A New Kind of War

Book 26: Murder Room

by Anthony Price

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

A New Kind of War takes us back to the Greece and Germany of 1945 - as the old kind of war comes to its official end. Why has David Audley broken the British-Greek truce? And furthermore, why did his brigadier order his actions? Is it just coincidence that Audley is surprised near Delphi by Captain Fattorini of the Royal Engineers? As a result of that unfortunate encounter, Fattorini finds himself in occupied Germany as the newest member of TRR-2: a special Intelligence unit engaged in a dangerous and brutal game. It is not until he at last meets Audley's mysterious brigadier that Fattorini learns the full truth about his own assignment in the ill-omened Teutoburg Forest.

Release date: September 6, 2012

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 208

Sample

Part One

Greece, February 2, 1945

The eagle continued its effortless wheeling and gliding far above them, like a spotter-plane safely out of range, as the last echoes of
gunfire finished knocking from peak to peak below it. Obviously, the bloody bird had heard a machine gun before, and possibly from the same godforsaken hillside. In fact, it was probably just
biding its time, waiting for its supper.

“Do eagles eat dead bodies?” As Fred watched, another eagle swept into view. So that meant they bloody did, for sure, and years of war had taught them to steer towards the sound of
the guns, with the prospect of succulent glazed eyeballs for an hors d’oeuvre.

“Eh?” Kyriakos had been busy studying the tree line on the crest of the ridge above the path. “What was that?”

“I said ‘So much for your bloody truce, Captain Michaelides.’” Fred was conscious of his own as yet unglazed eyeballs as he stared reproachfully at Kyriakos.

“You didn’t say that.” The Greek transferred his attention to the track below them. “But . . . not my truce, old boy—your bloody truce.”

The track was empty, and the mountains were as silent as they had been before that sudden burst of machine-gun fire had startled them. And even allowing for acoustic tricks, the sound had come
from over the ridge, certainly; and from far away, hopefully; and possibly even accidentally? Some peasant lad shooting his foot off? Or impressing his girlfriend?

“Not my bloody truce.” A tiny green shoot of hope poked through the arid crust of Fred’s experience: when things were not as bad as they seemed, that was usually because they
were preparing to be worse. But this returning silence was encouraging. “I’m just a tourist passing through—remember?”

Kyriakos chuckled, and then coughed his smoker’s cough. “A tourist?”

“You were going to show me Delphi, as I recall.” As Kyriakos himself began to relax, Fred’s miraculous green shoot flowered. Back in Athens they had said that there’d be
eagles over Delphi, so maybe it was just a welcoming party up there. “That makes me a tourist.”

“If that’s what you wish to be . . .” The Greek shrugged. “But I was actually going to introduce you to Mother as one of our liberators. Just like Lord Byron, I would
have told her—

Fill high the cup with Samian wine!

Our virgins dance beneath the shade

—although I can’t guarantee any virgins locally, after having been away so long. But I do know that Father bricked up some good wine at the far end of the old cellar in the winter of
’40. He knew what was coming, by God!”

“I’ll settle for the wine.” And this blissful silence! “What do you think it was, Kyri? A feu de joie?”

“What for?” Ever cautious, Kyriakos was scanning the ridge again.

“Christmas Eve?” To his shame Fred found the prospect of the temple of Apollo at Delphi insignificant compared with that of good wine and a soft bed, with or without an attendant
virgin. But then almost anything would be an improvement on his Levádhia billet.

“Christmas Eve? On February the second?” Suddenly there was something not quite right in the Greek’s voice. “No—don’t look! Keep talking, old man—just
keep talking—look at me!”

“Yes?” It hurt his neck not to look up the hillside. “What did you see?”

“Perhaps nothing. I am not sure. But it is better that we do not both stare, I think. So . . . you were saying?”

Fear crawled up Fred’s back like a centipede. “There’s an outcrop of rock about twenty yards ahead, Kyri. We’d be a lot safer behind it.”

“Yes—I know. But we’re having a conversation, and we haven’t seen anything yet.” Kyriakos brushed his mustache with heavily nicotine-stained fingers. Fred
remembered that when he’d first seen that mustache in Italy, it had been a well-groomed Ronald Colman growth, along the road beyond Tombe di Pesaro, on the Canadian Corps boundary. But now it
had bushed out and run riot, perhaps symbolizing its owner’s own reversion to the traditional banditry of his native land.

