Len Deighton - Spy Story

‘They were frightened it was going to put guns ashore in Ulster?’ Ferdy asked.

‘Who knows what?’ said Frazer. ‘There were two Russian intelligence trawlers and a destroyer off Malin Head, too. You can see they’d be worried.’

‘So?’

‘We stopped Class A Radio traffic for five and a half hours.’

‘And the sub?’

‘They tracked it out past Wexford yesterday afternoon. Looks like they were just taking our pulse.’ He smiled as he unlocked the door of his car. It was well cared for, and all dressed up in black vinyl, Lamborghini-style rear-window slats, and even a spoiler.

‘They’re tricky bastards!’ said Ferdy resignedly. He blew on his hands to warm them. ‘Who said something about splicing that damned mainbrace?’

Frazer got into the driver’s seat and twisted round to unlock the rear doors. ‘It might have been me,’ he said.

I reached under my oilskin coat and found a dry handkerchief to polish the rain off my spectacles. Frazer started the car.

Ferdy Foxwell said, ‘Never mind the dollars and the cinnamon toast and grain-fed steaks … six weeks without a drink: it’s positively unnatural.’

Frazer said, ‘Not all the skippers are as bad as Fireball.’

Ferdy Foxwell settled back into the rear seat of the car. He was a huge man, well over six feet tall and broad enough to carry it. He was in his early fifties but still had enough brown wavy hair to visit a smart barber once a month. But his hair was no more an advert for the barber than were his rumpled suits for his Savile Row tailor, or his curious inability to spell for the famous public school to which he’d also sent his two sons. ‘A drink,’ said Ferdy. He smiled. His crooked, gapped teeth needed only gold wire to complete the image of a mischievous child.

The Admiralty van containing our tapes went at the regulation fifteen miles an hour. We followed at the same pace, all the way to the exit. It was a double compound, with a large check-point at each gate, and the wire twenty feet tall. Newcomers were always told that HMS Viking had been a prison camp during the war but they were wrong, it had been an experimental torpedo testing unit. But it would have done, it would have done.

The dog handlers were drinking hot coffee in the guard tower and the dogs were howling like werewolves. The sentry waved us through. We turned on to the coast road and went down past the housing, the Officers Club and cinema. The streets were empty but the coffee-shop car park was full. The lights of the housing were lost in a flurry of sea mist that rolled in upon us. The Admiralty van continued along the coast road to the airport. We took the high road, climbing steeply up the narrow road that leads to the moors and the pass over the Hamish.

Defoliated by Iron Age farmers, the land is now good for nothing but a few black-faced sheep. This ancient tilted edge of Scotland has only a scattering of poor soil upon the hard granite that does not weather. I felt the wheels hesitate on an ice patch, and ahead of us the higher ground was grey with last week’s snow. Only the red grouse can survive outdoors on this sort of moorland, sheltering under the heather and feeding upon its shoots, moving gently all the time so that the snow does not bury them.

From here the valley formed an enormous stadium, roofed by the hurrying black clouds. Halfway up its steep far side there was a huddle of grey stone cottages smudged with smoke from open fires. One of them was a cramped little pub.

‘We’ll stop for a drink at The Bonnet?’

‘You’ll not get me past it,’ I said.

‘My God, it’s cold,’ said Ferdy, and rubbed the condensation from the window to see how far it was to the pub.

‘There’s the one I’m going to get next year,’ said Frazer. A large light-blue BMW was on the road behind us. It had a left-hand drive. ‘Second-hand,’ Frazer added apologetically. ‘It shouldn’t cost me more than a new one of these. My next door neighbour has one. Says he’ll never buy another English car.’

Cars, politics or climate, for a Scotsman they were English if bad, British if good. Perhaps he sensed my thoughts. He smiled. ‘It’s the electrics,’ he said.

I could hear it now, just a faint burr of the Highlands. It would make sense for the navy to use a local man for this kind of job. Strangers could still find a barrier of silence once the cities were left behind.

Frazer took the hairpin bends with exaggerated care. On one of the turns he stopped, and reversed, to pull tight enough to avoid the snow-banked ditch. But the blue BMW stuck with us, following patiently. Following more patiently than was natural for a man who drives such a car.

Frazer glanced in his mirror again. ‘I think we should,’ he said, voicing our unspoken thoughts, and Ferdy wrote down the registration number in his crocodile-covered note pad. It was a Düsseldorf registration, and even while Ferdy was writing it, the BMW gave a toot and started to overtake.

Whatever was the extent of his intention, he’d chosen his moment well. The BMW squeezed past us in a spray of powdery snow from the drift on our left, and Frazer’s nervous reaction was to swerve away from the flash of light blue and the hard stare of the bearded man in the passenger seat.

The road was downhill and the ice was still hard and shiny up here on the top of the Hamish. Frazer fought the wheel as we swung round – as slowly as a boat at anchor – and slid almost broadside down the narrow mountain road.

We gathered speed. Frazer pumped the brake pedal, trying vainly to snatch at the road. I could see only the sheer drop, down where a clump of firs were waiting to catch us a thousand feet below.

‘Bastards, bastards,’ mumbled Frazer. Ferdy, flung off-balance, grabbed at the seat back, the roof and the sun visor, so as not to grab at Frazer and kill us all.

There was a thump as the rear wheel struck some stones at the road edge, and the tyres for a moment gripped enough to make the differential whine. Frazer was into bottom gear by now, and at the next patch of stones the car whimpered and ceded to his brake pedal enough for him to narrow the angle at which we were sliding. The road was more steeply downhill and the low gear had not slowed us enough to take the steep bend ahead. Frazer hit the horn in two loud blasts before we hit the banked snow that had collected around the edge of the hairpin, like piped icing round a birthday cake. We stopped with a bang of hollow steel, and the car rocked on its suspension.

‘My God,’ said Ferdy. For a moment we sat still. Praying, sighing or swearing according to inclination.

‘I hope you’re not going to do that every time someone tries to overtake,’ I said.

‘Just foreign registrations,’ said Frazer.

Frazer started the engine again. Gently he let in the clutch and the car waddled out of the drift. He took the middle of the road, and at no more than twenty-five miles an hour we went all the way down to the bridge and up the next climb all the way to The Bonnet.

He pulled into the yard there. There was a crunch of gravel and a soft splintering of ice. The BMW was already parked but none of us remarked upon the way its driver had nearly killed us.

‘I’m not sure I’d enjoy it,’ said Frazer, talking of the voyage but studying our faces as if to see the effect the near-accident had had on us. ‘I’m a destroyer man myself … like to keep my head above water.’

I would have described Frazer as an office-boy, but if he wanted to play Long John Silver it was all right by me.

‘Peace time,’ pronounced Ferdy, ‘a submarine trip north is no different to trailing Russians round the Med in an intelligence trawler.’

‘In winter the Med’s a damned site rougher,’ I said.