Balance of Fear Read online

  BALANCE OF FEAR

  Geoffrey Osborne

  © Geoffrey Osborne 1968

  Geoffrey Osborne has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1968 by Robert Hale Ltd.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  For my MOTHER and FATHER, in gratitude for their sacrifices on my behalf.

  I should like to thank my wife’s uncle, Captain Robert Bradley, master mariner and North Sea pilot, and my friend Mr. P. L. D. Thomas, M.I.Mar.E., marine superintendent, for their technical advice, and Roy, who allowed me to pick his scientific brain.

  G. O.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

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  CHAPTER ONE

  Robert Brook, master mariner, balanced on the deck of the bobbing pilot cutter. As the gunwale III led against the side of the American Victory ship, he swung himself up on to the rope ladder and turned to take his seabag from the boatman.

  Captain Brook reflected that at sixty he was getting too old for this game. But this thought did not occur to the boatmen below as they watched his lithe, athletic figure climbing up the grey-painted side of the ship.

  With one leg over the rail, he handed his bag to one of the two waiting seamen and then raised his arm in in salute to the cutter’s crew. The pilot boat backed away; then the water threshed at its stern as it turned and headed back for Dover harbour’s eastern arm.

  Brook paused to watch the small craft for a moment; then he looked beyond it, to the town.

  It had been a fine summer’s day, but now dark clouds were scudding over Dover, hastening the dusk; already lights were twinkling in the huge block of flats that faced the harbour. The rising wind was chopping up the swell of the sea; white caps were creaming the crests of the mounting waves.

  Captain Brook raised his eyes to the hill that rose steeply behind the town. His home was up there, in the village of Whitfield; his home … and his beloved garden. He sighed, regretfully. He hadn’t finished the work he wanted to do in the garden. But he would be back in a few days, when he had piloted this U.S. supply ship, the Wild Rose, to Hamburg and back.

  A bell tinkled and the deck was already vibrating to the rhythm of the restarted engines by the time Brook had lifted his other leg over the ship’s rail.

  “Good afternoon. Welcome aboard, Pilot,” said a swarthy, thick-set young man. He was wearing a jacket with the three bars of a ship’s mate on the shoulders.

  “Good afternoon,” replied Brook. “You’re new to Wild Rose, aren’t you, Mister Mate?”

  “Yes, sir. My name’s Chester. Captain Winter’s compliments, sir, he’s waiting for you on the bridge.” He turned to the seaman who was holding Brook’s seabag. “Take the pilot’s gear to his cabin,” he ordered. “And you,” he added to the other A.B., “get that Jacob’s ladder stowed away. Look sharp about it!” The first officer ushered Brook ahead of him up the bridge ladder. As he climbed, the North Sea pilot was mildly surprised not to see his old friend Captain Will Winter, master of the Wild Rose, smiling down at him. But when he stepped into the bridge house, mild surprise was transformed into shocked amazement.

  Winter, on the other side of the wheel, was standing facing him; but there was no welcoming smile on his ashen face as he stared back at the pilot.

  It is hard to smile when a cocked and loaded Sten-gun is pointing straight at your stomach.

  Apart from the helmsman and Winter, there were three other men on the bridge. One of them wore, like Winter, the four gold braid rings of a captain on the sleeves of his immaculate uniform jacket. A complete stranger to Brook, he was studying the rapidly receding pilot cutter through a binocular.

  The two other men were dressed in denim overalls. Each carried a Sten-gun, one of which was aimed at Captain Winter. The other was now trained on Brook.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” demanded the pilot angrily.

  He felt the hard authoritative prod of a revolver in his back.

  “Shut up and go and stand with your friend Winter.”

  It was the mate’s voice from behind him — a harsh, menacing voice from which the earlier veneer of politeness had been stripped.

  The man who had been watching the pilot boat lowered the binocular and spun round sharply. No more than five feet seven tall, he was stockily built. A smooth, oval face gave him a soft, genial appearance; an illusion that dark blue jowls failed to dispel.

  For it was an illusion; there was no geniality in this man. When he smiled, which was often, gold fillings showed in his regular, well-kept teeth. He was smiling now, at Brook. But the smile was bleak. When he spoke, his excellent English was betrayed by only a suspicion of an Eastern European accent.

  “Good evening, Captain Brook. I am Captain Gregor Gorki — and I am in command of this vessel. Your services have been engaged, I believe, to pilot the ship to Hamburg?”

  “Yes, but … ”

  “Good,” Gorki broke in. “And what route have you been instructed to take?”

  “I’m damned if I … ”

  Brook was interrupted again, this time by Winter. The American captain’s voice was tired and strained.

  “Tell them all they want to know, Bob. My first officer and two of my crew are already dead.”

  “Dead?” echoed Brook.

  “Yes. Murdered by these … these … ”

  “That’s enough,” said Gorki. “Now, Captain Brook, will you answer my question?”

