by Jack Hayes
When Eagles Burn
Jack Hayes
Copyright © 2015 Jack Hayes
Jack Hayes has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published 2015 by Jack Hayes
For my son, Edward.
Dad loves you.
Let me tell you a story…
CHAPTER 1
Rupert Schmitz came out of the London underground and looked both ways. To his right, diagonally across the road, was the small street that led to the target. Naturally, he turned left.
It wasn’t so much that he was worried he was being followed – he’d been careful and, if they’d had any idea of his existence, he was sure they’d have picked him up already. It was more that, even if the Helix device worked as expected, he wanted to put it somewhere surreptitious.
After all, if you’ve got an edge – flaunting it simply causes your enemies to adapt and grow stronger. Better in his mind that the British put the next few weeks down to simple bad luck. They’d become aware of the gravity of their deficit soon enough.
The package under his arm shifted uncomfortably against his suit as he walked. It was weightier than it looked and, although he was no weakling, an hour of carrying it carefully was beginning to take its toll on his muscles.
It was amazing what science could accomplish these days.
“Miniaturization,” he muttered to himself. “It is certainly the future.”
Scarcely a decade ago, had the technology he carried in this container even been possible, it might have filled a decent-sized room. Now, everything was different. All those components, clicking and working away in unison, slotted neatly into a parcel little bigger than a shoe box.
National Socialism had brought amazing advances to the world.
A woman bumped into his shoulder, almost sending him into a spin. Her first thought was to apologise. His was to immediately bring the box in to his chest to protect it.
Stable, it had to be kept stable.
“Here!” she called. “What kind of a man are you that you don’t apologise?”
He pulled the brim of his hat down lower and continued on his way, ignoring her.
A man in a tweed jacket turned in sympathy with the woman: “Oi! You need to watch where you’re going.”
Schmitz walked faster.
He didn’t have time to engage in witless banter with the natives of London. He had a place to be. He had procedures to follow.
And time was ticking.
He weaved through the gap between a nanny, out with a baby in a pram, and a kid playing hooky from school. He crossed the street and disappeared down another side road.
Schmitz knew little of mechanics or engineering. Before the war, he had been a history lecturer. When the hostilities began, he had discovered a new talent – and with it, a new career.
He became a spy for Nazi Germany.
The Fatherland had been ridiculously inept in placing quality men behind enemy lines.
Some turned themselves in. Others swapped sides. One idiot was even captured shortly after arrival by parachute because he walked into a country pub and ordered a beer. When he opened his wallet, the landlord could see that he had a ludicrous amount of cash inside – far more than anyone in England would carry for legitimate purposes.
The police were called immediately.
Schmitz had several advantages over these men.
Although his father had been German, his mother was English. Naturally, he had been brought up speaking both languages. But, for his current profession, there was something about the way he spoke that was far more important than being fluent and accent free: he used English colloquially.
In addition, his background in history meant that he had plenty to talk about that could act as common touchstones with the local people; he knew the shibboleths that so regularly tripped his colleagues.
For all the power of German education, it could never fully cover those basics that being from Albion, every local took for granted: who won the Battle of Hastings? When was it? Which King George had been mad? Why is the Battle of Agincourt so deeply ingrained in the national psyche…?
“A pathetic skirmish of no interest near the end of a long, grinding, attritional war that lasted 136 years,” he mumbled.
The English had a patchwork history, from which they chose to emphasize only the best parts. Never mind that the Hundred Years War was a de facto defeat for the country – ask any Englishman to name two of its battles and Agincourt & Crecy would immediately issue forth.
He shook his head.
His knowledge helped him to blend in.
It didn’t hurt that he’d picked up his degree from a London university too.
That gave him the ability to casually mention place names, streets, night spots and even join in discussions about the best place to get breakfast on a Sunday morning.
Moving through a set of gates, Schmitz entered a small garden square. The September sun was dropping low in the sky. Soon it would be dusk – and with it would come a bombing raid the likes of which London had never seen before.
It was not simply that the attack would be any more or less devastating than those of the Blitz – regrettably, the war had been going poorly for the Fatherland since the middle of the year.
Its deadliness lay in another field: proof of concept.
And for that, a very particular target had been chosen.
A few more twists and turns and he had reached his destination.
The Cabinet War Rooms.
Schmitz smiled as he glanced across the street at its entrance. Policemen and guards strolled up and down. Sandbags were piled high around the outer walls, protecting it from a mortar attack.
But the roof – now that was a weak spot.
If you could get a large enough explosive onto it you could kill everyone inside.
Oh, how they’d debated attacking this one godforsaken bastion – thorn in Germany’s side – for five years.
But now, finally, they had a means to destroy it for good.
The key was precision targeting.
No one had the technology for that.
No one, until now.
