A Thousand Suns

by Alex Scarrow

  They watched as the B-17 waited her turn for the runway to clear of the last of the fighters, then, finally, the way was clear. The pitch of her engines rose and the large plane began to roll down the tarmac picking up speed as she went.

  As the bomber parted from the ground, and her undercarriage swung upwards into the wings, Hauser turned to Rall and shook his head.

  ‘That was very stupid, Major. Really very stupid.’

  Rall knew there was no point denying what he had tried to do. The Doctor must have heard him, must even have anticipated some last moment of foolishness. As the sound of the planes receded into the early morning sky, Hauser turned away from Rall and headed towards the truck he had arrived on the previous day. Rall continued to face down the runway, in the direction the planes had departed, standing stiffly and ready for what he knew was coming.

  He heard the sound of Hauser’s Leibstandarte guards scrambling aboard the truck, the cough and rattle of the vehicle’s diesel engine as it started up and a few moments later, the crunch of boots across the shattered and pitted concrete of the ground - coming towards him.

  Rall took his cap off and tugged at his Luftwaffe tunic, tidying out the creases, pulling it taut across his chest. He stared resolutely out to the west, a final and futile gesture of defiance. He wasn’t going to offer that insane bastard a final anxious glance over his shoulder. If it was coming, then it was coming. The only fear he felt now was not for himself . . . but that he might have done too little to stop this madness from going any further.

  Rall took a deep breath, and closed his eyes.

  In the end all war is madness . . . Who once said that?

  Rall’s mind never retrieved the answer.

  Chapter 33

  Observing

  From the comfort of the van he watched the photographer coming out of Lenny’s. The night lights down this street, which he presumed was the main street for this shitty little seaside town, were poorly maintained, and his driver had easily found a suitable place to park in a pool of dark where one light had failed.

  He watched the man walk slowly down the main drag, and then checked his watch.

  They should be done by now.

  His men had called in to say that there was only a bunch of grainy photographs and the negatives to be found, and asked what should be done.

  He had ordered them to take the prints, destroy any equipment and then trash the room. There was a chance this guy might be dumb enough to think he’d just been turned over by some junkie. It was always worth a shot. Not everyone automatically jumped to the conclusion they had been visited by some shady secret agency.

  Actually, it was pretty obvious this guy hadn’t a clue what he was dealing with and was in well over his head; a rank amateur at best. His clumsy attempts thus far to investigate the story had been made without any caution whatsoever.

  The man in the van laughed, not out loud, just a smile.

  It was looking good. By first light his dive team should hopefully have been down on the wreck and pulled the thing up, the ‘device’. He had been careful to use that word, instead of ‘bomb’, when briefing them. Neither of the divers had any idea what exactly it was that they were handling, just that it needed to be pulled from the wreck and dropped a little further out to sea where the shallow shelf drops away.

  He supposed in all fairness he should have told them they’d be handling degraded fissile material, but then the small amount of uranium that would have been in the bomb should have all but decayed by now. There might be some trace of radiation, but hell, they were being paid extremely well for one night’s work, and neither looked like the type to want to settle down any time soon and have a family.

  He wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.

  He let out a muted sigh of relief. Disposing of the ‘device’ had been the most important thing to take care of. He rubbed his temple once more. The tension was easing, his headache, this kittybitch of a headache, induced he knew by stress, was at last beginning to subside. The most important thing was being sorted out right now.

  The other part of the problem was making sure this fool walking down the street hadn’t been talking to anybody he shouldn’t. It might be sixty years on, but there were one or two people still alive he really didn’t want this guy making any associations with. His making contact with the Grady woman, that wasn’t good, but it wasn’t going to lead anywhere either. The woman knew nothing, nothing at all about what was found on the beach. So that angle wasn’t going to help him in any meaningful way.

  No, there were far worse people this guy could have spoken to, and if this guy already had . . . then he was going to need to think just how thoroughly this little mess needed to be squared away. There was still enough money in the budget to ensure that his silence could be bought. He settled back comfortably in the seat; his men should be done by now in his motel room and faded away into the night. By morning the hard evidence would be gone, the photographs gone . . . and just this rank amateur wandering around with an unsubstantiated tale spinning away in his head.

  He smiled.

  For now, at least tonight, it looked like things were in hand. He could relax, lie down and get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow, when his men reported in, he could decide how to wrap it all up.

  Chris looked around Devenster Street as he left the bar; it looked deserted. He was relieved to see there wasn’t any sign of those two men he had spotted down by the jetty. Wallace was hardly going to despatch them both with his Kung Fu moves if they had stumbled across each other.

  He made his way down Devenster Street and cut through a dimly lit alleyway that led down towards the jetty and his motel. At the end of the alleyway, he peered out at the open gravel parking area in front of the jetty to see if those two men were still there. They were gone.

  Feeling a little easier, he walked briskly across the open ground towards his motel. He made his way inside the motel, nodding at the lady who sat behind the reception counter, watching Ricki Lake on an ancient TV set with a picture that was sliding upwards. The old lady banged it once as she waved at him, and the hazy picture momentarily stopped its vertical drift.

