Werewolf (Commander Shaw Book 16)

by Philip McCutchan

  “It’s all we can do. It could be a deterrent.”

  The ACC looked thoroughly baffled. He suggested a conference in the VIP lounge, which would be emptied of all persons other than the vast number of officials who’d come down from Whitehall to be handy with their advice and their rejection, I felt sure, of all suggestions that a normal man might put forward. In the meantime, the Bolzes and their box would be held aboard the airliner while the disembarkation of all the other passengers and their baggage proceeded.

  I asked, “Has the East German aircraft come in yet?”

  “With Jones and Priddy? No, not yet.”

  I said, “Right. Let’s have that conference you spoke of. Something’s got to be decided, and fast. If it doesn’t go on into East Berlin I’d like to see Customs impound the bloody box and quietly drop the contents, if any, quietly down a drain somewhere.”

  The ACC sighed. “That’s being wholly unrealistic, Shaw. You just can’t do that sort of thing.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s too easy, isn’t it.” As I walked off with the ACC I cast a glance back at the airliner. The brain, if it was there, represented a personal failure. I should have intercepted it somewhere and done the drain drop all by myself. The thing was lethal: there was no other word. The implications were appalling. As if to bear out my thoughts I heard shouts and slogans coming, I fancied, from the spectators’ gallery. I lifted an eyebrow at the ACC.

  He said, spreading his hands as if in supplication, “A bunch of thugs … black leather jackets. I have men up there and it won’t spread. It was better to bunch them there rather than refuse them admittance.”

  “Has the word spread about what’s in the aircraft?” I asked.

  “I hope to God not! No, I’d say the racket’s due to the East German plane coming in. That mob’s there to give Jones and Priddy a good reception.”

  “And the Bolzes?”

  “The moment there’s any move in their direction,” the ACC said, “my men go in.”

  I felt the tension and the dither the moment I walked into the VIP lounge; the tension because a decision was needed, the dither because no-one had any idea of how best to handle the situation. They were all there, as at that first conference in the Cabinet Office just a few days before: Under-Secretaries from all sorts of places, plus this time the Minister of Defence himself, with security and intelligence, Customs and Excise, and Immigration.

  They wanted to hear what I had to say. One of the Under-Secretaries asked if I was sure the black box contained the brain.

  “Not having opened it,” I answered, “no, I’m not. It might be a good idea to find out.”

  The Under-Secretary’s jaw dropped. “By opening it?”

  I said, “Unless you can think of a better way.”

  Silence, briefly; then they all started yacking away at once. A lot of the brass was in favour of removing the black box from the aircraft for examination. But there was opposition from others. There would be trouble; East-West relations were always on a tight-rope.

  “Balls,” I said, rudely. “It’s a bloody British aircraft. We have the right to do what we want.” Some of them didn’t like that and no decision had been reached when a telephone burred. Being the nearest, I took it. The message was to say that the aircraft from East Germany was down and was now moving to the disembarkation bays. Having passed this to the brass, I asked for a decision, urgently.

  It was the Defence Minister who gave it. It was a surprise. “The box must be removed,” he said with finality. “When that’s done, we’ll have to think again. My security section will bring it out.”

  There were gasps of dissent. The Minister was a brave man. The dissent didn’t go too far, however; it wasn’t the dissenters who would get the stick afterwards and they had been saved from making a decision. No point in bringing the ball back into their own court …

  We all trooped down to watch the exchange being made.

  *

  Jones and Priddy walked forward, accompanied by East German guards. They looked wan, and both were in tears as they walked British soil and tasted freedom. From somewhere in the airport building there was an uproar of cheering and more slogans were chanted. Nazi slogans, old and new. Neither Jones nor Priddy looked happy about the racket; they were not Nazis, they were not Communists, they were just two ordinary decent citizens who’d been used as pawns in a very dirty game. I doubted if the noise was for them anyway, despite what the ACC had said. There had been a leak about that brain; the Nazi sympathisers in Britain, or some of them, would probably have got wind of something.

