Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  After lighting up the Assistant Superintendent kicked the meeting off by seizing the Squadron leader’s brown paper parcel and banging it down before him. “Well, here they are,” he said. “Possibly the most important pair of drawers in this part of the world since Jezebel’s.”

  “Didn’t think she had any,” murmured the Squadron Leader.

  The Assistant Superintendent turned to him. “Now let’s get this straight. Since it turns out to be a German parachute, but not the sort normally used by their aircrew, you think it must have been used to drop an enemy agent?”

  “Or his equipment. Does anybody have any idea where the chute came down yet?”

  “It was found near a place called the Horns of Hattin,” Calderwell told them.

  “The where?”

  “It’s an extinct volcano off the Tiberius-Galilee road. Old battlefield. Very old. Saladin gave the Crusaders a walloping there. The woman who was wearing part of it comes from a village quite close by.”

  “Did she buy the silk from somebody after it had been cut up?” This was Hare, the wireless wizard.

  “No. She was given them ready made by her niece, the daughter of her eldest brother.”

  Hare nodded. Calderwell took in the way the lank blond hair flopped across the high forehead, and just for a moment was reminded of another young officer in the other war. But he had been killed in the charge at Huj. Probably the nearest this one ever got to the sharp end of things was a map pin. All cloak and no dagger.

  “Apparently, the niece got the material from her husband’s sister-in-law, the wife of his younger brother, who had been given the silk by one of her own younger brothers who claims to have found the parachute in a cave on the Hattin while searching for a lost goat. I hope you’re all with me so far.” Calderwell was enjoying himself.

  “Apart from working out the family tree, have you found the cave?”

  “Not yet. We’re still trying to find the boy.”

  And it had not exactly been easy getting this far. The day before Katie Forster, having made it plain that she regarded their visit as an unwarranted intrusion, had ushered Calderwell and an Arab constable into her kitchen where, large and round and already bawling her eyes out, Muna was waiting in her ankle-length embroidered badawi dress.

  Convinced that she had got her family into “police trouble” she feared the wrath of her elder brother, her niece’s father, far more than she did any Inglizi Inspector. Because of this she had started off by repeating her story that she had bought the underwear at the Wednesday afternoon souk around the Damascus gate which was a silly lie because the police covered all the main souks like a rug and more than one of their informers would have told them if somebody had introduced a new line in parachute silk underwear.

  The Arab constable, who was mostly there to act as an interpreter, had started to try and bully the truth out of her with shouts and threats to round up her entire family. No doubt he would have eventually started slapping her around but Calderwell soon put a stop to it before the lady of the house came storming in. Slowly, in his ungrammatical, atrociously pronounced Arabic he had persuaded her that she must be mistaken, be thinking of something else, because the police would know if such things were on sale in the souk. She would not get into trouble, he assured her. It was simply that her clothing had come from a silken umbrella an Alman djinn had used to float down to earth and it was necessary to catch this djinn and bottle him up before he made bad magic. Muna was impressed. And it was then, between the odd sniffle, that she started to tell him about the young shepherd looking for his lost animals on the Hattin.

  “What’s the problem with finding this boy?” It was the first time Davison, the only one out of uniform in a fawn linen suit and rather a surprising blue and red polka dot tie, had uttered a word.

  “He’s gone missing,” Calderwell said. “Two days now.”

  “Oh dear,” sighed Davison. But it implied much more than “oh dear”. It implied the mists parting to reveal the first foothills of the range of Great Incompetence with the promise that behind them came the alpine peaks of Awe Inspiring Ineptitude. It occurred to Calderwell that Davison would probably get on very well with Katie Forster.

  “We’ll find him,” he said. “They never go very far.” Even as he said it Calderwell found himself wishing he had been a little less emphatic.

  “Why do you think he ran away?” asked Davison, eyebrows beginning to rise like twin peaks on his forehead.

  “Probably because he knows that we’re looking for him and he thinks he’s in trouble,” said Calderwell who had been asking himself the same question. “He’s sixteen or thereabouts, old enough to know that you’re supposed to report fallen parachutes, not set yourself up as a wholesale silk merchant.”

