Agent of Death (5 page)

‘Ugh,’ said Sohler and felt a hand on his arm. Weber was shouting at him, pointing to the wide open gates and the daylight, and the surging, splashing, open water that fountained up to heaven, thrown up by the enemy’s enormous bombs. Sohler nodded. He nodded and pointed forward. The Führerboat was moving faster. The blunt bows were already passing through the gates and into the light. Then BOOOOM! Another huge blow fell upon pen six. Sohler felt the shockwave and looked up in horror.

‘Down!’ he yelled. Nobody heard, but those around him were already face down flat with their hands over their ears. Again there was a ten-second wait.

This time it was worse. The pen roof was already cracked. The second huge explosion split the roof completely, and at the deepest end of the pen an incinerating blast seared downwards, igniting fuel, exploding ammunition, and roasting living flesh into smouldering meat. A rolling surge of flame roared towards the light and over the Führerboat’s conning tower, and searing heat reached down for the men cowering in the depth of the watch stations.

Two more direct hits followed, the ten-tonners detonating within the depths of the pen itself and destroying it as a coherent structure, with concrete, steel, and wreckage of every kind leaping into the air and flying outward like a volcano’s vomit. Minutes later, the lesser bombs of the second wave comprehensively wrecked the rest of Besuboft 1, obliterating its irreplaceable staff and unique equipment, such that a more perfect destruction of a target could not possibly be imagined.

*

But the Führerboat escaped.

CHAPTER 5

The
Grand
Lincoln
Hotel
,

Woodbrige
Spa
,
Lincolnshire
,
England.

Wednesday
17 May
,
11
.
00
hours.

The Daimler Straight-Eight was a noble beast. It steamed up the drive like a battleship and dropped anchor before a pair of church-gothic doors, incongruously set in art nouveau stonework in a Tudor mansion originally built by an Edwardian millionaire with bad taste. Later, the mansion became an excellent hotel, and now it was in the King’s service as officers’ mess to 696 Squadron, being only two miles from Woodbridge aerodrome where 696 was based.

Thus the mansion was guarded by the RAF Regiment’s so-called airmen, a pair of whom stood at the doors in army battledress and air force forage caps, with rifles and fixed bayonets. They stamped and presented arms at the gold braid visible through the car’s big windows, while their flight sergeant clattered down the steps in his mirror-polish boots and gave a textbook, quivering salute, before leaning forward to open the car’s rear door. Formed in 1942, the RAF Regiment was still young, but it was ferociously smart.

Stiff and straight, the flight sergeant demanded identity cards, and heroically managed to look at
them
, and not the blonde in the fox-fur who sat with a brigadier and an air commodore. But he smelt the perfume. Staff cars didn’t smell like that: not usually.

Then there was a charge of RAF blue from inside the building: the group captain, the wingco, and others. So the flight sergeant fell back, and the Daimler emptied, and there were salutes and handshakes, and beaming smiles for the fox-fur.

Half an hour later the Daimler driver looked out from the sergeants’ mess, with a mug of tea in his hand and a scowl on his face as a mud-stained BSA motorbike thudded up the drive and stopped in a shower of gravel, which pattered against the car’s multi-layer paint, and a young RAF officer let go the dispatch rider who’d been sent to fetch him, climbed off the bike, put on his cap, and showed his papers to the guards, who promptly saluted him. He was tall and dark, with pilots’ wings and two rows of ribbons on his tunic. He was me. Twenty-five years old and a squadron leader.

‘Look,’ said the Daimler driver, to the flight sergeant standing next to him: ‘A Brylcream boy! All the girls drop their drawers on sight of ’em.’

‘Yeah,’ said the flight sergeant, ‘But they don’t live long, poor little buggers.’

*

Inside the building I was shown into a side room, all oak panelling, chintz upholstery and velvet curtains, and all of it pre-war and fading.

‘Ah,’ said the group captain as the I came in. He stood, and the rest remained seated, but I recognized the brigadier even before I saw the medal ribbon on his chest. He was a neat, handsome man of about fifty, who looked a lot like the actor Ronald Colman, complete with a thin, pencil moustache and a uniform tailored in Saville Row. He was Sword-and-pistol Sanders, hero of the Great War, and famous for a cavalry action as a lieutenant in the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards, when his troupe were blown off their horses by German artillery. Those who could took refuge in shell holes, but Sanders repeatedly crawled out under fire to rescue the wounded, and being wounded several times himself. Then, when a troupe of German Lancers approached, he remounted and drove them back single-handed, first with Lee-Enfield fire from the saddle, then, when his rifle ammunition was gone, he turned first to his revolver then to his sword, using the latter with such determination that the German commanding officer rode forward and saluted him when our infantry arrived and took Sanders off the field as he fell from his horse, exhausted by loss of blood.

