The Proteus Operation Read online

  The problem was that they weren't supposed to have ended up in a warehouse in Brooklyn at all. Since there was nothing in the peculiar logic of the whole business that said it couldn't, the message from mid-1939 had sought to save the team the trouble of searching around for a suitable site for the return-gate by providing details of the one already acquired, from which the message was being sent. But the message had directed the team to a factory building in Jersey City, which it described as being empty and on offer for quick sale as a consequence of its two joint-owner brothers' getting into difficulty over gambling debts. When Greene and Anna flew to Jersey City expecting to conclude a quick deal, however, they had found the premises to be in use and not up for sale at all. They had managed to obtain the place in Brooklyn only after making a hasty tour of commercial real-estate brokers.

  So what had gone wrong? Clearly, the members of the Proteus team could have no reason to mislead themselves. If the message had indeed come from the site in Jersey City as claimed, then why had the site turned out to be unavailable? If it hadn't come from Jersey City—a conclusion that now appeared inescapable—then why would the message have said that it had?

  "Well, worrying won't do us any good at all now, Anna," Greene said. "The thing to do is keep going and not allow ourselves to get too concerned about bridges we don't have to cross yet." He looked down again at the crate he had been unpacking. "Now where were we? . . . These look like the JSK-23 resonators. Do you have the list there? It should be number thirty-seven."

  "Ah . . . let me see, here we are—two pages."

  "What about the actuator assemblies? Are they supposed to be here?"

  Anna flipped over some pages to find another sheet. "Let me see. No, they're not scheduled yet. The primaries are in Load Five with Ferracini and Cassidy. They should be somewhere between Indianapolis and here by now."

  "Then the secondaries must still be at Albuquerque, yes? When are they due—with Major Warren and Sergeant Ryan in Load Six?"

  "Yes, that's correct."

  "Fine. In that case we'd better—" A rasping sound from the ancient telephone hanging on a pillar nearby interrupted. "Excuse me," Greene picked his way between parts and boxes to answer it. "Yes, Gordon?" The call had to be from Gordon Selby, the only other person in the building at that moment, who was sorting out documents in the front office. Selby was one of Greene's scientific group. He was also the mission's engineering foreman and would be supervising the military personnel during assembly of the gate. As well as providing the security guard, the members of the military contingent had all undergone intensive technical training in order to assist.

  "Oh? . . . Oh, really?" Greene said into the phone. He was beginning to sound excited. "Does it sound like good news, Gordon? Very well, what does it say?"

  While Greene listened, Anna returned her attention to laying out the contents of another crate. She had the feeling that Greene was more concerned about the discrepancy than he tried to sound. If he could explain what had gone wrong, why didn't he? If he couldn't, how could he be sure of anything?

  She looked up inquiringly as Greene replaced the receiver with a jubilant flourish. "Gordon took a telegram up front a few minutes ago," he announced. "From Claud in London. It sounds as if everything's going as planned. They're meeting Churchill and three of his colleagues for lunch at the Dorchester on Wednesday!"

  CHAPTER 4

  THIS WAS NOT WINSLADE'S first visit to London. It was, in a somewhat strange manner of speaking, his second in less than a year. In the Proteus world, he had come to the British capital in August 1938, as a member of a U.S. intelligence-gathering tour of several European countries, sent to evaluate information being brought by fugitive scientists from the totalitarian dictatorships. Now, due to the extraordinary circumstances of the Proteus mission, he was back again, ten months later and thirty-seven years older.

  He had also visited London in the years following Britain's ignominious surrender on the first day of 1941. Until 1960, he had been involved in espionage activities camouflaged by various U.S. diplomatic missions and embassy appointments. In that year, Germany's formal relations with the West were virtually ended when Heydrich, after engineering Borman's assassination and forcing Hitler to retire at seventy-one on the grounds of diminishing mental faculties, came to power as the new Führer. Winslade had thereafter made several covert trips in connection with the work that eventually culminated in Proteus.

