New York Station

by Lawrence Dudley

  “Oh, come now,” Stroud said. Her expression had initially been slightly amused at his presumed bravado. But Hawkins was utterly matter-of-fact about it, hardly celebratory. Rather he was quietly resigned, like a man who’d long accepted a terminal diagnosis. Her tone shifted to open-mouthed alarm. “You can’t mean that.”

  “I do. There’s no chance in hell I’m going to survive this. That’s the way it is.” He turned to the general. “Want me to go to the Bahamas now? I’ll take care of it.”

  “No. They can’t get in trouble there,” Houghton said. “Water’s too shallow for a U-boat to get in. That’s why we picked it.”

  “Good. Tell me,” Hawkins said, “what’s the real picture? All this miracle-of-Dunkirk talk. You know how one only gets bits and pieces.”

  “Oh yes.” The general thought a second. “Well, what we put out about the army escaping at Dunkirk—now that’s true. What we’re not saying is the troops had to throw off their packs and sidearms to swim out to the ships. Obviously, nothing like artillery or armor made it back.”

  “What about the fleet?”

  “There’s no room in the Channel for ships to maneuver around to avoid Luftwaffe bombs. It all hangs on Lieutenant Stroud’s colleagues. If the Luftwaffe can get the best of them, get air control over southern England, there’ll be an invasion. Probably an air drop. Seize a field. Fly in a division or two a day. Break out to the coast. It’d be over in a fortnight. Who knows”—he fatalistically shrugged—“the flyboys may hold.”

  “They will,” Stroud said, a touch of irritation in her voice. “I know these men.”

  Houghton blandly continued as if he hadn’t heard her.

  “They may not have to invade. If we keep losing ships like that the U-boats will eventually starve us out anyway.”

  “But the Royal Navy’s blockade? Won’t they run out their oil stores?”

  “No. Stalin’s replaced every drop they lost because of the blockade. It’s a queer business, the invasion of France, fueled with Soviet petrol. Thank the pact between Molotov and Ribbentrop for that.” The general slammed his glass down and began lightly tapping his knuckles together. He motioned to a nearby waiter and ordered a double scotch.

  “What about the States?” Hawkins said. “What about President Roosevelt?”

  “It’s not encouraging,” Houghton said. “His hands are tied. He’s in a tough election. The idea of a third term, it’s very unpopular.”

  They all sat in complete silence for at least a full minute, the only sound the ocean rustling in the distance.

  “How could he lose?” Hawkins finally said. “So many hopes hang on him—not just the war—everything, a new deal for everyone—”

  “Ah, the Americans! I don’t know. We watch them pretty closely from here, with their damned Neutrality Acts, all this Fortress America rot, building a wall around their country—I simply can’t understand them. We get their radio all over the band here. You should have heard that new commentator last night—”

  “Ventnor?” Stroud said.

  “Yes, that one. Walter Ventnor, he’s the really big fish now—”

  “Caught him coming in. Caused quite a row in the plane,” Hawkins said.

  “I heard him, too. Wants the Yanks to turn their backs. Thinks it’s too late, that it’s all over,” Stroud said.

  Hawkins took out his pipe, started fidgeting with it, half filling it, then stopping.

  “A lot of people like to turn their backs on it. Maybe it is too late.”

  “I’m not sure I follow,” Stroud said.

  “None of this should’ve happened,” Hawkins said. “None of it! It’s senseless—totally senseless!”

  Houghton and Stroud sat back and said nothing, just waited and watched.

  “They sent me over to the other side of the Rhine a year ago when Hitler invaded Poland. The Wehrmacht had vanished. It wasn’t big enough, yet, for a two-front war. There weren’t even sentries in some places. When you walked into the bunkers you could hear your footsteps echoing. We could’ve occupied Germany up to the Rhine and the Nazi regime would’ve collapsed. I filed report after report. Drive off in an orchard. Get the radio set out. Start signaling. Get in! Get moving! Bugger ’em good! But what happened? Nothing. The biggest military force in Europe sat in their camps polishing boots. So tell me, exactly how much are we supposed to risk our necks because of other people’s stupidity? Or because they won’t listen? Who the hell wants to die for stupid people?”