“It was a Spandau that fired just now.” When he didn’t speak, Kyriakos occupied his silence. “That’s an Andarte weapon. And if they’ve got another one
up there trained on us, we wouldn’t get ten yards—if they think we’ve seen them. So . . . talk to me—wag your finger at me—as though you had all the time in the world,
okay?”

“Yes.” But words failed Fred, even as he raised a ridiculous finger.

Christmas Eve! he thought desperately. It wasn’t Christmas Eve—it was February the second, not December the twenty-fourth. February the second, anno Domini 1945, not
December the twenty-fourth, 1944! “Yes.”

“Go on—go on!” Kyriakos waved an equally ridiculous hand at him, as though to disagree with the ridiculous finger. “Talk to me!”

“Yes.” But on the other hand, it was Christmas Eve, thought Fred. Because General Scobie had abolished Christmas Day, 1944, for the British Army in Athens. It just
wouldn’t have sounded right for the British Army—the Liberators—to have caroled “Peace on earth, and goodwill to all men” when they’d been busy
killing their erstwhile Communist allies, with their twenty-five pounders firing over the Parthenon, and the cruisers and destroyers in the bay stonking targets along the Piraeus road, and the
Spitfires wheeling like eagles overhead! “It’s the eve of Scobiemas, I mean, Kyriakos.”

“Ah! Of course—I had forgotten! Scobiemas is tomorrow, of course! But we Greeks do not keep Scobiemas. Or Christmas, either—remember?”

Dead right! Fred remembered. And General Scobie had been dead right too, because the Commies had launched a midnight attack on the Rouf Barracks garrison, Christmas Day–Boxing
Day, on the otherwise reasonable assumption that the British would be pissed out of their minds by then; whereas in fact, thanks to General Scobie, they’d been stone-cold sober and
ready—and bloody-minded with it . . . also thanks to General Scobie, by God!

But he had to talk—

“I went to a party on Christmas Day, actually.”

“You did?” Kyriakos took a step towards him, turning slightly and draping a friendly arm across his shoulders. “I thought that all the parties were forbidden then.” He
glanced sidelong, uphill.

“It was for Greeks, too.” Fred let the friendly arm propel him forwards along the path. “What do you see?”

“Nothing . . . slowly now . . . for Greeks, you say?”

“Greek children. Some Fourth Div gunners gave it.” Fred let himself be pushed towards the rocky outcrop. “I saw one little kid gobble up four days’ M and V rations all by
himself.” It seemed a very long twenty yards to the outcrop, at this friendly snail’s pace. “And a couple of platefuls of peaches after that, plus a pile of biscuits.”

“Yes. I heard about that.” The arm restrained, him. “But it wasn’t a gunners’ party—it was Twenty-eighth Brigade RASC, Fred.”

“Well, it was a gunner who took me along.” They were getting closer, step by step. “But you’re probably right: trust the RASC to have the peaches!” Fred
shivered—slightly at the memory of the bitter wind that had chilled him before and after the party, as he’d helped the gunners find a position in suburban Athens free of electricity
cables (which they had not been allowed to pull down; and there was the added problem of the Parthenon, high up and dead ahead, which had worried one classically educated subaltern
mightily)—but mostly it was the last three agonizing yards, shuffled step by slow step, which frightened him.

“There now!” Kyriakos released him at last, under the safety of the rock. “Home and dry—eh?”

Fred watched, wordless and fascinated, as the Greek slid a stiletto from his jackboot and began to excavate a hole in the detritus beneath the rock.

“There now!” As he repeated the words Kyriakos fumbled inside his battle-dress blouse to produce a succession of documents—paybook, letters, and military
identification—which he then buried in the hole, smoothing the surface above them. And then, finally, he fished another collection of even more dog-eared papers from his other boot, which
went back into the empty battle-dress pocket.

The power of speech returned to Fred. “What the hell are you doing, Kyri?”

Kyriakos grimaced at him. “Not Kyri or Kyriakos—‘Alexander’—or ‘Alex,’ for short . . . shit!”

“Sh—?” Fred failed to complete the obscenity as Kyriakos reached beneath his leather jerkin, first on one side and then on the other, to unbutton his epaulets so that they each
hung down over his arms. Then he flipped the stiletto and offered it to Fred.

“Cut them off!” he commanded.

“What?” Fred had already admired the smart khaki green Canadian battle dress that Kyriakos had acquired during his service with the British Columbia Dragoons in Italy: to rip that
uniform, never mind the badges of rank, seemed a blasphemy. “Why?”

