Artillery of Lies
Authors: Derek Robinson
Artillery of Lies
Derek Robinson
Novels by Derek Robinson
THE R.F.C. TRILOGY*
Goshawk Squadron
Hornet's Sting
War Story
THE R.A.F. QUARTET*
Piece of Cake
A Good Clean Fight
Damned Good Show
Hullo Russia, Goodbye England
THE DOUBLE AGENT QUARTET**
The Eldorado Network
Artillery of Lies
Red Rag Blues
Operation Bamboozle
OTHER FICTION
Kentucky Blues
Kramer's War
Rotten with Honour
NON-FICTION
Invasion 1940
*Available from MacLehose Press from 2012/13
**To be published in ebook by MacLehose Press
An imprint of Quercus
New York ⢠London
© 1991 by Derek Robinson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.
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ISBN 978-1-62365-319-4
Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual personsâliving or deadâevents, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To Robin and Mary
“And there's no fog,” Luis complained. “You said there would be fog.” He managed to make his voice both sour and savage.
“Not all the time,” said Templeton. “I never said England was foggy all the time.”
“Damned swindle.”
“I could sing you a bit of fog,” Julie said. Luis was standing at the window with his hands deep in the pockets of his greatcoat. She stood behind
him
and slid her hands into the pockets, but he refused to link fingers. She rested her chin on his shoulder and crooned: “
A foggy day ⦠in London town ⦠It had me blue
â¦
It had me down ⦔
He hunched his shoulders and frowned even harder at the shifting image of parkland. The rain blurred the glass and made the bare black branches twitch and flicker like bits of early cinema film. He blinked, changed focus, and saw his own reflection.
Handsome young devil,
he thought.
Dark eyes, high cheekbones, strong brows: thank God for a bit of Moorish blood in the family.
He flashed his shy smile, just to keep in practice.
Irresistible.
“No orange juice for breakfast either,” he said bitterly.
“For God's sake, Luis, there's a
war
on,” Julie said, and walked away.
“Nobody told me I wouldn't get any orange juice. I always have orange juice for breakfast, I'm no good without orange juice, I can't work.” He kicked a radiator. “Wouldn't have left Lisbon if I'd known it was like this.”
“Tell you what, I'll lay on some nice juicy prunes tomorrow,” Templeton said.
“I shit on your prunes,” Luis said.
“No, it's the other way around,” Julie told him.
“I suppose the shortage of fog is also because there is a war on,” Luis said.
“Be fair, old chap,” Templeton said. “You can't expect to have fog
and
half a gale of wind and rain.”
“You will tell me next there is no pageantry in England. No pomp and ceremony. Because there is a war on.”
“I'll take you to the Changing of the Guard,” Templeton promised. “Just as soon as it stops raining.”
Luis sighed and took his hands from his pockets to raise them, palms upward. “I should live so long,” he said.
Templeton looked to Julie for help, but she shook her head. “He wasted his youth in the cinema,” she told him. “He thinks life is a B-movie. Does this thing work?” She had found a gramophone and was sorting out the records.
“This severe shortage of fog and orange juice,” Luis said, “is very significant and I shall inform Herr Hitler at the earliest possible opportunity.”
“I'll go and organize some tea,” Templeton said.
As he went out, Julie was dancing to a slow foxtrot with Luis, her arms inside his greatcoat.
“Earl Grey!” Luis called out.
“Wrong,” she said. “Duke Ellington.”
Which at least made him laugh.
I suppose that's your volatile Latin temperament for you,
Templeton thought.
Give me good old English phlegm every time. You know where you are with phlegm.
Templeton needed a stiff cup of tea.
Julie Conroy was American and she could take the stuff or leave it alone, especially before lunch; Luis Cabrillo was Spanish so his choice was simpler: he left it alone. Templeton was English and in the face of adversity he automatically thought of tea. There had been no lack of adversity on the journey from Lisbon.
This was December 1942. Portugal was neutral, perched uneasily on the elbow of Spain, which was also neutral but not too neutral to send a division of troops to fight for Hitler on the Russian Front.
