Avenging Steel: The First Collection

by Hall, Ian

  At eight-thirty, when the first newspapers came off the press, we stood eyes wide open looking at the sheer devilment on the front page. I shook with excitement.

  At nine, Alice and I walked away. Our audacity made no difference then, the deed had been done, huge machines five floors below were already churning tens of thousands of copies. We would probably pay dearly in the morning, but right then, strolling the darkening streets, the morning seemed a lifetime away.

  “I want to go to the Hotel.” Alice said as we strode through the dark lanes on the Meadows.

  I was in no mood to argue. Kellermann’s bag of clothes lay forgotten in the office, and as my arm slipped round her waist, I steered her to the left, taking the familiar path up to our expensive boudoir.

  What I didn’t plan was for us both to fall asleep afterwards. I awoke to the first light of dawn streaming in the window.

  “Crap!”

  Victory in the Desert

  Explaining a lie to an irate mother is never an easy task. I pushed the door open at exactly seven thirty-seven and walked right into a barrage that would have felled an ox.

  “Where the hell have you been?” she roared. Her hands were on her hips, her stance challenging me to speak.

  “I got drunk.” I said meekly. The shortest lie is always the most convincing. I had a copy of the newspaper in my hand, and passed it across the four feet separating us. “we… we printed this.”

  But of course, mother wasn’t interested in a newspaper; she wanted to know why her son had stayed out all night for the first time in his life.

  “You got drunk?” she mocked me. “It that the extent of it?”

  I nodded. “After Churchill’s message, we all got pretty smashed, then we went back to the office, changed the headlines. We’re probably all going to get fired for it.”

  She looked at the paper for the first time, her eyes devouring our brazen words. “Where did you sleep?”

  “Charlie Chambers’ place. On the couch.”

  “Did you have dinner?”

  “No.” I shook my head. About that I wasn’t lying. I was starving. “Or breakfast. As soon as I woke, I got back here.”

  She turned away, moving into the kitchen. “Get through here.”

  “Yes, Mum.”

  Thankfully the worst seemed to be over. Yes, she’d worried when I hadn’t returned home, yes, she’d heard the news, and she had put two and two together. Unfortunately I knew there was a presence in the room that hadn’t been mentioned yet. I watched her cook me porridge, dish it out into a bowl, and place it on the table.

  “Alice didn’t get home last night either.”

  I had been waiting for it, and had practiced my reply. “Really?” I looked shocked. “She left before I did.” I sprinkled salt, and attacked the porridge. “Mind you, she was with Daphne and the other girls. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she’s hung-over this morning.” I grinned, recalling our love-making the night before.

  “Are you two together?” Mum asked. “You know, seeing each other.” My shit-eating grin must have gone a little too wide. “James Baird!”

  It was time for a little lie, covering the larger truth. “We did kiss last night. Mind you, there was a lot of drink flowing, lots of people kissed last night.”

  She wagged a finger in my face. “You just watch yourselves, my man. Nothing good will come of it.”

  “Yes, Mum.”

  I ate heartily, seeing the goodness of our hastily-conceived plan. We’d let mum fume all day, and when Alice and I came in from work, she’d have gotten over her rage.

  After porridge, I changed clothes, and shot out of the door as quickly as I could.

  As I rounded the drizzly corner of Princes Street onto North Bridge, I expected to see German trucks outside the office, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. On entering, I called ‘morning’ to Daphne, and got no kind of warning of Germans upstairs. In the office, with the smell of fresh meat pies wafting up my nostrils, I was met with a cute smile, a light peck on the cheek, and a slap on my backside when I turned away. Life was good.

  I looked at the bag on my desk. “Crawfords?”

  Alice nodded. They made the best pies in Edinburgh. Mum still referred to them Crawfords-the-Bakers, as if their job description needed constant defining. “It should still be warm.”

  And it was.

  I looked at the pile of books on the window sill, my sign I had a message to deliver. As the hours passed, I grew more and more nervous that no-one had showed up to receive it.

