Bitter Field

by Jack Ludlow

  ‘Come on, Peter, the man’s a bombastic farce.’

  ‘I seem to recall some folk saying that about the fellow we used to jokingly refer to as “Herr Schicklgruber”. Calling Hitler that in Germany now can get you a very swift bullet in the brain. Anyway, that’s by the by; with the rivalries in the department, getting untainted advice to the top so they might make the right choices is proving difficult. The way things are we have no method of properly altering their stupid policy.’

  ‘So you need outside sources?’

  ‘More than one and people not at all connected with the establishment, yet they also have to be folk who have personal relations where they are needed.’

  ‘How many people did you set out to tell you were coming to La Rochelle?’

  Peter was slightly thrown by that question, even if he had known that eventually it must arise; Cal was never going to leave the uncertainty over betrayal dormant, but he did no more than hold up two fingers in reply. ‘Just don’t go asking me who.’

  ‘I wouldn’t expect an answer if I did, but I would like to know how important they are.’

  ‘Top floor.’

  ‘This is all a bit nebulous, Peter.’

  ‘Goes with the job, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’m curious as to what’s in it for me?’

  That produced a wry smile. ‘Fighting the good fight, which always tickles your fancy—’

  ‘Hardly enough,’ Cal interrupted.

  ‘How about the freedom to operate unhindered in your chosen field?’

  ‘Which I am doing now.’

  ‘You won’t be, Cal, take my word for it. Things leak out and certain folk are spitting blood at the rumour that you got those embargoed weapons to the Spanish republicans.’

  ‘It’s still just a rumour I take it?’

  Peter understood the question, not that he enjoyed it being posed. ‘If you are asking me if I let on about helping you, or any precise knowledge of what you did, the answer is no. I did nothing to expose you and I must add that I find the question itself offensive.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Cal responded, unabashed, ‘I had to ask.’

  ‘If we could get enough good info to put some backbone into HMG, maybe they will stand up to Hitler, or at least make some noises in that direction. That is what we need and we have no means of getting to such a position through an intelligence service that is not countered by those who think we should just let the Nazis do as they wish in Central Europe, many from a genuine desire to avoid another bloodbath like the last show. You have certain contacts in the Czech Government—’

  ‘Do I?’ Cal interrupted, suddenly guarded.

  ‘Come along, old chap. You spent months setting up the purchase of those weapons and no doubt greased a few palms in the process, but to get away with what you did, that fake End User Certificate, there had to be at least one person in a high official position who went out of their way to assist you, and probably more than one.’

  All he got for that statement was a bland look and a request that he sit down, given the sun was at his back, becoming low and blinding. That break was extended when the captain’s steward, who looked to be Malay, appeared to give them a refill and advise them that dinner would be in half an hour, for if they were in a rather low-class freighter, the captain was ex-navy and a man who adhered to certain standards in both dress and comportment.

  ‘Look,’ Peter said, once the man had gone, leaning forward from the edge of his lounger. ‘I can very well appreciate that you would want to keep to yourself the names of who you dealt with in Prague or Brno and I do not for one moment want you to disclose them. But to deny the existence of at least one high-placed contact is to insult my intelligence.’

  He paused again, allowing Cal’s silence to acknowledge that had to be the case. ‘What we require is that you get back in touch with him or them and find out how far the Czech Government is prepared to go to defy Hitler—’

  Cal’s interruption was brutal. ‘Which they cannot do alone.’

  ‘… and what they need from HMG to make that possible.’

  ‘Now you’re insulting my intelligence, Peter. What they need is general mobilisation in the UK and France as soon as Hitler acts up and, much as it pains me to say so, the backing of the USSR.’

  ‘We thought maybe Poland?’

  ‘The Poles won’t lift a finger to aid the Czechs. You have heard of a place called Teschen, I take it?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ Peter replied with a bored look that preceded a deep swallow.

  ‘My regiment was posted there after the armistice in 1919 to stop the Poles and Czechs killing each other for possession of the coalfields, and bloody hard going it was, a full-scale armed conflict, just when we thought all that was over.’

  ‘A few thousand on each side, Cal, and the odd armoured car! It wasn’t much of a war.’

  ‘It was enough of one for me. The Poles, who, I would remind you, have a military government, think they were hard done by in the plebiscite that followed and established the border, cheated in fact by the slimy Czechs. They have been smarting ever since.’

  ‘They’re a bit given to grievances, the Poles, old boy.’

  ‘They’re also a bit given to doing something about them. Half a sniff and they will take the Teschen region back and challenge anyone to oppose them. The only thing that’s stopping them is the Czech army, and if they are fighting the Germans—’

  ‘Enough, Cal, please. I don’t need a lesson on the last twenty years of European history.’

  ‘A point on which we fundamentally disagree!’ Cal snapped. ‘Our whole country needs a lecture on precisely that, especially the idiots in Downing Street.’

  ‘Let’s leave the Poles out of it, and the Russians for that matter. I can tell you, flat out, HMG wants nothing to do with Stalin.’

