The Invasion of 1950

Chapter Forty-Five

London, England

Roger Hollis was dead.

Kim Philby hadn’t known him very well on a personal level, but he had known what Hollis was. He had been the brightest star in the Soviet intelligence network within Britain. Hollis, a young recruit to MI5 who had risen rapidly in the ranks, had been tasked with covering the handful of highly-placed Soviet agents in the British Government. He had no obvious links to Hollis — although Hollis had called him in to give ‘advice’ on the Soviet Union — but his death came as a terrible blow. It was all he could do to get through the day and then return to his apartment, grimly aware that Otto Skorzeny would want all the details.

Philby wondered about it all through the day. Hollis had been bright and very dedicated, determined to do the right thing for communism and the global revolution, and he hadn’t been deterred by the fall of the Soviet Union. That made it fairly certain that Hollis, like Philby, had been tricked into supplying information to Berlin, information from the heart of MI5. Philby had heard about the unusual streak of luck that the Germans had in clearing out British spies and guessed, now, that that had been something to do with Hollis. If Hollis had realised that they had all been tricked into working for the class enemy…

Well, he couldn’t have gone to the government, any more than Philby himself could. They would both have faced a certain death penalty for their actions. He’d chosen to kill himself instead, which struck Philby as a little ironic, but maybe he had known that Berlin wouldn’t have allowed him to just leave his post. He’d had years in him yet, maybe even a position at the very top, and there was no way that Berlin would have permitted him to leave. If he had, there would have been a quiet disclosure and Hollis would have been dragged to a very quiet prison in chains. He’d chosen a way out that Philby frankly envied. It was tempting to take the same way out himself. Only a reluctance to die and a desperate hope that somehow Berlin would be somewhere new for him to live kept him from complete despair. He had nothing to live for, any longer, but the hope of escape.

He’d used the small café before, a French Restaurant in the heart of London, run by a pair of Frenchwomen who had escaped Occupied France. Their husbands had been in the Free French before that outfit had been disarmed and almost surrendered to the Vichy French by Atlee’s Government. Only hasty action had allowed them to escape to somewhere much safer for them. The Free French were a joke these days, Philby knew, and yet… they clearly had some uses.

The Frenchwomen were his direct link to Moscow, or what he’d thought was Moscow, long ago. Their communist ties were a secret. If that had been known when they had come to Britain, they would likely have been sent back to Vichy France’s tender mercies. Admiral Darlen would not have been pleased to see them.

“My usual, Simone,” he said as the woman approached him. He came in every second week for a drink and a cake. He’d picked up the habit of French Cakes from his time in France, just before German armoured columns had punched through the lines. It still gave him a moment of grim amusement that he had understood what was happening before the French Army. “A cake and a cup of tea.”

The cake was perfection. The tea surprisingly good for such a small place. Philby knew that while the common folk of the country were on rations, those with money could eat anywhere they liked, devouring massive meals that seemed to have no end. He’d taken it as proof that the British system was doomed to fall, but now, with Otto Skorzeny in his living room, he no longer had any grounds for complaint. It no longer seemed important that the Royal Family supplemented their merger rations with grouse shot on their estates or that the aristocracy sent their children to safety in America. He’d been a fool and more than a fool. They would be making up new words for what he had done to the country.

“Thank you,” he said finally. He took the slip of paper placed next to the cake and pocketed it, accepting a kiss from her before slipping back out of the door and into the streets. The air raid sirens howled in the distance, but he ignored them. If there truly was a God, and Kim Philby had long since abandoned any form of religion, he would die tonight, and that would be the end of it. There were no German bombers coming any closer than the docks, where they were dropping mines into the water; they never bombed the city itself. These days, people still ducked into the nearest air raid shelter, but many of them were already emerging, laughing at themselves for getting into such a state.