  The pilot looked into the barrel of the black Sten-gun, glanced again at Winter and decided that this was no time for heroics.

  “I normally take the Dutch coastal route,” he said. “But that goes through the minefield from the Texel Light Vessel to Elbe 1.”

  Gorki, who had been studying the chart while Brook spoke, looked up. “A swept channel?”

  “Yes, but it’s pretty busy. I was advised to avoid it in view of the nature of the cargo.”

  “You were told what the cargo is?”

  “No.”

  “Go on.”

  “I was advised to take the northern route to Elbe 1.”

  “Which is?”

  “Dover to South Goodwin Light Vessel; South Goodwin to East Goodwin LV; East Goodwin to Galloper LV, then … ”

  “All right. Carry on, Pilot,” snapped Gorki. “Set course as advised.”

  Brook stared.

  “Go on, man! I want this ship on the course anyone watching from Dover or that pilot boat would expect her to be on. So don’t try anything clever; because if anyone does notice anything peculiar in the behaviour of this ship, then you, Winter and the ship’s crew are all dead men.”

  Brook decided not to be clever. He addressed the helmsman: “Steer 070° 5’ for South Goodwin LV.”

  Gorki again gave Brook the benefit of his bleak smile. “You’ll have to
chalk it up on the board for him. He speaks only Russian.”

  With a heavy heart the pilot did as he was told, watching the gyro-compass as the Russian helmsman brought the Wild Rose round on to her new course. When the compass had settled, he turned to look out through the rear windows of the bridge. He was surprised to see, in the gathering gloom, several men working from bosun’s chairs. They were painting the funnel black — a colour to match the pilot’s despair.

  CHAPTER TWO

  When the Second World War ended, large slices of London were laid waste. Single walls with the tatty remains of wallpaper clinging to them speared the sky; vast labyrinths of previously hidden cellars were exposed to the public eye.

  But soon these scars were hidden by gleaming, modern office blocks. And it was in one of these — between St. Paul’s and Fleet Street — that Industrial International Limited occupied the ground floor. There was, apparently, no basement; bulldozers had filled in those old cellars with rubble from demolished buildings to make a firmer foundation. Apparently; but not in fact.

  Beneath the offices of Industrial International was a huge network of other offices, whose business was as secret as their existence.

  Not that I.I.L. was not a bona fide firm. It was. It sold, installed and maintained plant and machinery in many parts of the world. Only one department was not entirely what it seemed; the special contracts department. This was staffed exclusively by the Special Security (Operations) Section of M.I.5.

  Deputy head of the section was Nick Forbes; his cover was the title of special contracts manager for I.I.L. — responsible only to the company’s owner and managing director, John Clint. Clint neither knew nor cared about the precise nature of the work that went on in Forbes’s department. He only knew that the work had nothing to do with him or his firm. But Clint’s security rating was 100 per cent. He was a former British war-time agent whose deeds in the service of his country were legendary. In the last days of the war he had been freed, horribly scarred by fiendish tortures, from a Gestapo prison. And the British Intelligence Service had provided the capital to set him up in his now prosperous business — on condition that he allowed his offices to provide a front for the activities of SS(O)S.

  *

  At just about the time Captain Brook was boarding Wild Rose, James Dingle, top agent of SS(O)S, walked into the premises of Industrial International and passed through the swing door marked Special Contracts Dept. He went on down the passage, knocked on Forbes’s door and waited, gazing idly at the ceiling. He knew that he was being photographed by a television camera concealed above the door. Forbes didn’t like unknown callers. Then the door, electronically operated by a control on Forbes’s desk, swung open and Dingle entered. The door closed softly behind him.

  “You sent for me?”

  “Yes, Jim.” Forbes looked worried. “Go straight through. The Director wants to see you urgently. There’s something big on.”

  Forbes touched two switches on his desk; a panel on the wall slid back. Dingle stepped into the cupboard revealed there, turned and nodded at Forbes, who operated more controls. The panel closed, and the lift in which Dingle was standing descended to the headquarters of SS(O)S. There was one other entrance. But even Dingle didn’t know where it was.

  When the lift stopped, Dingle stepped out into a long passage — and looked into the business ends of two Service .38 revolvers. They were held, with familiar ease, in the large hands of two burly and capable-looking men.

  “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Dingle,” said one of the men, relaxing slightly. “We were told to expect you. Will you report to the Director’s secretary, please?”

  Dingle nodded and grinned at the two guards, whose bulk made his own five feet ten inches look puny. Yet he knew that, if he had to, he could take both of those men. He was an expert in the art of unarmed combat.