  For all my sense of dread, we got through the morning without incident of any kind.

  But of course, it was nearing the one o’clock deadline; I still had to face the bear.

  Leutnant Möller sat impassive; neither his expression nor demeanor allowed me a chink into his mood. He handed me my folder, and with a puzzled expression, I turned away.

  “I did not enjoy your replacement yesterday.”

  I turned, very aware that a tirade could begin here. “I was called away, I’m sorry. My sister… sorry.”

  “Tomorrow you will find me at our new headquarters building.” He eventually looked up. To my surprise I saw humor in his eyes. “You know the building?”

  “Yes, I know it.”

  “I thought you had heard of it…” He lifted a copy of our newspaper from a box on the floor. “You have an unmistakable style, Mister Baird. I see your hand in this.” He tapped the Victory in the Desert headline. “Be careful in future, Mister Baird, I may not always be able to save you from yourself.”

  I nodded, unable to find words.

  “Your father in Palestine?”

  “Yes?”

  “He knows about the Jews, what they represent. You would be well-advised to learn from him.”

  I refused to show the emotion he roused in me. I had taken the day off yesterday to rescue a Jew. Did Möller know something specific, or was he just fishing? “I’m not certain I get your drift, Leutnant.”

  “Oh, I’m quite certain you do.” He made a shooing motion with his free hand, and I gratefully retreated from his presence.

  Later that day, I decided to deal with Kellermann’s package myself; it was far easier to lose a tail when working alone.

  As far as I knew, there were six ways out of the Scotsman building, but in my time with the paper I had not used the one onto Fleshmarket Close. Looking up and down the steep pavement, I turned left, and bent my back to climbing up the wet slope onto Cockburn Street.

  The drizzle had settled into a more persistent downpour, and I was instantly grateful for the trilby part of my disguise. Using every street technique I could remember, I must have twisted and doubled-back a hundred times. I got on and off trams until my head spun. By the time I’d gotten to Portobello, I was in no doubt that anyone who might have been tailing me was well and truly shaken off.

  “He’s not in,” the landlady answered when I arrived at the door.

  I was immediately on my guard. “Have you any idea where he went?”

  “Down to the beach, I think.”

  The rain had stopped, but it was still hardly the weather for walking the beach. I left the package in the hallway, and walked down to the sands, remembering my new memory with Alice, just an event-filled day ago.

  I recognized the gaunt figure of Walter Kellermann immediately, down by the shore, his white shirt sleeves folded past his elbows.

  I’m not sure why I stayed back, but for some minutes I watched him, his face animated, his lips in constant motion, hands jerky and lively. If he’d had a companion his behavior would be perfectly normal, but here on his own, he looked a shade manic.

  Eventually I decided to approach, hearing a little of his personal diatribe. “… but it can be made into a bomb. That’s the problem with the theory…” Kellermann glanced at me and stopped talking.

  “I brought you some clothes,” I said. He fidgeted like I made him uncomfortable. “Just the basics, I’m afraid, but it’ll tide yo
u over.”

  “Thank you,” he frowned, looking suddenly lost; a fish out of water. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it, undecided.

  “You can confide in me, you know.” I didn’t know what he was keeping bottled up, but something was eating him away from the inside. “Sometimes a problem shared is a problem halved.” I could almost hear mum say it.

  “You don’t want to know, trust me.”

  “It’s completely up to you, Professor Kellermann.”

  He turned to the east and began to walk, looking over his shoulder to see if I followed. In seconds I had caught up.

  “The principles we have been theorizing on are complex, and not easy for the layman to digest.” I nodded, but kept my mouth shut. “Nuclear theory.”

  I had heard the term, but not much else, and I admitted so to him.

  “Basically, we’re looking inside the atom, breaking it apart, and harnessing the resultant energy that is developed.”

  “It doesn’t sound an easy task.”

  He gave me an enigmatic, suffering smile. “I’m afraid what the Nazis could force us to do.”

