Artillery of Lies Read online

  Artillery of Lies

  Artillery of Lies

  Derek Robinson

  Novels by Derek Robinson

  THE R.F.C. TRILOGY*

  Goshawk Squadron

  Hornet’s Sting

  War Story

  THE R.A.F. QUARTET*

  Piece of Cake

  A Good Clean Fight

  Damned Good Show

  Hullo Russia, Goodbye England

  THE DOUBLE AGENT QUARTET**

  The Eldorado Network

  Artillery of Lies

  Red Rag Blues

  Operation Bamboozle

  OTHER FICTION

  Kentucky Blues

  Kramer’s War

  Rotten with Honour

  NON-FICTION

  Invasion 1940

  *Available from MacLehose Press from 2012/13

  **To be published in ebook by MacLehose Press

  An imprint of Quercus

  New York • London

  © 1991 by Derek Robinson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to Permissions c/o Quercus Publishing Inc., 31 West 57th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10019, or to [email protected].

  ISBN 978-1-62365-319-4

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services

  c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway

  New York, NY 10019

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  To Robin and Mary

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Afterword

  Footnote

  Afterword

  “And there’s no fog,” Luis complained. “You said there would be fog.” He managed to make his voice both sour and savage.

  “Not all the time,” said Templeton. “I never said England was foggy all the time.”

  “Damned swindle.”

  “I could sing you a bit of fog,” Julie said. Luis was standing at the window with his hands deep in the pockets of his greatcoat. She stood behind him and slid her hands into the pockets, but he refused to link fingers. She rested her chin on his shoulder and crooned: “A foggy day … in London town … It had me blue … It had me down …” He hunched his shoulders and frowned even harder at the shifting image of parkland. The rain blurred the glass and made the bare black branches twitch and flicker like bits of early cinema film. He blinked, changed focus, and saw his own reflection. Handsome young devil, he thought. Dark eyes, high cheekbones, strong brows: thank God for a bit of Moorish blood in the family. He flashed his shy smile, just to keep in practice. Irresistible.

  “No orange juice for breakfast either,” he said bitterly.

  “For God’s sake, Luis, there’s a war on,” Julie said, and walked away.

  “Nobody told me I wouldn’t get any orange juice. I always have orange juice for breakfast, I’m no good without orange juice, I can’t work.” He kicked a radiator. “Wouldn’t have left Lisbon if I’d known it was like this.”

  “Tell you what, I’ll lay on some nice juicy prunes tomorrow,” Templeton said.

  “I shit on your prunes,” Luis said.

  “No, it’s the other way around,” Julie told him.

  “I suppose the shortage of fog is also because there is a war on,” Luis said.

  “Be fair, old chap,” Templeton said. “You can’t expect to have fog and half a gale of wind and rain.”

  “You will tell me next there is no pageantry in England. No pomp and ceremony. Because there is a war on.”

  “I’ll take you to the Changing of the Guard,” Templeton promised. “Just as soon as it stops raining.”

  Luis sighed and took his hands from his pockets to raise them, palms upward. “I should live so long,” he said.

  Templeton looked to Julie for help, but she shook her head. “He wasted his youth in the cinema,” she told him. “He thinks life is a B-movie. Does this thing work?” She had found a gramophone and was sorting out the records.

  “This severe shortage of fog and orange juice,” Luis said, “is very significant and I shall inform Herr Hitler at the earliest possible opportunity.”

  “I’ll go and organize some tea,” Templeton said.

  As he went out, Julie was dancing to a slow foxtrot with Luis, her arms inside his greatcoat.

  “Earl Grey!” Luis called out.

  “Wrong,” she said. “Duke Ellington.”

  Which at least made him laugh. I suppose that’s your volatile Latin temperament for you, Templeton thought. Give me good old English phlegm every time. You know where you are with phlegm.

  Templeton needed a stiff cup of tea.

  Julie Conroy was American and she could take the stuff or leave it alone, especially before lunch; Luis Cabrillo was Spanish so his choice was simpler: he left it alone. Templeton was English and in the face of adversity he automatically thought of tea. There had been no lack of adversity on the journey from Lisbon.

  This was December 1942. Portugal was neutral, perched uneasily on the elbow of Spain, which was also neutral but not too neutral to send a division of troops to fight for Hitler on the Russian Front.

  Because nearly all the rest of Europe belonged to Hitler, neutrals like Portugal and Switzerland and Sweden were immensely useful to both sides. Portugal was especially popular with the various intelligence agencies. The climate was pleasant, you could get a decent cup of real coffee for next to nothing, and the Portuguese secret police didn’t throw their weight about. Not unless you were stupid enough to embarrass them by not even pretending to be, for instance, the Assistant Cultural Attaché at your nation’s embassy. There were more spies in Lisbon than in any other capital. Demand attracted supply: detailed and startling information, some of it quite accurate, came from a shifting army of paid informants. In particular the Lisbon agents of the Abwehr, German Military Intelligence, always got advance notice of arrivals and departures by boat or plane. Despite the war, there were scheduled commercial flights between Portugal and Britain. If Luis Cabrillo had taken one of those planes, the Abwehr would have known and would have been painfully surprised, since they believed he had been in Britain for many months, working for them.

