Red Anger (26 page)

‘And after you had gone off towards the Sanctuary I went into the church.’

‘What for?’ I asked, meaning that I had wasted time looking for him.

‘Put it that my own love of country begins with two bits of wood, not a circle of stone.’

For the moment the KGB were checkmated by the leafiness of an English village. They could, of course, use their speed and charge up and down the only two lanes out of the place. That, however,
would give their identity away if we saw them—as was likely—and they failed to see us. Their best bet was to sit still and wait for developments, meanwhile getting their man with the
walkie-talkie down from the Grey Wethers and on to high ground on our side of the valley.

We too wondered whether we might not sit still till nightfall, possibly in the village inn. That would have fixed the KGB, but we could not count on the patience of the CIA or guess what they
were up to. They wanted Petrescu badly and might well use the police to detain him or play their old trick of impersonating Special Branch themselves. It stood to reason that they must have seen
Marghiloman’s car being driven away and only realised too late that he was not the driver. Then nobody at the rendezvous. No signs of violence. The only observers stones and tumuli, impassive
and disquieting. Afterwards two men had been spotted walking away. One must be Petrescu; the other was unknown. Even at a distance they could tell that neither was Marghiloman.

‘Wherever we go we should avoid the tops and be in sight of other people till darkness,’ Alwyn said.

‘Do you feel it’s safe to start off by road?’

‘Provided there is occasional traffic and a cottage or two.’

What I had in mind was the Wansdyke. It could be reached by a mile of road, very open and overlooked by hills on both sides, and then by another half mile where we could leave the road and take
to the woodland alongside.

The Wansdyke, I told him, ran from Savernake Forest to the outskirts of Bristol—with longish gaps—and all the way it was a track, a footpath or merely a ditch. He could hide in it;
he could avoid towns and villages by following it; and he had perfect cover as an amateur archaeologist studying the reason why so immense an earthwork was ever built.

‘Then you’d better let me know why it was.’

‘Nobody knows. It means Woden’s Ditch—fifth century and nothing to do with all the old friends around us. A frontier, it’s said, between Saxons and Saxons or
Arthur’s kingdom. Armies of men must have worked at it, for it’s still twenty feet deep in places. Yet they couldn’t possibly defend its whole length.’

‘Wansdyke!’ he murmured. ‘There’s a whole world of lost hopes in the name. What a place for your presences, Willie!’

‘I never noticed any. Beer and the sword don’t leave presences.’

It was then that we saw the station wagon which had gone up the Herepath to look for Marghiloman. Its general appearance was less commonplace than the KGB car. The driver and his three
passengers looked a bit too dead-pan and purposeful, lacking the gentle influence of the opposite sex. At a guess one would have taken them for a couple of bookies and their clerks or a gang of
dealers—in old cars or antiques rather than livestock.

The station wagon drove slowly through the village and then turned left on a course which would take them back to the main road. They might be having a last look round before heading back to
London or be scouring the country with no definite aim. They cannot have been very hopeful, for our likely move, once contact was broken, was to vanish into the green-scarred downs and wait for the
KGB to collect us. They could not guess that to be picked up by the KGB in any lonely spot was the last thing we wanted.

We started out for the Wansdyke fairly confidently. There was no cover on either side of the road and no traffic; on the other hand it was not a place which an assassin would choose when a
farmer’s car or a delivery van might come along at any moment. On the high ground to the left a small herd of Ayrshires were grazing. A townsman could well think that somebody unseen might be
keeping an eye on them and have a full view of the road.

We were not far from the T junction where we should turn right for the Wansdyke and at last have woodland on one side of us, when a car came round the corner towards us. There could be no doubt
that it was the station wagon doing a last sweep back through the lanes instead of giving up. No escape was possible. If we tried to bolt across country we risked being followed and caught. The CIA
men had looked dangerously athletic.

‘Quick! Do they know you by sight?’ Alwyn asked.

‘No, they can’t.’