  From the opposite direction came Lothar and Lotte Bolz, now out of the airliner from Santiago, also with their escort. There was a protest going on about something or other and I knew very well what it was: the black box. It wasn’t with the Bolzes anymore. There was going to be trouble.

  There was.

  The Jones and Priddy guards halted some distance clear, trilby hatted and grim. From our side, a Home Office man went forward and was allowed to shake the hands of Jones and Priddy. As this was going on, a man walked out from behind the East German group and approached the Bolzes and their combined East German — British escort.

  “All is well?” he asked in German.

  “Not well,” Lothar Bolz said in a voice high with agitation and distress. “The British are not behaving properly, and — ”

  “In what way, not properly?”

  “Our baggage. Some has been removed.” Bolz paused and swallowed. “An important part. It must be returned.”

  There was a whispered conversation with the East German, who nodded and then turned to the British side. He called out in English, “Yes, it must be returned.” The voice was authoritative, the face hard with determination. I sweated: something had leaked and the East Germans knew, after all, what was being sent through. Maybe the Bolzes knew too. The East German official went on, “Which is highest British authority, please? I wish to speak most urgently.”

  The Defence Minister moved towards him, shivering in a bitter wind. “You may speak to me.”

  “You are who?”

  The Minister identified himself.

  “So, yes. Some article of importance has been removed from Herr Bolz.” The tone was highly accusing. “Why is this?”

  “Security,” the Minister answered.

  “Why, security?”

  Some light snow had started to fall, and was settling on the Minister and the East German. It was bitterly cold. The Minister shrugged and said, “Sheer routine — I’m awfully sorry. It’ll be returned.”

  “Yes,” the man said flatly. “It will be returned. It will be returned now, this instant, please. Unopened and secure. At once, please.”

  “We have not yet had time — ”

  “At once. I say it again. Immediately.” The German scowled, staring straight into the Minister’s eyes. “No unexamined box, no Jones, no Priddy.”

  “Oh, I say, isn’t that a little thick?” The Minister was somewhat thrown off balance, I could see. The whole applecart was being upset and Whitehall wouldn’t love him for it. “What’s in the box that upsets you so much?”

  “No upset. Protocol. In the box are papers from our Embassy in Santiago. The property of East Germany. In a sense, our diplomatic bag, you understand? Not to be removed by British customs or security. I say again. No unviolated box, no Jones, no Priddy. They go back to East Germany, and prison.” He was totally immovable and the end could be foreseen. After a lot of argument orders were given for the black box to be restored to the Bolzes. After that, the ceremony was all but over. Jones and Priddy took their steps towards freedom and their guards remained behind. Lothar and Lotte Bolze made haste for the East German aircraft, Lothar clutching the box tightly. As soon as the Bolzes were aboard, the East German aircraft was given clearance by flight control and began to taxi out for take-off. I watched it recede through the lightly falling snow and I stayed with the VIPs until it had lifted off and was heading out for
the Iron Curtain. When the brass dispersed I was detained for another useless conference with the ACC and a couple of Under-Secretaries of State. A full report was wanted urgently for the PM from the man who’d been on the spot. I cursed the long delay but knew it was inevitable; and it was latish when I managed to get away and embark aboard the 6D2 helicopter that had been waiting to take me in to Focal House.

  I found Max in a filthy temper, not least because I’d taken so long to reach him. He’d had the report about the box, now beating it for East Germany. When I gave my opinion that if it contained the brain, which it might or might not, that was probably the best place for it, just so long as the West German Werewolves didn’t succeed in hooking it away, he went mad.

  “Don’t be bloody stupid. Wherever it is, it’s dynamite as any damn fool ought to be able to see for himself.”

  I said, “Less explosive dynamite in a Communist country.”

  “I doubt it,” Max said savagely. “It’ll be a continuing bone of contention!”

  “To add to all the others.”

  He glared. “What d’you mean?”

  “There are plenty of bones of contention. One more won’t make much difference. In any case, short of destroying it, it had to go somewhere.”

