Projekt Saucer: Inception Part 88

'What the h.e.l.l?'

'Those are the air-raid sirens,' Gladys said. 'That means the Germans are coming. Have you ever seen an air raid, Mike?'

'No.'

'Then let's stay right here.'

'Aren't we supposed to take shelter?'

'They come over nearly every night,' Gladys said, then reached out for his hand. 'Let's just stay here and watch.'

Glancing left and right along the Embankment, Bradley saw men and women hurrying in every direction, heading, as Gladys explained to him, for the concrete-and-brick air-raid shelters, the platforms of the underground train stations, or the more comforting confines of pubs, clubs, hotels, or even the rooms of prost.i.tutes. Even as he was watching them, he heard a distant, m.u.f.fled rumbling emerging out of staccato explosions, and he looked along the river to where clouds of black smoke were bursting under the stars and being criss-crossed by phosph.o.r.escent lines of tracer bullets that formed a web around the rise and fall of shadowy shapes flying in from the sea.

He was looking at an immense fleet of German bombers too many to count.

'G.o.d almighty!' he whispered.

Gladys squeezed his hand and the wind beat at his face as more ack-ack guns opened fire. The beams of searchlights swept the sky. He heard the distant explosions, felt the ground beneath him shaking, and saw clouds of black smoke billowing up from sheets of yellow flame and spreading out to cover the rooftops in a sky turning crimson.

'They're pounding the docks,' Gladys said. 'G.o.d help the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds there.'

She squeezed his hand again and he appreciated the gesture, being almost overwhelmed by the spectacle along the river, by the knowledge that the fabulous mixture of fire and smoke and light was being created by destruction and death on a terrible scale. Over there, where the bombs were falling, people were dying in flame and smoke, being crushed and suffocated and incinerated and blown apart, while the buildings were collapsing into rubble and hot ash and choking dust.

Yet from here it was beautiful.

Bradley choked up with emotion, feeling torn by awe and shame, then raised Gladys's hand to his cheek and pressed her knuckles into his skin in mute affirmation. Then the bombers were overhead, suddenly roaring like ravenous beasts, and he actually saw the bombs falling, turning lazily in the moonlight, and then the river erupted in a series of mighty explosions, the water geysering up and fanning out and raining down over the debris of the boats that had been hit and blown apart while he was blinking.

Icy water poured over him and he pulled Gladys down, held her tight behind the wall, and looked up to see the British fighter planes, the famous Spitfires, descending on the German bombers like birds of prey, their guns spitting fire as they dove and climbed and returned, until one of the bombers exploded, shuddered in mid-air, erupted in fire, and went down through a black pall of smoke that obscured its last seconds.

The rest of the bombers pa.s.sed on, heading toward the East End, still dropping their bombs, their guns firing at the attacking Spitfires. Gladys tugged at Bradley's hand. He looked at her and saw her pointing toward the city. The dome of St Paul's Cathedral, majestic in its halo of criss-crossing searchlights, towered over the rubble that burned and smoked far below, protected, as if by a miracle, from the destruction surrounding it.

Bradley's heart was racing. He wanted to cry with joy. He felt Gladys' hand, her fingers slipping between his, then she raised his hand to kiss his fingers one by one as the ground shook and bellowed. Bradley took a deep breath, tasted smoke, heard more bombing. Then he saw Gladys' face, erratically illuminated in flickering crimson and white light, moving in toward him, her eyes wet, until her lips touched his. They kissed there, on the Embankment, kneeling behind the protective wall, then clung to one another, exploring each other like children, and stood up only when the bombers had returned and flown back to the sea, leaving silence and a pall of black smoke that was streaked with red flames.

'I love you,' Gladys Kinder said.

Bradley was speechless.

Of course, she laughed about it later. She had meant it, but she laughed about it. She told Bradley that the expression on his face had just made her want him more. Yet they didn't go to bed together. They talked around it, but didn't do it. Bradley wanted to do it, but felt foolish, too old, and Gladys said that to do it would probably spoil a beautiful friendship.

'Right,' Bradley said. 'I agree.' He loved being with her, loved her flirting and teasing, and was enthralled by her conversation, her stories of politics and war, and was jealous when she mentioned the many men she had known over the years. She showed him the city, always kissed him good night chastely, and in letting him know she loved him and simply wanted to be with him, she raised him out of the grave of his grief and turned him into a new man.

Yet he still wanted to complete his mission, to find Wilson before it was too late. After five unparalleled days with Gladys, he tried to get back to work.

'I'm sorry,' Lieutenant Colonel Wentworth-King said after pouring Bradley a cup of tea in his cramped office in the busy SOE headquarters, 'but your request to parachute into occupied Europe has been denied.'

' What?'

'I think you heard me.' Wentworth-King sat behind his desk and lit one of his awful British cigarettes. 'You will not be allowed into occupied Europe until after D-Day.'

'What the h.e.l.l!'

But Bradley's intended protest was cut off by an airy wave of the hand and a rather chirpy, British public-school grin. 'Fear not,' Wentworth-King said, holding up a bulging, official envelope. 'You have not been forgotten. I have here, in this envelope, enough detailed instructions to keep you busy for the next year or so and certainly busy enough until the invasion.' Still grinning, he handed Bradley the envelope while asking, 'Did you know about this when you first came to see me?'

'No,' Bradley said, staring at the bulky envelope. 'Whatever it is, I didn't know a d.a.m.ned thing about it.'

'Operation Paperclip,' Wentworth-King explained. 'You were concerned with the Peenemnde scientists, I believe?'

'Yes,' Bradley said.

'Well, OSS has decided to mount an operation, code-named Paperclip, to seize the German rocket teams and prevent them from falling into the hands of the Soviets, who will also be greatly interested in them.'

'And what about Wilson?' Bradley asked.

'According to reports recently received from the same European resistance groups that originally informed us about the Peenemnde rocket project, the rocket teams have recently been moved from the Baltic to underground sites in Nordhausen, and possibly nearby Bleicherode, in the southern Harz mountain ranges of Thuringia. Since those establishments are top secret and under the control of Himmler's most trusted SS troops, and since we're no longer talking about an occupied country, where you might expect a.s.sistance, but about Germany itself, it's felt that a parachute drop into Thuringia would be suicidal. It's therefore been decided that your time would be spent more profitably in mounting, staffing, and planning the specific aims of Operation Paperclip, which will come into effect once Europe has been breached.'

'That may be too late,' Bradley said in growing frustration. 'If Wilson's already helped the n.a.z.is to build remote-controlled rockets, G.o.d knows what else he has in the pipeline. We have to stop him before the invasion commences, since he might come up with something even worse than the reported Peenemnde rockets.'

Wentworth-King simply shrugged. 'Can't be helped, old chap,' he said. 'For a start, we simply can't have anyone parachuting into Germany at this particularly sensitive point in time. Second, it's believed that Wilson, whilst contributing to the V-1 and V-2 rocket projects, was never actually a member of von Braun's team and is therefore probably still at k.u.mmersdorf which makes it even more sensible for you to follow the invasion troops into Berlin, once the invasion is underway. Either way, you are staying here, old son, until Operation Overlord commences.'

'And when will that be?'