Rapid fire thinking, justifiable but disastrous. Marghiloman had implied that he was to be the Judas who would point me out. To the CIA men in Devon I had been just a name, and their operator
who was watching Tessa’s movements had not recognised me. But I had long forgotten those weeks in London when strangers often stopped me to ask for directions or the right time and I had been
smugly satisfied that it was my kind face which attracted them.

I think Alwyn accepted my snap judgment because it was our only chance, not because he was convinced. He reminded me that he himself was safe; the chiefs of the CIA in London knew him by sight,
but the rank and file did not. They had probably learned from MI5 or Special Branch that he was not in Moscow, but that was all.

The station wagon came up and stopped. Its driver leaned out and asked if he was going right for East Kennett—a transparent excuse since he must have seen the signpost two hundred yards
back.

Remembering that the CIA file on Petrescu would state that he spoke only broken English, I burst into my thickest Wiltshire which I doubt if anyone under the age of sixty still speaks. They
couldn’t understand me, for I kept rambling on about whether they wanted the pub or a farm. Alwyn cut me short, giving the impression that I was the village idiot, and told them to keep
straight on.

They did, but then stopped and stayed put for half a minute. My conjecture is that one of them insisted I was Petrescu and another asked him if he thought those peasant noises were Romanian.
Meanwhile, we were stepping out as fast as we dared without making it too obvious. The pro-Petrescu man must have won the argument, for the car made a sudden and decisive U-turn through the long
grass at the side of the road, hit an unexpected ditch and had to back out. By that time we were round the corner and in Boreham Wood.

But far from safe. We had dropped flat only yards from the road and could not move. Two of them entered the wood; a third ran up hill towards the north-east boundary; and the fourth patrolled
the road. Calling up boyhood memories I realised that they had done the right thing. It was a small hanger on the hillside in which we were trapped. All round were open fields which we should have
to cross before we could reach the Wansdyke or the West Wood—two square miles of timber where we would be safe.

No one but Alwyn could have picked the right cover for us or even spotted its possibilities at all. The trees were beech with a little fir, well spaced so that there were patches of thick
undergrowth. He had stopped for an instant on entering the wood and—to my mind—wasted precious seconds looking round. What he chose was a patch of rose bay willow herb, just high enough
to conceal us, in an open glade. Our pursuers ignored it and plunged straight for the self-evident—the bramble and hazel where we must be since we had had no time to go far.

When the two had moved away, now searching the length of the ragged boundary hedge, I asked Alwyn in a whisper what weapon they were carrying.

‘That, Willie, is a machine pistol with a silencer. Only to persuade you to surrender without a fuss. Every intelligence organisation prefers interrogation.’

Up to that point I had never, I think, taken his extreme caution seriously. Now at last I did. He spotted my misgivings though they were only expressed by silence.

‘Just as much to comfort himself as to pot at you,’ he added. ‘Always remember that in action!’

He asked me for a situation report on the ground which I gave him, though it would have been more use to a small boy bird-nesting than two men clinging to cover which would just about do for a
rabbit.

‘I see. Eudora and the pack at the top of the hanger, John at the north-east corner and the Whips on the road. We can’t break out without someone yelling Gone Away. But we’ll
last out the season yet, Willie.’

All this hunting stuff was to comfort the raw recruit in his first experience of lethal weapons—artificial but it worked.

The two had now stopped searching the hedge and were climbing up through the wood. At any moment they might decide that they had gone far enough and cut straight back to the car. If they did and
looked down on our patch of willow herb they were bound to see us. We were only hidden from eyes on a level with us or below us.

We could not tell what the third man on the east side of the wood was doing—Eudora and the pack, as Alwyn called him—but even if we could reach that side we certainly could not leave
it. I remembered a wide strip of bare down with a cart track running down the middle, passable for a car. To return to the road where the sentry was alert and continually on the move was equally
impossible.

So our only hope was to try for the Wansdyke itself, although that involved crossing some two hundred yards of field which might be stubble or might be grass but was open to the road. If the man
patrolling it was near the T junction when we started we might just make the Wansdyke; if he was coming towards us we hadn’t a chance. And we could not watch him without exposing
ourselves.

