A dog hungered for dog: The Ninth Directive by Adam Hall (1966)

The Ninth Directive by Adam Hall (1966)

…..Besides, it's typical of the Person. He put his feelings in a nutshell for the Evening Standard when he said: 'I want to be able to see the people, and some of them may want to see me.' Behind the whole story is of course a very definite request: no shields. And behind that decision is his personal view of the situation - he feels he will best serve his country by demonstrating that anonymous threats are for the wastepaper basket.' He looked down at his feet. 'I rather wish we weren't quite so responsible for the safety of quite so good a man.'

'I've told you,' I said, 'I'd do it for the postman.'

His bright eyes came at me again, 'But it's a matter of consequences, isn't it? You must have given it some thought.'

'All right, you tell me. You've got one foot in the Embassy and the other in London. What are the consequences if we miss? Another Sarajevo?'

'I don't know.' Almost petulantly he said, 'I've never worked in an area of which I've known so little.'

'We'll know a bit more tomorrow.'

His mouth quivered silently, blocked by a rush of too many words. He was really very cross with me. He finally managed to speak. 'I wish I had your limited view, Quiller.'

'My view's limited by crossed hairs in a circle. Someone's got to concentrate on that. You look after the consequences while I pop the weasel. Then there won't be any.'

'How much,' he asked me as if I'd never spoken, 'do you think Kuo will be paid? If he succeeds?'

'He doesn't work that way. The cost of a dead body is a few bob and the cost of a bullet is a few pence. It's the set-up that's expensive and the fee's already in his pocket. I'd put it at five hundred thousand pounds.'

Loman nodded. 'Who can afford a sum like that? Only a government. That's why I can't ignore the question of consequences.'

I turned away from him. He could stay awake all night if he wanted to. I had to be fresh for the job.

'Worry it,' I said, turning again and watching him from a little distance. 'Worry it out. I've got my limited view. All I need to know is that the consequences of crooking the index finger are a hole in a skull.'

He didn't answer. I shall always remember him standing there among the colored kites, fearful and bright of eye, wondering what he'd got into and wondering how to get out. It was easier for me and my terms were simpler. A dog hungered for dog….

***

Quiller thinks of himself as a weasel sent down a role: is there a dog waiting at the other end? Pity the dog.

Quiller tells his own story. When he gets hurt, and he gets progressively more injured as the second half of the novel builds up speed, his voice becomes staccato and events are rendered as increasingly shorthanded collage.

Quiller is a Hawksian pro with a brain like a database. He recounts his skills, slows scenes down to describe each flash of action with near-scholarly footnoted detail. (Lee Child in the Reacher novels did not invent it, he just continues it beautifully.)

Quiller uses allies, though not all are on his side out of loyalty to him. But his own decency motivates his passion, and his angry exasperation at friend and foe alike.

Quiller gets maneuvered and out-maneuvered by his opponent in The Ninth Directive. But Quiller wades through mud and his own blood to make sure the final maneuver is his, and the player on the other side is the loser.

Quiller sweeps up all the pieces: how he does it is where the blessed poetry shines through.

Quiller? I've never read him (sorry, I mean Adam Hall) before. He was just a name on a bunch of paperbacks when I was a kid in rural Ohio. But this morning I devoured The Ninth Directive in six hours.

"The 9th Directive was wiped out."

***

Jay

30 December 2017

Define, infiltrate and destroy: The Warsaw Document by Adam Hall (1971).

'What's the area?'

'I think you'll need tropical kit.'

'Oh my God.'

'It's a shame,' he smiled amiably, 'in winter they send you to Warsaw, don't they?'

--Adam Hall, The Tango Briefing 

The Warsaw Document by Adam Hall (1971).

Quiller is dispatched by Bureau control to assist tyro spook Merrick in forging links with Polish anticommunists on the eve of a historic East-West summit in Warsaw.

Mission

....a director puts his ferret to work in the way he chooses, shows him the hole and shoves him down it and stands back and crosses his fingers.

....Mission-feel is never wrong: it's the specialised instinct you develop as you go forward into the dark like an old dog fox sniffing the wind and catching the scent of things it has smelled before and learned to distrust; and in the concealing darkness the forefoot is sensitive, poised and held still above the patch of unknown ground where in the next movement the trap can spring shut.

....the opposition had a programme running, its engineering as smooth and massive as the iron wheels that rolled past here on their predestined rails; and that I was in its path.

Egerton didn't know what it was but he knew it was there and he'd sent me to find it and blow it up.


Foster

Quiller finds himself pursued by Warsaw cops and a KGB contingent led by Colonel Foster.

