eight feet and immediately spied the large, flat stone, mostly obscured by the underbrush. The casual observer would notice nothing. Metcalfe knelt and brushed away the pine needles, twigs, and dead leaves, then pried loose the rock. Directly underneath it was green canvas, the tarpaulin Roger had wrapped over the small leather suitcase, set into a hollow that he'd obviously dug out earlier in the day. Metcalfe pulled it out with great effort it had been firmly wedged in place and then, after dusting off the dirt and debris, opened the case. He was able to operate in the dark, for he knew the workings of the transceiver well.
Built into the suitcase, which weighed some thirty pounds, was a twelve-volt automobile battery and power supply pack, a headphone and antenna, and then the transceiver itself, a steel box about a foot square with a black wrinkle finish. This was a BP-3, the most sophisticated clandestine communications unit ever built. It had been constructed by a group of Polish refugees working, in complete secrecy, at Letchworth, thirty miles north of London. These Poles, a remarkable assemblage of telecommunications experts who had been trained by the Germans before escaping their country just ahead of the Nazi invasion, were civilian technicians who'd been hired to work for the British secret service. Charged with improving upon the unwieldy old Mark XV transceiver, which was so bulky that it took up two suitcases, they came up with a compact yet powerful two-way communicator constructed of miniaturized components. Its receiver was excellent; it had an output of thirty watts. Its enormous power permitted intercontinental communications. The workmanship was unexcelled. When Corky had handed the suitcase to Metcalfe in a church in Pigalle, in Paris, he had taken no small pleasure in the fact that he'd been able to obtain several of the first advance prototypes even before the British MI-6 had been able to get their hands on them. This makes everything else obsolete,
Corky had crowed. All those other machines are now museum relics. But please, do guard it with your life. You can be replaced, but I'm afraid this device cannot.
The instructions for operating the unit had been pasted under the lid of the black steel box, but Metcalfe had the procedure memorized. He paused for a moment to take in the sounds of the forest. He heard the faint rustle of the trees, a distant call of a nocturnal bird. But nothing else. His knees were now quite damp from the snow, and his legs were beginning to feel numb. This whole arrangement was uncomfortable it would have been far easier if he'd been able to work somewhere indoors, but that was not an option but there was no reason to make it more uncomfortable than necessary. He unfolded the green canvas tarpaulin in which the suitcase had been wrapped and spread it out on the ground. At least he'd be able to sit on a dry spot. He was hardly dressed properly for this errand into the woods: over his evening clothes he wore a black cashmere greatcoat. Not only was his clothing already soiled and torn from making his way through the dense foliage, but his very appearance limited his escape options, if escape ever became necessary. He was clearly a well-dressed foreigner skulking through the forests outside Moscow, which would be immediate cause for suspicion if he was caught; he would be unable to pretend to be, say, a local man, a hunter, a sportsman. He spoke Russian with an accent, but so did many citizens of the Soviet Union who came from any of the far-flung areas, so his accent would not necessarily attract scrutiny. It was the clothes that didn't fit.
In the back of his mind, Metcalfe began rehearsing a possible cover story, in case one became necessary. He looked like a visiting American, so he would be one. He was a weekend guest at the embassy dacha Lana had said she and von Schiissler were spending the evening there, after all, so it wasn't implausible and he'd simply gotten lost on a late-night stroll. Or perhaps he was coming from an assignation in the woods, he would say. There was a woman a married woman, the wife of an embassy attache. They wanted privacy, so they'd gone into the woods, and she'd already returned to the dacha.. .. His fevered mind spun version after version, trying each one out for the soundness of logic.