mercury fulminate in a sweetly curved wrapper, it made a weird kind of sense. “Whatever you say,” Chaim told her, which only proved him a born optimist.
Alistair Walsh had spent some time in the stockade, and in civilian jails as well. Boys will be boys, and soldier boys will be soldier boys. Sometimes the police, military or otherwise, showed up before the tavern brawl finished. He’d never hurt anybody badly in those little dustups, and he’d never spent long behind bars.
Things were different this time. And he liked none of the differences. If they jugged you for rearranging a bloke’s face after he tried to smash a pint mug over your head, you knew what you’d done and you knew how long you’d stay jugged on account of it.
If they jugged you for treason, though… In that case, they were making up the rules as they went along. He’d asked for a solicitor. They didn’t laugh in his face, but they didn’t give him one, either. They might as well not have heard him.
But when they asked him questions, they expected answers. Oh, yes! No one asked you questions after a barroom brawl, except maybe Why were you such a bloody idiot? Here, they wanted to know everybody he’d ever met, what all those people had said in the past six months, and what he’d said to them. They weren’t just building a case against him. He was a minnow. They were trying to use him to hook the big fish.
They weren’t fussy about how they went at it, either. Bright lights, lack of sleep… “No wonder you back the buggers who threw in with the Nazis,” he told one of them. “The SS must have taught you all its tricks.”
That won him a slap in the face. They didn’t bring out the thumbscrews and the hot skewers. He wondered why not. Some lingering memory of the days when they were decent coppers? It seemed too much to hope for.
They told him all the other traitors were in cells, too. They told him the others were singing like canaries. They told him half a dozen people had named him as one of the earliest and most deeply involved plotters. “Then you don’t need me to tell you anything more, do you?” he said.
He got another wallop in the chops for that. When his ears stopped ringing, one of the detectives-if that was what they were-said, “You can make it easier on yourself if you give us what you know.”
“If you think I’m a traitor, you won’t go easy on me any road,” Walsh said. He might be sore. He might be half drunk with sleepiness. No matter what he was, that seemed obvious to him.
The interrogators muttered amongst themselves. Things didn’t seem to be going the way they wanted. One of them gave him another whack. “Talk, damn you!” the bastard bellowed. Blood salty on his tongue, Walsh rattled off his name, former rank, and pay number. The Scotland Yard man glowered. “You aren’t in the Army any more, and you aren’t a prisoner of war, either.”
“Then give me a solicitor,” Walsh said yet again. He got another slap for his trouble. He also got frogmarched back to his cell. He counted that a victory of sorts. He’d made them change plans.
Which was worth… what? Anything? They didn’t let him see newspapers, of course. They also didn’t let him listen to the BBC. That they still held him and went on knocking him around argued that Sir Horace Wilson remained Prime Minister, and that England remained allied to Hitler.
If they decided he was too big a nuisance-or if they decided he didn’t know anything they had to learn-they might just knock him over the head and get rid of his body. They went on and on about traitors, but they were at least as far outside the law as any traitors could be.
They fed him slop, and precious little of it. He’d eaten more and better in the trenches. He couldn’t think of anything worse to say about prison rations.
Then one day they opened his cell at an unexpected time. Alarm ran through him even before one of them pointed a service revolver at his head. Any jailbird quickly learns that breaks in routine aren’t intended for his benefit. “Come on, you,” the pistol packer snarled.
“Where? Why?” Walsh asked.
“Shut up. Get moving. You waste my time, it’s the last dumb thing you’ll ever do.” The fellow from Scotland Yard seemed to be trying to sound like an American tough guy in the movies. Only his accent spoiled the effect.
Something rattled outside. If that wasn’t a machine gun, Walsh had never heard one. And if that was a machine gun… Walsh held out his hand. “Here, you’d better give me that,” he said, as if to a little boy. “You don’t want the soldiers to catch you carrying it.”
“Soldiers? What soldiers? I’m not afraid of no bleeding soldiers.” The copper kept talking tough. The wobble in his voice gave him away. Outside, the machine gun brayed again.
“You’ll be doing the bleeding any minute now,” Walsh said. “Come on, hand over your toy. What do you think it can do against the kind of firepower the Army’s got, anyway?” Something blew up, a lot closer than the stuttering machine gun. Helpfully, Walsh explained: “That’s a Mills bomb-a hand grenade, if you like. They’re going to get in here. They won’t like it if they catch you with a weapon in your hand.”
Glumly, the copper handed him the Webley and Scott. Two other Scotland Yard men, moving with slow caution, laid their pistols on the ground. Walsh was tempted to plug each of them in turn after he scooped up the weapons. Not without regret, he refrained.
Pounding feet announced the arrival of soldiers. No one not in the military stomped with that percussive rhythm. “Over here!” Walsh called. “I’ve got ’em!”
Some of the men carried rifles with fixed bayonets. One of the bayonets dripped blood. A police official must have made a fatal mistake. At the soldiers’ head was the major with whom Walsh had examined 10 Downing Street. He cradled a Tommy gun as gently as if it were a baby. “Hullo, old man,” he said. “We’re in the driving seat now. First job of this sort in upwards of two hundred and fifty years, but we’ve brought it off.”
“That’s-” one of the Scotland Yard men began. The Tommy gun’s muzzle swung in his direction. He went pale as skimmed milk. Whatever his detailed opinion was, he kept it to himself. He wasn’t a complete fool, then. Walsh had had his doubts.
“Elections soon,” the major went on. “We’ll let the people have their say about what we’ve done. If they’re daft enough to want to go along with the Nazis…” He rolled his eyes to show what he thought of that. “But in the meanwhile, our troops in Russia are ordered to hold in place against anyone-anyone at all-who attacks them. We’ll get them out of there quick as we can.”
“But what if old Adolf goes after them hammer and tongs?” Walsh knew he sounded worried, and well he might-he had more than a few friends fighting in Russia. “They’re hostages to the Fritzes, you might say.”
“It’s possible, but I don’t believe it’s likely. Hitler would have to be raving mad to do anything like that. He’d be handing Stalin four prime divisions on a silver platter, eh?” the major replied.
That made perfect sense. Walsh wondered why hearing it didn’t reassure him more. Probably because, when dealing with Hitler, the most perfectly sensible things turned out to be nonsense after all as often as not. Changing the subject looked like a good idea: “Where are Sir Horace and the Cabinet?”
“They’re safe. None of them tried anything foolish.” The major answered without giving details, which didn’t surprise Walsh.
The Scotland Yard man who’d handed over his pistol worked up the nerve to ask, “What does the King think of all this?”
“One of the reasons Edward’s off in Bermuda is, he was too pally by half with Adolf and Musso,” the major said. “As soon as General Wavell brought his Majesty word the government had, ah, changed, King George knighted him on the spot. And Queen Elizabeth, God bless her, kissed him.”
All the captured coppers seemed to shrink in on themselves. They’d been following orders, and they’d been just as sure they were following the path of righteousness. Almost everyone was. Walsh supposed even Hitler didn’t face the mirror when he shaved each morning and think Today I’ll go out and do something really evil. But if enough others thought that was what he was doing… Well, in that case England got the most abrupt change of government since James II bailed out one jump ahead of the incoming William and Mary. And a good thing, too, he thought, or else they would have hanged me.
Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky looked out at the assembled Soviet flyers in his squadron. “Today we bomb west of Chernigov,” he said. “Our targets are the German and Hungarian troops in the area, not-I repeat, not-the English expeditionary force. The English have seen reason. They are no longer hostile to the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union… which means Hitler’s Fascist hyenas and the jackals who follow them are now hostile to the
