In the gathering
darkness Hungarian agent Janos Klees embarked upon his planned voyage to a
floating dry-dock borrowed from Poland, and moored in the North Sea.
Following the abortive 1956 anti-communist
uprising his government had made plans to modernize the country's industry
in any way they could, and outright theft of foreign technology was
authorized.
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Starting the noisy engine attracted unwanted attention, and Klees had no
time to learn the intricacies of the machine. He simply sped off on the
compass heading he had been given, unaware that his clandestine
trip coincided with the mass post-breeding migration of Anguilla anguilla,
returning from the Sargasso Sea to the rivers in which they lived. Without
the rubber skirt which had yet to be developed he found the craft tricky
to keep level, and he suddenly found himself submerged, fortunately on a
shallow mudbank. The damage had been done however, and the last
transmission received at the dry-dock before his apprehension by the Royal
Navy was "My hovercraft is full of eels!"
Dave
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