....Foster....once an Old Etonian and now a hero of the Soviet Republic with an alloy medal somewhere in the top drawer with his handkerchiefs and cuff-links', a rumour about a Hungarian woman, 'a simple daughter of the proletariat content to share his uneventful life'.

When it looks like Quiller has finally turned the tables on the opposition, he plans to take Foster back to London.

Hall archly observes:

....He didn't want to go to London; there were people there who'd believed they were his friends and he had something in common with all shabby men: he couldn't face his creditors.

The set-piece

The final two-thirds of The Warsaw Document is essentially Quiller the ferret going through the maze of Warsaw, trying to figure out what his control has really assigned him to do. And all the while evading Polish police and the KGB.

On of Hall's most spectacular coups in this long to-and-fro is a hand-to-hand fight between Quiller and a cop in a train station lavatory.

….At close quarters a gun is highly dangerous. The danger is present before it leaves the holster, since it gives a feeling of power, of superiority, thus leading to false confidence and the impression that no serious effort has to be made, that the conflict has already been won. The danger increases tenfold once the gun is in the hand because only one hand is left free for useful work; at the same time the psychological danger remains present: it is felt that the mere sight of the gun will intimidate the opponent to the extent of rendering him powerless, quite incapable of movement. If, at this stage, the opponent decides to move, the danger becomes so great that it dominates the situation and can no longer be averted. The simple act of moving confounds the strongly held belief that no movement will in fact be made, and the surprise has the proportions of severe psychological shock.

Kimura's first rule is grilled into new trainees until they're sick of it but later it saves their lives: when threatened by an armed man, do nothing until he comes into close quarters.

It's usually easy enough because he likes to frisk you and then you can go to work. In this case I was lucky because we'd walked into each other and the distance was perfect. The gun was in his hand but that was all: his index hadn't settled inside the trigger guard and he was nowhere near horizontal aim. In another tenth of a second I would have had to use the routine deflection drill designed to get the body clear of the bullet but I didn't wait for that because the noise would alert the nearest patrols.

I chopped upwards against the wrist-nerve and the force swung him partly round as the gun spun high and hit the glazed tiles of the ceiling and that was all right but he was already hooking for a kite blow and I knew I'd been wrong: he hadn't been relying a hundred per cent on his gun - he'd just thought it might be the most convenient way.

I went down first and he dropped and tried for the throat so I used the knee and he rolled and corrected and I thought it was probably kaminari, a bastardised form of kung fu, because he got very busy and couldn't relax the tensions so it was easy until the speed of the blows began foxing me and I had to go for a straight classic hand-edge for the shoulder hoping to numb and not succeeding the first time and not getting the chance to do it again because he was on to it and pulling clear and coming in again with a series of horribly fast kites that burned at the muscles while I hooked at what I could reach: windpipe, groin, plexus, trying for blows and then for locks and not getting them as I should.

Specialised disciplines are effective within their range but none of them are flexible enough: their patterns are too formalised. Pure karate can stop any amateur attack because it has the answer to every move in the book but there are one or two others and some of the kaminari blows have never been fully understood in the West so that an element of the unknown enters the conflict and there's no time to rethink on the established techniques because this form of attack is tense and fast and accumulative: the aim is to break down the opponent before he's had time to work for any kind of finalising strike or lock.

That's why karate has never been taught at Norfolk. They teach something different there.

I still couldn't use it. His energy was appalling and the blows came chopping wickedly fast for the vulnerable points and I knew that if I left only one of them unprotected for a half-second he'd be in there and finish me. His attack was animal: I couldn't believe that this creature could ever, short of killing it, be tamed; or that, once tamed, it could speak or write with a pen in a human hand. His breathing was like a wolf's, his frenzy producing grunts through the teeth and nostrils, a bestial snuffling, and somewhere in my mind there was surprise that these weren't claws ripping at me, that I touched no fur. Yet his blows were infinitely disciplined.

And suddenly I knew that if I didn't do something quickly he'd break me down and I'd have to be taken to Foster in an ambulance. My arms were losing strength and their muscles burned. I couldn't shift his weight from across my legs.

For a long time, for two or three seconds, I let myself relax, bringing the strikes closer to give him confidence, then twisted and freed an elbow and drove it hard enough to disturb his rhythm and he shifted his weight and I went for a yoshida and brought it off but couldn't hold the full lock because he slipped it enough to sap the leverage and come in again with neck strikes so that I had to roll back and parry them. Light had begun flashing in my head.

