Len Deighton
Spy Story
'This is a vintage Len Deighton thriller… Too laconic for an old-fashioned cliff hanger, Mr Deighton yet produces a sort of dispassionate cerebral excitement which like the polar ice itself, is nine-tenths submerged and all the more menacing for that'
'Fascination of war games, authentic thrills of chase and capture, and our hero's jokey approach to love, life and his colleagues can't disguise the true horror of what he's doing. Impressive'
'The dialogue has a freshly fired flavour and the Realpolitik a way-out plausibility… The tone may be realistic but the spirit is essentially up-beat and romantic. Behind the flip cracks and the technology, the spirit of Buchan stirs again'
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to acknowledge the help and assistance of Major Berchtold, U.S. Army (retired), and the staff of the Institute of War Studies, London, and in particular the permission given for the inclusion of extracts and quotations from the Institute's previously unpublished confidential reports and private papers. All such extracts are subject to full copyright protection provided by the Berne Convention and the Copyright Act of 1956. No part of these extracts may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or stored in any form or by any means, either electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
'But war's a game, which, were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at.'
Chapter One
As each bound ends, units cease to be operative until commencement of next bound.
Forty-three days without a night: six pale-blue fluorescent weeks without a sniff of air, sky, or a view of the stars. I drank in a cautious half-lungful of salty mist and smelled the iodine and seaborne putrefaction that seaside landladies call ozone.
H.M.S.
There were four submarines alongside the one from which I emerged. Out at the anchorage were more of them. The lash of the westerly wind made them huddle close to the mother ships and their crooning generators. The yellow deck lights were visible through the grey mist, and so were the flocks of gulls that screamed and wheeled and shrieked as they fell upon the kitchen garbage.
The wind brought gusts of rain, whipping up crested waves that awoke the subs. Underfoot I felt the great black hull so ain against its moorings. The brow tilted. Stepping from the edge of each horizontal fin to the next was easier if I didn't look down.
Now the next hull groaned, as the same wave sucked and gurgled at its bow. The forecast had been reasonably right for once: overcast, low cloud, drizzle and wind westering. The rain scratched at the slop-coloured sea and crept into my sleeves, boots and collar. My rubber shoe slipped but I recovered my balance. I shook the water off my face and cursed pointlessly.
'Steady on,' said Ferdy Foxwell behind me, but I cursed again and built his name into one of the inversions.
'At least the navy is on time,' said Ferdy. There was an orange-coloured Ford on the jetty. The door opened and a slim man got out. He was wearing a Burberry and a tweed hat but I knew he'd be the British naval officer from the police office. He bent it his head against the rain. The armed U.S.N. sentry at the end of the gangway poked his head out of his shelter to check the pass. I recognized the officer as Frazer, a lieutenant. He made his way along the slippery walk towards us, stepping across the gaps with commendable agility.
'Let me take that.' He extended a hand, and then smiled in embarrassment as he noticed that the shiny metal case was padlocked to a shoulder-chain under my coat.
'Help Mr Foxwell,' I said. 'He never fastens his.'
'Neither would you if you had any sense,' puffed Foxwell. The man squeezed past me and I had a chance to look down at the oily scum, and smell the diesel, and decide that Ferdy Foxwell was right. When I reached the brow — the horizontal fin — of the next submarine I rested the box and looked back. The young officer was bowed under the weight of Ferdy's case, and Ferdy was stretching his arms to balance his two hundred pounds of compact flab, teetering along the gangway like a circus elephant balancing on a tub. Six weeks was a long time to spend in a metal tube, no matter about sun lamps and cycling gear. I picked up the case loaded with spools and tape recordings, and remembered how I sprinted across these brows on the outward journey.
A red Pontiac station wagon came along the jetty, slowed at the torpedo store and rolled carefully over the double ramps. It continued along the front until turning off at the paint shop. It disappeared down between the long lines of huts. The curved huts were shiny in the rain. Now there was no human movement, and the buildings looked as old as the black granite hills that shone rain-wet above them.
'Are you all right?' Frazer asked.
I shouldered the wet case as I started down the companionway to the jetty. The hatch in the sentry hut slid open an inch or two. I could hear the radio inside playing Bach. 'O.K., buddy,' said the sailor. He slammed the hatch
