Elene said: 'Five pounds twelve and six, you wouldn't say that if you knew what he pays me, five pounds thirteen and six, six pounds-' 'Don't you like the job?'
She gave him a direct look. 'I'd do anything to get out of here.'
'What did you have in mind' He was very quick.
She shrugged, and went back to her addition. Eventually she said:
'Thirteen pounds ten shillings and four pence.'
'How did you know I'd pay in sterling?'
He was quick. She was afraid she had given herself away. She felt herself begin to blush. She had an inspiration, and said: 'You're a British officer, aren't you?'
He laughed loudly at that. He took out a roll of pound notes and gave her four-teen. She gave him his change in Egyptian coins. She was thinking:
What else can I do? What else can I say? She began to pack his purchases into a brown-paper shopping bag.
She said: 'Are you having a party? I love parties.'
'What makes you ask?'
'The champagne.'
'Ah. Well, life is one long party.'
She thought: I've failed. He will go away now, and perhaps he won't come back for weeks, perhaps never; I've had him in my sights, I've talked to him, and now I have to let him walk away and disappear into the city. She should have felt relieved, but instead she felt a sense of abject failure.
He lifted the case of champagne on to his left shoulder, and picked up the shopping bag with his right hand. 'Goodbye,' he said.
'Good-bye.'
He turned around at the door. 'Meet me at the Oasis Restaurant on Wednesday night at seven-thirty.'
'All right!' she said jubilantly. But he was gone.
It took them most of the morning to get to the HUI of Jesus. Jakes sat in the front next to the driver; Vandam and Bogge sat in the back. Vandam was exultant. An Australian company had taken the bill in the night, and they had captured-almost intact-a German wireless listening post. It was the first good news Vandam had heard for months.
Jakes turned around and shouted over the noise of the engine. 'Apparently the Aussies charged in their socks, to surprise 'em,' be said. 'Most of the Italians were taken prisoner in their pajamas.'
Vandam had heard the same story. 'The Germans weren't sleeping, though,' he said. 'It was quite a rough show.'
They took the main road to Alexandria, then the coast road to El Alamein, where they turned on to a barrel track-a route through the desert marked with barrels. Nearly all the traffic was going in the opposite direction, retreating. Nobody knew what was happening. They stopped at a supply dump to fill up with petrol, and Bogge had to pun rank on the officer in charge to get a chitty.
Their driver asked for directions to the hill. 'Bottle track,' the officer said brusquely. The tracks, created by and for the Army, were named Bottle, Boot, Moon and Star, the symbols for which were cut into the empty barrels and petrol cans along the routes. At night little lights were placed in the barrels to illuminate the symbols.
Bogge asked the officer: 'What's happening out here? Everything seems to be heading back east.'
'Nobody tells me anything,' said the officer.
They got a cup of tea and a bully-beef sandwich from the NAAFI truck. When they moved on they went through a recent battlefield, littered with wrecked and burned-out tanks, where a graveyard detail was desultorily collecting corpses. The barrels disappeared, but the driver picked them up again on the far side of the gravel plain.
They found the hill at midday. There was a battle going on not far away: they could hear the guns and see clouds of dust rising to the west. Vandam realized he had not been this near the fighting before. The overall impression was one of dirt, panic and confusion. They reported to the command vehicle and were directed to the captured German radio trucks.
Field intelligence men were already at work. Prisoners were being interrogated in a small tent, one at a time, while the others waited in the blazing sun. Enemy ordnance experts were examining weapons and vehicles, noting manufacturers! serial numbers. The Y Service was there looking for wavelengths and codes. It was the task of Bogge's little squad to investigate how much the Germans had been learning in advance about Allied movements.
They took a truck each. Like most people in Intelligence, Vandam had a smattering of German. He knew a couple of hundred words, most of them military terms, so that while he could not have told the difference between a love letter and a laundry list, he could read army orders and reports. There was a lot of material to be examined: the captured post was a great prize for Intelligence. Most of the stuff would have to be boxed, transported to Cairo and perused at length by a large team. Today's job was a preliminary overview.
Vandam's truck was a mess. The Germans had begun to destroy their papers when they realized the battle was lost. Boxes had been emptied and a small fire started, but the damage had been arrested quickly. There was blood on a cardboard folder: someone had died defending his secrets. Vandam went to work. They would have tried to destroy the important papers first, so he began with the half-burned pile. There were many Allied radio signals, intercepted and in some cases decoded. Most of it was routine-most of everything was routine-but as he worked Vandam began to realize that German Intelligence's wireless interception was picking up an awful lot of useful information. They were better than Vandam had imagined-and Allied wireless security was very bad.
At the bottom of the half-burned pile was a book, a novel in English.
