“The situation regarding food is actually fairly similar,” he concluded. “We built up our farms as much as possible over the years since Hitler tried to starve us out the first time, but we still import considerable amounts of foodstuffs from around the world. The secondary problem involves damage to the transport network, which means that some areas of the country have more than enough food to eat, while others are continually on the verge of starving. The rationing system remains in place, but it has started to fray as people realise that there may not be enough food to go around. The word on the street is that the rich have enough to eat and the poor… can starve for all they care.”
DeRiemer watched Churchill’s face carefully. There had been abuses of the system and Atlee’s Government had ordered an open investigation, revealing dozens of abuses that could, with some imagination, be blamed on Churchill and his Government. It had poisoned the minds of the citizens in some parts of Britain. Now, with a war on, such distractions could be fatal to the country as a whole.
“I want the system to be as open and fair as possible,” Churchill said, finally. He must have felt some of the taunts that had been directed at him in the past. “Are there any other major problems?”
“The refugees,” Parkinson said. His nose managed to pinch still further. “We ordered people to remain at home, but several tens of thousands were able to leave and escape the German noose; unfortunately they’re now draining resources from wherever they ended up. What exactly are we going to do with them?”
Churchill eyed him. “I expect you to treat them as you would any other British citizen,” he said, a dark tone in his voice. “I do not feel that we can blame people for retreating from the Germans, not after the rumours of German atrocities spread, and you will not penalise them for their actions. Find them something useful to do if you can, but you are certainly not to drive them back into the arms of the Germans, understand?”
Parkinson started to say something, caught Churchill’s eye, and fell silent. “Now,” Churchill said, “Admiral; what is the current status of the fleet and the convoys?”
Admiral Cunningham frowned as he answered, “We have taken most of Home Fleet’s destroyers and assigned them to convoy protection duties. The Germans didn’t launch any major U-boat attacks for a few days, which was lucky as we didn’t have any convoys organised and scrambled to put an escort system together. The Germans are attacking convoys now, but we’re hitting U-boats as well and some of our ships have been using American flags, just to provide some measure of protection. Overall, however, we have had some serious losses, and it will only get worse despite the high degree of protection. We don’t have enough convoy escort ships, and if they send one or more of their battleships on a raiding mission, they’re going to blow through convoy defences and annihilate the convoy.”
He paused. “We have continued to raid their supply lines at night and even risked a night bombardment of their positions, but they’re cutting back on their night time convoys, so that’s going to be less effective as time goes on,” he said. “Until we get the reinforcements, we’re just going to be able to hold our own against the Germans and preserve as much as we can of the remaining fleet.”
Churchill stood up.
“The situation looks grim,” he said firmly. “Regardless, the night always looks darkest before the dawn, and we must not despair. They too have their problems; they too have issues with the inflexible laws of supply and military logistics. They can be beaten, gentlemen, and we will defeat them. We will burn them out of England and show Hitler’s enemies that though he is evil incarnate, he can be beaten.”
On that note, the meeting ended. “I need a word with you, Prime Minister,” Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies said. The Director of MI6 leaned closer. “This concerns Percy and Alex as well.”
Churchill waited until the room was cleared of everyone but the four of them. “This had better be important,” he said, shortly. “I’m due to address Parliament in an hour and then inspect a Guards Brigade before they leave for the front.”
“I have a source within Hitler’s inner circle,” Menzies said, without preamble. “Actually, he’s connected to one of the inner circle members, so while we hear some things, we don’t always hear everything. The warning about the invasion plan reached us a day after the invasion began…”
“How very useful,” Churchill sneered.
“And we just received another update,” Menzies said, ignoring the Prime Minister’s jibe. “There are two components to the warning, sir; one is good news, and the other is extremely worrying.”
“This air of mystery is becoming tiresome,” Churchill said, annoyed. “What’s the good news?”
“The good news is that the feared invasion at Dover is a German decoy rather than a real attack,” Menzies said. “The Germans intend to force us to keep one eye on them, but they don’t actually intend to establish another beach head, particularly into the teeth of the Dover defences. The bad news… is that Otto Skorzeny is still alive and is hidden somewhere within London.”
“I see,” Churchill said. DeRiemer wondered how he managed to remain so calm; a man with Skorzeny’s reputation was nothing to laugh at, not even in the heart of British power. If he had organised the assault on Downing Street, no wonder it had worked so well and killed the Prime Minister himself. “How reliable is this source?”
Menzies considered for a long moment before he said, “We’ve had indirect contact with him for almost ten years. He sent Belgium a warning about the German invasion, but Hitler changed the date and his second warning was actually ignored until it was too late. He made contact with us later, and sent us information that proved to be accurate although always limited. After the war, he supplied us with information from time to time, but always kept himself firmly to himself.”
“I see,” Churchill said. He looked down at the table, and then back up at Menzies, holding him prisoner with his eyes. “Where is Skorzeny now?”
“We don’t know,” Menzies admitted. “Himmler has a secret source within Britain and that source is helping Skorzeny, but we don’t know who it is or why they’re helping him. Himmler is apparently playing this one very close to his chest.”
