Into Battle

by Michael Gilbert

  Mills shook his head. He could find nothing to say.

  “Very well, then. I will explain exactly what I have in mind.”

  He spoke, uninterrupted, for ten minutes and did so with the assurance of a man whose own plans are well in hand. He was attached, temporarily, to the B Mess at Woolwich and was due to leave, on that Thursday, with a party of other R.E. officers joining their units in France. He was happy at the thought that he would be on the other side of the Channel when Operation Asgard reached its final bloody conclusion.

  Before Mr. Blundell, in the East London Magistrate’s Court.

  The King against Patrick O’Hegarty, Dennis Macardle, Nicholas Mansergh, and Patrick Dunphy. Charged with committing grievous bodily harm: contrary to Section 18 of the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861.

  Being an application to commit the case to the High Court for hearing.

  Counsel:

  (To the witness) Your name is Arthur Merriman and you are currently serving in France as a second lieutenant in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.

  Witness:

  Lieutenant, actually.

  Counsel:

  I apologise. I should have said lieutenant. And at the time of this offence you were on fourteen days’ leave?

  Witness:

  Correct.

  Counsel:

  Before you joined the army, in September 1914, you were in charge of Loading Pier No. 5 in the London Western Dock and the four accused had worked under you for some time?

  Witness:

  For six months in the case of Dunphy. For more than a year in the case of the other three.

  Counsel:

  And you identify all four of them as having taken part in the assault on Frederick Portlach. (To the Magistrate) An assault, sir, that the medical evidence has shown to be a savage one.

  Counsel for the defence, being asked if he had any questions, indicated that he would reserve his questions for when, and if, the accused were committed.

  The magistrate, having found a prima facie case established, remitted the case to the Central Criminal Court. He said that the application that had been made for bail would be refused. He then pointed out that there was one important point to be considered. Addressing the witness, he said: “I am informed that in view of the pressure on the calendar it is unlikely that the case will reach the Central Criminal Court before late June, or possibly July, by which time you will have served for several further weeks in France. I have no doubt that an application for your attendance in Court will be readily granted. What I have to consider is the possibility—Mr. Blundell hesitated—that you will no longer be available.”

  Witness:

  You mean that I may have copped a packet.

  Mr. Blundell:

  That is the possibility I had in mind. And that is why you should consider making a formal deposition. The Crown solicitors will assist you with the wording.

  Witness:

  (Apparently delighted with the idea) Then it can be read as my funeral oration.

  Joe’s waking in the morning had, by now, become a well-established routine. At about seven he would be roused, unwillingly, from the depths of sleep by the sound of Ben, who had the next-door room, getting up. Then Joe might catnap until he heard feet clattering downstairs and the clack of the front door. After which he would turn over in bed and sleep until conscience, or hunger, got him out of bed at about nine-thirty. Recently, they had taken two steps to simplify life: they had reduced the watching team from two men to one, covering the twelve hours of daylight in two spells of six hours. This gave each of them one complete day off out of three and enabled Joe to preserve his comfortable morning routine except on the day on which he had the first spell of duty. Also, they had not now so far to go. They had moved into new lodgings, on Paroma Street, halfway between the attic observatory and the language school.

  On this occasion, Ben had sent out none of the usual signals, and when Joe stomped down to breakfast there was still no sound from his room. No reason for him to be up. He did not take over from Luke until midday. But a worm of uneasiness had begun to stir. It had been Joe who had lured Ben into MO5, and he felt a corresponding responsibility for his welfare. He had not been happy when – at Ben’s own insistence – the protective screen of Richner, Durkin, and Merchiston had been withdrawn. As soon as he had finished breakfast, he went upstairs to look into Ben’s room.

  His fears crowded back. The bed had not been slept in.

  It took him less than ten minutes to reach the attic observatory, where he found Luke, sitting at the window, his eyes glued to a pair of binoculars.

