“What’s this then? Explosives?” he asked, but when they opened the parcel, it was long thin strips of silver- colored foil.
Chaff, to fool the radar into thinking there were large numbers of ships in an area.
“It says here,” the Commander said, reading the letter, “that when we hear the message that tells us the invasion’s on, they want us to head for Calais and throw this stuff out behind us.”
Which would be even more dangerous than mapping the beaches. “Good luck,” Ernest said sincerely. He put on his almost-dry coat and shouldered his duffel bag.
“Goodbye, Commander.”
“Not Commander—Captain,” he said proudly.
“Grandfather got his commission,” Jonathan explained.
“Congratulations, Captain,” Ernest said, and saluted. The Commander beamed. “Good luck to both of you.”
“We don’t need luck,” he said. “Thanks to you, we’ve got the Lady Jane, and she won’t let us down. We’re going to come out of this all right, you mark my words.”
“I hope you’re right,” Ernest said, shook hands with Jonathan, and went up the ladder onto the deck.
And into a veritable hurricane. He had to force his way, bent double, off the boat and back along the dock, hoping he wouldn’t be blown into the water. When he heard Jonathan behind him, calling, “Seaman Higgins!” he thought, If he’s coming after me to bring me back, I’ll go.
But Jonathan wanted to give him something—a flat packet wrapped in oilcloth and tied with twine. “Am I supposed to give this to Tensing?” Ernest shouted, using his real name, since there was no way anyone could possibly overhear them in this gale.
Jonathan shook his head, raindrops flying from his wet hair. “It’s for my mother,” he shouted. “It’s in case we don’t make it back. So she’ll know what happened.”
“For after the invasion?” Ernest yelled.
“No!” he shouted back. “For after the war. All these secrets won’t matter then.”
No, Ernest thought. They won’t.
“I’ll send it,” he promised, and stuck it inside his shirt, thinking, as he watched Jonathan run back along the dock, Maybe I could give one to Cess to send.
But what could it say? “Dear Eileen, I wasn’t really killed that night in Houndsditch. I waited till after Bank Station was bombed and then went to find an incident that the Civil Defence hadn’t arrived at yet and left my papers and scarf for them to find, just like a murderer in one of your Agatha Christie mysteries. I’m sorry to have burned the coat, after all the trouble you went to to get it for me …”
You don’t have time for letter writing, he thought. You need to get to the train station.
He set off through the wind and rain to find it. He knew where it was from when he’d come to Dover that first September, trying to get to his drop, and he could walk/hobble a lot faster now than he could then, but he was so frozen by the time he got there that he had to blow on his numb hands before he had enough feeling in them to be able to get the coins in the telephone’s slot so the operator could put him through to British Army headquarters in Portsmouth.
He’d spent over a month making trips to Army headquarters in London and making calls—under various pretenses—to British Army camps all over southwest He’d spent over a month making trips to Army headquarters in London and making calls—under various pretenses—to British Army camps all over southwest England, trying to locate Denys Atherton, and he was still only halfway through the list. And God help him if Atherton had had an L- and-A implant and was here as an American GI because there were more than 800,000 American soldiers in England right now.
The operator put him through to Southampton, and he spent what was left of the afternoon and evening being transferred from office to office, officer to officer, to find out there was no Denys Atherton stationed in Southampton or Exeter or Plymouth, and to worm the telephone number of the paymaster at Weymouth out of a reluctant Wren by using his old-standby American accent. His implant had long since worn off, but he’d done it so long, it was permanently a part of him.
By the time he got off the phone with the Wren, he was coughing. He couldn’t spend the night in the station. It was too cold, and the ticket agent was beginning to eye him suspiciously. He couldn’t hope to catch a ride in this weather either, and at night, and he couldn’t go to an inn anywhere near the docks and risk running into the Commander and Jonathan in the pub room. And he was going to need something hot—and alcoholic—to ward off the chills he was already having.
You can’t get sick, he told himself. You only have a month and a half to find Atherton. And you still haven’t done your invasion-propaganda spreading, to which end he limped out to the edge of town to a pub which catered to the locals, ordered a hot toddy, and prepared to tell all comers that he’d overheard two officers saying the big show was starting on July eighteenth and it was definitely going to be Calais.
But there were no comers, in spite of the pub actually having ale and whiskey—a rarity at this point in the war. The weather was apparently too much even for hardy seafarers. Ernest spent the evening drinking one hot toddy after another and composing imaginary letters:
“Dear Eileen, I know I said we shouldn’t split up, but Denys Atherton didn’t come through till after Polly’s deadline, and it was the only way I could think of to get a message through to him. Remember my telling you about how Shackleton had to leave his crew behind and go off to get help because if he didn’t, no one would have had any way of knowing where they were and they’d all have died? And how he made it to the island and found help and came back to rescue them? Well, I didn’t tell you the whole story. When Shackleton got to the island, he was on the wrong side and had to walk over the mountains to get where he needed to be, and the same thing happened to me …”
And after two more drinks:
“Dear Polly, I lied to you when I came back from Manchester. The person who came to Saltram-on-Sea asking about me wasn’t Fordham. It was Tensing. He’d been tracking me down since Bletchley Park, but you were wrong.