Schmitz estimated the distance from his current position to the wall on his right. It was behind a stone balustrade and then a gap to allow light for the basement windows. He took it in with the merest glimpse so as not to betray his intensions.
Around 2 metres.
This wall, obviously, did not belong to the War Rooms themselves – but that didn’t matter. It was flush in line with the front entrance of Churchill’s war-time base, which lay further on down the road.
Schmitz mentally factored in an additional three metres, so that the explosion would occur far enough into the flimsy corrugated iron of the entrance’s roof.
He turned to face away from the wall and began walking once more.
He silently counted off steps. He’d previously measured his average pace at approximately 70 centimetres. A small amount of mathematics and all he had to do was take 64 strides: then, he would be exactly 50 metres from the target.
He marched the distance, trying to look as unsuspicious as possible. He was now far enough from the War Rooms that he could move more or less freely without arousing the attentions of the guards on its door.
Careful to keep his distance from the entrance the same, he found a bench and sat down.
His biceps ached with relief as he at last rested the Helix device on his lap. The box, sturdily built and made of walnut, sighed as he slid open the lid.
A smirk tickled at his lips.
Fool proof.
A
ll that could be seen once the Helix was open was a tiny light bulb, a switch and a dial. The mechanism was sealed away beneath the wood these were embedded in. He lifted a compass from his pocket, remembering the instructions from his briefing, one week ago.
“Find north and align the dial in its starting position,” he thought, swivelling the box slightly on his lap. “Then turn the dial to point in the direction of the target. Wait until the allotted time, flip the switch and walk away.”
He twisted the knob to point at the War Rooms.
So, so simple.
A quick check of his watch, synchronized with one in Luftwaffe headquarters in Berlin, and with a definitive click, he flicked the switch. The light blinked alive. He slipped the lid back into place and placed the box under the bench, careful to keep the orientation steady.
The compass needle in his hand began to spin wildly in circles.
Good.
The device was transmitting.
He dropped the compass back into his pocket, stood and began to stride along the path away from the target.
“Excuse me, mister.”
The voice of a boy from behind him.
Schmitz quickened his pace.
“Don’t engage,” he thought. “Don’t engage.”
“Hey!” the boy shouted louder. “Mister! You’ve left something!”
A policeman, across to the right, began paying attention to the child. Schmitz turned around. The schoolboy, the one playing hooky from his lessons that he’d seen earlier, was fishing away under the bench, yanking out the box.
Schmitz was now fifteen metres away as the child picked up the Helix device and began to run after him.
“No, no, no,” Schmitz said. “Please put that back!”
The Helix was already triggered. It had to be left in place.
The policeman began strolling across from his beat, a steady route around the square.
“Mister, you forgot your box,” the boy said, jogging towards Schmitz.
Schmitz ran to close the gap.
“Hey!” the kid yelped as Schmitz snatched the walnut container from his hands.
The policeman was coming over now.
They were seven metres from the bench.
And the box had been twisted away from its initial orientation.
Air raid sirens began to sound. Their long, crescendo wail reverberated around the buildings and park. Everyone else in the area started looking to the heavens. Schmitz was focused on the bench.
He pushed the boy aside, knocking him to the pavement.
The policeman started running.
The boy, only trying to be helpful, grabbed Schmitz by the leg in defiance. The German tripped. The Helix device tumbled from his hand, clattering on the tarmac path. Its wooden exterior cracked.
Wires and cogs and gyroscopes inside were clearly visible.
The policeman’s whistle was blowing, but Schmitz couldn’t hear it.
All he kept thinking was:
“It’s five metres from the bench and no longer aligned…”
The explosion shattered windows throughout the square. The soldiers, standing guard in front of the Cabinet War Rooms, were blown from their feet as a V2 rocket landed in the road.
For a few seconds it seemed that dirt and rubble and smoke filled the air. But not as thickly as the noise of that enormous blast.
And then, as the cacophony of the explosion subsided and the screams and shouts for help began to rise, one sound returned louder, stronger, playing above all others: the continuing wail of the air raid siren.
CHAPTER 2
The hum of conversation in the auditorium was broken by an outburst of raucous clapping as the professor stepped onto the stage. Three rows back, Captain Maddox didn’t join in the adulation. His interest was far too serious for that. He pulled a pen from his jacket and began scribbling on the notepad resting on his thigh.
The professor stepped behind a large lectern. Two tapped beats sounded over the room’s speakers as he tested the microphone to ensure it was live. The professor cleared his throat and the dampened the clapping by raising his hands.
“In 1869 Friedrich Miescher discovered what he called ‘nuclein’ in the pus of discarded surgical bandages,” he began. “What he at the time thought of as an interesting biological curiosity, we now call ‘desoxyribonucelic acid’.”
A slide showing bacteria multiplying in a petri dish flickered onto a house-sized screen behind the professor. Maddox subconsciously tugged at the sleeves of his shirt, pulling the cuffs lower to cover the network of scars that ran along his forearms.
