An American Spy Read online

  An American Spy

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  The Jane Todd WWII Thrillers

  Copyright

  For Mariea, with all my love and to the memory of John Buchan, whose writing started me on the long road from Number 7, Rideau Gate

  Every man, at the bottom of his heart,

  believes he is a born detective.

  John Buchan, The Power House, chapter 2, 1916

  Prologue

  Newly minted War Correspondent Jane Todd sat in the cramped bombardier’s seat of the B-17, munched on a very stale cheese-and-onion sandwich and stared out into the night. The four big Wright Cyclone engines thundered, shaking every rivet in the plane as well as her back teeth. The outside of the Plexiglas turret was crazed with frost. Jane was colder than she’d ever thought possible. She was wearing a heavily insulated flight suit, a borrowed leather flying jacket with the name Daddy’s Little Princess on the back, three pairs of socks, two pairs of long johns, heated flight boots and two more pairs of socks stuffed in her bra. After finishing her sandwich, she shivered, popped an old stick of Beeman’s in her mouth and replaced the oxygen mask over her face, all the while wondering what the hell she was doing twenty thousand feet over Greenland in the middle of the night.

  ‘Where the hell are we?’ she bellowed.

  Crabs Leslie, the co-pilot, bellowed back at her from a few feet above. ‘No idea! Ask Snake!’

  Snake was Sidney ‘The Snake’ Kerzner, the navigator. Sidney looked like an accountant and was heir to the Kerzner Junkyard fortune in Jamaica, New York, but now that he was in the Army Air Force he preferred to be called Snake for some reason. According to Crabs he’d also learned how to spit. Jane had no idea how Crabs had got his nickname and she didn’t want to know.

  ’‘An hour out of Bluie West One,’ called out Snake in his reedy little voice. When they’d left Gander, Newfoundland, on the second leg of their ferry flight to England, Jane had been informed that Bluie West One was a single airstrip tucked in between two long, completely frozen fjords and flanked by a pair of spiky mountains that barely accommodated the wingspan of a B-17. It was the radio beacon that guided them towards Prestwick and the only civilisation for a thousand miles in either direction. If they were an hour out of Bluie West One, that meant they were three hours shy of their refuelling stop in Iceland. Since Daddy’s Little Princess was on a ferry run she was flying with only pilot, co-pilot, radio operator and navigator. She carried no bombs and in place of waist guns she carried extra gas tanks. Not only was the plane freezing, it also stank of kerosene and Crab’s feet, the odour of which seemed to transcend every other malodorous thing in the world.

  Suddenly there was a sound like tearing cloth and Jane saw a line of brilliant white light arcing towards them out of the darkness. In between the white there were faint traces of bright blue. Something hammered into the outer port-side engine and it turned instantly into a ball of flame.

  ‘Shit!’ screamed Crabs. The plane tilted nauseatingly onto its right side and dropped at least fifty feet like a plunging anchor. Directly in front of her Jane had the brief impression of a massive, glistening hornet, nose gleaming in the pale moonlight. A flicker out of the corner of her eye resolved itself into the tail of another aircraft, this one bearing a large black swastika against a ghostly white-and-grey camouflage pattern.

  ‘Fokker, Fokker Fokker!’ screamed Kerzner, wailing out the name like some horrified expletive. Another rip of twenty millimetre cannon fire tore through the centre of the aircraft and Kerzner exploded all over the radio room upstairs, a spraying gout of blood and tissue flushing down into the bombardier’s station, covering Jane. All she could think about was that Kerzner had been wrong; it wasn’t a Fokker at all, it was a Focke-Wulf 190, the ten of diamonds in the deck of Spotter cards she carried in her duffel bag.

  ‘Shit shit shit!’ said Crabs again, as though everything was said in terrified threes now, the port-side engine like a torch blown back by a hurricane wind, eating away the wing as Jane tried to blink Snake Kerzner’s remains out of her eyes. She smashed herself back against the Plexiglas bubble, a quarter inch of freezing plastic between her and the frigid arctic darkness and the single, horrifying spectre of a German Fw190 where it couldn’t possibly be.

  Jane reached out and grabbed the long red handle of the chin turret gun to drag herself back into her seat, letting out a howling spray of machine-gun and tracer fire from the twin fifties below her, marking their spinning path towards the barren, icy landscape far below. Jane dug the old Leica out from the depths of her flight suit and was now snapping away at the horror all around her.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Jane spotted the wraithlike shape of the German fighter bearing down on them again. She dropped her camera, grabbed the red firing lever and swung it around, punching the firing button as she did so, sending an arcing line of tracers across the sky, sweeping across the other aircraft like a paintbrush whitewashing a fence. The other plane jerked and pitched out of the way, vanishing as quickly as it had appeared. There was a deep, throaty cough from the left and Jane saw that both the left engines were out now. The two on the right didn’t sound so hot either.

  ‘Fuck!’ said Crabs, back to single-word panic now. ‘Manifold pressure’s falling!’

