A Bitter Field (7 page)

‘Will you accept my reassurance that, in the present case, your own name is known to only three people?’

‘What about the shipment of arms?’

‘That was known to a whole raft of folk, coming in the way it did as a standard bit of intelligence. But all this is straying off the point, Cal, because the only real one is: are you in or not?’

‘Sorry to be a spoilsport, old chum, but it’s chapter and verse or no can do. I need to know where you stand with those for whom you work and what the risks of exposure are once an operation is in place.’

Peter drained his drink and stared out to sea for half a minute, obviously weighing up the odds of being open, and his voice was low and for once forcefully earnest as he finally spoke.

‘I am going to tell you, because I trust you, Cal, but I do want you to know there is not another soul in the world to whom I would impart what I am about to say.’

‘I’m flattered,’ Cal said, his surprise evident. ‘Given we have not
always seen eye to eye and we have been, how shall I say, on opposite sides of most arguments.’

Peter now looked like a man who had been put on an embarrassing spot, not blushing exactly but close to it; if there was one area where he was utterly typical in the possession of a national characteristic, it was in anything to do with any revelation of personal regard for another man.

‘I don’t dislike you, if that is what you are driving at, which was not always a statement I could readily and honestly have made before our little escapade in Hamburg and what followed. You are, without doubt, one of the most awkward buggers it has ever been my misfortune to deal with, but I do not think you will betray a confidence.’

Having gone as far as he was prepared to nail their relationship and got a complicit nod he felt secure to carry on. ‘When it comes to how bad things are in SIS I have not told you the half of it. In order to seal off the possibility of being wrong-footed, Quex has set up a separate bureau.’ Seeing the eyebrows rise at the name, Peter added, ‘Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, boss of MI6, or SIS if you prefer. “Quex” is his nickname.’

‘I won’t ask why.’

‘I am part of that bureau, code-named Operation Z, which is housed in a separate set of offices to the main body—’

Cal cut across him. ‘And in order not to alert those considered unreliable you cannot use the normal facilities of the main organisation, like the acquisition of false documentation on which to travel?’

‘If I had asked for a false passport it would have set minds wondering about what I was up to.’

‘Which should be none of their business.’

‘My dear chap, when it comes to being nosy SIS would not give ground to the most assiduous suburban curtain twitcher – hardly surprising when you consider it, given the job we all do entails sniffing out secrets other people want to keep.’

‘In the end, obviously, even taking those precautions did not work, Peter, and if what you have just told me is true, then where you had come from and where you were headed to was definitely leaked in London, and whoever did it either knew or guessed what you were on the trail of.

‘It saddens me to say that you are very probably correct, though I’m damned if I know how or whom.’

‘You went to Brno and, I presume, talked to the SIS contact there?’

‘I did.’

‘Then some bugger did as you did and put two and two together. Christ knows there’s not much more there to interest British intelligence in Brno other than an arms factory. Who, apart from you, is staffing this new lot?’

‘A couple of chaps like me, dragged back in, and even they are being kept in the dark about what I’m up to, just as their operations are a mystery to me. The idea is to avoid those on station at the various embassies as well, and seek to get information from the people carrying out business in those places in which we are interested. Naturally, what most are doing is legit, but one who is not, such as your good self, could be a priceless asset.’

‘Your idea?’ Peter nodded. ‘I take it this old lot are not too enamoured of what your boss is up to with his new incarnation.’

‘They’re bloody livid.’

‘Enough to seek to queer the pitch and get you and I killed?’

‘Not me, old boy, for in their wildest dreams they would not imagine that I would get so close to the actual movement of weapons.’

‘Me, then.’

‘In your case it would, to such people and should the information surface, be a pleasure to have done so. You may well see yourself as some kind of “holy warrior”, but you might be surprised at the number of folk that observe you in quite a different light.’

‘They don’t seem to be too fond of you either, Peter, because whatever you say, you too could have been killed and no one seemed concerned enough to tell you so.’

‘Sadly, no.’

‘But the question remains, say I agreed to go back to Czechoslovakia, what am I looking to do?’

