A Bitter Field (28 page)

They saw McKevitt’s back as he walked forward gingerly, the flap of the briefcase open, though they could not see the box camera around his neck. It mattered not as they disappeared up the wooden staff staircase, the noise they created making McKevitt turn to look; there was nothing to see.

Creeping through the lobby he could hear the sound of voices and some laughter, but a look into what had to be the lounge – it was full of settees – showed it empty except for a small suitcase and a canvas bag on the floor by an open doorway. The sound was beyond that and gingerly he moved forward, edging his nose round the door to the table-filled dining room.

They were all sitting at a circular board, eating and drinking without a care in the world, and it was obvious by the heightened sounds of conversation that they had been imbibing with gusto. McKevitt silently put his briefcase on the floor, flap open, and got his camera ready; all he needed was a shot, more than one if he could, of Jardine and Lanchester together and everything else would follow from that.

He would find out if, as he had suspected ever since that message had come from Brno, those machine guns had gone to the IRA, to
be used to fight and kill his fellow Protestants in Ulster. And when the truth of that came out, this pair would go to jail, while the man who had failed to see that one of his new boys was playing him false would be out on his ear, and that was before it came out that they were risking a war with their carrying on.

‘Smile!’

He said that loudly as he stepped into the middle of the door. Everyone looked, even those with their backs to him, and he clicked immediately before dropping the camera to advance the film, a broad smile on his face.

‘Good day to you.’

‘McKevitt,’ Peter said, ‘what the hell are you doing?’

‘Finding out who your friends are, Lanchester, like the man sitting on the other side of that lady, who I suppose is Callum Jardine, or as you have chosen to call him, Mr Barrowman.’

‘How the hell does he know that, Peter?’ Cal said, his eyes on the doorway. ‘I’ve never met him.’

‘I don’t know,’ Peter replied as McKevitt took another photograph.

‘Ask your little journo friend.’ Cal looked at Corrie. ‘Not her, the other one.’

A glance at Jimmy Garvin had him blushing, a question brought out the admission, the response to which was vituperative if also devoid of passion. ‘You stupid little bastard!’

‘When I show these to certain people, an awful lot of trouble for you two is going to come out in the wash.’

‘We’re here on SIS business, Noel.’

‘You’re here on Quex’s business, which he has no business being engaged in, and he’s another one for the chop, I can tell you.’

‘You’re out of your league, Noel,’ Peter insisted, as Cal stood up
and moved towards the doorway. ‘I’ll take the camera.’

McKevitt dropped to one knee and pulled the Webley revolver out of the briefcase he had bought at the same time as the camera. Cal, who moved at the same time, was just too slow to get to him, finding himself staring down the barrel.

The gunshot, even muted, made him leap sideways and he was still travelling when he realised the Irishman had not fired, just as he realised that more shots were following.

‘What the bloody hell was that?’ McKevitt shouted as a real fusillade came from the upper floors, as well as shouting and the screams of people obviously taking wounds. The Ulsterman was forced to turn just by the sheer mayhem he was hearing, and Cal rolled towards the door, his hand stretched out to grab his canvas bag and drag it inside.

‘Everybody down!’ he yelled, which made McKevitt spin back again and he guessed very quickly that the bag must have a gun. The shouting and screaming had moved to the staircase that led to Henlein’s suite and the man was in two minds as he saw several men reversing down the stairs firing upwards, vaguely aware that two of them were not moving properly.

‘Leave it,’ he yelled at Cal, as he saw him rummaging in the bag, but he spun back to look through the lobby.

What the man on the stairs saw, when that shout made him turn round, was a man with a revolver coming in an arc to aim at him. He fired and his was a fully loaded automatic weapon, so McKevitt was hit by three bullets that threw him back against the frame of the doorway and half into the dining room.

Having no idea what was happening, Cal hauled out his Mauser then scurried forward on his knees to get the Webley out of McKevitt’s
dying hand, shouting to Vince to take care of Corrie, and to Peter to get closer. It was all a blur from them on; he saw a shape and knew it was deadly, so he fired off the last of his rounds and took the target out.

Peter was beside him and had got hold of the Webley, which he started to empty, but they were sitting ducks in the doorway and both took return bullets, Cal more than one, which had him seek to get behind the wall. He was vaguely aware of the shouting in German and he also heard the click of Peter’s weapon – it was empty.