  Jane grabbed her camera and crawled up behind the pilot’s position. Snake was everywhere, not a piece of him bigger than the span of her hand. An eye connected to something else by some long, stringy, white things was swinging from the overhead hand supports like some insane voodoo doll. Jane knew that if she wasn’t so scared she’d be throwing up about now. The back of Crabs’s seat and his neck and shoulders were soaked with Snake’s remains as well. Trying not to look, she swung around and into the empty navigator’s seat.

  ‘What, what what!?’ yelled Crabs, back to three words again. Jane could see that the two starboard engines were struggling, sparks spitting into the night from both of them.

  ‘Can we make it?’ yelled Jane. The howling of the wind from the hole in the plane was enormously loud.

  ‘Make what?! We’re fucking going to crash, that’s what we’re going to make!’ He dragged hard on the controls, desperately trying to level off the sluggish machine.

  ‘Get on the fucking radio! Call Air–Sea Rescue!’

  ‘The radio went with Snake I think.’

  ‘Shit, fuck, piss and corruption!’ That was a new one. Jane figured it was a Midwestern thing since, as she recalled, Crabs came from Kansas. Toto territory, tornadoes and witches and yellow brick roads and Judy Garland with her tits strapp
ed down. Jeez! That must have been painful; it was a wonder she could sing wrapped up in all that Ace bandage. Jane was crazy now, of course, and knew she was going to die in the next few seconds but she put the viewfinder to her eye and took a couple of quick shots of Crabs in the deathly green light from the instruments. She spoke, just a split second before they struck: ‘Did you know that the Tin Woodsman’s name was actually Hickory and that the Cowardly Lion was Zeke?’

  Crabs looked at her, then looked away, his teeth clenched, his flying helmet squashed down around his head, the ear flaps jumping up and down in the wind at his back, and then they tipped over on one wheel and the world filled with the sound of Daddy’s Little Princess being torn apart in the ice and snow. Vaguely Jane was aware that Crabs was no longer sitting beside her. In fact she wasn’t sitting beside anybody. Things went black.

  When she woke up a pleasant, smiling Eskimo was staring down at her in the morning light and saying something that sounded a little bit like tupaksimayok, erkromayok ikkiertok inerkonartok. At which point she knew she was alive, which was more than she could have expected.

  Part One

  Swan Hill

  Chapter One

  The plain, three-storeyed country house looked very much out of place among the dripping pines around it; a bloody-minded statement in granite about man’s inevitable triumph over nature, the arrogance of the heavy Norman towers on either side of the narrow doorway muted with an overgrowth of ivy. By English standards Charlton House was small, no more than twenty rooms, set on fifty acres or so of gently rolling woodland a mile or so to the east of Cheltenham in the Cotswolds.

  The house stood at the top of a circular gravel driveway, the Stars and Stripes hanging limply from a flagpole on the front lawn, the red, white and blue a startling splash of bright colour against the dull green of the trees and the ivy and the drizzling pewter of the lowering September sky.

  Black on white, a freshly painted sign rammed into a dark, wet bed of earth to the right of the door announced that this was now the home of BOTJAG, Branch Office of the Judge Advocate General in the United Kingdom. From Charlton House, Brigadier General Lawrence H. Hedrick, acting under authority of the Visiting Forces Act, would prosecute crimes committed in the United Kingdom by members of the United States military and naval forces in the European Theatre of Operations.

  A black Vauxhall taxicab rolled slowly up the drive, tyres crunching wetly on the gravel. It stopped opposite the front door of the house and a tall blonde woman stepped out dressed in a perfectly cut ‘pinks and greens’ uniform including one of the newly issued knee-length belted raincoats that most of the officers were wearing now. There was a U.S. War Correspondent woven badge on her forage cap and another one on the left breast pocket of her blouse. The entire uniform, including the trench coat, had been tailor-made for her at Luxenberg’s in New York, a last indulgence before leaving the States. Her name was Jane Todd and she was a floater, working freelance for no particular newspaper or magazine and with the power to assign herself to almost any unit, a power often not appreciated by her fellow correspondents or the unit in which she was interested. Friends in high places was usually the rumour but none of them guessed how high those places really were.

  Jane ducked back into the taxi to retrieve her duffel bag then paid off the driver in the unfamiliar currency she’d been issued after landing at Prestwick the previous day. Windscreen wipers clacking, the taxi drove off and the woman hoisted the duffel. She went up the short flight of steps, banged the wrought-iron ring knocker on the darkly painted door, pushed the door open and stepped into the building.

  The front hall was gloomy except for the small pool of light cast by a gooseneck lamp on the old wooden desk directly in front of her. A clerk-corporal sat at the desk, working the keys of a big office Underwood. Behind the clerk, barely visible in the dim light, the woman could see a long flight of stairs leading up to the next floor. The hallway around her and the wall of the staircase were panelled with dark oak wainscoting, waist high. There was a candelabra chandelier high over the clerk’s head but it was unlit. The floor of the hall was a marble harlequin pattern of diamonds in black and white, just like the sign outside. There were file boxes piled everywhere.

  ‘Jane Todd to see General Hedrick.’