  ‘Oh, Mr Roland, isn’t it?’ she said as he made his way towards the stairs that led to the first floor.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I thought you were in already. I guess you missed them.’

  He turned round. ‘Who?’

  ‘A couple of gentlemen, they said you were expecting them.’

  She studied the expression on his face, and then realised somewhere along the line she’d screwed up. ‘You uh . . . weren’t expecting any visitors, were you?’

  Chris shook his head. ‘What did they look like?’

  ‘Uhh, middle-thirties, I guess. Short hair, smart, both of them.’

  ‘How long ago?’

  She looked at her wristwatch. ‘I don’t know, earlier this evening.’

  Chris looked up the stairs nervously. ‘Have they come back down yet?’

  ‘I haven’t seen them, but then I’ve been out the back in the office some of the time, you know?’

  He nodded and thanked her, and then took the steps slowly up to the first flight of stairs, his stomach flipping uneasily inside him. There, he warily took a few steps up the second flight until he could see over the lip of the top step and down to the end of the first-floor hallway. There was no one to be seen waiting outside his or Mark’s rooms. He allowed himself a small sigh of relief.

  Whoever it was, they had been and gone.

  He climbed up the last of the steps and walked briskly down the short hallway, his trainers squeaking on the wooden floor. From the smell he guessed it had been recently waxed.

  He reached in his pocket for the keys to the motel room while he rested his hand on the brass handle of the door. With a click of the latch, the door drifted ajar.

  It’s open.

  Chris remained frozen, expecting at any second for the door to be wrenched wide open and one of those two
men to pull him roughly inside. A handful of seconds passed and nothing happened.

  He remained where he was outside, though, listening intently, one ear close to the gap in the doorway, for subtle sounds of movement; the swish of skin against material, the creak of weight being shifted from one leg to another, the sounds of two well-built men, waiting patiently and readying themselves for Chris to commit to entering.

  But he heard nothing, except the muted murmurings of the TV from downstairs, a roar of studio audience laughter and Ricki telling them they were heading for a break.

  Sucking in air and puffing it out nervously, he leaned against the door to his room and it swung inwards.

  ‘Shit.’

  His room had been thoroughly turned over. Every drawer from the dresser had been pulled out, his travel bag had been emptied on the bed and his clothes and toiletries sifted through. He saw several rolls of unused film had been broken open and the celluloid pulled out and exposed, useless now. He noticed that the roll of dollar notes he kept in his bag for expenses was gone.

  He pushed the door open to his bathroom, knowing what he was going to see.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ he muttered.

  The prints were gone, all of them, as were the negatives. For good measure, whoever had been here had smashed his enlarger, and poured all his chemicals down the sink.

  ‘Ahh, that’s just great.’

  Chris was coming out of the bathroom when someone grabbed him from the side and roughly pushed him onto the bed. Before he could sit up, he felt something heavy land on his back, and his head was roughly pushed down into the covers on the bed. He could see nothing, and struggled to suck in air through the fabric of his bed’s quilt.

  ‘He came back too early!’ he heard someone say in a hoarse whisper.

  ‘No, we just took too fucking long processing the room,’ a second man said. He sounded older from the deep, grating timbre of his voice, and calmer.

  ‘What do you want?’ Chris tried to ask, his voice muffled by the quilt his face was being pushed into. In response he got a painful kick in the ribs, and then a moment later he felt hot, laboured breath against his cheek.

  ‘Be very quiet,’ he heard a voice mutter quietly; a younger man by the sound of it. ‘What do we do now? This wasn’t part of the plan.’

  The older man replied calmly, his voice muted, speaking gently. ‘I’ll call him.’

  Chris heard the tones of a mobile phone keypad, and then a pause.

  ‘No signal. Shit. We had a signal earlier, dammit.’

  ‘What are we going to do? Kill him?’

  ‘If we do, it can’t be here.’

  Chris squirmed in response, his arms flapping around, blindly searching for something to grab on to.

  His ribs exploded with pain as another swift kick landed. ‘Shut up and stop moving, or we will do you right here,’ the younger man hissed. ‘Try the phone again,’ he said. ‘Go over by the window, you might get a signal there.’

  Chris heard the older man walk across the room towards the small window and once again he heard the key tones. Whoever it was they were trying to get in touch with would presumably decide his fate right now, one way or the other.

  Oh Christ, I’m in deep shit.

  He wondered where the hell Mark was. These bastards must have made enough noise to alert him in his room next door. Then he remembered, Mark had said he was taking the Cherokee up the coast to refill the air tanks. But surely he should have been back by now? It was gone nine in the evening.

  Or maybe these sons of bitches had been next door dealing with him when Chris had entered his room.

  ‘No signal again.’

  ‘We’ll have to take him with us, until we meet up for the briefing tomorrow morning,’ whispered the man holding Chris down.

  ‘Yeah,’ the older one replied. ‘But it’s getting him out without attracting attention. Shit . . . maybe if I open the window and lean out -’

  Suddenly, Chris heard the door to the room swing open with a thud, and the sound of three heavy footsteps across the small bedroom followed swiftly by a metallic clang.