“Cut them off—hurry up! Don’t argue, there’s a good chap.”

Fred hacked at the straps left-handed, clumsily at first, and then with greater success as the sharp steel divided the stitching.

“Pull the threads out—go on—make a proper job of it, then.” Kyriakos admonished him casually, yet the very gentleness of the admonition somehow urged its importance.

Fred finished the job as best he could and then watched the Greek pick out every last shred of evidence. “You did see something—just now—didn’t you!”

“Thank you.” Kyriakos took the epaulets and the knife from him, hefting the epaulets for a moment as though weighing their rank. Then he bent down and opened up the hole again with
the stiletto, to add his badges of rank to his identity. “Our best intelligence is that this area is clear, all the way to Mesolóngion. And we’ve got the gulf patrolled
now.” He started refilling the hole again. “The word was that the Communists were pulling back into the mountains north and south of it—they don’t want to be caught with
their backs to the sea, come spring. Or whenever.” He replanted a straggling little piece of desiccated greenery on top of his handiwork, and then bent down to blow away the telltale
regularities left by his fingers. “But . . .”

“But?” The Greek’s casual certainty that his civil war would resume its murderous course depressed Fred, for all that it hardly surprised him: the British had imposed the truce
by overwhelming force of arms, but there had been too much bloodletting in those first dark December days, with too many scores left unsettled, for any compromise settlement to last—that was
what all his better-informed elders said. “But what?”

Kyriakos sprinkled a final handful of dust on the hiding place. Then he looked back at Fred. “But I think I want to be careful, just in case.”

“In case of what?” Fred resisted the temptation to answer his own question.

“In case our best intelligence is wrong.” Kyriakos showed his teeth below his mustache. “My friend, perhaps I imagined something . . . But if I did not, then they will
most certainly have observed us. And now they will know that we are behind this rock. So—”

The Spandau on the other side of the ridge cut Kyriakos off with its characteristic tearing-knocking racket, only to be suddenly cut off itself by prolonged bursts of fire from first one, and
then another, LMG.

“Ah!” Kyriakos breathed out slowly as the knock-knock-knock of the answering machine gun died away. “So now we know!”

So now they knew, thought Fred tightly. It was a familiar enough scenario, reenacted endlessly in no different and equally hated Italian mountains these last two years: the rearguard or outpost
machine-gunner getting in his first murderous burst, but then, if he was so unwise as to remain in his position, being outflanked or bracketed by the vengeful comrades of the first victims.

“Brens, the second time.” Kyriakos unbuttoned his webbing holster and examined his revolver. “So that must be our people, I would think, okay?”

Fred stared at him, conscious equally of the weight of his own side arm and of his left-handed inadequacy. “Not our people, Kyri.”

“No.” Kyriakos replaced the revolver in its holster. “Not your people—our people. But that at least gives us a chance.” He removed his beret, grinning
at Fred as he did so. “Lucky I didn’t wear my proper hat. So maybe I’m lucky today.”

Fred watched the Greek raise his head slowly over the top of the rock, trying to equate luck with headgear. Unlike his fellow officers, who wore bus conductors’ SD hats, wired and
uncrumpled and quite different from his own, Kyri often wore a black Canadian dragoons’ beret, complete with their cap badge. But then Kyri was an eccentric, everyone agreed.

“Nothing.” Always the professional, Kyriakos lowered his head as slowly as he had raised it. “I think I am still lucky, perhaps.”

“Bugger your luck!” A further burst of firing, punctuated now by the addition of single rifle shots, snapped Fred’s nerve. “What about mine. This is supposed to be my
Christmas Eve—I’m your bloody guest, Kyriakos!”

“Ah . . . but you must understand that your odds are a lot better than mine, old boy.” Kyriakos grinned at him.

“They are?” Somehow the assurance wasn’t reassuring. “Are they?”

“Oh, yes.” The grin was fixed unnaturally under the mustache, the eyes were not smiling. “If our side runs away—your pardon! If my side withdraws strategically to
regroup . . . If that happens, then the Andartes will outflank us here”—Kyriakos gestured left and right, dismissively—“or take us from below, without difficulty,
I’m afraid.”

Fred followed the gestures. There was dead ground not far along the track ahead, and more of it behind them. And they were in full view of the track below.