Meanwhile I was being introduced.

‘Ma’am, gentlemen,’ the group captain said, ‘this is Squadron Leader Landau, who was on ops yesterday.’

‘David,’ said fox-fur, ‘you look ghastly. Have you been celebrating?’

I saluted and grinned at the tall, slim figure who rose and took a step forward. She looked like a Paris fashion model. Clothes rationing obviously did not to apply to her. I kissed her on both cheeks, and felt eyes on the back of my neck.

‘Hallo…
Marlene
,’ I said. It was a family joke, which the company instantly understood, for the resemblance to Marlene Dietrich was acute, and fox-fur’s real name was Margaret: Lady Margaret Comings, wife of Professor Sir Jack Comings, the Cambridge mathematician, born sixty-three years ago in Krakov, Poland as Jakov Kominsky, the son of a furrier. She was far younger than her husband and had once been his student – his best student.

‘Hallo Aunty,’ I said: another joke. Her husband was Uncle Jack to me because Sir Jack was adopted family who’d known me all my life. But Lady Margaret wasn’t amused. She frowned and sat down, and so did I, but with the comfortable feeling that I’d scored a point. I’d known her a long time, and she could be infuriating. Fascinating but infuriating.

‘Can we get on with it,’ she said, looking at the brigadier, and tapping her Salvatore Ferragamo shoe. Mere military rank was nothing beside her superiority in wealth, class, and the utter self-confidence of a beautiful, clever woman who was greatly admired by men. So the brigadier raised his eyebrows, but agreed.

‘Why don’t
you
tell him,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said the rest, and I suddenly felt sick.

‘Is it my parents?’ I said. These days I lived and breathed English. I’d done so for years. But the homely Polish burst out, ‘
Tata
,
mumia
?’

‘Ah,’ said Lady Margaret, stretching out a hand, ‘No. Not that. We don’t know anything more. We don’t even know where they are. I’m sorry David. I should have thought.’ I sank back into my chair.

‘What then?’ I said, and Lady Margaret looked at the brigadier again.

‘Go on,’ he said, ‘That’s what you’re here for.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ she said, tactfully, and looked at me.

‘You’ve been conscripted,’ she said.

‘Oh, no,’ I said, ‘We’ve been through all that.’

She shook her head. ‘This time you’ve got no choice.’

‘Oh yes I have!’ I turned to the group captain. ‘Sir? Haven’t I got work to do here? What about my chaps? My crew?’ The group captain said nothing. He looked at the air commodore, who looked at the brigadier.

‘Oh, bloody hell,’ I said, and Lady Margaret turned to the brigadier.

‘There,’ she said, ‘I told you he’d say that.’

‘So you did,’ said the brigadier calmly, ‘but, nonetheless, and even as we speak, there is a long-range, high-speed Mosquito aeroplane waiting at Woodbridge aerodrome with a passenger seat rigged in the bomb bay, where I am afraid that Squadron Leader Landau will be very uncomfortable. But I really do assure him that he will be in that seat by fourteen hundred hours, one way or another.’

‘Yes,’ said the rest.

‘So,’ said the brigadier, looking at his watch, ‘It is now half past eleven. They have a decent restaurant here, I’m going for an early lunch and I suggest you gentlemen come with me as my guests.’ He looked at Lady Margaret. ‘While you, madam, have a word with this officer,’ he said, glancing at me, ‘who should know that Lady Margaret speaks with
my
full authority, and that of those above me. Is that understood?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

‘Good,’ said the brigadier. ‘I’ll have them send you some sandwiches, but remember we leave at thirteen hundred hours sharp.’ He stood, gave a small bow to Lady Margaret, and left followed by his companions.

The door closed. Lady Margaret looked at me. Her eyebrows went up.

‘I’m not going to do it,’ I said.

‘Yes, you are.’

‘No, I’m not!’

Silence. Lady Margaret snapped open her Hermès crocodile-skin handbag and extracted a neat, pink cigarette pack that bore a picture of a Cavalier in a red tunic and plumed hat. I glanced at it:
Passing
Clouds
. Expensive, but not as expensive as the handbag. That probably cost the price of the average semi-detached house. A long, thin holder followed, and a book of matches – small, flat, and black – from some London nightclub.