Four days ago, they’d erupted on his chest and legs too.
“We still don’t know the exact structure,” the professor said, changing slides. “But in 1927 Nikolai Koltsov theorised that it comprised giant mirrored strands that passed on hereditary traits – that this ‘DNA’ was the so-called ‘Darwin molecule’ that transformed us from apes, the very motor that has made us the civilised men we are today.”
The professor paused for effect.
If he’d been expecting a second round of applause at that very moment, he was disappointed. Instead, through the walls of the auditorium, the muffled wail of the air raid sirens began, a dim whisper unpinning the silence.
Faces glanced at one another with concern for their personal safety.
Maddox looked at the ceiling.
“Civilised men, indeed,” he muttered.
It was September 1944. The Allies were pushing their advance through Europe – the first town in Germany, Aachen, would soon be under siege. It was becoming rarer to have bombing raids on London.
Rarer, but not unheard of.
How poignant that a German attack should break through to hit London tonight… but also strange. There’d been a raid earlier in the evening. Two in one day? That wasn’t just rare – Maddox couldn’t remember the last time it had happened.
The professor, sensing his moment was being lost, clicked to another slide and continued with the lecture.
A tap on the shoulder.
Maddox looked sharply round.
“Sir,” a young man, hair glistening slick like a Hollywood star, leaned closely into his ear. “Are you Captain Maddox?”
A few heads turned from the row in front. Behind him, an irritated ‘shh!’
Maddox’s eyes narrowed as he nodded curtly.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the professor’s voice reached a crescendo. “I am pleased to confirm, we have replicated the February results from Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty: DNA is the transforming principle for life as we know it.”
The young man placed a hand on Maddox’s upper arm.
“Sir, there’s a car outside for you. They’re most insistent you come at once.”
“Is there a problem?” the professor asked loudly, stepping around the side of his lectern. “Because, please, feel free to continue your conversation. I’ll just pick up where I was once you’re finished.”
Maddox raised his eyes to heaven and sighed.
“Tell them I’ll be there directly,” he said to the boy.
His pen fitted neatly in his top pocket as he replaced the cap and slid it back in.
“My humble apologies for the interruption, professor,” Maddox said.
“No, please,” the professor sneered, jerking at the bow tie around his neck. “Feel welcome to butt in to my lectures any time – it’s a free country after all.”
Maddox grabbed his hat and placed it squarely on his head.
“Absolutely,” he said. “And I’m afraid I have to go and fight for that freedom right now.”
***
“Godforsaken country,” Major Nieder said, kicking a rock from the mouth of the mine entrance.
With the well-aimed strike of a champion footballer, the pebble whistled out across the snowy clearing and into the pine trees. There was a loud and echoing ‘crack’ as it stuck a trunk.
Beck sighed.
They
were technically behind Russian lines in what was once northern Finland and had in the last few years regularly swapped back and forth in ownership between the Finns and the Soviets.
It was conceivable Nieder’s impatient toe punt, and the resulting noise, could arouse the interest of an enemy patrol, snipers, or frankly, even a hungry bear.
Nieder continued to moan.
“It’s early September,” he said, leaning on one of the mine’s supporting beams. “It’s dawn at 4am and stays light again until almost midnight – and yet there’s still bloody snow everywhere. It’s bitterly cold except at midday – and the wind…”
“It’s been a poor summer,” Beck replied. “Ordinarily, the snow would have retreated, even here. But after winters like the one that scuppered us at Stalingrad, this pathetic summer has barely begun melting the two year build-up of ice on the lakes here.”
Nieder waved his arms.
“Stalingrad,” he spat. “That was the beginning of the end for Hitler’s Reich. The Eagle is burning, Beck. We’re desperate. But never forget – that from desperation, power can be harvested.”
Beck watched Nieder tramp across to the one patch of mossy grass that had managed to poke a hole through the crag and talus of the rocky slope. Beck smirked. The major should have known better. A plume of mosquitos rose up around his body.
“Damn it,” Nieder shouted. “Walk across one clump out of the snow and they swarm like clouds. I swear if we weren’t here I don’t know how they wouldn’t starve…”
Beck shook his head and tuned out the rest of the rant. He’d heard it all before. Of course it was inhospitable. What did Nieder expect? They were north of the Arctic Circle, for God’s sake.
Beck returned his attention to the pile of gems on his lap.
Putting his magnifying eye-piece back in, he lifted another diamond and examined it closely. For a rough stone, it was a beautiful piece. He rolled it between his fingers, allowing the ever present sunshine to glint through its facets. It was large too. In peace time it would be worth a fortune. If cut well, he estimated this one lump could produce three near flawless one-carat stones – as well as a half dozen of lesser quality.
He sighed.
“Worthless.”
He tossed it down into the growing pile by his feet.