The Suicide Exhibition: The Never War (Never War 1) (21 page)

General Hastings Ismay gave a short bark of laughter. ‘That goes for us all. Though I gather he’s feeling the pressure now. Clammed up so tight they can’t get so much as a peep out of him.’ Ismay – known to his friends and colleagues as ‘Pug’ – swirled the whisky round the inside of his crystal tumbler, letting the ice cubes clink together. He was Chief Military Assistant to Churchill – in effect, the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff. No one was closer to – or more trusted by – the Prime Minister.

‘He’s still loyal to Hitler and to Germany,’ said Brinkman. He won’t do or say anything to undermine the enemy’s war effort. But he sees these
Vril
, as he calls them, as a separate issue.’

‘And you say he’s not alone in that?’

‘Hess maintains that he has allies who feel the same. Again, they’ll do nothing to sabotage their country’s war efforts, but they’ll do anything they can to help win this separate war they believe they are fighting.’

‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend,’ Ismay said. ‘Up to a point, anyway. Yet, they admit Hitler is not allied to these Vril?’

‘Hitler will take whatever he can from them. But no, he’s not after an alliance. It’s more like…’ Brinkman paused to sip from his own glass as he tried to think of a good analogy. ‘It’s like invading Poland. Hitler will happily press-gang the local population into his armies and force them to fight for him. He’ll take whatever technology and resources he can find in Poland. But he’s not offering any sort of return or alliance.’

‘And he thinks he can do the same with the Vril.’

Brinkman nodded. ‘Whereas Hess thinks he’s bitten off more than he can chew. He’s stirred up a hornets’ nest, and the hornets aren’t particular whether they go after the person
who disturbed them or anyone else in the vicinity. In this case, the vicinity is our whole world.’

Ismay was pacing the floor as he thought. ‘So what do we know about these Vril? What are their intentions, their objectives?’

‘In military terms? Hard to say. They have advanced technology that overlaps with the occult – maybe it even informed occult thinking originally. They have evidently been here before, long ago as Hess maintains. We know that because their artefacts and their philosophy for want of a better word persist.’

Ismay drained his glass. He refilled it from a decanter, before offering Brinkman a top-up.

‘Thank you.’ Brinkman took a sip before going on: ‘According to Hess, Hitler believes that
The Coming Race
was right, that it was some sort of factual treatise, and the Vril live under the ground. There are a few points where their world emerges into ours. The Antarctic seems a key touching point. If that’s true, and there’s nothing to confirm or deny it, then the Vril agenda would seem to be expansionist. They’re running out of space and they think this planet belongs to them. They believe they are, if you’ll forgive the irony, the Master Race.’

Ismay nodded, a tight smile on his lips. ‘I begin to see why Hitler is both attracted to them and opposed to them. Their existence suggests he is right in his twisted thinking, while these Vril seek to usurp Hitler’s own people’s rightful place in the order of things – he believes. He wants to be their heirs, not their lackeys.’

‘The fact of it is,’ Brinkman said, ‘we need more information. What Hess conveys is second-hand at best. Much of it is supposition on his part. It may even be contrived to mislead us, though we do know that, at the heart of it all…’ He waved his glass in the air vaguely.

‘At the heart of it all is some measure of truth,’ Ismay finished for him. ‘God help us.’

‘There is one other thing. One other worrying thing.’

‘As if I’m not worried enough. Go on.’

‘The Vril have sympathisers. People who know the legends, who follow the occult, who even think they can communicate with them.’

‘Like Himmler’s female medium, what’s her name?’

‘Maria Orsic – yes, she’s one of the so-called Vril Society. There are several highly placed Nazis in that. Himmler, Goering, Bormann… Hess himself, of course. But this is different. The others all seem to share Hitler’s view, this desire to exploit and defeat the Vril.’

‘And you’re talking about Vril Fifth Columnists.’

‘Exactly. Hess thinks it is possible that the Vril may look like us. Or perhaps can make themselves look like us. Remember Shingle Bay? The Ubermensch?’

Ismay slammed his glass down on the mantelpiece. ‘Damn it! It’s bad enough that we might have Germans or Nazi sympathisers coming over here and trying to conceal themselves. Now you’re saying we could have these Vril too.’ He shook his head. ‘We need more information. More than anything, before we can act at all, we must know more.’

