The Proteus Operation Read online

  "And Overlord never projected another one-way team back to find out what happened?' Lindemann mused. "I assume there was no reason why they couldn't have."

  "Apparently they didn't. . . . At least, if they did, I never heard of it."

  "Mmm . . . that seems strange." There was a pause. "And the stage was set for Nazism to engulf the world without hindrance—as it proceeded to do. So what happened to the future that you came from in the first place? How could it ever have come to pass at all?"

  "I don't know," Scholder said. "Perhaps it no longer exists, somehow."

  "If that's true, how can there be a return-gate in Germany right now that's connected through to it?" Lindemann objected. "A connection, moreover, that you say won't be broken for several years?"

  "I don't know," Scholder replied again. "It mystifies me, too."

  "Well, let's hope that we get some good news today or tomorrow from New York."

  "Let's hope so."

  For it was nearing the end of May, and according to the information received in 1975 before the mission's departure, the first exchange of simple static messages ought to have been taking place just about then. Only the uncertainties of cross-ocean communications made it impossible to say for certain when confirmation would reach them in London.

  The compartment door opened, and a woman in a flowery, wide-brimmed, floppy hat came in, struggling with seemingly innumerable bags, packages, purses, and parcels. "Are these seats taken?" she panted. "No? Oh, thank goodness!"

  "Allow me, madam," Lindemann said, rising dutifully to assist.

  "Thank you. You're so kind. Oh—do be careful with that one. It has china in it."

  An elderly clergyman entered behind the woman, followed by a man in a business suit, a burly, red-faced man in a checked tweed jacket and cloth cap, who could have been a farmer, and a younger couple. They jostled around and found seats, while Lindemann wrestled the woman's encumbrances up onto the overhead luggage rack; then Lindemann regained his place in the corner and picked up his copy of the Times from the seat to make room for the woman to squeeze between him and the farmer.

  "Presents," the woman explained as she sat down.

  "Really?" Lindemann replied mechanically.

  "Toys, mainly."

  "I see."

  "I'm going to visit my daughter in Kensington."

  "How interesting." A note of hollow dread crept into Lindemann's voice with the sudden realization that he might be trapped in such conversation all the way to Liverpool Street station.

  "She has three children—my grandchildren."

  "I'm sure you find them delightful."

  The clergyman opened a magazine, the farmer and the businessman found places to stare at adjacent to each other's heads, and the couple began talking in whispers. Lindemann had just folded his paper to prepare for the crossword, when the woman stood up again to take off her coat. "I'm terribly sorry—I didn't realize it was so hot in here," she said.

  "That's quite all right, madam," Lindemann assured her.

  The woman folded the coat, stuffed it up among her other belongings, and sat back down. Lindemann returned his attention to his crossword, at the same time feeling inside his jacket for a pen. Then the woman began rummaging inside the purse that she had kept on her knee, and Lindemann had to draw back his shoulder to make room for her elbow. "Oh dear, I thought I'd put my ticket in here," the woman said. "It must be in the other one." She stood up again and began searching through the bags on the rack. Lindemann moved his knee and leaned away to make room once more, baring his clenched teeth as he nodded politely in response to her smiled apology.

  Smirking behind his hand, Scholder looked away to the scenery outside as the train began moving again. But at the same time there was a worried look in his eyes.

  This was the nation that was talking seriously about taking on the Nazi military colossus. In rural Essex and other places, Scholder had seen determined-looking spinsters on bicycles, pedaling through villages to pin airraid precaution bulletins on Post Office notice boards; he had watched retired Great War colonels drilling yokels with broomsticks on cricket greens and cramming their astonished heads into gas masks; he had observed Sunday-fete demonstrations of extinguishing fireworks with sand and a stirrup pump to show how to deal with incendiary bombs. It all typified the nearest that the English seemed able to get to working themselves into a war frenzy. They really believed they could stop Hitler by playing games like that.

