Colonel Butler's Wolf

gets too inquisitive.'

'Sir.'

'Korbel?' Butler growled. 'Peter Korbel?'

'You know him?' Richardson beamed, nodding. 'Poor old Korbel's doing this stretch, yes. He picked you up at where's it—Housesteads. Took over from a new chappie by the name of Protopopov, believe it or not—Protopopov —tall chappie with long arms like an orangutan. Long legs too, so he kept up with you nicely, whereas Korbel's been having a hell of a time ever since he twisted his ankle at Castle Nick.

'Fact we got quite worried about him in case he lost you completely— that wasn't in the script at all, you know. Even David didn't reckon on that.'

Richardson was relatively new to the department, a product of one of Sir Frederick's university forays, but already he was on familiar terms with Audley, Butler noted disapprovingly. But then, they were joined by the freemasonry of rugger, he remembered—they'd played for the same London club, or something like that.

He grunted irritably, dismissing the triviality from his mind; it was no business of his how Audley conducted himself with his underlings. More to the point, this underling knew very much better than he did what was now going on and what was intended.

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Richardson reached up and slid open a narrow grill in the side of the truck, applying his eye to an inch crack of daylight.

'But he's coming along very nicely now. He should be just about right to get his reward if he keeps up that pace.' He closed the grill. 'But if you don't mind we must take cover now, sir. If you get down on the floor here you'll be nicely out of sight.'

Butler wedged himself down in the shadow of a jutting section of transmitting equipment, thinking furiously. Korbel was pretty small beer, a bit of Ukranian flotsam that had been left high and dry by the Second World War only to be picked up and recruited by his ex-fatherland after ten blameless but unrewarding years of freedom in the West. It had never been satisfactorily established whether it had been belated patriotism or blackmail, or sheer desperation, that had turned him into an enemy, but in any case he had never graduated beyond fetching and carrying and watching so that it had never seemed worthwhile picking him up. Butler had never met him or crossed his path, but he had watched the sad, moon-shaped face age and sag, creasing with stress-lines, in a whole succession of photographs taken over the years and exposed to him by routine in the periodical rogues' gallery sessions.

But now his face in its turn had been exposed to the near-pensionable Korbel and the spidery Protopopov

—and now Korbel was hurrying after the latest in the line of false Butlers to get his reward up on the crag.

His reward . . . Butler lent back uncomfortably against his pack. All he had to do was to ask Richardson, and Richardson would dutifully tell him that everything was going according to plan—Audley's plan.

A crafty plan, without doubt, full of elaborate twists and turns. But a sight too twisty and elaborate for Butler's taste.

The primary aim was to identify the opposition—no bonus for that conclusion, it was inherent in his instructions—because the enemy's strength and quality must always be a valuable pointer to the importance of the operation. And with all the advantages of a well-prepared battlefield and apparently unlimited equipment that aim ought to be attainable.

But being Audley's the plan included a deception: Peter Korbel's reward was to be deceived about something.

'Your man, sir—he's just crossed the road.' The stocky Signals corporal murmured, deadpan. 'He's limpin' a bit, but he's goin' like the clappers,'

Richardson stood up and peered through a crack in the grill on the other side of the truck.

'So he is, Corporal—so he is! Bloody, but unbowed. I think he'll make it now, you know. You can send dummy2.htm

off the all clear then, and tell 'em we'll rendezvous according to schedule.' He turned back to Butler.

'You know what we've got for him up there? Not up there, actually—he's waiting down in Lodham Slack valley, just before Turret 4ob: Oliver St John Latimer in person!'

Butler frowned. Oliver Latimer was one of the more orotund of the resident kremlinologists in the department —a man with whom Audley was notoriously at odds too.

'Hah!' Richardson's teeth flashed. 'I thought you'd take the point! David don't like Oliver—and Oliver don't like David. Which is why David has had Oliver dragged all the way up here from his fleshpots in the Big Smoke just to confuse poor old Korbel. Two birds with one stone—just like David!'

Just like Audley. That was true enough, thought Butler grimly: the man was too shrewd to go out of his way to settle his private scores but could never resist settling them in the line of duty if the opportunity presented itself. Young Roskill had said as much from his hospital bed only a few days before.

But Latimer was the private bird; it was Korbel who mattered, and Protopropov, and whoever was behind them.

'He wants to find out if you're meeting anyone on the Wall, see,' continued Richardson, 'and we didn't like to disappoint him. So we're giving him Latimer, and with a bit of -luck that'll set their dovecotes all aflutter, specially if they've got a line on David, because they'll know David and Latimer aren't yoked together, see—'

'I see perfectly well.' Butler cut off the string of mixed metaphors harshly. 'For God's sake, man, let's get on with the job. Let's get moving.'

The Russians had followed him, and Audley's men were no doubt pinpointing the Russians. It was an old game, and the trick of it was still the same: you could never be quite sure who was outsmarting whom—who was the cat, and who the mouse.

XII

CORPORAL GIBSON SWUNG the big signals truck between the stone uprights of the farm gate, round an immaculate army scout car which was parked beside a Fordson tractor, and backed it accurately into the mouth of the barn.