The Proteus Operation

by James P. Hogan

  Winslade spread his hands. "But you never make your connection in Berlin. You get off the train early, at Leipzig. It will be nighttime, and if you're stopped at Leipzig station you can say that as foreigners you were confused by the blackout and thought the train had reached Berlin. Wait until the train is just about to leave to make sure you'll be left stranded, which will be your reason for checking into a hotel for the night." Winslade looked at Lindemann and raised his eyebrows in an invitation for him to continue.

  Lindemann cleared his throat. "I will introduce you to someone who'll be able to fill you in on current details regarding hotel registration, police checks, and so on," he began. "Now, for the next morning. Near the center of town is a square known as the Rathausplatz. One of the streets leading into it is called Kanzlerstrasse, a narrow, cobbled affair with a bierhaus on the corner, under a clock. A short distance along Kanzlerstrasse, you'll find a shoemender's with the name Hoffenzollen outside. You're to go in there and say that you've come for the shoes that were being heeled for Fräulein Schultz. You should be asked if she has recovered from her cold yet. You are to reply, "Yes, she's much better now. It's been such a dreadful winter."

  "And follow instructions from there on," Winslade said. "You both know the drill."

  Ferracini and Cassidy glanced at each other, but neither of them had any immediate questions. "What about the gear?" Cassidy asked, looking back at Winslade.

  "We've decided against air-dropping it," Winslade replied. "Instead, it's being independently routed, in two containers again, each going a different way. Each consignment will be enough to do the job."

  "Independently routed was a trade euphemism. It meant that the equipment would be transported separately by people who were considered more expendable than the six Ampersand specialists. If a container fell into the wrong hands and the people handling it were caught, they would know neither what its contents were nor its ultimate destination; nor would they know that a second container even existed. If both containers went astray, at least the team would be preserved, with the option to try again later by some other means.

  Assuming all went well, however, the Ampersand personnel would be able to retrieve the containers once they had been brought to safe drop points by the anonymous "other parties," as Lindemann called them, and after at least one of the Ampersand pairs had found its contact. But as a further precaution, until both conditions were satisfied the containers would not be retrievable.

  The whereabouts of a container would be represented by a standard six-figure map reference, of the kind that Ferracini and Cassidy were already familiar with, Lindemann explained. After safely depositing their container, the other parties involved would place different small ads in two of the local papers. To anybody who knew how to decipher them, each ad would provide one half of the map reference. The Ampersand people would know which ad to look for in one paper; their local contact would know which ad to look for in the other paper. Thus, only when the two had met would reconstruction of the complete map reference become possible. The second container would be obtained in the same way, but of course the two ads relating to it, and the group of other parties responsible for placing them, would be different.

  After completion of the mission, escape would be effected via a submarine rendezvous off the Baltic coast. A method of coded telephone calls to the American Consulate in Berlin had been worked out, whereby dates and timings for the rendezvous could be fixed with the British Admiralty via Washington.

  Departure date would be the end of February. The remaining time until then would be devoted to becoming familiar with details of life in contemporary Europe, memorizing cover stories, and all the usual precautionary chores.

  A knock sounded on the door just as they were finishing up. The naval sentry outside opened the door, and Churchill came in to inquire on progress. The papers that day had applauded his decision to send in the Cossack and said it exemplified the kind of spirit that the government should be showing more of; he was in a jaunty mood. "They'd have all ended up in prison camp if we'd waited for our illustrious friend to move at his usual funereal pace," he told them. Churchill's latest choice epithet for Chamberlain was "The Undertaker from Birmingham." He waved Ferracini and Cassidy back into their chairs as they started to rise and rubbed his palms together as he stood looking at them. "Well, and how does the plan strike you? You'll be the ones more affected by it than anybody."

  "It seems . . . very thoroughly worked out, sir," Ferracini said.

  "As fail-safe as you could hope to get," Cassidy agreed.

  Churchill nodded, satisfied. "As the man in Brazil said when asked how his mother-in-law's remains should be disposed of, 'Embalm, cremate, and bury. Take no chances.' With an enterprise of this importance, a comparable measure of prudence seemed in order."

  Winslade smiled. "Why Brazil?" he asked.

  "I have absolutely no idea. That was how I heard it."

  "We'll be talking to the last two of you tomorrow, and then it'll be hard swotting and memorizing for the rest of the month," Lindemann said.

  "And you feel confident that you can do it?" Churchill asked, looking at the two young Americans.

  "Sure," Cassidy replied, shrugging nonchalantly. If the mission screwed up, he told himself, whatever he said would have ceased to matter, anyway.

  Ferracini answered more circumspectly. "The chances look good. Having the unexpected on your side always helps."

  "Splendid." Churchill beamed from one to the other. "I know there's no necessity for me to spell out how much depends on the success of this undertaking. Therefore, I'll spare you any speeches. But you know, I have a feeling that this venture in cooperation across the seas will turn out to herald a grand alliance between our countries before this is over. That may sound strange in view of the current climate of isolationism on your side, but things like that can soon change. Did you two know that my mother was an American, by the way?"