  Hawkins slumped back in his chair. For a long moment there only came the distant sound of surf and seagulls.

  “Because you know they will care,” Houghton said.

  “Maybe. But half the time I feel I’m fighting to save people from themselves.”

  “You can’t condemn people to slavery forever because they made a mistake,” Stroud said.

  Hawkins sighed heavily, grudgingly. “I suppose.”

  “Perhaps the Axis will provoke the US like the last time,” Stroud said.

  “They’d certainly be provoked if they had any idea of the scale of Nazi operations in their country,” the general said. “Hitler regards the Americans as an enemy, even if the Americans don’t.”

  “Getting a lot of that?” Hawkins said.

  “Oh, yes. Come along, Hawkins, let me show you my baby while I can.”

  -15-

  After the brilliant sunshine outside the lobby was dark as a coal mine. Stroud snapped off another quick salute and vanished into the office. The general bolted down a side staircase. Hawkins groped down after him. Heat and humidity menacingly rose. An armed sergeant passed them through a checkpoint. They stopped on a landing. A long, dark, cavernous basement loomed in front of them. Dingy ceiling lamps caged in dusty wire baskets cast a dim light on the nightmarish scene.

  Down the room stretched row upon row of worktables studded with teakettles. Several hundred female clerks, most barely out of their teens, were laboriously steaming open mounds of letters. Each girl’s work had a methodical, frantic rhythm. First, snatch a letter from the pile. Hold it up for scrutiny in front of a gooseneck lamp. Check the paper for unusual watermarks or patterns. Then peer across the letter sideways, then all over with a magnifier. Occasionally, a girl rushed a suspicious one aside to smear stripes of chemicals across it in search of invisible ink. Finally, each letter was cleaned, ironed flat and meticulously resealed without a trace of surreptitious entry. All done at a furious, sprinting speed.

  The atmosphere was as close and dense as a steam room’s, only without benches or masseuse. Heat from the lights and vapor from the kettles continually roiled up. The clerks constantly wiped their hands dry on towels slung over their shoulders lest their fingers mark the letters. Every face glistened with sweat. Perspiration matted their clothes to their bodies. Most had their hair wrapped up around their heads in braids. A fetid, slightly rancid stench of glue, sweat, wet paper and mildew pervaded the air. A hollow-sounding pair of metal horns weakly piped in the Bermuda radio.

  With a reflexive jerk Hawkins loosened his collar, sweat already running down his face. “My God, how long can anybody stand working in this place?”

  “Oh, they get used to it after a while,” the general said. “Of course, we only do this in short bursts. The Clipper flies in. We unload the mail, rush it here. Then the lassies go take a dip in the pools or surf to cool off.”

  Hawkins intently scanned the scene, leaning on the banister. Appalling, he thought. These poor girls are probably stuck here in this sweatshop—literally—until the end of the war, rummaging through other people’s private papers.

  General Houghton straightened up, slapping his hand on the balustrade for emphasis. “This whole Bermuda operation is a godsend. The Clippers are the only transatlantic civil airliners operating right now. That means virtually all the mail between the Western Hemisphere and Europe passes right through this choke point.”

  “Righto. So how do we pick out the German letters?”

 
“We don’t.”

  “What’ja you mean—don’t.”

  “We don’t pick them out.”

  “Then how do you know which ones to check?”

  “We don’t.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “We inspect them all.”

  “All?”

  The general waved his hand over the rows of clerks. “That’s why we need so many.”

  “Every stinking piece of mail between the entire Western Hemisphere and the European continent?”

  “Why, yes. Every bit. From all of North and South America. Well, except Canada. They do that there. But, really, there’s no way of guessing or knowing. We open and inspect it all. Have to. When we add the submarine telegraph and telephone cables, plus any ships we can intercept, to this, we have a formidable intelligence resource, for all over the world. We can’t replace it.”

