Bitter Field

by Jack Ludlow

  ‘The idea is to keep whole the country we’re in and stop a German invasion. If I can do what I want, it may be possible to get Britain and France to stand up to Hitler.’

  That made her ponder, but in reality it could only be one of two things: he was either acting for those he had worked for in Ethiopia or the Czechs themselves. She knew what he thought about Fascism, given she had heard him talk about it too many times to be in doubt about his feelings.

  ‘Look, there is danger in this, I won’t lie to you, but it is more to me than to you. In a sticky spot you can always claim you were deceived about me, wave your press credentials and scream for the American ambassador.’

  ‘How do we get to this Cheb?’

  ‘I told you, by car, which I will drive.’

  ‘Long journey?’

  ‘Depends on checkpoints and things I don’t know about. Could be four hours, could be ten.’

  ‘When do we leave?’

  ‘As soon as we get the go-ahead. You happy with what you’ve been told?’

  ‘Like hell I am, but if I’m going to be sitting in a car with you for all that time I guess it will give me a chance to grill you properly.’

  ‘My real name and what I am up to is off-limits and I need your word on that.’

  That made her stop walking and look up at him and there was a note in her distinctive cracked voice, deeper that usual. ‘You telling me, Doc, that you would accept my word?’

  How do you say to someone, I know what you are made of; I have seen you embrace danger and a cause when you could have walked away; struggle through tents full of the dead and dying doing a job for which you had no training and do it superbly; that, in fact, for all the sparring we indulge in, you are admirable?

  ‘Corrie,’ Cal replied, ‘you might be a pain in the backside but you’re an honest pain in the backside, so if you give me your word I know you will keep it.’

  ‘Boy, are you a master of the compliment.’

  ‘Do we have a deal?’

  They had walked ten paces before the answer came, which pleased Cal; he did want her to think it through.

  ‘We do. Do I wait to hear from Henlein?’

  ‘Yes, but I will know the response before you do.’ That got raised eyebrows. ‘Pack a small bag and be ready to go at a moment’s notice, but don’t call down for a porter or say anything to the hotel desk. I will call you on the internal phone and you can carry it down yourself. And try to stay out of sight of any of your colleagues, who are bound to ask where you are going if they see luggage.’

  She giggled. ‘Mata Hari lives.’

  ‘Corrie, this is not funny. If anyone does spot you and asks, say you’re going to check up and try to get a story on the plight of those Jews seeking to get out over the Rumanian border.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The summons for Sir Hugh Sinclair to attend a private meeting at 10 Downing Street with the prime minister was uncommon indeed – he normally briefed the Home Secretary – so much so that it engendered in him a desire to know what was going on before he obeyed the summons.

  So he telephoned next the First Lord of the Admiralty, Duff Cooper, who was a member of Chamberlain’s Cabinet, albeit one who was vocally unhappy with the present policy, though only in private conversation. That required Cooper to make some enquiries before ringing back.

  ‘Neville thinks you are up to something, Quex.’

  ‘It’s my job to be up to something, Freddy.’

  ‘I can’t be certain, but I think Inskip has been whispering in Neville’s ear that you are acting against Government policy.’

  ‘Indeed. No details I suppose?’

  ‘Sorry, old chap, can’t oblige.’

  ‘Thanks anyway, Freddy.’

  ‘Be just like being had up before the beak, I shouldn’t wonder.’ That was followed by a laugh from a man who did that a lot. ‘And what a beak.’

  When Sir Hugh arrived in Downing Street it was to see fishing rods being loaded into the back of the PM’s Humber, along with a basket for his catch, making the head of SIS wonder how anyone could call standing flicking his rod by a riverbank at this time of trouble correct behaviour. When he was shown into the Cabinet room it was to find the PM dressed in tweeds and plus fours, obviously ready for departure.

  Normally in a wing collar and black coat, such country apparel did not improve Neville Chamberlain’s appearance; he was still the pigeon-chested fellow of caricature, tall with his slight stoop and that vulture-like face dominated by dark heavy eyebrows over the nose about which Duff Cooper had made his jest.

