She said, ‘SAC lead crews flying B52s working out of Bodo, Norway and the new field near Herat.’ She took her time to light it with a small silver cigarette lighter. ‘I’d say committed targets; those launching sites West South West of Lake Balkach and the underwater nuclear submarine harbours in eastern Novaya Zemlya that Bobby did the work on. You probably already saw the modified bomb-bays on two of the planes.’
I nodded.
‘Two of the crews have ex-Navy bombardiers; probably a delay device operating by water pressure.’ She tilted her chin as high as possible and exhaled a stream of smoke vertically at the ceiling in an unusually theatrical way. From somewhere she had obtained a WAC officer’s summer dress, and like Dalby she had this quality of looking right in whatever she wore. She waited for praise as a small child does; posturing and preparing declaimers of skill or virtue. The days of Pacific sunshine had made her face a deep shade of gold, and her lips were light against the dark skin. She sat there studying the evenness of her finger-nail polish for a long time, and then without looking up said, ‘You went to Guildford?’
I nodded without moving my head.
‘In the first week when it’s all physical exercises and IQ tests and you mostly sit around waiting to be interviewed and talked out of staying on for a second week, there’s one lecture about cell construction and cut outs?’
I knew that she knew that this isn’t the sort of thing anyone ever talks about. I hoped that the lounge wasn’t bugged. I didn’t stop her.
‘Well, Alice is my only official contact, through her you were my permanent contact. As far as I’m concerned …’ she paused. ‘Since then I have used no other as the man in the Pears soap advertisement said.’
I sat saying nothing.
‘The complexities of my job are greater than they were in Macao. Greater than I suspected they could be,’ Jean said very quietly. ‘I didn’t see myself doing that.’ She moved her head towards where she’d been sitting. ‘But I’ll go along with it OK. But there has to be a limit as far as personalities are concerned. I am a woman. I can’t switch allegiances easily, and I am biologically incapable of answering to a group.’
‘You may be making a big mistake,’ I said, more in order to gain time than because it meant anything.
‘I don’t think so, and I’ll show you why,’ she said, ‘if you’ve an hour or so to spare.’
I had. I followed her out and across to the car park. She climbed behind the wheel of a Ford convertible, the metal and leather hot enough to produce a sickly smell. Attached to the sunshield on the driver’s side was a grey painted metal box. One face of it was perforated; it was a little larger than an English packet of twenty. This was a monitoring radio sending conversation to a receiver up to three miles away, and by means of a compass device sending a signal to show the direction and travel of the vehicle. It was a compulsory fitting to all cars on Tokwe. It was attached by means of two magnets, and I pulled it off the metal of the sunshield and buried it deep in a big box of Kleenex in the rear seat of a pink Chevrolet parked alongside. I hoped no one would bother to tune us in. If they did without a visual check we’d be just another silent vehicle in a car park outside the Mess.
The tyres made an ugly noise on the gravel as Jean let in the clutch and swung the power steering into a fierce lock. Neither of us spoke until a mile down the road we stopped to fold back the hood. I took a close look around the windscreen and door tops.
‘I think we are probably clean now but let’s be careful just the same – you were smart to take the convertible,’ I told her.
‘It cost me a four-ounce bottle of Arpège perfume to find out not to pet in any other sort of vehicle.’
‘Put it on expenses,’ I said.
For a mile or so the road was first-rate, and except for a couple of police jeeps, quite clear. Jean moved the accelerator firmly down and I heard the faint snickering noises from the gear-box as the ratios automatically changed until the road wavered under us like a heat haze, and the roar of the wind dragging across the spotlight and aerial produced an unbearable battering on the eardrums. Small flying creatures hit the windscreen and burst in ugly blotches. Jean, her head tilted back, held the wheel in a confident, loose hold, unusual in women drivers. I watched the coast flash by until we began to lose speed. I felt her foot lift from the accelerator. She’d judged the distance nicely and scarcely used the brakes. Instead of following the road where it curved left inland, to the Administration Centre, we turned off the road to the right. The wide over-sprung car lurched into the soft edges of the road and its big blue nose lifted as the tyres engaged the soil of a rough pathway. Now the going was much slower and it took nearly an hour to reach the cluster of undergrowth to which we had seen the track leading from the hard road. Jean pulled us well in under the low vegetation, and cut the motor. We had left the desiccated sectors upon which both the Administration Centre, the Mess and Living Quarters were built. This lee side of the island, shielded from the prevailing wind, was cloaked in luxuriant vegetation and punctuated by razor-sharp layers of volcanic rock. Here and there large cone-shaped mustard-yellow flowers were beginning to close their fleshy petals.
The sun was low towards the west by now, and the spiky leaves of the palms sliced the heavy blue sky. Jean took a rubber-covered torch out of the glove compartment and we continued along the same pathway on foot. Through the undergrowth we passed the cheap-wristwatch sounds of a thousand insects kicking the heavy air.
‘I don’t want to pry or appear paranoiac,’ I said, ‘but what’s the deal?’ She took her time about answering and I supposed that she had as many doubts and puzzlements as any of us at that time.
‘Last night I was up here with Dalby. He took me along so that if anyone found us off the road it would just look like a petting party. I’m returning on my own account. You’re along for the ride. OK?’
I said ‘OK.’ What else could I say? We went on in silence.
Then she said, ‘Last night I was left in the car. Now I want to see the part I missed.’
I helped her over a rusting coil of barbed wire. We went out of sight of the road, and unless anyone looked very closely, the car was well hidden, too. Over to the right, the shore line, away from the new road, had been left littered with World War II debris. Golden-brown rust patterns grew over the broken landing craft. One on the far side gaped with rectangular holes, as though someone had attempted to salvage the metal with a cutter, but had found the market price out of proportion to the work. The one nearest me, a Tank Landing Craft, was charred at the front. The heat had bent the steel doors like a tin toy under a child’s foot. Below the water-line rich wet greenery busied itself in the lapping, clear movement of the water. The land was at its most uneven here and had clearly provided opportunities for a tenacious defensive. So well had the Japanese engineers merged their defence works into the terrain that I wasn’t aware of the enormous Japanese blockhouse until I saw Jean standing in its doorway. It was nearly twenty-five feet high and built of tree trunks with steel rail supports here and there. The weather had eaten at the poor-quality cement, and the vegetation had run riot. The entrance was low even for a Japanese, and waist-high scarlet flowers followed the great burnt scars along the timbers as though the plant gained a special nutriment from the carbonized wood.
Jean’s rubber-soled shoes left waffles in the sand, and where the ground was damper I noticed Dalby’s. His were deeper, especially at the heel.
‘Was it heavy –’ I said.
‘The box he carried? Yes, it looked heavy. How did you know?’
‘I guessed he didn’t drop by for the view, and something kept him too busy to notice you behind him.’
She stood aside as I climbed up the partly blocked entrance. ‘He told me to wait by the car, but I was curious. I came after him as far as the entanglement.’ Her voice changed and echoed mid sentence as we moved into the fort. It was a well-made one. The island had been one of the well-prepared outer-perimeter island