  Before Joe could speak he said, “Something’s going on. Ten minutes ago, I saw that gardener-handyman drive off, and he had a trunk in the cart and the old woman with him. And yes – there goes the young one. Something wrong there.”

  “I’ll say there’s something wrong,” said Joe savagely. “Ben’s disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Never came back last night.”

  The note of fear in his voice sobered Luke. This was a crisis. He was in charge. Must think. He said, “There’s a telephone downstairs. Get hold of our heavies. Any of them who are there. Bring them here quick.”

  During the half hour that it took to get Kirchner and Durkin, he never took his eyes off the chapel and the house. He saw no sign of movement. Joe said, “Go the back way. The way I went before.” Luke nodded.

  The windows of the house were shuttered, and the silence was so absolute that Luke found himself whispering. He said to Kirchner, “You watch this door.” It was the door leading into the chapel from the back. “Joe, you take a look in the cellar.”

  “For anything in particular?”

  “Yes. Have a look at those power and light switches. If they’re all off, we’ll know they’ve left.”

  The cellar door was unlocked. Joe kicked it open and, armed with a small pocket flashlight borrowed from Kirchner, went carefully down into the darkness.

  When Luke and Durkin reached the front of the chapel, they saw a van parked in the forecourt. There was a pile of luggage in the back. The big west door was ajar. Luke eased his way through, into the small antechamber. It contained only a few chairs and a notice board, with a list of services on it. Examining it quickly, Luke saw that there had been two on the Tuesday and one on the Wednesday. Thursday, and all the days after it, were blank.

  Luke turned to point this out to Durkin, who was standing in the doorway. He said, “If there’s no service, why’ve they lit the bloody furnace?” It was true. A belch of black smoke had started to rise, slowly but steadily, out of the chimney.

  Luke stared at it for a few moments, trying to rearrange his ideas. Then he walked across, opened the door that led into the chapel, and went in.

  At the far end, between the front row of chairs and the altar, was a platform on wheels, which ran up to an opening in the wall between the chapel and the furnace room and was closed by a steel shutter. On the platform lay one of the simple plywood coffins of the type used in cremation. But Luke had eyes only for the man behind the platform. It was Andrew Robb, but not the English businessman; not even Anders Raab, the German. This was Tyr, son of Odin, god of war. The first look had been surprise, but that had disappeared. There was nothing now in his engorged face but rage and defiance.

  As Luke and Kirchner walked forward, he touched a switch in the wall and the steel shutter slid up, letting in a gust of overheated air.

  “You can feel it?” said Robb. “Yes. You can feel it, because the furnace door is now wide open. I have only to press down this lever and the rollers will send the coffin through into the fire. They are stronger than you are. Nothing you can do will stop it. You understand me?”

  Luke nodded. The coffin, he could see, was clamped down onto the rollers.

  “And you wish to save the life of the young man who is in it? Alive, I assure you.”

  Luke nodded again. He was unable to speak.

&
nbsp; “Then I make you this offer. I require five minutes’ start. Only five minutes. How many years has this boy to live? If you give me your word, I will accept it and you shall have your friend back.”

  Luke saw that Robb’s hand was on the lever. He had no doubt that he was speaking the truth. The rollers and damps would send the coffin through with a power they could not counter. He was about to say something – anything – to postpone the decision, when the door at the back opened and Joe came through. He gave a thumbs-up sign and said, “Don’t worry. I’ve turned off the power.”

  For a moment, Luke could not grasp what Joe was saying, but Robb understood him and backed away from the platform. Kirchner, who had produced a clasp knife, inserted the blade under the thin cover of the coffin and levered it up clear of the pins that had been holding it. They could see Ben, cradled in a nest of papers and most clearly dead.

  For a moment no one moved.

  Then Robb, seeing that Joe had left the door open, spun around and darted toward it. Joe, who was holding an iron bar in his right hand, allowed Robb to go past him and then swung it in a vicious backhanded swipe, driven by all the strength of his arm and backed by all the fury in his heart. It hit Robb at the top of his spine with such force that it nearly severed his head from his body.

