World War II Thriller Collection (97 page)

“Have you heard from Hermia?” Harald asked him. Arne was engaged to an English girl whom he had not seen for more than a year, since the Germans had occupied Denmark.

Arne shook his head. “I tried to write to her. I found an address for the British Consulate in Gothenburg.” Danes were allowed to send letters to Sweden, which was neutral. “I addressed it to her at that house, not mentioning the consulate on the envelope. I thought I'd been quite clever, but the censors aren't so easily fooled. My commanding officer brought the letter back to me and said that if I ever tried anything like that again I'd be court-martialed.”

Harald liked Hermia. Some of Arne's girlfriends had been, well, dumb blondes, but Hermia had brains and guts. She was a little scary on first acquaintance, with her dramatic dark looks and her direct manner of speech; but she had endeared herself to Harald by treating him like a man, not just someone's kid brother. And she was sensationally voluptuous in a swimsuit. “Do you still want to marry her?”

“God, yes—if she's alive. She might have been killed by a bomb in London.”

“It must be hard, not knowing.”

Arne nodded, then said, “How about you? Any action?”

Harald shrugged. “Girls my age aren't interested in schoolboys.” He said it lightly, but he was hiding real resentment. He had suffered a couple of wounding rejections.

“I suppose they want to date a guy who can spend some money on them.”

“Exactly. And younger girls . . . I met a girl at Easter, Birgit Claussen.”

“Claussen? The boatbuilding family in Morlunde?”

“Yes. She's pretty, but she's only sixteen, and she was so boring to talk to.”

“It's just as well. The family are Catholics. The old man wouldn't approve.”

“I know.” Harald frowned. “He's strange, though. At Easter he preached about tolerance.”

“He's about as tolerant as Vlad the Impaler.” Arne threw away the stub of his cigarette. “Let's go and talk to the old tyrant.”

“Before we go in . . .”

“What?”

“How are things in the army?”

“Grim. We can't defend our country, and most of the time I'm not allowed to fly.”

“How long can this go on?”

“Who knows? Maybe forever. The Nazis have won everything. There's no opposition left but the British, and they're hanging on by a thread.”

Harald lowered his voice, although there was no one to listen. “Surely someone in Copenhagen must be starting a Resistance movement?”

Arne shrugged. “If they were, and I knew about it, I couldn't tell you, could I?” Then, before Harald could say more, Arne dashed through the rain toward the light shining from the kitchen.

Hermia Mount looked with dismay at her lunch—two charred sausages, a dollop of runny mashed potato, and a mound of overcooked cabbage—and she thought with longing of a bar on the Copenhagen waterfront that served three kinds of herring with salad, pickles, warm bread, and lager beer.

She had been brought up in Denmark. Her father had been a British diplomat who spent most of his career in Scandinavian countries. Hermia had worked in the British Embassy in Copenhagen, first as a secretary, later as assistant to a naval attaché who was in fact with MI6, the secret intelligence service. When her father died, and her mother returned to London, Hermia stayed on, partly because of her job, but mainly because she was engaged to a Danish pilot, Arne Olufsen.

Then, on April 9, 1940, Hitler invaded Denmark. Four anxious days later, Hermia and a group of British officials had left in a special diplomatic train that brought them through Germany to the Dutch frontier, from where they traveled through neutral Holland and on to London.

Now at the age of thirty Hermia was an intelligence analyst in charge
of MI6's Denmark desk. Along with most of the service, she had been evacuated from its London headquarters at 54 Broadway, near Buckingham Palace, to Bletchley Park, a large country house on the edge of a village fifty miles north of the capital.

A Nissen hut hastily erected in the grounds served as canteen. Hermia was glad to be escaping the Blitz, but she wished that by some miracle they could also have evacuated one of London's charming little Italian or French restaurants, so that she would have something to eat. She forked a little mash into her mouth and forced herself to swallow.

To take her mind off the taste of the food, she put today's
Daily Express
beside her plate. The British had just lost the Mediterranean island of Crete. The
Express
tried to put a brave face on it, claiming the battle had cost Hitler eighteen thousand men, but the depressing truth was that this was another in a long line of triumphs for the Nazis.