  The only person present was his newly appointed cabinet secretary, Edward Bridges, so fresh to the job that he took no part in the conversation; surprisingly he took no minutes either as Chamberlain began to speak in that rather high voice of his, not, Quex noted, while looking him in the eye.

  ‘Sir Hugh, I would like your latest appreciation of the state of affairs over the Sudetenland.’

  ‘I briefed the Home Secretary only two days ago, sir.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that; has anything altered in the meantime to change your opinion of events?’

  ‘No, sir, I fear that Lord Runciman’s mission is mired in intractability, that whatever President Beneš offers will be rejected and that the whole of Henlein’s campaign is being orchestrated from Berlin.’

  ‘You have taken no unusual steps in Czechoslovakia that would fall across the line of Government policy?’

  ‘No, Prime Minister, and neither would I contemplate such a course.’

  ‘Matters are coming to a head, Sir Hugh, perhaps as soon as Herr Hitler’s leader’s speech at Nuremberg. I want nothing between now and that occasion to in any way give the German Chancellor or the leadership of the Sudeten German Party cause for concern. It could be, in short, turned into a flashpoint from which things would either be said or done from which even the best intentions could never recover.’

  ‘Do you have any specific instructions, sir?’

  ‘Only that your task is to support the elected government.’

  ‘As always.’

  Only then did Chamberlain look directly at him and there was nothing benign in his eye.

  ‘Your car is waiting, sir,’ Bridges said, failing to disguise that he had been instructed to remind his boss, in short, to curtail the exchange as soon as the PM had issued what amounted to a warning.

  ‘Ah yes. Do you fish, Sir Hugh?’

  ‘Sad to say, only in troubled waters, Prime Minister.’

  ‘They can be smoothed by application, but not by anyone acting in excess of their instructions.’

  What had been said to him and by whom? There was no point in asking with the beak nose bobbing in dismissal. As he exited the heavy door Quex was tempted to look at the watch he wore in his waistcoat, to let Chamberlain know that he had dragged him up from Victoria for an interview that had lasted all of two to three minutes and that in consequence he was annoyed to be treated worse than a servant; he did not do it from a lifetime’s habit of concealing his emotions.

  Making his way down Whitehall and then across Parliament Square and along Millbank, with the tip of his unnecessary brolly beating out an increasingly angered tattoo on the pavement, it did not take long to nail the potential culprit who had engineered this event but the question remained as to what to do about it.

  If it was McKevitt, then he was entitled to his concerns about policy; Quex did not run a dictatorship but an organisation that had ample room for the free airing of views, even of dissent.

  But the protocol was that such a thing was internal, it was not to be taken outside the walls and if the Ulsterman had done so it was not merely because he disagreed but that he had another motive, and given his ambition was close to an open secret, that did not take long to arrive at either.

  Still ruminating on that, he returned to his office to find the latest telegram transcript from Peter Lanchester, which told him what was being planned in Czechoslovakia, which
in order to approve meant all he had to do was nothing. Was it the right policy to pursue?

  In a very acute sense it went right against what he had just been told by the PM – it was active when Chamberlain wanted passivity and if the truth emerged it would not be a warning he would be given but the door.

  Two problems combined in one solution: he needed to check the machinations of McKevitt, keep the operation that Lanchester had alerted him to in progress while ensuring if it all went tits up the blame lay squarely at another door. The finger was soon on the intercom buzzer to his secretary.

  ‘Ask Noel McKevitt to come and see me, would you, as soon as he has a moment free?’

  Translated that meant ‘immediately’ and was taken as such by the recipient. McKevitt knew that Inskip had passed on his concerns, just as he knew their knowledge of each other and shared interests were well known.

  That meant Quex was going to be hauled in and told to mind his p’s and q’s on Czecho and he had enough respect for the man to think it would not take his boss long to unearth the connection; the call from the top floor told him he already had.