Philby felt envy for them as he climbed aboard a bus for the ride home. He’d chosen the apartment carefully as somewhere where he could escape quickly if his cover were blown, but he hadn’t realised who he was really working for, or why. If he ran now, his handler back in Berlin would burn him and the British would come for him, hunting him down until he was caught and hung. His mind refused to leave the image of him slowly choking on a noose, hung just perfectly to ensure a long and painful departure, and he felt sick. Berlin was his only hope.

He stepped into his apartment and came face to face with Skorzeny. The SS commando looked terrifyingly big and powerful, or maybe that was just his reputation; even so, he filled the room with his presence. He wore a set of clothes that Philby had brought him, common workman’s clothes, and yet… somehow, he made them seem like a uniform. There could be no doubting what he was and somehow, regardless, he had walked through the streets of London without fear.

“Welcome home,” Skorzeny said without irony. Philby kept his face carefully blank, wishing that he didn’t feel so imperilled in Skorzeny’s presence; he had the sense that each time he turned his back, it might be the last. Skorzeny was intimidation personified; every time he smiled, Philby had the urge to cover his groin and run. “Did you get the information and the orders?”

“Yes, I did,” Philby said. Skorzeny had listened in disbelief as the advancing panzers, far from punching through the British defences, had been balked and then turned back by the British armour. Philby had been both pleased and worried. Pleased because of the expression on Skorzeny’s face, worried because without the panzers coming to rescue them, Skorzeny might try something stupid to escape London, dragging Philby down with him. “Have you made the tea?”

Skorzeny merely held out a hand. Philby passed him the note and went into the kitchen, somehow unsurprised to discover that the commandos, while very neat, hadn’t bothered to make any food. They hadn’t even set about preparing a small meal for them. The seven of them ate a great deal of food between them, he had realised, and as his rations were designed for only one person, he was having to use a great deal of ingenuity to gather enough food to feed them all. He had contacts and friends in high places, but with a witch hunt going on for German spies, he didn’t dare do anything that would cause anyone to realise what he was doing.

“Interesting,” Skorzeny said as he came into the kitchen. The team leader showed no sign of recognising Philby’s irritation. “Do you know what they want us to do?”

“No,” Philby said crossly. It had occurred to him that he could have forged information or orders for the commandos, but cracking the code for their communications had proven beyond his abilities. “I cannot read your codes.”

“No,” Skorzeny agreed dryly. His face twisted into a sneer. “I guess they didn’t trust you. Once a traitor, always a traitor.”

Philby had a rare moment of deep insight. Skorzeny acted like a small boy half the time. A small boy with utterly lethal combat skills and a small arsenal of weaponry. He had complete faith in his own abilities and absolutely no conception of what might happen to him if he were caught, or even of his own death in combat. He went to war gladly, with a smile on his face, completely unable to grasp the fact that he might die. His faith in his own invincibility was a powerful asset, the one that had kept him going through his career… and allowed him to become one of the legends of the SS.

“I thought that the idea was security,” he said, refusing to show any offence. They had had some details drummed into their heads a long time before Hitler’s forces had taken Moscow and killed Stalin. “If I am caught, the less I know, the better. What do you have to do, and how does it involve me?”

“It seems that someone in Berlin has decided to toss Winston Churchill down the WC,” Skorzeny said, laughing at his own joke. It wasn’t that funny, but Philby risked a laugh anyway, not daring to antagonise the bully too much. “They want us to remove him permanently from office with a shot through the head.”

Philby stared at him. “They want you to kill Churchill?”

“Apparently so,” Skorzeny said, buffing his nails with a toothpick. “I dare say that our esteemed Fuhrer has decided that Mr Churchill is no longer required for the war effort and has ordered him removed. As the best people in the Reich for such missions — I have killed several Russian generals personally — we have been ordered to dispose of him.”

He leered, picking his teeth with one hand. “Or don’t you think that’s a good idea?” He asked, his voice becoming mocking and very cold. “Are you feeling some tiny trace of loyalty still left in your system?”

