Ken Follett - Eye Of The Needle

She was not sure how much damage it would do, but she felt certain it would be no help.

An hour later she was regretting her cleverness.

Trudging through the mud, soaked to the skin, the sleeping child a dead weight over her shoulder, she wanted nothing more than to lie down and die. The booby trap seemed, on reflection, dubious and risky: gasoline would burn, not explode; if there was not enough air in the mouth of the can it might not even ignite; worst of all, Henry might suspect a trap, look under the bonnet, dismantle the bomb, pour the petrol into the tank and drive after her.

She contemplated stopping for a rest but decided that if she sat down she might never get up again.

She should have been in sight of Tom's house by now. She could not possibly have got lost even if she had not walked this path a dozen times before, the whole island just was not big enough to get lost on.

She recognised a thicket where she and Jo had once seen a fox. She must be about a mile from Tom's home. She would have seen it, except for the rain.

She shifted Jo to the other shoulder, switched the shotgun from one hand to the other, and forced herself to continue putting one foot in front of the other.

When the cottage finally became visible through the sheeting rain she could have cried with relief. She was nearer than she thought-perhaps a quarter of a mile.

Suddenly Jo seemed lighter, and although the last stretch was uphill-the only hill on the island-she seemed to cover it in no time at all.

"Tom!" she called out as she approached the front door. "Tom, Tom!" She heard the answering bark of the dog.

She went in by the front door. "Tom, quickly!" Bob dodged excitedly about her ankles, barking furiously. Tom couldn't be far away; he was probably in the outhouse. Lucy went upstairs and laid Jo on Tom's bed.

The wireless was in the bedroom, a complex-looking construction of wires and dials and knobs. There was something that looked like a Morse key; she touched it experimentally and it gave a beep. A thought came to her from distant memory, something from a schoolgirl thriller-the Morse code for S.O.S. She touched the key again: three short, three long, three short.

Where was Tom?

She heard a noise, and ran to the window. The jeep was making its way up the hill to the house.

Henry had found the booby trap and used the petrol to fill the tank. Where was Tom?

She rushed out of the bedroom, intending to go and bang on the outhouse door, but at the head of the stairs she paused. Bob was standing in the open doorway of the other bedroom, the empty one.

"Come here, Bob," she said. The dog stood his ground, barking. She went to him and bent to pick him up. Then she saw Tom.

He lay on his back, on the bare floorboards of the vacant bedroom, his eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling, his cap upside down on the floor behind his head. His jacket was open, and there was a small spot of blood on the shirt underneath. Close to his hand was a crate of whisky, and Lucy found herself thinking irrelevantly, I didn't know he drank that much. She felt his pulse.

He was dead.

Think. think.

Yesterday Henry had returned to her cottage battered, as if he had been in a fight. That must have been when he killed David. Today he had come here, to Tom's cottage, "to fetch David," he had said. But of course he had known David was not there. So why had he made the journey? Obviously, to kill Tom. Now she was completely alone.

She took hold of the dog by its collar and dragged it away from the body of its master. On impulse she returned and buttoned the jacket over the small stiletto wound that had killed Tom. Then she closed the door on him, returned to the front bedroom and looked out of the window.

The jeep drew up in front of the house and stopped. And Henry got out.

Lucy's distress call was heard by the corvette.

"Captain, sir," said Sparks. "I just picked up an S.O.S. from the island."

The captain frowned. "Nothing we can do until we can land a boat," he said.

"Did they say anything else?"

"Not a thing, sir. It wasn't even repeated."

"Nothing we can do," he said again. "Send a signal to the mainland reporting it. And keep listening."

"Aye, aye, sir."

It was also picked up by an MI8 listening post on top of a Scottish mountain. The R/T operator, a young man with abdominal wounds who had been invalided out of the RAF, was trying to pick up German Navy signals from Norway, and he ignored the S.O.S. However, he went off duty five minutes later, and he mentioned it to his commanding officer…

"It was only broadcast once," he said. "Probably a fishing vessel off the Scottish coast-there might well be the odd small ship in trouble in this weather."

"Leave it with me," the C.O. said. "I'll give the Navy a buzz. And I suppose I'd better inform Whitehall. Protocol, you know."

"Thank you, sir."

At the Royal Observer Corps station there was something of a panic. Of course, S.O.S. was not the signal an observer was supposed to give when he sighted enemy aircraft, but they knew that Tom was old, and who could say what he might send if he got excited? So the air raid sirens were sounded, and all other posts were alerted, and antiaircraft guns were rolled out all over the east coast of Scotland and the radio operator tried frantically to raise Tom.

No German bombers came, of course, and the War Office wanted to know why a full alert had been sounded when there was nothing in the sky but a few bedraggled geese. So they were told.

The Coastguard heard it too.

They would have responded to it if it had been on the correct frequency, and if they had been able to establish the position of the transmitter, and if that position had been within reasonable distance of the coast. As it was, they guessed from the fact that the signal came over on the Observer Corps frequency that it originated from Old Tom, and they were already doing all they could about that situation, whatever the he11 that situation was.

When the news reached the below-deck card game on the cutter in the harbour at Aberdeen, Slim dealt another hand of blackjack and said, I'll tell you what's happened. Old Tom's caught the prisoner of war and he's sitting on his head waiting for the army to arrive and take the bugger away."

"Bollocks," said Smith, with which sentiment there was general agreement.

And the U-505 heard it.

She was more than thirty nautical miles from Storm Island, but Weissman was roaming the dial to see what he could pick up and hoping, improbably, to hear Glenn Miller records from the American Forces Network in Britain, and his tuner happened to be on the right wavelength at the right time.

He passed the information to Lieutenant Commander Heer, adding, "It was not on our man's frequency."

Major Wohl, who was still as irritating as ever, said, "Then it means nothing."

Heer did not miss the opportunity to correct,him. "It means something," he said. "It means that there may be some activity on the surface when we go up."

"But this is unlikely to trouble us."

"Most unlikely," Heer agreed.

"Then it is meaningless."

"It is probably meaningless."

They argued about it all the way to the island.

And so it worked out that within the space of five minutes the Navy, the Royal Observer Corps, MI8, and the Coastguard all phoned Godliman to tell him about the S.O.S.

Godliman phoned Bloggs, who had finally fallen into a deep sleep in front of the fire in the scramble room. The shrill ring of the telephone startled him, and he jumped to his feet, thinking that the planes were about to take off.

A pilot picked up the receiver, said "Yes" into it twice and handed it to Bloggs. "A Mr Godliman for you."

"Hello, Percy."

"Fred, somebody on the island just broadcast an S.O.S."