  But then, they hadn't seen what Scholder had seen. They hadn't seen the desert of rubble that was Moscow after the atomic attack; or the mountains of corpses in the Polish extermination camps; or the films of Africans being herded into pits by the thousands to be incinerated by napalm. They hadn't been where Scholder had been. They just didn't understand.

  Winslade and Bannering were waiting at the end of the platform at Liverpool Street, which meant that something unexpected had happened. Scholder and Lindemann stepped up their pace as they walked by the locomotive, still venting steam and smoke after its exertions, and read from the expressions on their faces that the news was not good.

  Winslade, wearing a trilby hat and tan trenchcoat, drew them aside from the throng streaming by from the train. "Trouble," he said without preamble, keeping his voice low. "They should have opened the connection from Gatehouse this morning. It didn't work. Nothing came through from the other end."

  Scholder stared disbelievingly. "Nothing at all? You're sure the channel was operating correctly?"

  "The channel was operative, Winslade said. "But nothing activated it from the other end." In other words, the apparently infallible test performed before the team's departure from 1975 had been worthless.

  Lindemann looked aghast. "What do you propose doing?" he asked Winslade.

  "Getting over to New York right away. I'd like you to come, too, Kurt. Arthur will be staying here to carry on with Churchill and the others—turning the Russians around might suddenly have become more crucial than we thought."

  "Another week at sea?" Scholder sighed miserably. "Oh, how I hate ships!"

  "That won't be necessary, Winslade said. "Eden has managed to fix us a couple of seats on one of the Clipper mail flights that Pan Am has just started. We'll be there by tomorrow night. Mortimer has suspended further work on the gate in the meantime."

  A sickening feeling of fear clawed at Scholder s stomach as he looked around and took in the scene of reunited couples meeting and embracing in the station, parents leading children by the hand, a porter loading suitcases onto a cart—just ordinary people leading their lives, bothering no one, and wanting only to be left alone. And he thought of the broken, gray-faced, emaciated people that he had seen in his visits to England in the years after its capitulation in 1941. Was it all now destined to happen again as he remembered? Perhaps it had been unalterable all along.

  And what made the thought even more agonizing was the realization of what it would mean for him personally. He had spent thirty-four years in the previous world, and had seen the meaning of Nazi conquest firsthand. Was he now trapped with no escape from yet another past, destined to live through those same years of horror and despair all over again?

  CHAPTER 12

  REGARDLESS OF HOW IT was always done in the movies, the guard dogs used by the German police and military couldn't be dealt with by anything as simple as tossing them a piece of doped meat; they were trained to eat only the food fed to them by their handler. It was unlikely that the Dobermans loose in the grounds surrounding Iceman Bruno's residence at Pelham would have been trained anywhere near as rigorously, but one of the things that made Sergeant Floyd Lamson better at his job than most was that he made minimum assumptions and took maximum precautions. He dropped a sack filled with old clothes and scented with aniseed over the wall from a perch in an oak tree standing just outside a corner remote from the house, and used an air rifle equipped with a night-sniper's sight to pick the dogs off with fast-acting tranquilizer darts when they came t
o investigate. He had watched the place long enough, both night and day, to know there were four of them and that no guards would be roaming the grounds.

  On receiving two green signal-torch flashes from Lamson, Ferracini and Cassidy relayed them to Paddy Ryan, who was concealed in the foliage outside the main gate. Then they scaled the wall easily using ropes and grappling hooks. They found the electrical wires strung through the coils of barbed wire on top, and before starting to cut a way through, made bypass connections to avoid setting off alarms. Meanwhile, Ryan moved up to the gate and affixed a small, shaped charge that would cut through the locking bar to afford a quick way out if one was needed later. He attached a detonator, threw one end of a pull-line trigger in through the gate to be retrievable on the inside, and then connected the trigger to the detonator. Then he retreated back into the shadows and followed the foot of the wall to where Ferracini and Cassidy had gone over. He found the rope they had left hanging and joined them on the far side. They waited a minute or so for Lamson, who had dropped directly into the grounds from the tree to administer shots to the dogs that would keep them out for the rest of the night; then the four of them began threading their way silently in loose single-file through the shrubbery toward the looming silhouette of the house.