“We thought that we had wiped out the German spy networks within hours of the hostilities opening,” Sir Percy Joseph Sillitoe said. The Director General of MI5 looked worried. “The warning of a network so well hidden that we cannot find it is rather… worrying. We thought that we had wiped out the remains of the German force that attacked London, but if some of them survived and managed to escape detection…”
“Yes,” Churchill said, dryly. “I want you to find Skorzeny, whatever it takes, before it’s too late. If there is any truth at all in the superman Radio Berlin claims he is, he will not have gone to ground forever.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
London, England
The sound of a front door key turning in the lock brought Otto Skorzeny to his feet. Pistol in hand, he swung his legs over the sofa and stood as the door swung open. They’d been forced to allow the Englishman to leave his comfortable house to go to work and check the dead drops for messages but it held a danger for the commandos. If Philby had had anything resembling daring, maybe he would have tipped off the British authorities and vanished somewhere within London. That would have been… inconvenient, although Skorzeny had taken Philby’s measure and concluded that the Englishman no longer had the courage to try anything clever.
The thought made him smile. Philby, the communist who had spied for the regime that had stuffed senior communists into gas chambers and junior communists into work gangs, was in a mess. He couldn’t even tell his own people what had happened, because if they took Skorzeny alive and he testified against Philby, the British Government would know just what Philby had been doing for the last ten years. The British people would never forgive him for the invasion, and Skorzeny intended to make sure that Philby got all of the blame for that even though his intellige
nce had only played a small part in helping the Germans to formulate the invasion plans.
He stepped out of cover as the door closed. Philby was just standing there with a distant gaze. Skorzeny coughed gently, and Philby looked up, noticing him. The spy’s face twisted into an astonishing series of emotions; hate, fear, worry… but ended up with a kind of blank mask that reminded Skorzeny of some of the slave gangs he’d seen in the east. It was the face of someone who had accepted his fate.
“So,” he said, enjoying the chance to practice his English, “how was your day?”
Philby didn’t see the funny side. “The office was trying to determine if there was any way that Beria could be convinced to launch an attack into the rear of the Reich,” he said, shortly. His tone, too, was defeated; Skorzeny stepped forward and picked up one of the shopping bags. It hadn’t surprised him to discover that Philby had somehow acquired additional ration stamps from somewhere, enough to keep him in food for years, or feed six hungry German commandos. “They wanted someone to go to Russia directly and speak to him.”
Skorzeny snorted rudely.
“I know,” Philby said. The Red Army had been cut back sharply after their defeat. He was there at the time. The only remaining Red Army divisions were infantry, all equipped with weapons that dated right back to 1941. They weren’t supposed to have any tanks or aircraft, and while Russia was large enough to hide an entire army, Beria wouldn’t risk any secret forces to save Britain. It wouldn’t matter, anyway. There would be enough German soldiers in the west of Russia to defend it against anything Beria might field, without draining soldiers from the invasion of Britain. Adolph Hitler possessed over two hundred divisions, after all, and not all of them could be committed to the invasion of Britain.
Philby carried the other shopping bag into the living room and unloaded it under the table. Skorzeny’s eyes tracked it carefully; sealed tins of beans, corned beef, some fresh vegetables and some chocolate. Philby pulled out a large loaf of bread and Skorzeny sniffed it, noting that it didn’t smell as nice as the ones he remembered from Berlin, although that had been after food had started to pour into the Reich from the east. “They just think that Beria has a motive to go after Hitler, and if Beria should happen to be destroyed, so what?”
Skorzeny laughed at the bitterness in his tone. “You do know that Beria doesn’t even know your name?”
Philby flushed angrily. “I know that,” he sighed tiredly. “I know… I just don’t want to give up what I’ve been!”
“There’s no room for communists in the Reich,” Skorzeny said. He smiled coldly. “We defeated the communists back in 1941 and then we chased them to the east until they finally submitted. Doesn’t that show you something about communism?”
He leaned closer. “I was with SS Adolph Hitler,” he said, referring to the brigade-sized division that had once served as Hitler’s personal bodyguard and had then been upgraded to a fighting formation that earned honours in Yugoslavia and Russia. “I remember how we were welcomed by Ukrainians, who had been treated like dogs by the Commissars and even by Russians. They learned quickly that they had made a mistake, of course, but what would have happened if Stalin hadn’t treated them like that?”
Philby scowled. Skorzeny wondered just how he was holding up, inwardly; somehow, he had justified the fall of the Soviet Union as something other than communism being nonsense. Skorzeny had little time for traitors, but Philby puzzled him; the man had betrayed his country over… what? His faith in communism, every bit as deep and true as a religious conversion, had kept him loyal to the Soviet Union; he hadn’t even questioned it when the contacts had been reopened and he had been ordered to resume sending information.
