‘Of course,’ said Wills, weakly. ‘It’s just not … normal, that’s all.’
‘Nothing is very normal,’ said Clytemnestra. A German soldier was walking on top of her rifle’s foresight. Her finger tightened on the trigger. Even as she squeezed, Andrea’s Spandau started to chug heavily. Out there on the bare brown plain tiny figures began to drop and roll.
Wills sighted and squeezed, worked the bolt, sighted and squeezed again, and felt the barrel grow hot in his left hand. There were a lot of them: a terrible lot of them. They were not shooting back, though. Thus far, the gasoline drums were a success. But there were too many. They would be able to capture the position by sheer weight of numbers. Unless …
Wills knew with a sort of gloomy certainty that Andrea would have other plans, featuring the destruction of the fuel dump and everyone in it.
The machine gun jammed. The enemy trotted on over the shimmering grass. Any minute now, thought Wills.
Then from behind the line of attackers and to the left, he heard the cough and roar of an aero engine starting; first one, then another, throttling up, then back into a steady clatter. And from the direction of the huts there taxied a twin-engined Heinkel.
The aircraft stuck its nose on to the yellow-dun grass and swung towards the advancing Germans. A heavy, road-drill clatter added itself to the roar of the engines.
‘My God,’ said Wills. ‘He’s machine-gunning them.’ And even as he spoke, the front line of the advance began to collapse. The Germans faltered and stopped. The Heinkel swung back towards the fuel dump and taxied, fast. It came to a halt by the dump entrance. Andrea said, ‘Go. I’ll come.’ He had cleared the Spandau jam. There was still movement out there; squads were re-forming on the grass, and NCOs’ yells drifted down the breeze. As they ran for the entrance, they heard Andrea’s Spandau begin to chug again.
The Heinkel’s door opened. Mallory looked out. Beyond him, Carstairs sat at the controls, smiling an odd smile; a smug smile, cat-gets-the-cream.
‘All aboard,’ said Miller, swinging the mahogany Enigma case in his hand. Mallory jumped down, and went to fetch Andrea. Miller heaved the case up and into the plane. Carstairs reached down and grabbed it. Miller was starting to help Clytemnestra on to the step when Carstairs said, ‘I don’t think so.’ There was a Schmeisser in his hand. The muzzle trembled slightly. It was pointing straight between Miller’s eyes.
‘What?’ said Miller.
‘Bit of a load, six people plus pilot,’ said Carstairs. ‘Not a good idea.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘We don’t want to take any chances with the machine, do we?’ said Carstairs. ‘I mean, who can you trust, nowadays?’
‘You bastard,’ said Wills. ‘You absolute bloody —’
Miller stopped him. He said, ‘What are you going to do with that thing?’
‘Take it to the Allies,’ said Carstairs. ‘Trouble is, I haven’t decided which ones. Everyone wants it. The Yanks have got dollars, the Russians have got gold, and even the poor old Brits have got a couple of bob stowed away in a sock, I shouldn’t wonder. And they don’t like each other much. I’m going to have a little auction, that’s all. Now stand back.’
Miller stood back, pulling Wills and Clytemnestra back with him. His face was completely blank. ‘Goodbye,’ he said.
The door slammed. The engines throttled up. The Heinkel began to roll. Wills raised his Schmeisser. Miller knocked it down with his hand.
‘You can’t let him get away,’ said Wills. ‘He’s a bloody thief. A traitor. You —’
‘Hush,’ said Miller, and Wills observed now that Andrea had come down from his post. ‘The Germans think we’re all on that plane.’
The Heinkel reached the end of the runway and pivoted on one wheel. The engines crescendoed as the throttles went through the gates. It began to roll. It rolled faster and faster, shrinking with distance, the tail lifting, the wheels rising on their suspension until there was daylight under them and the undercarriage came up. A hand came out of the pilot’s window and waved. Then the aircraft turned over the buildings and headed out to sea, chased by the impotent black puffs of a couple of anti-aircraft shells.
‘Hell,’ said Wills. ‘Oh, bloody hell.’
The Heinkel rose steeply into the deep Mediterranean blue. Soon it was no more than a dot, headed north-west, for Italy. Spiro was watching it as if it were a ghost. All his work, said his slack jaw and fishskin jowls; all his massive bravery, his tolerance of Captain Helmholz, his feigning of coma, his sliding around on ropes in the dark; all in vain.
Wills was not so tongue-tied. He was pale and shaking with rage. ‘Sir,’ he said to Mallory. ‘I must protest. I must jolly well tell you that I shall be submitting a report to my superiors about this shameful, pathetic —’
He stopped. The black dot hung high in the blue vault of heaven. And then, shockingly, it changed. There was a brilliant white flash, and a puff of smoke, and comet-tails of falling debris. And later, several seconds later, the small bap of an explosion.
‘It blew up,’ said Wills. ‘It just bloody well blew up.’
‘Goodness me,’ said Miller, mildly. ‘So it did.’
‘But he had the machine,’ said Wills.
‘Yeah, well,’ said Miller. ‘I knew there was something.’ He was leaning on the concrete lip of the firefighting pond. He pulled a string that led into the murky deeps. On the end of the string was a chunky oilcloth parcel. ‘This here is the Enigma machine,’ he said. ‘Captain Carstairs only had the case. I guess someone must have put something else in it.’
Wills gaped at him, then at the Enigma machine; the key to the deliberations of German High Command, a window into the enemy’s most secret responses to the Allied second front, due to open any day now.
‘There is a game you play with three cups and a pea,’ said Mallory. ‘Corporal Miller is the world champion. Now let us find somewhere to lie up for the day.’
Spiro’s face was a miserable bag of sweating lard. ‘Lie up?’ he said. ‘You crazy. They searches everywhere, finds us, catches us. We deads, matey boy.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Miller. ‘Personally I am alive. And I have an idea that people in the great wide world are going to think we were on that plane.’
Spiro’s face suddenly shone with hope and anticipation. ‘My hell!’ he cried. ‘By the Godsalmighty you are one hunnert per cents!’
Andrea came down from the bank. ‘They’re coming,’ he said.
‘Time to leave,’ said Miller, looking at his watch. Like ghosts, they flitted over the earthwork and were gone.
Feldwebel Braun approached the fuel dump wall with his usual briskness, his squad well scattered over the ground, as per the tactical manual when advancing in the face of enemy fire. Except that there was now no enemy fire. The defenders of the dump had gone quiet — not surprisingly, since they had all flown away in that Heinkel. There had been a lot of disorganization and general unpleasantness these last few days. Braun looked forward to a more normal life in which regulations would be observed and there would be the minimum of fighting.
Crouching slightly — from habit rather than the expectation of enemy fire — he led his squad to the earthwork and into the fuel dump in a succession of short, textbook rushes.
But the dump was empty. He wandered into the stacked oil drums. There were signs of occupation: spent cartridge cases, a foil wrapper from a bar of chocolate. But they were safely out of the way; out of the sky, too, he thought, chuckling heavily. All that remained were the oil drums, like the stumps of a forest turned to steel.
There was a fungus on one of the stumps. Braun walked closer, to examine it. An odd brown growth, with a pencil-sized object sticking out of it, a pencil with a black stripe on the shaft.