“I know this country, this place.” The Greek nodded at him. “There’s a little ruined monastery over the ridge, which the Turks destroyed long ago. I have walked this path
before, with my father, in the old days: it is the secret back door to the village, which is below the monastery. So . . . I am very much afraid that our people have made a mistake—the same
mistake the Turks once made. They have come up from the sea to attack the monastery . . . if that is where the Andartes are . . . when they should have come out of the mountains, over this
ridge—up this path, even—to take it in the rear and push them down to the sea. . . . That will be some foolish, stiff-necked Athenian staff officer who thinks he knows everything, as
the Athenians always do.”

The firing started again, this time punctuated by the distinctive crump of mortar shells—a murderous, continuous shower of them.

Kyriakos swore in his native tongue, unintelligibly but eloquently, and Fred frowned at him. “What’s the matter?”

“Those are three-inch—they’ll be ours. So our people are well-equipped.”

That didn’t make sense. “So they’ll win?”

“Too bloody right!” Kyriakos swore again.

“So what’s wrong with that?”

“I told you.” Kyriakos was hardly listening to him. He was studying the landscape again. “I know this place.”

“Yes.” The eagles were still on patrol, wheeling and dipping and soaring over the highest peak, out of which the ridge itself issued in a great jumble of boulders piled beneath its
vertical cliff. “So what?”

Kyriakos looked at him at last. “This is the path the villagers took when the Turks came. Over this ridge—this path—is the only line of retreat. If our side is too strong . . .
we’re rather in the way, old boy.”

The Greek shrugged philosophically, but Fred remembered from Tombe di Pesaro days that the worse things were, the more philosophic Captain Michaelides became. “Then hadn’t we better
find another spot in which to cower, Kyri?” He tried to match the casual tone.

“Yes, I was thinking about that.” Kyriakos turned his attention to the hillside below them. But it was unhelpfully open all the way down to the track along which they should have
driven an hour earlier, happy and unworried—only an hour, or a lifetime, thought Fred. And that further reminded him of the Michaelides Philosophy: being in the Wrong Place . . . or there at
the Wrong Time . . . that was “No fun at all, old boy!” And now they appeared to have achieved the unfunny double, by Christ!

But the unfunniness, and the patient eagles, concentrated his mind. “If you did see someone up there, Kyri . . . couldn’t he just possibly be one of yours—ours?” He threw
in his lot finally with the Royal Hellenic Army and the bloodthirsty National Guard.

“Ye-ess . . .” Kyriakos shifted to another position behind the outcrop. “I was thinking about that, too.”

Fred watched him raise himself—never show yourself in the same place twice, of course; and the poor bastard had had a lot longer in which to learn that simplest of lessons, ever
since the Italians had chanced their luck out of Albania, back in the winter of ’40. But then he remembered his own manners.

“My turn, Kyri.” He raised himself—too quickly, too quickly, but too late now! And he wanted to see the crest of that damned ridge for himself, anyway.

The surface of the rock midway between them burst into fragments in the same instant that the machine gun rattled down at them, with the bullets ricocheting away into infinity behind them.

This time the echoes—their own echoes, much louder that those of the firefight over the ridge—took longer to lose themselves as he breathed out his own mixture of terror and
relief.

(“Missed again!” That was what Sergeant Procter, ever cheerful, ever efficient, always said, when he himself had been shaking with fear, back in Italy. “If they
can’t hit us now, sir, then the buggers don’t deserve to win the war—do they!”)

“That was deuced stupid of you, old boy.” Somewhere along the line of his long multinational service since Albania in 1940, Kyriakos had picked up deuced, probably from
some blue-bloodied British unit, which he used like too bloody right, a ripe Australianism, in other “no fun” situations.

“I’m sorry.” The ridge had been thickly forested on the crest, with encircling horns of trees to the left and right; so the machine gunner’s friends would have no problem
flanking this outcrop, thought Fred miserably. And Kyriakos had certainly observed all that already. “A moment of weakness, Kyri, I’m sorry.”

“But not altogether useless.” With typical good manners Kyriakos hastened to take the sting from his criticism. “That was a Browning—a ‘B-A-R,’ as our
American friends would say . . . a nice little weapon.”

“Yes?” Fred let himself be soothed, knowing that Kyri was using his hobby to soothe him, deliberately. “I bow to your experience, Captain Michaelides. But what does that
mean?”

“Not a lot, to be honest. It goes back a long way, does the BAR. . . . We had some of them in 1940—Belgian FN variants. . . . But, then so did the Poles. And the Germans and the
Russians inherited them, as well as ours, of course. . . . But so far as I’m aware, you never used them, old boy.”

