The Invasion of 1950

Chapter Twenty-Eight

London, England

The sound of a front door key turning in the lock brought Otto Skorzeny to his feet. Pistol in hand, he swung his legs over the sofa and stood as the door swung open. They’d been forced to allow the Englishman to leave his comfortable house to go to work and check the dead drops for messages but it held a danger for the commandos. If Philby had had anything resembling daring, maybe he would have tipped off the British authorities and vanished somewhere within London. That would have been… inconvenient, although Skorzeny had taken Philby’s measure and concluded that the Englishman no longer had the courage to try anything clever.

The thought made him smile. Philby, the communist who had spied for the regime that had stuffed senior communists into gas chambers and junior communists into work gangs, was in a mess. He couldn’t even tell his own people what had happened, because if they took Skorzeny alive and he testified against Philby, the British Government would know just what Philby had been doing for the last ten years. The British people would never forgive him for the invasion, and Skorzeny intended to make sure that Philby got all of the blame for that even though his intelligence had only played a small part in helping the Germans to formulate the invasion plans.

He stepped out of cover as the door closed. Philby was just standing there with a distant gaze. Skorzeny coughed gently, and Philby looked up, noticing him. The spy’s face twisted into an astonishing series of emotions; hate, fear, worry… but ended up with a kind of blank mask that reminded Skorzeny of some of the slave gangs he’d seen in the east. It was the face of someone who had accepted his fate.

“So,” he said, enjoying the chance to practice his English, “how was your day?”

Philby didn’t see the funny side. “The office was trying to determine if there was any way that Beria could be convinced to launch an attack into the rear of the Reich,” he said, shortly. His tone, too, was defeated; Skorzeny stepped forward and picked up one of the shopping bags. It hadn’t surprised him to discover that Philby had somehow acquired additional ration stamps from somewhere, enough to keep him in food for years, or feed six hungry German commandos. “They wanted someone to go to Russia directly and speak to him.”

Skorzeny snorted rudely.

“I know,” Philby said. The Red Army had been cut back sharply after their defeat. He was there at the time. The only remaining Red Army divisions were infantry, all equipped with weapons that dated right back to 1941. They weren’t supposed to have any tanks or aircraft, and while Russia was large enough to hide an entire army, Beria wouldn’t risk any secret forces to save Britain. It wouldn’t matter, anyway. There would be enough German soldiers in the west of Russia to defend it against anything Beria might field, without draining soldiers from the invasion of Britain. Adolph Hitler possessed over two hundred divisions, after all, and not all of them could be committed to the invasion of Britain.

Philby carried the other shopping bag into the living room and unloaded it under the table. Skorzeny’s eyes tracked it carefully; sealed tins of beans, corned beef, some fresh vegetables and some chocolate. Philby pulled out a large loaf of bread and Skorzeny sniffed it, noting that it didn’t smell as nice as the ones he remembered from Berlin, although that had been after food had started to pour into the Reich from the east. “They just think that Beria has a motive to go after Hitler, and if Beria should happen to be destroyed, so what?”

Skorzeny laughed at the bitterness in his tone. “You do know that Beria doesn’t even know your name?”

Philby flushed angrily. “I know that,” he sighed tiredly. “I know… I just don’t want to give up what I’ve been!”

“There’s no room for communists in the Reich,” Skorzeny said. He smiled coldly. “We defeated the communists back in 1941 and then we chased them to the east until they finally submitted. Doesn’t that show you something about communism?”

He leaned closer. “I was with SS Adolph Hitler,” he said, referring to the brigade-sized division that had once served as Hitler’s personal bodyguard and had then been upgraded to a fighting formation that earned honours in Yugoslavia and Russia. “I remember how we were welcomed by Ukrainians, who had been treated like dogs by the Commissars and even by Russians. They learned quickly that they had made a mistake, of course, but what would have happened if Stalin hadn’t treated them like that?”

Philby scowled. Skorzeny wondered just how he was holding up, inwardly; somehow, he had justified the fall of the Soviet Union as something other than communism being nonsense. Skorzeny had little time for traitors, but Philby puzzled him; the man had betrayed his country over… what? His faith in communism, every bit as deep and true as a religious conversion, had kept him loyal to the Soviet Union; he hadn’t even questioned it when the contacts had been reopened and he had been ordered to resume sending information.

