James Benn - Rag and Bone

Maybe I thought too much about this stuff. Maybe it was better to follow orders and do the job, whatever it was.

“Let’s go, Billy,” Big Mike said, his glance lingering on my face. I wondered what he saw.

“Sure,” I said, climbing into the jeep. The army seemed to be making a soldier of me, regardless of my attempts to prevent it. Or maybe it was the hangover. Whichever, it was the first time the thought of following orders had ever seemed comforting, and that bothered me.

“What exactly are we looking for?” Big Mike asked after we had a few more miles under our wheels.

“Russians,” I said, and filled him in on my assignment and what I’d learned from Scotland Yard. I showed him the photo of Gennady Egorov. Kaz and his pistol I kept to myself.

The road to High Wycombe paralleled the River Wye, which was more of a stream, as it meandered by fields, wooded groves, and low rolling hills. Luckily, the U.S. Army Air Force didn’t stint on road signs, and as soon as we entered High Wycombe we followed posted signs up a short hill, and took a long gravel drive to an imposing gray granite three-story building sprawled across tree-lined grounds. Twin turrets rose from the corners, making the place look more like a medieval fortress than the headquarters of a modern air force. A church, stuck onto the end of the building, looked like an afterthought.

Big Mike came in with me and peeled off to find a mess hall, saying he was hungry. That was pretty much a normal state for him, except for about a half hour after each meal. But he was also going to gather information, scuttlebutt from other noncoms. I went to the duty desk and asked where the XO’s office was. In any unit, the executive officer was the guy who had to know everything. No sense asking for the commanding officer, he probably wouldn’t bother with a lieutenant from outside his command. The XO would be different; he’d want to know why I was here asking questions.

I signed in and was sent up to the top floor, my feet fitting the worn grooves in the stone stairs, as thousands of others had done. Officers, clerks, WACs, and occasional RAF personnel swept around me in purposeful motion. Looking for the XO’s office, I passed an open doorway, the sign above it marked OPERATIONS. A private was affixing another sign below that, freshly painted letters spelling out that this was home to Colonel Dawson. The name was familiar, and I figured it was worth a shot.

“Is that Bull Dawson, by any chance?” I asked the private.

“No idea, Lieutenant. I just paint ’em. They come and go and I change the names. Ask inside.”

In the outer office, a sergeant sat at a desk typing with two fingers. The door to the inner office was open, but I couldn’t see inside. The sergeant didn’t look up. With so much brass around, my silver bars didn’t carry much weight.

“Help you, Lieutenant?” He didn’t stop typing.

“Colonel Dawson,” I said, crooking my thumb in the direction of the inner office. “Bull Dawson, by any chance? Fresh from Northern Ireland?”

“Who the hell wants to know?” A voice boomed out.

“That answer your question, Lieutenant?” Click clack. His lack of interest was formidable, so an answer wasn’t needed.

“How’s the shoulder, Bull?” I said, entering his office. It was large, with two map tables and one large wall map, pieces of string marking the distance from airfields in England to targets in France, Germany, and beyond. Bull was standing at the wall map, removing pins, letting strands of red string drop to the floor.

“Billy Boyle! Goddamn, I thought you were back in Algiers. The shoulder still hurts when it rains, which is most of the time.” Bull shook my hand, enveloping mine in his big, beefy grasp. We’d met in Northern Ireland, and there had been gunfire involved. Bull had taken one in the shoulder, but it hadn’t kept him from getting me off the island on the q.t.

“They still got you flying a desk, Colonel?” Bull Dawson wasn’t much for protocol, and wouldn’t mind my calling him Bull. But I’d never met an officer who didn’t like being given his rank.

“Yeah, they found something more useful for me to do than scheduling transport planes in and out of Northern Ireland. Got my orders three days ago, just getting settled in. No missions yet, but that’ll come. What brings you here, Billy?”

“I came in a few days ago myself, ahead of General Eisenhower. I’m investigating the death of a Soviet Air Force officer, Captain Gennady Egorov. Got himself shot in London.”

“Someone here involved?” Bull said, gesturing for me to sit down in one of the two armchairs in front of his desk. He took the other.

“Not as far as I know. I heard that he’d been involved in some sort of liaison role with the Eighth. Thought I’d check it out, see if anyone knew him.”

“We don’t have any Russians here, Billy,” Bull said, lighting a cigarette with a Zippo. “English, a few Canadians; the rest are all American. What would a Russian be doing here anyway?”

“Good question. What about Poles? Any of them stationed here?”

“No, but I did meet a few of them from the RAF 303 Squadron. The Kosciuszko Squadron, they call themselves. Highest kill rate in the Battle of Britain, a real wild bunch of fliers. They’re stationed over in Ruislip, ten or twelve miles from here. But that was a social occasion. Invite to the new American brass to dine in their mess, that sort of thing. Why?”

“No reason, Bull. Occupational hazard of a detective. Once you start asking questions, you can’t stop. Is there anyone who’s been here a while, who might know about any Soviet personnel visiting?”

“Let me ask our G-2. Intelligence ought to know about people showing up in funny uniforms, right?”

“Sounds good, if you’re not too busy,” I said.

“Billy, you and I have been through the real thing. I’m never too busy for former aircrew, even a ground pounder like you. Now you wait here. This will go a lot faster if I don’t bring a stranger, you understand?”

“Sure, Bull.” He slapped me on the knee as he left. I got up and stretched my legs, tired after the jeep ride and perhaps last night’s drinking. I looked out the window in time to see four fighter planes arcing across the sky, but they were too high for me to make them out. I looked at the maps on the table, one of France, the other Germany. Papers and files covered each of them, and I didn’t want to be shot as a spy in case the G-2 officer came back with Bull, so I left them alone.

The wall map ranged from Northern Ireland and Scotland in the north to Sicily in the south, and all the way to Moscow in the east. Red string from Italy went up past Rome, with others going into Romania and Poland. Strands from England crisscrossed each other, some headed deep into Germany, others along the coast of France. Not hard to guess what they were up to.

I picked up the strings that Bull had let drop to the floor. Three of them, all longer than any of the others. What had they pointed to? An ashtray on a table held colored pins, and it was easy to see former targets on the continent by the pinholes they had left. But where had the long pieces of string led? I let my fingers run across the map at about the right distance from England. Beyond Poland and Romania, the paper was unscarred. Until my fingertips found two tiny pinholes, deep into Russia, about midway between Moscow and the Black Sea. Right next to Mirgorod and Poltava, in the Ukraine. I held up a piece of string, and it reached perfectly from a number of bases north of London. What the hell was going on? Those weren’t targets; the bases were well behind the Russian lines.

I heard Bull’s voice in the outer office and stuffed the string into my pocket as I stepped away from the map.