Steve’s Transat van was quite crowded. The two prisoners lay trussed up on the floor, Lindsay was stretched out, fast asleep on his duvet – because he needed to be fresh to mastermind his ambush, and Heather was on guard, with the shotgun cradled on her lap. She still held George’s razor, and was using it to trim her nails – though it was a foolish thing to do, because the blade was really very sharp indeed – and occasionally eyed the two prisoners in a thoughtful sort of way. Cormack, who always carried a camera wherever he went, was now more interested in picture rights to their ambush than in Melanie, whilst Melanie was just glad the razor blade had come no closer. Lindsay’s gun was back in its holster – the girls had accepted it as part of the plot. Yvonne drove, with Aileen following in her Mini.
Yvonne drove sedately, keeping religiously to the speed limit. Aileen wondered what sort of aircraft they might ambush. She enjoyed all kinds of flying. But piloting a plane confers a very special pleasure, granting command of the skies, and she dreamed of donning a crisp blue jacket with gold braid at the cuffs. She also had friends in the light aircraft world, and perhaps an ambushed plane might acquire a new identity. She was sure that a good sale would bring a fistful of money. She also wonders what Richard planned to do with his two prisoners, but assumes they would probably be happy enough just to be turned loose.
George wondered how the hell he could have landed himself in such a mess. Steve slept.
Dawn rose as they passed Sudbury heading north. Yvonne yawned, because it had been a long day. She stopped to wake Lindsay. They must be close to Alpheton.
Lindsay drove slowly after passing Long Melford, because now he was coming into home country, the farmlands of his boyhood. He knew the abandoned airfield well, but it had been a long time. He had learned to drive on the perimeter track, cautiously circling the airfield in a battered Ford Consul, chaperoned by one of his father’s farm labourers. He slowed, and found the lane just where he expected, and nothing had changed. He edged forward carefully, just as he always taken the lane carefully in the Consul, driving for about a mile between hedges of brambles and wild roses, and then turned again, and the airfield spread out in front of the Transit, in a wide strip of concrete dotted with occasional clumps of grass and weeds stretching across open grass towards the rising sun. A few sheep were already grazing their breakfasts, and an early hawk circled high above them. Some of the wartime buildings still crouched on one side: a skeleton control tower and some rusty nissen huts living on as memories of war days when bombers laden with heavy cargoes of destruction had queued to fly off and sow and harvest death. Lindsay had parked the Consul once, and explored the buildings, wondering at the graffiti of young men long since gone or buried. Now the airfield was silent.
He glanced at his watch. They were early. He parked the Transit unobtrusively in the remains of a wartime revetment, hidden from the lane by its earth wall, and here again he was travelling back in time, for he had brought girls here after passing his driving test.
They waited for the best part of an hour, and the world was at peace. Then Lindsay heard the sound of an approaching car, several approaching cars. He climbed the earth bank cautiously, and found himself looking down on a small procession of vehicles, a dozen or so cars and farm pick-ups, and a couple of Land-Rovers. Several of the pick-ups had dogs seated patiently in the cabs beside the drivers. The procession cruised past him and turned away to the left, heading off past the remains of the airfield buildings, and then vanished into a dip in the landscape. Lindsay judged that some of the locals planned a morning out rabbitting.
Lavenham Young Farmers were a jovial lot. They played a fairish rugby team, and liked to enjoy a convivial pint. They took their farming seriously, but were also sportsmen to the core, and met regularly to shoot rabbit or pigeons. Shooting combined sport with good husbandry. Tom Younghusband had a problem with rabbits at Alpheton, and had invited fellow Young Farmers over to help solve it, promising a hearty farm breakfast as a reward. The whole branch had turned up, for June Younghusband had a fair way with raised pork pies and apple turnovers, and the Young Farmers knew there would be plenty of beer along with coffee and tea. The Younghusbands also had a couple of pretty teenage daughters, girls who could drive tractors with the best, and the family farmed the best part of a thousand acres. Younghusband invitations were much prized.
