesitated.

  ‘You do mind. I can see that. And of course you’re absolutely right. It’s a filthy habit.’ He put the packet carefully back in his pocket.

  ‘But have I made my point? Have you understood how you can help me?’

  Mary was confused. The man had not been specific. She had understood the drift of his argument, but what exactly did he want to know? Most crucial of all, what did he know already? Did he know about her relationship with Peter Joyce?

  ‘You’ll have to forgive me . . .’ she ventured timidly. ‘Sometimes I’m a little obtuse. I’m really not entirely sure what I can tell you that would be of any help.’

  The faint smile disappeared from his flabby lips, and his eyes grew cold and expressionless. He stared at her for a few moments before continuing.

  ‘I want to know some personal details, Mary. We’ve already talked in the office, haven’t we, but, as I’m sure you will remember, the only ground we covered there was on things like office procedure, routines, access to documents, and so on. Well, to be frank, that didn’t clarify anything very much, so I want to learn a little bit more about your personal life, just so that I can put my suspicious old mind at rest and cross you off my list of people who need investigating.’

  ‘Yes, well, of course, that sounds perfectly reasonable,’ Mary replied uneasily.

  He smiled briefly, as a reward for her answer, then waited for her to continue.

  She looked back at him anxiously, hoping that he would ask her questions and so reveal his hand. He did not however.

  ‘Well, there’s not a lot to say,’ she began uncomfortably. ‘I er . . . I lead a pretty quiet sort of life. I er . . . live here alone, as you can see, but I have lots of good friends whom I see from time to time.’

  She stopped and shrugged her shoulders as if there was no more to be said. Black looked at her icily.

  ‘How much do you drink?’ The question was hardly audible.

  ‘What?’

  ‘One bottle of wine a day? Two?’

  ‘Oh, nothing like . . .’

  ‘Whisky? Gin?’

  ‘Well, yes. From time to . . .’

  ‘How much? Two glasses a day? Half a bottle?’

  ‘Now, look here . . .’

  ‘Ever had treatment for it? Alcoholism?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Are you sure? I can easily check.’

  She shook her head in disbelief, but found herself putting down the wine glass she had been holding.

  ‘Go to pubs, do you?’

  ‘Sometimes, but . . .’

  ‘On your own? Sitting in a corner hoping someone will come up and talk to you and buy you a drink?’

  ‘No! I . . .’

  ‘Is that how you get your men? Pick them up in the pubs, do you? Tell them they can come home with you if they bring a bottle of scotch?’

  ‘For God’s sake! You can’t just come round . . .’

  ‘Don’t you like men then?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Lesbian, are you? A student of Sappho?’

  Mary found herself trembling uncontrollably. She was dumbfounded, and felt that at any minute she would be sick. Through the mist of tears clouding her eyes she could no longer clearly see the monster of a man who was taunting her. Part of her wanted to get up and run away, escape from her own home, but the rest of her felt incapable of movement, like a rabbit mesmerised by a stoat.

  She was aware that Black had stood up from his chair and was now wandering round the room. She heard the click of a cigarette-lighter behind her, and then smelled the Virginia tobacco smoke that swirled around her head.

  ‘Interesting books you’ve got, Mary.’

  The man’s voice was softer now, less aggressive.

  ‘You’ve done a bit of travelling in your time, judging by the number of guide-books on the shelf here. France, Spain, Morocco. Oh, and here’s the Soviet Union.’

  Mary was breathing deeply, trying to steady her racing heartbeat and to bring herself back in control of her voice. She knew the interrogation had a long way to go.

  ‘You have been to Russia, have you?’ Black asked pointedly.

  ‘Yes, I went to Moscow and Leningrad in 1984. It was a holiday organised by a civil-service travel club. We looked at museums and art galleries.’

  She breathed a silent sigh of relief at having given the answer without a quaver in her voice. She heard Black chuckling to himself behind her. Another cloud of smoke swirled past her head. He is doing it deliberately, she thought to herself.

  ‘Interesting titles you’ve got here, though, Mary. Marxism Today must make good bedtime reading. The Spread of Socialism in the 1980s can’t be a bad yarn either. Good heavens, we’ve got a whole shelf of such treats here. The Long Road to Freedom, Socialist Progress, they’re all here.’

  She heard him take first one book from the shelves and flip through its pages, then, with the occasional chuckle and a whistle through his teeth, he would replace it and take another.

  ‘I’m sure there’s something you’d like to tell me about all this, isn’t there, Mary?’ he asked with amused resignation.

  ‘I’ve always been interested in political philosophy,’ she answered flatly. ‘I read PPE at university. And I am a supporter of the Labour Party. I have been for many years. But that will be in your file on me already, I’m sure.’

  She heard him breathing heavily. His lungs must be coated with tar, she thought to herself. She found herself praying that he would die from cancer.

  He was standing at the end of the sofa now, looking straight down at her.

  ‘It’s still the policy of the Labour Party to scrap British nuclear weapons, isn’t it?’ he asked innocently.