  Those later visits, he had come to realize since his arrival from America with the King group, had clouded his memories. He had remembered a London of drabness, disillusionment, and defeat, with a Reich Governor installed at Buckingham Palace, the swastika flying above its roof, and black-uniformed SS sentries at its gates. He had remembered jackboots crashing in mockery on old cobbled streets before the halls in which the Mother of Parliaments had been born. He had remembered curfews, midnight arrests, and streets of boarded-up shops. He had seen stooped, sunken-faced women, whose menfolk had been taken to provide forced labor in the conquered lands of Russia, hauling handcarts and mending roads, while their ragged children fought over spillings from garbage trucks. He had watched the nation's wealth being carried away to swell the Reichsbank coffers, and its art treasures being looted for the greater glorification of the Fatherland or for the embellishment of Goering's show palace at Karinhall, near Berlin. He had remembered the grayness of everything, the fear, the hopelessness, the sullenness. And over the years, his preoccupation with such memories had dimmed his vision of the London that he had seen as a young man, now so long ago, yet at the same time, little more than yesterday.

  But now Winslade was seeing and feeling again the color and vivacity of the world that once had been as he strode with Kurt Scholder and Arthur Bannering across Hyde Park, jauntily sporting his adopted off-duty Guards officer's "uniform" of bowler hat, pinstripes, and tightly furled umbrella that was never opened, even when it rained. Cavalry troopers in khaki fatigues were exercising their mounts among the riders along Rotten Row; couples and lunchtime strollers ambled by the Serpentine Lake, where boys were sailing model yachts, and old ladies fed the ducks from wooden benches by the waterside. From the bandstand behind, with sunlight glinting off polished brass and tunics adding a dash of scarlet to the green, the band of one of the regiments of Foot Guards was playing a lively rendering of "The Man Who Robbed the Bank at Monte Carlo," complete with plenty of twiddly bits and oompahs, blotting out the distant rumble of traffic in Park Lane and Knightsbridge.

  In the past few days it had all come back to him: the small, glass-paneled, Dickensian shopfronts of Bloomsbury and Mayfair, known by reputation for too many generations to have need of the opulent displays of New York's Fifth Avenue or Rome's Via Condotti; raucously jovial Billingsgate and Covent Garden markets contrasting with the staid dignity of Pall Mall and its gentlemen's clubs; exotic foreign odors wafting from the restaurants in Soho; the Bovril and Guinness neon signs in Piccadilly Circus; black, upright taxis and red, double-decker buses advertising Booth's gin and Gold Flake cigarettes; the underground with its clattering tube trains; Holburn's swaying, round-ended trams; the squat, redstone rotundity of the Albert Hall; Trafalgar Square; The Monument; Westminster; beef at Simpsons in the Strand; the pubs, with their ornamented doors of polished wood and frosted glass, serving pints of Charrington's stout and Watney's bitter with pork pies or bangers and mash. Like the toys that come to life at night in children's fairy tales, it was all magically real once again.

  "Imagine how much of Europe is still like this!" Winslade exclaimed to his companions. "Paris, Stockholm, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, all still free. Can't you smell the difference in the air? That's what this whole mission is all about. Seeing all this reinforces one's determination to succeed."

  Arthur Bannering, tall, upright, distinguished in appearance and bearing, silver-haired and meticulously groomed, grunted noncommittally as he walked beside Winslade with long, easy strides. He was dressed in a black overcoat and h
omburg hat, and he carried a leather briefcase. "Possibly, Claud. But determination and results aren't the same thing. I'll feel happier when we've seen some reactions from Churchill and his people . . . or unhappier, as the case may be."

  Bannering was English and therefore sounded noncommittal about most things. A former official at the British Foreign Office, he was the Proteus team's diplomat. He had been deeply involved in European politics up until 1940, when his department had relocated to Canada, after which he had gone on to work with the U.S. State Department. The experience of returning seemed less moving for him than it was for Winslade, perhaps because living in England had ingrained his recollections more permanently; and then again, perhaps he was just being British.