  “Us?”

  “Born, Fuchs, Peierls, Cassels.”

  “Hasn’t Peierls gone back to Birmingham?”

  Kellermann shook his head. “He’s bedding a waitress from a nearby bar. For a scientist, he’s got a dynamic libido.”

  I almost laughed. “How important do you think Peierls is?”

  “After just a week in his company, I’m convinced he’s the closest of us all to the answers.”

  “And that makes him important?”

  “It’s the reason I’m walking the beach, trying to convince myself that if he won’t go into hiding, I’d be better shooting him.”

  “What?” Not at all where I expected the conversation to go.

  “It is not exactly common talk, but every major power has some kind of nuclear program. We all know that the first country to make the bomb will win the war.”

  “But it’s just a bomb,” I said. “We’ve got bombs already.”

  “We’re talking apples and oranges. One nuclear weapon, if detonated above Edinburgh, would kill most of the inhabitants.”

  That one was difficult to swallow. Edinburgh had a population of almost 200,000. “Everyone?”

  Kellermann nodded. “Not to mention the resultant radiation. That would infect and incapacitate everyone within twenty miles, maybe more.”

  “But surely an explosion of that magnitude would take a bomb bigger than any plane could carry?”

  “Again, you’re not getting the gravity of the problem. I’m talking about an explosive charge the size of a football. We’re not talking mainstream explosives here; we’re talking about a nuclear reaction. We’re talking about a fireball five miles wide. The country that wins that race wins the war. There’s nothing that could stand up to it.”

  I stopped. If what Kellermann was telling me was the truth, and I had no reason to doubt him, then compared to the importance of this ‘bomb’, everything else was window-dressing. “Then there’s men dying right now that don’t have to?”

  He nodded, his face distorted in a grimace of pain. “The only thing that matters in the world right now, is making and perfecting the bomb. The first team to win the race enslaves the world.”

  And then, right then, I grasped what I was doing. I really appreciated my own role in the grander scheme. I was engaged in a world-wide struggle, a jig-saw of purely epic proportions, and little-old me, Biggles the master-spy, was only a small piece, yes, but it seemed every piece was important to the whole picture.

  If we had the bomb, we’d send Hitler packing back to the jail he deserved, and the war would be over. However, if the German’s developed the bomb first, I had no doubt they’d use it to take over the entire world.

  But I couldn’t help envisage the rest of the men, the soldiers who were endangered every single day, the men who would die before the bomb was perfected. “They’re dying for nothing.”

  “Who is?”

  “The men in the desert, the men in the U-boats, the men in planes flying missions against their enemy. If the bomb is the only thing that matters, they’re all dying for nothing.” It was difficult to keep my feeling of despair from my tone.

  Yet Kellermann shook his head sharply. “No. Again you’re not getting it,” Hand movements emphasized his passion. “The men who fight right now, are fighting to give us all time to build the bomb. Without them, the Nazis win. Without them, the Nazis can take twenty years to build the bomb. Without them fighting, our work is pointless.” He grabbed me by the shoulders, forcing me to catch his eyes. “You, dear sir, are part of a global effort to stop Germany get the bomb. All over the planet there are scientists and thinkers moving mountains to find the way to the bomb. You, sir, are an essential part. Because of the work you do, you will keep it from Nazi hands. You are just as important cog as I in the larger machine.”

  That night, when I met Alice in the Golf Tavern, I sat behind the colored lead windows and looked out onto the children putting on the small green outside. The idea that their lives could be so close to destruction seemed terrifying. I must admit to being poor company that night, but it seemed she didn’t mind, quite content to hold my hand under the small table.

  Life was flying past me in leaps and bounds.

  A Thank-You and a Smile

  “Don’t tell me exactly where Kellermann is, but give me a rough direction.” Ivanhoe’s hushed tone travelled across the book tops. I could see his eyes looking up and down the next aisle. The University library made a great meeting point, but I now had doubts about Ivanhoe’s operations. The pile of books in my window had taken him a whole day to answer, whereas Lilith had been very quick. I wondered where she was.

