Operation Afterlight, page 5
He smiled over at the nearby table where Broadley, Barton, and two other pilots sat. Grant couldn’t help noticing that Broadley didn’t acknowledge the gesture.
A WAAF admin clerk walked in, cleared her throat, and announced that there would be a briefing at seventeen hundred. Grumbling, the aircrew hurried to finish their plates before streaming down the corridor to the auditorium. Durban was already there, along with some of the Ops staff. The Wing Commander stood patiently waiting until they had all filed in and taken their seats.
“I hope you’ve all had an excellent dinner,” he said, smiling tolerantly at the mumbles of derision that followed. “Orders have just come in. We’re joining a Main Force raid tonight. Bomber Command is hitting Dortmund. This is a big effort, chaps. Eleven hundred aircraft.”
“With that many,” Barton said, “why do they need us?” A couple of others murmured their agreement.
“Do you have something better to do this evening? 465 Squadron hasn’t flown a mission in two weeks.” Durban ran his eyes over the crowd, and the grumbling faded to nothing. “Another squadron dropped out and we’re taking their place. Our target is the main railway station and engine sheds. This will give us a chance to dust off the cobwebs before something more suitable comes along. We’ll be above the flak until our dive on the target and I imagine any fighters will go after the heavies, so there shouldn’t be much out there to concern us. That said, while the Luftwaffe night fighter force isn’t what it used to be, they can still cause trouble.”
Grant thought he saw a flicker of emotion cross the Wing Commander’s face. It was gone in an instant.
“You all heard what happened last week,” Durban continued. “We lost twenty-five aircraft within sight of their airfields. The Jerries suffered badly too, and I doubt they can mount an intruder push that big again, but stay alert all the way home. No careless errors. This should be a milk run. If anyone manages to get themselves killed, I’ll be most put out with them.” A titter of nervous laughter ran through the crowd as the Wing Commander handed over to the Ops Officer to run through the details of timings, formations and weather.
Jeffries leaned close to Grant. “Our first op, a juicy target, and it isn’t even that far to fly. How brilliant is this?”
“Yeah,” Grant lied. “Brilliant.”
Somehow, he made it to the end of the meeting, despite the sweat that gathered on his temples and neck. He didn’t make it much further, though.
Five minutes after the Wing Commander dismissed them, Grant stared at the remains of his meal floating in the toilet bowl, felt the seat shaking in his grip, and knew it wasn’t brilliant at all.
Chapter Six
London, 12 March
Sarah Lane took a sip of lukewarm tea and opened the next file. Only three sheets of typed paper. That brought the day’s total to nearly one hundred and twenty pages of dense text. Not bad for a Monday.
Outside, beyond the brick walls, the sound of traffic rumbling past on Baker Street continued unabated, mingling with the clack of typewriters and their chatting operators. It was a wonder she ever got anything done here with all the noise, but she counted herself lucky. At least she had half an office. Few had even a shared workspace to call their own. Space was always in short supply at Special Operations Executive, though things had become a little better since the liberation of France had freed up some of the ‘F’ Section desks. And with her colleague absent for the week on some rare home leave, she had spread her files over his desk, too.
Not that she had found much. ‘X’ Section had always received less reporting and funding than ‘F’ Section. Things had been worse since the July coup failed. The Gestapo and the Inland SD had reacted with all their characteristic brutality, rounding up anyone even vaguely suspected of anti-Nazi sentiment in Germany and Austria. Thousands were tried and murdered on trumped-up charges and with little regard for process or evidence. Some had genuinely worked for ‘X’ Section. Most were just bystanders or ordinary citizens.
She glanced up, feeling a little sick as always. On the wall, a board of photographs and note cards, each carefully affixed with its own brass pin, marked the roll call of those of her agents still missing. She didn’t need to look. Not really.
She knew all of their faces as well as she knew her own.
