“I see you as a Major,” said Mr. Fortescue. “With a 1918 Victory Medal and a 1939 defense medal.”
“The Africa Star,” said Mr. Calder firmly.
One week later Mr. Calder, wearing a Service dress hat half a size too large for him and a battledress blouse which met with some difficulty round the waist, was walking up the path which led to the barn. It was ten o’clock, dusk had just fallen, and around the farm there was a scene of considerable activity as F Troop, B Battery of the Seventeenth Field Regiment settled down for the night.
Four guns were in position, two in front of and two behind the barn. The gun teams were digging slit trenches. Two storm lanterns hung in the barn. A sentry on the path saluted Mr. Calder, who inquired where he would find the Troop Commander.
“He’s got his bivvy up there, sir,” said the sentry.
Peering through the dusk Mr. Calder saw a truck parked on a flat space, beyond the barn, and enclosed by scattered bushes. Attached to the back of the truck, and forming an extension of it, was a sheet of canvas, pegged down as a tent.
Mr. Calder circled the site cautiously. It seemed to him to be just the right distance from the barn and to have the right amount of cover. It was the place he would have chosen himself.
He edged up to the opening of the tent and looked inside. A young subaltern was seated on his bedroll, examining a map. His webbing equipment was hanging on a hook on the back of the truck.
Mr. Calder stooped and entered. The young man frowned, drawing his thick eyebrows together; then he recognized Mr. Calder and smiled.
“You’re one of our umpires, aren’t you, sir,” he said. “Come in.”
“Thank you,” said Mr. Calder. “May I squat on the bedroll?”
“I expect you’ve been round the gun position, sir. I was a bit uncertain about the A.A. defenses myself. I’ve put the sentry slap on top of Slay Down, but he’s out of touch.”
“I must confess,” said Mr. Calder, “that I haven’t examined your dispositions. It was something — well, something rather more personal that I wanted a little chat about.”
“Yes, sir?”
“When you buried her” — Mr. Calder scraped the turf with his heel — “how deep did you put the body?”
There was silence in the tiny tent, which was lit by a single bulb from the dashboard of the truck. The two men might have been on a raft, alone, in the middle of the ocean.
The thing which occurred next did not surprise Mr. Calder. Lieutenant Blaikie’s right hand made a very slight movement outward, checked, and fell to his side again.
“Four feet, into the chalk,” he said quietly.
“How long did it take you?”
“Two hours.”
“Quick work,” said Mr. Calder. “It must have been a shock to you when a night exercise was ordered exactly on this spot, with special emphasis on the digging of slit trenches and gun-pits.”
“It would have worried me more if I hadn’t been in command of the exercise,” said Lieutenant Blaikie. “I reckoned if I pitched my own tent exactly here, no one would dig a trench or a gun-pit inside it. By the way — who are you?”
Mr. Calder was particularly pleased to notice that Lieutenant Blaikie’s voice was under firm control.
He told him who he was, and he made a proposal to him.
“He was due out of the army in a couple of months time,” said Mr. Calder to Mr. Behrens, when the latter came up for a game of backgammon. “Fortescue saw him, and thought him very promising. I was very pleased with his behavior in the tent that night. When I sprung it on him, his first reaction was to reach for the revolver in his webbing holster. It was hanging on the back of his truck. He realized that he wouldn’t be able to get it out in time, and decided to come clean. I think that showed decision and balance, don’t you?”
“Decision and balance are most important,” agreed Mr. Behrens. “Your throw.”
George Sumner Albee
Foreign Agent
Michael Gilbert’s “The Future of the Service” and George Sumner Albee’s “Foreign Agent” — we simply couldn’t resist the impulse to couple two counterespionage stories, both by outstanding authors. You will find the contrast interesting — indeed, we found it fascinating — the contrast between British and American intelligence ops at work, one at home, the other in a foreign land, and each playing a deadly serious, if not a desperate, game of wits at high, tremendously high, stakes...
Algiers is pronounced not Algiers but El Jay; the Sahara is spelt with a Z and looks more like Texas range-land than it does the dune-breasted desert you see in the movies; and there are other things in North Africa about which we Americans have unrealistic notions. But there are things, also, about which we are quite realistic.
The young Arab who stepped down at Bou Zanna from an old Chevrolet truck piled high with canned tomatoes and slab codfish wore scuffed slippers with tire-tread soles, an undergarment like a rayon nightgown, a burnoose of whitish wool to reflect the sun and keep him cool, and a pale blue turban. Not having bathed for nine weeks, he stank, but in the dry air not too badly — something like a bunch of over-ripe bananas. His skin was dark, his eyes were darker. He came from Sioux Falls and his name was Warren Tate.
The truck bustled on southward toward Ghardaya, over the good road the French had laid down in safer times for luxurious P.L.M. buses, and Warren balanced his cheap fiber suitcase on his turban and walked splay-footed into the village. The Arab walk was not hard to mimic — not in such shoes.
Bou Zanna was a cluster of mud-brick huts the color of cocoa. There was a fonduk, a corral good for half a dozen dromedaries at most; there was a dusty public square in which the owner of an ambulatory restaurant was broiling chunks of fresh-killed mutton over charcoal.
“Peace,” said Warren Tate. “I seek my Great-Uncle, Ahmed ben Ahbes.”
“The two-story house at the end of the street,” said the restaurateur, his arms gloved with blood and flies. “You will see his horses with their heads out of the windows on the ground floor. Beauties.”
Ahmed the son of Ahbes was a powerful, dignified man of forty-odd with a square beard, dyed blackest black, and lime-green eyes far handsomer than those of the women who, peering and tittering, gathered behind him.
“Good evening, Uncle,” said Warren. “I’m Sellim.”
“You are expected.” Ahmed eyed wives and daughters with no great enthusiasm. “Hens cackle,” he said. “Leave your suitcase. We will promenade ourselves.” He used the French expression.
They passed some ragged boys playing with a hoop who, touching fingertips to forehead, lip, and breast, saluted them respectfully because Ahmed was a man of substance. Under dusty palms, barefoot women hoisted water from Bou Zanna’s only well. Fifty meters farther along they stepped onto open desert With the sun setting, it was the color of a ripe apricot every ledge casting its long purple shadow. The clearness of the air was beyond belief; pebbles, cobblestones looked as if they had been scrubbed clean and thrust beneath a magnifying glass; each foot-high shrub threw golden sparks. An expanse of black pumice a mile away shone like a reef of coal.
“Your Arabic is very good,” commented Ahmed.
“I learned it at a United States Army language school,” replied Warren. “But I’ve been in Algeria six months, and I have a good ear.”
“You’re the first American I’ve seen since tourist days,” lamented Ahmed. “I used to rent horses to Americans, and sell them sand roses — vous savez, the little crystalline flowers made by the heat of the sun. Tell me, what do your fellow Americans think of this mess of ours?”