‘Find the means to stop Jerry,’ Peter replied, ‘and for the love of God do not mention the Russians again.’

Now it was Cal’s turn to stare into the middle distance for several seconds, while he weighed his words. ‘Perhaps your best hope lies in Germany, not Czechoslovakia. Adolf is round the bend but I got a hint from a contact in Prague his generals are not. What they don’t want is another war until they are good and ready, and that to them means another ten years at least.’

‘SIS is more interested in what you think about the Czechs.’

‘While I think you need to get back to London and find out who set the
Jeunesses Patriotes
on to your mission, because someone did and they did not give a damn how many people might be killed in the process.’

‘And you?’

‘Gentlemen,’ called the dark-skinned steward, before Cal could
respond, ‘the captain wishes you to know that dinner is about to be served.’

‘I need to know,’ Peter insisted.

‘And I need to eat, sleep on it and think.’ Seeing his companion swell with the air needed to blast him, Cal added, with exaggerated politeness, ‘And I do think it would be bad manners to keep our host waiting, don’t you, old boy?’

L
ying in an upper bunk inside a stifling cabin, with Peter Lanchester gently snoring below him, his nasal rasping accompanying the steady rhythmic thud and vibrations of the ship’s engines, Callum Jardine was thinking, and not of the dangers he might face in doing what had been asked of him; one question that mattered kept recurring, without him being able to nail a definitive conclusion: could he be of any practical use?

He did have some contacts in Czechoslovakia and they were pretty good, the most important in this regard being the twin heads of both Czech Foreign and Domestic Intelligence whom he had met very briefly – he suspected they were determined to check him out, which was a necessary precaution for a country threatened by powerful neighbours.

The one who approximated to the head of MI5 had been a rather brusque character called Colonel Doležal, whose only concern was
that the weapons should get off Czech soil as soon as possible, without wind of the shipment getting to any other body than those who were the end recipients, while he sought assurances that once delivered the secret would remain that.

The Foreign Intelligence chief he had found the more amenable, but that was, he suspected, because General František Moravec wanted something. In that murky world of international espionage and gunrunning, especially where money was involved, the notion of truth was not a given – people lied or acted for profit and sometimes did not care a damn what mess they left behind.

He had found the Czechs to be pretty straight as a rule – there had been no requirement for bribes – and in any case, people like Moravec did not provide aid in clandestine operations for payment.

Their price for cooperative silence was information, and, after years of running guns and dealing with those complicit in the game, Cal Jardine had amassed a depth of knowledge of the world in which he moved, both in the movement of weapons and other matters.

He knew what rumours might have a basis in truth and also had the ability to dismiss many that were fantasies, which was all grist to the mill for a man whose occupation depended on the ability to garner disparate facts from the countries surrounding his own and make connections denied to others.

Their conversation had then become general, almost friendly, and had inevitably turned to the present crisis with Germany and where that might lead, moving on to discussion, initiated by Cal, about the wisdom of training and deploying irregular forces as well as the various forms of sabotage that could be employed to penetrate enemy positions and destroy their rear communications.

It was an area where Callum Jardine had a lot of experience,
gained in fighting in Iraq, the Chaco War in South America, and in training bands of Zionist settlers in Palestine to defend themselves against attacks by Arabs who resented their arrival from Europe to cultivate what both considered their ancient land.

He advised Moravec to think of guerrilla tactics in advance and not wait until an invasion happened, the trick being to train men and provide them with caches of the things they needed – handguns and rifles, grenades and explosives, as well as the means to detonate them – along with a list of pre-identified targets, choke points for any invaders, which could be reconnoitred and in some cases prepared in peacetime.

There had been a gentle enquiry as to Cal’s availability to help in such training – it was, after all, a specialised field – politely declined, given he was not a free man until his consignment of machine guns was on the last leg of its Spanish journey, but he did not entirely rule out the possibility at some later stage; it was, after all, what he did.

It was Moravec, in the course of their conversation, who had alluded – and it had been no more than that – to the reluctance of Hitler’s top generals to plan for an invasion of his country, fearing a simultaneous invasion by the French; had that aside indicated a truth based on sound verifiable fact or wishful thinking?

