Skydancer (11 page)

She heard him rustling through her private papers, which were stuffed inside the cubby-holes of the bureau. Suddenly the rustling stopped, and she assumed he had found what he was looking for. Inside a tattered brown envelope were the snapshots she had taken during her two-year affair with Peter Joyce, together with the three letters that he had written to her during their relationship.

She flinched as she felt John Black's hand on her shoulder.

‘Don't you think the time has now come, Mary, for you to tell me about Peter Joyce?'

It was after midnight when John Black eventually left the garden flat in Chiswick. The air smelt of fog, and the street lamps looked like orange-headed sentinels glaring sullenly down through the mist. Black sniffed at the air, finding it curiously refreshing after the despair-laden atmosphere he had just left.

He was not proud of the methods he had used to make her tell him what he wanted to hear, but he knew no other way. He shivered in the cold air, hurriedly climbed into his car, started the engine, and set off for home. He failed to notice the large Mercedes parked on the other side of the road.

MIDNIGHT IN LONDON
was seven o'clock in the evening Florida time. The sun was low in the sky and painted the endless beaches with a wash of golden orange, as the RAF VC10 banked for its final turn over the coast and settled smoothly down towards the runway of Patrick Air Force Base. Beyond Patrick, a few miles to the north, the pilot could see the towers and gantries of the Kennedy Space Center pointing challengingly at the stars.

Peter Joyce looked down at the long oblongs of the cars cruising slowly up and down the coastal boulevards. The pilot had sent back a note to say the temperature on the ground was a humid seventy-five degrees. It certainly looked hot down below, and Peter was grateful he had remembered to wear a lightweight suit.

Jill Piper's face was glued to the window, her eyes drinking in their first sight of the USA. Suddenly Peter remembered he had meant to warn her of something. He glanced down to check, and cursed himself. The girl was wearing a skirt.

‘Christ, Jill! Have you brought a pair of trousers with you, by any chance?' he enquired, embarrassed.

She turned from the window, a knowing smile on her lips.

‘For the submarine, you mean? Don't worry, I was warned! A friend of mine went on one last year in a skirt, and had ten sailors round the bottom of each hatchway looking up at her as she came down the
ladder! I'll change as soon as we've landed.'

Peter smiled; the girl was quite sharp. He was very tired, but satisfied that they had managed to complete the writing of the new programmes. It had been a full eight hours' work, but he was as confident as he could be that the deception plan for the missile test would be convincing.

The plane bounced once as it touched the tarmac; then the nose levelled out and the four engines shook and roared as they went into reverse thrust. Peter glanced across the aisle to check that their microcomputers, packed away in their boxes, were still firmly strapped in the seats and cushioned against the force of the landing. When the plane stopped moving, he left Jill on her own in the compartment to change.

As they stepped out on to the steps the warm air enveloped them. The naval officer standing below was wearing a crisply starched white shirt and shorts. He looked up at Peter with recognition.

‘Good evening, Mr Joyce, and welcome to the US of A,' he smiled. ‘Phil Dunkley. We met last year.' He extended his hand. ‘I'm the PSO, the Polaris Systems Officer from
Retribution
.'

Peter was grateful for the reminder, but pretended he did not need it. ‘Of course. I remember you well. Nice to see you again.'

The smile on the Lt. Commander's face broadened as he turned to greet the second visitor from Aldermaston.

‘Ah, Miss Piper, is it?' With a quick all-over glance he took in her blonde hair and the shapely figure clad in blue cotton blouse and slacks.

‘Jill will do!' she smiled back.

The equipment was loaded carefully into a US Navy van. Then they climbed into a large black automobile,
with the officer from HMS
Retribution
sitting next to the US Navy driver in the front. During their forty-minute journey up the coast, Dunkley gave them a running commentary on the local attractions of Florida.