  The hand that had roughly been holding the back of his head and forcing his face into the quilt went slack, and Chris found he could lift his head up and look to the side.

  Just in time to see a lean, middle-aged man, with short, crewcut, greying hair turning round and pulling his gun out. He turned his head to see Mark holding up one of the air cylinders in front of himself.

  ‘Hit this and we’re all history!’ growled Mark.

  Chris could see this stalemate would hold only a second or two. He pushed the unconscious form of the younger man off his back and found another gun lying on the bed beside him. He picked it up and levelled it at the grey-haired man, his hands trembling, fingers fumbling for the trigger.

  The older man switched his focus and brought his gun to bear on Chris. ‘Put the gun down, son,’ he said in his calm voice.

  Cool under pressure. The thought raced through Chris’s mind. Very bloody cool.

  Without warning Mark hurled his cylinder at the man, who swung his aim back around towards him just in time to be knocked off balance by the heavy cylinder.

  Chris got to his feet in a second and scrambled for the doorway. As he hurled himself out of the room he felt a hum of hot air whistle past his ear and a window overlooking the seafront in the hallway outside his bedroom exploded.

  ‘Fuck! He’s shooting!’ Chris heard himself shout as he pounded down the hallway after Mark.

  He heard the man tumble out into the hallway after him, thudding against the wall opposite, feet crunching on the broken glass.

  Another thread of hot air burned past him and the wall ahead erupted with a shower of plaster dust.

  ‘Pissing hell! Run faster, Mark!’

  Both of them took the stairs down to the lobby four at a time and hurried outside into the night, gasping cold air into their lungs as they ran across the open parking area of the jetty towards the Cherokee parked up next to the two Runcies trucks.

  ‘Key! You got the key?’ Chris yelled.

  ‘Yeah I got it, got it. Lemme just find it.’

  As Mark fumbled with the keyring, Chris looked back at the motel entrance. There was no sign of the older man just yet.

  ‘Come on, Mark!’

  The door locks on the Cherokee popped, and both men dived in. Chris kept his eyes on the motel entrance as Mark fired it up and spun the vehicle round in a hurried loop so that they were facing the exit leading onto the coast road and out of town. With the tyres spinning, sending a cloud of dust and pebbles up into the air, the Cherokee leaped forward and out of the parking lot just as a silhouette appeared in the doorway of their motel.

  Chapter 34

  Mission Time: 30 Minutes Elapsed

  2.35 a.m., 29 April 1945, outside Nantes

  The landing had been a bastard. They had paddled towards the sound of waves breaking only to find the bloody things were breaking on a rocky outcrop. All three dinghies had been punctured in quick succession and Koch and his men had had to swim the last few dozen yards and scramble hastily up the razor-sharp rocks to avoid being punished for their reckless landing by the waves. One of his men had drowned during this mad dash, dragged under by the weight of his thick clothes, and two others had received bad gashes clambering ashore; one of them had a broken shinbone. The wounds were bandaged for now, and the broken leg in a makeshift splint, but the men would require medical treatment soon.

  That left him twenty-seven effectives.

  Koch was cold, wet from the sea and the spattering of rain, chilled by the sporadically gusting wind blowing in from the Atlantic. He stared at the farmhouse from the cover of an apple orchard less than a hundred yards away. It backed onto the airfield; he suspected it would be warm and dry and there was the possibility of some food inside. It looked like it might offer a few hours of relative comfort for his men before the morning’s fun and games.

  He unslun
g his MP-40 and turned round to face Feldwebel Büller. ‘That looks good for tonight, what do you think?’

  The man nodded eagerly. The previous week aboard the U-boat had been a damp and cold hell. A night of dryness and relative comfort sounded like the smartest command decision he’d heard in a long time.

  ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  Büller passed the word on, and moments later the men jogged across the open ground and scrambled over a low stone wall towards the isolated building.

  Remi Boulliard enjoyed the sound of an excited sea tumbling onto the rocky shoreline below. There was something quite delightful about savouring the snug warmth of a plump wife under the comforting spread of a goose-feather quilt while outside the elements did their best to beat their way noisily in; although this smug pleasure was lessened somewhat by the clatter of rotten wood on plaster. The wind tonight was playing mischief with the wooden shutters of their bedroom window. It had worked one of them loose, and every few seconds the damn thing was banging irritatingly against the wall outside. The shutters needed replacing, and the fresh sea breeze was gleefully reminding him of that.

  Another job to do.

  He shrugged, it was a job for the summer, like whitewashing the old plaster walls of the building; it could wait a couple of months.

  He listened to the regular, heavy breathing of his wife; it would take a marching brass band to wake her up. He often found the rhythmic ebb and flow of her deep breathing punctuated by the metronome regularity of her nasal click soporific when he was close to sleep. But on a night like this, when sleep seemed such a remote prospect for him, it was irritating. He slid his bony carpenter’s hand under her left shoulder and gently lifted. She obliged automatically in her sleep and rolled onto her side, the nasal clicking stopped.

  Remi sighed.

  He heard the brittle crash of breaking glass. It sounded as if it had come from the kitchen or the pantry downstairs.