  The British embassy had a department called Quarantine Control to handle this kind of problem. At three in the morning, during a cold drizzle, in a sad and semi-derelict corner of Lisbon docks, Quarantine Control smuggled Luis, Julie and Templeton on to a rusting gutbucket of a British freighter only minutes before she sailed. It was a three-day voyage to Gibraltar. The weather got worse. The boat lurched and plunged and thumped and butted the Atlantic as if looking for a fight. She was loaded and overloaded with a cargo of carob pods, her skipper taking the view that if you were going to be torpedoed you might as well go down big. The carob pods put out an overblown
supersweet smell that no gale could disperse. Luis had never been to sea before, and he was very sick. He lay in his bunk, a martyr to every heave and shudder, and raged feebly against the British government. “Is this the best you can do?” he demanded of Templeton. “This slow death?’”

  “I’m afraid it is, old chap.” Templeton had once served in the Royal Navy, and now he was enjoying a thick ham sandwich with plenty of mustard. Julie slumped in a chair, pale as an empty plate.

  “That filthy stench …” Luis clung to the bunk as the freighter groaned under the wallop of another wave. “It chokes me.”

  “I’m told carob makes splendid animal feed. Cattle fight each other for it, apparently.”

  “Eldorado Network,” Luis whispered. “Best damn network in Europe. All that work. Suppose I die?”

  “Oh, can it, Luis,” Julie said. “D’you think I’m enjoying this?” Against all advice from her stomach she had eaten a bowl of stew and she knew that if she relaxed her attention for an instant, her stomach would send it back. “Anyway, the Eldorado Network doesn’t exist, so you can go right ahead and die and see if anyone cares.”

  They glared at each other. Templeton sighed. He was a bachelor; he had never understood love.

  “Think I’ll take a turn about the deck,” he said. “Can I get anyone anything?” Neither of them even looked at him.

  Quarantine Control had a man waiting for them at Gibraltar. “Good news,” he said. “I’ve got you on a plane for England tonight.” The plane was a Sunderland flying-boat and it took off as soon as night fell, carrying them high above the route the freighter had taken. When Luis discovered this he took malevolent pleasure in telling Templeton.

  “Only a couple of hours and we shall be back exactly where we started,” he shouted. (The Sunderland made a lot of noise.) “Isn’t progress wonderful?”

  Templeton nodded and got on with his leg of cold chicken. He had made this flight before and he knew that the best approach was to fill yourself up with food and drink and hope to sleep the rest of the way. Julie was already wrapped in blankets with a bottle of wine for company.

  Luis had never been up in an airplane before and he could not rest. On the other hand there was nothing to see, nothing to read, nothing to do, and the booming roar of the engines made conversation difficult. The fuselage was dimly lit. As the plane climbed the temperature fell. He couldn’t find anywhere comfortable to sit or lie or sprawl. His eardrums hurt.

  The pilot flew far out over the Atlantic in order to avoid German aircraft operating from France. The Sunderland was not built for speed. It cruised at 150 or 160 miles an hour, churning stolidly through the night, hour after hour. Luis had never been so bored in his life. This was worse than prison; if he were in prison he could make trouble; inside this deafening, freezing machine was nothing, nothing. He found his penknife and began scraping his initials on a black box while thinking savage and brutal thoughts about Templeton for persuading him to leave Lisbon. A crewman came and shouted and took the penknife away. Luis hated the crewman too.

  The flight lasted ten and a half hours.

  It was still night when they landed at Plymouth harbor. They were given breakfast—charred bacon and a slab of reconstituted dried egg—and then put in a car. Luis fell asleep. The first time he saw England by daylight it was gray with rain. He asked Templeton where they were. “Salisbury Plain, I think,” Templeton said. “Not far now.” Luis asked him where they were going. “Big house called Rackham Towers, just outside London. You’ll like it there.”

  “Don’t bet your pension on it,” Julie said.

  It was mid-morning when they arrived. Rackham Towers was a Victorian pile set in five hundred acres of parkland and built of rain-blackened granite. It had battlements. It had round turrets with arrow slits, and overhanging square turrets with cannon ports, and smaller square turrets growing out of the bigger square turrets. A besieging army would have died of hunger until it worked out how to get in through the french windows.

  They stood in the rain and looked at it.

  “Fortunately, the light is bad,” Luis said.

  “Unusual place, isn’t it?” Templeton said. “I’m told the architect shot himself.”

  “Before or after?” Julie asked.

  “It’s quite nice inside.” Templeton and Julie made for the door, leaving Luis standing and staring at the house. “Why on earth is he being such a pig?” Templeton murmured.

  “Why not? There he was in Lisbon, having a lovely war, running the whole show, praised and admired by all and making a killing too, when down came the British Secret Service and took all his toys away.”

  “Not quite. We just want him to let us play with them.”

  “He says it’s a rotten swiz. Is that the phrase?”

  “In my country,” Luis shouted at them, “in Spain, we would pay our enemies to come and bomb a thing like this.” He turned “thing” into a piece of airborne graffiti.