  Since arriving in London, Bannering had developed the compulsive habit of scrutinizing passersby, especially in the vicinity of Whitehall, where the British Foreign Office was located. He found the thought irresistibly fascinating, he had confessed to an amused Winslade, that at any moment he might encounter an innocent, unknowing copy of his earlier self. That was just another of the peculiarities admitted by the strange situation in which they now found themselves.

  Kurt Scholder, second to Mortimer Greene in the team's scientific arm, said nothing as he walked on Winslade's other side. Short and lean, wiry-limbed, with lined features and cropped, steel-gray hair, he had lived in the United States for twenty years after being smuggled out of Germany in 1955 in the course of another Winslade-managed operation.

  They left the park at Stanhope Gate and crossed Park Lane to the Dorchester, Winslade marching ahead and holding his umbrella high to keep the traffic at bay. Their private luncheon room was prepared with the table already set, and they were thirty minutes early as they had planned. Winslade ordered aperitifs from the small bar that he had asked to be installed in the room, and they settled back with their drinks to await the arrival of Churchill and his party.

  The bar included a box of Churchill's favorite brand of cigars, purchased from Fribourg & Treyer in the Haymarket, and plenty of brandy and port. Scholder cast his eye curiously over the other bottles while he sipped a vermouth. He noted the selection of fruit and tomato juices. "So, you still think it will be Lindemann, eh?" he said, cocking an eyebrow at the other two.

  Winslade smiled thinly through his Mr. Pickwick spectacles. "It won't do any harm to be prepared, anyway," he replied.

  "Still in for a pound, then?" Bannering asked Scholder.

  "Five pounds if you wish," Scholder told him. "Churchill will have recognized the importance of this. He will have taken it to the official government specialist committee, not to the academic all-rounder. Five pounds says it will be Tizard."

  "Done." Bannering shook his head. "You're still thinking like a German, Kurt. Forget about official channels of reporting. Churchill values friendships more than procedures. Five pounds on Lindemann."

  "Well, we shall soon see," Scholder grunted.

  The reason why Winslade had refrained from specifying whom Churchill should bring with him had been to test the theories of rival Proteus-world historians by inviting them to predict Churchill's choices, and seeing who was right. The number of candidates put forward had been relatively few, indicating a measure of agreement that was reassuring.

  As first choice everyone had agreed on Anthony Eden, the former Foreign Secretary, and thus Arthur Bannering's one-time chief, who had resigned early in 1938 over Chamberlain's snubbing of Roosevelt to avoid offending Mussolini. The majority had picked as second Alfred Duff Cooper, formerly First Lord of the Admiralty and the only government figure to have quit over Munich, with the dissenters opting for Bracken, Wigram, Morton, or Austen Chamberlain, the Prime Ministers brother.

  For the technical expert that it was assumed Churchill would include in his party, opinions had been more divided. One group of the mission planners had opted for Professor F. A. Lindemann, head of the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford and professor of experimental philosophy, which in those days had meant physics. He was a long-standing personal friend of Churchill's, and among other things had advised him on the fountains and hydraulics at Chartwell. He was also a confirmed nonsmoker, teetotaler, and vegetarian, which explained the variety of food and drink. The other group had favored Henry Tizard, chairman of a government committee formed to conduct a scientific survey of air defense. In 1935, Tizard's group had begun investigating reports of radio disturbances caused by passing aircraft, and from that beginning had followed the development of what would later be called radar.

  The list of names had been a short one and had followed fairly automatically once Churchill was selected as the initial contact. Choosing him for this role in the first place, however, had been a far less straightforward business.

  The political historians involved in planning Proteus had argued incessantly among themselves over whom the King group should approach first in England, but none of their nominations had commanded the unanimous vote of confidence that the importance of the mission warranted. Eventually, Winslade had settled the matter by asking surviving British statesmen and members of the Royal Family from that era who had escaped to Canada and the U.S. the question: If there had been a chance of preventing Britain's collapse in 1940, who, with hindsight, would have been the best person to do it? And the majority of those polled had replied, "Winston Churchill." The verdict came as a surprise, since the name had not figured prominently among the recommendations of the Proteus-world's experts. In their opinion, although Churchill's earlier career had seen its colorful moments and shown some potential for greatness, by the beginning of 1939 he was all but finished as a politician.

