26
SID CRIPPS LOOKED OUT OF THE WINDOW AND CURSED under his breath. The meadow was full of American tanks—at least eighty of them. He realized there was a war on, and all that, but if only they’d asked him he would have offered them another field, where the grass was not so lush. By now the caterpillar tracks would have chewed up his best grazing.
He pulled on his boots and went out. There were some Yank soldiers in the field, and he wondered whether they had noticed the bull. When he got to the stile he stopped and scratched his head. There was something funny going on.
The tanks had not chewed up his grass. They had left no tracks. But the American soldiers were making tank tracks with a tool something like a harrow.
While Sid was trying to figure it all out, the bull noticed the tanks. It stared at them for a while, then pawed the ground and lumbered into a run. It was going to charge a tank.
“Daft bugger, you’ll break your head,” Sid muttered.
The soldiers were watching the bull too. They seemed to think it was very funny.
The bull ran full-tilt into the tank, its horns piercing the armor-plated side of the vehicle. Sid hoped fervently that British tanks were stronger than the American ones.
There was a loud hissing noise as the bull worked its horns free. The tank collapsed like a deflated balloon. The American soldiers fell all over each other, laughing.
It was all quite strange.
PERCIVAL GODLIMAN walked quickly across Parliament Square, carrying an umbrella. He wore a dark striped suit under his raincoat, and his black shoes were highly polished—at least they had been until he stepped out into the rain. It was not every day, come to that it was not every year, that he had a private audience with Mr. Churchill.
A career soldier would have been nervous at going with such bad news to see the supreme commander of the nation’s armed forces. Godliman was not nervous—a distinguished historian had nothing to fear, he told himself, from soldiers and politicians, not unless his view of history was a good deal more radical than Godliman’s was. Not nervous, then, but worried. Distinctly worried.
He was thinking about the effort, the forethought, the care, the money and the manpower that had gone into the creation of the totally ersatz First United States Army Group stationed in East Anglia: the four hundred landing ships, made of canvas and scaffolding floated on oil drums, that thronged the harbors and estuaries; the carefully manufactured inflatable dummies of tanks, artillery, trucks, half-tracks and even ammunition dumps; the complaints planted in the correspondence columns of the local newspapers about the decline in moral standards since the arrival of thousands of American troops in the area; the phony oil dock at Dover, designed by Britain’s most distinguished architect and built—out of cardboard and old sewage pipes—by craftsmen borrowed from film studios; the carefully faked reports transmitted to Hamburg by German agents who had been “turned” by the XX Committee; and the incessant radio chatter, broadcast for the benefit of the German listening posts, consisting of messages compiled by professional writers of fiction, and including such as “1/5th Queen’s Royal Regiment report a number of civilian women, presumably unauthorized, in the baggage train. What are we going to do with them—take them to Calais?”
No question, a good deal had been achieved. The signs indicated that the Germans had bought it. And now the whole elaborate deception had been put in jeopardy because of one damned spy—a spy Godliman had failed to catch. Which, of course, was the reason for his command performance today.
His short birdlike paces measured the Westminster pavement to the small doorway at No. 2, Great George Street. The armed guard standing beside the wall of sandbags examined his pass and waved him in. He crossed the lobby and went down the stairs to Churchill’s underground headquarters.
It was like going below decks on a battleship. Protected from bombs by a four-foot-thick ceiling of reinforced concrete, the command post featured steel bulkhead doors and roof props of ancient timber. As Godliman entered the map room a cluster of youngish people with solemn faces emerged from the conference room beyond. An aide followed them a moment later, and spotted Godliman.
“You’re very punctual, sir,” the aide said. “He’s ready for you.”
Godliman stepped into the small, comfortable conference room. There were rugs on the floor and a picture of the king on the wall. An electric fan stirred the tobacco smoke in the air. Churchill sat at the head of an old mirror-smooth table in the center of which was a statuette of a faun—the emblem of Churchill’s own deception outfit, the London Controlling Section.
Godliman decided not to salute.
