James Long - Sixth Column

‘Sir.’

It wasn’t just in the offices within the base – it was in the club, the restaurant, the bank, the workshops and even, most worryingly for the security staff, down in the depths of the Saddlebush bunker. After the first five minutes the word went round, spread by the separate intercom system, that no one was to pick up any phone until further notice. Normal work ground gradually to a halt. But the Commander was slow to absorb the fact that this was only part of it. In the houses clustered in the northern end of the base compound the phones were also ringing, and wives of base personnel were being exposed to an outside world they didn’t often encounter. Even those who had chosen to live outside the base, in the surrounding villages, weren’t immune.

The local peace groups had worked long and hard. Their first source was the pile of internal phone directories which they had collected on various illicit trips into the base, copied and passed around among themselves. Then there was another file, put together slowly and laboriously by a dedicated group. It had meant going through each successive issue of the local phone book, collecting new names, looking at where they lived and whether they sounded American, then ringing them under some pretext to see if they were base workers living in the surrounding area. They’d been astonishingly successful.

When the word reached the group around the Base Commander that the families were all being called, it elicited a series of very contradictory responses. The Commander was shocked and furious. The impassive older man next to him began to think, as he always did, about whether there was anything in this set-back that could be turned to advantage. There was a problem he was dealing with and in these unexpected events, he began to discern a possible solution. He moved rapidly in search of a suitable helper.

Since noon, Heather had made six calls to offices inside the base. Alone in the quiet, cluttered room she used as a study in her small stone cottage, she wished they could all be doing this together. It would be much more fun if she could break off and tell some of the others the funnier moments along the way, but she knew they didn’t have access to any one place with enough phones to make it work, knew also that the electronic trespass had to be organized with care, by post and word of mouth, lest the electronic ears they were trying to block should get to hear of what they were planning and take steps to frustrate it.

It had been Margo who had the idea of deliberately misleading the other side while at the same time checking out once and for all what they believed to be true, that their own phones were targets of the buggers on the Stray; so they’d made carefully orchestrated phone calls discussing the timetable and the arrangements for the trespass, phone calls that had been designed to suggest the trespass would be a physical event. Then they’d sent a car past to take a look a couple of hours before noon and had a good laugh at the fuss they seemed to have caused. So someone out there was listening. It came as no surprise.

Heather moved on to the seventh number on her list. Of the first four, two had allowed her to say her piece, without comment except a polite, ‘Thank you ma’am,’ one had slammed the phone down straight away and the fourth had broken into a tirade of foul-mouthed abuse until someone at his own end of the line had interrupted him. The last two calls had just rung and rung so she had switched to the list of house numbers.

This one rang twice and was answered by a very American female voice, high pitched, weary, nasal. ‘Lanie Gerow.’

‘Oh, hello,’ she said, ‘I just thought I’d call you for a chat.’

‘Who is this, please?,

‘You don’t know me. My name’s Heather. I live near by. We’re just a group of people anxious to extend the hand of friendship to newcomers to our community.’

The woman’s voice brightened a bit. ‘Gee, that’s nice. I haven’t met too many British people since we moved in. My old man says British people don’t like us too much.’

‘Oh, that’s a shame. It’s not your fault that your husband works for the NSA. I’m sure you didn’t ask him to.’

‘Well, that’s right,’ Lanie said with enthusiasm, and then a little note of caution crept in to her voice. ‘How do you mean, not my fault?’

Heather kept her voice breezy. ‘Well, I thought that was what you meant about your old man. I mean if the British don’t like what the NSA is doing here that’s no reason to be nasty to families like yours, now is it?’

‘Well, I guess that’s right,’ said Lanie, ‘but Pacman, he ain’t doing nothing wrong here, just keeping the world safe for democracy.’

‘There’s a lot of good men who believe that, Lanie. Like I say, it’s not their fault the NSA’s doing things it shouldn’t really be doing, listening in on our phones for example. Probably even listening in to this call.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you, Heather. I don’t hold with that either. Not back home and not here. If my Pacman’s doing that, it ain’t right.’

‘I’m glad to hear you say that, Lanie.’

‘I been feelin’ it. Just haven’t found the opportunity to say it before.’

Heather knew she mustn’t let this one slip away. ‘Lanie, I’ll give you my number. If you want to talk more, give me a call.’

In the normal way of things, Pacman didn’t go inside the dish buildings. That was for engineers. The message came from Oily Gandrell in person, springing him from his shift. That made it unusual and it made it interesting. He expected Gandrell to come with him but he waved a goodbye as Pacman got in the Buick. He wondered about it as he drove down the road into the dish farm and bumped left on to the unfinished new track which led to the latest addition to the Stray’s battery of giant dishes.

There was a Nissan coupé parked outside but no one was in it. The door in the base of the golf ball opened as he came to it. He’d seen the man who stood there around the base but only fleetingly, a wizened man in late middle age whose creased leathery skin fitted closely round the bones of his face under a brush of close cropped vertical hair. His eyes gave nothing away.

‘Mr Gerow,’ he said in a rasping voice, ‘I apologize for any inconvenience or disruption I might be causing to your work.’

‘No need,’ said Pacman, wondering. The man’s eyes looked yellow but that could have been the light filtering through the translucent plastic of the soaring dome above their heads. The gantry loomed above them, the dish installed on its pivots ready to swing up to receive the beam from the bird. For now though it was standing vertical, focused uselessly on the horizon, waiting for the infinite minutiae of connections for its commissioning.

‘The name’s Ray,’ said the man putting out his hand, ‘from OS/M5.’

Office of Security, thought Pacman with a sudden tingle, the spooks’ spooks.

‘You want to check me out,’ said the man nodding at the phone on the wall, ‘Gandrell’s on the other end.’

Pacman shook his head. ‘I buy it.’

‘We got a little problem you can help with. Detach you from duty from time to time. Intensive monitoring of a few targets. Personal for me and my mob. Could just include one or two unorthodox operations.’

Unorthodox operations. Pacman thought about it. ‘Do I get paperwork?’

The older man looked at him coolly. ‘No, I guess not.’

The four words hung between them and the meaning was quite clear. Even by the NSA’s unaccountable standards this was an unaccountable assignment. If anything misfired no one but Pacman himself would be in the firing line. Private snooping would be the explanation, a regrettable departure from this officer’s impeccable record, a lapse of judgement with implications for his future career. End of story.