  “We’ve been told this parachute might have been used to drop equipment,” said Davison, measuring his words carefully. “Let us suppose it was. Time and place would have had to be agreed. Is there any evidence of an illegal transmitter here? Has anything been intercepted?” He was looking straight at Hare.

  Who had been expecting this. It was well known that Davison’s service were furious that the rivals had grabbed the lion’s share of wireless intercepts and code breaking on the grounds that intelligence gathering, or whatever you wanted to call it, was their job. And Hare had decided that, when the inevitable question came, he would reply by talking about the enemy transmissions coming into Palestine rather than those going out.

  “Well, as I’m sure you all know,” he said, each word causing Davison’s eyebrows to crawl a notch up his forehead, “last month the Germans opened a new wireless relay station in Athens. One of its functions is to improve the strength and clarity of the Mufti’s Arabic language broadcasts from Berlin and Rome. Before that their nearest relay station was on the east cost of Italy at Bari.

  “Most of his broadcasts are straight propaganda. A few days ago, for instance, both the Mufti and Rashid Ali, made broadcasts on the anniversary of last year’s revolt in Iraq calling for the blood of the Arab martyrs to be avenged, Holy War against the Anglo-Jewish conspirators. The freedom loving German National Socialist Party is right behind them. The usual line.

  “But mixed in with the ranting, we do get the odd ‘Abdullah sends peaches’ greeting that certainly sound as if it might be a coded messages intended for an agent in place somewhere. When this happens we notify all interested parties.”

  “In your own good time you do,” murmured Davison.

  Hare looked a little startled but avoided all eye contact. “It’s possible,” he went on, “that some of these messages are phonies to give the impression they have an entire fifth column in place.”

  “What about stuff going the other way?” inquired the Squadron Leader? “Any evidence?”

  “No. Not really,” said Hare. “Not since last summer when we closed down the Vichy French Beirut operation. The Mufti had a couple of agents operating from a place near Ramallah controlled by the Abwehr resident in Beirut and they had a wireless transmitter. But they were much too busy with it and we soon got a fix on it. I believe they were picked up. ”

  “What happened to them?” asked the Assistant Superintendent.

  “We shot them,” said Davison in his mournful way.

  “I don’t remember a trial,” said the policeman who could not recall an execution by firing squad either. The noose and the sudden drop was the practise in Palestine as it was in every place on earth where a British judge donned his black cap.

  “There wasn’t one,” said Davison. “They tried to make a run for it. It was in the Galilee. Your Mobile Striking Force provided the muscle though they may have thought they were dealing with Syrian drug runners. The coroner did. All cleared by the highest authority: thought best that the locals didn’t know that the Mufti was still in touch. Unsettling. But we’re not sure we got all of them. All that money spent on Tegart forts and fences and those frontiers with Vichy Lebanon and Syria used to be as leaky as a sieve.
”

  Davison signalled that his attack on the Palestine Police’s border patrols was at an end by putting his palms flat down on the edge of the table. Then he turned to Hare. “Exactly what do you mean when you say, ‘not really’. Are you picking up an illicit transmitter or are you not?”

  Oh dear, thought Hare, here we go. “Well, Sarafand does pick up the odd corrupt signal it can’t identify,” he said in the breeziest manner he could contrive. “It would be surprising if they didn’t. There are a lot of units in Palestine at the moment, a lot of wireless telegraphy.”

  “Hmm,” said Davison then thoughtfully punched home his next question, every word a jab between the ribs. “Do you mean to say, do you really mean to say, that the Mufti could have a transmitter here chatting away to Berlin on a daily basis and you wouldn’t know?”

  “No I didn’t say that,” said Hare carefully. “If somebody was sending on a regular basis, and we were picking up intercepts of more than a few seconds, then the chances are we would locate them. It’s short signals, four or five seconds at most, that can be difficult to get a fix on even if they’ve been monitored and logged.”

  Davison sighed, shook his head and permitted a worried hand to push back his thinning hair.

