Initiative (The Red Gambit Series Book 6)

by Colin Gee

  He smiled the usual dazzling smile, the one that his reputation as a ladies man was founded upon.

  “Only the best for you, honey.”

  He looked at his watch and made his move.

  “Now, do you need to freshen up after your journey, or shall we have dinner first?”

  Olivia von Sandow half closed her eyes, pursing her lips in an innocent but completely not in the slightest bit innocent fashion.

  “Actually, Humphrey, I wondered if we might eat in the room? I’m really very tired and would much prefer something more intimate… if that’s ok with you, darling?”

  Seven minutes later, Humphrey exploded noisily inside her mouth, her expert ministrations relieving his pent-up sexual frustration.

  “Fucking hell, Olivia. And on a first date too!”

  She gave a little shrug.

  “Is any purpose served by beating about the bush, Humphrey? You’re here to fuck me… I’m here because I want to be fucked by you.”

  Her direct approach was like an aphrodisiac to his ears.

  “Anyway, you really did need that, didn’t you, darling Humphrey?”

  Looking down with the biggest of grins, he ran his fingers through her long dark hair and cupped her chin with great tenderness.

  “I will always need you, sweetheart.”

  She kissed the head of his softening member.

  “And now that you’ve emptied yourself, we can relax and have a nice meal, eh?”

  Von Sandow giggled and stood up, kissing him lightly on the cheek as she straightened out her clothes.

  “Now I feel hungry. Shall we go down, darling?”

  On their way to the elegant main dining room, Olivia nodded to someone she knew, informing Humphrey that he worked at the embassy, but not to worry, as he was also there for the same reasons as them.

  She coughed and wiped her mouth with a small handkerchief, sharing a knowing and decidedly sexual look with her escort, before disappearing into the restaurant, where the maître di immediately swept the couple off to a private corner, as Humphrey Forbes had previously requested.

  The man, for whom the nod was a simple signal, waited whilst the couple disappeared, and gave them time to settle before acting.

  That he worked at the German Embassy was correct, but his reason for being at the hotel was other than von Sandow suggested.

  He walked quickly up to the front desk with an envelope he produced from his pocket, marked with the name that Olivia was using in her ‘secret’ liaison.

  The clerk was immediately attentive.

  “Good evening, Sir. How may I assist?”

  “Hi there. I’ve an envelope for Miss Jacqueline Dawson. I wonder if you could retain it and pass it to her as soon as is possible please?”

  He offered up the envelope, which the clerk took with great care, examining the details.

  “Most certainly, Sir. I will attend to it personally. Miss Dawson is dining at the moment, and I will pass it to her the moment she leaves the restaurant, if that’s acceptable to you?”

  “Yes, thanks. That’ll be just fine.”

  The clerk turned and slotted the envelope into a numbered hole in the rack.

  ‘104.’

  “Thank you.”

  The German Intelligence officer moved away from the desk and waited until the clerk was heavily engaged with another guest before swiftly mounting the stairs, two at a time, and finding himself in front of the door to suite 104.

  The hotel door lock could not defeat a trained spy for long, and a few twists of his picklocks were enough for him to gain entry.

  He found the small briefcase easily, and his camera started to record its contents.

  Another pair of eyes had registered Olivia’s movement through the lobby and into the dining room.

  Michael Green, having a well-earned break away from his clothing business, watched von Sandow through the periphery of his vision, all the time engaging his NKVD contact and lover in conversation.

  Seemingly, no signal was passed, none that could have been detected for what it was in any case, but Green, also known as Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov, and presently the NKVD rezident in America, understood the cough and handkerchief to be a definite confirmation that his agent had snared her target, and that it was likely that the information would soon start to flow from the senator from Illinois, namely Humphrey Randall Forbes.

  With professional care, he idly cased the room again, and made eye contact with the huge breasted woman sat three sofas away, drawing a coquettish smile that promised everything he wished for.