Himmler had said that Philby was a true believer and looking at him now, Skorzeny suspected that he was right. Philby had believed in World Communism and the Dictatorship of the Workers and Peasants with all of his heart, using it as the justification to put a keen mind and a vast range of contacts at the disposal of the Soviet Union, an intelligence coup that had awed Himmler when he had first learned of it. Skorzeny’s forte was special operations, not intelligence work, but he understood both the value of good intelligence and the need to keep a careful eye on his people, just in case they cracked under the pressures of their work.
“Stalin was a mistake,” Philby said finally, with a desperation Skorzeny doubted he could hear in himself. “He was someone who should never have been allowed anywhere near a place of power.”
“I see,” Skorzeny said as Philby took the food into the kitchen. Skorzeny’s men were upstairs, some of them sleeping while the others kept watch. The smell of food would bring them downstairs soon enough. They now knew who Philby was and why he was helping them. It was something that worried Skorzeny. He’d agreed to kill himself, rather than be taken alive, but the others had made no such commitment. “And what did you find in the dead drop?”
Slowly, unwillingly, Philby reached into his pocket and pulled out a small matchbox. Skorzeny took it and opened it, finding a small sheet of paper, folded over time and time again, which he unfolded and placed on the table. The message looked perfectly innocuous, without anything that would arouse suspicion, but he picked out the code phases easily enough; they had been embedded within what looked like a piece of a novel. Philby’s communications with his handlers had mainly been one-way; it had always been harder to send messages from Germany or Moscow to an agent. If something occurred that code phases didn’t cover, a meeting would have to be arranged, and that would be almost impossible with Britain at war.
“We’re to remain here and prepare for a mission,” he said, after a moment. He cocked an eyebrow. “I trust you won’t mind if we stay for a week longer?”
Philby eyed him murderously. “You can stay here as long as you like, provided you have a way of getting me back to the Reich,” he said, after a moment. Skorzeny didn’t miss the submission in his tone; stripped of everything but himself, Philby had finally abandoned his cause.
Skorzeny shrugged. “When London falls, we will make contact with the German forces and arrange for extraction,” he said as if it wasn’t important. It would have been a personal defeat for him personally; he didn’t want to remain in London passively until the city fell to the advancing Germans. “If the city doesn’t fall, we may have to make our way to Ireland and travel from there to the Reich or maybe steal a boat and sail across to France.”
He threw his hands in the air and grinned at Philby.
“It hardly matters, anyway,” he said. “If we are called upon to perform a mission, we will carry it out whatever it takes, and then we will make our escape.” He frowned. “Or do they have some reason for believing that we might still be alive?”
“There have been some reports of Germans hiding in the streets,” he said after a moment. Skorzeny lifted an eyebrow, wondering. Could it be that others had survived from his unit? They had all had orders to leave the city as swiftly as possible and go to ground, but the British counter-attack would have caught most of them before they could escape. “There have also been other reports of German spies and infiltrators dropping from the skies.”
Skorzeny shook his head, dismissing the rumours. “I don’t think that they would send additional paratroopers into London,” he said after a moment. The Reich didn’t have that many paratroopers, and those they did have would be needed to secure territory in the path of the main advance. “It might be one of those rumours that has gotten out of hand and expanded a bit.”
“They used to have rumours of nuns in hobnailed boots dropping from the sky,” Philby said, as he returned carrying a vast pot of steaming stew. “Do you want to call your men down to eat?”
Skorzeny nodded and summoned the other paratroopers. He was worried about them, even though they all had experience remaining concealed in enemy territory; this Englishman’s home wasn’t some forest hideaway in the middle of insurgent Russia. The experience was almost surreal in its implications; they were in a pleasa
nt home, but if they were caught, they would almost certainly be shot out of hand. The British uniforms might just give any investigator a moment’s pause, but he doubted that it would last long enough for them to react and escape. The bizarre combination of normality and being in the heart of enemy territory would affect them, sooner or later, and if they broke…
“You first,” he said. Philby wasn’t much of a cook and normally ate out, but Skorzeny had insisted on him eating everything he prepared just in case it occurred to him to try to poison the commandos and bury them somewhere in the garden. Now that they’d made contact with Himmler, someone in Berlin would know who had betrayed them and burn Philby from a safe distance, but that wouldn’t stop him taking precautions. Philby couldn’t be trusted even if he only wanted to save his own skin.
The food tasted slightly strange to Skorzeny’s mouth, but Philby ate without hesitation; he’d explained that some British foods included different cooking oils or substitutes caused by the food shortages. He’d then gone off on a rant about how he’d seen the rich obtaining all the food they could possibly want or using their status to gain other advantages or exemption from war duties, something that had made Skorzeny laugh. The rich of Britain might have betrayed their duty, but Philby had betrayed his entire country and he used the black market. He was little more than a hypocrite who would probably have been liquidated had he ever arrived in Moscow.
“So,” he said when the uncomfortable meal had ended, “did you manage to find a way of getting us identification cards?”
Philby considered for a moment. “I believe I could get you some cards,” he said after a moment. “There is a filing clerk who owes me a favour, and I could ask him to present me with some cards for you, but they wouldn’t be very useful. The ones that would allow you into secure areas aren’t available at his level of clearance.”
The Invasion of 1950 Page 25
