Saundra was rubbing the side of her head. “Is there any news from home?”
“No,” Fanaroff said, shortly. “It looks as if we have to stay here.”
Saundra looked good as she dressed; his treacherous mind was too tired and sore to exercise proper discipline and banish the thoughts. It was only the two of them; they had remained chaste, but their relationship had developed well beyond senior-junior.
Madam Rose met them as they descended the stairs. “Morning,” she said, shortly. Her face split into a strange leer. “There’s breakfast on the table; help yourself, and then get back to bed.”
“Thank you,” Fanaroff said, as he took Saundra’s arm and guided her to the table. There was a massive pot of porridge on the table, something he had only had in England before; he took a small amount and filled Saundra’s bowl to the top. She needed her strength more than he did. “Any news from the outside?”
“Very little,” Madam Rose said. “There was a call for you on the phone; they want you to call them back as soon as you have had your breakfast.”
Fanaroff took a long breath. “Why didn’t you call us at once?”
“I don’t interrupt my customers when they are using the facilities, even if they are well-paying customers,” Madam Rose said tartly. “People who come here come for privacy; they don’t come for my conversation.” She slapped her belly. “I may have a belly that people come miles to see, and a strong right arm that some men find impossible to resist, but they don’t come for my conversation.”
And perhaps you wanted to try and get something out of them first, Fanaroff thought dryly. Madam Rose was a desperate woman, after all; her girls and herself would be caught in the path of the Russian advance, if what they had been told was true. Fanaroff was still having problems coming to grips with it, but if it was true, the German Army had been scattered and was in full retreat, assuming that it was still in existence. Fanaroff had reviewed the old war plans from the cold war; there would be no reinforcements from the other NATO allies, not now. The Germans were in real trouble.
“I’ll call them after we have finished eating,” he said. He wasn’t that hopeful; as far as he knew, there were no American assets that could be used to extract them, and the British had their own problems. He had thought about trying to get into one of the airports and stealing an aircraft, but without any IFF transponder, one or the other side would probably shoot them out of the sky. “Is there any other news?”
“I’m starting to think that it might be time to get out of the city,” Madam Rose said. “What about you?”
Fanaroff couldn't disagree. The criminal gangs had secured vast food supplies — and the girls had an easy way of paying for them — but everyone knew that it couldn’t last. There seemed to be no government people trying to pull everything back together again… and it seemed an impossible task anyway. The city had collapsed into a dozen semi-independent fiefdoms; it reminded him too much of the old No Man’s Land Batman movie.
But he said nothing. As soon as he had finished his breakfast, he picked up the satellite phone and carried it upstairs to their room, allowing Saundra to activate it while he remembered some of the identification words. The satellite phone might work using American satellites, but it was hardly a secure system; his controllers had been reluctant to give him too many details because the Russians might well be listening in to the transmissions. It made him long for the lost terminal; if he had had that, they would have had no problems at all in downloading information from the military datanet.
“This is Fanaroff,” he said shortly, and recited a string of identification numbers. “I understand that you wanted to talk to me?”
“Certainly,” a droll Texan voice said. “Who played George Washington in the university play you took part in back in 2010?”
Fanaroff had been surprised the first time he had been tossed such a question, a moment’s thought had explained why. It would be harder for a Russian imposter to figure out the answer in time to matter. “That was Shawn O’Neil,” he said, remembering. Fanaroff had wanted that part; but he had lost the draw and played Arnold the Traitor instead. “Do you have anything useful for me?”
“Friends of ours have been busy in Ostend,” the voice said, without bothering to comment on Fanaroff’s tone. “We have talked to them and they have agreed to pick you and your lady-friends up and get you back to mother if you get there within a few days. Failure to get there within five days may result in you being left to your own devices.”
Fanaroff took a second to unravel everything. Something was happening at Ostend; he guessed that the British had secured the small port and city, and they were willing to extract him and his ‘lady-friends’ — perhaps Madam Rose and her girls as well, if she had talked to the controller first — if he made it there. He scowled; the real problem with improvising a code was that it would be easy to either make it blatantly obvious, or confuse friends as well as enemies.
“I understand,” he said. If he were wrong, there would be a chance to steal a boat and set sail for England anyway. “Is there a lower limit?”
There was a pause. “The day-tourists are moving in now,” the controller said finally. “I would recommend haste; mother may have popped her clogs earlier than we thought.”
“I understand,” Fanaroff said again. “I’ll call you later.”
He closed the connection and thought for a long moment, then turned to face Saundra. “If I understood that bastard properly, we have a chance to get out if we can make it to Ostend,” he said, grimly. “I guess that the invitation includes Madam Rose and her girls… if they will come with us, if not, just the two of us.” He grinned. “Unless you wish to stay, of course…”
“Not bloody likely,” Saundra said. She looked less mussed than he did; Madam Rose would have made a fearsomely effective drill sergeant, unlike some commanding officers he’d met who had insisted on shaving every day, despite low water supplies. “I don’t want to stay in this place any longer.”
“Come on, then,” he said. “Let’s go see Madam Rose.”
He explained the situation as clearly as he could to her. “We have this one chance and you’re included in the offer,” he said. “We can’t let anyone else know, because there would be panic; are you interested in coming?”
Madam Rose laughed. “I have been thinking about joining one of the boats leaving Belgium for England,” she said. “I’ll come with you, if the girls will come; if not, then… I can’t leave them here.”
“She’s a very strange woman,” Saundra muttered, as Madam Rose headed off to organise the girls. She hadn’t liked the thought of staying in a whorehouse, even if it had been safe and even fairly secure; female soldiers and officers were rarely comfortable with the chain of brothels that appeared everywhere that soldiers lived and worked. “What will happen to her if she remains here?”
“Die, probably,” Fanaroff muttered back. “Pussy is cheap in desperate times; someone might take the girls and leave her to die. This is her best chance to get out and she knows it.”
There were nine girls in all; seven of them native to Belgium, one whose family had come from darkest Africa, and one who had been from an Arab family that had thrown her out for premarital sex. She had been very lucky, the more so because Madam Rose had found her and offered her a job before she starved to death on the streets. She was apparently popular with the clients; Madam Rose had claimed with some pride that she brought in more money than the others put together. The conversation had gone downhill from there.
“Jade wants to return to her family,” Madam Rose said finally. “The others are willing to come with us. We have a truck and enough fuel, I think, to reach Ostend; keep your weapons visible and we won’t have any trouble.”