  The clerk looked up from her typing. ‘Put your duffel down over there and go right in, ma’am.’ She gestured towards a heavy wooden bench to Jane’s right. Beside the bench there was a massive elephant’s foot umbrella stand and beside the umbrella stand there was a high, darkly stained door. ‘You’re late,’ the clerk-corporal added dryly as Jane dropped the heavy bag onto the bench. ‘You should have been here two days ago.’

  ‘I was unavoidably detained,’ she explained. She stripped off her trench coat, draped it over the duffel bag and spent a few seconds doing what she could to straighten out her rumpled uniform. When she was done she poked at her hair a little, then knocked on the door.

  ‘Enter,’ said a voice. Jane did so. The room was a half circle, occupying the base of one of the Norman towers, wainscoted like the hall outside. At one end of the room there was a desk flanked by the flags of the United States and the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, a chair in front of the desk and a chair behind. The room was equipped with a glowing coal fire. The large triple windows looked out over the sign and the circular driveway. Between the windows and the desk there was a large, worn rug laid out across a glowing, cherry-hued hardwood floor.

  The man seated behind the desk was wearing the uniform of a brigadier general but the round, pleasant face and the steel-rimmed glasses belonged to someone who looked more like a schoolteacher than an assistant judge advocate. Jane stepped up to the desk and came to attention. ‘Jane Todd, sir. I’ve been attached to your organisation for the moment.’

  ‘You’re late,’ said the general, his voice pleasant.

  ‘Yes, sir. So I’ve been informed.’

  ‘Sit down,’ said the general. He pointed to the chair in front of the desk. Jane sat. ‘Presumably there is a reason for your tardiness.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And what would that reason be, Miss Todd?’

  ‘We were shot down by a German fighter an hour out of Bluie West One.’

  ‘There are no German fighters that far out.’

  ‘This one was – two-tone grey paint job.’

  ‘Exciting.’

  ‘Not really, sir. Just cold.’

  ‘You were rescued relatively quickly?’

  ‘Yes, sir. The next morning. Had to spend two more days in Reykjavik waiting for another B-17 to take us on to Prestwick. It’ll make a good story eventually.’

  ‘Well, you’re here now,’ said the general. ‘Fixed up with a room yet?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Jane said. ‘The Lilley Brook I think it’s called.’ She was looking forward to the first good night’s sleep since leaving Presque Isle, Maine, almost a week before.

  ‘You have a tan,’ said the general, smiling lightly. ‘You didn’t get that in Iceland.’ The smile broadened. ‘And certainly not in Scotland.’

  ‘No, sir. Los Angeles.’

  ‘You went to the provost marshal general’s school at Fort Oglethorpe. Did one of your stories there as well.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I was interested in military law and criminal investigation.’

  ‘Purvis is teaching there, yes?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Melvin Purvis, ‘The Man Who Got Dillinger,’ had gone from FBI agent to lieutenant colonel and teacher. Jane had quickly come to the conclusion that the man was a pompous fool who didn’t know the first thing about criminal investigation. From her previous experiences she didn’t have much respect for the Boss G-man himself, J. Edgar Hoover.

  ‘Not the gung ho type, presumably.’

  ‘You mean Colonel Purvis, sir?’ Jane asked blandly.

  ‘I meant you.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean, sir.’

  ‘No interest in joining a combat unit. Wri
ting under fire.’ He made the word writing sound like something only cowards did. Jane glanced at the campaign ribbons on the left chest of the general’s tunic. Everything from the Army of Cuban Pacification to the 1918 Occupation of Germany ribbon, not to mention half a dozen silver Victory Medal clasps. Hedrick hadn’t built his whole career behind a desk.

  Jane kept her voice even. ‘When the times comes I’ll join a combat unit. So far we haven’t been doing much fighting over here.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I hope you do, sir. I didn’t come over here to write about girls making do without silk stockings.’

  The general looked at Jane, a thoughtful expression on his plain, round face. ‘Is this your first time in England?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What do you think so far?’

  ‘It rains a lot, the trains are crowded, the sandwiches are terrible and the cars and trucks drive on the wrong side of the road.’

  ‘My point exactly,’ said the general, leaning back in his chair.

  ‘What point would that be, sir?’ Jane asked.

  ‘To them it’s not the wrong side of the road, it’s the right side.’

  ‘I don’t quite understand.’

  ‘The British are sensitive, especially where we’re concerned.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Americans. We think we’re pulling their irons out of the fire, they think we’re Johnny-come-latelies, just like the last war. We’ve been at war for less than a year. They’ve been at it for three. They think they’ve been bullied into letting us prosecute our own men under military law rather than in their civil courts.’

  ‘Have they?’ Jane asked flatly.

  ‘Have they what?’

  ‘Been bullied.’

  The general’s eyes flashed behind the schoolteacher. ‘That would depend,’ he said quietly, ‘on how you looked at it.’

  ‘And how are we looking at it?’ asked Jane.

  ‘Sensitively,’ the general answered.

  ‘Sensitively.’ Jane repeated the word, trying to figure out exactly what the general was getting at and failing.