The Sons of Adam

by Harry Bingham

There’s a war on, in case you were forgetting.’

  ‘And this is America, in case you were forgetting.’ Bard spat. In America you should be able to fight a world war in Asia and Europe, win in both places, and still give motorists as much cheap gas as they wanted.

  ‘I’m going to Europe,’ said Tom.

  It was true. Tom’s role in the Pacific war was increasingly unnecessary. The oil war had been won so conclusively, that there wasn’t much more for an oilman to do there. From an oil perspective, the real action was transferring to Europe. Tom was America’s top oil strategist. It made every sense for Tom to go out there and liaise closely with the British Petroleum Board.

  But that didn’t mean he wanted to go. The Secretary of State had suggested it. Tom had refused. President Roosevelt had suggested it. Tom had refused. Then Roosevelt had called Tom into the Oval Office, told Tom he was damn well going to go if he, Roosevelt, had ordered him to go. And it was only then, deeply reluctant, but no longer able to say no, that Tom had agreed.

  ‘You just going for a trip,’ said Bard, ‘or –’

  ‘No. There’s work to be done. Plenty of it.’

  Bard stared hard at his boss. There could be only one reason for Tom going to Europe. The Americans were finally going to take the war to Hitler, and Tom was going to be the man holding the petrol pump.

  ‘Sheez,’ said Bard, ‘you gonna have your work cut out there, no mistake. Oil business is hard enough, never mind Kraut-heads shooting at you.’

  Tom nodded agreement. He couldn’t say anything, but Bard was right. Never in the history of war had anything been attempted on the scale now envisaged, and in terms of supply logistics, by far the toughest part related to oil. The American Quartermaster Corps reckoned each allied soldier would need to be supported by approximately seventy pounds of supplies and equipment. Fully half of that total was oil-related.

  But as the moment drew nearer, Tom found it harder and harder to concentrate. He was going to London to meet Alan. He couldn’t think about it. The very idea was like a plate of red-hot metal. If he allowed his mind to touch upon it, even for a second, he had to snatch his attention away with a mental shriek of pain. Alan had tried to kill him, had tried to wreck his company, had tried every way he could to ruin his life. Tom would have given all the money he had – his oil wells, even – to avoid meeting his twin again.

  Bard was looking at his boss with concern. ‘You OK, bud?’

  Tom forced himself to grin. ‘Yeah, guess they’ll keep me busy.’

  ‘So this is like a kind of goodbye visit, then?’

  Tom nodded. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, good luck, pal. I guess you have the honour of serving your country, and all.’

  Tom nodded.

  ‘I’ll take you to Mitch.’

  Tom nodded again. ‘Yeah.’ He hesitated.

  Bard raised an eyebrow. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Yeah, look, do me a favour, would you?’

  ‘Sure. Whatever.’

  ‘Just don’t tell him I sat on the goddamn steam pipe, willya?’

  It was 18 May 1944.

  159

  Pipeline or tanker.

  That was the choice. One alternative which couldn’t be built. A second alternative which was a please-bomb-here invitation to the Luftwaffe. So what was to be done?

  Alan did the only thing he could do. Working with his best engineers, he ordered the development of a brand-new technology, one never used anywhere in the world before. They hammered out the concept during an all-night conference that began with tea and cigarettes and ended with dawn tangling in the London trees and the air thick with tobacco smoke and optimism. They built scale models. The mathematicians ran computations, came up with the wrong answers, and worked their numbers again. Alan ordered prototypes and simulations and dummy runs, until he was sure he had something that could work. But the fact remained there was only one test that mattered, and it was coming up shortly.

  The project had been kept top secret, of course – though, naturally enough, Tom Calloway had been kept in the loop. But it needed a codename and Alan had been the one to christen it. The name, once you thought about it for a moment, was obvious. There was only one thing it could be called: PLUTO.

  The fate of the free world would hang on a thing called PLUTO.

