Johnson smiled. “It’s Browning. The Pied Piper of Hamelin.”
Stewart smiled. “Well done, Peter! I can see we’ll have to make a space for you in our competitions. I’ll tell Frank next time I see him.”
Stewart paused and looked up, thinking he could hear the distant rumble of aircraft. “I was just wondering, sir, if you had any information about the bigger picture?”
“How do you mean, Jack?”
“Well, sir, the intensity of the raids seems to be easing.”
Steele pulled out a pipe and tapped it on the table. “The feeling is that if the Germans are to invade, they need to get their skates on as autumn rolls in. The great job our pilots have done may have caught them by surprise. I doubt the air raids are going to stop, but we may well have put off the invasion until next year.”
As Steele began to fill his pipe with tobacco, a siren went off. In the back of the room, a phone rang. One of Stewart’s men answered it, then shouted out, “Knightsbridge, sir. We’re to hook up with the others behind Harrods.”
Steele rose to his feet. “Good luck, gentlemen. Take care. There’s a long way to go yet in this war, but we shall overcome, no doubt.” He lit his pipe and beamed.
*
“Where to, Herr Generalfeldmarschall?”
As the car edged away from the Berlin Reichkanzleri, Hermann Goering, the Fuhrer’s right-hand man and Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, simmered. “Anywhere, Gunther, I don’t give a shit. Just drive. No, on second thoughts, drive out into the country. I need to see trees and grass.”
Goering loved the countryside. He had several beautiful country homes, adorned in most cases with the heads of the herds of animals he had hunted and shot. Perhaps, he thought, he should go for a few days’ hunting to get things out of his system.
He and General von Rundstedt had been summoned to the Fuhrer’s office that afternoon. After a long tirade about the incompetence of the Luftwaffe in particular and all his commanders in general, Adolf Hitler had informed them that Operation Sealion, the plan for the invasion of England, was being postponed indefinitely. “You have let me down, Hermann. Your pilots are cowards, are they not? The English are on their last legs, you told me. ‘They will not be able to resist our glorious Luftwaffe!’ Well, they have resisted, haven’t they? With their inferior aeroplanes they have defied the might of Germany – and me!”
“But, mein Fuhrer—”
“Hah! Do not make excuses. It is time to move on. We must turn our attention to the east and that Georgian lout, Stalin. You must both concentrate on that now.”
How had the British survived and overcome them? Luftwaffe losses over the weekend had been huge. Goering had never been as dismissive of the British military capabilities as the Fuhrer, but still he had thought his pilots would prevail.
The car had reached the countryside and as the trees and fields flashed by in the growing dusk, the Field Marshall loosened the belt on his uniform and helped himself to a glass of the Macallan Scotch Whisky he kept in the bar compartment in his door. He had looked forward to taking personal possession of some Scottish distilleries after the invasion, but that was not to be, at least not for a while. Perhaps Operation Sealion could be revived in the spring? He sighed and gazed out at a herd of Friesian cattle being chased through a field by some small boys. He drank and felt the warm golden liquid trickle down his throat. He swirled the remainder of the whisky around in the large balloon glass which was engraved on the side with his initials. He closed his eyes and chuckled at the thought of the buxom all-Nordic athlete he had bedded the previous evening. A little more of Greta tonight would help to put the Fuhrer’s tirade behind him. Those legs, those eyes…
*