Agent of Death (30 page)

‘Look,’ I said over the intercom, ‘I can’t tell you everything, but trust me that you mustn’t land in New York or anywhere near it.’

‘Why not?’ said Davies, and I dithered a second more, then told them.

‘Because the Jerries have got something nasty. Very nasty indeed, and they’re going to use it on New York if we don’t stop them.’ The engines roared, the aircraft trembled, and the clouds sped past below. Davies looked at me. Even sitting next to me, I needed the intercom to hear what he was saying over the engine noise, and I couldn’t see much of his face between his flying helmet and his oxygen mask: just his eyes. But he didn’t look happy.

‘What is it?’ he said. ‘This thing they’ve got.’

‘I can’t say. But it’s bad, and you can’t land anywhere near New York.’ I just about saw his frown.

‘What, the whole city?’

‘Yes.’

‘But how can a whole city be in danger? The Jerries haven’t got a thousand bombers on the way, have they? They haven’t got anything with the range.’ He wondered nervously about that. ‘They haven’t, have they?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘That’s all I can say, but you need to land somewhere upwind of New York, and as far away as possible.’

‘Upwind?’ he said. ‘Is it gas? Have they got a bomber that can reach New York?’ I shook my head. ‘Is it a rocket, then? Is that it?’ I didn’t say anything. ‘But it is gas, though?’ he said. I still said nothing, so he gave up and spoke to his navigator. ‘Hear that, Jerry? It’s gas! We’ll go for the second airfield then. Middleton field, right?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said the navigator. ‘On the Susquehanna river. Got it!’

After that, the plane flew on, the fuel tanks slowly emptied, I gave up my seat for the actual co-pilot, and tried to sleep – which proved impossible – laid out on the narrow walkway just behind the flight deck. They had some sandwiches on board, and hot drinks in Thermos flasks and I had some of that but I still couldn’t sleep.

Many, many hours later, they called me back to the flight deck, with my ears popping, and me swallowing hard as the aircraft came down from cruising height. My body thought it was one o’clock the following morning, but by flying westward towards the dawn, the local time was six hours behind and it was still light. I was bleary-eyed with tiredness, and my head was droning all by itself, even without the roar of the engines, and I felt neither awake nor asleep, nor tired nor not tired. But that’s normal on a long flight. You get used to that, and at least I didn’t have to fly the aircraft. So I squeezed into the co-pilot’s chair and Davies showed me another of the Liberator’s tricks: a Mk VI ASV search radar. It had a Plan Position Indicator scope among the instruments, between pilot and co-pilot. It was Flash Gordon electronics like the TV screens I’d seen on Punno Island: a circular, cathode-ray display, with a sweeping line of light that went round like a clock-hand so you were in the middle and anything else showed up as a blip. It became the standard radar display, used ever since, but it looked like science fiction to me.

‘There’s a retractable scanner back behind us,’ said Davies, ‘and we’ve just lowered it to start looking for your carrier. It gives a three-sixty-degree scan and it should pick up a ship at seventy miles range.’

‘That’s pretty good,’ I said.

Davies nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but it’s a big ocean, and your carrier is on a training cruise, working up, and the captain might take it wherever he wants.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘We fly a search pattern up and down over the place where it’s supposed to be, and hope we find it.’ Which we did. Davies turned the aircraft in a series of long runs like a farmer ploughing a field, going round a hundred and eighty degrees at the end of each run, and so on, and the more we flew, the more Davies looked at the fuel indicators. But he never worried too much because we got lucky fairly soon.

‘There!’ said the radio operator. He had his own screen down in his compartment, and spotted it quicker that we did. ‘Two o’clock!’ he said, ‘Nice fat blip! Got to be a big ship! How big’s this carrier?’ I had my briefing notes in front of me and read out the details.

‘USS
Saint
Mihiel
: Independence class, light carrier, originally laid down as USS
Irvington
, five-inch cruiser, then converted and launched December 1943. Fifteen thousand tons fully laden, six hundred and twenty feet long, maximum speed thirty-one point five knots.’

