Torpedo Run

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Lieutenant-Commander John Devane sat on a plain wooden bench seat and regarded the opposite wall. Grey rough concrete. You could even see where the first layer had been tamped home. The brief professional interest passed just as quickly as it had emerged and he sank back again, outwardly relaxed, but his mind busy with the distant sounds, the feeling of being off balance, lost.

The room was little more than a space curtained off from one of many such corridors beneath the Admiralty building in London. A far-off murmur was like the sea across a scattered reef, but it was traffic – red buses which still managed to make splashes of colour against the dust and rubble of wartime London, and taxis which never seemed to see you when you needed one – and people on the move: endless, restless throngs, many in the uniforms of countries occupied by ‘them’, as his mother called them. The enemy.

Devane glanced at his watch. Again the movement was easy and without waste. It was eleven in the forenoon, a May day in 1943. But down here it could have been anywhere, any time.

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