Gunner Kelly

it . . .And Audley . . . Audley will either go to the very top or into the outer darkness— perhaps Audley and Butler together . . . one more Intelligence failure over here, and they are well-placed to pick up the pieces and take over. So you are in the nature of an investment, Schneider— a professional and political investment—

dummy1

Benedikt did not much like being an investment, the more so if there were politics involved, and most of all when someone as equivocal as Dr David Audley was involved in them. It would be better —or, at least, it would be simpler—to see himself as a loyal ally of an ancient comrade-in-arms ... in the mud of the Addle stream now, but once in the mud of the Lasne, where the road to the field of Waterloo crossed it, straining to get von Billow’s guns across to save Wellington’s army, with old Blucher’s challenge in his ears: Come on, lads! Would you have me break my word!

Treading mud, he could see just above the banks of the Addle, across the fields on each side.

Well, at least there was one thing he could do, which had nothing to do with being a loyal ally, even: he could see— literally see—

how good the British image intensifiers were, courtesy of the SAS, as supplied to the Falklands reconnaissance groups!

Well . . . they were good—they were really quite good, and almost as good as those on which he had trained —

Good enough, anyway, to observe the herd of cows munching peacefully far away across the field to his right . . . and no hazards or obstacles in prospect except those designed to give the fox-hunters good practice, with not one yard of barbed-wire, which the riders hated as much as any infantryman.

He pushed forward, keeping to the deepest centre of the stream, where he could almost swim. After a few strokes, the cord on his wrist tugged at his stroke, but a second tug freed the cylinder—that was how the plastic branches were designed: to look real, but to bend and give way as soon as extra pressure was exerted on them, dummy1

to allow the ersatz tree-trunk to follow its master—

It was easy. With the weak current behind him, and the water holding him up and taking the weight of the cylinder, he could make something like walking pace, with his head below the bank.

At intervals, he stood up—always between the clumps of willows to which any inexperienced sentry would inevitably gravitate—but each sweep identified only animals . . . first cows, which took no notice of him, and later sheep, which bleated weakly and uneasily, as though they couldn’t quite remember the nights when the wolves had hunted their remote ancestors, but nevertheless hadn’t lost some dim frightening memory of long-extinct enemies, from which their loving guardians, the good shepherds, protected them all the way to the slaughter-house. But their warning protests were quickly silenced when he sank down into the stream and let himself drift by their wallows, careful only not to sample any of the fouled water.

The River Addle—

Addled eggs his English vocabulary had given him, but Mother’s dictionary had warningly added the definition of addle as ‘stinking urine or liquid filth’; which he could believe now, after having traversed several trampled-down gaps in the Addle’s banks where its fauna drank and defecated, so that he didn’t even like to wipe his sweaty face with Addle-water, let alone quench his thirst with it.

But it was easy. If there were night-guards out in Duntisbury Chase, they were not here, along the Addle— Colonel Butler had calculated correctly. . . . Maybe there were no such guards —

maybe they had imagined the whole thing, between them, and this dummy1

was all for nothing; the only obstacles to his passage were the wires stretched across the stream at field boundaries—not barbed-wires of course (not barbed-wire in the Chase!), but inoffensive strands under which he could duck with no fear of snagging himself even if he had touched them—

It was easy—

And now the wolf—or this fox, anyway—was almost within the fold— this fold—on the edge of the belt of trees which marked the beginning of the Roman villa-site on the outskirts of Duntisbury Royal itself, where he planned to come ashore.

It was easy—

He caught hold of a tree-root eroded out of the bank with his free hand, and jerked the cord which attached him to the cylinder trailing five metres behind him. This was the ideal landfall. Then, suddenly, it was not so easy!

The bright red tip of a cigarette flared briefly, like a fire-fly in the dark, downstream not twenty metres from him, freezing him into immobility in that instant, with half his body out of the water.

The flare died down, then disappeared altogether—there was the thick trunk of an old willow-tree curving out over the stream where it had disappeared—then the fire-fly flew in an arc, out over and into the stream, to be instantly extinguished. Not easy—but too easy: now it was his own undeserved good luck which froze him, congealing the sweat on his face as he sank back noiselessly into the stream, crouching down in it.

He had been foolish; he had not accorded Colonel Butler his dummy1

absolute confidence—and, even worse, not backing his own judgement of Duntisbury Chase, because it had seemed to him over-imaginative: Audley’s not trained to set up anything like this . . . But don’t underrate him for that reason: if there is anything there, waiting for you, it’ll be maybe amateurish . . . But, if he has anything to do with it, it won’t be predictably amateurish.

So we’ll take precautions—

He swore silently under his breath, easing himself closer to a tall growth of water-weeds on the edge of the stream. The damnable truth was that this was both predictable and amateurish, and he had still nearly been caught by it: predictable, because the air photos had shown a narrow footbridge across the Addle not far downstream from here, so that this was where he ought to have expected a hazard . . . and