What could he find out in Czechoslovakia that the British Secret Service did not already know? Not very much, he surmised, but he was willing to try. More to the point, could that hint from Moravec provide a way to achieve what the people Peter Lanchester represented sought, given the level of doubt that any other course was possible, and where, if it could, did he fit in?

The more he thought on what Peter had said about the attitude of HMG, the more he saw it as a stance fully backed up by what he read
in the newspapers – nothing definitive, but telling and disturbing trends about the status of British Government policy.

Neville Chamberlain had dropped so many hints in so-called off-the-record talks to journalists, both foreign and domestic, as to lay down a marker as to where he stood on the Sudetenland question and it was not on the side of intervention.

He had sent a mediator, it was true – a fellow Cal had never heard of called Lord Runciman – to broker a deal between the Czechs and the Sudeten minority. There was talk of a plebiscite in which the people could vote for what they wanted, but that mission of mediation, according to what he had read in the French newspapers, did not seem to be getting very far.

Then there were the editorials in London papers like
The Times
– day-late copies which he had picked up at various stops – which if they did not spout actual Government policy had a good idea of where it was headed, with leaders asking questions as to why the Czechs were being so intransigent about granting rights to their minorities, which made it sound as if the British and French Governments would go to any lengths to appease Hitler.

There was no doubt in Callum Jardine’s mind that Hitler had to be stopped and the sooner the better. He had spent too much time in the country to harbour any illusions about the intentions of the so-called Führer of the German Reich, and had seen at first hand the effect of a totalitarian police state on the behaviour of the mass of its citizenry.

Even in a big sprawling city like Hamburg, home to millions, the presence of the state was all-pervasive, with formal political opposition neutered in every aspect of what had once constituted normal life. The communists had been rounded up or fled in the first
year of Hitler’s rule, the social democrats or anyone mildly left of centre cowed into silence by public beatings or selective incarceration in numerous concentration camps.

In the camps they were subjected to a brutal political re-education, a fate the Nazis were equally willing to hand out to any member of a former right-wing party as well if they did not put enough verve into their ‘
Heil Hitlers
’ or dig deep enough into their meagre wages to support that fraud upon the public called
Winterhilfe
.

Such overbearing weight did not even begin to account for what had happened to Jews, Gypsies, the mentally retarded and those considered sexually deviant. Conformity was all, strikes were banned, unions suppressed and all other organisations, from workers to Boy Scouts, subsumed into things like the Nazi-created German Labour Front or the Hitler Youth.

When it came to the rights of the citizen they were quite simply whatever Adolf Hitler or one of his satraps decided they would allow. No one openly complained and even in private it was wise to be careful for there were those all around at work, and even in your own street or tenement, just looking for someone to denounce to prove their own loyalty to the party and the Führer.

Until the beginning of the year the structures of the German army had been intact, but even they were now subject to Hitler’s will. He had removed Blomberg, the Minister of War, somehow got rid of the head of the army, von Fritsch, and appointed himself Supreme Commander. Those running the armed forces were his personal appointees, beholden to him, so now, even for the army to rise up and remove the Nazis would take a lot of nerve.

Every facet of German life was controlled, every organisation, military and civilian, including their own party organs, spied upon;
it was claimed half the office walls in the Berlin ministries contained hidden microphones and that officials, for their own safety, even if it was not proven, communicated in writing or whispers to avoid the attention of the
Geheime Staatspolizei.

By decree, the Gestapo were not subject to any law; you could be arrested on a whim and just disappear, it being their decision, if they put a bullet in a victim’s brain or tortured them to death, as to what the victim’s family were told. Often nothing was said; at other times a wife, father or mother received an urn of ashes accompanied by the terrifying mantra that their loved ones had died while trying to escape.

Lost in this gloomy introspection Cal had to remind himself that he had managed to live for many months outside the attentions of the state and had, in that time, helped many Jewish families to escape to a safer place, not only with their lives but with the bulk of their portable possessions.

This had been achieved when most Jews wishing to depart Germany were forced to leave with no more than what they could carry in a single suitcase, and that after having paid hefty bribes or transferred valuable property, houses, businesses and works of art to the SS for a pittance.

