Doomsday England [antikvár]

THE START A coek crew once in East Berlin. Day, Thursday 10th June, 4,32 a.m. The milk van pulled up in the shadows across the street from 19a Lenin Platz and Keys got out. Carrying a crate of milk bottles in his right hand he clattered across the street. His left hand dragged plastic hose which unreeled silently from a spool beneath the chassis of the van. Whistling a bar from the 'Nutcracker Suite', Keys plonked three bottles noisily on the step outside the iron-studded door. Then, dropping the metal crate to muflQe the click, he rammed the nozzle of the hose-pipe through the letter-box. Fed it rapidly in until five feet of tube had vanished into the dark and silent house. Keys went back across the street. Nodded to the man in the driver's seat. 'Fill her up,' he said softly. The driver threw a switch on the dashboard. Immediately the hose-pipe quivered like a snake as sixty-five gallons of high octane petrol, pumped under enormous pressure, fled across the deserted street and into the East German Headquarters of Soviet Strategic Intelligence. Then the whirring stopped. 'That's it,' the driver said. Keys looked at the luminous hands of his watch. Then up at the changing sky. 'You sure the points will arc?' he asked. The man in the driver's seat nodded.