Once through the gates of the US Navy Base at Port Canaveral, Peter felt a sense of anticipation and unease. The smooth black hulls of several submarines lined the quayside – in harbour for maintenance, or waiting to conduct missile tests out in the Atlantic. The sight of this most sinister of military hardware brought him down to earth; the hours spent re-writing the missile warhead programmes had been an academic challenge, but the sight of the slim fins and opened missile hatches reminded him of the monstrous destructive potential of the weapons he designed.

At the end of the quay, the White Ensign fluttering limply in the light evening breeze distinguished HMS
Retribution
from her lookalike American counterparts. As the car pulled to a halt, two sailors on her deck snapped to attention, while a third spoke urgently into a microphone connected by cable to the inside of the hull.

Within seconds the tall, bony figure of the submarine's captain had emerged from a hatchway, and he stood at the head of the gangway with his hand outstretched in greeting.

‘Nice to see you again, Mr Joyce,' Commander Carrington exclaimed. They had also met the previous year, when the scientist had attended the test firing of early prototypes of the Skydancer warheads.

‘Likewise,' Peter answered, smiling politely. ‘And this is Jill Piper, my assistant. She knows much more about using that stuff than I do,' he explained, pointing at the computers that were being unloaded from the US Navy van.

Carrington bowed his head respectfully. ‘I'm afraid that usually when ladies come aboard we give them tea and show them the wardroom,' he grinned. ‘It's a new experience to have a woman tell us how to programme our missiles.'

His words had sounded pompous even to his own ears, and he covered his embarrassment by leading the way down into the bowels of the submarine.

‘Now, how much have you been told about all this?' Joyce asked, once he was alone with Carrington and the Polaris Systems Officer. Jill was elsewhere, supervising the stowage of equipment.

‘Not much,' Carrington answered. ‘They said there was no need for us to know the details.' The injunction to secrecy was a restraint they were well used to, but the two Navy men were clearly burning with curiosity.

‘I'm sorry, I can't explain much to you, as secrecy is terribly important in this matter,' Joyce went on, his eyebrows arched in apology. ‘And I'm going to need your help, please, in damping down speculation among the crew. Many of them will remember me from my last visit, but if anyone asks, could you simply say I'm here to make minor adjustments to the missiles?'

The two officers nodded.

‘Unfortunately what I have to do is not really minor at all. It involves extensive re-programming of the warheads. Your test launch procedures won't be affected, but the changes will make a big difference to what happens at the other end of the range. And I shouldn't really have told you that much!'

‘Don't worry, it'll go no further,' Carrington reassured him. ‘Now when do you want to start work? Tonight?'

‘No, I don't think we can do any more today,' Peter sighed, drawing a hand round his chin and feeling the
stubble of nearly twenty-four hours. ‘I'd rather get some sleep and start fresh in the morning. With any luck we might be finished by lunchtime.'

‘Fine,' the Commander replied. ‘We've booked a couple of rooms for you in a motel down the road. Nothing very special, I'm afraid, but it's on the beach and you should be more comfortable there than on board. We don't have proper facilities for ladies anyway!'

Peter nodded. He suddenly felt a desperate need to sleep; he had been concentrating solidly for the past sixteen hours.

The equipment they had brought from Britain had now been carried carefully down the metal ladders and into the missile compartment in the heart of the submarine. As the PSO led him down there, Peter was pleased to notice sentries standing in the corridors leading to the chamber. He would want complete privacy the following morning.

He stood for a moment looking along the two rows of missile tubes, sixteen in all. Their white casings, over five feet in diameter, looked clean and clinical, and bore large red identification numbers on their sides. Inside each one was a weapon ten times as destructive as the primitive bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

On this occasion however one tube did not contain a bomb. The one he would have to work on the following day held the product of his recent efforts, a warhead of dummies and complex electronic creations, the testing of which was of vital concern both to London and to Moscow.

Satisfied that the equipment was safe, Peter escorted Jill up to the black steel outer casing of the submarine, and down the gangway to the shore. The US Navy driver was still waiting there to take them to their hotel.