  He walked down the corridor, hard, lean, confident; his movements, those of an athlete in peak condition, casual and easy, concealed an immense wiry strength. His age could have been anything from thirty-eight to forty-five. Dark hair, flecked with grey, framed the regular features of a face that was neither handsome nor ugly; an anonymous face — a great asset to a secret agent who hated to be conspicuous in a crowd. But he now had one characteristic, listed in his description on the files of the Russian and Chinese security services, that would immediately betray him to agents of those Powers. The index finger of his right hand, and the one next to it, were missing. He had lost them while on a mission to the Far East. He had since spent weeks practising with his automatic, learning to hold it in his right hand, using his third finger to squeeze the trigger. And practice had made perfect. He had also learned to fire left-handed.

  Dingle knocked on the door at the end of the passage. He opened it, and entered an office that was lavishly furnished to make up for the lack of windows. It was not pleasant to work in a place where daylight was a stranger.

  “Hullo, Sweetie,” he said to Miss Peach, the Director’s secretary. He walked over to her desk and kissed her on the forehead. “Have you missed me? How about you and me hitting the town tonight?”

  “The answer to both questions is ‘No’,” replied Miss Peach, trying but failing to look disapproving. “You’d better hurry up and go in. The Director’s waiting for you.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Dingle. “But I wish you’d tell me what I have to do to win your love.” He blew her a kiss. “See you.”

  Miss Peach chuckled good naturedly as the British agent went through the inner door to meet his chief. Miss Peach was fat, jolly — and sixty-four; past retirement age, she had been kept on by the Director, who insisted that she was indispensable.

  *

  The Director — he was never given any other title — was the most anonymous man in that department of anonymous men. Not one of his agents knew his real name; nor did they know the details of his career. Rumour had it that he spent the whole of the Second World War in Germany, working under cover for British Intelligence. Then, it was said, he had moved to Russia for two years, before being brought in from the cold to run SS(O)S when the department was formed in 1948. Nobody could confirm these rumours; nobody could scotch them. But it was a known fact that he was fluent in both German and Russian.

  A powerfully built man of about fifty-eight, former hard muscle had turned to fat. He looked about two stones overweight. But the most striking thing about the Director was his enormous — and completely bald — head. The bulging forehead was permanently creased in a worried frown, pulling bushy, white eyebrows down low over bright, alert and deep-set brown eyes.

  As those eyes peered out at him, Dingle caught himself thinking that his chief looked like an Old English sheepdog with a bald head.

  “Sit down, Jim,” the Director indicated a chair on the other side of his massive desk. “You can help me to finish a jig-saw puzzle.”

  “A jig-saw, sir?”

  “Yes. And if the finished picture turns out the way I expect it to, there will be a rush job on for you. I think … ”

  A telephone buzzed, and the Director leaned forward to pick up the white receiver. He listened carefully for a few moments, asked a question, then listened again.

  Dingle knew that his chief was speaking to Washington. The white phone was a direct line to Central Intelligence Agency headquarters at Langley, eight miles from Washington. The British agent knew the place well, a white concrete, eight-storey building in a secluded, wooded area.

  There were four other “safe” telephones, with scrambler attachments, on the Director’s desk. The black one was an ordinary outside line — although its number was unlisted. The grey one connected him with his secretary, Miss Peach. The red one was a “hot line” to the Prime Minister. And the green one the Director called his life-line. It linked him to his control room.

  In the control room, a battery of high-speed printers received top-secret and other classified information from various British Intelligence departments,
embassies abroad, the War Office, Air Ministry, Admiralty, and the Foreign Office. News from SS(O)S agents all over the world was also flashed there. Reports could be transmitted, too, from the control room to other centres. Computers encoded the messages as they were fed into the teleprinters — and decoded them instantly at the receiving end.

  The Director replaced the white telephone receiver and looked thoughtfully at Dingle.

  “That’s another piece of the jig-saw slotted in,” he announced. “It’s beginning to add up — but the C.I.A. boys don’t seem to be very impressed with my arithmetic.”

  He picked up the green handset. “Priority check on an American supply ship, the Wild Rose,” he snapped. “Find out whether she’s cleared Dover yet. If she has, find out if there was anything unusual about her.” The Director dropped the handset back on to its cradle and continued almost in the same breath: “Know anything about anti-ballistic missiles?”

  “A little; not much,” replied Dingle. “I know there’s a big row going on about them at the moment.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” said the Director. “America’s Administration is trying to persuade Russia to enter an agreement under which neither country would install ABMs, and so avoid a further escalation in the arms race. But Russia is believed to be deploying already a defence system aimed at protecting its major cities against attack by intercontinental ballistic missiles. The U.S. generals want to counter this by installing a big ABM system of their own.’

  “Seems logical,” murmured Dingle.

  “Logical perhaps. But expensive. American domestic politics complicate the issue — and it’s been estimated that the bill for a comprehensive defence system could reach 40 billion dollars.”

  Dingle whistled softly: “As you say, it’s expensive. But it all depends what value they put on more than a hundred million American lives. Anyway, where do we come into all this?”