Brinkman had to agree. ‘We need to know their origins, their intentions, their strengths and weaknesses. Who they are, what they look like. Their capabilities – both as people, if indeed they are “people”, and in military terms.’

‘And all we currently have, despite your Station Z being operational for almost a year, are the words of a defector, and logs of these Unknown Detected Traces.’

‘We also have the detected transmissions,’ Brinkman pointed out. ‘We’re still trying to make sense of them, but they could be communications traffic.’

Ismay nodded. ‘Or they could just be engine noise, or some sort of atmospheric disturbance. The point is, we don’t know. So,’ General Ismay said, fixing Colonel Brinkman with an intense gaze, ‘what do I tell the Prime Minister?’

WAR HAPPENS IN
fits and starts. Perhaps it was the opening of the Russian Front, or maybe it was because he was away from the constant updates of the Foreign Office, but it did seem to Guy as if the conflict was slowing down. The most immediate reminder of the war was the bombing of London, but since late May even that had eased. By the start of September 1941, a year after it first started, the Blitz seemed to have petered out. The threat was always there, but the bombers came less frequently.

As a soldier, Guy had been in the thick of things – literally on the front line. In the Foreign Office he was a step removed, but still very much caught up in day-to-day events. Now, at Station Z, his work was further divorced from the actual combat. Apart from the bombing, the most effect it had was that he now had to use margarine coupons to buy clothes.

In early July, Sarah told him that she’d heard American troops had landed in Iceland to prevent a possible German occupation. Perhaps after all, the US was about to enter the war. But nearly three weeks later, with America still not committed, the news was less good as the Japanese set up base in Saigon and moved troops into Cambodia…

In the last week of August, Chivers – Guy’s former superior at the FO – rang him at home one evening. He had taken to calling, though at increasingly infrequent intervals, to beg
Guy to return to work in his office and get involved in ‘real work that will make a real difference’.

‘I was asked to recommend someone for a new outfit they’re putting together called the Political Warfare Executive,’ Chivers said when Guy again turned him down. ‘Don’t suppose you’d be interested in that either? Unless it’s what you’re already doing?’

Guy refused to be drawn, though Chivers was obviously curious about what he
was
doing. Even so, Chivers couldn’t disguise his upbeat mood.

‘So what’s happened?’ Guy asked.

‘I suppose it’ll be common knowledge soon,’ Chivers said, ‘but our lads together with the Gurkhas have taken Iran. Joint operation with our Soviet allies. First of many, we’re hoping. A complete success, and almost without loss.’

‘Almost’ was always the kick in the shins, Guy thought. ‘Almost’ meant that somewhere a widow was distraught, children were crying for the father they would never see again. ‘Almost no loss’ for others was total loss for them…

The work at Station Z was unrelenting, though it was difficult for Guy to convince himself it was making any difference. When he shared this view with Brinkman in an unusually candid moment, Brinkman nodded.

‘We have to chip away at this until we can see the shape of it. The smallest thing now could mean a huge difference later. Patience must be our watchword, I’m afraid. But I agree – it’s a bugger.’

‘He’s right,’ Sarah said when Guy related this conversation to her. ‘I was with Wiles at Bletchley the other day. I asked him how he’s getting on decoding the UDT transmissions, and he said he’d got nowhere so far.’

‘He must be as frustrated as we are,’ Guy said.

‘Yes and no. He said, you have to do a lot of work that seems to take you nowhere or the wrong way before you find out where you’re really going. Then one day some tiny thing, maybe something you discounted ages ago or didn’t realise was significant, will just slot into place. Like pulling on a tiny
thread in the fabric of the code, and the whole thing then unravels.’

Guy knew what he meant. The trouble was, they didn’t know what the tiny, precious, all-important thread might turn out to be. And until they found it they couldn’t afford to ignore anything.

Since reading Brinkman’s report of his meeting with Hess, Guy had also read
The Coming Race
, and found to his surprise that he quite enjoyed it. Miss Manners supplied a seemingly unending stock of occult literature, some of it quite obtuse and impenetrable. Then there were the UDT reports to follow up – searching for eyewitnesses. Most were false alarms or easily discounted. But some added a little to their meagre stock of knowledge.

