Maxim drove slowly back to the huge nineteenth-century church that stood right up against the low dock wall – or perhaps it was the churchyard wall; in any event it was no more than four feet high – and the ever-open gate down past the warehouses to the Aldam Dock.
"I don't know where we're going to set up here," Caswell said, and Maxim didn't know either. The lowness of the wall and the fact that the gate was on a corner of two streets, each quite wide, made it near impossible for an ambush.
"Somebody had better go in for a shufti," Maxim decided. "You, Jim. With a radio. "
It had to be that way: if you split your force, you had to split your commanders. Caswell took Blagg's pistol; they set the radios at channel 3 and agreed to change to 5, 7, 9 and11in that order if they had to shift. Caswell walked quickly through the gate and was lost behind a stack of forklift truck pallets. He had about three hundred yards to go to the Seesperling's berth.
On the other side of the church, the town centre side, therewas a small car park. Maxim backed the Renault in there, behind a truck loaded with what looked like sections of oil pipeline, and they waited. The walkie-talkie was jammed inthe driver's window so that its telescopic aerial stuck upoutside, and it murmured to itself. Agnes doubled herself over to light a cigarette near the floor of the car, trying to hide theflare of her lighter. They went on waiting. There was no wayto call Caswelclass="underline" his own radio would be turned off, that close to theenemy.
He came in surprisingly strongly. "Jim. "
"Go."
"Pilot van's just leaving. White job."
"Roj."
They got just a glimpse of the van beyond the church, thirty seconds later. They waited. "Jim."
"Go."
"Customs just leaving. Blue Allegro. And two men on bikes."
They saw that, too, again just about on thirty seconds later. The bikes – probably dockers – came up Church Road past them, much more dangerous than a car driver surrounded by his own noise and light. Maxim snapped off the radio until they were gone.
Caswell was calling.
"Sorry. Go."
"One car left, a green Metro. I can't see anybody around."
"Roj."
The night went silent again. Blagg whispered: "Would they be using radio themselves, sir?"
"Likely enough." Now that CB radio was legal, they wouldn't even have had to pinch sets from the Intelligence Service's quartermasters. But there was nothing he could do about it.
The walkie-talkie suddenly squawked: "Hey, did I hear a good buddy out there ready to shoot the bull? This is the Dog in the Smog tooling down the rip strip and feeling kinda lonesome. Do you copy?" It was an adenoidal Birmingham voice trying to sound like a Tennessee truck driver.
Maxim glared at the radio as if it had bitten him, but the voice came back, jamming the waveband with more verbose CB garbage. Given a pause, Maxim snapped: "You fucking moron," which wasn't military radio procedure either, and switched to channel 5. It stayed silent.
Then at last: "Jim."
"Go."
"I've got Sims and 83 out on the deck. Two others with them. Nobody who looks like Eismark."
"Roj."
"Well, I'm damned," Agnes said. "We're in the right place."
"D'you think the old lady's there already?" Blagg asked.
Maxim and Agnes glanced at each other, then she said: "No. Sims and his bloke will have gone aboard to set up a deal. She's stored away somewhere."
Caswell's voice crackled: "Sims is using a walkie-talkie. sb's getting off the boat. Going for the Metro."
"Roj." Maxim started the engine. "We're going to have to stop him."
"He's most likely going for the old lady," Agnes said. "He could lead us there. "
"He'll talk once I get at him."
"You and your trusty ammonia? It could take hours. "
Caswell reported: "Metro's on its way."
Maxim pulled the radio back into the car. "Wehave to stop him. I can't tail him, not through an empty town, this time of night."
"Of course you can't, but I can. Shift your arse."
Maxim scrambled around to the passenger side as she slid across under the wheel. The green Metro slipped out of the gates and up past them; there was one person in it. Without turning on the lights, Agnes jumped the Renault forward to the edge of the park just as the Metro turned left at the end of the road.
"Stanhope Street," Maxim said, juggling the map, a torch and the radio. "He has to go either left or right in three hundred yards."
Still lightless, the Renault bounded forward and slewed into Stanhope Street; the Metro's tail-lights swung left.
"Bridge Street. Long and looks dead straight. Leads out of town southwards."
It was indeed dead straight – it was the main road feeding the west side of the docks – but became a series of humped-backed bridges over offshoots of those docks. Agnes let the Metro go over the first, out of sight, and then hurled the Renault down to it, jammed to a stop and crept up for a look. And so she went on, driving like a rifleman moving forward under fire, using the car with a skilled savagery that made Maxim and Blagg, men who lived with machinery, wince as they would have done had she used the walkie-talkie to hammer in a nail. But she kept a quarter of a mile back from the Metro yet out of its sight until it crossed the last bridge and turned down the Swinefleet Road along the south bank of the Humber. The soft-sprung Renault screamed around after it.
The radio said: "Jim," already noticeably fainter.
"Harry. We're behind him, going south out of town, by the river. Shin"
The street lights had suddenly ended and they plunged into a moonless darkness and Agnes braked heavily to let the Metro's lights vanish beyond the next corner. Then she snapped on the headlights and tore forward.
"Jim – check in every ten minutes if you can."
"Roj."
One side of the road was a walled dike holding in the river; if the Metro turned, it could only be to the right. That was some consolation for moving in briefly lit rushes and suddenly dark stops as they rounded a bend. But at least the road would be dead flat as long as it clung to the river, and there were occasional tiny villages with lamps up on telephone poles to give them some respite.
Then, inevitably, came the bend which had no tail-lights showing beyond it. Agnes must have been prepared because the lights came on and she changed to an easy cruising drive. "Get your heads down. He may just be checking his back. "
They kept going for another thirty seconds or so, and Agnes said: "He turned off. I've gone past, it should be far enough for him not to hear. D'you want to wait, or walk it?"
The car coasted to a stop and Maxim lifted his head off his knees. "I'll walk it. You follow up in a couple of minutes."
He ran – which he hadn't wanted Blagg to try and do -back the quarter mile to the corner, where a wooded lane led off beside a disused-looking wooden barn. The Metro, unlit, was parked just on the verge; the van, if it was there, would be up the track beside the barn. He waited a few seconds, recovering his breath. As a hiding place it made good sense, since they could have sat on top of the dike a few yards away and watched the Seesperling come chugging upstream and timed their trip into Goole itself precisely.
Gun in hand, and using the Metro as cover, he reached the corner of the barn and paused to listen. There was a mutter, a pause, another mutter. Of course: somebody was speaking German on a radio. He eased an eyebrow around the barn and there was the van, a windowless Bedford of some dark colourhe couldn't make out, with a man perched half on the driving seat under an interior light and using a long-lead microphone. There was no sign of any second man.