A hokku and it threw him and 'I followed with the second stage of the lock but wasn't fast enough and his weight came back and I had to protect again because if only one of his strikes got through it would leave me paralysed. My head throbbed, pulsing to the rhythm of the flashing light, and breathing was difficult now. He fluttered above me, a vague dark shape whose weight increased and bore down and smothered my movements, and its snuffling became excited as the strikes hammered at the crossed shield of my arms and shifted their aim and hammered again and found the target protected but only clumsily now as I lost strength, and worse, lost science. Time was going, no more time. I needed time.

Sorry about that, old boy, but you shouldn't have chanced your arm, these chaps won't put up with it.

Relax and bring him closer. Get the breathing right or it's no go. Relax.

But I was a torch, a body burning, my own light blinding. His blows poured pain into me and the flames burst brighter. There was no time. Then let it be done without time. Now.

Twist. But he was ready and I had to try again and it didn't work but his aim was shifted and I moved the other way and felt purchase available as we rolled with my knee rising hard but not hard enough: it baulked his strikes but he went for a neck lock and I had to stop it because it was a musubi and we are frightened of that one, all of us. Lock and counter-lock and we lay still, the muscles alone engaged, contraction without kinetics, the hiss of our breathing the only sign of life. Then I felt purchase again: my foot had come into contact with the wall of the subway and when I used it he was surprised and the lock went slack and I had time and forced him over and we lay still again but the position was changed and I saw that there was a blow I could use if I worked very quickly.

But I hesitated. Morality came into this and the awareness of what I was going to do was holding me back. This was the jungle but even in the jungle there are laws: a male wolf, in combat with another and sensing mortal defeat, will pause and expose its neck and the jugular vein, tokening submission; and the victor will leave it.

Here the law didn't apply: a vulnerable point had been exposed by chance and morality was out of place because the organism was shouting it down, squealing for survival, and I put the last of my strength into the blow. It wasn't very hard because I was weakened now, but it was effective because it struck the point that Kimura had told us about.

Then I got up and leaned with my back to the wall, dragging air into my lungs while the nerve-light went on flashing in my head. A sound was somewhere, a rumbling, and I remembered where I was, in the railway station of a modern city where men could speak, and write with pens. It seemed a long time since I was here before: an act so primitive had brought a time shift and the past few minutes had been measured in millennia.

The rumbling became thunder overhead and its rhythm slowed: a train was stopping. I would have liked to rest but there'd soon be people here….

The Warsaw Document is a fine thriller filled with ice, snow, and plenty of duplicitous Eastern bloc Cold War atmosphere.

Jay

10 January 2018

You’ve got to mind your fingers when you give a dog a bone: The Striker Portfolio by Adam Hall (1968)

The Striker Portfolio by  Adam Hall (1968)

The Striker Portfolio (1968) is a short, sharp spy thriller. Secret agent Quiller zigzags between West and East Germany, struggling to "get in the way" of a Stalinist cell crashing Luftwaffe jets and forcing the political downfall of FRG politicians and military leaders opposed to reunification on the GDR's terms.

Author Adam Hall's strengths are epitomised in this little peroration prefacing a car chase:

....Their headlights came on suddenly in the mirror and I knew what was happening because I'd worked out the formula: the formula for survival. The basic data for the N.S.U. RO-80 included weight and speed figures: 1210 kilograms with a dry tank, 180 kilometres per hour. The gears were automatic and the front wheels did the driving. The time-lag was about the same with the automatic as with a manual shift and so it didn't make any difference. The superior traction of front-wheel drive wasn't likely to affect things even on the fast curves north of the mountains because there would have to be a curve that had to be driven round if the N.S.U.'s cornering advantages were to be brought into play.

The Mercedes 300 weighed 1560 kilos and the top speed was 190 k.p.h. Gear control was optional and I didn't know which this one had. The rear wheels did the driving.

First findings: all factors being equal the Mercedes could overhaul me by 10 k.p.h. and give ms a 350-kilo nudge into the tree-trunks when it was ready.

Unknown data: the precise weight of the two men and the amount of fuel they had on board. There was nothing to be done about this. Give a man eighty kilos with shoes and overcoat: they had an extra 430. Assume their tank was close on full: it took them past 450. But it would need a slide-rule to decide the balance: how much their extra weight was going to cost them in acceleration and maximum speed, how much it was going to help them nudge me off the road.

I'd done what I could at the Esso station, telling the man to shut off at twenty-five litres. That amount would get me to Hanover if necessary and left the N.S.U. lighter.

