ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

NICK COOK 87
It was then that I realized the man in the boat was Marckus.
He looked up and waved me aboard. I hesitated. Taking a ride on a
boat had not figured in our brief phone conversation.
Until then, I'd not considered the possibility that Marckus was
anything other than the person he claimed to be.
But what did I know about him? That he was plugged firmly into
Britain's aerospace and defense community, that he didn't make a habit
of talking to journalists, and that he was taking a risk by talking to me.
The ferry was preparing to leave.
I ran along the jetty and dropped down into the boat. Marckus paid for
both of us and the ferryman cast off.
I found myself apologizing for the mix-up; how I'd thought Marckus
was with the woman and her children on the jetty. Silly, nervous
jabbering.
Dr. Marckus cut me short. "Does the significance of this site mean
anything to you?" he asked, his arm almost hitting my face as he waved
in the direction of the road.
I shrugged and he gave a mild snort of derision. "I thought you said
you were a Jane's man."
"I'm sorry," I said, "it looks like a small yacht club and a fishing
village." I neglected to tell him, because I couldn't see the point, that
history wasn't my bag. My work was high technology of the 21st-century
kind.
Once, Dan Marckus must have been lean and ascetic-looking; the
thinning hair and high forehead still gave a hint of it. With age, however,
he had put on some padding, making him look a lot less severe than he
sounded. A dark, scratchy beard, flecked with gray, distracted the eye on
first meeting from a thick pair of lenses in tortoiseshell frames.
Behind them, Marckus' brown, beady eyes watched me intently and
with a hint of irritation.
He was dressed sharply in a thick blue polo-neck, a trendier version of
the kind fishermen wear, and a brown leather jacket. His voice said he was
around 65, but he looked younger.
"What you saw when you drove through those trees was one of the
orginal antenna masts of Bawdsey Manor. Before the Second World War
broke out, the Germans sent an airship, the Graf Zeppelin, up and down
this coastline trying to figure out what we were up to—what those tall
steel lattice towers meant."
"And what did they learn?" I asked.
"They'd packed the Graf Zeppelin with electronics—listening gear.
But the old man was so much smarter than them, thank God."