John Lawton - Riptide

It took more than quarter of an hour.

‘What’re those last two at the bottom there?’ The first words Reggie had spoken in what seemed to Cal to be an age. He’d never known the man to shut up for so long.

‘More Waffen SS regiments,’ Stahl said. ‘The Adolf Hitler and the Viking.’ Stahl no longer looked at the board-he turned his back on it. Cal was staring at it, overawed, chilled by the magnitude of it, the sheer power of what it stood for. Reggie was smiling. Not pleasure, not smugness, he thought, more like a schoolboy thrilled to have finally got what he wanted.

Cal moved closer to the board while Reggie scribbled and said, ‘Will it work? Will anything so colossal hold up once you get it off the drawing board?’

‘It’s perfect country,’ said Stahl. ‘The flat plains that stretch from Prussia to Moscow. Perfect Panzer country. The tanks will simply throttle up and roll-and when they’ve cleared a way through, there are more than three million men in uniform to follow on. Hitler thinks it will be over before winter sets in-although it might be more accurate to say that he prays it will over by then. These men have not been issued with winter uniforms. There aren’t even orders placed with the factories for any winter uniforms.’

‘Air power?’

‘The Lutwaffe will pound the Russians first. Rather like what was meant to happen here last year.’

‘How many men was that?’ Reggie chipped in, head bent over his notebook.

‘Three million. But that is a conservative figure.’

‘Could I ask you to run through it again?’

Cal looked at Stahl. He didn’t seem to resent the question-more as though he had expected it. He didn’t even glance at the blackboard.

‘Pick a column,’ he said simply.

‘Okey doh,’ said Reggie. ‘How about von Kleist’s Panzers?’

Stahl rattled it off like liturgy.

‘3 rdPanzer Korps, von Manteuffel, comprising the 14 thPanzers, the 44 thand 298 thInfantry. i4th Panzer Korps, von Wietersheim, 13 thPanzers. 48 thPanzer Korps, Kempl, comprising the nth Panzers, the 54 thand 75 thInfantry.’

‘Astonishing,’ said Reggie. ‘I don’t suppose you could recite that backwards?’

Stahl closed his eyes as though projecting an image onto the back of his eyelids and recited the entire list from bottom to top, Reggie checking every item against his notes.

‘Jolly good. Do you know, I think I’ve got enough to be going on with. I think we might take a bit of a break now, eh?’

He smiled at Cal. Cal knew he was bursting, simply bursting to tell somebody.

‘There is just one thing,’ Stahl said. ‘The date? You haven’t asked me the date.’

‘Oh,’ said Reggie, as if surprised that he might have forgotten anything. ‘Oh bugger.’

‘June 22 nd. The anniversary of the 1812 invasion by Napoleon. At dawn, needless to say.’

‘Right,’ said Reggie. ‘If you chaps will excuse me for an hour or so…’

He scuttled out.

Stahl looked at Cal.

‘Is that it?’ he said. ‘So soon?’

‘I doubt he means to be rude, but I guess you told him what he wanted to know.’

‘There’s more,’ said Stahl. ‘Much more than dates and division numbers. There are ideas in this. And an idea of Russia so big that it would shock Mr Ruthven-Greene.’ ‘Try shocking me instead.’

Reggie would not take no for an answer. He brushed McKendrick’s secretary aside and took the inner office by storm. McKendrick looked at him across the top of his glasses and said, ‘What’s so bloody important you have to barge in here like a gatecrasher? As if I couldn’t guess.’

He waved his secretary away and told Reggie to close the door.

‘Let’s hear it, Reggie.’

Reggie was almost breathless with glee.

‘Stahl is everything the Americans cracked him up to be. Memory like a Pathé newsreel. Marvellous stuff, sir, simply marvellous.’

‘Give me the edited version, Reggie.’

‘June 22 nd, dawn. Luftwaffe attack precedes Panzer invasion and Infantry. He reckons three million men under arms, possibly more.’

McKendrick thought this important enough to merit taking off his glasses. ‘As many as that?’ he said flatly. ‘Oh well, it’s pretty much what I thought. Just the scale is a wee bit bigger. No matter…’

‘When do we tell the Russians?’ Reggie asked.

McKendrick thought this important enough to merit putting his glasses back on.

‘We don’t,’ he said.

‘What?!?’

‘We don’t tell them. But, to be exact… we have already told them.’

‘I do hope I’m not being dim, sir, but I don’t get it.’

‘Remember Reggie, I said all along that you were “confirming sources”?’

Reggie vaguely remembered.

‘Our ambassador in Moscow saw Vice-Commissar Vyshinsky at the Soviet Foreign Office on the twenty-third of April. He’d asked for a meeting with Stalin in person. A Vice-Commissar was all the audience he got. Nonetheless, he delivered our warning. We gave Stalin the date and the time of the German invasion six weeks ago, and as far as our sources can tell, Stalin’s only reaction was to dismiss the ambassador as some sort of agent provocateur.’

‘Six weeks ago? How did we know six weeks ago? Six weeks ago Stahl was still on the run.’

McKendrick said ‘Reggie, shut up. Don’t ask. Don’t tell’… and looked enigmatic.

‘Imagine,’ Stahl began, ‘a German settlement as a series of concentric circles, like the rings on a target-but each ring is a layer in a racial hierarchy. At the centre, the pure Nordic stock-not just Germans, but Dutch and Danes and Norwegians. English too-the maddest of plans has planned for the eventual surrender of the English. As the circles fan out, ripples around a stone in water, the lesser races. Perhaps a circle of Estonians or Byelorussians, until you get to the perimeter, and beyond the perimeter are the races condemned to barbarism. The Slavs.’

‘And the Jews?’ Cal asked.

‘No. Not the Jews.’

‘Then where are they?’

‘Nowhere. The Jews are no more. Imagine a series of such settlements strung out from the Bug River to the Urals, from the Baltic to the Caspian, linked by new roads, roads made straight for soldiers and Panzers, or made high along every ridge to keep them clear of snow. And what you have is a map of the moon or Mars in some scientific romance. The Soviet Union has ceased to exist. It is occupied by the higher races as though in some atmosphere unbreathable by man; the colony is a bubble-the bubble civilisation. Enough barbarians have been left this side of the Urals to labour for us all-they sow and reap the Ukrainian wheat fields, they drill and pump the Caucasian oil – they are taught to sign their names but expressly forbidden literacy, and if they prove too fecund they are sterilised. But, being inferior they are happy in their inferiority. Does any of this sound familiar? Because this is what those madmen are going to do.’

‘It’s part Brave New World-“gee, I’m so glad I’m not an alpha”-but it’s Roman in its model,’ said Cal. ‘It reminds me of all those Roman forts scattered across Britain, linked by military roads. But the Romans at least absorbed the local populace eventually-they made Romans of some of them.’

‘The Germans won’t. Russia will know a new slavery beyond the bounds of the serfdom they shook off less than a hundred years ago. Beyond the fort, a new dark age. Within a new civilisation.’

‘They make a wilderness and call it peace. That’s what Tacitus wrote of the Romans’ first century in Britain.’

‘Exactly,’ said Stahl. ‘The Pax Germanica-a bubble of civilisation in a vast wilderness of their own making.’