  ‘If you want to put a spoke in Hitler’s ambitions, Peter, unpalatable as it is, you will need the Russians, just as we did in 1914. Necessity makes for strange bedfellows.’

  ‘Shall we get back to the subject at hand, Cal, which is the need to find out how far the Czechs are prepared to go to stand up for themselves?’

  If he was expecting an answer to that question he did not get one, and what Cal did say threw Peter Lanchester completely.

  ‘Are you sure you are working for HMG?’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Don’t take this personally, but it is the nature of what I do to be suspicious …’

  ‘Something that has not gone unobserved,’ Peter growled.

  ‘Much as you don’t want to, I think you are going to have to be open with me about certain things, or this conversation is going nowhere.’ The silence that followed was, to Cal Jardine, a clear indication that there were indeed ‘things’. ‘For instance, I would like to see the passport on which you travelled to France.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘Because it has to be your own and that is worrying.’

  Peter took refuge in sipping his G and T, so Cal had to press.

  ‘I can think of only one reason why you did not use a hotel in La Rochelle and why we had to go to so much trouble to clean up that apartment you were staying in, and the car for that matter. Your prints were all over both and you are not travelling on false papers.’

  Peter shrugged and smiled, though it had a forced quality to the recipient. ‘I told you, standard procedure and, I might add, it was done to protect you as much as me.’

  ‘I shouldn’t need it, given I do have a false passport.’

  ‘You can’t be too careful.’

  ‘Which is only a viable reason if you suspect my real identity has been leaked to the French, a leak that could only have come from London, and if that is the source, then it is from the outfit you claim to work for. Now you are asking me to go into Czechoslovakia for those same people, a prospect that does not fill me with confidence that whatever identity I use will remain a secret.’

  ‘Will you accept my reassurance that, in the pre
sent case, your own name is known to only three people?’

  ‘What about the shipment of arms?’

  ‘That was known to a whole raft of folk, coming in the way it did as a standard bit of intelligence. But all this is straying off the point, Cal, because the only real one is: are you in or not?’

  ‘Sorry to be a spoilsport, old chum, but it’s chapter and verse or no can do. I need to know where you stand with those for whom you work and what the risks of exposure are once an operation is in place.’

  Peter drained his drink and stared out to sea for half a minute, obviously weighing up the odds of being open, and his voice was low and for once forcefully earnest as he finally spoke.

  ‘I am going to tell you, because I trust you, Cal, but I do want you to know there is not another soul in the world to whom I would impart what I am about to say.’

  ‘I’m flattered,’ Cal said, his surprise evident. ‘Given we have not always seen eye to eye and we have been, how shall I say, on opposite sides of most arguments.’

  Peter now looked like a man who had been put on an embarrassing spot, not blushing exactly but close to it; if there was one area where he was utterly typical in the possession of a national characteristic, it was in anything to do with any revelation of personal regard for another man.

  ‘I don’t dislike you, if that is what you are driving at, which was not always a statement I could readily and honestly have made before our little escapade in Hamburg and what followed. You are, without doubt, one of the most awkward buggers it has ever been my misfortune to deal with, but I do not think you will betray a confidence.’

  Having gone as far as he was prepared to nail their relationship and got a complicit nod he felt secure to carry on. ‘When it comes to how bad things are in SIS I have not told you the half of it. In order to seal off the possibility of being wrong-footed, Quex has set up a separate bureau.’ Seeing the eyebrows rise at the name, Peter added, ‘Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, boss of MI6, or SIS if you prefer. “Quex” is his nickname.’

  ‘I won’t ask why.’

  ‘I am part of that bureau, code-named Operation Z, which is housed in a separate set of offices to the main body—’

  Cal cut across him. ‘And in order not to alert those considered unreliable you cannot use the normal facilities of the main organisation, like the acquisition of false documentation on which to travel?’

  ‘If I had asked for a false passport it would have set minds wondering about what I was up to.’

  ‘Which should be none of their business.’

  ‘My dear chap, when it comes to being nosy SIS would not give ground to the most assiduous suburban curtain twitcher – hardly surprising when you consider it, given the job we all do entails sniffing out secrets other people want to keep.’

  ‘In the end, obviously, even taking those precautions did not work, Peter, and if what you have just told me is true, then where you had come from and where you were headed to was definitely leaked in London, and whoever did it either knew or guessed what you were on the trail of.

  ‘It saddens me to say that you are very probably correct, though I’m damned if I know how or whom.’

  ‘You went to Brno and, I presume, talked to the SIS contact there?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Then some bugger did as you did and put two and two together. Christ knows there’s not much more there to interest British intelligence in Brno other than an arms factory. Who, apart from you, is staffing this new lot?’

  ‘A couple of chaps like me, dragged back in, and even they are being kept in the dark about what I’m up to, just as their operations are a mystery to me. The idea is to avoid those on station at the various embassies as well, and seek to get information from the people carrying out business in those places in which we are interested. Naturally, what most are doing is legit, but one who is not, such as your good self, could be a priceless asset.’