  He intended to enjoy the sexual delights that Dilara Bölükbaşı would offer when she would clandestinely slip into his room later.

  For now, he accepted her smile with the natural nod of a man interested but too shy to approach, and resumed reading the sports pages of his paper.

  The FBI pair assigned to watch Dilara Bölükbaşı, suspected as being a member of Turkish Intelligence, and also suspected of being a double agent for the NKVD, saw the exchange, but neither felt it was anything but a man-woman thing, based around the wares the Turkish woman had prominently on display. There had been a number of other such non-events in the hour that they had observed her.

  Of greater concern to them now was the presence of the Senator, member of the recently established Armed Services Committee. One agent slipped away to make an urgent call, summoning reinforcements.

  The third angel sounded, and a great star fell from Heaven, burning like a torch, and it fell upon a third of the rivers, and on the springs of waters. The name of the Star is called Wormwood, and a third of the waters became Wormwood, and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.

  Revelations 8:11

  Chapter 151 – THE HORROR

  0601 hrs, Monday, 27th May 1946, Briefing room, North Field, Tinian, Mariana Island Group.

  They had practised the mission hard, as much as the short time span would permit, which had meant, including the day the order had arrived, twenty-five days of take-offs, precise navigation, dropping inactive bombs, three actual bombing missions, and all things that had generally welded them into a first-class team.

  The day beforehand, their B-29 had dropped a pumpkin bomb on Miyazaki, as part of a group of B-29s sent on a milk run job over an ailing enemy nation.

  It had been a singularly rude awakening when two of the Superfortresses were chopped from the sky by Japanese fighters of a type never seen before.

  One rear gunner, Staff Sergeant Arthur Hanebury, took out one of the impressive fighters, sending it spinning away into the sea, important pieces detaching themselves with every rotation.

  The surviving two fighters damaged two more B-29s before drawing off, ahead of the arrival of a wave of protective US fighters.

  It was Hanebury’s fourth kill, and second as a Superfort gunner, and the previous evening’s celebrations, although muted by the loss of two crews, were still heavy enough to have left a mark.

  Not so much of a mark that he and the men of ‘Dimples 98’ were not ready and raring to go.

  “Ten-hut!”

  The assembled crews sprang to their feet as the door at the end of the Quonset hut flew open, and the progress of their unit commander and S-2 were announced by the sharp sound of feet marching in unison.

  The two officers reached the end of the briefing hut and came to a position of parade rest.

  “Be seated.”

  The crews dropped into their chairs in eager anticipation, recognising their own excitement mirrored in the CO’s face.

  “Special mission 17 is go. We go the day aft…”

  The whistles and yells drowned out the rest of Tibbets’ words, so he stopped and let his boys have their moment.

  The noise subsided gradually, as senior aircrew called the rest to order.

  “We go on Wednesday 29th. You all know the mission profile… this is what we’ve been training for… and soon it all comes good.”

  He nodde
d at his Intelligence officer to start.

  Lieutenant Colonel Hazen Payette, the 509th Composite’s intelligence officer, pulled back the red cover, revealing the map, with its taped routes and targets clear in the eye of every man present.

  As he spoke, occasionally pointing at the map, notes were taken, even by those who were not tasked for Mission 17, just in case a failure or a loss promoted them to participating in the greatest bombing raid in history.

  Hazen drew their attention to the new fighter aircraft that had wounded and killed men from other units in the 313th Bombardment Wing the day beforehand.

  “Intelligence suggests that they’re Nakajima 87’s, a specialised high-altitude interceptor. Seems like 679th Bombardment Squadron also had a run-in a couple of days beforehand.”

  No one stated the obvious about the lack of intelligence communications on the matter.

  “Anyway, they don’t seem to have many of them, but they’re bad news for sure. The powers-that-be’ve upgraded our fighter support, and three squadrons of long-range Mustangs, not one, will be staging out of our foothold on Taiwan to escort you all the way in and out.”