  He was thus well prepared to face Sir Hugh Sinclair’s wrath with the certain knowledge that he was fireproof – there was no way he could be sanctioned for merely doing his job and if he was it would go all the way back up to Downing Street; the man under threat was the man he was going to see.

  ‘Noel, nice of you to respond so quickly. Do take a pew.’ As his backside hit the chair, Quex followed up that jolly greeting. ‘I’ve just had an interesting chat with the PM.’

  ‘Really,’ McKevitt replied, putting as much marvel into the tone as he could and also wondering why the old man’s secretary had stayed in the office, taking a chair well away from the discussion.

  ‘Aye, he’s worried about Czecho – and who can blame him, what?’

  Beware of the cat that smiles, McKevitt was thinking, for if the old man was not actually grinning his tone was too jocular for what he had just gone through.

  ‘Wants nothing to upset the apple cart,’ Quex continued, ‘and as I pointed out to him, that will not be easy, what with the Hun stirring things up. Look what they did to Kendrick in Vienna.’

  And what, McKevitt thought, has that got to do with the price of coal?

  ‘He fears an incident that will somehow compromise his sterling efforts to sustain the peace. What chance do you think there is of something cropping up in, say, Prague, that the Germans could exploit?’

  The temptation to say ‘You would know better than I’ was one that had to be suppressed.

  But he was not going to give this old sod the answer he wanted, which was that such a scenario was unlikely, so that, at some future date and backed by the testimony of his secretary, he could openly claim to have asked for a reassurance only to find it not forthcoming. Best seek to be non-committal, not definite, opaque.

  ‘Sure, if they tried anything, it might be there all right.’

  ‘Exactly my point to the PM, they may attempt a repeat of what happened to Captain Kendrick.’

  ‘Prague is not Vienna, sir.’ Presented with a chance to be sarcastic he was not about to pass it up. ‘The Gestapo has, as far as I’m aware, no power of arrest there.’

  ‘True, but any accusation that excessive numbers of our chaps in situ, and you know the numbers better than I, are involved in using their skills to aid the Czechs might appear in the German papers at any time.’

  ‘I felt that more muscle was needed there, sir; it is after all the present hot spot in my area of responsibility and it could impact on its neighbours.’

  ‘And very apposite that was to move more men in, but how will the Hun see it? What if they publicise the number of our Prague agents in the same way they splashed on Kendrick, with the added information that the establishment has increased threefold. Shipping in more bodies might come back to haunt us, and even if it’s untrue what they claim, the mud, the PM fears, might stick and, I have to tell you, he was even more alarmed to hear we had reinforced the station recently, thus increasing such a risk.’

  ‘I considered it worth an extra effort to keep the Government informed.’

  ‘And, my dear chap,’ Quex cried, ‘it was a brilliant ploy at the time, which I told the PM.’

  ‘But not now?’

  ‘No, it now involves a risk Mr Chamberlain does not want to take! With his agreement I’ve decided to pull out all our chaps in Prague, including those you have shipped in from other stations. They, of course, can go back to their previous posts.’

  The thought could not be avoided: he’s heard about my request to search for new arrivals and he wants to put the mockers on it to give his man, and now I am convinced there is one in place, a free run.

  ‘Only it has to be done with maximum discretion, Noel, and we cannot risk even a coded cipher. So I want you to go to Prague yourself and close down the operations there. It must not, I repeat not, be revealed to either the press or the Germans that we have done so.’

  ‘To ensure discretion will take time. Embassy folk have wagging tongues.’

  ‘Yes, it will, though shipping the extras back should be straightforward.’

  ‘When do you want me to go?’

  ‘I would have thought soonest done soonest mended, wouldn’t you? You can go in on a diplomatic passport, so I would like you to drop everything else and travel as soon as you can.’

  McKevitt made a good fist of looking thoughtful, but he had come to one conclusion while Quex was still talking. ‘It might be best to get everyone out as soon as possible, over a day or two, including the regulars, and stay around to clear up anything outstanding myself.’