If there was no underground movement, the German state still possessed an underbelly in the big cities: a black market in scarce goods particularly, the best customers now those with the means to pay, the higher-ranking Nazis and the industrialists and employers who had done so well out of the suppressed workers.

Criminals and those who lived the life of the quasi-legal had a natural survival strategy, particularly in the big commercial and industrial cities where once the Reds and socialists had ruled, places
where people still had the guts to make jokes debunking Hitler and his satraps, the most obvious of those being Berlin – no wonder the Führer hated the place.

Cal’s beat had been the Hamburg quarter of St Pauli, a place of hucksters, whorehouses, prostitutes in windows and highly suspect drinking dens dedicated to fleecing their itinerant customers – visiting sailors or provincials come to test out the fleshpots – a district where they also showed a cunning ability to circumvent the endless
freedom-limiting
decrees.

Was there enough of that commodity in an institution like the armed forces to curb Hitler and his plans for expansion? In many ways, especially in its codes of conduct, it was still the Kaiser’s army – the officer corps hidebound in its traditions, fiercely clinging to its codes of honour and obedience, those hiding, in too many cases, the hypocrisy of professional ambition.

A lot of questions, few definitive answers, but the other nagging uncertainty was natural: should he get involved at all? Though he had been active in many places either fighting, training or supplying weapons, the last four years seemed to have been an ongoing fight against Fascism in its various incarnations, first in Hamburg, then Ethiopia and lastly Spain; this was no exception.

Yet if he lacked one thing it was an ideology; his politics did not go much beyond a hatred of any government dedicated to killing or imprisoning innocents to maintain power, and that included Communism. Peter was not the only person who openly wondered at what triggered his actions; Callum Jardine often asked himself the same question.

Was he a soldier of fortune, an international crusader or out of his mind, nothing more than a psychotic thrill-seeker, never happy
unless he was in some place where the bullets were flying or there was order to be circumvented? He had never known the answer and it did not surface now as sleep took over.

What the captain of the freighter called his ‘motor launch’ was a bit less than that – one of his lifeboats fitted with an outboard motor – and since he did not want to re-enter French territorial waters, that meant in excess of a three-mile boat ride in a vessel that seemed designed to ship water over the bows in any kind of sea, and the one on which they were travelling was excessively choppy.

Their destination was the sandy beach on the southern shore of a low-lying peninsula called the Ile d’Oléron, a rocky sandbar jutting out into the Bay of Biscay, which became an island at very high tide. In a country with such a huge and fragmented coastline, the chances of being intercepted by authority were low, while the island was a place to which folk travelled for sea and sunshine, so that strangers excited no comment.

Peter’s small suitcase had been replaced with a sailor’s ditty bag and once on land it was a hot and dusty trek to find first the road which acted as a spine along the island, then wait for an infrequent bus to take them to the mainland and a town big enough to have a railway connection to the regional capital of Angoulême and the main route north.

The journey back to and across Paris to the Calais boat train provided ample time to talk, eat, doze, make a decision and plan; there was no thought of stopping en route, which would have required a hotel and the necessary registration. Bar that, it seemed all the difficulties lay on the opposite side of the Channel.

‘If I’m going to do as you ask, I have to put in place my own plan,
because I tell you this, Peter, I will deal only with you and I would ask that you tell no one where I am, what I’m doing and to whom I’m talking.’

‘You can’t do this alone, you need money, papers and the means of keeping in contact as well. What if I seek to come out to help you?’

‘Do you know Prague?’

‘No.’

‘Matters not, we have to work out a way to stay in contact.’

‘Funds?’

‘Demand a lump sum of money from SIS, a decent one, and bank it in your own name, payment to be sorted out when the operation is complete. Transferring money to Czechoslovakia is too risky, too open to being picked up, and besides, that will avoid currency controls.’

‘Do you still have funds there?’

‘That’s a question I don’t need to answer.’

Peter nodded; he thought he just had, but it was moot if they were his own or what was left over from his work for the Spanish Republic. If it was the latter, then the use of them for the purpose outlined lay on Cal’s conscience, not his.