Lying back and looking upwards, Fred caught sight of one of the eagles making a wider circuit. Or maybe the bloody bird had pinpointed his dinner now. “So those aren’t our friends,
up there?”

Kyriakos thought for a moment. “Ah . . . now, I don’t think we have any friends at the moment, either way.” Another moment’s thought. “Because we’re not part
of the action: we’re an inconvenience, you might say.”

The firefight continued sporadically over the crest. By now the commanding officers on each side would be estimating casualties and discretion against the remaining hours of daylight and their
very different objectives. And sudden and overwhelming bitterness suffused Fred. Because the bloody Germans were one thing, and bad enough. But the bloody Greeks were another—and this really
wasn’t the war he had volunteered for. Even, until now, it wasn’t a war that he had been able to take seriously. It was Kyri’s bloody war, not the British Army’s bloody
war—and especially not his!

All of which made him think of the unthinkable, which nestled in his pocket, where he had put it this morning, freshly laundered. “How about surrendering—for the time
being?”

“Yes.” Kyriakos nodded. “I had been thinking about that, also.”

The lightness of the Greek’s voice alerted him. “The truck talks . . . we could claim flag of truce—couldn’t we?”

“We could.” The Greek had his own large white handkerchief. “But . . . if you don’t mind . . . we will claim it my way”—he shook the handkerchief
out—“okay?”

Suddenly Fred felt the breath of a colder wind within him than that which he had already felt on his cheeks. “Kyri—”

“No! You are quite right, old boy!” Kyriakos shook out his handkerchief. “We wouldn’t get ten yards. . . . This way . . . there’s a chance, I agree.”

“No—”

“Yes!” The Greek nodded. “I am ‘Alex’ ”—he patted his battle-dress pocket—“and you wanted to visit Delphi . . . you can bullshit them about
your classical education, and how you are a British socialist—tell them that you don’t like Winston Churchill, if you get the chance. . . . But say that Spiros in
Levádhia—Spiros the baker—he recommended me. Okay?”

“Spiros, the baker.” Fred echoed the order. “In Levádhia?”

“That’s all. Let me do the talking, old boy.” Kyriakos drew a breath, and then grinned at him. “If they’re in doubt they won’t shoot you—they can always
trade you; you’re worth more alive than dead at the moment—don’t argue.” He raised his hand quickly to preclude the argument. “I know what to say, if we
can only get them to talk. And since this is their only line of retreat, I think they’ll talk—at least, to start with.” He qualified the grin with a shrug. “After that, it
will be as God always intended.”

Fred bridled, already bitterly regretting his suggestion. “I don’t know, Kyri.” The truth, which he had quite failed to grasp in half-grasping, was that it was this
man’s own bloody war, truce or no truce. And that meant . . . that if it was true that a British officer had some value as a prisoner, it was even more true that a Greek royalist officer was
certain to be shot out of hand if caught in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time. In fact, Kyri himself had said as much, and he had replied with cowardly stupidity, claiming guest rights on Scobiemas
Eve—I’m your bloody guest, Kyri! “I don’t think so.”

The Greek frowned. “Don’t think what, old boy?”

Fred shivered inwardly, aware that he could never explain his shame—that would make it worse. “I don’t think I care to take the chance. I think I’d rather shoot it
out here.” He clawed at his holster with his right hand, only to find that the damn claw was as useless as ever—more useless even, in its very first real emergency. “Damn
it!” Damn it to hell! Now he had to reach across with his fumbling left hand! “What I mean is . . . we can just slow them up and wait for our chaps to come up behind them,
Kyri.” The bloody thing wouldn’t come out—it was snagged somehow. Damn it to hell and back!

“Too late, old boy,” the Greek murmured almost conversationally, raising himself, and then raising and waving his arm with the handkerchief on the end of it. “There! Never done
that before. But there’s always a first time for everything, they say. And I’m told it always worked a treat with the Germans—with their ordinary fellows, anyway . . .
eh?”

“Oh . . . fuck!” Fred almost wept with frustration as his left hand joined the claw’s mutiny. “Fuck!”

“Such language!” Kyriakos tut-tutted at him. “We made a pact, remember, old boy?”

