Read Spy Sinker for Free Online

fugitives were heading.
    When they reached the lake it was not anything like the obstruction that either of them had anticipated. They'd been soaked to the knees wading across the slow-moving Besen. The necessary excursion into the Mause See – to get around the red marker-buoys which Max thought might mark underwater obstacles – did no more than repeat the.soaking up to the waist. But there was a difference: the hard muscular legs had been brought back to tingling life by brisk walking, but the icy cold water of the lake up to his waist drained from Max some measure of his resolution. His arm hurt, his guts hurt and the arctic water pierced through his belly like cold steel.
    The snow began with just a few flakes spinning down from nowhere and then became a steady fall 'What a beautiful sight,' said Bernard and Max grunted his agreement.
    There was just a faint tinge of light in the eastern sky as they cut through the first wire fence. 'Just go!' said Max, his teeth chattering. 'There's no time for all the training school tricks. Screw the alarms, just cut!'
    Bernard handled the big bolt-cutters quickly and expertly. The only noise they heard for the first few minutes was the clang of the cut wire. But after that the dogs began to bark.
     
    Frank Harrington, the SIS Berlin 'resident', would not normally have been at the reception point in the Bundesrepublik waiting, in the most lonely hours of the night, for two agents breaking through the Wall, but this operation was special. And Frank had promised Bernard's father that he would look after him, a promise which Frank Harrington interpreted in the most solemn fashion.
    He was in a small subterranean room under some four metres of concrete and lit by fluorescent blue lights, but Frank's vigil was not too onerous. Although such forward command bunkers were somewhat austere – it being NATO's assumption that the Warsaw Pact armies would roll over these border defences in the first hours of any undeclared war – it was warm and dry and he was sitting in a soft seat with a glass of decent whisky in his fist.
    This was the commanding officer's private office, or at least it was assigned to that purpose in the event of a war emergency. Among Frank's companions were a corpulent young officer of the Bundesgrenzschutz – a force of West German riot police who guard airports, embassies and the border – and an elderly Englishman in a curious nautical uniform worn by the British Frontier Service, which acts as guides for ail British army patrols on land, air and river. The German was lolling against a radiator and the Englishman perched on the edge of a desk.
    'How long before sun-up?' said Frank. He'd kept his tan trenchcoat on over his brown tweed suit. His shirt was khaki, his tie a faded sort of yellow. To the casual eye he might have been an army officer in uniform.
    'An hour and eight minutes,' said the Englishman after consulting his watch. He didn't trust clocks, not even the synchronized and constantly monitored clocks in the control bunker.
    Hunched in a chair in the corner – Melton overcoat over his Savile Row worsted – there was a fourth man, Bret Rensselaer. He'd come from London Central on a watching brief and he was taking it literally. Now he checked his watch. Bret had already committed the time of sunrise to memory; he wondered why Frank hadn't bothered to do so.
    The two men had worked together for a long time and their relationship was firmly established. Frank Harrington regarded Bret's patrician deportment and high-handed East Coast bullshit as typical of the CIA top brass he used to know in Washington. Bret saw in Frank a minimally efficient although congenial time-server, of the sort that yeoman farmers had supplied to Britain's Civil Service since the days of Empire. These descriptions, suitably amended, would have been acknowledged by both men and it was thus that a modus vivendi had been reached.
    'Germans who live near the border get a special pass