  ‘Yes. But not all members of the party support that policy,’ she answered coldly, looking straight ahead. She reached for her glass, and swallowed the remains of her wine.

  ‘Good God!’ he exclaimed in disgust. ‘It amazes me that we have any secrets left in this country. There you’ve been for the past God-knows-how-many years, sitting in the nuclear weapons department of the Ministry of Defence, with top-security clearance, and all the time you’ve been an alcoholic, lesbian, left-wing anti-nuclear activist!’

  ‘Look, you evil pig of a man!’ Mary exploded in rage, rising to her feet so that he could not dominate her. ‘I’ve had quite enough of your vile insinuations and lies. I am not a left-wing anti-nuclear activist! I happen to believe in nuclear deterrence, and in Britain keeping the bomb. I couldn’t possibly have done the work I do if I didn’t believe that. Also, I am not an alcoholic, and above all I am not a lesbian!’

  Her voice had risen to a penetrating crescendo, and she was trembling again. This time with anger at the faint expression of amusement discernible on John Black’s face.

  ‘Oh,’ he nodded amiably. ‘Oh well, you should have said that before. Would have saved a lot of trouble.’

  With that he turned away from her and studied a watercolour on the wall. Sighing gently he moved on to examine some prints, and stopped by an antique walnut-veneered bureau, on top of which were two photo-frames. One contained a picture of an elderly couple in a co
untry garden. They looked to him as if they could be her parents. Next to it was a more recent colour print of Mary with her arms round two young children.

  ‘Nice-looking kids,’ he commented sincerely.

  ‘They’re my brother’s.’

  ‘Sort of substitute for not having any of your own, are they?’

  Mary ignored the remark and bit her lip.

  ‘You’ve never been married, have you?’ he persisted.

  ‘No,’ she answered softly.

  Suddenly there was a squeak from the hinges of the old bureau.

  ‘You can bloody well keep out of there!’ she shouted furiously. ‘That’s private!’

  ‘I know,’ Black murmured without turning round.

  ‘You’ve got no right to look in there!’ she screamed, striding across the room and grabbing him by the arm, to pull him away.

  ‘Rights?’ he mocked, swinging round and brushing her hand from his arm. ‘Rights? This country’s most precious nuclear secrets are being stolen by some self-interested sneak-thief, and you talk about rights!’

  His outrage blazed from his eyes.

  ‘What is it you want? A warrant? I can whistle up a search warrant in half an hour, if that’s what you want. But along with the warrant will come three of my heaviest-handed men who will not only search this place from top to bottom, they’ll slit the very elastic out of your knickers to check that it hasn’t got code-words written on it. Those are you rights, Miss Maclean!’

  Mary knew that she could not stop her tears anymore. Her privacy was going to be violated, and there was nothing more she could do to prevent it happening. Turning back to the French windows, she pressed her head against the glass and hugged her arms tightly round her chest in an effort to hold herself together.

  She heard him rustling through her private papers, which were stuffed inside the cubby-holes of the bureau. Suddenly the rustling stopped, and she assumed he had found what he was looking for. Inside a tattered brown envelope were the snapshots she had taken during her two-year affair with Peter Joyce, together with the three letters that he had written to her during their relationship.

  She flinched as she felt John Black’s hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Don’t you think the time has now come, Mary, for you to tell me about Peter Joyce?’

  It was after midnight when John Black eventually left the garden flat in Chiswick. The air smelt of fog, and the street lamps looked like orange-headed sentinels glaring sullenly down through the mist. Black sniffed at the air, finding it curiously refreshing after the despair-laden atmosphere he had just left.

  He was not proud of the methods he had used to make her tell him what he wanted to hear, but he knew no other way. He shivered in the cold air, hurriedly climbed into his car, started the engine, and set off for home. He failed to notice the large Mercedes parked on the other side of the road.

  Chapter Three

  MIDNIGHT IN LONDON was seven o’clock in the evening Florida time. The sun was low in the sky and painted the endless beaches with a wash of golden orange, as the RAF VC10 banked for its final turn over the coast and settled smoothly down towards the runway of Patrick Air Force Base. Beyond Patrick, a few miles to the north, the pilot could see the towers and gantries of the Kennedy Space Center pointing challengingly at the stars.

  Peter Joyce looked down at the long oblongs of the cars cruising slowly up and down the coastal boulevards. The pilot had sent back a note to say the temperature on the ground was a humid seventy-five degrees. It certainly looked hot down below, and Peter was grateful he had remembered to wear a lightweight suit.

  Jill Piper’s face was glued to the window, her eyes drinking in their first sight of the USA. Suddenly Peter remembered he had meant to warn her of something. He glanced down to check, and cursed himself. The girl was wearing a skirt.

  ‘Christ, Jill! Have you brought a pair of trousers with you, by any chance?’ he enquired, embarrassed.

  She turned from the window, a knowing smile on her lips.

  ‘For the submarine, you mean? Don’t worry, I was warned! A friend of mine went on one last year in a skirt, and had ten sailors round the bottom of each hatchway looking up at her as she came down the ladder! I’ll change as soon as we’ve landed.’

