The Invasion of 1950 (34 page)

“Stalin was a mistake,” Philby said finally, with a desperation Skorzeny doubted he could hear in himself. “He was someone who should never have been allowed anywhere near a place of power.”

“I see,” Skorzeny said as Philby took the food into the kitchen. Skorzeny's men were upstairs, some of them sleeping while the others kept watch. The smell of food would bring them downstairs soon enough. They now knew who Philby was and why he was helping them. It was something that worried Skorzeny. He'd agreed to kill himself, rather than be taken alive, but the others had made no such commitment. “And what did you find in the dead drop?”

Slowly, unwillingly, Philby reached into his pocket and pulled out a small matchbox. Skorzeny took it and opened it, finding a small sheet of paper, folded over time and time again, which he unfolded and placed on the table. The message looked perfectly innocuous, without anything that would arouse suspicion, but he picked out the code phases easily enough; they had been embedded within what looked like a piece of a novel. Philby’s communications with his handlers had mainly been one-way; it had always been harder to send messages from Germany or Moscow to an agent. If something occurred that code phases didn’t cover, a meeting would have to be arranged, and that would be almost impossible with Britain at war.

“We’re to remain here and prepare for a mission,” he said, after a moment. He cocked an eyebrow. “I trust you won’t mind if we stay for a week longer?”

Philby eyed him murderously. “You can stay here as long as you like, provided you have a way of getting me back to the
Reich
,” he said, after a moment. Skorzeny didn’t miss the submission in his tone; stripped of everything but himself, Philby had finally abandoned his cause.

Skorzeny shrugged. “When London falls, we will make contact with the German forces and arrange for extraction,” he said as if it wasn't important. It would have been a personal defeat for him personally; he didn’t want to remain in London passively until the city fell to the advancing Germans. “If the city doesn’t fall, we may have to make our way to Ireland and travel from there to the
Reich
or maybe steal a boat and sail across to France.”

He threw his hands in the air and grinned at Philby.

“It hardly matters, anyway,” he said. “If we are called upon to perform a mission, we will carry it out whatever it takes, and then we will make our escape.” He frowned. “Or do they have some reason for believing that we might still be alive?”

“There have been some reports of Germans hiding in the streets,” he said after a moment. Skorzeny lifted an eyebrow, wondering. Could it be that others had survived from his unit? They had all had orders to leave the city as swiftly as possible and go to ground, but the British counter-attack would have caught most of them before they could escape. “There have also been other reports of German spies and infiltrators dropping from the skies.”

Skorzeny shook his head, dismissing the rumours. “I don’t think that they would send additional paratroopers into London,” he said after a moment. The
Reich
didn’t have
that
many paratroopers, and those they did have would be needed to secure territory in the path of the main advance. “It might be one of those rumours that has gotten out of hand and expanded a bit.”

“They used to have rumours of nuns in hobnailed boots dropping from the sky,” Philby said, as he returned carrying a vast pot of steaming stew. “Do you want to call your men down to eat?”

Skorzeny nodded and summoned the other paratroopers. He was worried about them, even though they all had experience remaining concealed in enemy territory; this Englishman’s home wasn't some forest hideaway in the middle of insurgent Russia. The experience was almost surreal in its implications; they were in a pleasant home, but if they were caught, they would almost certainly be shot out of hand. The British uniforms might just give any investigator a moment’s pause, but he doubted that it would last long enough for them to react and escape. The bizarre combination of normality and being in the heart of enemy territory would affect them, sooner or later, and if they broke…

“You first,” he said. Philby wasn't much of a cook and normally ate out, but Skorzeny had insisted on him eating everything he prepared just in case it occurred to him to try to poison the commandos and bury them somewhere in the garden. Now that they'd made contact with Himmler, someone in Berlin would know who had betrayed them and burn Philby from a safe distance, but that wouldn’t stop him taking precautions. Philby couldn’t be trusted even if he only wanted to save his own skin.

The food tasted slightly strange to Skorzeny’s mouth, but Philby ate without hesitation; he’d explained that some British foods included different cooking oils or substitutes caused by the food shortages. He'd then gone off on a rant about how he’d seen the rich obtaining all the food they could possibly want or using their status to gain other advantages or exemption from war duties, something that had made Skorzeny laugh. The rich of Britain might have betrayed their duty, but Philby had betrayed his entire country and he used the black market. He was little more than a hypocrite who would probably have been liquidated had he ever arrived in Moscow.

“So,” he said when the uncomfortable meal had ended, “did you manage to find a way of getting us identification cards?”

Philby considered for a moment. “I believe I could get you some cards,” he said after a moment. “There is a filing clerk who owes me a favour, and I could ask him to present me with some cards for you, but they wouldn’t be very useful. The ones that would allow you into secure areas aren’t available at his level of clearance.”

“That will be fine,” Skorzeny said, after a moment. He didn’t want to keep his men cooped up in the flat much longer and besides, sooner or later they would have to leave London in a rush. “What will we be in their eyes?”

“Labourers,” Philby said. “They’ve been issuing the cards to refugees fleeing the occupied areas, all strong men, who are then working on the defences of London and other places. You might end up being asked to help with some of the construction, but at least you would be able to move freely without too many questions, as your normal papers would be inside the occupied zone.”

