And all because of one man. Winston Bloody Churchill! The evil old drunkard who, if only he hadn’t been so monumentally stubborn and short-sighted, could have brought the war to an end less than a year after it started with Britain and its empire still intact, and Germany straddled across Europe. They could have shared the world between them. But in his whisky-sodden blindness he had thrown away the historical destiny of their two great nations, had bled them both dry, Winston Bloody Churchill, who had been biting their backsides for years. Well, perhaps it was time for him to take some of his own medicine. And the poison was here, in Goebbels’ hand.
He knew he couldn’t wait until Hencke was back. Hencke might never get back or, if he did, it might all be too late. Goebbels needed something now, not next week. So he would announce Hencke’s survival and escape to Ireland, and humiliate Churchill in his bare-faced lie, and hope to cause so much confusion that the world would never again believe a thing that the British leader told them, even if he had Hencke, his grandmother and his entire fornicating family on public display in London Zoo.
The lights flickered and dimmed as the blast from a nearby explosion momentarily disturbed the smooth running of the generator. Another cloud of dust descended from the ceiling and fell around Goebbels. But in the half light, he didn’t seem to mind. For the first time in days, he was smiling.
‘I did warn you.’
The old, baleful eyes turned, admonishing, but said nothing. Cazolet was right, after all. Damn him.
‘Don’t feel too depressed,’ the younger man continued, adopting a more generous tack. ‘It’s not the first time Berlin Radio has accused you of lying.’
‘The great British public expect their politicians to lie,’ Churchill responded mournfully.
‘So …?’
‘But not to get caught.’
‘They can’t blame you.’
‘Willie, he is part of the biggest escape of the war. In response we are forced to launch a nationwide manhunt. Then, with all eyes upon us, we announce his death. Yet within days Goebbels is able to tell the whole world I was lying. If he ever has the proof, if in spite of it all Hencke turns up in Berlin, we shall never hear the end of it. At best I shall look incompetent, as though I am losing my grip. At worst it will look as if I have been deliberately deceiving both our electors and our allies to cover up my own inadequacies. Sacrificing the truth for my own squalid personal purposes – that’s what they will say.’
‘What does one man matter? The whole world is changing, victory is within our grasp … Hencke is a mere drop in the great oceans swirling around us.’
The Old Man looked up sharply. ‘Willie, you do not yet understand.’
‘You’re right, I don’t. I’ve always felt you had some sort of mystical attachment to this man, admiration for him, even. Solidarity amongst escapees.’
‘He is a brave man. And far from being a drop in the ocean he is of overwhelming significance.’
‘As you said, I do not yet understand.’
Churchill shook his head sorrowfully, his fleshy jowls quivering in agitation. ‘It was all so simple when it started. Hencke seemed just another escaping soldier, of little consequence, the merest flicker of a candle in the darkening night of German defeat. But …’ He sighed deeply. ‘He has changed, beyond anything we could have expected. He is no longer anonymous. Eisenhower chose to turn him into a token of his victory over me, now Goebbels has embraced him as a symbol of ultimate resistance. In every broadcast Berlin Radio makes he will try to humiliate and destroy me through Hencke.’
‘Surely not …’ Cazolet felt sure that Churchill was going too far in personalizing events, but the Old Man raised his voice to shout him down.
‘Hencke is a remarkable man, a prize in anyone’s army. Unique. Powerful. He has outwitted an entire nation.’ Animation had sparked within the Old Man, as if he were caught personally in the excitement of Hencke’s adventure; he waved away the smoke that was clinging around his forehead in order to see Cazolet more clearly. ‘If he makes it back to Berlin, the only German soldier to do so throughout the course of this entire bloody war, Hencke becomes a mighty weapon. It has been inevitable since the moment he escaped.’
‘Then let us pray he never makes it back.’
Churchill glowered. ‘Goebbels has stacked the odds so fearfully against him.’
‘Goebbels …?’ Cazolet was growing impatient. Churchill talked in such riddles, making no sense that Cazolet could discern.
‘In order to use him as a weapon against me, Goebbels has betrayed him. He should never have told us that Hencke was in Ireland.’
‘But we can’t touch him in Ireland. Can we?’
‘Already he will have been smuggled out of Dublin, to somewhere safe, somewhere beyond our reach. But …’ The lower lip quivered, the moist end of the Havana forgotten. ‘To accommodate his disastrous timetable Goebbels has to get him from Ireland back to Germany in a fearful hurry. He cannot be smuggled through Spain or some third country – it would take too long. He cannot be flown there, for we have total mastery of the skies. They have no ships left afloat which could make the journey. No. There is only one way. By submarine!’
Cazolet was nodding slowly; this much he could understand.
‘And there is only one route, Willie! To run the gauntlet of the English Channel, so full as it is of our frigates and patrol boats, would be suicide. A twenty-mile stretch of water without so much as a friendly rock behind which to hide. He couldn’t escape detection if he tried to swim through! No, Willie, no. He must go the long way round, beyond Scotland and down through the North Sea. There he might hope to hide in the depths, to escape our attentions. Nearly two hundred thousand square miles of dark water. There he might stand a chance.’ Churchill had seemed caught up in Hencke’s challenge himself, his cigar stabbing the air to leave a trail of smoky exclamation marks, but in an instant his demeanour changed. It was as if a string had been cut. He slumped back in his chair. ‘And it is there they shall stop him. Because of Goebbels’ precipitateness and stupidity. The Navy are already moving everything they have to throw a gate across the North Sea so solid that even the fishes will have trouble penetrating it.’ The voice brimmed with anguish. ‘They will leave nothing to chance, Willie.’
After many years spent so close to the Old Man, Cazolet was accustomed to the sharply swinging emotions, his sudden tempers too, but never had he seen his mood change so quickly. One moment Churchill had been lost in self-pity, the next caught in the thrill of trying to outwit Goebbels and even his own sea defences, yet now he was shedding tears.
‘Goebbels has sacrificed him, to get at me. He could have waited, got Hencke back home before making his wretched announcement, keep us unawares. But he couldn’t wait to humiliate me. Goebbels has betrayed him with the kiss of Judas. And so we must betray him also and nail him to a hard cross on which only brave men perish.’ His bottom lip quivered, the head fell forward, the tears began to fall into his lap, tears of sorrow, of pity, and of guilt. ‘We move great armies around the chessboard of war, knowing the battle will result in tens of thousands of deaths. When I went to thank the troops on the night before they left for the Normandy beaches, they cheered, even with the knowledge that many of them were shortly to die as a result of my orders. There will be death warrants to be issued even after this war is over, and I shall not shrink from signing them. The game of war brings death, and the devil has ensured that this has been a hellishly long game. But to conspire in the destruction of this one brave man, whose only crime has been to love his country and to show the most peculiar courage, to order him cast over like a pawn, is almost more than I can bear. For he is no ordinary man. The whole world has betrayed him, poor, poor man. And now it is our turn.’