A New Kind of War

today.

‘You don’t?’ After searching his grin for a long moment Audley seized on his reassurance eagerly. But then the look became calculating. ‘And you are a friend of the Brigadier’s, aren’t you! And a bloody dark horse, therefore ... at least, according to Hughie, anyway!’

Poor boy! ‘I wouldn’t put too much store on that . . .’ A dull thump at the door stopped him from continuing to qualify his statement. ‘Come in!’

There was a scuffling noise outside before the door opened, to reveal Trooper Leighton piled high with Fred’s belongings.

‘Put it all down, Lucy – put it all down!’ Audley started to unload the man quickly of his variously well-pressed or well-blancoed and well-polished cargo. ‘Put it all down –and get out, man-juldi, juldi!’

Trooper Leighton gave Fred an agonized glance. ‘Your bath, sir – Major M’Crocodile’s servant took all the ’ot water while my back was turned – ‘

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‘It doesn’t matter.’ Fred was grateful for having been saved from contradicting the rumour Clinton wanted spreading. ‘I prefer to wash in cold water. Just bring me enough hot for shaving.’

‘Thank you, sir – ’

‘No?’ Audley closed the door on the man. ‘Why not?’

The battle-dress was as immaculate as Audley had promised, Fred saw with relief. And, for good measure, his major’s crowns were there on the straps, too.

‘What?’ This was hardly the time to tell Audley that, according to Hughie, Captain Audley himself was a good friend of the Brigadier’s. Because Audley would know that that was a distorted version of the truth.

‘What?’

‘Ah!’ The boy’s downcast expression vanished suddenly. ‘It’s that bomb, of course!’ He grinned hugely. ‘Saved by a bomb – that’s me!’

‘Yes.’ Half the conversation over dinner had been about the amazing new bomb which had been dropped on Japan the previous day – or, at least that part of the evening which had not been devoted to a long and acrimonious argument about the origin of the recipe for the delicately-spiced meat balls which had formed the meal’s piece-de-resistance . . . which the Crocodile had maintained was Berlin, while the Alligator had originated them in Hamburg; and which, in Otto Schild’s unexpected absence, had never finally been dummy4

resolved. ‘Yes – I think you can rely on the atomic bomb, David.’

Audley nodded happily. ‘That’s what old Kenworthy said. Bloody marvellous!’

‘Kenworthy?’ Fred’s memory of the little bespectacled major was of sullen silence and heavy drinking. ‘But he didn’t say anything – ?’

‘It was after you left.’ Audley nodded again. ‘He perked up then for a bit, before he was sick – before Lucy and Hughie carried him away and tucked him up.’ Nod. ‘But he said the Japs would be waving the white flag within a week. Or, if they didn’t, it didn’t matter. Because then there wouldn’t be any Japs left, so it came to the same thing. And that we’d all be going home.’ This time Audley shrugged his immense shoulders. ‘But that was just before he threw up –

which was just after he said he was going home tomorrow. Which is today of course . . . But I don’t think he will.’

Fred looked across the room to his valise, and to the zip-fastened pocket in it with the lock, the key to which hung round his neck with his identity discs. Because his own envelope was there, with his wallet and all the things he had taken out of his pockets last night. ‘Why not?’

‘He was very drunk . . . drunker than I’ve ever seen dummy4

him. So I don’t think he’ll be able to walk,’ explained Audley innocently. ‘But he certainly talked last night . . . before he returned to his Hamburger or Berliner meat balls ... to us, coram populo. Which was all the more spectacular because that isn’t like him either . . . Besides which he’s not due for release until next year, by my calculations.’

‘What did he say?’ It was unfortunate that Audley was the one officer he couldn’t ask about the efficacy of the long brown envelope in practice, and whether it had ever been opened and given a date before.

‘Oh ... he said this bomb was the real thing . . . not just like the Tallboys our gallant boys in blue dropped on the Bielefeld viaduct just down the road, which brought it down even though they missed it by miles . . .’ The boy’s eyes widened as he exaggerated the RAF’s incompetence ‘... he said it almost certainly isn’t very big . . . But that doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t work like an ordinary bomb . . . it’s quite different from all the stuff we’ve dropped on Germany.

In fact, he says that there’s no limit to its destructive power, and that the Jap scientists would know that themselves. So the one the Yanks dropped on wherever it was is probably just a little demonstration job. Some demo!’

It was plain that Audley wasn’t a scientist. But then, of course, he wasn’t: he was a historian potentially, and dummy4

an unwilling ex-tank commander and temporary captain actually, at this moment. ‘What does Major Kenworthy do ... refresh my memory, David? He collects machinery . . . ? But what was he ... before the war?’

‘What he really does . . . don’t ask me! He never talks to me ... or anyone else, much. But he is damn good with his machinery, certainly.’ The boy was still so entranced with the end of the war that the words tumbled out of him. ‘What he was ... I think was a physics lecturer at Manchester, or Birmingham, or somewhere. But he kept talking about his friends in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge last night ... is there a Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge? It’s all Greek to me, I tell you!’

‘Yes.’ It was almost Greek to Fred, too. But there was a hint of Teutoburger Blut und Leichen about it also, with his mathematician’s war-weakened recollections of the bright boys of the Cavendish in mind, as well as what Clinton had said yesterday.