‘Still don’t smoke?’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. She shrugged and put the matches carefully on the table between us, and sat back and waited.

‘Well?’ she said. ‘Lost the art?’ I smiled because she had touched on a point of vanity; my vanity concerning a talent that I have and which I can’t resist showing off. So I picked up the matches and spun them in the fingers of my right hand, while passing the left hand in front of them and, as far as she was concerned, the matches were gone. To prove it, I turned both hands swiftly in front of her eyes, showing that nothing was held in either of them, nor hidden behind them. Not to her, anyway. There were no matches. Or so it seemed, because it was classic sleight of hand. It was yet another form of trickery, mainly physical this time, but still with a lot of psychology in it: psychology, theatricality, deception – whatever you want to call it – and if you can do it there’s nothing clever to it and nothing difficult. But they’d have burned me at the stake for it in the middle ages.

‘Ah,’ I said, and looked at the door as if someone had come in … and in the half-second that she followed my eyes and then looked back … the matches had returned and I was striking one and holding out the flame.

Yes, I know it sounds like boasting, but I repeat that there’s nothing clever or virtuous in something you can do easily. There’s no moral depth to it. It’s not like practising to play the piano, or doing your duty, or just being kind: the greatest of all human virtues. The same thing goes for being good-looking, which I was, and the Daimler driver was right about the girls. There’s no virtue that either. It’s just chance. But it’s happy chance and you wouldn’t say no to it. So I smelt the perfume as I leaned forward, and she laughed, then lit up, breathed in the smoke, threw back her head in satisfaction … and then frowned.

‘You are a natural for Intelligence work,’ she said, ‘you were born for it. It’s not just your fingers that twist round corners, your mind does too. So why do you waste your time doing a job that thousands of young men can do?’

‘You know why,’ I said. ‘I want to hit the Jerries. I want to hit them in their homeland where it really hurts. I want to get back at the bastards, and I can do that best in a Lancaster.’

‘Is that all?’ she said, knowing me so well. ‘Nothing else? Not still sulking, are you?’ She stabbed like a dentist drilling a nerve, and I flinched.

‘Why did you marry him?’ I said. She sighed in irritation.

‘This is pointless. We’ve been over all that. You should have come to Bletchley.’

‘Damned if I should!’

She paused. She tried another approach. ‘That was Brigadier Sanders I came in with,’ she said.

‘I know,’ I said, ‘We had a house named after him at school. He won the VC at the first battle of Mons.’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘He’s not just a good soldier. He’s extremely clever actually. He read chemistry at Oxford and he’s an expert on gas warfare. He’s also a great believer in new ideas, and he runs something special at Bletchley and he wants you there.’

‘I’m still not bloody doing it.’

‘Listen, you stupid boy …’

‘
Don’t
call me that,’ I said.

I saw her blink; she must have feared she’d gone too far. I wasn’t a boy, and I knew that it showed in my face. I was stretched to the limit. She saw it and switched to charm, smooth as a Rolls Royce gearbox. She would have made a wonderful actress. She was very beautiful, and all she had to do was lean forward with a gentle smile and look concerned, and men melted. I certainly did anyway. I always did. Still do.

‘How often are you on ops?’ she said.

‘Two days a week. Sometimes three.’

‘And this is your third tour.’

I frowned. ‘What are you getting at?’

She took a deliberate risk. ‘Statistically, you should be dead by now. Dead twice over.’

I gripped the arms of my chair. Nobody said that. It was the worst possible bad luck. You might joke about it when you were drunk. But you never said it; never, never, never. ‘I’m fit to fly,’ I said.

‘You don’t have to fly.’

I blinked fast and half stood. ‘Look Margaret, if they think I’m cracking up, why isn’t the doc telling me, or the bloody padre?’

‘Because the doc and the padre think you’re God Almighty, and so does everyone else. You’re the squadron hero. Or perhaps you never noticed.’ She put on the charm again and I crumpled. I couldn’t help it. It was like being in the ring with Joe Louis. You weren’t going to win. She knew it too, and she smirked before turning serious.

‘David,’ she said. ‘What I’m going to tell you now is uttermost secret. OK?’

‘OK,’ I said.

‘We, at Bletchley Park, are breaking the Germans’ codes …’

‘Bloody cloak and dagger. Waste of time!’