Десмонд Бэгли - Running Blind

Suddenly he chuckled. ‘Remember the Fishing War?’

I nodded. The so-called Fishing War was a dispute between Iceland and Britain about off-shore fishing limits, and there was a lot of bad blood between the two fishing fleets. Eventually it had been settled, with the Icelanders making their main point of a twelve-mile limit.

Valtyýr laughed, and said, ‘Surtsey came up and pushed our fishing limit thirty kilometres farther south. An English skipper I met told me it was a dirty trick — as though we’d done it deliberately. So I told him what a geologist told me; in a million years our fishing limit will be pushed as far south as Scotland.’ He laughed uproariously.

When we left Surtsey I abandoned my pretended interest and went below to lie down. I was in need of sleep and my stomach had started to do flip-flops so that I was thankful to stretch out, and I fell asleep as though someone had hit me on the head.

My sleep was long and deep because when I was awakened by Elin she said, ‘We’re nearly there.’

I yawned. ‘Where?’

‘Valtyýr is putting us ashore at Keflavik.’

I sat up and nearly cracked my head on a beam. Overhead a jet plane whined and when I went aft into the open I saw that the shore was quite close and a plane was just dipping in to land. I stretched, and said, ‘What time is it?’

‘Eight o’clock,’ said Valtyýr. ‘You slept well.’

‘I needed it after a session with you,’ I said, and he grinned.

We tied up at eight-thirty, Elin jumped ashore and I handed her the wrapped rifles. ‘Thanks for the ride, Valtyýr.’

He waved away my thanks. ‘Any time. Maybe I can arrange to take you ashore on Surtsey — it’s interesting. How long are you staying?’

‘For the rest of the summer,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know where I’ll be.’

‘Keep in touch,’ he said.

We stood on the dockside and watched him leave, and then Elin said, ‘What are we doing here?’

‘I want to see Lee Nordlinger. It’s a bit chancy, but I want to know what this gadget is. Will Bjarni be here, do you think?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Elin. ‘He usually flies out of Reyjkavik Airport.’

‘After breakfast I want you to go to the Icelandair office at the airport here,’ I said. ‘Find out where Bjarni is, and stay there until I come.’ I rubbed my cheek and felt unshaven bristles. ‘And stay off the public concourse. Kennikin is sure to have Keflavik Airport staked out and I don’t want you seen.’

‘Breakfast first,’ she said. ‘I know a good café here.’

When I walked into Nordlinger’s office and dumped the rifles in a corner he looked at me with some astonishment, noting the sagging of my pockets under the weight of the rifle ammunition, my bristly chin and general uncouthness. His eyes flicked towards the corner. ‘Pretty heavy for fishing tackle,’ he commented. ‘You look beat, Alan.’

‘I’ve been travelling in rough country,’ I said, and sat down. ‘I’d like to borrow a razor, and I’d like you to look at something.’

He slid open a drawer of his desk and drew out a battery-powered shaver which he pushed across to me. ‘The washroom’s two doors along the corridor,’ he said. ‘What do you want me to look at?’

I hesitated. I couldn’t very well ask Nordlinger to keep his mouth shut no matter what he found. That would be asking him to betray the basic tenets of his profession, which he certainly wouldn’t do. I decided to plunge and take a chance, so I dug the metal box from my pocket, took off the tape which held the lid on, and shook out the gadget. I laid it before him. ‘What’s that, Lee?’

He looked at it for a long time without touching it, then he said, ‘What do you want to know about it?’

‘Practically everything,’ I said. ‘But to begin with — what nationality is it?’

He picked it up and turned it around. If anyone could tell me anything about it, it was Commander Lee Nordlinger. He was an electronics officer at Keflavik Base and ran the radar and radio systems, both ground-based and airborne. From what I’d heard he was damned good at his job.

‘It’s almost certainly American,’ he said. He poked his finger at it. ‘I recognize some of the components — these resistors, for instance, are standard and are of American manufacture.’ He turned it around again. ‘And the input is standard American voltage and at fifty cycles.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Now — what is it?’

‘That I can’t tell you right now. For God’s sake, you bring in a lump of miscellaneous circuitry and expect me to identify it at first crack of the whip. I may be good but I’m not that good.’

‘Then can you tell me what it’s not?’ I asked patiently.

‘It’s no teenager’s transistor radio, that’s for sure,’ he said, and frowned. ‘Come to that, it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’ He tapped the odd-shaped piece of metal in the middle of the assembly. ‘I’ve never seen one of these, for example.’

‘Can you run a test on it?’

‘Sure.’ He uncoiled his lean length from behind the desk. ‘Let’s run a current through it and see if it plays “The Star-Spangled Banner.”‘

‘Can I come along?’

‘Why not?’ said Nordlinger lightly. ‘Let’s go to the shop.’ As we walked along the corridor he said, ‘Where did you get it?’

‘It was given to me,’ I said uncommunicatively.

He gave me a speculative glance but said no more. We went through swing doors at the end of the corridor and into a large room which had long benches loaded with electronic gear. Lee signalled to a petty officer who came over. ‘Hi, Chief; I have something here I want to run a few tests on. Have you a test bench free?’

‘Sure, Commander.’ The petty officer looked about the room. ‘Take number five; I guess we won’t be using that for a while.’

I looked at the test bench; it was full of knobs and dials and screens which meant less than nothing. Nordlinger sat down. ‘Pull up a chair and we’ll see what happens.’ He attached clips to the terminals on the gadget, then paused. ‘We already know certain things about it. It isn’t part of an airplane; they don’t use such a heavy voltage. And it probably isn’t from a ship for roughly the same reason. So that leaves ground-based equipment. It’s designed to plug into the normal electricity system on the North American continent — it could have been built in Canada. A lot of Canadian firms use American manufactured components.’

I jogged him along. ‘Could it come from a TV set?’

‘Not from any TV I’ve seen.’ He snapped switches. ‘A hundred ten volts — fifty cycles. Now, there’s no amperage given so we have to be careful. We’ll start real low.’ He twisted a knob delicately and a fine needle on a dial barely quivered against the pin.

He looked down at the gadget. ‘There’s a current going through now but not enough to give a fly a heart attack.’ He paused, and looked up. ‘To begin with, this thing is crazy; an alternating current with these components isn’t standard. Now, let’s see — first we have what seems to be three amplification stages, and that makes very little sense.’

He took a probe attached to a lead. ‘If we touch the probe here we should get a sine wave on the oscilloscope...’ He looked up. ‘...which we do. Now we see what happens at this lead going into this funny-shaped metal ginkus.’

He gently jabbed the probe and the green trace on the oscilloscope jumped and settled into a new configuration. ‘A square wave,’ said Nordlinger. ‘This circuit up to here is functioning as a chopper — which is pretty damn funny in itself for reasons I won’t go into right now. Now let’s see what happens at the lead going out of the ginkus and into this mess of boards.’