  For reasons that, he hadn't disclosed, Mortimer Greene had ordered a halt to further work on the machine after tests of some kind that he and Gordon Selby had conducted all through the previous night and into the morning. Also, apparently, Winslade and Scholder were on their way back from England in a hurry. So presumably the tests hadn't worked. What it all added up to, Ferracini wasn't sure; but it did mean extra leave for the troops, and Ferracini had persuaded the others that it was time to pay Iceman the visit they'd been planning for some time.

  Counting the ins and outs through the afternoon and evening had yielded the tentative result that there were nine other men inside the house besides Bruno, and also three women. All of the ground-floor and second-floor windows were formidably barred and probably wired, and the pattern of lights suggested that the occupants were moving mostly among the rooms at the lower front of the building. That was convenient, for the easiest way in that Lamson had identified was a small, circular window tucked high up on a rear wall, just below the eaves in the angle of a large gable. That window hadn't been barred; "obviously" there was no way for anyone to get even close to it.

  At the house, Ferracini and Cassidy moved off around a corner into the shadows on the north side and ascended a vertical recess between a wall and a projecting pillar of fluted stonework, which they climbed by bridging across with legs and arms. From the top of the pillar, using rubber-soled boots to provide friction grips for most of the way, and a spike forced into a crack in the mortar to get them over one awkward spot, they traversed horizontally along a line of ornamental brickwork to a corner and followed the corner up to the roof. High against the night sky, they pulled themselves around the overhang and vanished; a few minutes later, the end of a line tied in a series of overhand loops sailed out from somewhere above the round window and dropped into the flowerbeds where Lamson and Ryan were waiting.

  Lamson climbed the ladder of loops while Ryan steadied the bottom end; then, when Lamson was up to the height of the window, Ryan pulled the rope outward and inward again to swing Lamson in underneath the overhang of the eaves. On the third swing Lamson hooked the wooden window ledge with a fine-barbed grapnel attached to a rock-climber's étrier, and then he stepped into the étrier to give himself a stance where he could work on the window. The window yielded quickly, and Lamson climbed through. He secured the rope for Ferracini and Cassidy to lower themselves down hand-overhand from above, while at the same time Ryan began climbing the other section of the rope from below.

  "Yeah, yeah, I gotcha." Bruno Verucin, known as the Iceman because of his opulent tastes and predilection for diamonds, tilted himself back in the chair behind his wide mahogany desk and nodded into the telephone. He puffed out a cloud of smoke and hooked the thumb of the hand holding his cigar in his suspenders. "Like I said, Pete, the whole idea is to get us set up off Atlantic City the same way they're doing out West. That ship that Tony Stralla's rigged out as a floating casino outside the three-mile limit at Santa Monica is making three hundred grand a month—did you know that? Yeah, that's what I said, Pete—grand—a month. Well, that's what we're out to beat, okay?"

  From an armchair in one corner where he was lounging with one leg propped up on a stool by the bar, Bruno's lieutenant, Freddie Numbers, raised his eyebrows and looked across at One-Round Connahan, who was leaning by the door, chewing gum, looking bored. Connahan remained expressionless and carried on chewing.

  "That's right," Bruno went on. "It all depends on the Kraut signing over the boat, the crew, and his whole operation with no strings . . . Wally Fritsch, his name is. He's in trouble over the money he owes, and I can put the screws on him there. . . . Yeah, yeah, I hear ya, Pete. Wally's here now, and we're negotiating the deal. . . . Not yet, but we're working on it. . . . Okay, I'll call you back as soon as its final. . . . Sure thing. Trust me, baby, okay? When did I ever fail to deliver?"

  Bruno put the phone down and looked at the other two. "Pete's getting anxious. Maybe it's about time we went back down to see how the negotiations are doing, huh?" He laughed at his joke and got up from the desk. Numbers rose to his feet, One-Round straightened up from the wall, and they followed Bruno out of the den.