Himmler had said that Philby was a true believer and looking at him now, Skorzeny suspected that he was right. Philby had believed in World Communism and the Dictatorship of the Workers and Peasants with all of his heart, using it as the justification to put a keen mind and a vast range of contacts at the disposal of the Soviet Union, an intelligence coup that had awed Himmler when he had first learned of it. Skorzeny’s forte was special operations, not intelligence work, but he understood both the value of good intelligence and the need to keep a careful eye on his people, just in case they cracked under the pressures of their work.

“Stalin was a mistake,” Philby said finally, with a desperation Skorzeny doubted he could hear in himself. “He was someone who should never have been allowed anywhere near a place of power.”

“I see,” Skorzeny said as Philby took the food into the kitchen. Skorzeny’s men were upstairs, some of them sleeping while the others kept watch. The smell of food would bring them downstairs soon enough. They now knew who Philby was and why he was helping them. It was something that worried Skorzeny. He’d agreed to kill himself, rather than be taken alive, but the others had made no such commitment. “And what did you find in the dead drop?”

Slowly, unwillingly, Philby reached into his pocket and pulled out a small matchbox. Skorzeny took it and opened it, finding a small sheet of paper, folded over time and time again, which he unfolded and placed on the table. The message looked perfectly innocuous, without anything that would arouse suspicion, but he picked out the code phases easily enough; they had been embedded within what looked like a piece of a novel. Philby’s communications with his handlers had mainly been one-way; it had always been harder to send messages from Germany or Moscow to an agent. If something occurred that code phases didn’t cover, a meeting would have to be arranged, and that would be almost impossible with Britain at war.

“We’re to remain here and prepare for a mission,” he said, after a moment. He cocked an eyebrow. “I trust you won’t mind if we stay for a week longer?”

Philby eyed him murderously. “You can stay here as long as you like, provided you have a way of getting me back to the Reich,” he said, after a moment. Skorzeny didn’t miss the submission in his tone; stripped of everything but himself, Philby had finally abandoned his cause.

Skorzeny shrugged. “When London falls, we will make contact with the German forces and arrange for extraction,” he said as if it wasn’t important. It would have been a personal defeat for him personally; he didn’t want to remain in London passively until the city fell to the advancing Germans. “If the city doesn’t fall, we may have to make our way to Ireland and travel from there to the Reich or maybe steal a boat and sail across to France.”

He threw his hands in the air and grinned at Philby.

“It hardly matters, anyway,” he said. “If we are called upon to perform a mission, we will carry it out whatever it takes, and then we will make our escape.” He frowned. “Or do they have some reason for believing that we might still be alive?”

“There have been some reports of Germans hiding in the streets,” he said after a moment. Skorzeny lifted an eyebrow, wondering. Could it be that others had survived from his unit? They had all had orders to leave the city as swiftly as possible and go to ground, but the British counter-attack would have caught most of them before they could escape. “There have also been other reports of German spies and infiltrators dropping from the skies.”

Skorzeny shook his head, dismissing the rumours. “I don’t think that they would send additional paratroopers into London,” he said after a moment. The Reich didn’t have that many paratroopers, and those they did have would be needed to secure territory in the path of the main advance. “It might be one of those rumours that has gotten out of hand and expanded a bit.”

“They used to have rumours of nuns in hobnailed boots dropping from the sky,” Philby said, as he returned carrying a vast pot of steaming stew. “Do you want to call your men down to eat?”

Skorzeny nodded and summoned the other paratroopers. He was worried about them, even though they all had experience remaining concealed in enemy territory; this Englishman’s home wasn’t some forest hideaway in the middle of insurgent Russia. The experience was almost surreal in its implications; they were in a pleasant home, but if they were caught, they would almost certainly be shot out of hand. The British uniforms might just give any investigator a moment’s pause, but he doubted that it would last long enough for them to react and escape. The bizarre combination of normality and being in the heart of enemy territory would affect them, sooner or later, and if they broke…

“You first,” he said. Philby wasn’t much of a cook and normally ate out, but Skorzeny had insisted on him eating everything he prepared just in case it occurred to him to try to poison the commandos and bury them somewhere in the garden. Now that they’d made contact with Himmler, someone in Berlin would know who had betrayed them and burn Philby from a safe distance, but that wouldn’t stop him taking precautions. Philby couldn’t be trusted even if he only wanted to save his own skin.

