‘Then why the flare? Yes, it’s a contradiction, the flare, but with a zoom lens, one that would change its focal length, at an extreme length, the sort of thing they use at ball games, the light transmitted would be very little. But with the flare and the high-speed transmission, it would be possible to get very close-up pictures of the mountain. Probably the flare was triggered automatically by the reception apparatus as soon as the “picture”, so to speak, was too dark. The camera was held on to the mountain by an electro gyroscope controlled by a compass set to the correct bearing.’
‘They don’t leave anything to chance, do they?’ I said. He gave me a sour look. I went on, ‘It’s a wonder they couldn’t do without the flare, then no one would have known about any of it.’
‘Not at all, we monitored the whole thing as I keep telling you. I’ll demonstrate if you like. You won’t do anything silly, will you?’ the old man asked. ‘Because…’
‘I’m not under-rating you, sir,’ I said.
‘Swell,’ he smiled. ‘Nor I you,’ and carried on. ‘Obviously the party last night was because of what we were doing on the mountain. I don’t have to tell you that.’ I tried to look like a man who knew, but in reality kicked myself for being fooled so easily. A party: I should have suspected that it wasn’t that social here. I wondered if Dalby knew that secret experiments were planned for that night of the garden-party. The Brigadier had been there perhaps to make sure we were. It all made sense now. I guessed that it was the neutron bomb that they were about to explode.[22] The information we had been given about it being a Uranium 238 bomb with a SUVOM trigger had been true but on the night of the party a team of people had been ‘crash programmed’ into the explosion area to modify the bomb. Without a break in the conversation I said, ‘You mean the insertion of the neutron device?’
He nodded.
‘What did you do, a ’copter shuttle from the flat top?’
‘Something like that,’ the Brigadier said, with a smile like a scythe.
He wheeled a metal trolley to the centre of his office. He began to talk as he threaded up the 16mm projector that stood on it.
‘We have infra-red cameras on towers monitoring the road and the shipping channel. Some towers are manned, most are remotely-controlled. Each camera transmits on the same frequency and the receiving apparatus shows…’ He threaded the last loop of the big crackle-finish grey machine, and closed the metal gate. The desk lamp went out and a grey scratched rectangle of light fell across the wall as a screen rose into position with a soft purring sound. 15. 14. 13. The large leader numbers gave place to the hastily processed film.
The Brigadier continued ‘…shows the pattern as a distorted map of the side of the island.’ The screen was dark except for a white worm-shape that came into the frame from the bottom centre, moving upwards. ‘That’s your car,’ the Brigadier said. I guessed that it was a composite of Dalby’s car and my car but said nothing. As the short white worm-shape got to the top of the screen there was a horizontal flip across the screen.
The Brigadier said, ‘That was when the manned tower was connected to the electric cables. That camera went out of action then, of course, but luckily we have overlap on the camera fields. Now you see.’ The white worm had shrunk to a dot as my car halted, and suddenly the screen became a confusion of very intense horizontal bands of varying widths and intensity. ‘That’s the high-speed TV transmission; so fast that we are getting hundreds of TV pictures per frame.’ The bands became darker now. ‘Somewhere here the flare went off.’
Apart from the small white dot made by my Lincoln the screen was quite black.
‘Egg beaters.’ The two helicopters came in from the side of the frame; they were quivering little blotches. I watched them return to my car and circle round it. So far the film had shown me nothing of which I was not already aware. But the film lab had been very thorough, they had spliced on the end of the film the incident of my arrest: Two cars coming down the road from the top of the screen, one up into the frame from the bottom. Now I had learnt something. This equipment showed a distinct difference between one car and two. I knew that Dalby had made that journey a few yards ahead of me along the highway. It meant that Dalby had found a way of making his car entirely invisible to the radar defences of the island.
It was easy to understand the small slip of paper I’d found in the cranberry box now. The VLF radio wavelength was a standard method of speaking to submerged submarines. The compass bearing was to set the electro gyroscope on the camera. My only luck in the whole deal was in not putting that slip in my pocket.
Furthermore the TV transmission was required because a neutron bomb is not one big flash like an H-bomb, it is designed to hang over a city, bombarding it with neutrons. Only pictures of its progress would be any use. A still picture would reveal little or nothing.
The next day they showed me the black metal twisted parts of the HSTV unit. The big heavyweight handles were less twisted than the thin metal casing. They showed me photos and stuff. It seemed they’d got a pretty fair set of finger-prints off the unit. They were mine, of course. I’d never touched the damn thing, but I didn’t doubt that everyone was being sincere.
Chapter 25
[
The days following were clotted together in an inseparable mess. It stayed 4.22 all the time — one long fluorescent day punctuated by interrogations like TV commercials in a peak-hour play.
For an hour each day I was medically examined. I had IQ tests, interviews, and was told to write my autobiography. I matched triangles and circles and put wooden rods into racks. I was tested for reaction, speed, co-ordination and muscular efficiency. My blood was measured, and identified, its pressure checked and recorded. Birth marks, I never knew I had, were photographed and tape measured. Cold showers and hot lights blurred into a month, like blades of grass blur into a field. I ceased to remember that Jean or Dalby existed, and sometimes I doubted if
Sometimes the guards would tell me the time, but mostly they’d say it had just turned 4.20. One day or perhaps night, it was the first guard change after cornflakes, anyway, a US Army Captain came into Waiting Room No. 3. I didn’t get up off the stretcher, I had begun to feel at home there. He was about forty-two and walked like a European, that is, like a man who wears braces to hold his trousers up. His hands were wrinkled and looked like no amount of soap would ever remove the farm soil that lay dark and rich in his pores. The lobe of one ear was missing, and it was easy to imagine the village midwife, tired and clumsy in the small hours of a Balkan morning.
‘Jo napot kivavok,’ he said.
I’d met this greeting in the Cafe Budapest a couple of times and had always found that ‘kezet csokolom’ (kiss your hand) had given good mileage with the younger waitresses.
With this boy it went over like a lead balloon.
‘Make on the feet, mack,’ he said, changing his approach.
He spoke with a heavy accent liberally sprinkled with idiom. The idiom was to convince you he was the all- American boy, and gave him respite during which to translate the next sentence.
‘No spik Inglese,’ I said, giving a characteristic shrug and presenting the palms of both hands upwards.
‘Op, or I kick you some!’
‘Just as long as you don’t damage my watch,’ I said.
He opened the breast pocket of his uniform jacket and unfolded a white paper about 10 in by 8 in.
‘This is your deportation order, signed by the Secretary of State.’ He said it like he was going to paste it into the back of his vest pocket edition of Thomas Paine. ‘You can think yourself stinking lucky that we are exchanging you for two fly boys that know senators, or you’d be for a slow tcheeeek.’ He made a revolting noise as he ran his finger across his windpipe.
‘I don’t dig you, Uncle Tom,’ I said. ‘Why is England exchanging me for two fliers?’
‘England ho ho ho!’ he said; it was a merriment symbol. ‘England! You’re not going to stinking England, you pig, you going back to stinking Hungary. They’ll like you there for fouling up the detail. Ho ho! They’ll tcheeeek ho