  “Kellermann’s east of town.”

  “So could you get him to Musselburgh?”

  It was just a stone’s throw along the coast from his current position. “Probably.” I kept my answer vague.

  “Do you know the town?”

  I’d been there for the Musselburgh horse races, one of my choice memories; a family picnic. “Not well.”

  “Okay.” He glanced up and down the aisle again, obviously nervous. “As soon as you get to the outskirts, there’s a road, a left turn, runs down to the harbor. Take that road, and walk along the promenade. Someone will contact you.”

  “When?”

  “This evening, about seven.”

  I didn’t like the imprecise idea of time. “About seven? Can we be more specific?”

  His eyes flashed anger over the tops of the dusty books. “I’m making this up as I go along here. Don’t be such a shite! About seven!” And he stalked off, his heavy footfalls heard for a moment or two.

  Again, the organization seemed to be falling apart around him, more and more snapped instructions, now nebulous timings.

  This morning, Alice too had seemed distracted, and when I had gone to meet Ivanhoe, she gave me a lame excuse of meeting a friend, and went her own way, leaving us no idea where we’d meet up later.

  I now had to get Kellermann and his notes to Musselburgh by seven. I attended a lecture that afternoon, but my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t even bother to take notes.

  Halfway through, a student interrupted, whispering in the lecturer’s ear. Together they looked around the auditorium.

  “James Baird?” the Professor fixed on me.

  “Yes, sir?” I said nervously. In olden times I would have wondered what I’d done wrong, what administrative quirk had found me out. Today I worried if there were German soldiers standing in the corridor with levelled Schmeissers.

  “Outside.”

  My heart sank. I left my book, my plain piece of unmarked paper.

  Thankfully, apart from the student who had interrupted the class, the corridor was empty. “I’m Ian Craig.” He said nervously. “I need help.” I put his accent at mid-England somewhere, maybe Manchester.

  “I’m not sure I
understand.” I was immediately suspicious. I didn’t know this chap from Adam. “Help?”

  “I’m a Math’s student. I think you’re working with the resistance. You could get me out.”

  Yes, I thought, and you could be a German plant sent to flush me out. It wouldn’t be difficult, just send him round random classes, asking the same questions until he hit pay-dirt.

  “I’m sorry, Ian, but you’ve got the wrong James Baird or something.” I turned to walk back into my classroom.

  He grabbed my arm. “I’m desperate.” He almost sobbed. “I worked with Kellermann. If I don’t disappear, they’ll catch up with me too.”

  Damn, he was good, sending all the right words to me. “I don’t know you.” I said emphatically. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You were at Kings Buildings when Max Born spoke. You and a woman. I was on the door. I checked your matriculation card. That’s why I know your name.”

  Again, his words were true, but I had to hold out. “And you could have been briefed to say that.”

  “I have a photographic memory.” He said, closing his eyes slightly. “James Baird. Student ID 0094627. 9 Barclay Terrace. Edinburgh. Birthdate 15th October, 1920. Reading Philosophy.”

  He opened his eyes and grinned as if he’d passed a test. I decided to test him. “The person before me?”

  “Patrick Donovan. Student ID 0093288. 25 Tyler’s Gardens, Brechin. Birthdate 22nd January 1919. Reading Physics.”

  “And my companion?”

  “She didn’t show a card.” Craig shook his head. “She didn’t even try.”

  Damn if he didn’t get it right.

  “Argh.” I sighed in frustration. I couldn’t just let him dangle for the Nazis to pick up. Yet, if he were a German insider, if I did anything remotely like helping him, I’d be under immediate observation at the least. I’d blow my own cover, and possibly others too.

  “Do you have any luggage?”

  Craig shook his head. “None,”

  That made him even more suspicious. “No papers? Documents?”

  He tapped his forehead. “It’s all up here.”