The food tasted slightly strange to Skorzeny’s mouth, but Philby ate without hesitation; he’d explained that some British foods included different cooking oils or substitutes caused by the food shortages. He’d then gone off on a rant about how he’d seen the rich obtaining all the food they could possibly want or using their status to gain other advantages or exemption from war duties, something that had made Skorzeny laugh. The rich of Britain might have betrayed their duty, but Philby had betrayed his entire country and he used the black market. He was little more than a hypocrite who would probably have been liquidated had he ever arrived in Moscow.

“So,” he said when the uncomfortable meal had ended, “did you manage to find a way of getting us identification cards?”

Philby considered for a moment. “I believe I could get you some cards,” he said after a moment. “There is a filing clerk who owes me a favour, and I could ask him to present me with some cards for you, but they wouldn’t be very useful. The ones that would allow you into secure areas aren’t available at his level of clearance.”

“That will be fine,” Skorzeny said, after a moment. He didn’t want to keep his men cooped up in the flat much longer and besides, sooner or later they would have to leave London in a rush. “What will we be in their eyes?”

“Labourers,” Philby said. “They’ve been issuing the cards to refugees fleeing the occupied areas, all strong men, who are then working on the defences of London and other places. You might end up being asked to help with some of the construction, but at least you would be able to move freely without too many questions, as your normal papers would be inside the occupied zone.”

Skorzeny shook his head in awe. The Reich prided itself on the massive records it had collected on each and every one of its citizens, regardless of their social class and racial value, and a group of British soldiers would certainly not be allowed to walk around behind the lines without being stopped. If details couldn’t be checked against the records, the refugees would have been placed under strict supervision, if not placed in camps, until their identities were confirmed. The British lacked the concept of real security, or even basic paranoia; they’d allowed Philby, and Himmler alone knew how many other communists, to operate at the heart of their world for decades.

“That will be excellent,” Skorzeny said, thinking of the chance to get a look at the defences from the inside. The British would have learned to use camouflage by now, hiding as much as they could from the spying German planes, high enough to see everything and yet escape anti-aircraft fire. He’d heard the sound of British guns, from time to time, and he hoped that the apartment wasn’t bombed. They couldn’t go to an air raid shelter, whatever happened. “When can you have them ready for us?”

Philby looked nervous. “Maybe in a couple of days,” he said. Skorzeny suspected that he was only guessing; normally, he sounded more confident. “They’re issuing hundreds of them at the moment; I’d just have to have my friend snatch a few of them, enter them into the central records, and then take them out of the building.”

“That should be no problem at all,” Skorzeny said. “How much else have you taken out of that building over the years?”

“This is wartime,” Philby said icily. Skorzeny lifted an eyebrow in wry challenge. “It will take some time to move even a few cards out of the building without being detected, unless you want to be found…?”

Skorzeny didn’t bother to come up with a sharp reply. “Get them as soon as you can,” he said shortly and stood up. He was tired, and besides, there was only so much of Kim Philby that anyone could take. He didn’t understand how he had been allowed to operate for so long. “I’m going to get some sleep, and I suggest that you do the same; we have a busy day ahead of us tomorrow.”

Alex DeRiemer looked down at the report and rubbed his eyes bitterly. He had worked for MI6, spying on Germany, Italy and Japan, but he hadn’t really focused on the business of enemy intelligence activities within Britain itself. That was the responsibility of MI5, but at Churchill’s orders, he was making an overview of the situation… and it astonished him. There were too many ways for the Germans to get someone into the country, and while most of the German spy networks had been wiped out in 1939 and again a week ago, there might well be others — were others, if the report from Germany was to be believed.

He re-read the message from Germany again. Himmler had a source, someone fairly high up in the British establishment, maybe more than one. He was keeping those details to himself but the British now knew that he was out there. For all DeRiemer knew, the agent might be someone who only supported Himmler’s operations and didn’t have any major role within the British establishment.

He shook his head. It would have to go to MI5, who would put together an investigative team that would discover who the spy was and what they’d sent back to Berlin, before it was too late. If the spy was a deep-cover agent, he or she could be anyone from the director of a government department to one of the cleaners, someone with much more access than anyone understood, or suspected. If…

If the spy had known anything about the Omega Project, they might have warned Germany that certain aspect of science that were considered Jewish were far more important than they had guessed, and if that happened, with all the German technical skill and the vast resources of the Reich focused on the problem…

The war might be within shouting distance of being lost.