The shoot was scheduled for seven thirty sharp. Branch members began arriving at seven, and the Younghusband girls marshalled their vehicles in a neat row. Tom took the lead, a big bluff man in a camouflage jacket, fanning his guests out in a line with its back to the airfield. He had experienced trouble from time to time with people using it covertly. Not learner drivers – half the county had practised reverse turns on the runway. But sometimes light aircraft had flown in surreptitiously, stopped briefly, and flown off again, generally early in the day.
‘One day I’ll catch one of the varmints,’ he rumbled to Bruce Callan, the gun immediately to his left. ‘Heavens knows whom they might be, but I’ll have the varmints.’
Callan smiled politely, all the while keeping a watchful eye on the grass ahead of him. They were closing on a stretch of fresh corn stubble, and pickings promised to be good. Everyone had heard about Younghusband’s mystery flights, and the intruders seemed to grow bigger and more frequent with each of his retellings. Some took them as gospel, and put them down to smugglers, or spies. But some thought they represented a bit of a pipedream.
A flurry of shots began to crack out along the line. Several rabbits had broken cover. However they were sighted by some of the county’s best shots, and did not run far. The line advanced steadily.
Suddenly Youghusband stopped, cocking his head to the wind. He blew a whistle – it was a signal to pause.
Callan stopped to listen. He could hear an engine, and it was too big and heavy to be a car. He turned, and could see sunlight glinting on a twin-engined aircraft heading in low for the runway. It levelled off, just above the ground, and then bounced down on the concrete in a flurry of dust, running up towards the northern end of the runway. It seemed quite a bit larger than most of the light aircraft he had seen. Not an airliner, but big enough to carry several passengers, painted a muddy green-brown on its upper surfaces, pale blue underneath, with no registration markings. A ghost plane.
A white Transit van emerged simultaneously from behind a grass-covered bank on the far side of the airfield, making for the plane, bouncing across the grass. The plane stopped as the van approached, and two men climbed out. Both were dressed in camouflage fatigues. The van slowed, and also stopped, perhaps twenty metres from the plane, and a man and a girl got out.
Tom Younghusband watched, his face aglow with the joy of a man proving himself right against all odds. ‘I told you so.’ He was busy signalling for the line of young farmers to close up on him. ‘This time I’ll nail the varmints.’
He began to issue a rapid string of instructions, and it was plain that he had been preparing an ambush for quite some time. One of his daughters whisked away on the back of a motorcycle to call up Bury police station from the farm, whilst two cars swung off along the perimeter track to cut the plane off from the rear, and two more moved to box the plane in from either side. The rest of the Young Farmers fanned out in a determined arc. Now they had much better prey than bunnies.
Klaus Martins piloted the CIA twin-engined Aerocommander from Berlin under protest. He was convinced Ackerman was losing touch with reality, blowing this Lindsay thing out of all proportion. Hunting reds was one thing in Germany, but Britain was an ally, for Christ’s sake, even if it did have a fellow-travelling prime minister. He had a bad attack of second thoughts as he flew out from Tempelhof, escorted by a USAF cargo flight – for the Aerocommander carried no markings, and the Red Air Force was sometimes tetchy about these things – and an even worse attack as he landed at Bremen to refuel. For a moment, as ground crew refilled the plane’s tanks, he even thought of walking away from the whole thing. But he had a nice apartment in Berlin, plus two kids at the American school, and Ackerman had ways of revenging himself. Maybe no court martial, but something hairy by way of a mission, and curtains for Klaus Martins. So he swallowed a couple of quick slugs of rye from a hip flask tucked in the long pocket on the left leg of his combat fatigues, breathed a silent prayer, and took the Aerocommander up again.
The plane flew smoothly, heading south and west across the North Sea, above water as smooth as a millpond. Howland dozed in the co-pilot’s seat, with Jackson, the third member of Martins’A team, snoring gently behind them. Martins shed height as he approached the British coastline, sliding down towards the sea until he was almost skipping the surface. He was a good pilot, and crossed the coast below the local radar scanning floor. He had flown into Alpheton on several missions, and ground hopping was a darn sight easier than filing a flight plan and maybe having to face tricky questions. Then he lifted a little as he flew inland. Nobody could complain about the Aerocommander, because it carried no markings.