There was one more photo there, too. Bigger than the rest. Not an agent. An enemy. Blond hair. Blue eyes. More than one colleague had commented on the man’s good looks, the sharp cheekbones, the thin lips that curled at the edges into the beginnings of an arrogant smile. She remembered how the appreciation vanished from the faces of those same colleagues when she told them who the man was. Thin pieces of string led from the man’s face to thirty of the smaller photographs. She suspected there should be more.
Though she had seen it only once, in darkness, through eyes near-blinded by panicked tears, she knew that face best of all.
Finishing the tea with a grimace, she turned back to the report. Straight away, she could tell it was three pages of nothing. The source was a low-level bureaucrat in a Thuringia chemical company who had seen an opportunity to mix genuine antipathy for Hitler with the chance to turn a profit by selling secrets. He rarely had much to add.
She read it anyway. That was her job, after all. A page of rail movements to begin with. It used to be three or more pages, but the German rail system was suffering just as much as the rest of the Reich from the relentless assault of Allied air power. Most of the rest was gossip, little titbits from the factory canteen or casual conversations with senior management. The parts that could have been true weren’t very interesting, and the interesting parts were clearly not true.
Sighing, Lane was about to close the file when she saw the single word.
Götterdämmerung.
She stared at it in silence for a long time.
Standing, she walked over to the filing cabinet and unlocked it. Calm contemplation of the contents became a frantic search. She found one file she was looking for, then two. A third had slipped to the back of a drawer. Slamming the cabinet shut and securing it, she dug through the files that covered her colleague’s desk until she found the last one she wanted and rifled through dozens of pages.
The word fairly sprang from the page.
Götterdämmerung.
Lane reached for the telephone, but her fingers froze before they could touch the handset. With a sharp exhalation of breath, she grabbed the four files together, tucked them under her arm, and headed for the door.
She took the stairs up, trying not to run, passing a steady stream of people heading downstairs as their shifts ended. Most smiled, and some offered cheery greetings. A few simply looked at Lane with indifference or thinly veiled dislike. They were normally older hands, the ones who had been here since the beginning. The ones who remembered her arrival.
As she climbed further, she found herself alone except for the thud of her sensible issue shoes on the steps. The WAAF uniform she wore might have been a fiction, as she had never spent a day on an RAF station, in uniform or otherwise, but it had advantages beyond just the comfortable shoes. Most of the girls working in SOE HQ spent half their lives worrying about what to wear and the latest fashions. Lane didn’t envy them that choice, or the burden that came with it. Most importantly, the WAAF Squadron Officer rank tabs on her shoulders, the equal of an RAF Squadron Leader, gave her some credibility with the military types.
Even if they could never quite see the uniform without first seeing the woman inside it.
She passed through a heavy wooden door, passed down the corridor beyond, and knocked on a door. Pushing it open, she smiled at the woman within. “Hi, Mary.”
“Miss Lane,” Mary said, beaming. She’d gone for yellow today, Lane noted, with a floral hair clip to match. She looked awfully attractive, which was unfortunately the main reason her boss had picked her. “Squadron Officer Lane,” Mary said, blushing. “Sorry.”
“That’s fine, Mary. Is the Colonel ready for me?”
Mary frowned and looked at her notes. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting you today.”
Lane kept her face even. “Oh, that’s my fault,” she said. “He told me to let you know, and I’m afraid I simply forgot. Would you mind awfully not telling him? You know how grumpy he gets when he feels let down.”
Mary winked. “Of course, Miss Lane. We girls have got to stick together. He’s not busy. Please go on through. I’ll bring some tea.”
It wasn’t easy lying to Mary, but it had to be done. Lane had been trying to arrange an audience for two weeks. The man always had some excuse.
This time, she couldn’t afford to wait.
“When is he next in with the Joint Intelligence Committee?”
“Let me check.” Mary opened her notebook. “Wednesday morning,” she said. “Assuming he gets up in time. He missed it the other week, you know.”
