the cottage and let himself in wearily. Corporal Cooper sat in the parlor drinking tea, watching the clock and the warm red tubes of the shortwave transceiver.
Alex went through to the back of the house. Sergei was in the kitchen-standing guard, stiffly zealous of Irina, unwilling to leave her alone in the house with Cooper. It amused Alex a little: she was capable of turning men like Cooper into quivering jelly if it suited her; she was in no danger from that quarter. But it wouldn’t do to belittle Sergei’s loyalty.
She was curled up asleep. In her hand were the coded notepad sheets for the night’s communique. He slipped them carefully out of her grip without waking her and retreated to the front of the house and handed the sheets to Cooper.
“Bit of a long message tonight, in’t it sir.”
It was long but there wasn’t much time left for his conversations with Vlasov. Actually the real danger was at Vlasov’s end-it wasn’t much risk for Vlasov to receive long communications but it put him in great danger to have to send long ones because they gave Beria’s direction-finders more time to zero in on the location of the illicit shortwave broadcaster. For the past six weeks Vlasov had taken the precaution of recording his transmissions on wire and attaching the wire-recorder to the transmitter so that if it were discovered he wouldn’t be there at the time. Every third or fourth night-they communicated at those intervals-he had to move the transmitter or set up a new one and his irritability was becoming more and more obvious even through the obstacles of codes and Morse key. Alex had found it necessary to bolster him with encouragements: It will be over soon, that sort of thing.
“Should we get the madame up, sir?”
“No. She’s been working around the clock on this. I’ll decode the answer myself-it won’t be a long one tonight.”
It was in fact a very short one. It was not a response to his own broadcast; that would have to wait three days till after Vlasov had decoded Alex’s message and encoded his own reply. This was an eighty-second transmission which took Alex forty-five minutes to decode because he wasn’t nearly as practiced at it as Irina was. When he had it sorted out on his desk the message had a special importance.
KOLLIN X KOLLIN X FINAL CONSPIRATOR APPREHENDED X INTERROGATIONS HAVE REVEALED MUNICH CONNECTION GERMANS AND RUSSIANS X NETWORK SMASHED X STEEL BEAR DOUBLE STILL MISSING BUT WE ARE IN THE CLEAR X FIELD TRIALS REAFFIRMED FOR FRIDAY FIFTH X HOPE FOR OUR SUCCESS X KOLLIN X CARNEGIE
2
The smell of her talc was faint in the room. He fell gently onto the bed and into a sleep as swift as that of a marathon hiker who’d slipped his pack. When he came awake there was a vague recollection of a dream in which Vassily Devenko had been charging at him on horseback at the head of a thousand thundering Tatar Cossacks, their karakul hats bobbing in the dust, Krenk rifles spitting, Vassily’s saber flashing in the air.
It was still dark and Irina breathed evenly in sleep. He armed the sweat from his face and lay eyes up in the dark with no idea whether it was one or six in the morning. He saw Vassily at the head of the mess table laughing at something he’d just said to a Polish cavalry major. Vassily was talking about the Polish army and the German army-how Poland would mop up the battlegrounds with German bodies if Hitler were fool enough to attack. It was one of those moments Alex never forgot-a spark that glowed brighter whenever it was touched by the wind of association: the grey rain now beating against the invisible window, a certain taste in the back of his throat that might have been left there by the wine he’d had with supper. Beside him at the officers’ mess table a Polish captain had kept shifting the knife and fork at his place, lining them up along various parallels. Alex remembered the captain’s eyes: drab and uneasy while Vassily drummed on about squashing the Wehrmacht.
He was a bloody fool, he thought. Vassily Devenko the hero of Sebastopol. Well he’d acquitted himself superbly when it called for tenacity and horseback dash: a brave indifference to losses, the cruel Russian battering- ram conception of martial excellence. Vassily the electric, Vassily the magnetic. They’d all have followed him blindly through Hell: the high handsome face, the white mane, the great thundering voice that called them on to fight and win. But these things were only half of leadership. Vassily’s flair and his grand ambitions hadn’t been matched by tactical realism and that had been his flaw. In the end he was a bloody fool.
Then why the intense feeling that he had to have Vassily’s approval?
He still needed that: he needed to have Vassily speak to him in his dreams, he needed to hear Vassily say It’s brilliant-you have my admiration. But instead Vassily came pounding at him on horseback lofting his saber with merciless rage.
He turned on his side; he touched her hip and withdrew his hand, still jealous of Vassily, uncertain in the darkness, afraid.
The day had its little crises-a C-47 came in from the chute drop and blew a tire and ground-looped on the runway but it didn’t crack up; Calhoun groused about the dwindling supply of spare tires. Then one of the Russian- made 9mm tommy-guns malfunctioned and burst on the target line and the corporal had to be taken to the dispensary to have metal splinters dug out of his hand. One of Solov’s men twisted his ankle on the afternoon jump. At four Alex walked down toward the hard-stands to have a look at the high-octane supply; Calhoun groused about that too.
When Alex walked back toward the hangar he saw a dark green car move past on the road beyond the fence. It drew his attention because it moved too slowly. It stopped about eighty yards beyond the gate: the driver got out and lifted the right-hand flap of the engine bonnet to look inside. It was just a bit coincidental having a breakdown right across the road from the fence and the runway. Too far away to get an impression of the driver’s face. The car was a Daimler with a long snout and coupe coachwork. The driver’s back was hunched; he was reaching into the engine compartment and fiddling but it was quite possible he was looking at the base under his arm. Alex turned his line of march toward the gate.
The two sentries came to atttention and Alex said, “One of you hike up there and see if you can help him on his way.” But then the driver buckled the flap down and climbed back into the car and smoke spurted from the pipes when the engine caught. The Daimler moved away-quite slowly.
“If anyone else stops move them along.”
“Yes sir.”
The publican brought their steaks and Irina dimmed the little kerosene lamp on the table. Through the doorway there was a lusty racket from the saloon bar. The velvet blackout curtains made the room stuffy; smoke hung against the low ceiling. It seemed to affect her eyes but she went on puffing at the Du Maurier. No one else was dining in the room. The walls were cluttered with the obligatory gimcracks-copper mugs, shotguns, a pair of flintlock pistols, emblems of highland regiments, photographs of hunting dogs and golfers in plus fours. Logs burned cozily on the hearth opposite their table.
Silence separated them. It was only in public formalities that she was capable of pretending an emotion she didn’t feel. They cut up the Angus beef and ate it. Finally the awkwardness got too much for her. “What’s the matter, darling?” A new Du Maurier; he struck the match for her.
“Getting close to the time, I suppose. Tense-you can’t help it.”
“That’s not all of it. You used to look like this when-”
“When what?”
“I’m not sure. It’s not a happy look. You know, darling, it’s not hard to hide something but it can be very hard to hide that you’ve got something to hide.”
“What do you suppose I’m hiding?”
“Whatever it is it’s got to do with me-with us.”
When he didn’t reply to that she said, “I suppose it’s still Vassily.”
“Perhaps it is. I had a dream about him-he was riding me down with a Cossack horde.”
“You feel you’ve betrayed him, don’t you?”
“It’s damned foolish of me. But he might have made this work. His plan. The odds were against it-more than they are with mine-but he might have done it. It was possible.”
