The Athens Assignment
Page 11
“I’ll give them heat,” said Frank and proceeded to do so. His stubbled face and dirty shirt, after a month at sea, contrasted with the pristine uniforms of the desk officers they met around the dockyard.
“Listen,” he said. “Miss Schneider is an extremely brave woman. I don’t know what she’s been doing because I’m not allowed to know and neither are you. But my instructions are to deliver her to you for urgent despatch to London for debriefing. If you’re unable to organise that, please put me in touch with an officer who can.”
Finally, here was Sub-Lieutenant Patterson.
“About bloody time, if you ask me,” said Frank.
“My apologies, Miss Schneider. We have received instructions after all, and I’ve been told to take you to the airfield immediately. Can I offer you a drink? Water? I’m afraid we don’t have terribly long.”
“Where are all the big ships?” asked Frank as they strode out to a waiting car.
“Oh well, we can’t say, of course. But between you and me, they were sent to Gibraltar to replace Force H which has been hunting the Bismarck.”
The Bismarck. Of course! She had been so exhausted and had slept for so long on the submarine, that she had almost forgotten the reason she had come here in the first place. On board the Rorqual, she was still in the dark. But here, she could find out the end of the story.
“I’m so sorry, but I have been rather cut off. What happened to the Bismarck?”
“You don’t know? Oh well, we got her. The Home Fleet sank her last week. She was heading for France and nearly made it. Miss Schneider? Are you all right?”
Xanthe dissolved into tears.
“Excuse me for being a nuisance. But can I sit down, just for a moment?”
Patterson and Frank helped her to a battered chair, and for a few minutes, Xanthe wept uncontrollably.
She cared little whether her signal had made a difference or not. The Hood was avenged, Hugh was avenged. With or without her assistance, the navy had done it. The team, of which she was a minor part, had achieved it. They were tears of intense relief, for herself and for Indigo, in a peculiarly uncertain world.
Then she blew her nose, took a deep breath, brushed herself down and got up. The two naval officers offered her a hand and looked a little embarrassed.
“I’m very sorry. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m recovered.”
Good grief, she said to herself as she headed across the naval tarmac towards Patterson’s car. She had felt so exhausted that she had wondered in Athens whether she was suffering from some kind of post-natal infection, but she felt physically better, and now she was pretending to be recovering mentally too. Is my upper lip now stiff, she asked herself? Have I actually become one of them?
*
The homecoming in London was almost as disconcerting. Nobody met her at the airfield in Buckinghamshire. She had been driven into London and was dropped at Euston, where she caught the train to Bletchley.
“Shh! He’s asleep,” said Sister Agnes, smiling. “Oh, it’s you! How lovely to see you, Xanthe. Little Indy will be so pleased to see you too…”
Indy? She thought the diminutive had been hers alone. Why was anyone else using it? She put her small bag down by the cot.
“Do you think he’s missed me?”
“Of course he’s missed you! He was only just asking, ‘When’s mummy coming home?’”
For a moment, Xanthe wondered if this could be right. Had she been away so long that Indigo could speak? No, she was more tired than she realised – this was one of Agnes’ fund of little jokes.
A moment later, he was in her arms, still sleeping, and she began to sleep too, the sleep of the depths of her relief. “But this isn’t home either,” she murmured as she fell asleep. “I need to go back to Ohio.”
*
When there was a knock on the door, she was unsure whether she had slept for five minutes or five hours, except that Indigo slept on, much as before, giving little twitches as he lay there, breathing deeply.
“Come in?” she said, as quietly as she could.
Whoever it was came in.
“Oh, um, um. So sorry, I’ll… I mean, I’ll come back later.”
“Oh, come in, Alan, for goodness sake. I haven’t got a breast out or anything to frighten the British horses.”
He grinned sheepishly.
“I know this may be hard to understand, but not everyone shares this obsession with breasts, enjoyed by so many of my male colleagues.”
“Really? Oh well, I thought you all did.”
For a moment, her thoughts drifted to Giorgios in the cavern under Athens cathedral. What was he doing now?
“Ah, um, well…” said Alan. “Has anyone said thanks to you?”
“No. I haven’t seen anyone.”
“Honestly, what a shower! Well, er, Fleming asked me to say thanks from him.”
“Thanks for what?”
“Because your message got through and it got a reply.”
“It did?”
A huge electric charge of jubilation pulsed through Xanthe, and she gave a great whoop of triumph. Then she checked herself – and then the baby, stirring uncomfortably beside her.
“Oh, look, don’t make me too excited, Alan. I need Indigo to sleep.”
“Yes, amazing, wasn’t it? The message from Jeschonnek got a reply, saying that Bismarck was heading for Brest.”
“So I did help?” she said in a whisper.
“Yes, I gather you really did. Officially, Bismarck was spotted heading in a circle by a plane from Coastal Command. But thanks to you, we knew far better where to look. The Home Fleet did the rest. Thanks to you.”
“Oh Alan, that is absolutely fab!”
“Fab? What’s that when it’s at home?”
She laughed.
“Just means good, right. Fab?”
*
All that held back her jubilation was the peculiar sight of someone she knew in the crowd on Euston station. She felt absolutely certain it had been Hugh. But why had she seen him? Was she so exhausted that her imagination was playing tricks on her? Or was he actually alive – that seemed impossible, given the descriptions she had been given about his death. Had it actually been some kind of ghost, sent to welcome her home? Yet, if it was, it hadn’t seen her.
She had shouted across the heads of the crowd of soldiers and sailors on leave – “Hugh! Hugh! It’s me! Over here!” But there had been no reaction. Had she gone completely doolally?
As soon as she had slept, she would contact his friend, Tug and find out if there was any possibility, any mistaken identity that would have allowed Hugh to have survived.
In the meantime, she was going to sleep.
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Author’s Note
This is a continuation of the story of Xanthe Schneider, which began in my book, The Berlin Affair. Like that book, this one is based – if not quite on true events – largely on real people. I have leaned heavily, therefore, on Betty Wason’s memoir, Miracle in Hellas (Museum Press, London, 1943) and Argyris Fortounas’s memories of Aegina at the time, in his book, An Island at War (Shoestring Press, Nottingham, 2012). Both of them, and, of course, Turing and Fleming, were real people. The idea at the heart of this book is real too: the Bismarck was pinpointed, partly thanks to a decrypted signal from the Luftwaffe general in Athens, asking where the ship was heading. I have always wondered if this story was quite as simple as it seems, and this book suggests an answer.
DCB, Steyning, October 2017
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