Vince had an easy way of putting the whole thing into perspective; for him, all he saw in the Daily Mail, the paper which was most vocal in its support for Hitler, Mussolini and that ‘turd’ Oswald Mosley, was lies. This constituted a trio which, even with his Italian parentage, he hated with a passion. It was, in his pithy phrase, ‘Pure bollocks, guv.’
Eventually they got aboard the twin-engined DC2 and it took off, lumbering into the air with a full passenger load and, flying from an airport to the north of Paris, it soon took them over some of the old battlefields of the World War. For anyone who had been there the scars in the landscape, though they were green and verdant instead of mud-brown now, were unmistakable.
From on high on a clear summer day the line of the trenches, gentle depressions now, stood out starkly in the fields of grazing land and wheat, running from north-west to south-east, as did the mass of craters that littered the otherwise fertile fields surrounding them, holes that regularly threw up body parts.
There were trees again where their predecessors had been reduced to matchwood, rebuilt farmhouses, and cows grazing contentedly in well-ordered pastures. When you thought of the millions who had perished on that restored landscape it was easy to see very good reasons to not want to go through the whole thing again.
Nor was it simple to equate the trouble of the country to which they were headed with the peaceful-looking parts of France over which they then flew, those that had been occupied but untouched by trench warfare, the very fields over which Cal and Peter Lanchester had advanced to battle.
That was until, just over the broad grey River Rhine, their passenger aircraft was buzzed by a couple of German single-engined fighters, seemingly, according to the steward, a common practice, a way of telling those on board that their passage in a Czech aircraft was only possible through German tolerance.
Just over an hour later the rolling hills of Bavaria gave way to the more broken country of Southern Bohemia, part of that chain of hills and deep forested valleys in which lay the formidable Czech defence line, copied from the French Maginot Line, which Cal had described to Peter Lanchester.
Not that anything could be seen of the artillery-filled cupolas and machine gun-bearing pillboxes, but to an experienced military eye it was very possible to understand how formidable it could be to advance into a terrain in which it would be easy to inflict casualties on and hurt even a well-equipped enemy.
The next cause for exhilaration was when the banking plane showed the numerous church spires of one of the jewels of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire: Prague, the city of a hundred churches, looked peaceful at this distance and that was maintained when they landed, to be greeted by folk who seemed grateful they had troubled to travel to their country, whatever their purpose.
Cal liked the Czechs despite their airs; they tended to speak German as a second language, which meant he could communicate, drove their cars on the left, were honest, if rather strict in their morality, and proud to be citizens of an independent nation, that proved by the calm way they had mobilised in May in the face of Hitler’s bluster, getting to the colours some eight hundred thousand fighting men and forcing the Fuhrer to back down.
Most had been stood down but it was obvious the country was still feeling threatened. There was a strong military presence at the airport and Cal had noticed both sides of the runway were lined with trucks, which could be driven on to the concrete strip to block it in the event of an emergency. The Czechs had an air force, but it was nothing compared to the Luftwaffe.
There were knots of soldiers on the route into the city and, even if the roadblocks had been moved to the side, evidence of a state of emergency was more obvious still the closer they got to the city centre. All the shop and office windows were still taped to counter the effects of blast and some of the larger buildings remained as Cal had last seen them, sandbagged at their entrances; this was a country on edge.
It seemed much more crowded than before and there were, too, beggars on the streets in a quantity Cal had not seen on his last visit, when he had passed through on his way to and from Brno. There would be refugees from the borderlands, and not just Jews or communists; anyone who dreaded the consequences of war would have tried to get out of the way of the feared invasion.
Much as he liked luxury, they needed to reside somewhere discreet, so the reservations Cal had made were at the Meran Hotel and in the names of the passports supplied by Snuffly Bower. He was now Thomas Barrowman and Vince, Frederick Nolan. They had discreetly switched their documents at the airport, once they had cleared Czech customs, their original travel papers going under the reglued false bottoms.
The Meran was an old family-run establishment, not in any way luxurious but central and not the sort of place in the lobby of which Cal was likely to run into the army of journalists now camping out in the Czech capital. On his previous visit he had stayed at one of the other top establishments, the Alcron, where he was known as Mr Moncrief, and that he would have to avoid.
The Czechs, not surprisingly given their staunch association with France, had adopted many of her customs; they operated on a similar system of hotel registration, in which the passport details were entered on cards to be picked up by the local bobbies before being sent on to the Ministry of the Interior where they were filed.
After a bit of juggling due to the influx of refugees, he and Vince managed to get separate rooms. They were lodged in a narrow building hemmed in on both sides by others of equal height. The hotel had a single front entrance, easy to watch, and at the rear the back doors led to a series of alleyways that would make it easy to disappear into a main thoroughfare without anyone in pursuit being sure of the direction taken.
Rule number one in a foreign country was to make sure you had a safe way out, and that could only be by a passage through Poland or Rumania and not by air or train, where papers would be bound to be rigorously checked, so a whole day was spent in doing what he and Vince had done in Bucharest two years previously.
They bought a reliable second-hand car for cash, in this case an early model of the Tatra 77, which if it looked odd to the Anglo-Saxon eye was at least, with its aerodynamic body, reasonably fast. Next came clothing, along with the necessary maps, non-perishable food and a supply of water as well as cans of petrol. Another absolute necessity was to have cut a couple of spare door keys.
It took time to do all that, even more in a strange city to find a safe place to park and leave the Tatra, Cal insisting it must be on both a bus and tram route that ran from the city centre. Once that was found, under the front passenger seat went their proper documents, passports and Cal’s genuine driving licence; from now on they would operate on those provided by Snuffly Bower.
The last thing to do was to remove and hide the distributor cap in the boot of the car, thus immobilising the engine; the Czechs might be an honest lot, but with the number of refugees around, many of them people seeking to get out of the country right now — Prague alone had a population of Jews rated at forty thousand — there was a high risk of a long-parked car being stolen.
‘Right,’ Cal said, once they were back near Wenceslas Square. ‘Food, a good night’s sleep, and in the morning I will set about seeing what we can do.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The initial contact when buying those light machine guns, given to him by a Spanish republican envoy, had been a ministerial aide called Janek. He had a Catalan wife and worked at the offices of the Czech Finance Ministry as an aide to the minister.
To carry out the trade had involved Cal in several secret meetings with him, before he was passed on to others, but the notion of just calling at his home and saying hello was not one to contemplate. This was an operation in which there was no way of knowing where it would lead; he could not involve the man’s family or jeopardise his livelihood.
Nor could he visit him at the ministry without raising questions about an association that was supposed to be for that one transaction only and had been kept within a strict circle of those who needed to be consulted and squared politically, both to process the payments and call in the necessary documentation to transport the guns out of the country. What had been done might have had the nod from above, but it was illegal and thus stood as a career risk to those who had participated.
Cal did, however, know the cafe at which the man took a cup of morning coffee before going to work and he was there before him, keeping his face hidden until Janek walked in, a clutch of morning papers under his arm. For someone not versed in the craft of the intelligence game, Milas Janek was good; there was no startled reaction, indeed no apparent reaction at all.