  160

  The Boeing Clipper seaplane bobbed uncomfortably on its ungainly floats. The engines started up, the propellers beating the grey water into spray. The engine noise ascended into a high whine, the plane lurched, then took off, slewing a little in a vicious little sidewind. They gained height and the pilot took the plane round in a long arc, heading east. Beneath them, a dirty Atlantic surf creamed round the rocky Newfoundland coast, before it too passed behind them. They wouldn’t see a coastline again until just a few minutes short of their destination.

  The plane was unheated and it quickly grew freezing. There was a pile of American army-issue blankets at the back of the cabin, and Tom and the four other passengers helped themselves generously. Although it was theoretically a night flight, there wasn’t much darkness this far north at this time of year. Tom attempted to sleep and failed. Instead, for the long thirteen-hour flight, he sat beneath a mound of blankets, half-deafened by the noise, sipped from a flask of coffee he’d brought with him and stared out of the window at the grey-blue world beneath.

  He tried to think of other things. He tried thinking of Rebecca or Mitch or Lyman Bard or Norgaard Petroleum. He tried focusing on work. He thought about PLUTO and the huge test it was about to face. But it was hopeless.

  For the first time since he embarked from Liverpool in 1919, he was returning to the country of his birth. To England. To Alan. He tried to wrestle his thoughts away, but couldn’t. His heart was locked and inaccessible. His feelings were numb. He felt like the seascape passing under the wing: frozen, grey, desolate.

  161

  An odd-looking coaster with a salt-caked smoke-stack nosed her way towards them. The wind was at cross-purposes with the tide, and sharp little waves griddled the water. Alan looked at the boat long and hard through a pair of binoculars. She looked like nothing at all: a snub-nosed sea-tramp out of place amidst the jam of naval shipping. But though less than beautiful, she was the most important ship in port.

  On the dockside with Alan – Sir Alan Montague now, following the death of his father and brother – there was a lieutenant colonel from the American staff. He had the spacious sun-filled manner of a born Westerner, but the slow intelligent eyes of a serious professional. The American looked at the coaster for a little, then said, ‘So? Can we go see it now?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Go see it. PLUTO.’

  Though Alan was tired all the time these days, he couldn’t help but laugh. Obviously no one had told the American what to expect. Alan pointed out across the water. ‘There. PLUTO.’

  ‘What? You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That little … boat?’

  ‘Well, not the ship so much, it’s what’s on board her.’

  The American took another look. The coaster had passed them now. It was clear that her hold had been adapted for some specific type of cargo, but the cargo space itself was empty.

  ‘I’m not getting you,’ said the American. ‘There’s nothing on board her.’

  ‘Precisely. That’s precisely the beauty of it.’

  But Alan wasn’t thinking about PLUTO. He was thinking about Tom. Tom was in England now. In little more than a day, they’d meet. He tried to wrestle his thoughts away, but couldn’t. His heart was locked and inaccessible. His feelings were numb. He felt like the crowded seascape in front of him: wind-blown, grey, desolate.

  162

  The Clipper landed neatly on the windy waters at Stranraer, Scotland. The breeze outside the plane was salt and sharp, and Tom was half soaked by the time they made it from the plane to shore. An American GI had a car waiting.

  ‘Welcome t
o Britain, sir. This your first time over?’

  Tom didn’t even answer that. The car whisked him to a railway station and left him there with his bags. It was all so familiar. The Victorian railway architecture. The big station clock. The tiny rituals of politeness, meticulously observed. The smell of hot tea coming from the station waiting room.

  It was all so familiar – but also different. For a while Tom couldn’t understand it, but then he could. It was to do with class. It wasn’t as though everything had changed, far from it. But the country he’d returned to was no longer the one he’d left. With the entire country at war, who was the gentleman and who the working man? With the entire country governed by ration-book and sacrifice, who was the rich man and who was the poor?

  For a while, Tom waited on the station platform overwhelmed equally by the new and the old. He waited a while, then couldn’t stand it.

  He left his bags and ran from the station. Opposite him, there stood the inevitable Station Hotel. He ran inside.

  ‘I have a call to make to the United States. It’s extremely urgent.’