Workable findings: assume the best figures - both men were heavy and their tank was full and it would cost them 10 k.p.h. in maximum speed. Add 1 k.p.h. In one hour there would be a kilometre's distance between us and with that kind of margin I could peel off at whatever loop-road I liked: Braunschweig Hildesheim, Hanover itself. And they wouldn't see me go. Assume, the worst figures - both men were average weight and they had a quarter tankful and they had the edge on me in terms of maximum speed. The extra weight of one man would bring down the speed fractionally but not the full 10, k.p.h.

Conclusion: the Mercedes had to be faster than the N.S.U. by 1 k.p.h. if they were going to stay with me and send me into the trees. I believed on the figures alone that it was 1 k.p.h. faster and that they could do that.

There was only the one area in which I could hope to work, hope to avoid a mathematical certainty. The N.S.U. had a rotary engine and was lighter by 350 kilos and that gave me the edge on them in acceleration. I was already establishing a lead: that was why they'd just put their headlights on. They were worried. Their idea would be to stay with me almost bumper-to-bumper with their lights out so that I couldn't see enough in the mirror to judge how close they were, couldn't see which side they were creeping up on to shape for the final nudge.

The N.S.U.'s superior acceleration and the Mercedes' higher top speed would vary the distance between us as we went north. It would be like a Chriscraft towing a water-skier on a long piece of elastic: the N.S.U. would draw ahead and then the tension would be taken up and the Mercedes would close the gap until it hit.

The only outside factor that could come into play was the presence of other cars making north. But we were both going to take it right up to the ceiling and there wasn't likely to be anyone driving in the 180-190 region at night....

Jay

11 January 2018

The Quiller Memorandum by Adam Hall

Not a great thriller, like Quillers 2, 3, and 4. The beginning in a theater box sticks the novel in first gear for 20 pages. The neo-Nazis reborn plot is for the retrospective reader simply tiresome.

Jay

10 December 2018

The Kobra Manifesto by Adam Hall (1976)

The Kobra Manifesto by Adam Hall (1976)

My useful political education has been entirely within the periphery and membership of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party.

The Kobra Manifesto struck several notes for me. The kidnapping of an industrialist in South America recalled the disgraceful left sectarian kidnapping of Oberdan Salustro. Mentions of Fourth International "terrorism," however distorted by bourgeois journalism, recalled the decade-long internal FI faction fight on guerilla warfare strategy. (The SWP-led LTF defended the traditional program of party-building; the IMT led by Mandel and Tariq Ali defended the get-rich-quick schemes of the IMT.)

In under 300 pages The Kobra Manifesto takes Hall's executive operator Quiller from Monaco to the U.S. by way of Khmer-encircled Phnom Penh and the jungles of the Amazon. In one shattering chapter, hot on the trail of the Kobra cell and their hostage, Quiller stows away on their international 707. In the wheel well!

Quiller's own manifesto

….Up there on the far side of the Channel there were doors opening and closing along those dim-lit passages, and the gibberish was crackling through the static and out of the scramblers in Signals while a phone rang and was picked up and someone in Monitoring sent a memo to Egerton or Mildmay or Parkis and everyone waited for the word that would start this whole thing running. Somewhere in Beirut or The Hague or the Azores they were looking for the hole, and when they'd found the hole they were going to put the ferret down, and the ferret was me.

***

"The Organism" - Quiller's euphemism for himself as a mechanism

....The organism had looked after itself without my having to do any more thinking. I'd done me necessary amount of thinking first and then given the instructions to the organism and it had taken over. With two of them coming at me from each end of the alley there'd been no point in waiting till they closed on me at their own pace. The only chance lay in immediate and very aggressive action and I had made my run flat out, choosing this end of the alley because the street at the other end had exposure zones that I wanted to leave alone.

I didn't know if the two men behind me had started running: it didn't make any difference because I was going so hard that they wouldn't gain on me. The strength of the opposition had now been halved and there were only two people to deal with. They'd both stopped and were waiting and I think one of them was pulling a gun as I reached them.

The techniques of unarmed combat taught at Norfolk are based partly on karate. I have only used them twice to save my life, once in Warsaw and once in Hong Kong. In those instances there was only one adversary. Here there were two. There is nothing new about the primordial components of speed and surprise: they are essential to any attack, by whatever technique. Two further psychological components come into play when life is actually threatened: the instinct to survive, and the ability to relax and allow the primitive animal to perform in its own right.

In civilized society the will to take life is seldom conscious. Most murders are committed by relatives or close friends of the victim and the motivation is subconscious, an expression of rage, jealousy, humiliation, so forth. The need is not to kill but to relieve the psyche of its stress, and to do it in the quickest and surest way available.

The animal will do it consciously in order to survive.