‘Sounds right,’ said the radio operator. ‘Nice big blip like I said.’ Davies and I looked at the blip on our screen. There it was indeed, but I remembered something else I’d read.

‘She’ll probably have seen us already,’ I said, and looked at my notes. ‘It says here that
Saint Mihiel
has a radar installation that can spot a bomber at one hundred miles, and the notes also say,’ I read the words, ‘“Be wary in approaching USS
Mihiel
, as the ship may be at general quarters.”’

‘What’s that?’ said Davies.

‘I think it’s Yank for action stations,’ I said.

And indeed it was. USS
Saint Mihiel
was a very nervous ship.

Davies turned towards the location of the radar blip which soon became a grey, visible shape with a white wake under the bow, indicating high speed. The ship was a long, flat, narrow shape with four stumpy funnels and a control tower rising from the starboard side, and the landing deck ending just before the bow, to accommodate a large, four-gun Bofors mounting. Being warned, Davies flew a wide circle round the ship at one thousand feet, while the radio operator did his best with an Aldis lamp through a window – all radio communication being forbidden – to convince the Americans that we were a British Liberator not a German Focke Wulf Condor, which should have been obvious at a glance, but was not, because as we came round on a still closer pass, the whole flat-topped ship lit up with twinkling flashes of malignant light, and horrible streams of tracer reached out, most of it curving down into the sea beneath us.

The notes said that
Saint Mihiel
mounted twenty, forty-millimetre guns, and twenty-four, twenty-millimetre, but it looked like more, especially as the heavy stuff was shooting up beyond us and going past our windscreen, seeming impossibly slow at first, as it climbed up from the ship, then flashing past quicker than the eye could follow, some of it punching into the aircraft’s hull and going off with ugly sharp cracks.

‘Shit!’ said Davies, and heaved the control column over. ‘Through the gate!’ he said to me, and I shoved the four throttle controls forward and the big engines howled, and Davies weaved P-for-Popsie in a corkscrew to put off the gunners. It was over in seconds; we were out of range and Davies was yelling, ‘Pull ’em back!’ and I was easing the throttles. ‘Bastards!’ said Davies. ‘Don’t they know we’re on their side? Everyone OK?’ he said. ‘Anyone hit?’

We were very lucky. We’d been an easy, side-on target, not coming head-on with intent to bomb. Perhaps they opened fire too soon? Perhaps they were novices? As it was they blew some holes in our hull, but did no serious damage and, next time, as Davies came round at a safe distance, out of range, they had the grace to read our signals, and a big twelve-inch lamp on the control tower flicked and clacked and asked for our ‘Day Code Friendly Signal’, which we were able to give them, courtesy of Eisenhower’s office.

Then everything was very easy for everyone but me. Our Aldis operator told USS
Saint
Mihiel
that a British special agent was to be dropped into the sea, and asked the ship to heave to and pick him up. After some hesitation
Saint
Mihiel
signalled ‘Affirmative’, which is American shorthand for ‘yes’ just as automobile is short for car, and elevator is short for lift. So P-for-Popsie manoeuvred carefully, coming down to the minimum height at which a parachute would properly open, so as to drop me as close as possible to the ship. Likewise,
Saint
Mihiel
came round in a beautiful, curving, white wake, then lost way and lowered a launch on davits. We saw the boat go into the water and the crew waved as we made a low pass.

I don’t know how long this took, but it was all too fast for me. I’d happily have waited a year or two before jumping. Then finally Davies patted me on the shoulder, wished me luck, and I got up, and collected my spare parachute, and made my way to the catwalk over the bomb bay, which was wide open by then – the Liberator’s odd, roller-blind bomb doors curling up into the hull, not opening like a pair of gates as in other bombers. My heart was going hard; my head was dizzy. I was unplugged from the intercom and never heard what the man was saying – he was one of the side gunners – who put me in place and connected a self-inflating dingy to my harness by a line, so it would hang beneath me as I dropped.

Then the aircraft banked and roared as Dougie made his bombing run, with me as the bomb, and the side gunner put a hand to his earphones and waited a bit, then nodded, gave me the thumbs-up, and stood back, and I looked down at the fathomless, grey ocean, sliding past at ninety miles an hour, which was as slow as P-for-Popsie could go without dropping out of the air.