Churchill said, “Sit down, Professor.”
Godliman suddenly realized that Churchill was not a big man—but he sat like a big man: shoulders hunched, elbows on the arms of his chair, chin lowered, legs apart. He was wearing a solicitor’s black-and-stripes—short black jacket and striped gray trousers—with a spotted blue bow tie and a brilliant white shirt. Despite his stocky frame and his paunch, the hand holding the fountain pen was delicate, thin-fingered. His complexion was baby-pink. The other hand held a cigar, and on the table beside the papers stood a glass containing what looked like whisky.
He was making notes in the margin of a typewritten report, and as he scribbled he occasionally muttered. Godliman was not really awed by the great man. As a peacetime statesman Churchill had been, in Godliman’s view, something of a disaster. However, the man had the qualities of a great warrior chieftain, and Godliman very much respected him for that. (Churchill modestly denied being the British lion, saying that he merely was privileged to give the roar; Godliman thought that assessment was just about right.)
He looked up abruptly now. “I suppose there’s no doubt this damned spy has discovered what we’re up to?”
“None whatsoever, sir,” Godliman said.
“You think he’s got away?”
“We chased him to Aberdeen. It’s almost certain that he left there two nights ago in a stolen boat—presumably for a rendezvous in the North Sea. However, he can’t have been far out of port when the storm blew up. He may have met the U-boat before the storm hit, but it’s unlikely. In all probability he drowned. I’m sorry we can’t offer more definite information—”
“So am I,” Churchill said, and suddenly he seemed angry, though not with Godliman. He got out of his chair and went over to the clock on the wall, staring as if mesmerized at the inscription, Victoria R.I., Ministry of Works, 1889. Then as if he had forgotten that Godliman was there, he began to pace up and down alongside the table, muttering to himself. Godliman was able to make out the words, and what he heard astonished him. The great man was mumbling: “This stocky figure, with a slight stoop, striding up and down, suddenly unconscious of any presence beyond his own thoughts…” It was as if Churchill were acting out a Hollywood screenplay that he wrote as he went along.
The performance ended as abruptly as it had begun, and if the man knew he had been behaving eccentrically, he gave no sign of it. He sat down, handed Godliman a sheet of paper and said, “This is the German order of battle as of last week.”
Godliman read:
Russian front:
122 infantry divisions
25 panzer divisions
17 miscellaneous divisions
Italy & Balkans:
37 infantry divisions
9 panzer divisions
4 miscellaneous divisions
Western front:
64 infantry divisions
12 panzer divisions
12 miscellaneous divisions
Germany:
3 infantry divisions
1 panzer division
4 miscellaneous divisions
Churchill said: “Of those twelve panzer divisions in the west, only one is actually on the Normandy coast. The great SS divisions, Das Reich and Adolf Hitler, are at Toulouse and Brussels respectively and show no signs of moving. What does all this tell you, professor?”
“Our deception and cover plans seem to have been successful,” Godliman answered, and realized the trust Churchill had placed in him. Until this moment, Normandy had never been mentioned to him, not by his uncle Colonel Terry or anybody else, though he had deduced as much, knowing as he did about the artificial buildup aimed at Calais. Of course, he still did not know the date of the invasion—D-Day—and was grateful that he did not.
“Totally successful,” Churchill said. “They are confused and uncertain, and their best guesses about our intentions are wildly wrong. And yet”—he paused for effect—“and yet, despite all that…” He picked up another piece of paper from the table and read it aloud. “‘Our chances of holding the beachhead, particularly after the Germans get their buildup, are only fifty-fifty.’”
He put his cigar down, and his voice became quite soft. “It has taken the total military and industrial might of the whole English-speaking world—the greatest civilization since the Roman Empire—four years to win this fifty-fifty chance. If this spy gets out, we lose even that. Which is to say, we lose everything.”
He stared at Godliman for a moment, then picked up his pen with a frail white hand. “Don’t bring me probabilities, professor. Bring me Die Nadel.”
He looked down and began to write. After a moment Godliman got up and quietly left the room.