Carter spoke from the dining room door. 'Willi, there's something they want to clarify in London. What are your father's holiday dates

… in Magdeburg this summer?'

God Almighty, what were they thinking about in their ivory towers?

What bloody scheme were they hatching up above the cloud level? They weren't going to try to bring the old man out, not through the minefields, not through the bloody fences. Remember the maxim of the Service, Henry; it exists for the gathering of information and how it is acquired is irrelevant. And it's what the old Service would have done. He curbed himself, doused the thought. They wouldn't be so bloody mad.

'From the first of June to the fifteenth…'

'Thanks, Willi.' Carter glanced at his watch face, read the date. A month till Otto Guttmann went on holiday. Six weeks till he left, that was more positive. What on earth were they playing at in London?

'Why do you need to know, Mr Carter?'

'Don't ask me, lad. Don't expect me to be told anything.'

They had been in the earth bunker at the edge of the Spellersieck wood for eight hours and the relief lorry to collect Ulf Becker and Heini Schalke was late.

The 0400-1200 duty, the killer time. The duty that started as the first birds broke the night silence and that ended at noon with the head pounding in pain, the legs stiffened, the eyes red rimmed from staring out in concentration over the cleared ground to the border fence.

There was no friendship between these two boys as they squatted in the half dark. Becker from Berlin, Schalke from Leipzig. No basis for mutual understanding or trust. The orders of the company commander insisted that sentries should talk together only on matters that affected their operational readiness. And if one spoke in the earth bunker or the watch tower or the patrol jeep then he must know first that his colleagues would not denounce him, and it was the skill of the officers and the NCOs and their rosters that the conscripts never knew with whom they were safe. The boys watched each other with lonely, hawk suspicion.