Guy liaised with a police inspector about the creature that had attacked Elizabeth Archer. An artist’s likeness was circulated, but no one reported seeing a walking corpse. Possibly there were so many emaciated and sleep-deprived Londoners that he didn’t seem so out of place. Possibly people had better things to concentrate on, like surviving. Inspector Cartwright was more interested in applying, and reapplying, for a military posting. But, as Guy soon realised, the man was too good at his job to be spared. Guy sympathised.

Much of the work was similar to what Guy had done at the Foreign Office. He attended boring and barely relevant meetings together with Brinkman, and deputised for the colonel at others. He read, wrote, and filed reports.

Most evenings, he walked to the nearest tube station with Sarah Diamond and listened to her similar frustrations, both alleviated and exacerbated by the fact her role seemed to be as Brinkman’s main driver. It meant she spent a lot of time with the colonel, so she had a better idea of what was going on than Guy did. But she felt underused and unappreciated. Guy hoped that, like him, she appreciated their time together if nothing else…

A rare joint expedition was a trip Guy and Sarah made to Station X at Bletchley in the first week of September. Sarah
drove, and Guy dozed for much of the journey in the passenger seat. He’d spent most of the previous night tracking down a Spitfire pilot who it turned out had seen nothing at all of a UDT that RADAR had put right behind him. Guy had a wire recording of the UDT transmissions as well as the tracking coordinates in his briefcase.

Dr Wiles was enthusiastic. It was unusual for a Y Station to have managed to record more than a few seconds of a transmission. ‘The most we usually get is an approximation broken down into Morse code. That gives us an idea of the shape of the sound, but not the pitch, not the intensity, not the
tone
.’ He handed the spool to the young woman who seemed to be his personal assistant. ‘Let’s play it for everyone to hear, please Deborah.’

‘I thought her name was Eleanor,’ Guy murmured to Sarah.

The young woman heard him. ‘It is,’ she said, before hurrying off with the spool of magnetised wire.

The two huts Wiles and his team had been allocated were separate from the rest of Bletchley, not geographically but conceptually. Whereas the other huts were numbered, Wiles’ team worked in Hut A and Hut B. In common with the other paired huts, ‘A’ was concerned with decoding, and ‘B’ with analysis.

Guy and Sarah usually dealt with Hut B. The documents they delivered tended to be reports and accounts unearthed during their seemingly endless task of going through archives for any hint of UDT activity that had been misinterpreted, ignored, or simply not understood. These went to Hut B for further analysis, and to be added to an increasingly large, and increasingly incomprehensible wall chart that Wiles was compiling. Each time Guy saw it, the chart had grown. It now covered two whole walls, papering over the windows with a pattern of text and lines, boxes and circles.

The wire recording was played in Hut A. Here the walls and desks were covered with paper dotted and dashed with Morse code, scrawled with fragments of text – usually suffixed by multiple question marks.

Two men sat in upright chairs. One of them tilting his chair back at an alarming angle as he puffed on a pipe and stared at the ceiling. The pipe did not appear to be lit. The other man was scribbling feverishly on a pad with a stub of pencil.

Eleanor threaded the wire through the heads of a playing machine in the corner. The single large room was soon filled with the hissing, crackling sound of the recording.

‘It’s someone frying chips,’ the scribbling man said without pausing in his work.

There was a polite ripple of laughter, which broke off as the actual UDT transmission began to play through the background noise. It was a series of clicks and whistles without any apparent structure. How it could possibly
mean
anything, Guy could not imagine. He glanced at Sarah, who seemed just as nonplussed.

‘Play it again,’ the pipe man said as soon as it finished. ‘Keep playing it.’

After the third time through, neither of the men apparently paying any attention, and Wiles smiling and nodding as if it all made perfect sense, Guy had had enough.

‘We’ll leave you to it,’ he said quietly.

‘What? Oh, rightio.’ Wiles nodded again. ‘You ever heard dolphins?’

He shook his head.

‘Me neither,’ Wiles admitted. ‘Just wondered.’ He whistled in time to a segment of the recording. ‘I’ll see you off the premises.’

‘I hope it’s useful,’ Sarah said as they walked back to the car.