  Templeton carried in a tray of tea and biscuits, and found Luis and Julie on the sofa, reading the morning papers. Her eyes were half-closed. “If you want to go to bed,” Templeton said, “your rooms are ready. Just say.” She smiled, looking as lazy as a cat in the sun.

  “Listen,” Luis announced, “I didn’t realize this Stalingrad business was so awful.” He winced as he read on. “My God,” he muttered.

  “I haven’t seen a paper.” Templeton looked over Luis’s shoulder and scanned the story. “That’s not so bad, is it? I’d say it was quite good. German Sixth Army’s still trapped and the Russians are breaking out on all sides. Nothing for us to worry about there.”

  “What? It’s a disaster. It could become a catastrophe.” Luis gave him the newspaper and began bouncing on the sofa, using up his excess of nervous energy, until Julie complained and he stood up. “The OKW must be desperately worried,” he said. “I mean, where is it going to stop?”

  Fatigue was beginning to catch up with Templeton. “Sorry, old chap,” he said. “Not quite with you. O K What?”

  “Oberkommando der Wehrmacht.” Luis snapped out the words. “Hitler’s High Command.” Templeton put milk in his tea, and waited. “You remember Hitler?” Luis said. “Looks like Charlie Chaplin, only not so funny?”

  “With you now, Luis. So tell me why I should worry about OKW’s ulcers.”

  “Because the largest office in OKW is the Abwehr. When OKW catches a cold, the Abwehr runs a fever. It needs to be soothed.” Luis was pacing up and down, gesturing. “Luckily I have just the medicine. The British War Cabinet is unhappy about this Soviet success, very unhappy.”

  Templeton was more tired than he knew. “Where does it say that?” he asked. He gave the newspapers a shake.

  “Perhaps not the entire War Cabinet. No. But a powerful minority is very, very apprehensive. The danger is …” Luis walked all around the sofa and ended up looking at Julie. “What is the danger?” he asked, like an actor at rehearsals, seeking a cue.

  Julie yawned and curled herself around a cushion. “I guess the danger is the Bolsheviks will sweep across Europe like a red tide,” she said sleepily.

  Luis clicked his fingers. “Of course. And we don’t want that, do we?” he said to Templeton. “So we’re going to reduce the number of Arctic convoys we send to Russia. We must stop feeding the bear before he gets too big and gobbles us all up. That’s it. That’s what several influential members of the War Cabinet are demanding. Yes. Far too many ships are being sunk in the Arctic. Britain must stop bleeding herself white for the greater glory of Uncle Joe Stalin. Ha!” He jumped in the air, clicked his heels and clapped his hands. “You see? Stalingrad is not all doom and disaster. There is a bright and optimistic side to Stalingrad, if you know where to look. Where to listen.”

  “And where exactly did you see and hear all this?” Templeton asked.

  “Um …” Luis gave it some thought, pursing his lips and shrugging as he selected his source. “Pinetree,” he said at last.

  “Pinetr
ee? Refresh my memory. Whose codename is Pinetree?”

  “British civilian employee in the American embassy.”

  Templeton finished his tea. “Well, Pinetree would know, if anyone does.”

  “Exactly. I’ll draft something for transmission. The Abwehr will love it, they must be gasping for good news. Can we get it out tonight?”

  “I’ll see.” Templeton heard the crunch of tires on gravel and he went to the window, in time to see a man in a blue raincoat run up the steps. Freddy Garcia. Thank God. For the first time in a week, Templeton felt he could afford to think about relaxing. Eldorado was Freddy’s pigeon now.

  “How is Lisbon? Don’t tell me, I can’t stand to know,” said Freddy Garcia. “London’s ghastly. The Americans have got all the taxis and ever since we had a bomb in the back garden, I can’t make the hot-water system work. Not that it matters, because I virtually live in the office, which is another madhouse. The Director won’t hire a secretary unless she’s in Debrett or Burke’s Peerage; he says in this racket loyalty counts more than efficiency, so there are debs everywhere. Charming gels with perfect manners but the files are in chaos. You don’t know how lucky you are, Charles.”

  “Actually, it was raining in Lisbon too. I think it’s raining everywhere. Not in North Africa, perhaps.”

  “What? It rains harder and colder in North Africa than anywhere outside Burma.”

  “I’ll take your word for it, Freddy,” Templeton said. “I mean to say, you’ve been everywhere, haven’t you?”

  They were warming their backsides at the library fire. Garcia was about forty years old. He was Anglo-Spanish. His face was olive-skinned, smooth, straight-lipped, with a polished ax-head of a nose and black hair that he brushed straight back, no parting. But he dressed like an English countryman, perhaps a successful vet or a stud-farmer: whipcord trousers, tweed jacket of a soft and faded pattern with leather patches on the elbows, rust-red woolen tie. His father had been a minor Spanish diplomat, his English mother a very good painter of watercolors. For work and pleasure the family had traveled around the world, ending up in London, where MI6 (the public label of the British secret intelligence service) recruited Freddy the day after Hitler invaded Poland.