The Contract

He was at the Stettiner Hof, a small and vintage hotel… His wife would have liked to have stayed here on holiday, Carter thought. .. Low ceilings, dark woodwork, stairs that creaked in age. Not a bad room, simple and functional with a bathroom across the landing. But he'd mixed his seasons, muddled his habits and the evening had come and he was wide awake, and not hungry either because he'd eaten a big meal at 3 served by the proprietor's wife in the empty dining room.

The afternoon had been wasted with a stroll out onto the medieval Holzberg that sloped, cobbled, down the hill, in rounded by the timber and plaster houses that were made for postcards and holiday photographs, nothing to impress Henry Carter.

With evening there was at last some purpose to Henry Carter's day. He took a taxi from the Stetdner Hof to the NAAFI Roadhaus. That was what he had been told that he must ask for, not that he was searching for a cup of tea or a hamburger or a plate of chips.

Two kilometres short of Checkpoint Alpha the Roadhaus offered the British armed forces a last staging post before the drive along the autobahn through East Germany to their garrisons in West Berlin, access guaranteed by the four power post-war agreement. There was a Military Police unit stationed here, secure communications by radio and telephone and telex, and repair and towing facilities for service personnel luckless enough to blow a gasket or overheat an engine on the autobahn.

The Union Jack fluttered in the last minutes before coming down from the flag pole. At the Guard House Carter explained that facilities had been arranged for him. He was expected and that brightened him, he had resigned himself to an hour kicking his heels while they checked him out. Ushered straight to the major's office, and he was left by himself to telephone Mawby in West Berlin. There wasn't much for him to say, only that he'd arrived, was installed, was groping his way around and would put in a detailed reconnaissance in the morning. And Mawby sounded confident, and said the Berlin team were in shape and raring to go. Bloody Mawby, never a doubt up his sleeve. Well, just the once, just the once at Holmbury on the eve of the launch. Must have been his menopause then, right out of character.

When Carter came out of the room the major was waiting. An apology, the excuse that supper would be on the table at home, but if Mr Carter cared for a drink there was the NAAFI bar. Carter watched the major leave in his car, he'd never met a military man yet who was happy in the company of civilian intelligence.

The bar was little more than a hatch surrounded by the decoration of the wall shields emblazoned with the insignia and mottoes of the army and air force units that had stopped over the years at the Roadhaus before the drive to Berlin. It was a wide, airy room, some tables for eating, some easy chairs. The requisite portraits of the Queen and her Consort and the carefully stacked piles of back numbers of Country Life and Woman's Own and Punch. Carter was back in the realm of the familiar.

There were two men at the bar, elderly and black uniformed, white shirts and black ties, and two white crowned caps on the stool beside them.

'Good evening, the name's Carter.'

'How do you do, Charlie Davies.'

'Pleased to meet you, Mr Carter, I'm Wally Smith.'

They'd be good for some beers thought Carter, good for some company. His estimation was correct, his hopes were justified. For several minutes they chewed over whether it would rain in the next 24 hours, whether at last the summer had come. They swapped winter anecdotes, how much snow there had been in southern England as against north-east Germany. They discussed the merits of the Stettiner Hof as a hotel, whether he could have done better. Gentle and pleasant conversation at the end of a piggish day.

'You'll forgive me, Mr Davies, but the uniform stumps me. I haven't come across it before,' Carter said.

'BFS… British Frontier Service… you're not alone, no one's heard of us. After the war we were up to 300 strong, but they've cut us so hard there's damn all lead left in the pencil. I'm called a Frontier Service Officer Grade Two, and there's three more that have Grade Three rank, that's all that's left along with a half dozen that do customs work for the forces on the Dutch border.' Charlie Davies spoke with a cheerful gloominess.

'What do you do?'

'On paper it says that we're supposed to keep Chief Service Liaison Officer at Hannover informed of the day to day situation on the IGB… that's Inner German Border. We do that and we accompany all army and RAF patrols within five kilometres of the frontier,' Wally Smith chipped in. 'In effect we have to know every damned inch of it from the Baltic down to Schmiedekopf, and that's 411 miles. It's our responsibility to see that no idiot goes where he shouldn't and starts a bloody incident going.'

'It's a fair old stretch of ground,' Carter said with sympathy.

'We manage…' confidence from Davies.