Wrath of the Lion. Jack Higgins
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dark hair, ran to the far side of the gymnasium. He selected a knife from a table which contained an assortment of weapons, turned and ran forward, a blood-curdling cry surging from his throat.
He swerved to one side, came to a dead stop, then moved in quickly, the knife slashing at the Major’s face. Adams moved with incredible speed, warding off the attacking arm with an extended knife-hand block. At the same moment he fell diagonally forward to one side and delivered a round-house kick to the groin. In what was virtually the same motion he kicked at his opponent’s knee-joint with the same foot. The Japanese somersaulted, ending flat on his back, and the foot thudded across his windpipe.
For a moment they lay there and then both men scrambled to their feet grinning widely. ‘In other circumstances, and had the blows been delivered with full force, my assistant would now be dead,’ Yoshiyama said simply.
Adams picked up a towel, started to wipe sweat from his face and caught sight of Mallory in the gallery. He nodded briefly, said something to Yoshiyama and moved across to the door. Mallory met him in the corridor outside.
‘What are you trying to do, go out in a blaze of glory?’
Adams grinned. ‘Every so often I get so sick of the sight of that damned desk that I could blow my top. Yoshiyama provides a most efficient safety-valve.’ He ran a hand over his right hip and winced slightly. ‘That last fall hurt like hell. I must be getting old.’
As they mounted the stairs at the end of the corridor, Mallory thought about Adams. One of the best agents the department had ever had; all the guts in the world and a mind like a steel trap until the night he’d got too close for someone’s comfort and they’d tied a Mills bomb to the handle of his hotel bedroom in Cairo.
And now he was a desk man, running G3, the intelligence section that was the pulse-beat of the whole organisation. Some people would have said he was lucky, but not Adams.
He opened a door and walked through a small, neat office. A middle-aged, desiccated-looking spinster with neat grey hair and rimless spectacles sat behind the typewriter. She glanced up, an expression of disapproval on her face, and Adams grinned.
‘Don’t say it, Milly. Just tell them I’m ready.’
He led the way into his own office. Like Sir Charles’s, it commanded a fine view of the river, the desk standing by the window. He opened a cupboard, took out a heavy bathrobe and pulled it on.
‘Sorry about the delay. I thought Sir Charles would keep you for an hour at least.’
‘More like fifteen minutes,’ Mallory said. ‘He always goes straight to the heart of things with the sticky ones.’
‘I wouldn’t call it that,’ Adams said. ‘Interesting more than anything else. Whole thing could be just a storm in a teacup. Let’s go into the projection room.’
He opened the far door and they descended a few steps into a small hall. There were several rows of comfortable seats and a large screen. The place was quite deserted. They sat down and Mallory offered Adams a cigarette.
‘Any gaps in this one?’
Adams exhaled with a sigh of pleasure and shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. Nothing important, anyway. Has the old man told you much?’
‘He’s outlined the job, told me who the principals are. No more than that.’
‘Let’s get started, then.’ Adams turned and glanced up at the projection box where a dim light showed. ‘Ready when you are.’
A section of film started to run a few moments later. It showed a submarine entering port slowly, her crew lining the deck.
‘To start with, that’s what all the fuss is about,’ Adams said. ‘L’Alouette. Taken at Oran a couple of years ago.’
‘She looks rather small. There can’t be more than a dozen men on deck.’
‘Originally a German U-boat. Type XXIII. Just over a hundred feet long. Does about twelve kilometres submerged. Crew of sixteen.’
‘What about armament?’
‘Two twenty-one-inch torpedoes in the bow and she doesn’t carry spares.’
‘Doesn’t leave much room for mistakes.’
Adams nodded. ‘They never really amounted to anything. This one was built at Deutsches Werft in 1945 and sunk with all hands in the Baltic. She was raised in ’46, refitted and handed over to the French.’
The film ended and a slide appeared. It showed a young French naval officer, eyes serious beneath the uniform cap, the rather boyish face schooled to gravity.
‘Henri Fenelon, full lieutenant. He’s her commander. Age twenty-six, unmarried. Born in Nantes. Father still lives there. Runs a small wine-exporting business.’
Mallory studied the face for a moment or two. ‘Looks weak to me. Ever been in action?’
Adams shook his head. ‘Why do you ask?’
Mallory shrugged. ‘He looks as if he could crack easily. What’s his political background?’
‘That’s the surprising thing. We can’t find any evidence of an O.A.S. connection at all.’
‘Probably did it for adventure,’ Mallory said. ‘He only needed half a dozen men in the crew to agree with him. They could have coerced the rest.’
‘Sounds feasible,’ Adams said. ‘Let’s move on.’
Various slides followed. There was an Admiralty chart of Ile de Roc, with the harbour, the hotel and General Grant’s house all clearly marked. St Pierre was little more than a rock lifting a hundred or so feet out of the sea and crowned by the Victorian Gothic Castle.
Mallory shook his head. ‘God knows how they ever managed to build the damned thing out there.’
‘Eighteen-sixty-one,’ Adams said. ‘A self-made industrialist called Bryant. Bit of a megalomaniac. Saw himself as king of the castle and so on. Cost him better than a hundred thousand to build the place and that was real money in those days.’
‘I can’t see a jetty. Is it on the other side?’
‘There’s a cave at the base of the cliffs. If you look carefully you can see the entrance. The jetty’s inside.’
The castle faded and another picture took its place. It was that of a distinguished-looking man with silvering hair, eyes calm in a sensitive, aquiline face.
‘De Beaumont?’ Mallory said.
Adams nodded. ‘Philippe, Comte de Beaumont. One of the oldest of the great French families. He’s even a rather distant blood relation of you-know-who, which makes the whole thing even more complicated.’
‘I know quite a lot about his military history,’ Mallory said. ‘After all, he’s something of a hero to paratroopers the world over. He came over here during the war and joined de Gaulle, didn’t he?’
‘That’s right. Received just about every decoration possible. Afterwards he went to Indo-China as a colonel of colonial paratroops. The Viets picked him up at the surrender of Dien-Bien-Phu in 1954. After his release he returned to France and was posted to Algeria. He was always at loggerheads with the top brass. Once had an argument with the old man himself at an official reception over what constitutes war in the modern sense.’
‘That should have been enough to get him put out to grass on its own.’
Adams shrugged. ‘They needed him, I suppose. After all, he was the most outstanding paratroop colonel in Algeria at that time. Handled all the dirtier jobs the top brass didn’t want to soil its fingers with.’
‘So he helped bring de Gaulle back to power?’
‘That’s right.