Philby frowned at him, thoroughly disgusted.

“Not really,” he said, trying to sound casual. “I just suspect that if we actually kill Churchill, it’s going to be extremely difficult to remain in place and avoid detection.”

Skorzeny quirked an eyebrow. “In the middle of a power struggle over who would succeed Churchill as Prime Minister?”

“We’re not going to fight a civil war over it,” Philby proclaimed. “The handful of possible candidates will either form a compromise government between themselves or one of them will gain enough votes in Parliament to go to the King and receive his blessing to form a new government. Regardless, they’re not going to stop looking for you, and they’ll go through everything — and everyone — with a fine-toothed comb.”

“And maybe they’ll see through your cover at last,” Skorzeny said, a smile forming around his lips. His teeth showed once; they were perfect, of course. “What are you going to do then?”

“I have no idea,” Philby said wilting. He had some plans for escape, but he suspected that the press of events would ensure that they were no longer usable They had partly depended on Hollis, and he was now dead. “What do you want me to do?”

“They want us to get out of the city afterwards,” Skorzeny said calmly. Philby tried to paste a relieved-looking expression on his face. Skorzeny probably thought he was a coward, but that hardly mattered, not now. There might just be a chance to escape completely. “How do you advise that we do that?”

Philby had looked into the matter before the Germans launched their attack against the defence lines to the north.

“It’s not going to be easy,” he said, after a moment to collect his thoughts. He’d have to check everything again, and that would risk detection. “I don’t think I can get us papers to get very far out of the city, and if we were to pose as a military unit, we would be unlikely to get away with it for long.”

“Why not?” Skorzeny smiled and asked. His eyes lit up as he contemplated an important point. “You could be an important minister and we could be your bodyguards.”

Philby shook his head.

“The British Army senior ranks are very entwined with the political and aristocratic framework of the country,” he said. How much did Skorzeny actually know? “It’s quite likely that if we posed as a government personage and his escort, whoever we met would know all of them by sight and would smell a rat at once. If we tried to make it to German lines in the north, we would very likely be caught and then thrown into jail.”

“Executed,” Skorzeny said flatly. He laughed aloud as Philby flinched at the blunt word. “Where else is there? Ireland?”

“That’s where they would expect us to go,” Philby said. “There are dozens of possible ways to get to Ireland, but all of them would be watched under any circumstances, and of course that would be doubled after Churchill’s death. The only other way out would be to head to France.”

Skorzeny gave him a sharp look. Did he see the deceit that Philby was planning deep inside his heart?

“France happens to be on the opposite side of a rather large sea,” he said coldly. “They may claim that I can walk on water, but I would sink if I tried to swim that far, so what do you have in mind?”

“There are fishing boats all around the south coast of England,” Philby said carefully. “Any one of them could get us to France; hell, there are reports of Frenchmen using the boats to smuggle stuff in and out of Vichy France. The fishermen haven’t even stopped in time of war. They have kept fishing, and they are feeding part of the south coast through their efforts.”

Skorzeny rolled his eyes.

“You British couldn’t secure a thing,” he said dryly. Philby, who would have privately agreed, said nothing. “In the Reich, we do not allow such behaviour.”

“Without their efforts, the south coast would be much more hungry,” Philby said, half-smiling. “Would you want to be the Government that told millions of people to starve rather than allow the fishermen to continue their trade?”

“Democracy is an alien concept to me,” Skorzeny growled. It was true, Philby knew. The Reich had never been a democratic state and the state before it, the Weimer Republic, had failed spectacularly. They had been meant to vote in a communist government, but instead they had trusted Hitler, a dreadful mistake. “Are you confident that you can get us all out that way?”

“As long as we move quickly, we could be in France within hours,” Philby promised. “I think that we could make it without any major problems.”

“Good,” Skorzeny said. “Now, it’s time to start figuring out the answer to the most important question in the world; how can we get a clear shot at Winston Churchill?”