  ‘Your idea?’ Peter nodded. ‘I take it this old lot are not too enamoured of what your boss is up to with his new incarnation.’

  ‘They’re bloody livid.’

  ‘Enough to seek to queer the pitch and get you and I killed?’

  ‘Not me, old boy, for in their wildest dreams they would not imagine that I would get so close to the actual movement of weapons.’

  ‘Me, then.’

  ‘In your case it would, to such people and should the information surface, be a pleasure to have done so. You may well see yourself as some kind of “holy warrior”, but you might be surprised at the number of folk that observe you in quite a different light.’

  ‘They don’t seem to be too fond of you either, Peter, because whatever you say, you too could have been killed and no one seemed concerned enough to tell you so.’

  ‘Sadly, no.’

  ‘But the question remains, say I agreed to go back to Czechoslovakia, what am I looking to do?’

  ‘Find the means to stop Jerry,’ Peter replied, ‘and for the love of God do not mention the Russians again.’

  Now it was Cal’s turn to stare into the middle distance for several seconds, while he weighed his words. ‘Perhaps your best hope lies in Germany, not Czechoslovakia. Adolf is round the bend but I got a hint from a contact in Prague his generals are not. What they don’t want is another war until they are good and ready, and that to them means another ten years at least.’

  ‘SIS is more interested in what you think about the Czechs.’

  ‘While I think you need to get back to London and find out who set the Jeunesses Patriotes on to your mission, because someone did and they did not give a damn how many people might be killed in the process.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ called the dark-skinned steward, before Cal could respond, ‘the captain wishes you to know that dinner is about to be served.’

  ‘I need to know,’ Peter insisted.

  ‘And I need to eat, sleep on it and think.’ Seeing his companion swell with the air needed to blast him, Cal added, with exaggerated politeness, ‘And I do think it would be bad manners to keep our host waiting, don’t you, old boy?’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Lying in an upper bunk inside a stifling cabin, with Peter Lanchester gently snoring below him, his nasal rasping accompanying the steady rhythmic thud and vibrations of the ship’s engines, Callum Jardine was thinking, and not of the dangers he might face in doing what had been asked of him; one question that mattered kept recurring, without him being able to nail a definitive conclusion: could he be of any practical use?

  He did have some contacts in Czechoslovakia and they were pretty good, the most important in this regard being the twin heads of both Czech Foreign and Domestic Intelligence whom he had met very briefly – he suspected they were determined to check him out, which was a necessary precaution for a country threatened by powerful neighbours.

  The one who approximated to the head of MI5 had been a rather brusque character called Colonel Doležal, whose only concern was that the weapons should get off Czech soil as soon as possible, without wind of the shipment getting to any other body than those who were the end recipients, while he sought assurances that once delivered the secret would remain that.

  The Foreign Intelligence chief he had found the more amenable, but that was, he suspected, because General František Moravec wanted something. In that murky world of international espionage and gunrunning, especially where money was involved, the notion of truth was not a given – people lied or acted for profit and sometimes did not care a damn what mess they left behind.

  He had found the Czechs to be pretty straight as a rule – there had been no requirement for bribes – and in any case, people like Moravec did not provide aid in clandestine operations for payment.

  Their price for cooperative silence was information, and, after years of running guns and dealing with those complicit in the game, Cal Jardine had amassed a depth of knowledge of the world in which he moved, both in the movement of weapons and other
matters.

  He knew what rumours might have a basis in truth and also had the ability to dismiss many that were fantasies, which was all grist to the mill for a man whose occupation depended on the ability to garner disparate facts from the countries surrounding his own and make connections denied to others.

  Their conversation had then become general, almost friendly, and had inevitably turned to the present crisis with Germany and where that might lead, moving on to discussion, initiated by Cal, about the wisdom of training and deploying irregular forces as well as the various forms of sabotage that could be employed to penetrate enemy positions and destroy their rear communications.

  It was an area where Callum Jardine had a lot of experience, gained in fighting in Iraq, the Chaco War in South America, and in training bands of Zionist settlers in Palestine to defend themselves against attacks by Arabs who resented their arrival from Europe to cultivate what both considered their ancient land.

  He advised Moravec to think of guerrilla tactics in advance and not wait until an invasion happened, the trick being to train men and provide them with caches of the things they needed – handguns and rifles, grenades and explosives, as well as the means to detonate them – along with a list of pre-identified targets, choke points for any invaders, which could be reconnoitred and in some cases prepared in peacetime.

  There had been a gentle enquiry as to Cal’s availability to help in such training – it was, after all, a specialised field – politely declined, given he was not a free man until his consignment of machine guns was on the last leg of its Spanish journey, but he did not entirely rule out the possibility at some later stage; it was, after all, what he did.

  It was Moravec, in the course of their conversation, who had alluded – and it had been no more than that – to the reluctance of Hitler’s top generals to plan for an invasion of his country, fearing a simultaneous invasion by the French; had that aside indicated a truth based on sound verifiable fact or wishful thinking?