  But before he could say anything there was a knock on the door followed by the appearance of the head of the Jewish constable outside. With the exception of Davison they all welcomed the interruption. The constable whispered to the Assistant Superintendent who then turned to Calderwell. “Nazareth on the telephone,” he said.

  Calderwell pushed back his chair and left the room.

  The Assistant Superintendent leant over and picked up Muna’s unmentionables. “I don’t suppose there is any doubt that these were once part of a German parachute?” he said looking at the Squadron Leader.

  “None at all. You can see the panel stitching down one leg.”

  “What do you think Colonel Davison?”

  “I think we’re in trouble. Most Palestinian Muslims believe the Mufti is their spiritual leader and even the Christians respect him. It would be worth a couple of tank divisions to Rommel if we had another revolt on our hands when we need all we’ve got at Mersa Matruth. And it’s not all that difficult. The Arabs think Hitler is the best thing since Saladin because he hates the Jews as much as they do. There’s a lot of dry tinder and given half a chance the Abwehr will set the entire place alight. I must say,” he said, looking at the Assistant Superintendent, “it’s fortuitous for us that Inspector Calderwell put his nose where he did.”

  They were all so astonished that Davison should, in the same breath, deliver a kind of praise laced with an attempt at humour that nobody noticed that Calderwell had returned, quietly closing the door behind him.

  “Have they found the boy?” asked the Squadron Leader.

  “No,” said Calderwell, taking his seat. “They’ve found another parachute.”

  Davison was raised by his eyebrows.

  3 - Some Thoughts on the Hill of Muses

  Over the Acropolis the Swastika, like all the other German flags in Athens, indeed in all the European capitals Berlin now ruled, was at half-mast.

  The Templer, who was about a kilometre away on the Hill of the Muses, could just make it out, hanging limply in the windless heat from a pole that had been attached to the remains of the Parthenon. He still found it hard to come to terms with what it signified for it had seemed that the worst was over. The best surgeons in Germany had flown to Prague to attend the man it honoured. “Comfortable and out of danger,” said their bulletins and young women wept with relief for, with his blondest of Aryan good looks, he was always the pinup boy of the Party.

  Then, nine days after the Czech parachutists the British had trained had thrown their grenades, Reinhard Heydrich had died of his wounds. The recently appointed Reichprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia and, more relevant as far as this mourner was concerned, the founder of the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS intelligence department and rival to the Abwehr, had been two years short of his fortieth birthday, eight years junior to the Templer. His enemies had called Heydrich “Der Henker”, the hangman, though this had never appeared to worry him. He rarely bothered to travel with an escort.

  It seemed that the British, markedly inferior to Germany in conventional warfare this time round as Rommel had just reminded them at Tobruk, were becoming adept at the kind of terrorist theatre the Russian anarchists used to practise. They had even invented a new type of explosive for it and were beginning to parachute it to various miscreants masquerading as patriots all over the occupied territories. He had a couple of kilos himself, a gift from an Andarte band more interested in killing their own Greek Communists than Germans. It was a beige coloured substance, soft and malleable as plasticine, that smelt like almonds and, until a detonator was inserted, not in the least volatile. You could stub a cigarette out in it.

  At a ceremony of remembrance for Heydrich, held in the Mosaic Hall of the Reich Chancellery, Heinrich Himmler reminded his audience of their “sacred duty to avenge him”. Of course, this was the kind of thing one wished to hear from the leader of the SS and, like a popular hymn, no less comforting for its familiarity.

  As in most stories, for the people involved it started at different times and at different places. As far as the Templer was concerned, it began on that Attic hillside a week after Heydrich’s state funeral with the flags still dipped because nobody could bring themselves to order them back up. Since the first rays of Spring, and in Athens it had been a cruel winter, the Templer had been in the habit of coming here in the late afternoon before he went down to the radio station to see that all was well with the Arabic broadcasts or to wait for one of Lang’s short messages in his beautifully played Morse.

