The Proteus Operation Read online

  The driver, who had got out and was standing in front of the car, took Ferracini's bag and stowed it in the trunk. Inside, Winslade leaned across to open the door opposite him. Ferracini climbed in and shut the door. Succumbing to the texture and smell of the padded leather upholstery, he stretched back with a grateful sigh and closed his eyes to savor for a few precious moments the unaccustomed feeling of luxury and warmth enveloping him.

  "I take it we have to collect Cassidy," Winslade's precisely articulated voice said while the driver was getting in. "Where to? The air base?"

  Ferracini nodded without opening his eyes. "He's taking care of the papers."

  "The air base," Winslade said, in a louder voice. The car moved smoothly away. "So, Harry, how did it go this time?" Winslade inquired genially after a few seconds.

  "Okay, I guess. We got set up as planned. We got them out. We brought them home."

  "All of them? I counted only eight."

  "The three that were supposed to come through from London didn't show up. We never found out what happened. Pluto thinks there's a leak at that end."

  "Hmm . . . that's unfortunate." Winslade paused and digested the information. "Does that mean Pluto's compromised?"

  "Maybe. He's closing down the operation as a precaution—moving to Bristol and opening a new shop there, probably inside a month."

  "I see. And our dear friend, Obergruppenführer Frichter? How is his health these days?"

  "Lousy. He won't be hanging any more hostages."

  "How tragic."

  Ferracini opened his eyes at last and sat up with a sigh, at the same time pushing his cap back off' his forehead. "Look, what is this, Claud?" he demanded. "There are proper places and procedures for mission debriefings. Why are you handling it, and why are we riding around in a car?"

  Winslade's voice remained even. "Just my personal curiosity. The regular debriefing will be held later by the appropriate people. However, there's more pressing business to be attended to first. To answer your other question, we're not simply riding around, but going somewhere."

  Ferracini waited, but Winslade left him hanging. He sighed again. "Okay, I'll buy it. Where?"

  "We were going to the air base, anyway—flying to New Mexico."

  "Where, specifically?"

  "Classified."

  Ferracini tried another approach. "Okay—why?"

  "To meet some people whom I have no doubt you'll find interesting."

  "Oh, really? Such as?"

  "How about JFK for a start?"

  Ferracini frowned. He knew that while Winslade had a way of playing with people sometimes, he never joked frivolously. Winslade smirked, his pale gray eyes twinkling behind rimless, semicircular spectacles, and his mouth stretched into a thin, upturned line.

  In his late fifties at least, with a rounded face, ruddy complexion and nose to match, medium build, and white wisps of hair showing above his ears, Winslade would have cut a good figure as a jovial but slimmed-down Mr. Pickwick. In addition to his soft, floppy-brimmed black hat he was wearing a heavy gray overcoat with fur-trimmed lapels, a dark silk scarf, and brown leather gloves. He was clasping the carved top of an ornamental cane standing propped between his knees.

  The most anybody seemed to know about Winslade was just as much as they needed to, which was never very much, usually no more than he chose to disclose. Ferracini, for sure, had never really figured out exactly who Winslade was or what he did; but he did know that Winslade walked in and out of every department of the Pentagon with impunity, dined regularly at the White House, and seemed to be on first-name terms with the directors of nearly every major scientific research institution in the country. Also, in talking with Winslade over the several years in which their paths had been crossing intermittently, Ferracini had formed the distinct impression of Winslade as a man who was far from new to the business of undercover operations—and not only theoretically, but in terms of hard, firsthand experience as well. He suspected that Winslade had been operationally active himself once, long ago, possibly; but he couldn't be sure because Winslade never talked much about himself.

  The sedan slowed as it approached the gate leading out of the dockyard area. The barrier rose, and a Navy Police corporal waved them through while the two guards presented arms. Once through the gate, the car accelerated and turned in the direction of the air base.