  He dropped papers on the desk, indicating his seniority. The girl on the desk glanced at them and took Tom to a horrible little booth, overheated, red plush, airless. There was a phone there and a tiny pad of paper. He called the operator and asked for a connection. For forty-four minutes, he waited. And waited. Time slid by and his train wouldn’t wait. When there was just three minutes to go, he gave up. He had stood up to go, when the phone rang. He snatched at it.

  ‘I have your line for you now,’ said the operator.

  Then a ringing tone.

  Far away in Norgaard House a maid picked up the phone. Tom asked her to get Rebecca, to run, to fetch her as quick as possible. He could hear the girl’s footsteps running across the wooden floor as she ran for her mistress. Tom looked at his watch. Two minutes. One and a half. Then more steps, and: ‘Tom?’

  ‘Becca, my God, I can’t stand it here –’

  ‘But you can only just have arrived. Why don’t –’

  ‘Can you join me? As soon as possible? My office can arrange transport.’

  ‘Not very easily. I’m busy here. Perhaps when things at the Foundation quieten down in July.’

  ‘Christ, I’d better not still be here in July. Can’t you come over right away?’

  There was a pause. The lines were unreliable, but this break wasn’t to do with the lines. ‘Is it being in England? Is it meeting Alan Montague?’

  ‘I just need to see you.’

  There was another pause, longer this time. ‘No, dearest Tomek, you need to do this by yourself … Call me from London.’

  ‘Please, Becca, I –’

  ‘Call me from London, Tomek. Good luck.’

  It was 4 June 1944.

  The following day, 5 June, Tom Calloway-Creeley would meet his one-time twin, Alan Montague, for the first time in nearly thirty years. And the day after that, in the very first hours of 6 June, an invasion fleet would begin the landings in Normandy, which would determine the fate of the war.

  Tom sat in an empty first-class compartment and watched the countryside slide past. Time and distance were narrowing now. In a matter of hours, he and Alan would meet again. Tom had no idea what he would say, no idea what he would feel.

  163

  Dusk, 5 June 1944.

  The big car rolled onwards. The trees moaned in the wind and the car’s feeble lights turned little shadows into great ones. Alan was driving and Lottie sat beside him in the passenger seat. The American Petroleum Administration had its British office in a small village a few miles outside Windsor. They were driving there now: driving to meet Tom.

  ‘How do you feel?’ asked Lottie.

  Alan shook his head. ‘Great God! I have no idea at all.’

  Lottie smiled. ‘Well, do you feel more inclined to kill him or more inclined to embrace him?’

  Alan shook his head again. ‘No idea. Though I don’t suppose I’ll embrace him … not unless …’

  Lottie’s tone sharpened an inch or two. ‘Not unless he apologises first? And do you just think it’s possible he’s saying the same?’

  ‘I don’t in all honesty care.’

  Lottie didn’t answer, just pursed her lips and looked crossly out of the window. She knew everything, of course. She knew about her husband’s lunatic war against Tom. She had argued against it, then given up. Like Rebecca in Texas, she had urged the two men to meet, but without success.

  Alan drove on in silence. A burst tyre earlier in the drive had caused them to lose several hours, and the twilight drive had been slow and arduous. Alan was tense and drove too fast. A convoy of army trucks rumbled by, heading south. It was one of the few visible signs of the momentous events that would be taking place in Normandy at dawn tomorrow.

  ‘There are a lot of trucks on the road,’ said Lottie.

  ‘There’s a big operation being launched tomorrow,’ said Alan, who had carefully avoided the topic before.

  ‘The invasion?’

  Alan nodded.

  ‘Of France, I suppose?’

  Alan nodded again. Lottie’s question hadn’t been foolish. The Allied plan had been shrouded in the very highest secrecy from the start. Only a few people in Britain knew. Alan had been one of them. Lottie had not.

  She took a deep breath. ‘Will it … ? I suppose it will … ?’

  Alan snatched a glance sideways before looking back at the road. ‘Be successful? Yes, probably. Might it go wrong? Yes, possibly. Either way, we’re about to find out.’

  He didn’t mention PLUTO, but, of course, the thought was never far from his mind.

  The conversation fell silent. Lottie decided to get some rest and curled up in the back under a travelling blanket.