  Hawkins’ perspiration now felt like cold sweat. All the mail is opened? he thought. That means all my mail, too. What about my luggage, the Louis XVI tea set? Are they ransacking the plane, right now?

  -16-

  The job with Bolley Manufacturing had come with an interesting perk. Hawkins got paid to travel. And he always had a few spare hours. That meant he could slip into antiques stores, flea markets, curio shops and auction halls. Turned out he had a good eye. Picked up small, easily shippable treasures and mailed them back to New York. It’d grown into a very lucrative sideline, one that became almost a necessity once he went on the MI6’s payroll.

  Unless one had family money there was almost no way to credibly keep up the appearances needed to do the job, given what the Crown paid. It seemed to be more or less assumed agents would cover certain expenses out of their own pockets as a form of national service. Unfair. Foolish in terms of how it limited who could be recruited. But no less real.

  Hawkins mentally raced over the trail he’d left. The packages went by ship. Probably safe, there, he thought. But the letters, invoices and statements all went by air mail. Could they be reading my bank statements? Never told anyone about my little sideline. None of their damn business. Especially that I needed money. Not a good thing to admit in this business. It could be interpreted as meaning he had an exploitable vulnerability.

  The alarm dug in deeper. Suppose they only intercepted part of the correspondence—the checks and bank statements coming back from New York? Someone might suspect the money might be coming from the Abwehr or the SD. It could look like a payoff.

  He did a quick inventory of the environment. Any coppers around? No … no visible reason for alarm. If I was in trouble, would the general be showing me this incredibly sensitive facility? Maybe they’d missed it. Still—

  “And they actually read them all?” Hawkins said.

  “Yes. Of course.” Houghton caught something in Hawkins’ tone or expression and eyed him carefully. “Our networks on the Continent?”

  “Swept away. At least all the ones I was privy to. It’s going to be very risky, but when I get back in we’ll have to rebuild everything inside Europe from scratch.”

  “And what happened to the people?” The question more a statement.

  “God only knows. I tried to help some Deuxième Bureau people I worked with in Paris. Had some blank passports. Nowhere near enough. Most of the rest went to ground. At least I hope so.” He paused a moment. Not true, he thought, or knew, not true at all. “Well, no. Actually, the odds are the ones that didn’t make it out are all dead. Or captured. Which is as good as dead. I … I …” His voice started to choke, breaking slightly. The faces, he could see the faces again. “I couldn’t save them. I had to leave them behind.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “I know. But I still see them every night.”

  “Friends?”

  “Yes. Good friends.”

  “I’m sorry. Truly. But the disaster you saw in Paris is what’s behind all this. The Continent’s become a dark void. We’ve no idea what’s going on. As you say, our networks were swept away. What you see here is the only alternative we have left.”

  “There’s nothing else?”

  “No. Hawkins, don’t miss this for what it is. This”—he waved his hand out again—“is an act of utter desperation. It’s a measure of how weak we really are. It’s the kind of thing people do when the odds are against them and the last chip’s down, the act of people who have absolutely nothing to lose.”

  “We’ve nothing to lose?”

  “No. Nothing. We’re going down. Like that ship. Face it, Hawkins, our world is ending. You can count the number of democracies left on your fingers. So, righto, we’ve not a damn thing to lose now.”

  “You could ask what the point is. Maybe they’ve already won.”

  “I know. Makes us like the Nazis. But it’s nothing to what’s coming. If the Nazis win, this is the future of the human race, only worse. There’ll be no going back.”

  Yes, Hawkins thought. That’s exactly what it’s like inside Europe now.

  “US government have any idea we’re doing this?” he said.

  “Hardly! I’m sure they’d be huffy, as you say.”

  “But you are tracking actual Nazi agents?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “How do they code their messages?”

  “They’re using a sort of open code, first letter of every sentence in words of three or more letters in length. Makes for long, windy, contorted messages. That’s how you spot them. You have to read it for sense.”