  Refusing to play further question-and-answer games, Ferracini clamped his jaw tight and thrust out his chin obstinately. Winslade shrugged, then smiled and reached into the briefcase beside him to draw out a neatly made, pocket-size portable radio, with a black front panel, silver knobs, and chrome trim. It was smaller than anything Ferracini had seen before, apart from secret military devices, and had a hinged cover on the front.

  "Empire-built Japanese," Winslade commented as he flipped the cover open with a thumb. "You won't see anything like it here, but the children there carry them around in the streets. It even plays recordings on magnetic cassette tapes. Want to hear one?" He produced a tiny cartridge, inserted it into a space behind the cover, snapped the flap shut, and pressed a switch. Then he rested the radio on his knee and sat back in his seat, watching Ferracini's face.

  Ferracini stared in disbelief as powerful, swinging music poured from the speaker, with a clarinet leading over several saxophones to a lively, thumping rhythm of accentuated bass. It was unlike anything that he had ever heard. The popular music of the seventies tended to be a mixture of militaristic and patriotic marches, Wagner and the dreary dirges of the people who thought America could save itself by going Fascist, and the wailing about doom and destruction of liberal-minded adolescents. But this? It was crazy. It didn't go with the times, either—or with Ferracini's present mood.

  After a few bars of incomprehensible vocal harmonizing, a male soloist came in with the lyric. Winslade tapped his fingers on the armrest beside him and nodded his head in time with the beat.

  Pardon me, boy.

  Is that the Chattanooga choo-choo?

  Yeah, yeah, track twenty-nine,

  Boy, you can gimme a shine.

  Ferracini brought a hand up to cover his brow and shook his head, moaning tiredly. "Claud, gimme a break. I've just got off a sub that we've been cooped up in for days. We were over the other side for six weeks. . . . I don't need this right now. ''

  You leave the Pennsylvania station ‘bout a quarter to four,

  Read a magazine and then you're in Baltimore,

  Dinner in the diner,

  Nothing could be finer,

  Than to have your ham n' eggs in Carolina.

  Winslade turned the volume down. "Glenn Miller. Would you believe I used to dance to that?"

  Ferracini stared at him incredulously, as if seriously wondering for the first time if Winslade really had gone insane. "You? Dance?"

  "Certainly." A faraway look came into Winslade's eyes. "The Glen Island Casino was the best spot, off the Shore Road in New Rochelle, New York. That was the prize booking for all the big bands then. It had the glamour and the prestige. The main room was up on the second floor, and you could walk out through big French windows and look right across Long Island Sound. All the kids from Westchester County and Connecticut went there. Ozzie Nelson played there, the Dorsey Brothers, Charlie Barnet and Larry Clinton. . . . You really don't have any idea how the world was before the fall of Europe and the Nazi atomic attack on Russia, do you, Harry?"

  Ferracini stared dubiously at the box in Winslade's hand and listened for a few seconds longer. "It doesn't make sense," he objected.

  "It doesn't have to make sense," Winslade said. "But it's got a positive, confident sound to it. Doesn't it give you an uplift, Harry? It's happy, free, alive music—the music of people who had somewhere to go, and who believed they could get there . . . who could achieve anything they wanted to. What happened to that, I wonder."

  Ferracini shook his head. "I don't know, and to be honest I can't say I care all that much, Claud. Look, if you want to take
off on a nostalgia trip or something, that's okay, but leave me out of it. I thought we were supposed to be talking about the assignment that Cassidy and me were radioed about, that you said had something to do with the President. So, could we get back to the subject, please?"

  Winslade cut off the music and turned to look directly into Ferracini's face. Suddenly his expression was serious. "But I never left the subject," he said. "This is your next mission . . . or I should say, our next mission. I'll be coming along, too, this time—heading up the team, in fact."

  "Team?"

  "Oh, yes. I told you we're on our way to meet some interesting people."

  Ferracini struggled to make some kind of connection. Finally he shook his head. "So where are we going—Japan? Someplace in the Japanese Empire?"

