Carberry had given Shaw a photograph of Mr Ackroyd, too, so that he could identify the little man, if necessary, before he’d managed to wangle a properly casual meeting; and he’d told him quite a lot about Mr Ackroyd, and the full story of Project Sinker.
He’d said, booming out his exclamation marks, “It really is something big, old boy — the Old Man’s perfectly right! They’re blasting away the rock in some of those caves below Arrow Street, which runs along the top of the east face. It’s quite well advanced already! They’re making the caverns big enough to take these nuclear-powered subs, you see, and use the Rock itself as a kind of underground port, fully protected from the air—”
“Even against H-bomb attack?”
“We-ell, yes. As near as one can possibly hope, anyway! Can’t think of anywhere else on God’s earth where they’d have a better chance — put it that way!”
Shaw had agreed with that. Under those millions of tons of living rock, beneath that great towering natural edifice, they would be pretty secure. Carberry had continued, “In time, as I dare say you’ve been told, there’ll be other refueling bases, but that’s very much in the future — they take a longish while to establish, and Gib’s our great white hope for the next few years! You can imagine the security — officially it’s being given out that the project’s concerned with providing safe berthing facilities for ordinary surface craft— the smaller escorts and anti-submarine vessels and so on— in time of war. All the people working on it are hand-picked, but even they don’t get the whole picture, and all the area is heavily screened by security police, while the labour’s provided by specially graded volunteers from among the dockyard mateys in the home ports.”
Shaw nodded. “The Old Man said something about that.”
“Now, what you might call the hub of the whole thing is in that power-house leading off Dockyard Tunnel, where this man Ackroyd has his infernal machine! He’s due to demonstrate it soon after you arrive, and we’re all keeping our fingers crossed that it’s going to work! It’s what you might call a dicey do, that machine, and Ackroyd’s last test wasn’t very satisfactory. An entirely unexpected defect cropped up. ’Course, it’s been dealt with, but I don’t care for the sound of it, old boy!”
“How’s that?”
Carberry had bunched his lips and examined his fingernails for a moment; then he’d looked up, and his voice had become tauter, less plummy after that, and Shaw had known he was going to tell him something fairly startling. Carberry had that technical mind — unlike Shaw — and knew what he was talking about.
They approached the Straits a day or so later under a cloudless blue early-morning sky and a hot sun which warmed away the chills of the outward run in a grateful glow of penetrating heat which made Shaw sweat into his thin suiting of tropic-weight cloth.
Shaw watched the coast slip past the cruiser’s port side. Cape St Vincent, on the south-western tip of Portugal, faded astern, and after that Cape Trafalgar brought him the first sight of Spain. Then Tarifa, and they were in the Straits, with Cires Point, in Spanish Morocco, to starboard, Gibraltar riding high into view, vast and rocky, looming above Carnero.
By courtesy of the cruiser’s captain, Shaw was on the bridge as the Cambridge turned up for Algeciras Bay.
Captain Hugo Kent-Thomas was a vast bull of a man; the eyes, small and rather glittering, seemed sunken and lost in an expanse of red-leathery skin above the rolls of pink, bristly flesh which overlapped the stiffly starched high neckband of his white uniform. Legs apart, hands clasped behind his back, he stood and took up most of the available room in the fore-part of the navigating bridge, a solid chunk of opaqueness round which navigator and officer-of-the-watch had to peer as best they could. Owing to the weather, Kent-Thomas had been up there nearly all the time since leaving Portsmouth, and when he hadn’t been there he’d been snatching an hour or two of sleep. He’d taken such meals as he’d needed on the bridge. The result had been that he’d had no time to yam with Shaw except very briefly just after the agent had embarked, and once even more briefly when they’d met on deck at sea. He was making up for this lack of hospitality by giving Shaw the freedom of his bridge now.
His voice rumbled out. “Well — there you are, Shaw.” A heavy arm made a sweeping gesture towards Gibraltar. “Safe delivery of the all-important Admiralty Inspector — and won’t they be pleased to see you! Gib’s all yours now.” He sighed, memory of his soaking hours on that bridge still too fresh. “Wish I had your job, Shaw.”
Shaw didn’t comment.
“Damn-all to do and all day to do it in — what?”
Shaw answered that with a laugh. “Don’t underestimate the Admiralty civilian, sir. I’ll probably find I’ve got to do a fuller day’s work than ever I did when I was in the Service.” (That ‘when I was in the Service’ came off his tongue quite easily, Shaw was glad to note.)
Kent-Thomas grunted. Shaw had gathered already that he had a prejudice against pretty well all civilians. Kent-Thomas asked, “Where did you get to in the Service, Shaw? Odd we never ran across each other, y’know.”
Shaw said, “I… spent a good deal of time in the Admiralty.”
“Oh — really?” The Captain looked round, raised his eyebrows disdainfully. “What department?”
“Just messing around,” said Shaw vaguely. He was watching the Spanish coast.
“H’m. About all they do in the Admiralty, isn’t it — mess around?”
“That’s right, sir.” Shaw knew well enough that such was the general opinion in the Fleet; but he thought of Mr Latymer, and Carberry, and the others in the outfit, those who had died and those who still lived a little longer… then, shortly before they began making in for the entrance to the inner harbour, Kent-Thomas said suddenly, “Sorry not to have seen more of you, Shaw. Pity you’ve become a damn’ civilian.” He hesitated. “We’ll be in Gib for a while… come aboard again for a meal and a yarn sometime if you feel like it.”
“Thank you, sir. I’d like to do that if I’m here for long.”
“You don’t know how long the job’ll take?”
“No.”
“Where d’you go when it’s done?”
“Back to London, to mess around again, sir.” Surreptitiously Shaw crossed his fingers, wondering if he’d see London again, see Debonnair. He always wondered that, though he knew nothing was ever as bad as imagination made it. The pain started up again, cruelly.
Half an hour later Shaw left the cruiser at the Detached Mole in the Captain’s motor-boat, headed in for the Tower Steps. In the increasingly hot sunshine, Shaw disembarked, looked up at the flag of the Rear-Admiral drooping limply above the Tower. The Rock of Gibraltar stood before him, three miles long, barely a mile across at its widest point, but high, seemingly sheer, overwhelming the buildings of the little town clustered at its foot and on the lower slopes. The Rock, continuously garrisoned by British regiments since 1704, symbol of England’s former might, one of the ancient keys to that Pax Britannica which once had kept the world in tune — the whole huge edifice speckled white and brown and dusty green in the burning heat. North and west lay the blue hills of Spain, mysterious Andalusia, land of sun and grape, passion and hot blood, of mountains, and almost inaccessible mountain-towns isolated in those high, barren hills.