We crouched down and used the wretched cover of the thin boundary hedge until it turned away from the road and we could stand up. The two searchers in the wood had done what we expected and cut
back to the station wagon, beating out the undergrowth all the way. Giving them time enough to get well into the trees, we took to the open and started to race across what turned out to be stubble.
The bank of the Wansdyke was a light green wall in front of us, looking like the edge of another wood though it was a bare forty yards wide with more open country beyond. We were nearly there when
the man on the road came round the corner and saw us. He shouted to us to stop and began to run. He could not fire even if he wanted to. A tractor and trailer was in sight and he had to consider
the susceptibilities of the natives.

Crossing the Wansdyke by road you would notice our side of it only as a small copse with a deep dell in it; on the other side it was shallow and treeless, filled up by centuries of rain washing
down the banks but still a work too large and smooth to be formed by water or by grubbing up some immense hawthorn hedge. That was the stretch of the ditch we intended to follow after dark,
sweeping westwards over the downs past tombs and earthworks already three thousand years old when it was dug, until we came down at dawn into softer, well-timbered country where we would
separate—he towards Bristol, I grabbing the first bus or train which went anywhere at all.

As soon as we hit the leafy bottom of the Wansdyke we hurried up it and then climbed the bank to see what was going on to the north of us. The two men who had been searching our wood had come
out at the top of it and joined their companion. We had been right in assuming that we could never escape into the West Woods there. The fourth man who had kept watch on the road had now taken the
station wagon up the cart track and was bumping over the open ground towards the others. Their tactics were plain. They probably did not know what the belt of trees was in which we had taken
shelter, but they could see that it led up to the West Woods. They were dashing to cut us off and at the same time get a clearer view of the country.

They had in fact cut us off, but they could stay up there waiting for us as long as they liked. Twilight was now not far away and the bottom of the ditch was in shadow. We remained on the bank,
safe in that mysterious line of defence, gazing at the long run of the Wansdyke on the other side of the road as it climbed towards the high ground and the continuation of the Ridge Way. Alwyn said
that it looked like a modern tank trap.

‘If the bank was then sheer it would have stopped cavalry, always assuming that intelligence reports from enemy territory were accurate enough to get the swordsmen up in time to the right
spot.’

He looked at the blank skyline to the west as if tanks or perhaps Arthur’s cataphracts might be massing unseen behind it with a clear run down to the ditch.

‘That’s our problem, too, Willie—local intelligence in the shape of a walkie-talkie. The KGB must now recognise the CIA station wagon which went up to look for Marghiloman. The
CIA have no reason to recognise theirs.’

‘Avebury car park?’

‘No, they would have been much too careful and looked like any other visitors.’

‘Since they are in the same line of business, the CIA must know there is a KGB car about somewhere.’

‘Yes, they do know now. But when they came to Avebury it was just to grab Petrescu and they were not prepared for competition. The Russians were. That man who was among the Grey
Wethers—where would you post him so that he could overlook the country on this side of the Kennet?’

‘The Long Barrow which you saw from the road or up on the Ridge Way bang opposite to us.’

‘If he was there in time, he’d see us on the road and he’d notice some odd goings-on afterwards. But would he have seen us crossing the field to here?’

‘From the Ridge Way, yes, if he was watching.’

‘How much would he see of the Wansdyke?’

‘I should think just the belt of beeches and nothing of the ditch.’

The CIA had left the lower end of the Wansdyke wide open for our escape. They realised, I suppose, that a lot of good it would do us; if we broke cover there they must see us either on the road
or climbing up to the desolate Ridge Way where they could probably run us down without much fear of interruption. The essential from their point of view was to cut us off from the woodland. I was
inclined to try for the hills, though doubtful if Alwyn could stand the pace. But it was not that which set him against it. He was still obsessed by the need to avoid any emptiness where the KGB
could get at him without any witness.