  Kirchner, more used to violence than the other two, was the first to move. He came around the end of the platform and looked down at Robb, who lay in a slowly oozing puddle of blood. He said, “Killed trying to escape. Right?” Leaning forward, he picked up the envelope that had slipped onto the floor. The passport had fallen out of it. He said, “Give him the five minutes he was asking for and I guess you wouldn’t have seen him for dust.”

  “But who?” said Luke. “How did he? When did this happen?” He was finding it difficult to speak.

  “If I might make a suggestion,” said Kirchner. “Have a quick look through the papers this type was trying to burn and you’ll probably find the answers.”

  That same morning, Kell was having one of his weekly meetings with Basil Thomson. It was clear that Kell was pleased with himself. “Two strokes of luck,” he said. “First, we’ve got rid of that gang of Irish bullies. For a good long time, I should say.”

  “Good luck for us,” said Thomson. “Bad luck for them. That they should have run up against the one man who could identify them.”

  “And someone they couldn’t hope to intimidate.”

  “Right. You said two lots of luck.”

  “For some time now, we’ve been examining the letters in and out of that newspaper office. The very last one that the editor mailed gave us the address of Daryl Forbes in Walton-on-Thames. The local police have now got him under discreet observation. He seems to have settled down very nicely. They’ll tell us at once if he tries to move on.”

  “It’s even better than that surely. Now that the English edition of the paper has folded up, he’ll see no point in writing further articles. It was England he was preaching to, not Ireland. He’s lost his pulpit.”

  “Two up and one to play,” said Kell. “It’d be game, set, and match if I could only make out what Robb and Goodison are up to. But the damnable thing is”—he indicated the pile of documents on his table—“that it’s all there. Under my eyes. If only I could read it. The key’s in those first two messages. I’m sure of that. I spent two whole hours yesterday thinking about them. Have you ever tried thinking about one thing for two hours?”

  “Certainly not,” said Thomson. “After ten minutes my thoughts would be going around in a circle, chasing each other up their own posteriors. So what conclusion did you come to after that feat of mental gymnastics?”

  “I came to this conclusion: to find the answer, you’ve got to take a general view of the matter before trying to pick out the details.”

  “Wholesale first, retail later,” suggested Thomson.

  “It was rather that you had to look at the background before you could focus on the foreground. You understand me?”

  “No. But don’t stop.”

  “Right. The background is in Germany. No question about it. I can see the hand of Steinhauer pulling the strings to make his puppets dance. What’s more, he can send them messages, through Zeeman, in Switzerland, to Goodison in London. He must have sensed that Robb was getting fidgety. Were things going quickly enough? Would he be ready in time? Goodison is told to calm him down. Tell him that the ‘special product’ is already on its way to you. And tell him that you’ll be letting him have ‘suitable supplies’ in plenty of time for him to do his bit.”

  “That’s tolerably clear,” said Thomson. “It would be clearer still if we had any idea what things he was talking about.”

  “I’m more and more convinced that the ‘special product’ is some form of explosive – probably cordite. I could ask Customs and Excise to make a special examination of anything coming from Zeeman. But I don’t want to alert Goodison until we’ve got the whole picture.”

  “Very well. Let’s assume that the ‘special product’ is cordite. In that case, what are the ‘suitable supplies’? Am I being simplistic if I point out that Goodison is a fuel stockist? In the ordinary way what he would supply would be coal.”

  “Heaven preserve my wandering wits,” said Kell. “Of course. Not just coal. Anthracite.”

  The words seemed to sound an echo.

  “Slivers of anthracite. A bench of tools. Robb was working on lumps of anthracite that Goodison sent him. That must be right.”

  “Not forgetting,” said Thomson, “that Robb, in his youth, had been a sculptor. What he was producing was a novel sort of bomb.”