  A descendant of the first Duke of Marlborough, Captain-General of the armies of Queen Anne and victor of the battles of Blenheim, Ramilles, Oudenarde, and Malplaquet, Churchill had first followed a military calling and served in India and the Sudan as an officer with the 4th Hussars. After that, sent to cover the South African war as a correspondent for the London Morning Post, he had earned a measure of fame for his part in rescuing an ambushed train and for his escape from a Boer prison camp. He took up politics on returning to England in 1900 and during the years leading up to 1914 had held a number of government offices, culminating in First Lord of the Admiralty by the time of the outbreak of the Great War. In 1915, however, he had been widely blamed, probably unfairly, for the failed attempt to force the Dardanelles and for the ensuing fiasco of the Gallipoli campaign. He had resigned from the government and returned to soldiering in the Flanders trenches.

  His political prestige had shown some recovery to begin with in the postwar period, but acrimonious differences over Britain's India policy had kept him out of the MacDonald coalition of the early 1930s, and his exclusion from Cabinet rank in Baldwin's later government had left him without influence until Britain's final fall. After the German landings at the end of 1940, he and a group of like-minded neighbors had refused to obey government orders against offering resistance, and all of them had been killed when they opened fire with rifles, submachine guns, and a mortar on the first column of the Wehrmacht to appear in front of the barricade erected at his gates. Churchill had long been one of the Nazis' marked men, and after his triumphal entry into London, Hitler had driven down to Kent especially to gloat over the burned-out remains of Chartwell Manor.

  So, although Churchill had shown himself to be a man of some achievement, high principle, and considerable courage, little on the face of things singled him out as the savior that the Proteus planners were looking for. He was impetuous, inclined at times to be too easily seized by the romantic appeal of an idea to be practical about implementing it. Although considered a liberal rebel by many of the old-school Conservatives, he was nevertheless in many ways a backward-looking imperialist, and on top of that, well past his prime. And he had been virtually exiled to a political wilderness.

  But further investigation and interminable discussions between Winslade, Bannering, and Anna Kharkiovitch had gradually put the issue in a differe
nt light. England, terrified by the still-fresh memories of 1914-1918 and mindful of the Red menace to the east, had been stupefying itself with delusions for years, acting as if solemn reaffirmations of faith in the good will of man could alter reality. Of course, that England had refused to listen to the truth; the truth destroyed the myths upon which its comforting delusions were based. Different people, appropriately, had spoken for that England.

  But now it was blinking open its eyes and taking stock of its situation. After the short-lived euphoria of Munich, people across the nation had found themselves awakening to the sober realization that they did not feel reassured of having bought peace in their time, and that shame and guilt had not been appeased. Since then, although the papers gave no great exposure to the fact and most people continued to go about their business pretending that they weren't pretending not to have noticed, gas masks were being issued to every citizen; airraid shelters were appearing in all the cities; strange steel lattice constructions were springing up at intervals along the coast; and the Hurricane and Spitfire factories were working round-the-clock.

  Now, at last, the nation was starting to heed the warnings that it had been ignoring. It would want facts now, not myths; it would look for direction, not empty reassurances. It made sense that the right people to speak for this new, awakening England would be the ones whom the old, sleeping England had rejected. And the person around whom these people were falling into orbit as they gravitated together was Churchill.

  Furthermore, Winslade and his colleagues had begun to see, even Churchill's political ostracism could turn out to be more of an advantage than the hindrance it had seemed at first sight to be. Perhaps there was something to be said for picking as their contact a person whose public image and reputation had not been tarnished by association with the policies of recent years and who could in no way be held accountable for their consequences. Suddenly the verdict of the old-timers made sense, so much so that it seemed it should have been obvious all along, and in the end Churchill was chosen unanimously.