Len Deighton - Horse Under Water

‘O.K.,’ I said, ‘you’re in – what’s your message?’

He spoke very rapidly. ‘I’m seconded to work with you, sir, on account of my skin-diving experience. I’ve brought my equipment in the car … .’

‘I can see you have,’ I said. Sitting in the car was a young blonde.

‘Yes sir.’ He ran his hand through his hair and smiled nervously. ‘Charlotte Lucas-Mountford – Admiral Lucas-Mountford’s daughter.’ I said nothing. ‘London told us that we should send someone with underwater experience and someone to look after the household. Charlotte speaks fluent Portuguese and I have the …’

I closed the door and slowed him to a standstill with my eyes. I took a long time lighting a cigarette and I didn’t offer them.

‘Sit down, sonny,’ I said, ‘sit down and dust off your mind. You think you’re on a ripping little fun-jaunt, don’t you?’

‘I’m a Clearance Diver, sir, R.N. certificate. You’ll need an underwater expert for this job.’

‘I will, will I?’ I said. ‘Well, I don’t know what you call “expert”, but the man we already recruited spent nearly four years as an Italian frogman. He once spent a night standing in pitch darkness on the floor of Gibraltar Harbour mending a timing device while the Navy threw every grenade they could find into the harbour. They only stopped in the morning because they calculated no one could be alive down there. Then he swam up under the North Mole, fixed a charge weighing 550 lb. to a tanker and swam back to Algeciras. He did that twenty years ago when you were wearing a Mickey Mouse gas-mask and saving your coupons for a Mars bar. If you are going to work here there’s not going to be any half-way for ladies and it’ll mean being a lot smarter than you’ve been so far. Why do you think London sent that message in code to the embassy? Why do you think Lisbon couldn’t send me a wire? They trusted you with it because they wanted to make sure it didn’t get intercepted, and yet as soon as I bend a little muscle at you you broadcast it.’ I waved down his explanations. ‘Go and get your equipment,’ I said.

Giorgio made some quiet remarks about Clive’s bright-green undersea gear, but it was much more professional than I feared it might be. As for Charlotte, I’d never seen her before, but there were two things about her one could never forget. However, she set to work in the kitchen in a way that surprised me. They were both dying to prove how efficient and tough they were.

After breakfast we had a conference. Joe spread the linen Admiralty charts across the table and showed us the way the U-boat was lying. The echo-sounder charts were strips of electrolytic paper about seven inches wide. Down each was a thick black uneven band (the ocean floor) and a thin black uneven band, separated by a quarter-inch of white. The thinner of the two bands was fish or objects lying along the ocean floor. On one chart a shape could be interpreted. I was prepared to take an expert’s word that it resembled a U-boat.

According to Singleton, Naval Intelligence were very keen to get the log of the U-boat as it was of a new type about which they had very little information. I asked Giorgio and Joe what the chances were.

Joe said, ‘If the log wasn’t dumped overboard before the sub. sank, it’s easy.’

‘You know where to find the log book? I can ask London about stowage procedures.’

Giorgio said, ‘It will not, I think, prove necessary. I have encountered some experience of the life aboard the German craft.’ We exchanged thin grins.

‘And if they did jettison it?’

‘In that case it depends upon: one,’ Giorgio tapped his index finger, ‘how far the boat traversed between the jettison and sinking, and two, if the Kelvin Hughes apparatus will encounter such a small flat objective which will likely submerge into the mud, and three,’ the gold ring on his finger flashed in the bright sunlight, ‘if the boat has been moved much distance by means of the underwater currents which I suspect are strong.’

After that Giorgio asked Joe about tidal movement at surface, absolute slack-water times and slack-water duration, and they discussed ways of setting out a diving timetable in order to use those facts to advantage.

Charlotte brought in a large tin pot of coffee and a plate of black figs. She said, ‘After I’ve drunk my coffee I’ll go and do the bedroom.’ There was a moment or two in which we were all alone with our thoughts.

There was no point in getting the boat into position so late in the day. I told everyone to relax that afternoon, we’d have another briefing that night and go out on the morning tide for a reconnaissance.

Dawlish had cleverly realized that the way to prevent someone deserting from a situation was to put him in charge of it.

The sea was kicking idly at the beach that Friday afternoon. Charlotte was nearly inside a white bathing suit, Giorgio was doing handstands that had her oo-ing and clapping her brittle little hands together, and Singleton was jumping in and out of the water like a yo-yo. I told Giorgio to swim out to sea with Singleton and let me know what sort of endurance he had.

‘Go out about two hundred and fifty yards and come in again. Don’t hurry him, but let him know you’re watching him.’

‘Yes, it is understood,’ said Giorgio, and went to tell Singleton.

I watched them run across the soft damp sand lengthening the curved imprints that marry space and time in huge dotted arabesques. Then Joe talked about the echo-sounder.

‘I put the sounder in when we first got a whisper of this job three – no, nearly four – weeks ago; we’ve used it for fishing ever since. It’s deadly efficient and some of the fishermen have been talking about buying them for themselves.’

‘Isn’t there a possibility that they’ll follow us out to locate the fish?’

‘No, I disconnected it yesterday and I told the old man to say it had gone wrong.’ He paused, carefully designing a sentence that wouldn’t sound impertinent. ‘Why doesn’t London do this operation through official channels – and get local cooperation?’

‘The whole thing stinks, Joe. To tell you the truth, I have an awful feeling that we are sitting out here bleating like a goat in a tiger trap. That message Singleton brought about the log book. It doesn’t ring true. The only department still interested in Nazi U-boats is the Historical Department. How could it be of importance to a modern intelligence department?’ I told Joe about my being followed by the two cars, and how one of them belonged to Henry Smith, the Cabinet Minister. I told him about Butcher, Smith’s dirty-work man who had sold us the ice-melting documents. I told him that I thought it all connected up. ‘And what about this Giorgio character?’ I finished. ‘Why does he have to meet me at a weird little place like Los Palacios?’

‘He’s been doing a job underwater inside a gasometer in Seville.’

‘Where is his equipment?’ I said immediately.

‘He leaves a set there,’ Joe said. ‘It’s a contract job. He really is O.K.; he’s been checked and re-checked, but there is an American living here in the village that I’m not at all sure about …’

As he said it Giorgio and Singleton came out of the water. Giorgio was tanned dark-brown and moving like he’d just come out of the shower. He brushed his chest as though still wearing his silver tie. Singleton had his mouth open and was gulping down deep draughts of air, throwing his head back and running an open hand through his long fair hair. They walked slowly up to where Joe and I were sitting and waited for words of praise.

‘How do you feel, Singleton?’ I asked.

His white chest heaved. ‘O.K., sir … absolutely … first rate, sir.’