  The two men looked at each other. Before either of them could speak, the door burst open and Hall was in the room. He was white with fury, so angry that he could hardly speak.

  He said, “While we’ve been piddling and twiddling here, they’ve done it again.”

  “Done what?”

  “Destroyed another ship. The Princess Irene, with most of her crew and some dockyard men who were working on her. You may be happy to sit talking. I’m not. I’ve brought half a dozen of our own dockyard policemen, and if you won’t get off your bottoms and pick up that sod Goodison and twist him till he squeals, why then I’m quite ready to do it myself. And my men won’t be gentle. They had friends on the Irene—”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Kell, and the coldness and heavy calmness in his voice took some of the steam out of Hall, “we were planning to go around there ourselves. We’ve just worked out what we’re likely to find. We’ll explain as we go.”

  When the two naval tenders squealed to a halt outside the coal merchant’s shop there was no stopping or delaying the wave of men who broke over it. The youngster who opened the door was swept aside. Any door that was shut against them was kicked open. Goodison was alone in his office. He started to say something, then stopped. Tried again and failed again.

  Hall said to the naval contingent, “Take this place to pieces. Particularly the fuel stocks. You know what to look for.”

  As they streamed out of the room, Hall marched up to Goodison, who was on his feet now but silent. When Hall spoke, their faces were only inches apart. He said, “The laws of England contain one section that you may have overlooked. The crime of treason is still on the statute book. It includes damaging or setting fire to His Majesty’s dockyards or the ships in them, and punishment for it is specified in the act. Not an honourable death, in front of a firing squad. That’s too good for traitors. The penalty for treachery is hanging. You understand? To be dropped through the floor with a rope around your neck, your arms strapped to your side, and a hood over your face. And if we could cut you down and hang you twenty times it would be less than payment for the work you’ve been doing.”

  Goodison backed away from the fire and fury in Hall’s voice. Kell thought he was going to faint. But he managed, somehow, to get back to his chair.

  At that moment, a sergeant came in, followed by two men. Each of them was
carrying, with extreme caution, a lump of anthracite, roughly the size and shape of a small pineapple. “I think this must be what you’re looking for, sir.”

  Kell said, “Let me have it. And lend me your knife.”

  He inserted the blade gently, and the two halves of the lump came apart. Both halves had been hollowed out, and both were empty.

  Hall said, “Cordite in one half – sent from Stockholm by Zeeman – sulphuric acid in the other – stolen for them by their Irish friends from that chemical works. A thin membrane to separate them, which the acid would eat through in due course. If inserted in a furnace, the heat would destroy the membrane and activate the cordite at once.” He weighed the lump of anthracite thoughtfully in his hand. “As pretty a little time bomb as ever slid unsuspected into the boiler of a ship.”

  “Or of an ammunition factory,” said Kell. “Take this man away. Handcuff him and throw him into one of the vans.” He grabbed the telephone. There were so many people he had to contact urgently. The Royal Arsenal, the powder factory, the premises at Slough, all dockyards, all ports in which coal-fired ships might be found. If any had received fuel from Landsells, their furnaces would have to be raked over and every lump of coal, in furnace or in store, examined.

  “We can only pray,” said Hall, “that we aren’t too late.”

  “Well,” said Luke flatly, “so now we know.”

  The first two or three papers from the coffin had shown them the truth. Der Vetter, Wotan, the director of Operation Asgard, was the soft-spoken, intelligent, helpful head of the Abbey Road language school, David Mills, into whose hands outrageous chance had delivered Ben. Now that all the papers had been removed, from around and under him, he looked small and lonely.

  Joe, after glancing at him, had not spoken a word but had wandered off, out of the chapel and into the anteroom. When the others joined him, they found him sitting, cross-legged, on a chair and staring at nothing in particular. Luke, spotting a telephone on the shelf above his head, said, “Is it working?” Joe said, “No,” but it was clear from his tone of voice that he meant that he didn’t know and didn’t care. His mind was far away.