The airfield stood out in the green countryside, a long pencil of white concrete ahead of him. Martins began his approach. The Aerocommander slid in gently, steadily closing on the concrete, until it touched down with a bump and began to roll, and Martins could see a white van heading out across the grass towards him. Five minutes to load Lindsay, maybe less, and he would be on his way back to Berlin. Maybe Ackerman would allow him a week’s furlough for doing the job smoothly.
He turned the plane as he reached the end of the runway, slowing it to a halt, and reached down for his flask to treat himself to a self-congratulatory refresher. Everything was going well. He lifted his flask to his lips, preparing to take a good swallow, when something pushed at his elbow. He coughed, caught unawares, and his whisky sprayed out in an arc. Howland was prodding him hard and pointing at the van.
Martins looked up, and cursed. The stupid jerk of a driver had parked it right across the Aerocommander’s take-off path, rather too close to the aircraft for comfort. He gestured angrily, pointing away to the side. Then he stopped, open mouthed. He could see Lindsay standing next to the van, holding a sawn-off shotgun, pointing it at the Aerocommander’s nearside fuel tank, and he had a girl with him, all dolled up in a party dress, holding a handgun.
Howland fumbled for his own gun, but Martins put a restraining hand on his arm. This was no time for fireworks. The Aerocommander held enough aviation fuel in its tanks to blow the lot of them to kingdom come.
Suddenly the airfield seemed to go mad. Cars began to appear from all directions, surrounding both plane and van. Martins saw a couple of men holding shotguns close up on Lindsay and the girl, and for a moment wondered whether Ackerman had laid on some back-up. But Lindsay and the girl seemed wholly relaxed about their surrender, and their body language conveyed no fear. A large man in a camouflage jacket began talking to them, and looking up at the Aerocommander, and Lindsay seemed to be providing an explanation. The girl laughed, gesturing at the van, and the large man walked to the back of the van, to look inside. Two more girls got out, and a man with a camera.
Martins closed his eyes. This was not the party as planned: this was a catastrophe. The man with the camera was now busy taking pictures, and he knew that all hell and damnation threatened to open up and engulf him. He lifted his flask to his lips. He had never needed a drink so desperately. He had never so bitterly regretted taking the Aerocommander on a mission.
A few minutes later a convoy of police vehicles arrived, and he drained his flask. He knew he could not bluff his way out of this one, nor call on authority. Blood would surely flow, and Martins visualised himself ending up as a victim on a sacrifical altar. He might as well get drunk.
Major Jones was tired. His weekend had been much too hectic: what had begun as a benevolent mission of supervision had first dotted his path with drama, and now everything was turning into a thorough-going mess. Schulz was dead, and a senior member of the Whitehall intelligence community was shedding tears. Lindsay had sown a trail of mayhem and destruction across Germany before vanishing into thin air, only to surface again in Suffolk at the head of a motley gang of girls with a photographer in tow. Fury was raging in high places.
He had planned to spend Monday catching up on his paperwork. Instead he was in the back of a police car, heading for Bury St. Edmunds, after a tricky half-hour briefing Winstanley, better known outside Whitehall as Brigadier Charles Winstanley, head of MI7, and man responsible for controlling military counter-espionage operations.
Winstanley had been very short. ‘This is a bloody farce.’ He had made Major Jones stand throughout the briefing, for all the world like a junior subaltern. ‘The PM is livid – he’s just back from a charm offensive in Washington and the Americans have dumped this on our plate. This plane business is bloody ridiculous. We’ve slapped a D-notice on the papers, but we can’t shut everyone up forever. Someone should take this Lindsay fellow and dump him on a desert island.’
Major Jones had nodded sagely, and said nothing, though secretly he could not but help admiring the man, just a little. Lindsay appeared to have spent his weekend skilfully staying several clear jumps ahead of disaster. A handy fellow to have around at tricky times. Perhaps even a possible recruit. Journalists were good at sniffing around.
An officious police inspector shepherded him to an interview room in the depths of Bury police station. It was a beautiful June day outside, but the police station smelled musty and institutional, and the interview room was a depressing cell painted in local authority cream, with a single small window high on one wall, bare but for a table and a couple of chairs.
