Eye of the Needle(54)
Well, it wasn’t very satisfactory, but the only way to be totally safe was not to be a spy.
As he topped the thousand-foot-high Beattock Summit, it began to rain. Faber stopped the car and got out to raise the canvas roof. The air was oppressively warm. Faber looked up. The sky had clouded over very quickly. Thunder and lightning were promised.
As he drove on he discovered some of the little car’s short-comings. Wind and rain leaked in through several tears in the canvas roof, and the small wiper sweeping the top half of the horizontally divided windshield provided only a tunnellike view of the road ahead. As the terrain became progressively more hilly the engine note began to sound faintly ragged. It was hardly surprising: the twenty-year-old car was being pushed hard.
The shower ended. The threatened storm had not arrived, but the sky remained dark and the atmosphere foreboding.
Faber passed through Crawford, nestling in green hills; Abington, a church and a post office on the west bank of the River Clyde; and Lesmahagow, on the edge of a heathery moor.
Half an hour later he reached the outskirts of Glasgow. As soon as he entered the built-up area he turned north off the main road, hoping to circumvent the city. He followed a succession of minor roads, crossing the major arteries into the city’s east side, until he reached Cumbernauld Road where he turned east again and sped out of the city.
It had been quicker than he expected. His luck was holding.
He was on the A80 road, passing factories, mines and farms. More Scots place-names drifted in and out of his consciousness: Millerston, Stepps, Muirhead, Mollinburn, Condorrat.
His luck ran out between Cumbernauld and Stirling.
He was accelerating along a straight stretch of road, slightly downhill, with open fields on either side. As the speedometer needle touched forty-five there was a sudden very loud noise from the engine; a heavy rattle, like the sound of a large chain pulling over a cog. He slowed to thirty, but the noise did not get perceptibly quieter. Clearly some large and important piece of the mechanism had failed. Faber listened carefully. It was either a cracked ball-bearing in the transmission or a hole in a big end. Certainly it was nothing so simple as a blocked carburetor or a dirty spark plug; nothing that could be repaired outside a workshop.
He pulled up and looked under the hood. There seemed to be a good deal of oil everywhere, but otherwise he could see no clues. He got back behind the wheel and drove off. There was a definite loss of power, but at least the car would still go.
Three miles farther on steam began to billow out of the radiator. Faber realized that the car would soon stop altogether. He looked for a place to dump it and found a mud track leading off the main road, presumably to a farm. One hundred yards from the road the track curved behind a blackberry bush. Faber parked the car close to the bush and killed the engine. The hiss of escaping steam gradually subsided. He got out and locked the door. He felt a twinge of regret for Emma and Jessie, who would find it very difficult to get their car repaired before the end of the war.
He walked back to the main road. From there, the car could not be seen. It might be a day or even two before the abandoned vehicle aroused suspicion. By then, Faber thought, I may be in Berlin.
He began to walk. Sooner or later he would hit a town where he could steal another vehicle. He was doing well enough: it was less than twenty-four hours since he had left London, and he still had a whole day before the U-boat arrived at the rendezvous at six P.M. tomorrow.
The sun had set long ago, and now darkness fell suddenly. Faber could hardly see. Fortunately there was a painted white line down the middle of the road—a safety innovation made necessary by the blackout—and he was just able to follow it. Because of the night silence he would hear an oncoming car in ample time.
In fact only one car passed him. He heard its deep-throated engine in the distance, and went off the road a few yards to lie out of sight until it had gone. It was a large car, a Vauxhall Ten, Faber guessed, and it was traveling at speed. He let it go by, then got up and resumed walking. Twenty minutes later he saw it again, parked by the roadside. He would have taken a detour across the field if he had noticed the car in time, but its lights were off and its engine silent and he almost bumped into it in the darkness.
Before he could consider what to do, a flashlight shone up toward him from under the car’s hood, and a voice said: “I say, is anybody there?”
Faber moved into the beam and asked, “Having trouble?”
“I’ll say.”
The light was pointed down, and as Faber moved closer he could see by the reflected light the moustached face of a middle-aged man in a double-breasted coat. In his other hand the man held, rather uncertainly, a large wrench, seeming unsure of what to do with it.
Faber looked at the engine. “What’s wrong?”
“Loss of power,” the man said, pronouncing it “Lorse of par.” “One moment she was going like a top, the next she started to hobble. I’m afraid I’m not much of a mechanic.” He shone the light at Faber again. “Are you?” he finished hopefully.
“Not exactly,” Faber said, “but I know a disconnected lead when I see one.” He took the flashlight from the man, reached down into the engine and plugged the stray lead back onto the cylinder head. “Try her now.”
The man got into the car and started the engine. “Perfect!” he shouted over the noise. “You’re a genius! Hop in.”