  They talked until lunchtime, at which point Churchill and Lindemann left to keep an appointment with some admirals to discuss U-boat matters. Winslade had arranged for the rest of them to meet Arthur Bannering and some of the others for lunch. They locked the room, ascended two levels, and went out by the front entrance. "You should be getting used to this London by now," Winslade said as he trotted briskly down the main steps with Ferracini on one side of him and Cassidy on the other. "Quite a change from what you'd seen where we came from, eh?"

  "It looks nicer without any of the wrong uniforms around," Cassidy said. "Say, Harry, do you remember what this building we were just in used to be?"

  "Southeast Region Gestapo Headquarters," Ferracini said.

  "And making sure it doesn't become that again is what the mission is all about," Winslade said as they began walking in the direction of Trafalgar Square.

  In the single room that he had rented in a dingy office building almost across the street, the man with the telescopic camera removed the plate on which he had snapped the trio coming down the Admiralty House steps and added it to the pile he had been accumulating all morning. He sighed with boredom and glanced at his watch as he inserted another slide into the camera. Five more hours, and then a crowded bus home, a supper of pie and chips in the transport cafe down the street, maybe a pint at the corner pub, and then back to his seedy bed-sitter in Willesden. To think he'd believed all those stories about a spy's life of wine, women, fast living, and excitement. He hadn't even received the money for the rent and the film yet!

  At the end of the month, Ferracini and Cassidy departed by air from Croydon for Paris as scheduled, the other four having already disappeared during the preceding few days for destinations unknown. A day later, Winslade received an urgent call from New York: Something was happening at Gatehouse again—another partial contact with the 1975 machine. It was faltering and intermittent, but this time the scientists were managing to sustain it. Mortimer Greene felt there was a good chance of connecting fully at any time.

  If a cont
act with 1975 seemed imminent, everyone agreed that Winslade as head of the Proteus group should be present, all the more so since his task in England was finished for the time being. If need arose, the Ampersand operation could be halted anytime within the next week—Ferracini and Cassidy at Home by a message to the American Consulate there, and by similar means in the cases of the others. But the first thing was to get Winslade back to the States as quickly as possible. President Roosevelt had been interested to learn that Anna Kharkiovitch was a historian who had specialized in the politics of the times, and he sent a request via Churchill for her to come over with Winslade. Once more, he arranged for an American military aircraft to be made available for the journey.

  "Just imagine, dinner with the First Lord of the British Admiralty last night, and now a personal invitation from the U.S. President," Anna said to Winslade as a Royal Navy car drove them toward the airport at Hendon, in the northern outskirts of London. "My word, I am becoming popular in this world! Do you know, I don't think I'd mind all that much if we never went back to ours at all."

  Winslade smiled and pretended not to notice the pointed look that she flashed at him beneath the joking words. "It's election year over there," he reminded her. "Roosevelt's just hoping for some campaign tips, I bet."

  Anna sighed. "You know, Claud, you have this rare gift for really boosting a woman's ego."

  "Oh, it's no gift, I assure you. It requires lots of practice."

  Anna's face became serious and distant all of a sudden. "It could mean good news, she murmured thoughtfully. "Very good news, in fact."

  "How come?" Winslade asked her.

  "It could mean that, privately, Roosevelt has already decided to run for a third term," she replied. "Now that, Claud, would really be a change from what we remember, wouldn't it?"

  CHAPTER 34

  WINSLADE'S FACE WAS SERIOUS as he and Mortimer Greene followed Anna up the steps of the loading dock in the front area of Gatehouse and walked toward the facade of boxes and crates screening the rear of the building. The two plainclothes military policemen who had driven with Greene to meet the plane disappeared into the front office to report back to the guard commander.

  "I don't like it," Winslade said. "The bumbling amateur business could be a clever second cover. You say that documents from Abwehr headquarters were found in his apartment? That's enough in itself to make me worry. Canaris is no fool, and he's got some sharp people working for him."

  "Yes, but those documents only dealt with routine matters," Greene said. "There wasn't anything that specifically pointed either to us here or to the mission. And if Fritsch were any kind of a professional at all, he'd never have left even those lying around like that."

  "I still don't like it," Winslade repeated as they threaded their way toward the hidden door that led into the machine area. "I'd like to talk to him myself, later."

  On their way back from the airfield, Greene had told them of the man the guards had caught snooping around the building the day before: a German by the name of Walther Fritsch, who had immigrated several years previously. He was being interrogated elsewhere, but a preliminary check had revealed that he was known to the FBI, which had dismissed him as something of a comic figure working outside the regular German espionage services, and probably not worth the bother of apprehending. In fact, American counterintelligence had found him a useful aid to unraveling the labyrinthine tangle of the Nazi information-gathering system by feeding him planted information and tracing its path through the system. Now it appeared that this assessment might have been dead wrong. If Berlin had gotten wind of what was going on at Gatehouse, the consequences could only be disastrous.