Glancing up, she saw a short man of about her own age coming toward her, carrying a cup of tea, walking briskly but with a noticeable limp. “May I join you?” he said cheerfully, and sat opposite her without waiting for an answer. “I'm Digby Hoare. I know who you are.”

She raised an eyebrow and said, “Make yourself at home.”

The note of irony in her voice made no apparent impact. He just said, “Thanks.”

She had seen him around once or twice. He had an energetic air, despite his limp. He was no matinee idol, with his unruly dark hair, but he had nice blue eyes, and his features were pleasantly craggy in a Humphrey Bogart way. She asked him, “What department are you with?”

“I work in London, actually.”

That was not an answer to her question, she noted. She pushed her plate aside.

He said, “You don't like the food?”

“Do you?”

“I'll tell you something. I've debriefed pilots who have been shot down over France and made their way home. We think we're experiencing austerity, but we don't know the meaning of the word. The Frogs are starving to death. After hearing those stories, everything tastes good to me.”

“Austerity is no excuse for vile cooking,” Hermia said crisply.

He grinned. “They told me you were a bit waspish.”

“What else did they tell you?”

“That you're bilingual in English and Danish—which is why you're head of the Denmark desk, I presume.”

“No. The war is the reason for that. Before, no woman ever rose above the level of secretary-assistant in MI6. We didn't have analytical minds, you see. We were more suited to homemaking and child-rearing. But since war broke out, women's brains have undergone a remarkable change, and we have become capable of work that previously could only be accomplished by the masculine mentality.”

He took her sarcasm with easy good humor. “I've noticed that, too,” he said. “Wonders never cease.”

“Why have you been checking up on me?”

“Two reasons. First, because you're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen.” This time he was not grinning.

He had succeeded in surprising her. Men did not often say she was beautiful. Handsome, perhaps; striking, sometimes; imposing, often. Her face was a long oval, perfectly regular, but with severe dark hair, hooded eyes, and a nose too big to be pretty. She could not think of a witty rejoinder. “What's the other reason?”

He glanced sideways. Two older women were sharing their table, and although they were chatting to each other, they were probably also half-listening to Digby and Hermia. “I'll tell you in a minute,” he said. “Would you like to go out on the tiles?”

He had surprised her again. “What?”

“Will you go out with me?”

“Certainly not.”

For a moment he seemed nonplussed. Then his grin returned, and he said, “Don't sugar the pill, give it to me straight.”

She could not help smiling.

“We could go to the pictures,” he persisted. “Or to the Shoulder of Mutton Pub in Old Bletchley. Or both.”

She shook her head. “No, thank you,” she said firmly.

“Oh.” He seemed crestfallen.

Did he think she was turning him down because of his disability? She
hastened to put that right. “I'm engaged,” she said. She showed him the ring on her left hand.

“I didn't notice.”

“Men never do.”

“Who's the lucky fellow?”

“A pilot in the Danish army.”

“Over there, I presume.”

“As far as I know. I haven't heard from him for a year.”

The two ladies left the table, and Digby's manner changed. His face turned serious and his voice became quiet but urgent. “Take a look at this, please.” He drew from his pocket a sheet of flimsy paper and handed it to her.

She had seen such flimsy sheets before, here at Bletchley Park. As she expected, it was a decrypt of an enemy radio signal.

“I imagine I've no need to tell you how desperately secret this is,” Digby said.

“No need.”

“I believe you speak German as well as Danish.”

She nodded. “In Denmark, all schoolchildren learn German, and English and Latin as well.” She studied the signal for a moment. “Information from Freya?”

“That's what's puzzling us. It's not a word in German. I thought it might mean something in one of the Scandinavian languages.”

“It does, in a way,” she said. “Freya is a Norse goddess—in fact she's the Viking Venus, the goddess of love.”

“Ah!” Digby looked thoughtful. “Well, that's something, but it doesn't get us far.”

“What's this all about?”

“We're losing too many bombers.”

Hermia frowned. “I read about the last big raid in the newspapers—they said it was a great success.”

Digby just looked at her.

“Oh, I see,” she said. “You don't tell the newspapers the truth.”

He remained silent.

