Arctic Assignment by Charles Robert

Author:Charles, Robert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sapere Books
Published: 2022-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

But Larren didn’t sleep. His head was throbbing dully, as he had claimed, and so was his left arm. But he lay on his back on the low cot with his eyes closed and the injured arm folded across his chest and continued to think. His thoughts revolved like cats chasing their own tails, and despite the pain in his skull he had to try and catch them and straighten them out.

He was uneasy about everything that Cleyton had told him. Every fact seemed to fit too neatly into the picture, but then when he turned them round they failed to fit at all. The explanation that the base was the headquarters for a parallel programme to A.U.T.E.C. seemed quite plausible. The field of undersea warfare was quite obviously going to be an important one if the conflicting powers of East and West ever did cease their political arguing and come to actual blows, and it was quite feasible that the Russians would want to investigate every facet of that field as thoroughly as the West were doing. The testing of sub-to-sub missiles adequately answered the mystery of the shoal of radioactive fish that had been washed up on Barren Island, and also explained the presence of the submarine that had reared up out of the straits to frighten the Dog Eskimos. Everything in fact fitted. Except for one thing. The Americans and the British were going about their programme quite openly, there was a tight security clamp on details and findings, but the broad purpose of A.U.T.E.C. had even been reported in the newspapers. Why then were the Russians so insistent upon absolute secrecy for their own project? Why too had they installed the headquarters for their testing centre here on Barren, practically on the doorstep of pro-Western Norway, when they could so easily have used one of their already constructed submarine bases along their own Siberian coastline?

The more Larren thought the less happy he became. He began to wonder whether it was possible that Kerensky was not so unaware as he appeared to be of Cleyton’s ability to understand Russian. There was a possibility that the security major had been deliberately dropping stray titbits of false information.

Then a second possibility suddenly hit him. How much could he really trust Adrian Cleyton?

He repelled the thought almost as quickly, he had worked with Cleyton in Athens, and twice Cleyton had saved his life. Besides, Smith rated the slim man as one of his best agents, and Smith was not the man to make that kind of mistake — he couldn’t afford them. Cleyton had to be straight.

Then slowly the doubt began to creep back again. How far could anyone trust anyone in this business? International espionage brewed more double agents than leaves that fell in autumn. Larren’s mind went back to Greece and the island of Kyros in the Aegean Sea. The job, the recovery of a vital drug antidote, had been one of the few that did not involve direct entanglement with any branch of Communist intelligence.

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