Looking up he saw two men, both carrying wounds themselves, with their weapons up and looking to administer the
coup de grâce
to both him and Peter. Suddenly their bodies began to jerk like rag dolls as, from behind them, the Czech police – or was it soldiers? – riddled them with dozens of bullets. The last thing Cal saw before he passed out was, at the same ground level as his own, the glazed eyes of Peter Lanchester.

He did not see Corrie or hear her scream for an ambulance, nor feel Jimmy help her to make him comfortable. The hand that slipped into his pocket and lifted his car keys was equally unknown to a numb and unconscious body. Vince was trying to help Peter, relieved to hear sirens in the distance, which he hoped were ambulances and not more police.

Whatever else Cheb had, the medical services were good; all three men were rushed to the emergency department of the local hospital but McKevitt was dead on arrival, while Cal and Peter were hanging on to life. The surgeons were Sudeten German but the Hippocratic oath knows no nationality and they worked hard to save their two remaining patients.

It was Vince who asked where Jimmy was; he was not in the hospital. Only when they could do no more and they returned to the hotel to sleep did they discover he was not there either. It was the next day before anyone looked in the garage and saw the Maybach was gone.

S
ide by side on deep mattresses and enclosed in crisp linen, Callum Jardine and Peter Lanchester were as comfortable as two men could be having suffered multiple bullet wounds and undergone several operations. The doctors who were treating them were of the opinion that news, good or bad, was inimical to a speedy recovery, but they knew from their visitors that things were dire. They had no idea how bad until Sir Hugh Sinclair turned up in person.

At first, during the official visiting time, everyone had been present: Corrie, Vince, Major Gibson and the aforementioned Quex. He had charmed Corrie with his old-world courtesy and was taken with Vince, as any once-active serviceman would be with another. But the time came when he asked for privacy so that he could talk to the two patients, one of whom was pressing in posing the obvious question.

‘There is no doubt that having stolen your car, young Garvin
searched it and found the Hitler document.’

‘I tip him as future editor of a national daily,’ Peter said, bitterly.

‘So it never got to Chamberlain and the Cabinet?’

‘Two different beasts, Mr Jardine, but let me explain. Young Garvin flew out of Prague with the goods and insisted on taking it not to the editor of his newspaper but to the proprietor, a fellow called Layton, and he spiked the story.’

‘Did he spike the little shit with it?’ demanded Cal.

Blinking at the vulgarity, Quex shook his head. ‘No, he bribed him to forget it with a senior post, which, I am told, had Vernon Bartlett spitting blood.’

‘If you spawn evil …’ Peter intoned, leaving the rest to the imagination of the others.

‘But Layton gave it to Sir Samuel Hoare, who in turn showed it to Chamberlain.’

‘So he got it!’ Quex nodded. ‘Then why did he sign that rubbish bit of paper at Munich?’

‘Don’t you see, Mr Jardine, he was the saviour of the nation?’

‘Destroyer, more like.’

‘Never,’ Sir Hugh said gravely, ‘underestimate how far a politician will go for a bit of short-term popularity. The PM was cheered by thousands when he came back from Munich and it went to his head. He quite forgot he is the leader of a nation of millions who think him a dupe.’

‘Who were these thousands?’

‘Those who think they have something to lose by war other than their lives. Comfort, houses, businesses, and that is allied to a deep fear of Bolshevism and the working classes. Anyway, according to my
good friend Duff Cooper, who resigned in disgust, Chamberlain saw it and dismissed it as propaganda, then embarked on his shuttling to and fro by air to suck Hitler’s poison, with Mussolini as the convenient suppository.’

‘With the result that he has the Sudetenland.’

‘And will have all of Czecho soon.’

‘Poland?’

‘Will take the coalfields they have desired for so long only to lose them again. Once Hitler has Teschen, Danzig and the hundreds of miles of Silesian border they are doomed. Not that they think so – to hear them boast, a squadron of cavalry is a match for any tank.’

‘Which,’ Cal growled, ‘was perfectly obvious a year ago to anyone who looked at a map.’

‘Politicians are strange creatures. Chamberlain is now acting as if Munich was a deliberate policy to gain time to rearm, instead of what it really was, the worst piece of diplomacy our country has ever engaged in.’