  “Don’t be difficult, Shaw. Frankly, I expected you to destroy it in Chile — ”

  “And I didn’t. Okay, so I tailed and I’m bloody sorry.” I changed the subject, since it was unfruitful. “Is there any news of Miss Mandrake?”

  He shook his head. “No. Nor of Jason Clutch alias Humphrey Rowbottom.”

  “Out of the country?”

  “Shouldn’t be. Everything’s been under close watch.”

  “Slips,” I said, “do occur. Don’t they?”

  Max looked dangerous. “You’re beginning to bloody well annoy me, Shaw. Bugger off.”

  “With pleasure,” I said. I went down to get myself a cup of coffee in the restaurant. While there, I caught up on the newspapers. The world was still chaotic: strikes, go-slows, petrol getting more and more expensive, ditto electricity and North Sea gas, Russia rampaging wherever it seemed profitable, inflation rising still. Some things never changed … I chucked the papers from me: my mind was running along different lines and the track was Felicity Mandrake. I was desperately worried about the girl, had been all along though in the interest of job efficiency I’d done my best to keep it down. An agent is an agent, no difference between men and women, and agents live shaky lives. It’s something you get used to. Every day you live on is a day you didn’t expect — or if you’re wise you don’t. Live life as it comes … I found a tune running through my head, Bridge Over Troubled Water, a one-time hit song that Felicity and I used to play on a tape in my car during briefly-snatched and blissful leave periods. Troubled water was right. Find Jason Clutch and I had found Felicity — or so I hoped. I didn’t believe even now, that he would have killed her.

  I felt bloody restless, not knowing where to begin. ‘That was resolved for me. The telephone burred and a waitress came across to tell me I was wanted in The Suite. I went back up again. Max’s temper had improved but he was looking baffled and anxious. He said abruptly, “Reports are coming in from our people in Bonn, also from the Foreign Office here.”

  “What reports?” I asked.

  “Explosion over East Berlin. No details yet and the Fast German authorities are keeping a low profile. Our information came from one of our field men.”

  I frowned, ran a hand over my chin. I asked, “When was this?”

  “At the time the Bolz aircraft was due in.”

  “Bolz! Christ, a bum attempt at interception?”

  “Not slap over East Berlin, I think.” Max sounded scathing. He was right, of course. Then I ticked over.

  I said, “The bloody box!”

  Max asked quietly, “You see a connexion, Shaw?”

  “Don’t you?”

  He shrugged. “It’s possible. We must wait. The reports weren’t from eye-witnesses. We can’t even be a hundred per cent sure it was an aircraft.”

  It was only a matter of minutes later that Max’s security line rang: more reports. The call taken, he gave me a hard stare. “It was an aircraft,” he said. “That’s confirmed. And it was the Bolz lift.”

  I let out a long breath. “Goodbye Bolzes, then, poor sods … and thank God we didn’t keep that bloody box!”

  Max nodded. “It’s an ill wind — sometimes.” He paused. “The casualties have been heavy and horrible. No structural damage — nothing like that. But we know what it was. Ever heard of what they call Big Eye? A nerve gas bomb developed in America?”

  “Bloody hell,” I said, staring back at him. Yes, I’d heard about Big Eye. Even the Americans themselves didn’t like it much and a few years ago some senators and congressmen had called urgently for a moratorium to give breathing space for some sort of agreement with the Soviet Union on such monstrosities. Now it had burst over East Berlin.

  “One bomb,” Max said, “is capable of a square mile scatter even when dropped on the ground direct. Just one tiny drop on the skin causes agonising convulsions leading to death. There’s no antidote.”

  And it could have been us. I thought about what might have happened at Gatwick. I wondered what had triggered the thing: almost certainly a time mechanism, which must mean that whoever had set it — Klaus Kunze in my book — hadn’t intended it for Gatwick, at any rate on the assumption that it wouldn’t be retained by Customs, but had meant it to do what it did, which was to kill Communists. Max asked, “How do you see this, Shaw?”

  I said, “The first blow of the Werewolf faction against their sworn enemies, what else?”

  Max nodded. “But there is something else, isn’t there?”