“Oh, I heard,” Lane said. Giving Mary a grateful smile, she knocked on the interior door. Without waiting, she entered the office beyond.
Colonel James Dennison gave a disapproving grunt and closed the newspaper that lay across the large desk in front of him. As always, he wore his thinning hair neatly to the side, pomade helping to conceal the traces of grey spreading from the temples. Unlike Lane, he wore civilian clothes. Between his MC at Dunkirk and four years in SOE, he had all the credibility he needed and more. Secrets were Dennison’s business, and he was good at finding them out. And keeping them, Lane thought. Especially his own. “I don’t believe we had an appointment today, Lane,” he said.
“I’m sorry, James. It couldn’t wait.”
“It never can,” he said with a sigh. “What is it today? Another crazy Nazi plot?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Not a great start. I take it Mary said she’d bring you tea?”
“Of course. This isn’t my first time.”
“No, it’s not.” He sniffed. “Go on, then. You can have five minutes of my time.”
“Fifteen.”
“Ten. And you’ve already wasted one minute of it.” He pointed at the first file she placed on his desk, thicker than the rest combined. “That looks ominous. I think I’d better have a smoke. Here, try these.” He offered her a thin cigarette from a silver regimental cigarillo box, then lit it for her.
She inhaled deeply. “Parisian?”
A nod. “I was there last month for a meeting with Eisenhower’s staff, before they moved to Reims.”
“They’re not very good, James.”
“Well, Silver Tree, you should have brought your own.” He seemed proud of his own cleverness. It was not his only fault. Not even the worst.
Exhaling, she opened the first file. “Werwolf,” she said, ignoring his groan just as she ignored his use of the nickname that only he found amusing. She had long since stopped letting it bother her. “Last summer, Himmler gave an order for special SS units to be assembled to resist our advance. Stay behind forces, if you will, hitting our rear areas, conducting small unit raids and assassinations. The man in charge of them is an SS Obergruppenführer by the name of Hans-Adolf Prützmann. Here.” Turning the file around, she pushed Dennison a full-page photo of a shaven headed officer with oddly reptilian eyes. “Prützmann learned his trade studying the Partisan campaigns in northern Russia and the Baltic nations. He put them down, too. Murdered thousands.”
“So far, so Nazi.” Dennison yawned. “What was it Goebbels said? Something about fanatics keeping us up at night?”
“The enemy will be taken in the rear by the fanatical population,” Lane quoted, “which will ceaselessly worry him, tie down strong forces and allow him no rest or exploitation of any possible success.”
“Hmm. I said it in fewer words.”
“Except,” Lane said, “I don’t think he was talking about Werwolf. My sources indicate Werwolf is a military unit, closer to our Commandos or SAS than partisans.”
“All the better,” Dennison said. “That will make it harder for them to vanish into the local population.”
“While giving them access to better training and weaponry.”
“Perhaps.” The Colonel coughed, and a cloud of acrid smoke spilled from his mouth. “Damn it, these things really are awful. Bloody French.”
Lane pushed aside the Werwolf file and reached for another. “Here. Look.”
“A visitor log.” Dennison peered at the page. “How fascinating.”
“This is the visitor log for an underground pharmaceutical facility outside Hildesheim.”
“Which is where?”
“Just south of Hanover. Look at the seventh name on the list.”
With a theatrical yawn, the Colonel leaned closer. “Hans-Adolf Prützmann,” he read.
“Why would the head of Werwolf, preparing to conduct operations behind our lines, feel the need to visit an obscure laboratory in Lower Saxony?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps he ran low on aspirin, or he’s got a morphine addiction like Goering. Or his sister works there. Who cares?”
There was a knock at the door, and Mary entered and placed two steaming cups of tea on the desk.
“Thank you, Mary,” Dennison said. “Off you go now.”
Smiling at Lane, Mary left, with Dennison watching her each step of the way. The Colonel waited until the door closed behind her, then gave his smouldering cigarette a rueful look and stubbed it out. Without asking, Lane took another and lit this one herself. She didn’t mind the taste. It reminded her of happier days, before the war.