Because nearly all the rest of Europe belonged to Hitler, neutrals like Portugal and Switzerland and Sweden were immensely useful to both sides. Portugal was especially popular with the various intelligence agencies. The climate was pleasant, you could get a
decent cup of real coffee for next to nothing, and the Portuguese secret police didn't throw their weight about. Not unless you were stupid enough to embarrass them by not even pretending to be, for instance, the Assistant Cultural Attaché at your nation's embassy. There were more spies in Lisbon than in any other capital. Demand attracted supply: detailed and startling information, some of it quite accurate, came from a shifting army of paid informants. In particular the Lisbon agents of the
Abwehr,
German Military Intelligence, always got advance notice of arrivals and departures by boat or plane. Despite the war, there were scheduled commercial flights between Portugal and Britain. If Luis Cabrillo had taken one of those planes, the
Abwehr
would have known and would have been painfully surprised, since they believed he had been in Britain for many months, working for them.
The British embassy had a department called Quarantine Control to handle this kind of problem. At three in the morning, during a cold drizzle, in a sad and semi-derelict corner of Lisbon docks, Quarantine Control smuggled Luis, Julie and Templeton on to a rusting gutbucket of a British freighter only minutes before she sailed. It was a three-day voyage to Gibraltar. The weather got worse. The boat lurched and plunged and thumped and butted the Atlantic as if looking for a fight. She was loaded and overloaded with a cargo of carob pods, her skipper taking the view that if you were going to be torpedoed you might as well go down big. The carob pods put out an overblown supersweet smell that no gale could disperse. Luis had never been to sea before, and he was very sick. He lay in his bunk, a martyr to every heave and shudder, and raged feebly against the British government. “Is this the best you can do?” he demanded of Templeton. “This slow death?'”
“I'm afraid it is, old chap.” Templeton had once served in the Royal Navy, and now he was enjoying a thick ham sandwich with plenty of mustard. Julie slumped in a chair, pale as an empty plate.
“That filthy stench ⦔ Luis clung to the bunk as the freighter groaned under the wallop of another wave. “It chokes me.”
“I'm told carob makes splendid animal feed. Cattle fight each other for it, apparently.”
“Eldorado Network,” Luis whispered. “Best damn network in Europe. All that work. Suppose I die?”
“Oh, can it, Luis,” Julie said. “D'you think I'm enjoying this?” Against all advice from her stomach she had eaten a bowl of stew and she knew that if she relaxed her attention for an instant, her stomach
would send it back. “Anyway, the Eldorado Network doesn't exist, so you can go right ahead and die and see if anyone cares.”
They glared at each other. Templeton sighed. He was a bachelor; he had never understood love.
“Think I'll take a turn about the deck,” he said. “Can I get anyone anything?” Neither of them even looked at him.
Quarantine Control had a man waiting for them at Gibraltar. “Good news,” he said. “I've got you on a plane for England tonight.” The plane was a Sunderland flying-boat and it took off as soon as night fell, carrying them high above the route the freighter had taken. When Luis discovered this he took malevolent pleasure in telling Templeton.
“Only a couple of hours and we shall be back exactly where we started,” he shouted. (The Sunderland made a lot of noise.) “Isn't progress wonderful?”
Templeton nodded and got on with his leg of cold chicken. He had made this flight before and he knew that the best approach was to fill yourself up with food and drink and hope to sleep the rest of the way. Julie was already wrapped in blankets with a bottle of wine for company.
Luis had never been up in an airplane before and he could not rest. On the other hand there was nothing to see, nothing to read, nothing to do, and the booming roar of the engines made conversation difficult. The fuselage was dimly lit. As the plane climbed the temperature fell. He couldn't find anywhere comfortable to sit or lie or sprawl. His eardrums hurt.
The pilot flew far out over the Atlantic in order to avoid German aircraft operating from France. The Sunderland was not built for speed. It cruised at 150 or 160 miles an hour, churning stolidly through the night, hour after hour. Luis had never been so bored in his life. This was worse than prison; if he were in prison he could make trouble; inside this deafening, freezing machine was nothing, nothing. He found his penknife and began scraping his initials on a black box while thinking savage and brutal thoughts about Templeton for persuading him to leave Lisbon. A crewman came and shouted and took the penknife away. Luis hated the crewman too.
The flight lasted ten and a half hours.