  Peter smiled; the girl was quite sharp. He was very tired, but satisfied that they had managed to complete the writing of the new programmes. It had been a full eight hours’ work, but he was as confident as he could be that the deception plan for the missile test would be convincing.

  The plane bounced once as it touched the tarmac; then the nose levelled out and the four engines shook and roared as they went into reverse thrust. Peter glanced across the aisle to check that their microcomputers, packed away in their boxes, were still firmly strapped in the seats and cushioned against the force of the landing. When the plane stopped moving, he left Jill on her own in the compartment to change.

  As they stepped out on to the steps the warm air enveloped them. The naval officer standing below was wearing a crisply starched white shirt and shorts. He looked up at Peter with recognition.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Joyce, and welcome to the US of A,’ he smiled. ‘Phil Dunkley. We met last year.’ He extended his hand. ‘I’m the PSO, the Polaris Systems Officer from Retribution.’

  Peter was grateful for the reminder, but pretended he did not need it. ‘Of course. I remember you well. Nice to see you again.’

  The smile on the Lt. Commander’s face broadened as he turned to greet the second visitor from Aldermaston.

  ‘Ah, Miss Piper, is it?’ With a quick all-over glance he took in her blonde hair and the shapely figure clad in blue cotton blouse and slacks.

  ‘Jill will do!’ she smiled back.

  The equipment was loaded carefully into a US Navy van. Then they climbed into a large black automobile, with the officer from HMS Retribution sitting next to the US Navy driver in the front. During their forty-minute journey up the coast, Dunkley gave them a running commentary on the local attractions of Florida.

  Once through the gates of the US Navy Base at Port Canaveral, Peter felt a sense of anticipation and unease. The smooth black hulls of several submarines lined the quayside – in harbour for maintenance, or waiting to conduct missile tests out in the Atlantic. The sight of this most sinister of military hardware brought him down to earth; the hours spent re-writing the missile warhead programmes had been an academic challenge, but the sight of the slim fins and opened missile hatches reminded him of the monstrous destructive potential of the weapons he designed.

  At the end of the quay, the White Ensign fluttering limply in the light evening breeze distinguished HMS Retribution from her lookalike American counterparts. As the car pulled to a halt, two sailors on her deck snapped to attention, while a third spoke urgently into a microphone connected by cable to the inside of the hull.

  Within seconds the tall, bony figure of the submarine’s captain had emerged from a hatchway, and he stood at the head of the gangway with his hand outstretched in greeting.

  ‘Nice to see you again, Mr Joyce,’ Commander Carrington exclaimed. They had also met the previous year, when the scientist had attended the test firing of early prototypes of the Skydancer warheads.

  ‘Likewise,’ Peter answered, smiling politely. ‘And this is Jill Piper, my assistant. She knows much more about using that stuff than I do,’ he explained, pointing at the computers that were being unloaded from the US Navy van.

  Carrington bowed his head respectfully. ‘I’m afraid that usually when ladies come aboard we give them tea and show them the wardroom,’ he grinned. ‘It’s a new experience to have a woman tell us how to programme our missiles.’

  His words had sounded pompous even to his own ears, and he covered his embarrassment by leading the way down into the bowels of the submarine.

  ‘Now, how much have you been told about all this?’ Joyce asked, once he was alone with Carrington and the Polaris Systems Officer. Jill was elsewhere, supe
rvising the stowage of equipment.

  ‘Not much,’ Carrington answered. ‘They said there was no need for us to know the details.’ The injunction to secrecy was a restraint they were well used to, but the two Navy men were clearly burning with curiosity.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t explain much to you, as secrecy is terribly important in this matter,’ Joyce went on, his eyebrows arched in apology. ‘And I’m going to need your help, please, in damping down speculation among the crew. Many of them will remember me from my last visit, but if anyone asks, could you simply say I’m here to make minor adjustments to the missiles?’

  The two officers nodded.

  ‘Unfortunately what I have to do is not really minor at all. It involves extensive re-programming of the warheads. Your test launch procedures won’t be affected, but the changes will make a big difference to what happens at the other end of the range. And I shouldn’t really have told you that much!’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’ll go no further,’ Carrington reassured him. ‘Now when do you want to start work? Tonight?’

  ‘No, I don’t think we can do any more today,’ Peter sighed, drawing a hand round his chin and feeling the stubble of nearly twenty-four hours. ‘I’d rather get some sleep and start fresh in the morning. With any luck we might be finished by lunchtime.’

  ‘Fine,’ the Commander replied. ‘We’ve booked a couple of rooms for you in a motel down the road. Nothing very special, I’m afraid, but it’s on the beach and you should be more comfortable there than on board. We don’t have proper facilities for ladies anyway!’

  Peter nodded. He suddenly felt a desperate need to sleep; he had been concentrating solidly for the past sixteen hours.

  The equipment they had brought from Britain had now been carried carefully down the metal ladders and into the missile compartment in the heart of the submarine. As the PSO led him down there, Peter was pleased to notice sentries standing in the corridors leading to the chamber. He would want complete privacy the following morning.