“You’ve got to admit, Lane,” Dennison said, leaning back in his chair, “this is thin stuff. No wonder you didn’t call to make a proper appointment.”
“Do you blame me? I’ve been trying to brief you on this for weeks. Here.” She gave him the third file and pointed.
“Götterdämmerung,” he read. “The final part of the Ring Cycle, and the best if you ask me. I didn’t know you were a Richard Wagner fan, Lane. That surprises me, given your heritage…” He tailed off, flicking his fingers in an airy but indeterminate gesture.
She ignored the comment and laid open the fourth file. “Here it is again,” she said, pointing. “On a trans-shipping manifest for chemical rail wagons in Thüringen. This one came in today.”
“Your ten minutes is nearly up,” Dennison said wearily. “Would you care to get to whatever point you think you’re making?”
“Werwolf. Prützmann. A pharmaceutical laboratory in Hildesheim, and a chemical factory near Weimar. This word Götterdämmerung, coming up over and over.”
“So?”
She stared at him. “If the day should ever come when we must go, if some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that the universe will shake and mankind will stand back in stupefaction.”
“Hitler?”
“Goebbels.”
“You know the man is a professional liar, don’t you? That sort of nonsense is pure propaganda. Or else he was talking about the V1 and V2 or even the bloody V3, and we dealt with those all well enough, didn’t we?”
“What if it’s more than that?”
“It’s not,” he said firmly, closing the file and handing it back to her.
She stared at him. Not blinking. Just watching. It had the desired effect. It always did.
Even as a child, people had talked about her eyes. The more polite ones used words like “enigmatic.” They were in a minority. Icy. Intimidating. That’s what they really meant. She didn’t care what people thought of her eyes, no more than she cared what they thought of her family, or blood, or her rise as a woman from the typing pool to Deputy Chief of ‘X’ Section.
All that mattered was that they did what she needed them to.
“Fine,” Dennison snapped. “Get together all the evidence you can and bring it to me. I’ll push it up the chain.”
“At the JIC,” she said. “On Wednesday.”
“Put it all together in a briefing note, and I’ll see what I can do. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Silver Tree, your time is well and truly up. I have other business to attend to.” He reached for his newspaper.
Lane stood to attention, then reached for the files. The picture of Hans-Adolf Prützmann slid free, and for a moment seemed to stare at her with cold mocking from those odd, pitiless eyes. She covered his face with the other papers and closed the file, piling it with the others before placing them under her arm.
“Sarah?”
She stopped halfway to the door. “Yes, sir?”
At least he had the courtesy to lower his newspaper. “No one has done more for this section than you,” he said. “I know that more than anyone. You were my secretary, after all. You’ve come a long way since then, and you have truly been invaluable. But you seem tired. Why don’t you take a few days off? Head to Brighton or Margate for some sea air?”
“Thank you,” she said, “but I’m fine.”
“Very well. I offered. Seeing as you’re going to still be in town, at least come for a drink with me tonight at my club. They don’t normally allow ladies, but as my guest…”
He already knew her answer, of course. He’d heard it often enough. She could have admired his tenacity, if only he’d applied it to his work instead. “I can’t,” she said, patting the files under her arm. “I have work to do.”
“Of course. Perhaps some other time.”
“Perhaps,” she said, not meaning it. She turned and walked from the room, feeling his eyes on her the whole way.
After slamming the door of her office, she put the files on her desk and lit one of her own cigarettes. For a long time, she stared at her filing cabinet. Then she put in a requisition order for more files from the central registry and went to work.
Götterdämmerung was out there.
All she had to do was find it.
Chapter Seven
Above Germany, 12 March
Durban didn’t need two tours in Pathfinders to find the target. He barely needed a navigator. All he needed was the vast glow that had, until recently, been the city of Dortmund.
“Jesus,” Grant muttered next to him.