‘What did you do about McKevitt?’

‘Treated him as a hero externally and a warning internally. No point in washing our dirty linen in public, but he has served to remind those who incline to ill discipline that the end result is unpleasant.’

‘What drove him?’

‘Ah, what else but that madness which afflicts Irishmen on occasions? He was sure those machine guns were going to the IRA and he set out to stop it by diverting them to the
Jeunesses Patriotes
.’

‘Who would have used them on their own government.’

‘A notion which did not bother McKevitt one bit!’ Quex snapped. ‘Then I became the target of his ambition, an affliction which progressively warped his judgement, I fear.’

‘He’s not unique in SIS?’

‘Sadly no; but anyway, now to business, because you cannot stay here until you are fully recovered. The Germans will move into Eger within days.’

‘I’m feeling pretty good,’ Cal said.

‘Your physician does not agree. What we are planning to do is employ an ambulance to get you both back home and your doctors will travel with you, all covered by diplomatic immunity.’

‘That’s a lot of money, sir.’

‘On the contrary, Peter, the doctors have no desire to be here when the SS arrive, both being social democrats. They and their wives, who will be designated as nurses, will be much happier domiciled in England and for that their services are free. Their children we will get out by normal channels.’

There was a pause to allow him to be smug. ‘And now we come to you, Mr Jardine.’

‘The Tower, I expect.’

‘An amusing and tempting idea, but not sound.’ There was another pause, to gather his thoughts. ‘You are the possessor of skills that are in short supply and, I might add, skills we are going to need very sorely in the coming years. It has occurred to me that having someone of your ability inside the tent might be better than having you running around outside.’

‘Are you offering me employment?’

‘Don’t pay him,’ Peter snapped, ‘he doesn’t need it.’

That got a thin smile. ‘There is a war coming, Mr Jardine, and
we can do nothing to avoid it. I am too old to be entering such a cataclysm. Peter will prosper both through his brains and his judgement.’

That got a raspberry from Cal.

‘But you and your type are needed, Mr Jardine.’

‘Type?’

‘Killers. Or should I say imaginative eradicators of human vermin.’

‘You should look after General Moravec, he’s got some good people and he is, as I know to my cost, a wily old bugger.’

‘Already arranged; he will come to England when the Germans take the rest of the Czech lands.’

‘His agents?’ Cal was thinking of Veseli.

‘His to decide on.’ Quex stood. ‘Now I must go and seek to advise a government intent on adding to their foolishness.’

‘Not possible.’

‘Oh it is, Mr Jardine. They are talking about guaranteeing Poland’s borders.’

‘Vince, in my bag is a fortune in German marks. Could you do me a favour and take it to Prague and then fly home from there? Give it to Elsa Ephraim at the Jewish Emigration Centre and tell her it comes from the
Reichsbank
. She will be tickled to think she’s using their money to get her people to freedom.’

The last person to talk to was Corrie and she was very mature. ‘You’re not free to marry and I’m not willing to give up my career.’

‘So how do we stay in touch?’

She tapped her forehead. ‘Up here, Cal, up here, where there are
good memories. And – who knows? – we are flotsam who gravitate towards war zones. We both like trouble, so I guess we will meet more often than you think possible.’

‘I hope you believe me when I say I want that.’

She bent forward and kissed him. ‘Take care, Doc.’

J
ACK
L
UDLOW
is the pen-name of writer David Donachie, who was born in Edinburgh in 1944. He has always had an abiding interest in history: the Roman Republic, Medieval warfare as well as the naval history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which he has drawn on for the many historical adventure novels he has set in these periods. David lives in Deal with his partner, the novelist Sarah Grazebrook.

T
HE
R
OADS TO
W
AR
SERIES

The Burning Sky

A Broken Land

A Bitter Field

T
HE
R
EPUBLIC SERIES

The Pillars of Rome

The Sword of Revenge

The Gods of War

T
HE
C
ONQUEST SERIES

Mercenaries

Warriors

Conquest

Written as David Donachie

T
HE
J
OHN
P
EARCE SERIES

By the Mast Divided

A Shot Rolling Ship

An Awkward Commission

A Flag of Truce

The Admirals’ Game

An Ill Wind

Blown Off Course

Enemies at Every Turn