There is no name, at Norfolk, for the extended techniques based on classic karate. Most of them are psychological and the most effective is this ability to relax and leave the animal to protect itself: not by defensive tactics but by the most implacable ferocity. In brief it might be termed the invocation of blood-lust.

There is probably a spin-off involved: the instillation of fear in the adversary. As I reached the two men I was an animal totally committed to killing them and I would believe that my whole body projected a degree of menace that would give them doubts.

Doubts at the instant of lethal combat can be critical.

Basically I used the tobi-mae-geri and was in the air with my feet at the knife-edge angle when I crashed into them. The man on the right died immediately and this was to be expected because I am right-handed and since if wasn't possible to aim a specific blow at both of them I aimed it at this one and he had no chance. The most effective weapon I had for the other man was my left knee, the leg doubled, because it isn't possible to perform the tobi-mae-geri with both feet: the body has left the ground and the balance has to be maintained.

****

The Way to Go

....We've all got a rough idea of the way we'd like to go when it gets too hot to hold. For most of us it doesn't work out like that, although Delacorte managed it last year on the end-phase of the Bulgarian thing when he took his Mercedes through the frontier at Svelingrad into Turkey, straight through the bloody barrier flat out at a hundred and ten miles an hour with the tank on fire where they'd shot him up with a submachine-gun and the stuff still coming at him from the guard post-finished up like a sieve 'but his director in the field was there at the rendezvous and got 'him out and found the stuff on him: military installation layouts, airfield preparedness schedules, Moscow directives and fifteen long-run tapes of the Sovinformburo breakdown of the tactical manoeuvres operation, the whole beautiful bonanza right in London's lap.

That's the way we'd like to go, when we've got to….

Jay

11 December 2011

London insists: The Tango Briefing by Adam Hall (1973)

....that renowned student of spy fiction, Randall Masteller, regards the Quiller books as 'one of the greatest spy series ever written'

--Mike Ripley, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed (2017).

The Tango Briefing by Adam Hall (1973)

....The situation, Quiller, is simply this. Even if you have only a one per cent chance of surviving the end-phase, London would appreciate your making the attempt.

One always has to paraphrase just a little, with Loman.

Then I'd called to Chirac to start up and I was here because I was an old ferret sharp of tooth and I knew my warrens and I'd run them before and I'd run them again because the chance I believe in is the one-per-center and that is the way of things, as I see them. Pure logic, of course: the high risks of my trade drew me to it and that is why I ply it, and the greater the risk the more I am drawn and when the risk is expressed as a one per cent chance of survival then I'm hooked and damned and hell-bound and don't get in my way.

An impossible situation: get rid of something permanently before it undercuts the prestige of UK imperialism in the international arena. Loman is put in charge, and Loman demands Quiller for his executive. It's easy to see why. Quiller is a frustrating pain in the neck, but Loman knows that is tolerable fallout considering he acts without fail.

The Tango Briefing starts out like one of those interminable 900 page Clive Cussler novels. But by page 200 the mission is accomplished.

Adam Hall's skill as a writer is on ample display in The Tango Briefing. The Algerian desert is beautifully evoked, with its head-aching heat and eye-burning sand. But the real pleasure is sitting back and observing Quiller gaming both sides of the chess board in the nanosecond before he has to take action.

The ellipses Hall employs to keep the first-person narration captivating are fine coups of craftsmanship.

….So at 19.15 I checked out of the Hotel Africa and went across to where the Chrysler was parked and they said later at the hospital that the glass had been the worst trouble because some very small fragments had got stuck in my face and they'd been difficult to find.

There weren't any bones broken but they were worried by various signs of physiological shock that were still hanging about, and the bruises where I'd been flung across the pavement. I didn't remember much, but there'd been no actual retrogressive amnesia: I checked on that right away. I was just walking towards the Chrysler and then the senses went partially dead through overloading: very bright flash, a lot of noise, smell of burnt aromatic nitro compounds and the feel of the pavement sliding around under me.

They'd made a silly mistake, that was all. They wouldn't have risked installing an ignition detonator linkage right outside in the street: they'd had to put something quick on board and it was probably a rocking activator and a bus had passed close and the slipstream had rocked the Chrysler enough to trigger the thing at the wrong time, three or four seconds too early.

Loman came as soon as I rang him and found me in the casualty room with bowls and bandages and blood everywhere.

'Listen, get me out of here and fix another plane.'

Speech sounded a bit sloppy because the mouth had got cut up by the glass and it had begun puffing.

'Do they want to keep you under observation?'

'Yes, there's the odd bit of glass left in but it'll work itself out, they know that….

Jay

10 January 2018

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