It was mid-evening Florida time, though three in the morning by Peter's body-clock. Large convertibles cruised lazily up and down the boulevards, and the bars, motels and arcade houses competed for attention in garish neon. The air smelled of seaweed and grilled meat, and it still retained much of the humid warmth of the day.

‘It's just like on television, only worse,' Jill commented in surprise. ‘Do they
only
eat pizzas and hamburgers?'

‘Just about,' Peter sighed.

The Navy car turned into the driveway of the Cocoa-Beach Lodge, and pulled up by the hotel entrance. The two Britons climbed out, carrying their small suitcases, and arranged for the driver to collect them at eight the next morning.

Peter entered the reception uneasily; American motels all looked alike to him, but there was something familiar about this one. It was only after checking in, and after he had bid Jill a weary goodnight, that he remembered. As he let himself into his room, he realised this was where he had stayed on his last visit, a year ago, the visit when Mary Maclean had accompanied him.

He exhaled sharply, cursing the coincidence that was stirring memories he preferred to keep buried. It might even have been the very same room; above the king-sized bed was an identical cheap print of a space-shuttle launching from Cape Canaveral.

Peter took off his sweaty clothes and lay back on the bed, listening to the surf pounding on the sand fifty yards away. His affair with Mary had begun in London, but it had been here in Florida in a room like this that it had become more than a casual flirtation.

He had surprised himself that first evening of the
train strike when Mary had joined him for dinner in London. He had not been looking for an affair, he was certain of that, but suddenly the opportunity was there. At the time, neither of them had expected the relationship to develop, but it had, and his occasional visits to America had given them the chance for a week on their own.

He clearly remembered their first night here. They had both experienced a childlike excitement at being able to walk around together openly, without the constant secretiveness they had learned to practise back home. They had enjoyed shrimp and lobster at a restaurant on a tumbledown jetty, with a view up the coast to the launching towers of the Space Center, and then they strolled down the beach as the sun set. At the first onset of a chilly evening breeze, they had hurried back to the hotel.

Once inside their room, they had looked at one another and hesitated. There was something unsavoury about this motel.

‘What's this room smell of to you?' he had asked, frowning. ‘They must spray it with something.'

Mary had made much of sniffing the air.

‘No. It's the smell of adultery!' she'd proclaimed with a wicked smile. ‘Now stifle your conscience and get on with it!'

He had snorted with laughter, and then nudged her attention towards the phallic photo of the space-shuttle above the bed. She had turned the picture to the wall.

That week had changed their relationship irrevocably. Until then, neither of them had defined precisely what their affair meant to them. Peter had considered it little more than a flirtation, a compensation for the erosion of his relationship with Belinda. Not in any way an alternative to his marriage, he was determined it
should not affect his family. But Mary had brought a new dimension to his life, and that week in Florida had turned the affair into something much more serious. For the first time Peter had realised he was deeply involved with Mary, and that she was intensely in love with him. But warning bells had soon rung in Peter's mind, and he had known instinctively that the end was already in sight.

On their third evening, Peter remembered, they had revisited the restaurant on the tumbledown jetty, and something he said had caused Mary to giggle uncontrollably. Suddenly she looked twenty years younger. All traces of spinsterishness had vanished. Her face had shed its worry-lines and her eyes shone softly.

Peter knew she had not had many relationships with men; her inexperience was clear to him in the way her body had moved against his with hesitancy and uncertainty when they made love. That evening, however, when they returned to their motel, her reserve had evaporated, and she had given herself to him with a totality that was almost sacrificial.

Suddenly everything had changed. His desire to be with Mary was becoming overwhelming. The possibility of leaving Belinda – separation and divorce – had begun to haunt his thoughts.

In Mary's heart a spark of hope had been lit. She had finally found the love that she had always been seeking, and it seemed to her there was now a chance that it could last for ever. In the months that followed their week in Florida, that spark had grown into a flame, eventually so bright and visible that Peter made his painful but inevitable decision. He could not inflict the misery of a break-up on his children. He had to extinguish the flame for ever.