  They went down some stairs with thick carpeting, across an ornately furnished hallway with many doors opening off it, and along a corridor that led past an open room in which some hoods were playing pool. Finally, they descended more stairs and stopped outside a closed door. Bruno gave two sharp raps, and the door was opened from the inside.

  The room was sparsely furnished, with just a bare table, a closet, and some upright wooden chairs. Two more of Bruno's strong-arm men were there, their ties loosened and shirts wet with patches of perspiration. A third man, in his mid-fifties, looking bruised and haggard, was slumped in a chair at the table. Blood showed at a corner of his mouth, and he was breathing in labored gasps.

  Bruno crossed the floor and came to a halt, his knuckles resting on the tabletop. He looked down and shook his head reproachfully. "Too bad you're not as smart as I thought, Wally." he said. "Looks like you been giving yourself a tough time. So, I said I was a reasonable guy. You had enough time to reconsider yet?"

  "You go to hell, pig's fart," Fritsch wheezed through lips that were starting to stiffen. He had a strong German accent.

  Bruno's expression darkened. He slapped Fritsch hard across the face. "Talk to me like that again, boy, and you get your feet toasted, understand? Now, my patience is just about run out. You got one more chance to sign the paper before I get really mean."

  Fritsch shook his head. "I vill not do ziss. You go unt fry in your own fat first."

  "It's gonna be tough," one of the hoods murmured. He was known as Fairytoes on account of his two-hundred-eighty-pound bulk. The other, who was called Charlie, lit a cigarette and looked on expressionlessly.

  Bruno glowered for a second or two longer. "Then bring the dame down and see how he likes that," he snapped. One-Round turned and went back out the door.

  Fritsch s eyes widened. "Her you leef out of ziss!" he protested, rising to his feet. "It doesn't—"

  Fairytoes cuffed him back down again. "Listen when da boss is talkin ."

  "Waddya think I brought her here for—a bridge party?" Bruno sneered. "I told ya I'm a busy man. I don't have time for fooling around."

  Fritsch looked genuinely scared for the first time. "But everyzing I make . . . years of vork, it all goes into ziss business. Vat you talk about now vould be giving it away." He shook his head. "You talk about offers, so make der offer. . . . But ziss . . .'he shook his head again, "iss robbery.

  "Ah! Do I hear a new voice of cooperation?" Bruno said, nodding approvingly. "Does that mean you're willing to talk now, Wally boy?"

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sp; "Always I half said I vill talk. But you haff never given even ze chance to talk. You talk only of take, take, take."

  Bruno reversed a chair and sat down on it with his elbows spread along the top of the backrest. "Okay, he sighed. "I'll give it to ya one more time. Now hear me good, Wally, because this is the way it is. . . ."

  His jaw moving mechanically, One-Round clumped up a short flight of stairs at the back of the house and came to the landing outside the room where they had left the girl, with Chins keeping an eye on her. He tapped and called, "Chins, it's me—Connahan," then turned the handle and pushed the door inward. There was no response from the other side, and he had just begun registering that the room was strangely still, when a finger tapped him lightly on the shoulder. He started to turn automatically.

  An arm streaking upward like a piston, fingers of the hand curled back to expose the heel, smashed into the nerve plexus at the base of his nose and straightened him up for the knee already jackknifing into his crotch. He doubled over without a sound and was already out before an edge-handed blow to the base of his skull made sure he'd stay that way for some time to come.

  The hooded figure in black caught him before he could fall, and a second, similarly clad figure came out of the room to take the feet and carry the limp form back in. The woman standing by the vanity, plain in looks and modestly dressed, in her late twenties or early thirties, watched, terrified, as they laid their burden on the floor away from the door and behind the bed, alongside Chins. One of them stooped to take One-Round's gun from its shoulder holster, frisked him quickly for other weapons, and straightened up, satisfied.

  "Look, whoever you are, I don't have anything to do with this," the woman whispered tensely. "I don't belong here. I'm—"