“What are you doing?” shouted the Inspector.
Benedikt continued to move, past the blanket-covered, lashed-down object in the centre of the cargo-space.
“Keep yer ‘air on—I ain’t goin’ anywhere. I’m jest goin‘ to phone the missus to tell ’er I’ll be late ‘ome.”
Benedikt smiled to himself in the darkness. Whether he was on guard duty or not, Blackie Nabb had put two and two together satisfactorily, and was about to warn the Eight Bells of the impending after-hours raid.
But meanwhile, the business of the night was beginning at last, because from outside, at the back of the van, there came the sound of the scrape and clunk of the locking-bar which secured the doors.
He sank on to one knee beside the piano—it probably was a piano, and maybe Jack Worsdale was a van-driver, and the police really dummy1
had intended to raid Duntisbury Royal to catch after-hours drinkers.
His finger touched and ran along the rough bark—it felt like genuine tree-bark—which covered the Special Air Service’s cylinder, past the false branches—genuine plastic—until they felt the cord at the end, with its wrist-loop.
One of the doors banged open and a bright torch-beam transfixed him.
“Nothing in here, sir,” called the policeman. “Just the piano, it looks like—like he said. It’s all clear.”
The policeman moved away, leaving the door open, sweeping the bushes with his torch.
Now it had to be done quickly. It was all clear, and the policeman would have scouted round with his torch to make sure of that, in so far as it was possible. And Blackie Nabb was in the phone-box, and it was unlikely that they’d have more than one guard this far from the village.
The cylinder was unnaturally heavy—heavy not because of its contents, but because it had to float correctly and unobtrusively, like a water-logged tree-trunk. But he was ready for its weight, and the van’s position—front wheels already in the water, within a metre of the footbridge alongside it—cut the distance he had to move to a minimum. Half a dozen noiseless steps took him into the water, and if he made any splash it was covered by the extra banging the policeman made as he closed up the van. Even before that had finished he had ducked down under the footbridge into the darkness and deeper water downstream, cradling the cylinder in his dummy1
arms.
The immediate need was to put distance between himself and the vicinity of the ford, in case Mr Nabb strayed round to the footbridge, for the reflected light from the headlights of the furniture van illuminated the pool that was scoured below the bridge by the flow from off the hard surface of the ford. But the action wasn’t as easy as the thought, for though the water took the weight of the cylinder from him, the thick mud of the river-bed sucked down his feet, holding him back.
River— R. Addle— River Addle—the map had called the blue line which straggled along the margin of Duntisbury Chase. But a river it was not; perhaps in mid-winter, or when the spring floods rose, it might aspire to that description; but here, even in this deeper pool in the middle of a damp English summer, its mud and water between them could only submerge him to chest-height.
His feet came free at last, and he was able to push forward, half-swimming, half-walking, in the wake of the cylinder, which had already begun to drift away on the sluggish current.
At least the distances were miniature, though: a dozen noiseless strokes and trailing branches brushed his head as he reached the exit from the pool; and then, as utter darkness closed around him, he could already see a paler area ahead of him, like the night outside a tunnel, which marked the end of the woods surrounding the ford, and the beginning of the open fields through which the River Addle flowed, with only occasional willow-trees on its banks, until it reached the trees of the Roman villa site on the edge of the village.
dummy1
River, indeed! thought Benedikt contemptuously, as his feet sank into another shallow part of the bed of the ‘river’, and one of his hands touched the SAS cylinder, which had snagged on a tree-root
—
What am I doing here, encased in a wet-suit, crawling up a muddy English ditch like this towards an English village, for all the world as though I’m penetrating a high-risk Comecon installation, somewhere east of the line? It’s ridiculous!
He pushed the cylinder aside and waded out into the open, beyond the last straggle of undergrowth. An image of the air photograph Colonel Butler had shown him reproduced itself in his brain: from this point he had perhaps a mile of river to negotiate, little more, along the valley bottom, although the road he had travelled a few hours before—the rolling English drunkard’s road—had meandered for twice that distance.
What am I doing here?
Herzner’s voice answered him: Whatever it is he wants you to do, within reason— do it. This has the smell of one of their domestic scandals, so it may be tricky . . . But Colonel Butler is a man of honour, as well as influence in high places. If we assist him he will not forget it . . .And Audley . . . Audley will either go to the very top or into the outer darkness— perhaps Audley and Butler together . . . one more Intelligence failure over here, and they are well-placed to pick up the pieces and take over. So you are in the nature of an investment, Schneider— a professional and political investment—
dummy1
Benedikt did not much like being an investment, the more so if there were politics involved, and most of all when someone as equivocal as Dr David Audley was involved in them. It would be better—or, at least, it would be simpler—to see himself as a loyal ally of an ancient comrade-in-arms ... in the mud of the Addle stream now, but once in the mud of the Lasne, where the road to the field of Waterloo crossed it, straining to get von Billow’s guns across to save Wellington’s army, with old Blücher’s challenge in his ears: Come on, lads! Would you have me break my word!
Treading mud, he could see just above the banks of the Addle, across the fields on each side.
Well, at least there was one thing he could do, which had nothing to do with being a loyal ally, even: he could see— literally see—
how good the British image intensifiers were, courtesy of the SAS, as supplied to the Falklands reconnaissance groups!
Well . . . they were good—they were really quite good, and almost as good as those on which he had trained—
Good enough, anyway, to observe the herd of cows munching peacefully far away across the field to his right . . . and no hazards or obstacles in prospect except those designed to give the fox-hunters good practice, with not one yard of barbed-wire, which the riders hated as much as any infantryman.
He pushed forward, keeping to the deepest centre of the stream, where he could almost swim. After a few strokes, the cord on his wrist tugged at his stroke, but a second tug freed the cylinder—that was how the plastic branches were designed: to look real, but to bend and give way as soon as extra pressure was exerted on them, dummy1
to allow the ersatz tree-trunk to follow its master—
It was easy. With the weak current behind him, and the water holding him up and taking the weight of the cylinder, he could make something like walking pace, with his head below the bank.
At intervals, he stood up—always between the clumps of willows to which any inexperienced sentry would inevitably gravitate—but each sweep identified only animals . . . first cows, which took no notice of him, and later sheep, which bleated weakly and uneasily, as though they couldn’t quite remember the nights when the wolves had hunted their remote ancestors, but nevertheless hadn’t lost some dim frightening memory of long-extinct enemies, from which their loving guardians, the good shepherds, protected them all the way to the slaughter-house. But their warning protests were quickly silenced when he sank down into the stream and let himself drift by their wallows, careful only not to sample any of the fouled water.