  Nods gave the seal of approval to the upgrade in fighter protection.

  Hazen finished up and ceded the floor to Colonel Tibbets.

  “Final mission allocation, gentlemen.”

  He pulled aside the black cloth, revealing the aircraft assigned to which task.

  There were whoops and groans, depending on the job allocated, the deeper groans from those whose call sign was not on display and therefore had no role in Special mission 17.

  Major JP Crail spoke to his boys through the hubbub of joy and disappointment.

  “At least we get to fly, boys. And who knows, eh?”

  There were three possible targets for the mission, a situation brought about by the unpredictable nature of Japanese weather. The alternates were listed, should there be obscuration issues over target number one.

  Hiroshima.

  The B-29 could bomb by radar, but the mission parameters required a visual drop.

  Hiroshima and the two alternates, Kokura and Nagasaki, each had a weather assessment aircraft assigned, the three B-29 crews happy to be involved, but restrained because they had no active role to play.

  Dimples 85, 71, and 83 were assigned to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Kokura, each aircraft recorded by their nose name, as ‘Straight Flush’, ‘Jabit III’, and ‘Full House’ respectively.

  Dimples 89, ‘The Great Artiste’, was slated for the bombing group, its blast measuring gear there to record what happened when the mission hit the target.

  ‘Necessary Evil’, call sign Dimples 91, was also in the bomb group, included as official observation and photography unit.

  Tibbets would take ‘Enola Gay’, Dimples 82, and carry the Atomic bomb, serial number L-11, as primary strike aircraft on the mission.

  Which left Crail and his crew, in Dimples 98, who would be armed with L-9, a fully operational device that they would take into the air and bring back home, unless Tibbets and Enola Gay fell by the wayside.

  Crail smiled across at Eddie Costello of ‘Laggin Dragon’, who was not rostered to play any part.

  The hurt in his friend’s eyes gave him a moment’s pause.

  In the background, he heard the ‘dismiss’, which was underlined by the scrape of chairs as men rose up.

  He nodded sympathetically to Costello and brought his attention back to his disappointed crew.

  “Could be worse, guys,” he inclined his head towards the silent crew of the ‘Dragon’.

  “Now, let’s grab some chow.”

  Crail’s crew were a quality team, brought together by their excellence at their individual crafts, and welded into a tight and efficient group by training, and training, and yet more training.

  They were mainly good friends, although there were frictions, as there always will be.

  They were officers and NCOs, college boys and farmer’s sons, whose only common ground was servicing the Silverbird B-29 and the country whose uniform they wore.

  Fig # 180 – The Japanese Home Islands.

  0301 hrs, Wednesday, 29th May 1946, North Field, Tinian, Marianas Island Group.

  ‘Miss Merlene’ rose into the dark sky with as much grace as its overweight frame would permit, throttles pressed hard against the stops to extract maximum power.

  In the blackness below, the sight of headlights and torches flitting around the shape of a B-29 stood out, the more so because of the importance of what had happened precisely six minutes beforehand.

  Special mission 17, now known as Centerboard One, had not started well.

  ‘Enola Gay’ was fourth off, and had been taxiing to the runway when her outside port engine did what the Wright R-3350s did now and again.

  Normally such failures were based around an issue with the valves, the ground crew called it ‘eating them’, where the valves were somehow drawn into the engine.

  The alloy crankcase meant that any combustion was abetted by the magnesium, making such failures frequently fatal to the engine and mission, and if airborne, highly dangerous for the crews.

  The fire had been brought under control speedily, as the strip had twice the normal allocation of emergency response considered standard for a ‘Very Heavy’ bomb group.

  But Tibbets and his aircraft were spent, which meant that the burden of the attack now fell upon ‘Miss Merlene’ and her crew instead.