“In fact, my entire picture of the bombing campaign is mere
propaganda,” she went on. “The truth is that it's a complete disaster.” To her dismay, he still did not contradict her. “For heaven's sake, how many aircraft did we lose?”

“Fifty percent.”

“Dear God.” Hermia looked away. Some of those pilots had fiancées, she thought. “But if this goes on . . .”

“Exactly.”

She looked again at the decrypt. “Is Freya a spy?”

“It's my job to find out.”

“What can I do?”

“Tell me more about the goddess.”

Hermia dug back into her memory. She had learned the Norse myths at school, but that was a long time ago. “Freya has a gold necklace that is very precious. It was given to her by four dwarves. It's guarded by the watchman of the gods . . . Heimdal, I think his name is.”

“A watchman. That makes sense.”

“Freya could be a spy with access to advance information about air raids.”

“She could also be a machine for detecting approaching aircraft before they come within sight.”

“I've heard that we have such machines, but I've no idea how they work.”

“Three possible ways: infrared, lidar, and radar. Infrared detectors would pick up the rays emitted by a hot aircraft engine, or possibly its exhaust. Lidar is a system of optical pulses sent out by the detection apparatus and reflected back off the aircraft. Radar is the same thing with radio pulses.”

“I've just remembered something else. Heimdal can see for a hundred miles by day or night.”

“That makes it sound more like a machine.”

“That's what I was thinking.”

Digby finished his tea and stood up. “If you have any more thoughts, will you let me know?”

“Of course. Where do I find you?”

“Number Ten, Downing Street.”

“Oh!” She was impressed.

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye,” she said, and watched him walk away.

She sat there for a few moments. It had been an interesting conversation in more ways than one. Digby Hoare was very high-powered: the Prime Minister himself must be worried about the loss of bombers. Was the use of the code name Freya mere coincidence, or was there a Scandinavian connection?

She had enjoyed Digby's asking her out. Although she was not interested in dating another man, it was nice to be asked.

After a while, the sight of her uneaten lunch began to get her down. She took her tray to the slops table and scraped her plate into the pigbin. Then she went to the ladies' room.

While she was in a cubicle, she heard a group of young women come in, chattering animatedly. She was about to emerge when one of them said, “That Digby Hoare doesn't waste time—talk about a fast worker.”

Hermia froze with her hand on the doorknob.

“I saw him move in on Miss Mount,” said an older voice. “He must be a tit man.”

The others giggled. In the cubicle, Hermia frowned at this reference to her generous figure.

“I think she gave him the brush-off, though,” said the first girl.

“Wouldn't you? I couldn't fancy a man with a wooden leg.”

A third girl spoke with a Scots accent. “I wonder if he takes it off when he shags you,” she said, and they all laughed.

Hermia had heard enough. She opened the door, stepped out, and said, “If I find out, I'll let you know.”

The three girls were shocked into silence, and Hermia left before they had time to recover.

She stepped out of the wooden building. The wide green lawn, with its cedar trees and swan pond, had been disfigured by huts thrown up in haste to accommodate the hundreds of staff from London. She crossed the park to the house, an ornate Victorian mansion built of red brick.

She passed through the grand porch and made her way to her office in the old servants' quarters, a tiny L-shaped space that had probably been the
boot room. It had one small window too high to see out of, so she worked with the light on all day. There was a phone on her desk and a typewriter on a side table. Her predecessor had had a secretary, but women were expected to do their own typing. On her desk, she found a package from Copenhagen.

After Hitler's invasion of Poland, she had laid the foundations of a small spy network in Denmark. Its leader was her fiancé's friend, Poul Kirke. He had put together a group of young men who believed that their small country was going to be overrun by its larger neighbor, and the only way to fight for freedom was to cooperate with the British. Poul had declared that the group, who called themselves the Nightwatchmen, would not be saboteurs or assassins, but would pass military information to British Intelligence. This achievement by Hermia—unique for a woman—had won her promotion to head of the Denmark desk.

The package contained some of the fruits of her foresight. There was a batch of reports, already decrypted for her by the code room, on German military dispositions in Denmark: army bases on the central island of Fyn; naval traffic in the Kattegat, the sea that separated Denmark from Sweden; and the names of senior German officers in Copenhagen.