  “Go on?”

  “The mastermind, my dear chap! Hitler. It looks as though your earlier idea was right — the actual brain’s going in by sea. Or anyway, we can take it that it wasn’t in that box.” Max lifted a hand and stubbed his forefinger towards me, a familiar gesture that indicated the strength of feeling behind his orders. “Get it, Shaw. Get it before its filth is disseminated amongst the West Germans. Get it — and then get rid of it!”

  *

  The whole thing still had to be played cool. Whitehall was as firm as ever about not being seen to be involved. So was Bonn. The Federal Government was touchy and didn’t want any overt involvement in destruction of the brain if it was found. The Americans came in on it, also sotto voce as it were. In Max’s office I talked to a high-up American from NATO. NATO had a desperate need of the West German bases and facilities for battle training and so on. The Werewolves, after the heady injection of Hitler’s brain into their covens, would demonstrate and riot in an attempt to dislodge the Allied presence and restore all the wonder and glory of an unfettered Reich — the forces of dementia and that fearsome Vernichtung all over again, on the march beneath the swastikas.

  The whole West was worried but it looked like being left solidly with 6D2, at least on the surface, and the surface hadn’t to be broken. I asked Max for an RAF lift into West Germany, soonest possible. He said he would fix it. Inside ten minutes he’d done so.

  “Lyneham in Wiltshire,” he said. “Get there by first light. You’ll enter West Germany in army uniform, secrecy being all. Major, Light Infantry. You can keep your own name, it’s a common enough one.”

  By first light; and no offer of a helicopter to Lyneham. I asked, “Is this a routine flight, not a special — ”

  “Routine. I say again — secrecy is all.”

  I shrugged, left The Suite, and took a taxi to my flat, went in and had a shower and a change of clothing, then went down to my lock-up garage to get out the replacement car, a Jensen, that in my absence overseas had been delivered by a Focal House driver. I did what I always do, which was to make a sight check under the car’s body and wheel arches, and found no suspicious lumps or bulges. Then I backed out. It was while I was backing out that I heard the muffled scream, a
woman’s scream that seemed to be shouting a warning, and hard on its heels the gunshots came and my rear screen shattered into a million pieces. My windscreen went too, but somehow or other I didn’t, though I felt a lot of blood run from both ears.

  Behind, a car’s engine revved hard and I heard another scream, this time the scream of tyres as the car was wrenched at high speed round a corner.

  Using my mirrors I reversed at speed, smashing away meanwhile at what was left of the Jensen’s windscreen. When I was back beyond the corner the other car had taken, I went ahead into that corner and caught a glimpse of something moving fast without lights, just before it was wrenched around another corner, left.

  I followed, screaming into a quiet road.

  I didn’t see much hope: I knew the road and knew that there were a number of turns that car could take, but I tried something that might work out: off left there was a square, a quiet old square of tall houses now split up into flats, around a locked garden. The turn was the next ahead, and if the vanished driver had taken that, he would find that the only way out was the way he’d gone in.

  So I went in, and I drew a blank.

  No good: time had been wasted now. I swung round corners for a while longer then gave up a hopeless chase and in bitterly cold air that hit me through the non-existent windscreen I headed the Jensen for the M4 and Swindon, where I would exit for Lyneham. I was hoping I would be picked up and followed, which could give me my chance; whoever had tried to kill me would presumably try again, and by now I had convinced myself that the scream I’d heard had been Felicity’s. If that was right, then I would have to be careful for her safety: no more crashes like on Sutton Bank. But there was no tail that I could find, all the way to the M4 entry. And I hadn’t had time during the shooting even to identify the type of car, let alone get its registration number.

  I breakfasted at an RAF airfield in West Germany, ostensibly Major Shaw of the Fight Infantry joining a unit near Bonn. I was on my third cup of coffee when an army helicopter came in to pick me up. Aboard it was a lieutenant-colonel; I asked what his orders were. I think I sounded cautious. He said, “All’s well, Major. I know the score … you’re for Bonn, as a matter of fact. Interview at a high level.”