  The machine area had a busy look; lights winked, machinery hummed and whirred overhead and all around; and technicians worked at readout screens and control panels. Kurt Scholder was standing with Szilard and a technician by a large table covered with charts and papers that had been set up in one of the spaces below the machine. Fermi was tinkering with something in the background, while Colonel Adamson, who had been present at the first meeting with Roosevelt at the White House, looked on, along with a lean, sallow-faced man whose face was unfamiliar. Teller was talking to somebody on the walkway above.

  A round of handshakes welcomed Winslade and Anna back. Greene introduced the stranger as Harry Hopkins, a roving presidential aide who had come from Washington in order to make a report on progress. The feeling of expectancy that hung in the air made elaborate preliminaries seem inappropriate.

  "A good flight?" Scholder inquired.

  "As good as could be expected," Winslade said.

  "The Ampersand operation?"

  "They all left on schedule."

  "Still no attack in the West?"

  "Nothing."

  Scholder nodded and changed to more immediate matters by moving back a pace and raising an arm to indicate the panel behind him. "Here we have a most peculiar situation, which has developed only in the space of the last few hours. We managed to stabilize the conjugate function this morning, and now we're reading probe resonance harmonics in the sigma-tau spectrum—and at full strength, not low level."

  Winslade's brow creased. "You don't mean rho-sigma?"

  "No, that's the point. The locking signature is clear and unambiguous."

  The frown on Winslade's face deepened. He explained in answer to Anna's questioning look, "It means we're encountering a probe beam from the other end that's trying to lock on. But it's a full-power beam to activate the main transfer gate, not simply the auxiliary communications channel." He turned to Scholder. "And have you had any luck with the communications side?"

  "No. There's nothing. That subsystem is completely dead."

  "How about the beam that's seeking—did you try a lock-on initiation to see if it would work?"

  "Not yet. Since you were on your way, we decided to wait until you got here," Greene said. He looked at Scholder. "Has there been any change in quality?"

  Scholder shook his head. "Not really. It's still oscillating near threshold. We lost it for fifteen minutes about an hour ago, but it has restored itself since."

  "But it could die on us at any moment," Greene said.

  From what the instruments were saying, the chance was there now to connect the gate through to 1975. In just a few minutes' time, perhaps, they might be able to walk into the cylinder a few feet above their heads and be back in their home time.

  Winslade clasped his hands behind his back and paced a short distance away across the floor. There was really little to think about, but checking one last time for anything he might have missed before committing himself to a decision had long ago become a habit.

  "This intermittency worries me, Claud," Scholder called across, reading Winslade's action an hesitation. "If I could give details of the modifications here to the engineers at the other end, they would be able to make suitable compensations. It would give us a more stable link."

  "We have to go for it now, Claud," Anna urged. "If there's a chance that the Germans might be onto us, we can't risk losing even a day."

  Winslade turned and came back again, smiled faintly at their anxiety. "Then let's go for it," he said. His manner became more brisk. "Okay. Kurt, start priming for lock-on initiation right away."

  "I can handle that," Szilard offered. Winslade raised an eyebrow. Scholder nodded.

  "Fine," Winslade said. Szilard moved away to commence organizing the people around the machine. "You'd better collect your information, Kurt," Winslade said. He looked at Greene. "I'll go through with Kurt if we connect, and leave you to carry on in charge here, Mortimer. Anna, you'd better come with us to start filling in our political people on what's been happening here in the last year." His gaze fell on Harry Hopkins and Colonel Adamson. "And perhaps some kind of representation from this era wouldn't be out of place as a gesture."

  Hopkins held up a hand protectively. "Now wait a minute, I'm just here as a passive observer, remember? President's orders. You're not gett
ing me inside that thing."

  Winslade looked at Adamson. "Keith, how would you like to be the U.S.A.'s first ambassador to another time?"

  "Not thirteenth?" Anna queried. "What about us?"

  "Depends how you look at it," Winslade said. "We're from 1975. This is 1940. Nineteen forty is earlier than 1975."

  Adamson was taken aback. "I really don't know about that. . . . I don't have any orders that say anything about—"

  "Fiddlesticks," Winslade said. "Your orders are to facilitate our mission by all the means at your disposal. Well, this facilitates it. Here . . ." Winslade tossed him the briefcase that Scholder had finished cramming with papers. Then he turned and led the way to the steel stairway behind. Adamson shook his head helplessly, then sighed and followed.

  They climbed the steps and walked along the railed platform flanking the return-gate cylinder to the access port, an opening like a large doorway without a door, leading into the boxlike construction at the end of the cylinder. In front of the port, the walkway widened into a broad platform of steel-mesh flooring, above which a system of pulleys and hoisting tackle hung from overhead girders: There was no telling what might need to be brought through the gate—nuclear bombs, maybe. Winslade positioned himself in the center of the platform, facing the port, and Adamson drew up uncertainly a pace or two behind him.

  A minute or so later, Anna and Scholder joined them; Scholder was clutching a second briefcase. Fermi appeared with one of the technicians and went over to a local monitor panel that communicated with the main control area below, where Greene had remained with Szilard. A group began forming at the back of the platform to watch, including Teller, Harry Hopkins, Einstein, and George Pegram from Columbia.