  Flight Lieutenant Stroud rushed down the stairs waving a transcript. “Another one—on the New York source! They just finished translating it.”

  “Come!”

  -17-

  The general, with Hawkins and Stroud chasing his heels, ran back up through the lobby to a spacious office that apparently had been expropriated intact from the former management, tourist promotional pictures and all. Here and there military charts had been tacked up over sunny posters of beaches and tennis players.

  The general sat, hooking a pair of half glasses methodically around his ears. They stood waiting in anticipation.

  “Let’s see—‘need funds soon Orator’—um, something, something, ‘typ convoy times excel wants money house rented.’ Also a note here, those words after ‘Orator’ they couldn’t figure out, ‘Stahl Wadenetz.’ Must be a person.”

  “I doubt that,” Hawkins said. “‘Stahl’ means steel, of course, but a ‘Wadenetz’ is a seine net.”

  “Interesting. Given the American military’s predilection for alliteration it’s probably one of their code names, Steel Seine. Who knows what that could be.”

  “So, spy seeks to steal secret of Steel Seine,” Hawkins said.

  Houghton looked up in openmouthed surprise before exploding in laughter.

  “Oh my God! You’ll do just fine!” Leaning back, sheepishly pushing at the papers, “Haven’t had much to laugh about lately.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  The general handed the intercept to Hawkins. He silently read it again. “Convoy—typ—typist? A clerk perhaps? Like a shipping clerk? Has the schedule?”

  “Convoy times!”

  “Yes. That tanker—you said you’ve been hunting for someone here in Hamilton …”

  Houghton took the letter, studied it a moment, started to hand it back, looked again, then started waving it in fury.

  “Righto. Not here at all. Ah dammit! God dammit to hell!” He threw it down.

  “Why, what? I thought you were worried about that?” Hawkins said.

  “No. Very limited population here, only a matter of time before we caught someone sending sailing times out. Now we’re talking about the entire United States instead. Millions of people. Wholly different picture. Trust me, I’d rather have an agent here, by far. Since you’re flying out, you better take this straightaway to our new HQ in New York. This is a job for them.”

  “Headquarters? You mean the New York station—”

  “No. There’s be
en a change. There’s a big new headquarters being set up in New York. Very hush-hush. Going to coordinate activities, so on. They’re over us, that’s all I know.”

  “What? Am I being sent to some damned desk job? I’ve got to get back into France, for Christ’s sakes—”

  “I doubt that,” the general said. “You’ve been inside Europe. That’s why you probably haven’t heard.”

  “It’s all been very chaotic,” Stroud said.

  “I suppose,” Hawkins allowed.

  Houghton slipped the paper into an envelope and handed it to Hawkins.

  “We better get you back.”

  A quick walk brought them around to the dock and the speedboat. The ensign had returned several minutes earlier with a grisly cargo. General Houghton had been right. Not a single sailor survived the U-boat attack. The ensign and a pair of Hamilton ambulance drivers lifted a body onto a tarp. It was burnt a brownish black above the chest, like overcooked bacon, marking where the sailor had jumped into the flaming oil floating on the water. His hands were seared to his face. Below the chest, under the protective water, the legs and feet were intact, the skin still pink. As they set the half-charred corpse down one arm broke off and fell away with a soft crunch. Houghton and Stroud put their hands over their mouths and quickly walked away.

  The ensign stumbled to the side and threw up, holding on to a piling with a shaky hand, his face seasick green. Hawkins blankly stared at him. Then he looked down at the burned body at his feet. Then back at the ensign. When the ensign recovered Hawkins indifferently stepped over the body and tarp and into the boat.

  -18-

  The powerboat sped off. The flight lieutenant began unknotting the aide’s rope off her shoulder, then replaced the medical service caducei on her lapels.

  “Well, Doctor, what’s your psychiatric prognosis?” the general said.

  “Been under tremendous stress for quite a long time.”