Gustav Hartmann had been with them that night. He joined in the conversation. Unusually, he seemed depressed.
'They enjoy it, you see, Lindsay. Fighting. Killing It has been going on for centuries in this accursed cesspit of Europe. They don't mind who they fight – just so long as the killing goes on. Read the history of the Balkans. Short of an enemy, they fight themselves. Croat against Serb, and so on. Tonight the news for you is good, for me it is bad, for all three of us it is terrible…'
'I don't understand,' said Paco.
By now they had come together almost as a small group of intimates. Lindsay, the Englishman; Hartmann, the German; and Paco, part-English, part-Serb. Dr Macek was not yet a fully paid-up member of the club, but he had visitor's rights.
'Reader,' Hartmann explained, 'brilliantly hides his transceiver by night and transports it by day on one of the mules. He has bribed the mule-train driver with gold. He keeps in touch with the outside world.
Stalin has driven back the Wehrmacht along the whole front. So, Lindsay, for you it is official good news. For me it is official bad news. You see?'
'No, I don't,' said Paco. 'You ended up by saying that for all three of us it is terrible…'
'You believe in crystal balls?'
Hartmann took out his pipe and sucked at it enviously. There was no question of lighting it. Heljec had shot one of his own men who had started a bonfire to warm his freezing hands when the temperature had dropped after nightfall.
'Crystal balls? Seeing into the future?' Paco cocked her head to one side and peered quizzically at the German. She had come to like Hartmann. 'Can anyone do that?' she asked.
'Maybe in dreams we see what we would give an arm not to see.'
'Now he talks of dreams…' Paco spread out both hands towards Lindsay propped against a rock in a gesture of helplessness. 'He is making fun of me, Lindsay…'
'I think that when people look back in forty years' time from now,' Hartmann continued, 'they will see what a catastrophe it was to permit Stalin to roll over half, maybe most of, Europe. Generations yet unborn will have their lives blighted by this war.'
'The wise man speaks,' said Paco, pulling his leg. 'Let him go on, interjected Lindsay.
'Wise man, go on…'
'People forget history. Today England fights Germany. England's great enemy was once France, before that Spain. I think England's real ally is Germany, that the day will come when she will realize this. Germany will realize it, too. But how much of the home of civilization – Europe – will have been lost?'
'The whole shooting match,' said Lindsay and fell unconscious.
'Care for a bit of foreign travel, Whelby?' Colonel Browne asked.
'Would it be for long, sir?'
Whelby forced himself to maintain his usual offhand manner, to conceal the shock Browne's suggestion had given him. The idea of no longer being Browne's deputy, of being exiled to a distant outpost away from the centre of operations didn't suit him at all.
He had been summoned urgently to Ryder Street and it was close to midnight. So far as he knew the only two occupants of the building now were himself and Browne. And the caretaker downstairs who unlocked the front door and locked it again after he entered the building.
'Cairo,' said the Colonel.
Browne was worried about something. He kept pacing round the office, hands clasped behind his back, shooting glances at his visitor as though trying to make up his mind.
'A permanent posting, sir?' ventured Whelby.
'No. A flying visit. I sense an atmosphere of lethargy out there. Place has become a backwater since Monty cleared Rommel out of North Africa and invaded Sicily and Italy with the Yanks. Their signals reflect that inertia. I need information. Bloody soon.'
'The subject being?'
Again the hesitation, the quick, darting glances. Whelby was, in contrast, imperturbable. Browne, he knew, disliked his deputy being absent. Whelby had made himself indispensable for the day-to-day running of the department.
'It's Lindsay,' Browne said abruptly. 'You don't get on with him too well, the word is.'
'I've only met him on two or three occasions. He struck me as an able enough chap…'
'I want you to go out there and raise Cain, find out just what's happened to him. They simply must have some word about Lindsay – good or bad. If not, they'd better get it…' Browne paused and then decided to go ahead. 'This comes down from God – who smokes cigars…'
It had indeed, which was what had thrown Browne into turmoil. Where is Lindsay? I want him back. Expense no object. Action this day …
Christ Almighty, Browne thought.. this day. He'd be lucky to get news next month. And Whelby, sitting relaxed, was careful not to show the triumph he felt at being selected for this mission as the Colonel continued.
'Your father's an Arabist,' Browne recalled. 'Knows the Middle East. Some of it must have rubbed off on you. Your plane leaves tomorrow night from Lyneham, Wiltshire. And this never happened – your trip to Cairo. Sign attendance sheets before you go – showing you were in London…'
'I travel under my own name?' Whelby enquired.
Impassive on the surface, underneath his mental turbulence was as great as Browne's. Departure in twenty-four hours – somehow he had to contact Savitsky before he left.
'Like hell you do,' Browne replied. 'You're Peter Standish for the duration – of this mission…'
He extracted something from his breast pocket. A British passport landed on the desk together with an envelope. Whelby picked up the passport and examined it, his manner still diffident.
Mr Peter Standish. National Status: British Subject by birth. The usual appalling photograph of himself. They had even weathered the gold seal so it had a well- worn look, a document carried and used for ages.
'Standish is a bit John Buchanish, wouldn't you say?' Whelby remarked as he pocketed his passport.
'Rather suits your personality, we thought,' Browne said and he smiled. 'That envelope contains the name of the chap you contact, Egyptian currency and a letter of introduction. What more could you wish for?'
The American Liberator bomber, Glenn Miller, approached Cairo West airfield one hour after dawn. Tim Whelby stretched his aching arms and legs as the huge machine banked prior to landing on Egyptian soil.
It had been a swine of a journey and he hadn't slept a wink. There were no seats inside the great fuselage; each passenger had been provided with a sleeping-bag which rolled and slithered about with the aircraft's movements. Alongside Whelby lay a British major-general with red tabs.
'You're a boffin they've sent out, I suppose?' the general enquired.
Whelby merely smiled, stifling a yawn. His suit was crumpled, he was in need of a shave and he had lain awake all night thinking how paradoxical it would be if they were shot down by a German fighter. Had the Nazis known who was aboard they'd certainly have mustered every fighter available to locate and destroy the plane.
`Shouldn't have asked, should I?' the general remarked. 'Do you realize there are a dozen men aboard this machine and not one of us has a clue as to the identity of his fellow-passengers? You'd think there was a spy aboard…'
The Liberator was descending rapidly. The hard ochre of the bleached desert came up to meet them, the wheels touched down, there was a nasty bump, then they slowed into a smooth glide and stopped. The endless engine sound, the vibration ceased.
Whelby looked round at the other passengers whose faces wore a blank, washed-out expression.
The exit door was opened from the outside. Fresh air flooded in, displacing the foetid atmosphere of too much carbon dioxide, too little oxygen. The passengers disengaged themselves from their sleeping-bags like insects emerging from cocoons.
'Mr Peter Standish! Sir! You're the first to disembark, if you please…'