  The training cut in, so Crail moved up to the take-off position and waited whilst the Weaponeer and his assistant were speedily transferred from the lame duck to his craft.

  No sooner were the two Navy men aboard than permission to take-off was in hand, and ‘Miss Merlene’ rolled down the North runway to a date with history.

  The sun rose over Japan at 0428 hrs precisely, bathing cockpits and crew positions in a penetrating light that seemed to almost single out each man in a beam of focussed attention, as a spotlight plays upon an actor on a stage.

  Most of the crew saw the patterns of the ‘Rising Sun’ flag within the beams of light that radiated outwards from the fiery ball, and each felt the sight was an omen… one way, or the other.

  And then, when the beauty and awe of the sight fell away, each man felt uncomfortable at the attention the sun gave him, as if the rays singled him out, and him alone, making him a target, vulnerable and exposed to what was to come.

  ‘The Great Artiste’, ‘Necessary Evil’, and ‘Miss Merlene’ came together over Iwo Jima and set course for the primary target, Hiroshima.

  Ahead of them, the three meteorological birds plied their craft, and fed back mission-changing data.

  Crail listened as Jones, the radio operator, passed on the information from ‘Straight Flush’ over Hiroshima.

  ‘Solid cloud… Ten-tenths… No chance of bombing visually.’

  “Damn.”

  The mission protocol was quite clear, but the decision was not his to make.

  That responsibility lay with William Parsons, mission commander and weaponeer, a US Navy Captain presently working in the bomb bay, finishing up arming the ‘Little Boy’ bomb.

  Three minutes later, Parsons arrived in the cockpit and announced the successful arming of L-9.

  Crail briefed him in a minimum number of words.

  “Shit. We could consider radar delivery?”

  “No, Sir. The orders are quite specific on that. Visual delivery only.”

  “Shit.”

  Army Air Force and Navy agreed on the situation, and Hiroshima gained a reprieve.

  “Alternate one?”

  “Patchy cloud cover, but probably will be fine by our time over target.”

  “Alternate two?”

  “Perfect so far, predicted best conditions for time on target.”

  “Mission implications, Major?”

  “Eight minutes difference in flight time. Alternate mission profile allows for increased enemy defensive measures, but nothing that would sk
ip past our escort guys.”

  “Your recommendation?”

  “Get another check… we don’t need to commit for another…err… six minutes. A lot could change in that time, Sir.”

  Parsons nodded.

  “Make that call, Major. I need a drink.”

  The Naval officer disappeared to seek out one of the thermos flasks whilst Crail confirmed the latest from the Met planes.

  Five minutes passed in the blink of an eye, and Parsons, accompanied by Naval 2nd Lieutenant Jeppson, appeared back in the cockpit.

  Crail got in first.

  “No change on primary. Alternate One has increasing cloud cover. Alternate Two is clear, Sir.”

  Parsons exchanged looks with Jeppson, who simply nodded.

  “Alternate Two is the target. Send it, Major.”

  The radio operator, Staff Sergeant P.S. Jones the Third, fired out the one word transmission three times.

  ‘Burnside… Burnside… Burnside…’

  In Hiroshima, the primary target, and Nagasaki, Alternate One, no one felt relieved, no one celebrated, and no one thanked their God for sending a modicum of cloud to spare them from the horrors of Atomic warfare.

  Both cities, plus a number of others, had been spared from heavy attack until this day, a conscious cold-blooded decision made so that the bomb could be used on a relatively intact target, to permit proper understanding of its destructive force.

  The people in Kokura thanked their ancestors, or their God, for the continued sparing of lives, although they had no understanding of why the Yankees did not darken the skies above them, as they did most other places in the Empire.

  In Kokura, life went on as normal.

  The workers in the Arsenal, one of the last major production facilities available to the Empire of Japan, went about their business, blissfully unaware that a decision, made high up in the sky many miles away, was bringing death on a biblical scale to their front doors that very day.

  Centerboard One was coming.