It was one of the most sickening moments of my life. I had never used a parachute before and I struggled to remember what I’d been told:

Jump!

Count three to clear the aircraft!

Pull the ‘D’ ring!

Wait for the jolt!

No jolt?
Pull
the
reserve
chute
!

Knees together, arms up!

When you hit the water … etc. … etc.

*

It seemed to me that everything could go wrong in every possible way, and from the depths of my bowels I didn’t want to do it. I hesitated. The gunner nodded encouragement. He gave thumbs-up again.

And I jumped.

CHAPTER 35

Waverly
Mansions
,

Lambeth
Embankment
,

London.

Wednesday
7
June
,
19
.
15
hours

Lady Margaret frowned. She was tired and sick after two bumpy air journeys in one day. She wanted a bath, a drink, and an early night, but she could see the concierge under full sail emerging from the big glass double doors, with the pill-box-hat page boy just behind him, pointing at her. She sighed as the concierge nodded at the boy, sent him off with a sixpence, then straightened his back and advanced down the wide marble steps, in a peaked cap, a military-looking overcoat, and gleaming boots. He was a very big, very splendid man in his late sixties, with rows of medal ribbons, a big moustache, and a face like General Kitchener.

He caught Lady Margaret’s eye, did a most wonderful, raised-eyebrows warning, further emphasized by a white-gloved finger that came up like a semaphore, and indicated her penthouse far above.

‘Ah!’ she said. Just the one, sharp syllable. She gave him a quick nod, and he came to a halt, stamped to attention, and saluted like the guardsman that he was, or had been. He’d been regimental sarn’t major of the Coldstream Guards, before getting the wonderful billet he now occupied, with a fortune in tips, and the joy of following the adventures of the great, the good, and the beautiful who lived in London’s smartest apartment block.

‘Here,’ she said to the cabbie who’d brought her from Hendon aerodrome. She paid the fare and added an over-generous half a crown because she couldn’t be bothered to find a smaller coin, and money was boring.

‘You sure, m’um?’ said the cabbie, but adding, ‘Gor bless you,’ in the same breath and roaring off before she could change her mind.

She went up the five wide steps, the concierge saluted again, and looked down on her from his tall height. He thought she was wonderful. He would have stood between her and a bullet. She gave him the shivers. She was fascinating. He wished he was young again. He spoke in a low voice.

‘
He’s
here, m’lady. He’s upstairs.’ He glanced up then looked at her again. He thought she looked a shade tired. He lowered his voice still more. ‘Thought you should know, m’lady.’ His spine tingled as he got his reward. A grateful smile straight into his eyes, and a slim hand briefly touching his arm. That and another half-crown, which was always nice. But he didn’t do it for the money.

‘Thank you, Ronald,’ she said. ‘You are my champion, as always.’ His breast swelled. He grew six inches in height. He saluted again, and advanced to the double doors to throw them open for her. Never mind a bullet – he’d have stood between her and the devil!

But she groaned inwardly as she smiled. The half-crown was never enough and the expected question came swiftly.

‘Did it all go well, m’lady?’ he asked, as they entered the elaborate, marble-lined foyer. ‘With the young wing commander, ’an all?’

She forced another smile. Ex-RSM Ronald Ellis was a wonderful ally, but he was very, very nosy indeed, and relished little conversations with ‘his’ residents. He relished the gossip and the power that came from knowing who came and went, who was having affairs with whom, who regularly telephoned for professional ladies, and who preferred boys to girls and vice versa. So he was good to have on your side, but there was always the possibility that he might use his knowledge against you. So Lady Margaret paid the real price, which was much more than half a crown. She looked up at Ellis.

‘He’s in good spirits,’ she said, as if confidentially, as if revealing information. ‘I left him at Portsmouth naval base where he went aboard a destroyer – can’t say which one …’

‘Course not, m’lady,’ said Ellis instantly, and listened intently as she gave him five minutes of invented nonsense, to keep him happy, as they walked slowly towards the lifts, and the great and the good and the beautiful looked through the glass wall that divided off the Waverly Cocktail Bar from the foyer. It was an excellent place to sit, and to see and be seen, and a few hands waved at Lady Margaret, and she waved back as she spoke.

