that of the egregious Glaushof. Anyone who could call four no trumps without a diamond in his hand had to be a cretin. 'So the situation is that Glaushof has this man Wilt in custody and is presumably torturing him and no one is supposed to know he's here. The operative word being 'supposed'. Obviously whoever sent him knows he never returned to Ipford.'
'Yes, sir,' said the Corporal. 'And the Major's been trying to get a message on line to Washington.'
'See it's coded garbage,' said the Colonel, 'and get a copy to me.'
'Yes, sir,' said the Corporal and disappeared.
Colonel Urwin looked across at his deputy. 'Seems we could have a hornet's nest,' he said. 'What do you make of it?'
Captain Fortune shrugged. 'Could be any number of options,' he said. 'I don't like the sound of that hardware.'
'Kamikaze,' said the Colonel. 'No one would come in transmitting.'
'Libyans or Khomeini might.'
Colonel Urwin shook his head. 'No way. When they hit they don't signal their punches. They'd come in loaded with explosives first time. So who's scoring?'
'The Brits?'
'That's my line of thinking,' said the Colonel, and wandered across to take a closer look at the sporting print. 'The only question is who are they hunting, Mr Henry Wilt or us?'
'I've checked our records and there's nothing on Wilt. CND in the sixties, otherwise non-political.'
'University?'
'Yes,' said the Captain.
'Which one?'
The Captain consulted the computer file. 'Cambridge. Majored in English.'
'Otherwise, nothing?'
'Nothing we know of. British Intelligence would know.'
'And we're not asking,' said the Colonel, coming to a decision. 'If Glaushof wants to play Lone Ranger with the General's consent he's welcome to the fan-shit. We stay clear and come up with the real answer when it's needed.'
'I still don't like that hardware in the car,' said the Captain.
'And I don't like Glaushof,' said the Colonel. 'I have an idea the Ofreys don't either. Let him dig his own grave.' He paused. 'Is there anyone with any intelligence who knows what really happened, apart from that Corporal?'
'Captain Clodiak filed a complaint against Harah for sexual harassment. And she's on the list of students attending Wilt's lectures.'
'Right, we'll start digging back into this fiasco there,' said the Colonel.
'Let's get back to this Radek,' said Glaushof, 'I want to know who he is.'
'I've told you, a Czech writer and he's been dead since God knows when so there is no way I could have met him,' said Wilt.
'If you're lying you will. Shortly,' said Glaushof. Having read the transcripts of Wilt's confession that he had been recruited by a KGB agent called Yuri Orlov and had a contact man called Karl Radek, Glaushof was now determined to find out exactly what information Wilt had passed to the Russians. Understandably it was proving decidedly harder than getting Wilt to admit he was an agent. Twice Glaushof had used the threat of instant death, but without any useful result. Wilt had asked for time to think and had then come up with H-bombs. 'H-bombs? You've been telling this bastard Radek we've got H-bombs stashed here?'
'Yes,' said Wilt.
'They know that already.'
'That's what Radek said. He said they wanted more than that.'