  Just before the outbreak of war, Alan had bought himself a wine-red Bentley. The car was a pleasure to drive and its huge motor purred evenly under the bonnet. The miles dropped away. But he found it hard to concentrate. A couple of times, he’d taken a bend badly. A couple of times, he’d snatched at the wheel and recovered in time. Each time he’d done so, he glanced in the mirror to see if he’d woken Lottie. Each time, he found her wide blue eyes open and turned on him. He murmured an apology for carelessness and let her sink back into sleep.

  They drew closer to Windsor. He checked the directions and began to head down a steep slope into the little valley below.

  Then it happened.

  ‘Watch out!’ Lottie screamed from the back.

  There was a huge shape, reddish-grey in the headlights. Alan slammed on a brake and swerved. The shape was a deer that bounded away, startled, into the undergrowth.

  ‘Careful,’ said Lottie, ‘careful!’

  Alan, in his anxiety, was annoyed with her for making a meal of what was trivial. He stepped on the accelerator, guiding the big car back into the centre of the road. There was a strange sound, like a sort of metallic sigh. Just for a moment, then nothing.

  Then something else appeared in the lamplight. A tyre, bounding black and silver down the steepening hill. It was their tyre. It bolted downhill, bounced high a couple of times, then vanished.

  ‘Darling!’

  Lottie’s voice was high-pitched and desperately strained.

  Alan tried touching the brakes, but as soon as he did so the big car threatened to dive out of control. He decided to take the hill as well as he could and lose speed naturally on the flat.

  ‘Hold tight!’ he said.

  He flashed the car’s headlights full on, so the road was brilliantly lit. The hill was dangerously steep. With clenched mouth, Alan watched as the gleaming tarmac rode up at him. He took one corner. Then another. The big car was leaping forwards faster and faster. He tried touching the brake again.

  A mistake.

  Control of the car was snatched out of his hands. There was a moment of terrifying freedom. In the sudden blare of headlights, a huge tree appeared, shining white. The tree and the car leaped towards each other.
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  There was a colossal smash.

  164

  Oddly enough to those who had known him earlier in his life, Tom had gained a reputation for coolness and calm among his Washington colleagues. Not tonight.

  Every gust of wind that came through the trees sounded like the arrival of a car. Against all blackout regulations, Tom had had big lights put on in the drive. Five times Tom had checked that the telephone lines were working. He paced and paced. He was a frenzy of nerves.

  By ten o’clock, it was solidly dark. Tom sent his aides and the British house staff back to their lodgings, off to bed. He was the only person left in the house: a former rectory that had been converted into offices. He would have given anything in the world to be away from England, away from Alan.

  He went down into the kitchen, looking for something warm to drink. There was no coffee, only tea. The kitchen was supplied with an old-fashioned range, black kettles, and a tap that ran explosively or not at all. The whole place seemed exactly like the Whitcombe House of forty years earlier. Even the draughty whistle in the chimney struck the same notes. Tom half expected to turn and find Mrs White, the old cook, making pastries in a corner. He shook coal into the range, filled the kettle, found tea leaves. The big stove began to warm. The kettle slowly rose above room temperature.

  Tom waited impatiently for the kettle, burned his finger on the range, longed for home. He wondered what Rebecca was doing right this moment. He wondered how Mitch was doing on the rigs. The kettle began to sing.

  Tom reached to lift it from the stove, but, as he reached, all of a sudden, there was a bang at the door, the jiggle of a latch, a blast of cool air. A woman ran in, as though blown by the wind.

  ‘Please … my husband … please help, there’s been the most terrible accident … He’s on the road back there … I saw your lights … Thank God you’re up.’

  Lottie had no idea whose house she had entered.

  She had been asleep in the back of the car and had no idea where the crash had happened. But one thing was clear: by sheer good fortune, she had come to beg help from a man superbly equipped to give it. Despite Lottie’s shocked and shaken state, the strong American quickly and accurately found out from her what had happened. Instantly, he was on the phone, giving orders, sending for doctors, cutting equipment, fire wardens, an ambulance.