Even as a knife appeared in his hand, the one with blood streaming down his chin from his injured mouth was no longer all that dangerous — he was too enraged to think clearly. The blade flashed in the dim street lighting, but he dodged it easily as it cut the air where his face should have been. Ducking under the swing, he presented the wielder with a hard jab to the stomach. As the man was bent double by the impact, he followed up by sending his left forearm into the side of the man’s already injured face. With a dazed wail, the skinhead sagged to the ground, the strength draining out of him.
It was at that moment he caught a flash of movement from the third man out of the corner of his eye. Whirling, Thorne attempted to gain some fighting room and remove himself from the proximity of the thug he’d just poleaxed, but the last attacker was far too quick to allow that. A fist crashed against his temple before he had time to duck, sending stars and fire coursing across his mind and eyes.
He staggered backward and crashed to his knees, thinking groggily that he heard Anna screaming again. Trying to turn his head in her direction, he barely caught sight of the Doc Marten as it arced in toward him. The impact fractured his skull and dropped him completely to the hard cobblestones in a daze. The doctors would tell him later he was lucky: another inch or so the wrong way and that boot might’ve crushed his skull, such had been the force of the blow. ‘Lucky’… for a few years he’d actually believed that.
He could hear his wife wailing for help now, and he knew the last one had caught her before she could run. If she’d left him the moment they’d attacked, she’d might’ve had a chance, but the thought of abandoning him had never entered her mind. He tried to move, but his limbs refused to respond and the world kept spinning round and round his unfocussed eyes. It was the screams that’d drive him very nearly mad for years afterward. It was her screams that night that he’d hear in his head and continue to tear at his heart and mind, long after his wife’s eventual death.
When he’d first recovered from his injuries, and Anna had been waiting for him outside the hospital, he’d agreed with the doctors that he’d been lucky, really… he’d heal okay… and as for his wife… well, Anna was a strong woman, the psychiatrist had told him. As it was, they hadn’t really hurt her very much physically, apart from the rape itself, of course, and hopefully the mental anguish and feelings of violation would subside with time, given enough love and support.
That was how it’d seemed at the time, at least, and it’d be four more years before they found out the doctors had all been completely and utterly wrong. He’d carried a picture of his wife in his wallet in the years after, yet the only image of her he could ever recall was that of her on her deathbed, her skin ashen and drawn tight upon frail bones and a shattered body. In the end he was happy for her: happy that her suffering was finally over.
Thorne woke up in tears as usual after the nightmare, although it’d been the first time he’d experienced it so badly since they’d made the jump. During the preceding nights he’d only suffered through unnerving ‘snippets’ of the dreams, which had been a marked change in comparison to the constant night terrors he’d suffered through in the twelve months or so leading up to Hindsight’s displacement.
In the two years following her death, his ongoing erratic behaviour led to continuing speculation at MI6 that he’d be replaced as head of the investigation he’d been directing into advanced Neo-Nazi activities within Britain and Europe in general. It was only after the abduction of Samuel Lowenstein and the realisation there was something far more serious and sinister in the wind, that he’d finally managed to bring his life under control once more. As the United Nations came on board and billions of dollars of funding began to flood in, the Hindsight Interception Unit was officially born and, on the surface at least, it appeared that Max Thorne was finally on the road to recovery. He’d told no one during that time of the existence of the recurring nightmare that by that stage he’d been experiencing regularly for almost three years.
The luminous hands on his wristwatch informed him it was 3:35am. He groaned and sat up in bed, staring about his quarters in the darkness and glad he didn’t share a room. Groggy at first, he slipped slowly out of bed and pulled a pair of track pants and T-shirt over his shorts and bare chest. Opening the door and checking that the hallway was empty, he slipped silently out, instinctively knowing what he needed to help him sleep.
He ignored the biting cold as he stepped from the barracks and walked gingerly along a path of crushed gravel in bare feet before entering the nearby officers’ mess, attached as it was to the far end of the same building. He moved silently for all that, and if any of the nearby night piquets saw or heard him, none raised any alarm.
There were still embers enough left in the fireplace inside to ignite a newly placed piece of wood, and with the blinds all drawn as per blackout regulations there was little likelihood of anyone from outside noticing the glow of the small fire.
A quick search behind the bar located what he was looking for. The fiery rum burned his throat as he drank straight from the bottle, but it made him feel a little better. Bundaberg Rum it wasn’t — not even up to the standard of Bacardi as far as white rum went — but it’d do the job well enough in an emergency.
The orderly assigned to him would find him asleep in that armchair two hours later and help him back to bed before he was missed. A dyed-in-the-wool military man of twenty-eight years service, the dour corporal would never countenance the idea of reporting the event to anyone or of mentioning the half-bottle of rum he found by the CO’s chair. It was replaced behind the bar before the cleaners arrived that morning.
9. Taking Care of Business
HMS Proserpine, Home Fleet Naval Anchorage
Scapa Flow, Orkney Islands
Monday
July 15, 1940
Kransky hadn’t been given much time to rest upon arrival back in England, and by and large he was fairly happy with that. He was a man used to being in action and on constant alert, and extended periods of time alone with his thoughts wasn’t something he actively pursued. He was quite pleased to discover that SOE already had an assignment waiting for him upon arrival as he stepped off the boat in Dover, accompanied by a commission into the British Army at the rank of major. He’d requested immediate embarkation, happy to have anything to keep his mind active, and Army GHQ were equally happy to oblige: they sent him north.
His first suspicion that something unusual was going on at Scapa Flow was as his Dakota transport began its final approach. While circling the remarkably large base on Hoy Island below, he caught sight of several things he at first felt certain must have been a poor attempt at deceiving the Germans. Two massive aircraft sat on concrete hardstands near the hangar end of the main runway, aircraft so large they initially seemed too huge to be anything but fakes… phonies set up to perhaps frighten or confuse an enemy’s reconnaissance aircraft or intelligence services. However as they drew closer and came in for landing, Kransky was ultimately forced to throw out the notion of decoys: not only did they seem far too detailed and well-made to be false on closer inspection, but something in the back of his mind also suggested it made no sense for someone to create ‘fakes’ that were so patently unbelievable.