Then she was blessedly inside the lift, the doors sliding shut and cutting out Ellis, and she was on her way to the top floor.

*

She’d have known who was there anyway, as soon as she turned the key and opened the door. The lights were on and so was the radiogram. The flat was full of music; the sort of music that she detested. Someone was hammering the hell out of a grand piano, the noise pounding up and down and left and right, to the command of some concert pianist, whichever one; they all sounded equally bad. Margaret Comings preferred big band swing. Something you could dance to and sing to. But she actually did know who the pianist was in this case. He would be Arthur Rubenstein: intellectual, Polish–Jewish, émigré and genius, just like the man who was listening to his music – her husband, once Jakov Kominsky, now Professor Sir Jack Comings.

The flat had a small entrance lobby with doors off to the other rooms. The décor was yew veneer, a beige carpet, and soft, indirect lighting. She stood and waited … and nodded in satisfaction as the music abruptly stopped. Jack was a most considerate man.

‘Darling!’ he said, as the door to the lounge opened. He wore a beautiful suit, immaculately tailored; he was always tremendously clean, smelt faintly of cologne, and he looked very clever because he
was
very clever, and he was successful, powerful, rich, charming, and kind. He was also old, bald, fat, and short – shorter than her if she wore heels.

‘Darling!’ she said, and they exchanged formal kisses.

‘You look tired,’ he said. ‘Take your coat off and sit down. I’ll put on something nice and make you a drink. Gin and tonic?’ He even took the coat and hung it in the wardrobe in the lobby. Then he opened the radiogram, took Rubenstein off the turntable, put on Arty Shaw’s
Stardust
, mixed her a drink, and gave it to her. ‘Have this, then a bath.’ He smiled. ‘And then we’ll talk,’ he said, and the alarm siren sounded inside her head.

An hour later they sat together, looking out at the Palace of Westminster from the big windows. She wore a dressing gown, she felt better, and they talked about nothing, which is to say they discussed the nation’s most profound secrets, irrespective of the Official Secrets Act, just as they always did when they met, because these secrets meant nothing to them. They were just small talk. They were nothing dangerous.

‘Here,’ he said, when she first came out of her bedroom after the bath. ‘This came for you while you were out. You were supposed to be in the flat.’ He smiled. ‘A motorcycle dispatch boy came right up here in the lift. Couldn’t give this to anyone but you.’ He handed over a brown manila envelope with the words ‘MOST SECRET’ stamped diagonally across it in red.

‘So how did you persuade him to give it to you?’ she said, opening the envelope.

He waved a hand, dismissively. ‘I phoned Donny Trent at Bletchley, had a word, and he got the boy’s commanding officer to ring here and tell him that
my
security rating is higher than yours, my dear Margaret …
et
voila
!’

‘Hmm …’ she said, going quickly through the papers.

‘So?’ he said. ‘What news?’

She looked up, and brushed her long hair out of her eyes; a very feminine gesture which he admired greatly, such that – like RSM Ellis - he wished he were younger. He also wished to be tall and slim, and he sneered at himself for such vanity.

‘Do you remember what I told you about Svart and Mem Tav?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Well, there was a commando raid on Punno Island, off the Swedish coast.’

‘And young David was involved. Yes, I know.’

‘Oh?’ she said, surprised. ‘You know that?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I asked some questions about David, because I have got some news for him. But go on.’

So she explained the Punno raid in detail, then finished by giving him the papers from the manila envelope. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘some of the Germans we captured at Punno have been talking.’

‘Talking?’ he said. ‘To your people?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘to each other. We collected them in a bus from the naval dockyard, and the bus has microphones to record what people say. And remember, they still think we’re on Svart’s side, trying to help him.’

He shook his head. ‘Dear me,’ he said, ‘what devious people you are.’ He looked at her closely. ‘But I suppose you have to be devious, if you pretend to be one thing, and really are something else.’