Skorzeny shook his head in awe. The
Reich
prided itself on the massive records it had collected on each and every one of its citizens, regardless of their social class and racial value, and a group of British soldiers would certainly not be allowed to walk around behind the lines without being stopped. If details couldn’t be checked against the records, the refugees would have been placed under strict supervision, if not placed in camps, until their identities were confirmed. The British lacked the concept of real security, or even basic paranoia; they'd allowed Philby, and Himmler alone knew how many other communists, to operate at the heart of their world for decades.

“That will be excellent,” Skorzeny said, thinking of the chance to get a look at the defences from the inside. The British would have learned to use camouflage by now, hiding as much as they could from the spying German planes, high enough to see everything and yet escape anti-aircraft fire. He'd heard the sound of British guns, from time to time, and he hoped that the apartment wasn't bombed. They couldn’t go to an air raid shelter, whatever happened. “When can you have them ready for us?”

Philby looked nervous. “Maybe in a couple of days,” he said. Skorzeny suspected that he was only guessing; normally, he sounded more confident. “They’re issuing hundreds of them at the moment; I’d just have to have my friend snatch a few of them, enter them into the central records, and then take them out of the building.”

“That should be no problem at all,” Skorzeny said. “How much else have you taken out of that building over the years?”

“This is wartime,” Philby said icily. Skorzeny lifted an eyebrow in wry challenge. “It will take some time to move even a few cards out of the building without being detected, unless you want to be found…?”

Skorzeny didn’t bother to come up with a sharp reply. “Get them as soon as you can,” he said shortly and stood up. He was tired, and besides, there was only so much of Kim Philby that anyone could take. He didn’t understand how he had been allowed to operate for so long. “I’m going to get some sleep, and I suggest that you do the same; we have a busy day ahead of us tomorrow.”

***

Alex DeRiemer looked down at the report and rubbed his eyes bitterly. He had worked for MI6, spying on Germany, Italy and Japan, but he hadn
’t really focused on the business of enemy intelligence activities within Britain itself. That was the responsibility of MI5, but at Churchill’s orders, he was making an overview of the situation…and it astonished him. There were too many ways for the Germans to get someone into the country, and while most of the German spy networks had been wiped out in 1939 and again a week ago, there might well be others –
were
others, if the report from Germany was to be believed.

He re-read the message from Germany again. Himmler had a source, someone fairly high up in the British establishment, maybe more than one. He was keeping those details to himself but the British now knew that he was out there. For all DeRiemer knew, the agent might be someone who
only
supported Himmler’s operations and didn’t have any major role within the British establishment.

He shook his head. It would have to go to MI5, who would put together an investigative team that would discover who the spy was and what they’d sent back to Berlin, before it was too late. If the spy was a deep-cover agent, he or she could be anyone from the director of a government department to one of the cleaners, someone with much more access than anyone understood, or suspected. If…

If the spy had known anything about the Omega Project, they might have warned Germany that certain aspect of science that were considered Jewish were far more important than they had guessed, and if that happened, with all the German technical skill and the vast resources of the
Reich
focused on the problem…

The war might be within shouting distance of being lost.

Near Felixstowe, England

I really shouldn
’t be here
, Gregory Davall thought, as the woman at the door waved him towards one of the smaller rooms. He was a committed Christian, a husband and a father, and a month ago, he had wanted to be one of the voices demanding that the building be burned to the ground. He had said nothing, largely because he knew what interest the Grey Wolves had in the building, but being anywhere near it sickened him. It was all he could do to walk inside, past the German guard, and request a particular girl.

The German guard had even winked at him as he walked past. It had been the first sign of humanity he'd seen from a German, but he was sure that the guard was quietly laughing at him or thinking that there was something wrong with his relationship with his wife. Why else would a married man patronise a brothel?

He glanced around, purely for tactical purposes, of course, as he walked through and into the private room. The building had started life as a small hotel, but had been bought by a madam and turned into a brothel, which was quietly ignored by the mayor and the police. Johnston had once told him that the cat house would have been closed down were it not for the Grey Wolves. They had a very real interest in keeping the place open. Even the Germans, he’d joked, would respect a lady’s time with a client. They’d wait and arrest him afterwards. The door opened at his touch  and he stepped into the small room, closing the door behind him.

“Woof, woof,” the girl said as she looked up at him. Davall took one look at her and felt the heat rising to his cheeks. She was young, very pretty, and naked. He could see her pert breasts peeking out from under her long dark hair and his eyes fell downwards to the neat dark triangle between her legs. She sprawled in perfect relaxation with an easy smile, an invitation to any man who saw her. “Aren’t you going to enjoy the view?”

Davall tore his eyes away from her breasts with an effort. Kate was hardly a shrinking violet, and she enjoyed sex almost as much as Davall himself did, but Janine, the prostitute, was far less inhibited. If Johnston was to be believed, she had been born in France and had actually started life as a prostitute there before moving to Britain and working for British Intelligence. She hated the Germans, he'd been told, and yet…she opened her legs for them all the time. If McAllister was to be believed, the German workers spent the most time in the brothel. Perhaps, he’d joked, even screwing in step.