Jack of Spies Read Free Page A

beach and some twenty yards out into the water, to what was probably the low-tide mark. He had first seen barbed wire corralling Boer women and children in South Africa, and finding it stretched across a Chinese beach was somewhat depressing, if rather predictable. There was no EINTRITT VERBOTEN sign, but there didn’t really need to be. Only an idiot would think the fence was there to pen sheep.
    McColl decided to be one. A quick look about him failed to detect any possible witnesses, so he took off his shoes and socks, rolled up his trousers, and waded out and around the end of thefence. The water was deeper and colder than he had expected. After drying his feet as best he could with a handkerchief, he wrung out his trouser bottoms, inserted his sand-encrusted feet into the dry footwear, and ventured on down the forbidden beach. I went paddling in the Yellow Sea, he thought. Something to tell his grandchildren, should he ever have any.
    As he approached the end of the headland, the stern of a passenger ship loomed into view. It had obviously just left the harbor and was already turning southward, probably bound for Shanghai. McColl found himself wishing he were on it, rather than seeking out German guns with a pair of cold, wet trousers clinging to his thighs. He’d already earned the pittance that Cumming was paying him. What did the man expect from a brief visit like this one? A serious spying mission to Tsingtau would need a lot more time—and a lot better cover—than McColl had at his disposal. Cumming’s favorite agent, Sidney Reilly, had lived in Port Arthur for several months before he succeeded in stealing the Russian harbor-defense plans.
    McColl stopped and scrutinized the view to his right. The guns were up there somewhere, and this looked as good a spot as any to clamber up the slope. If he ran into officialdom, he would play the lost tourist, afraid of being cut off by the incoming tide.
    Five minutes later he reached the crest and got a shock. The gun emplacements were up there all right, just as the Admiralty had thought they would be, but so were watching eyes. McColl was still scrambling up onto the plateau when the first shout sounded, and it didn’t take him long to work out that dropping back out of sight was unlikely to win him anything more than a bullet in the spine. They’d seen him, and that was that.
    Two soldiers in pickelhaube helmets were running across the grass. He walked toward them, mind working furiously. The lost-tourist act already seemed redundant—an Englishman this close to German guns was surely too much of a coincidence. But what was the alternative?
    One of their guns went off, and for a single dreadful moment he thought they were shooting at him. But it quickly became obvious that one of them had pulled his trigger by accident. Seizing what seemed like an opportunity, McColl lengthened his stride, shook his fist, and angrily asked in German what the hell they thought they were doing.
    “No civilians are allowed up here,” the older of the soldiers insisted. He looked a little shamefaced but had not lowered his rifle. “Who are you? Where have you come from?”
    “My name is Pluschow,” McColl told him impulsively. There were two thousand soldiers in the garrison, and it seemed unlikely that these two would have run into the aviation enthusiast. “Lieutenant Pluschow,” he added, taking a guess at the man’s rank. “I am sorry—I did not realize I had strayed onto army territory. But I can’t believe your orders are to shoot first and ask questions later.”
    “That was an accident,” the younger man blurted out. He couldn’t have been much more than eighteen.
    “And no harm done,” his partner insisted. “But you still haven’t explained what you’re doing here.”
    “I’m surveying the area. Tsingtau needs an aerodrome, and I’m getting a feeling for the local air currents.” He reached for his packet of cigarettes and held it out to the