‘Yes,’ she said, hoping there was nothing behind his words. ‘So look here. This is a summary of the transcript.’ She leaned close to point out a section of text and he smelt her perfume, which was wonderful and should have made him happy but didn’t; it made him sad. ‘One of them said that the Karolings – that’s the religious group Svart comes from – have got a large settlement in Chile, in South America, and that’s where all the Mem Tav development will take place from now on because they have lanthanide ores that are vital to making the catalysts in Mem Tav generators. And they’ve also got help from the Chilean government, and they mentioned something called the
Silbervogel
project.’

‘
Silbervogel
? Silver bird.’

‘Yes.’

‘So what does that mean?’

‘We don’t know,’ she said, then: ‘But what was this news you have for David?’

‘I’m afraid it’s not good,’ he said. ‘You know that I’m in touch with
Schweitzer
Yada
, the Zionists in Switzerland?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Well, they’ve learned from their sources in Poland that David’s mother was killed – murdered – by the Gestapo when she and David’s father were arrested in Warsaw. They tried to escape, they were badly beaten, and his mother died. His father was then taken to a concentration camp at Munsterlager. Somewhere where they wanted educated men for special work.’

‘And is he still alive?’

‘We don’t know.’

They sat quiet for a while, thinking.

‘Want another drink?’ he said. She nodded. He got up and went to the cocktail cabinet.

‘So what about
your
work?’ she said, as he handed her a glass. ‘Why are you in London?’

‘For reasons,’ he said, as if the reasons were nothing special, which was impossible because he wouldn’t have left Manchester for anything trivial. ‘And my project on uranium enrichment is complete,’ he said, and sat down again. ‘Did I tell you about separating the fissile isotope?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the Americans have to enrich uranium so that it’s all isotope two-three-five, to make the uranium bomb.’

‘Atom bomb,’ he said, ‘we’re calling it that, now.’

‘Are you?’

‘Yes. And there are a number of ways to concentrate the isotope: centrifugation, mass spectroscopy, gaseous diffusion, and liquid thermal diffusion. You know that?’

‘You’ve mentioned it,’ she said, and for no particular reason began to feel nervous.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘at the Rutherford Institute in Manchester, we’ve constructed a mathematical model to compare efficiency of the various methods, and we’ve clearly shown that gaseous diffusion is more efficient than any of the other methods. So! To make the atom bomb it has to be gaseous diffusion of a uranium salt: uranium hexafluoride, in fact.’

‘I see,’ she said, and the nervous feeling grew.

‘I hope you do, my dear, because that is one of the greatest secrets in history.’ He smiled. ‘Comrade Stalin would give a thousand tons of gold to know what I’ve just told you.’

‘Really?’ she said, realizing that she was nervous because she knew him very well, and his manner and attitude weren’t right. He wasn’t his normal self. He was staring at her too hard and he looked unhappy.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But there are other secrets, and we always share secrets, you and I.’ He got up and opened a briefcase that he’d left on a coffee table. He reached inside the case and produced two photographs. They were large, high-quality photos taken by an expert using an excellent camera. He came and sat down again, beside her.

‘There is a young man,’ he said, ‘now in the commando service, who was a newspaper photographer before the war, and he was official photographer on the Punno Island raid. He is an enterprising fellow because he has a little sideline selling photos to the press. He does very nicely out of it, and is commendably discreet, in offering only images that breach no secrecy. He offers what the newspapers call “human interest”.’ She nodded, already guessing what was coming. ‘I have here two of his latest images, as offered to the
Daily
Mail
, whose editor is a friend of mine. Thus
I
have the images and the public does not.’

He placed the photos on the sofa between himself and his wife. One showed a young woman, illuminated in the floodlights of a dockyard, with her arms round the neck of a soldier, kissing him in greeting. It was a beautiful image. All the happiness of reunion was there, and the splendour of a warrior received home in triumph. Better still, it told a general, rather than a particular truth, because it was impossible to see who they were. But in the second picture, taken just as they separated, the love that each had for the other was shining in their joyful faces, and it was indisputably clear that the young man was Wing Commander David Landau and the young woman was Lady Margaret Comings.