  Winslade's eyes gleamed. "Not where, Harry. We're not going any where at all. We're staying right here, in the States. Try asking when."

  Ferracini could do nothing but look at him blankly. Winslade made a pretense of being disappointed and nodded toward the radio as if giving a hint. "Back then!" he exclaimed.

  Nonplussed, Ferracini shook his head again. "It's no good. Claud, I still don't get it. What the hell are you talking about?"

  "Nineteen thirty-nine, Harry! That's the next mission. We're going back to the world of 1939!"

  CHAPTER 1

  TWENTY-FIVE MILES SOUTH of London, near the town of Westerham in the Weald of Kent, Chartwell Manor and its estate stood amid a rolling landscape of woodlands, fields, and sleepy farming villages lying chilly and damp in the bleakness of an English February afternoon. Although cluttered now by such signs of modern times as clumps of roofs spreading among the tree-covered hillsides, buses and motor cars vanishing and reappearing along roads hidden by high hedgerows, and bridges and viaducts carrying railway lines south to the coast, the basic character of the scenery was as it had been for centuries.

  Chartwell itself was a massive, two-storey, red-brick affair of indeterminate architecture, some parts going back to Elizabeth I, standing in spacious grounds and approached from the road by a curved gravel driveway. A lawn at the rear separated the main building and its outhouses from a cheerfully rambling layout of walled kitchen garden, rose gardens, greenhouses, stable, and summer pavilion, interspersed with flagstone terraces and copious shrubbery. Running water pumped from a reservoir at the bottom of the grounds returned via a system of fishponds, duckponds, cascades, and rockeries to enliven the gardens and provide a soothing background of rustling and chattering. Solid, immutable, and serene, the house and its setting epitomized the English ideal of secure, comfortable, leisurely contentment.

  The Right Honorable Winston S. Churchill, parliamentary member for the electoral constituency of Epping, gazed out at the scene from behind his desk in the south-facing, upstairs study. Such serenity had not arisen of itself, as part of the natural order of things, he reflected. It had been fought for by a nation struggling for generations to win and hold a survival niche against forces of disruption, destruction, and violence that were not of its invention, but which had existed as part of human nature's darker side for as long as humanity had existed. Freedom had been won only at heavy cost, and to survive, it had to be protected jealously. As in the gardens below the window, the blooms and fruits of civilization, carefully cultivated over long periods of time, would soon be overrun by the weeds of barbarism if the gardeners relaxed their vigilance. Churchill made a brief note of the analogy for possible future use, then turned to relight his cigar from a candle kept burning on a side-table for the purpose. He blew a stream of smoke across the desk and resumed reading the speech that he had made to his constituents five months previously, late in August 1938.

  It is difficult for us . . . here, in the heart of peaceful, law-abiding England, to realize the ferocious passions which are rife in Europe, he had said. During this anxious month you have no doubt seen reports in the newspapers, one week good, another week bad; one week better, another week worse. But I must tell you that the whole state of Europe and of the world is moving steadily towards a climax which cannot be long delayed.

  That had been before the Anglo-French capitulation to Hitler at Munich and the throwing of Czechoslovakia to the Nazi wolves. The weeds were threatening to engulf the garden, and the gardeners were still asleep.

  Churchill—he and a small group, predominantly of Conservatives—had tried to waken them. For years now, although persistently excluded from cabinet office and the inner ranks of government, he had been trying to waken them. Germany's withdrawal from the League of Nations and the Disarmament Conference in 1933, just nine months after Hitler came to power, should have given ample warning. But the nation hadn't heeded. The Nazi blood purge of the following year, clear evidence that a powerful, industrialized state was being taken over by criminals and subordinated to the gutter ethics of street gangs, had failed to provoke the indignation that could have extinguished Corporal Hitler's grotesque social and political experiment in its infancy. And it had been the firm reaction of Mussolini, before he changed sides, not of the West, that had foiled a premature Nazi coup in Austria shortly afterward, in which the Austrian Chancellor, Dollfuss, had been murdered.