  Originally, it had been a certain interest in military history that had drawn him to this spot. For it was from this very hill that one of the most awful acts of vandalism since the invention of gunpowder had occurred. On the moonlit night of 26 September 1687 a certain Lieutenant from Lunenberg, one of many German mercenaries recruited for a Venetian siege of Ottoman Athens, had with devastating precision lobbed a mortar bomb into the powder magazine the Turks had installed in the Parthenon. The roof of the world’s best preserved classical building, perhaps the greatest benchmark of man’s tottering progress from the primeval slime, was blown clean off. “A most fortunate shot,” Generale Francesco Morosini had informed Venice.

  It occurred to the Templer that in a way not all that much had changed. The Italians had the same mercenaries. Mussolini had recently arrived in Tripoli in order to be close to the Libyan-Egyptian border while Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps made the final arrangements for Il Duce’s Roman Triumph in Cairo. Next would come the liberation of the rest of the British occupied Middle East as they moved on through Palestine, Syria, Trans-Jordan, Iraq and Persia where they would eventually meet up with another German army currently advancing through the Soviet Caucasus. And everywhere they would be hailed as liberators, for the British were equally loathed in all these countries for the pact they had made with the Zionists supporting the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine as long as the rights of ‘the existing non-Jewish communities’ were protected. The last of course was typical English equivocation, trying to have it both ways. There would be no such weasel words from Germany. All European Jewry would be encouraged to move to Palestine. It was as simple as that. And, once they got used to the idea, the Arabs and even the Persians would respect them for it.

  That afternoon the Templer felt that it would be easy to pretend this war had never happened. Or better still, for the war was necessary, that it was over and all that remained to be done was for Germany to decide the peace terms. Perhaps the Royal Navy should be permitted to scuttle itself on the bones of the Kaiser’s ships in the Scapa Flow just as two years ago the French had been made to sign an armistice in the same wagon lit where in November 1918 Foch had made the German peace emissaries grovel.

  His only re
gret was that he had not played a more active role in this settling of accounts, at last won some visible laurels to rest on. After all, he was at least five years younger than Rommel, fit and still in his prime. But there was no doubting that the assets he was most valued for, his fluent English and serviceable Arabic, had proved his greatest handicap. They had harnessed him to that netherworld where even the celebrations for its greatest triumphs were often as cloaked as the deeds themselves. A place where the knowledge that yours had been one of the invisible hands that had wrought some crucial change was considered reward enough.

  The dipping sun was at his back and he was comfortably seated on a flat white rock pleasantly shaded by olives and conifers. The warm scents of thyme and rosemary floated up from the lower slopes and at his side, lay Dispacci del Capitan Generale Francesco Morosini May 31, 1686 - May 19, 1688 as published by the Civic Museum in Venice.

  But the Templer did not immediately return to Morosini’s accounts of victories in the Morea, Turkish ransoms paid, mercenaries hanged for rape and pillage, his pleas to the Senate for more money and more men. Instead, the Venetian was neglected in favour of a letter from a friend in Prague that had been delivered to him just before he left his headquarters at Constitution Square’s pleasingly named Hotel Grande Bretagne, now as firmly occupied as the Channel Islands.

  This friend, an old comrade from the war the back stabbers on the home front had lost for them, had witnessed certain events and wished to share them. Whether this was for cathartic or other reasons he couldn’t tell. There was a certain breeziness to his style that could possibly have been a smokescreen for a less certain attitude than he cared to admit on paper. It was difficult to say. As it was, the friend would be in enough trouble if it was discovered he had committed these details to a letter going overseas that might, by some accident of war, have fallen into enemy hands. After the normal greetings he began:

  There were eighteen in the firing squad and the Czechs were shot in batches of six so that each man, in theory at least, received three bullets. Most of them were steel workers or coal miners in the prime of life though here and there was a grey beard and a bent back. I must admit I was a bit surprised to see a priest because the Gestapo had told everybody that they selected the place because it was hotbed of Communism. A sergeant finished them off. Instead of a pistol he used one of those American style automatic shotguns - messy but much more certain! He was a reservist and most of his men looked the same. Solid, practical types who thought ahead. To reduce ricochets they had taken straw filled mattresses from the farm and its surrounding cottages and placed them upright against the stone wall.