  ‘Good thinking, I’m sure with you there any risks will be sealed down tight.’

  Making his way back to his own office, McKevitt was nearly laughing. The old man had just handed him the keys to unlock his suspicions and, while he was there, he would find out what was going on and put a stop to it, but not before he had laid at the door of those who needed to know the truth that Sir Hugh Sinclair was not only losing his touch, he was actively thwarting the policy of those who employed him.

  Odd that Quex was happy too, for Jardine, by the time McKevitt got there, would be long gone from Prague and the Ulsterman had no way of connecting anything to him, doubly so given he was travelling under an assumed name.

  The man might seek to stir things up but that would only play into Quex’s hands, and if it all went up in the air and an incident did occur, how could he carry the can for anything, when the head of the relevant section was on site and in control?

  For all Veseli’s certainties it was an anxious two days and a testing exchange of telegrams before on the Saturday morning the invitation came from Henlein’s press office to say the visit was on and that two rooms were waiting for Corrie in the Victoria Hotel.

  Moravec phoned Cal to confirm, again without using either his name or hers, that Corrie would be given full access to the SdP leader on the Sunday. Cal then called the Ambassador Hotel and alerted Corrie that he was on his way and for her to be ready to move.

  Throwing economy to the winds – it was Moravec’s money after all – Cal had hired a really luxurious and very powerful German-made car, a dark-green Maybach Zeppelin with a soft top, a V12 engine and a top speed that exceeded a hundred miles an hour if you had the courage to push it hard.

  It was also a very weighty car which, apart from a tank, would smash to bits anything it hit – if he had to run he wanted to do so in something hard to catch and impossible to knock off course. He had also bought a good camera, a long lens and several rolls of film, as well as a hunting knife which he would just leave in the car to be found if anyone wanted to search; hiding it would only make it seem suspicious.

  ‘I like the bins,’ Vince said, when Cal tried on the pair of rimless spectacles he’d bought. ‘You’ll look a bit like Himmler now you’ve got your barnet cut short.’

  Cal ran a hand across his now-short red-gol
d hair, then nodded to the telegram he had compiled for Peter Lanchester, lying by the open book of short stories.

  ‘I don’t know why I bother with coding messages. I could get you to telephone Peter and talk to him in cockney.’

  ‘Only one problem, guv, he wouldn’t understand a bleeding word I was saying to him.’

  ‘True, I struggle enough.’

  Cal had begun splitting the notes in his money belt; half he would leave with Vince and the rest he would take. His friend had a simple way of keeping the currencies separate: they went into different pockets.

  ‘You say you’re going to get tooled up when you get to this place.’

  ‘That’s the deal, I’ve asked for a Mauser.’

  ‘A bloke doing the job you’re supposed to be at would not carry a shooter.’

  ‘He’s about to become a reformed character.’

  ‘One who’s out on a very long limb, guv, and as for involving Corrie, well …’ The undertone of what Vince was saying came down to the fact that he was unhappy about being left behind. ‘She’s a game bird, but this might be pushing it a bit.’

  ‘She will have instructions to dump me if I’m exposed, say that I used her.’

  ‘Corrie won’t do that, guv.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because,’ Vince replied with slow deliberation, ‘she fancies you.’

  ‘Rubbish. I’ve got to send that telegram to London,’ Cal responded, ducking the implications of that statement. ‘I’ll get dressed, then let’s get my own bag packed and into the car.’

  ‘You taking all the documents?’

  Vince was referring to those hidden in the Tatra.

  ‘No point, and if they were found they would only get the noses sniffing for more. You sure of what to do if the balloon goes up?’

  ‘How many times do you want me to tell you?’

  Vince had instructions, if the emergency was so dire as to be irresolvable, to think only of himself, to go to the Jewish Emigration Centre and find Elsa Ephraim, using Cal’s name and that of Monty Redfern – she would know how to get him out to safety if he could not use either of his own passports, and given the money he was holding there was always bribery.