  In 1935, when Germany openly defied the Versailles Treaty by introducing military conscription and announcing the existence of the Luftwaffe, the Allies had responded by sitting down at Stresa and solemnly registering an empty protest; then the British had rushed to make atonement by concluding a naval agreement that permitted unlimited German construction of warships, including U-boats—without so much as consulting their French partners.

  "Peace at any price," the cry had been. And what was the result? That an extortionate price had been extracted, there was no doubt: Italy lost from the Allied cause, and Abyssinia surrendered to brazen, unprovoked aggression; Japan permitted to maraud across China with impunity; the Rhineland re-occupied by three German battalions flaunting themselves under the very guns of the French, who had done nothing; preachings of nonintervention in Spain while Franco was being installed with the help of German bombs and Italian bullets; Austria seized by brute force; Czechoslovakia abandoned to threats of force. Yes, the price had been high indeed.

  And the gain? Not a penny's worth. There would be war yet before the reckoning was done, Churchill was certain.

  In fact, the result had been a grave loss. If there was going to be a war anyway, it would have been better fought on the terms of the previous September than on those confronting the West now, in 1939. Czechoslovakia had been intact then, with one of the most capable and well-equipped armies in Europe. Churchill was convinced that the French should have fought. They should have fought in September 1938, when the Czechs rejected Hitler's ultimatum to Chamberlain at Godesberg and mobilized their army, and the British Cabinet was on the verge of rebellion against further appeasement. Then Russia would have come in through the treaty that pledged her to follow France's lead—and the Russians had been eager to act—after which Britain would surely have been drawn in, too, even without a treaty obligation. Public opinion would have seen to that, if nothing else. Then, the chances of crushing Hitlerism might have been good.

  Instead, Chamberlain had rushed off, clutching his umbrella, to obey the summons from Munich, and while he was in the very act of handing the victim over to blackmail, he had publicly proclaimed his trust in the Führer's good will and honesty.

  "We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat," Churchill had told the House afterward, only to be greeted by jeers and a storm of protest. But delirious crowds had welcomed Chamberlain back from Munich, applauding rapturously when he waved his piece of paper and promised them "peace in our time."

  In Paris, Frenchmen had wept for joy in the streets as the news spread that war had been averted. "The fools!" Daladier, the French Premier, muttered as he was being driven back from Le Bourget airport. "If only they knew what they were cheering."

  Churchill sighed, shifted some papers, and took a sip from a glass
of Scotch whisky and water. Reluctant as he was to admit it, he was forced to conclude that his own career, which at times had appeared quite promising, was leading him now, at age sixty-five, only toward an outcast's lonely failure. His political burial was already as good as arranged by the architects of national policy, still persevering in their belief that tolerance and appeasement would eventually satiate the dictators and win concessions in return. How many times now had the delusion been exposed for all who wished to see? Yet the blindness remained.

  However, the end of a political life didn't mean the end of living, he reflected philosophically. He had tried his best to uphold what was right as he saw it, and he had never deviated from the guidance of the moral principles that he believed in. Not many men could say that, even at the end of lifetimes usually judged far more successful. That was adequate compensation in itself. He had a comfortable home and a devoted family. There were some stock-raising ventures that he wanted to experiment with. His History of the English-Speaking Peoples, begun ten years ago now, awaited completion. And there would always be plenty of painting. . . .

  No. It was no good.

  He thrust out his lower lip and shook his head. There could be no disguising the sadness and bitterness. It wasn't so much any sense of personal injustice that dismayed him—anyone choosing a politician's life should be prepared for the risks, after all—but the prospect of watching the institutions of freedom and democracy, which he had devoted his life's work to defending passionately, debasing and prostrating themselves before tyranny, brutality, and every other antithesis of decency and civilization. The consequence of giving the world such a precedent to learn from could only be a calamity.