That was also true, thought Fred as he gagged on other and fouler expletives in giving up the struggle. Only hours—or maybe only minutes—before they had discussed the degeneration of
their everyday language under the influence and pressure of army life, in the light of their imminent meeting with Madame Michaelides (who countenanced no such words) and Fred’s eventual
return to the bosom of his family (who would certainly be equally shocked); and while his own persuasion had been that it would be no problem—that some automatic safety valve would
activate—Kyri had not been so confident and was unashamedly more frightened at the prospect than he seemed to be now, at another prospect, as he waved his large white handkerchief.

“Don’t you forget now, eh?” The Greek also waved his finger, admonishing him for all the world as though they were about to meet his mother, instead of more likely God
Almighty, Whose intentions they were now supposed to be anticipating. “I am Alex, the friend of Spiros, okay?”

It was also, and finally, true . . . what Sergeant Procter always said: that you could like a man and hate him at the same time.

Kyriakos smiled again, turning the knife in the wound. “So now we wait?”

“What for?” The mixture of unpleasant noises from the other side of the ridge had become increasingly sporadic while they had been arguing. But now it seemed to have died away
altogether, so maybe that was a silly question. “Not for long, though?”

“They’ll flank us.” Kyri gave the handkerchief a final vigorous wave and then pointed first left, then right. “Where those gulleys from the top peter
out—‘peter out,’ is that right?”

“Yes.” Five years of English education, followed by another five of military alliance, had rendered the Greek almost perfectly bilingual. But more than that, Fred at last understood
how Kyriakos had seen their positions through an infantryman’s eye. While their refuge could easily be flanked from those treacherous gulleys, it also had to be eliminated because they in
turn had a clear view of the lower slopes and the track below. “I understand, Kyri.”

“Good. Then you watch the left and I will watch the right.” He paused. “And understand this also, old boy. The moment you see anything, you put your hands up—and I mean
up—up high, my friend. Because we’ll only have that one moment, maybe. Understood?”

“Understood.” He didn’t want to add to the man’s burdens.

“And then you’re my guide, Alex . . . recommended to me by Spiros the baker.” He wondered for a moment about Spiros the baker. Was he one of Captain Michaelides’s ELAS
suspects? Or one of the captain’s double agents? But then, other than sharing the general British Army distaste for the mutual barbarities of the Greeks’ December bloodbath, he had
never really attempted to understand their politics. The distinction between Captain Kyriakos Michaelides, of the Royal Hellenic Army, and Kyriakos Michaelides, the son of Father’s old
friend, was not one he had even thought of seriously until now. “But I don’t speak halfways decent Greek, remember—okay?”

“Don’t worry about that.” Kyri threw the words over his shoulder, forcing him to concentrate on his own gulley. “I’ll do the talking. Just you be an outraged
British ally to start with, old boy—and be angry with me for getting you into trouble. And—” He stopped suddenly.

“And what?” He fought the urge to turn towards the sudden silence. “Have you spotted something.”

“And . . . nod . . . nod and smile when I mention Spiros, okay?” The Greek spoke with unnatural slowness. “Ye-ess . . . I think maybe I have . . . so get
ready!”

Fred still couldn’t see anything. But the muscles all the way down his arms wanted to get his hands up even before his brain transmitted its own instructions. “Nothing this
side—”

“YOU THERE! STAND UP!”

The shout came from his side, out of nowhere.

“Get up,” Kyriakos snarled at him from behind.

Fred and his arms shot up simultaneously, his boots digging into the scree beneath them so urgently that he almost over-balanced; and it was only when he’d rebalanced himself that the
reason for his failure to react instantly came to him.

“DON’T SHOOT!” He hadn’t imagined in advance how he was supposed to obey an order given in a foreign language. But there was suddenly no problem about how to reply to an
order in the plainest Kyri’s English. “BRITISH!”

Kyri shouted something, also. But Fred was too busy staring at the figure that had risen out of the dead ground of the gulley no more than thirty yards away from him.

“KEEP ’EM UP! DON’T YOU DARE MOVE A FUCKING INCH!”

Fred was suddenly impaled on the prongs of disbelief and relief, any last doubts about the identity of his captor dissolved by that beloved obscenity, which sounded sweeter in his ear than all
the music of heaven, which could never be foul and harsh again, it was so beautiful.

The welcome figure advanced cautiously towards him, cradling a gangster’s Thompson machine pistol in its hands, until it had halved the distance between them.

“KEEP ’EM UP!”

Relief had started to lower his arms. But as they instantly went up again, disbelief still clogged his tongue.

“Say something, old boy!” Kyri no longer s