The Romanov succession

Alex jammed its legs hard down into the earth and braced it with one hand while he hooked the other hand into Cooper’s belt and boosted him up toward the low-sloping roof.

Cooper was gone a good five minutes; Alex heard the twanging rustle of the antenna wire as Cooper drew it along after him and pulled it taut before fixing it to the chimney.

They went inside. Irina had finished coding the message. Cooper pulled the telegrapher’s key out of its slot and began twisting wires around knurled connectors. “The weight of it’s in those dry cells, y’see, sir. We can’t trust the electric up here so we carry our own.”

Alex had a look at Irina’s pad: groups of numbers-each five digits separated from the next by an X. It would mean nothing to Cooper but that was how it had to be.

“Ave you got frequencies for me, sir?”

“Set to send and receive on five-point-six-two megacycles. Have you got a wristwatch?”

“No sir, sorry to say.”

“I’ll warn you when it’s time then. We’ve got about an hour.”

He took the pad and rolled the top sheets over until he came to a blank page; he glanced back at the list of notes Irina had made and then he jotted something on the clean page and tore it out and carried it to Cooper.

“This is the message you’ll receive first.”

On the sheet of notepaper he’d written: XXX30X21901X 63302X19016X33021X90163X.

Cooper had neat small white teeth. “Same word three times, in’t it, sir?”

It meant he knew his job and that was good. “It’s a recognition signal. If you don’t get that opening you don’t respond to the message.”

“I understand, sir.”

“Now here’s your reply to it.” He gave him the second sheet.

Cooper glanced at it and nodded. To him it didn’t say Condotierri three times; it was merely a string of twenty-seven digits separated by Xs. But it was obvious he understood the procedure.

“When you’ve broadcast that recognition code you’ll continue immediately without waiting for an answer. You’ll broadcast the message on these sheets. At the end of that transmission you’ll switch over to Receive and you should get an acknowledgment that looks like this one.”

KollinXCarnegie.

“There won’t be a message from your opposite number then, sir?”

“That’ll be tomorrow night.”

Cooper nodded. “Right, sir. Got it.” He displayed his fine teeth again. “All quite mysterious-like, in’t it.”

“When it’s all over you’ll find out what it was about, Corporal. You’re part of something very important.”

“Yes sir. That’s what Brigadier Cosgrove told me.”

Irina said, “Would you like coffee, Corporal?”

“I wouldn’t mind a cuppa, madam. If you’d show me to the larder I’ll brew it meself.”

“I’m sure Sergei will be glad to do it.” She left the room.

Cooper pushed his lips forward and lifted his eyebrows. He didn’t say anything; he grinned at the doorway where Irina had disappeared, transferred the grin to Alex and then went back to his key to test the circuits. Tubes began to glow in the ungainly apparatus and Cooper twisted the tuning rheostat; the brass telegrapher’s key began to tap out staccato rhythms, picking up incoming messages on the various bands. Satisfied it was working properly, Cooper shut it down and leaned back in the wooden chair. “Well then sir, I expect we’re ready to go to war, ain’t we.”

14

Thursday morning he watched MacAndrews’s drafted dockyard crew put the finishing touches on the spidery rapelling tower and then he spent nearly three hours with Irina interviewing Colonel Yevgeny Dieterichs, the Soviet defector. At half-past ten they took a break and he walked outside with Irina.

“He seems genuine enough,” she said.

“Keep putting him through his paces. Milk him-you know how important it is.”

“I wish I were going with you instead. Dinner at the Savoy-an evening at the Haymarket… I could do with a bit of that. I feel as though I’ve been shipwrecked up here.”

“This was your own idea.”

“Darling, the whole blessed thing was my own idea and I confess I’m unforgivably proud of it.”

“You’ve a right to be.” The Austin was swinging up the verge of the runway toward him. “I hope the rest of us can live up to it.”

“You will,” she said, very soft. Sergei drew up and reached across the seat to push the passenger door open for him.

She stood watching while the Austin took him away toward the main gate.

They drove south and west along the chain of lochs through the dark green highlands. The sky was matted but they had no rain down the craggy length of Loch Ness. There was virtually no traffic. They ran on south at a steady forty and fifty miles per hour through the early hours of the afternoon. Maneuvering Scottish recruits were tenting on the banks of Loch Lomond and on a brighter day it would indeed have been bonnie-swards of rich grass dropping gently toward the cool deep water.

At four they picked up the smoke of Glasgow’s furnaces above the hill summits. Alex navigated from the street map on his lap and Sergei did an expert job of threading the clotted traffic. The city was dreary, black with soot.