A thousand suns

His phone chose this moment in time to vibrate enthusiastically and trill the Simpsons’ theme.

In the relative silence of the jetty, it carried effortlessly across to the two men standing near the edge. They both spun sharply around.

‘Shit!’ Chris cursed as he fumbled to pull his phone out of his jeans and kill it.

He looked up to see the men walking warily towards the trucks. One of them gestured to the other to check out the right-hand side of them, while he veered towards the left.

Chris, panic beginning to grip him, finally eased the damned thing out of his front pocket, only to let it slip through his fingers and clatter noisily to the ground.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ he whispered as he squatted down and patted the gravel in search of it. The shrill theme tune came to an abrupt end, which was a small relief, but the damage was done. The two men were almost upon him. He looked under one of the trucks; there was enough space to slide beneath, but he dared not leave his phone on the ground for them to find. As they drew close enough to hear their footfalls, Chris redoubled his efforts, feeling the uneven ground for the phone.

But it was no good, and they were too close.

He quickly dropped to a prone position and crawled as quietly as he could under one of the trucks just as one of the men appeared as a silhouette in the space between both of the vehicles.

A shaft of bright torchlight illuminated the ground beside Chris, throwing into sharp relief the scuff and drag marks he had left in the pebbles; a telltale sign of Chris’s hasty scramble for cover. Chris could now see where his phone was. It nestled just behind the front tyre of the truck opposite, half in, half out of view.

Shit.

All he needed now was for the previous caller to try his number again.

The beam of torchlight moved up and down the narrow gap between the trucks with a slow and steady thoroughness.

‘No one,’ he heard one of them say.

‘Check in the drivers’ cabs,’ the other said.

The torchlight flickered wildly, and shadows leaped as the beam was aimed into the cabs of both trucks in turn.

‘No one inside, but there’s a phone up here on the dash. See it?’

‘Yeah. Maybe that was it.’

‘Shit, that was a loud ring.’

The torch snapped off, and he heard the crunch of feet on gravel as the two men slowly headed back down towards the jetty’s edge. Chris watched them as they returned to where they had been standing, resuming, it seemed, a vigil.

They’re waiting for Will’s fishing boat to come back in, aren’t they?

Yes, it looked like they were. Word must have got around that Will had taken out a couple of divers to the plane wreck; that’s how McGuire had found out in all likelihood. The old boy had been talking for sure, then.

With great care, Chris eased himself out from beneath the truck and hastily reached out for his phone. His fingers quickly located it and before it could ring again he switched it off, letting out a sigh of relief as he did so.

It was nearly time to meet ‘Wallace’ at Lenny’s. He looked anxiously back at the two men down by the jetty. If they really were here to keep things quiet, then not only were he and Mark potentially in danger, but this poor old sod Wallace too.

And hadn’t he already sounded a bit uneasy on the phone when he’d called you out of the blue?

Wallace could be dangerous. He may be a harmless old man with the best of intentions to blow the whistle on some wartime secret, but if there were spooks like these watching him from afar, then he was leading them, albeit unintentionally, right to Chris.

Not exactly an encouraging thought.

Shit, Chris, you muppet. If the CIA or whoever wanted you dead, you’d be dead already.

Fair point. He made his way towards Lenny’s, casting one last glance back over his shoulder as he crunched quietly out of the parking lot, and walked briskly up the dark cut-through between a couple of buildings and onto Devenster Street.

Chapter 17

Decision

Max finished explaining the details that he’d been given. Major Rall had described to him an outline of the plan, just enough to understand the enormity of the task they were being asked to perform, and the appalling risk.

And now his men knew too.

He swigged a mouthful of tepid coffee, relishing its bitter taste. The questions were coming, any second now.

His men sat around him in the bunker’s canteen on document cases dragged in from the radio room. Chairs, it seemed, were a rarity down here. They sat in a circle, each of them savouring the coffee, and all but Stefan smoking the cigarettes Major Rall had generously offered the crew after they’d returned from the hangar. The blue-tinged smoke from the coarse Russian brand converged above them against the low concrete ceiling in a thick fog.

As Max watched each of them absorb what he had finished telling them, the silence lengthened. Faintly he could hear Rall moving around in his office, no doubt anxiously waiting for them to discuss the mission and decide whether they were willing to undertake it.