Nile Shadows

The Colonel smiled.

Oh no, that was Colly's doing. As a matter of fact, it was the name he used when he reenlisted and went into the Imperial Camel Corps after the last war. Says something about his sense of humor, I suppose.

He thought it would be amusing to skulk around the Middle East on a camel, using the last name of a famous Armenian oil millionaire.

Bizarre, murmured the Major. Gulbenkian does seem to be an odd name to come across here. But what were the initials A.O. supposed to stand for?

The Colonel laughed.

Alpha and Omega, probably. Colly's sense of humor again.

Our Colly of Champagne, murmured the Major. Extraordinary.

Yes, the same. And he was small and dark all right, and thin and wiry and every bit a professional. So I admit the description you brought back had me disturbed for a moment.

The Major was even more confused.

Why? Couldn't he be our Purple Seven, working out of the Monastery? You said the identity was issued to him originally.

It was, and it's also true that he was working out of the Monastery the last time around. But those Monks in the desert have been up to something since then. Do you recall the facts concerning the kidnapping of the German commandant of Crete?

Certainly. Did Our Colly have something to do with that?

His show from the beginning. Thought it up and worked out the details and then went along to see that it went smoothly. Well it did go smoothly, as an operation. They grabbed the commandant and walked him across the island to the south coast, and the submarine was where it was supposed to be on the night of the pickup. But that night Colly's luck ran out. He'd been defying the law of averages for just too long.

What happened?

He and his group crossed tracks with a German patrol. Colly made a racket and headed up into the mountains to lead the patrol off the scent. He was shot and wounded in the darkness but he managed to keep on going, until he had to look for a place to hide toward dawn. That section of the mountains is as bare as a lunar landscape, and the only place where he could get out of sight was inside one of the underground stone cisterns the Cretan goatherds use up there, to gather the runoff in the spring when the snow melts.

The Colonel scowled.

On their way by, the Germans left one of their men at the cistern because he was having an attack of dysentery and couldn't keep up, but Colly didn't know that. Colly waited long enough for the patrol to move on across the mountain, then stuck his head out of the cistern to take a look. Shivering, numb, barely able to move. He'd been standing up to his nose in the mountain-cold water of that cistern for an hour by then. And as chance would have it, the lone German happened to be squatting on a knoll right behind Colly.

The Colonel grimaced.

A freak accident really, I don't like to recall it. The startled German tossed a hand grenade and death was instantaneous for Colly. Decapitation.

What? Our Colly?

So the only way he could be part of these new events is if he'd been resurrected, which would certainly explain the enigmatic smile on the Armenian's face after the explosion in the bar. If O'Sullivan had been resurrected, he'd certainly be one to smile about it.

What?

No, he's dead all right. This Purple Seven isn't Colly. There's another Gulbenkian out there somewhere now.

The Major recovered and thought for a moment.

As I remember, there wasn't any mention of a British sergeant in connection with the kidnapping in Crete.

That's right, said the Colonel.

It was described by us as the work of some British officers.

There were a couple along, yes. And we broadcast that so the Germans would stop rounding up Cretan villagers and shooting them in retaliation. Since it was army to army, we said we'd shoot German POWs if they did that, and they stopped.

But why didn't they mention the fact that they'd killed O'Sullivan?

Because they didn't know who the dead man was, said the Colonel. Colly was disguised as a Cretan mountaineer and the Germans decided to keep us guessing about whether that mountaineer was alive or not, just in case he happened to be someone who was important to us. And also, so we could never be sure what he might have told them. Is telling them, for that matter.

The Major nodded. It was obvious to him that since the Colonel knew exactly how O'Sullivan had died, he must have a source in Crete who had reported the truth to him. Most likely a partisan, he thought, who had been following the German patrol and had witnessed the incident at the cistern from afar. But Crete was outside the Major's area of concern, so he said nothing more on the subject.

The Colonel, meanwhile, was pursuing a new chain of thought that struck him as curious. In fact he did have a special source in Crete who had reported the circumstances of O'Sullivan's death, as the Major suspected, but the agent was far more valuable than a partisan in the mountains. And it was in order to protect this agent's highly sensitive position as an apparent collaborator with the Germans, a dangerous role to attempt in a place like Crete, that the Colonel had decided not to reveal to anyone the fact that he knew for certain Sergeant O'Sullivan was dead.

Until now, when these nostalgic reminiscences concerning Our Colly had caused him to forget himself in front of the Major.

But before this moment he had told no one. Not even the elite intelligence unit for which O'Sullivan had been working when he went to Crete, the obscure command in the desert often referred to by the Colonel and others, in private and with some disdain, as the Monastery.

Thus a question had suddenly occurred to the Colonel.

How did the Monastery know O'Sullivan was dead?

For they certainly had to know. Otherwise they would never have assigned his Purple Seven identity to another man. And yet the Monastery was unaware of the Colonel's special source in Crete. Was there someone else, then, who could have been in touch with the Colonel's special source without the Colonel knowing about it? One of the agents, perhaps, who had been landed in Crete by submarine since the time of Colly's death?

The Colonel reached for another file, then stopped and nodded to himself. There was no need to look up any names. Who, after all, had provided the Colonel with this valuable source in Crete in the first place?

Who indeed? Stern, of course. Stern had recruited the woman soon after Crete had fallen to the Germans. She had been an acquaintance of Stern's from somewhere over the years, and it had been Stern who had gone to her and convinced her to undertake the role of a collaborator, with all the danger and humiliation that entailed. And then not long after Colly had disappeared in Crete, Stern had managed to get himself sent there on another assignment altogether. But obviously his real purpose in going had been to find out about Colly.

Stern must have known Colly, the Colonel now realized, from the time when Colly had been in Palestine.

Perhaps they had even become close friends then, for they were the kind of men who would have been naturally attracted to one another. Colly with his resourcefulness and his many idiosyncrasies, an eccentric dreamer who was more religious than rational, who was a firm believer in the Bible and who had become an ardent Zionist while working in Palestine fired with a mystical sense of the special mission of the Jews.

Yes. Colly would have appealed to Stern and they had probably become close friends, unknown to the Colonel and even to the Monastery. So when Colly hadn't returned from Crete, Stern had worked out a way to get himself sent there, to find out what had happened to his friend.

It fit, the Colonel was sure of it. It was exactly the kind of thing Stern would have done. And once in Crete, Stern must have left the safety of the mountains and taken the risk of going down into town, disguised as a Cretan mountaineer, and looked up the woman he had previously recruited for the Colonel, to learn for himself what Colly's fate had been. And later mentioned the fact of Colly's death to the Monastery, disguising his source.