The police inspector was deferential, impressed by Major Jones’ Whitehall credentials. ‘I’ll go and fetch him, sir.’
Major Jones took a deep breath. No doubt the police had stripped Lindsay of his tie, belt and shoe laces, before locking him up. Not the best way to make friends and influence people. He looked round the interview room with distaste. Bury must have a hotel of some kind, with facilities for tea and coffee, perhaps even a bar. He nodded. ‘Where is he?’
‘We’ve put him in a cell, sir.’
‘And his girls?’
‘They’re in another cell, sir. So is the photographer and the two thugs they had tied up.’
‘Not all together?’
The police inspector twitched and looked offended. ‘No, sir. Of course not.’
Major Jones took one of the chairs and stretched his legs. It had been a long drive. ‘Alright, wheel him in.’ He paused. ‘But first give him his things back.’
The police inspector looked surprised. ‘Everything, sir?’
Major Jones was not accustomed to being called to account. He bristled slightly. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘He was carrying a very large sum of money, sir.’ The police inspector’s voice was tinged with a kind of hushed awe – he had counted Lindsay’s banknotes himself, before making out a receipt, and had not seen quite so many American dollars in one place for some time. He had even gone to the trouble of telexing the Bank of England to check exchange control regulations, and the answer had been quite clear: Lindsay was in breach, and the money ranked as forfeit.
‘Give them back to him.’ Major Jones was brusque. He did not need a country policeman to tell him his job.
‘He also had two sets of papers, sir.’
Major Jones lifted an eyebrow. This was growing tedious.
‘British and East German, sir.’
‘The devil he did.’ This was rather more interesting. ‘East German?’
‘It appears to be a diplomatic passport, sir.’
Major Jones’ eyes narrowed a little. Lindsay seemed to have considerable depth for a travel journalist. ‘Issued where and when?’
‘I’ll fetch them for you, sir.’ The police inspector backed hurriedly out of the interview room. He was a conscientious man, a stickler for clean paperwork and correct procedure, and he had a feeling that things were not developing the way they should.
He returned a few moments later, carrying a small plastic bag filled with Lindsay’s possessions – passports, money, a propelling pencil, a small diary, a comb, and a handkerchief. Major Jones looked at the bag and frowned.
‘I thought I told you to return the money.’
‘He’s in breach of Exchange Regulations, sir.’ The police inspector knew his job, and his job was to enforce the law. He was not going to be made party by anyone to any infractions, whoever they might be.
Major Jones began to bristle again, and then sighed. The man was only doing his job. ‘Alright, I’ll talk to him now.’
Half an hour later he knew that he must be out of this damned hole, with Lindsay and his girls, as quick as possible. Lindsay had made him laugh several times, and given him a great deal to think about. He had never met Delahaye, but the Hilton siege was the stuff of pure comedy, and he only regretted not being at the Moskau. Caviar and vodka, shashlik and champagne? The words were enough to set his stomach rumbling. But he was also thinking long and hard about Wotan and the CIA. Whitehall was not happy about links between US intelligence and German neo-Nazis, not least because Washington appeared to be intent on crowding out its Allies and monopolising penetration across the Iron Curtain - he had heard unkind words along the same lines from the French BDST. Now Ackerman appeared to have engineered a whole succession of major blunders, and might very well have opened a way to turning the tables on the Yanks, possibly generating his own comeuppance as well. The thought warmed the cockles of Major Jones’ heart, for Ackerman had led to him taking a pounding as a member of the Berlin Inter-Allied Golf Committee. Ackerman had cheated in the Berlin Tournament, triggering an official Committee investigation. But he had pulled some influential strings, ministers had interefered, and the whole thing had been hushed up.
He pushed his chair back and got to his feet. Lindsay had recovered his tie, belt and shoelaces, but had something of a rumpled looked about him. Major Jones looked at his watch. It was coming up towards lunchtime, and the police station was thoroughly depressing. He must get Lindsay and his girls out of here, and find somewhere decent to eat.