Connie Willis - All Clear

“And what did you tell him?”

“We told him we didn’t know where you were,” Jonathan said, “but that he should ask in Saltram-on-Sea.”

He knew the rest of it, how Tensing and Ferguson had gone there and given Daphne the address he’d thought was the retrieval team’s. He’d wondered how they’d traced him to Daphne, but he’d always assumed one of the nurses at the hospital had mentioned she’d come to see him.

“It looks like he found you,” Jonathan said.

“Yes, he found me.” Or rather, I found him, I went to the address in Edgebourne Daphine gave me, expecting to find the retrieval team, and there he was. Scared the bejesus out of me. I thought he was going to arrest me as a spy, but he didn’t. He offered me a job. Which I turned down till I found out that Polly’s deadline was two months before Denys Atherton got here.

“What else did you tell Tensing?” he asked.

“What do you think we told him?” the Commander said. “That you were as brave as they come, that you’d saved our lives and the life of every soldier on the Lady Jane when you unfouled that propeller. And I told him he’d be a blasted fool not to recruit you, in spite of you being a Yank.”

That day in Edgebourne, Tensing had said, “You come highly recommended,” and he’d assumed Tensing had talked to Hardy, but it had been the Commander and Jonathan.

If it hadn’t been for them, Tensing wouldn’t have found him after losing him at Bletchley. He wouldn’t have offered him a job and the possibility of finding Atherton and of telling him where Polly and Eileen were. He wouldn’t be working on Fortitude South. And if they hadn’t rescued Tensing, would there even have been a Fortitude South? And they couldn’t have rescued Tensing if he hadn’t unfouled the propeller.

“Tensing recruited you?” Jonathan was asking, as excited as when he’d been fourteen, and Ernest was suddenly reminded of Colin Templer. “You’re a spy?”

“Nothing so glamorous, I’m afraid,” Ernest said. “When I’m not delivering parcels I spend most of my time at a desk. And speaking of parcels, I’d better deliver the one I brought and get going.”

He reached for his duffel bag, but the Commander stopped him. “You can’t go yet, not without telling us what all’s happened to you since we saw you last.”

I faked amnesia, nearly killed Alan Turing, got knocked unconscious by a collapsing wall, faked my own death, and met the Queen.

“It’s a long story,” he said.

“We got plenty of time.” The Commander pulled out a chair for him. “Sit down. You can’t go out in that gale. You want some coffee? Some stew?”

He remembered the Commander’s stew. “Coffee, thanks.” He sat down. There were things he needed to find out, too.

The Commander sloshed over to the coffeepot. “Jonathan, see if you can find that brandy we were saving for V-Day,” he said. He fished a mug out of the litter of opened cans and charts on the table, poured coffee into it, and handed it to Ernest.

The mug didn’t look like it had been washed since the last time he’d been on the Lady Jane. Ernest sipped cautiously at it. I should have had the stew, he thought.

“Here it is,” Jonathan said, bringing the brandy over.

“Are you sure you want to open that?” Ernest asked. “Won’t it be bad luck to drink it before the war’s over?”

“It’s as good as won already,” the Commander said, “or it will be a month from now, isn’t that right, Kansas?”

And here was the perfect place for his propaganda, the perfect chance to say the invasion couldn’t happen till July twentieth at the earliest and mention FUSAG and Patton and Calais. Better than perfect. If they got captured by the Germans and were interrogated, they could help corroborate Intelligence’s deception efforts.

But they’d saved his life as much as he’d saved theirs. He owed them the truth, and since he couldn’t tell them who he really was, he could at least tell the truth about this. “That’s right,” he said. “Only we need the Germans to think it’s mid-July.”

The Commander nodded. “So Rommel won’t bring his tanks up. And you need him to think it’s Calais for the same reason.” And at Ernest’s look of surprise, “The last two weeks we’ve been minesweeping in Calais harbor to convince them that’s where the invasion’s coming. You think it’ll fool them, Kansas?”

“If it doesn’t, we won’t win this war.”

“Then we’d better see to it that it does. Hold out your mug.” He added a dollop of brandy to Ernest’s coffee and to Jonathan’s and then poured himself a mugful and sat down. “Now, then,” he said. “Tell us what you’ve been up to.”

“You first,” Ernest said, and leaned back, sipping his coffee—which even the brandy couldn’t improve—as they told him about their adventures. They’d spirited Jewish refugees and pilots who’d been shot down across the Channel to England and delivered supplies and coded messages to the French Resistance.

And he knew he should be worried that what they’d done—what he’d done when he unfouled that propeller and kept them from getting hit by that Stuka—had altered events. He’d been afraid of that ever since Private Hardy. But oddly, he wasn’t worried.

He’d thought he’d got the Commander and Jonathan killed, and he hadn’t. Which meant maybe other things he’d feared weren’t true either. Maybe it wasn’t true that he’d been unable to find Denys Atherton and get Polly and Eileen out before Polly’s deadline. Maybe it wasn’t true that something he’d done that night in that he’d been unable to find Denys Atherton and get Polly and Eileen out before Polly’s deadline. Maybe it wasn’t true that something he’d done that night in Dunkirk—saving Hardy’s life or hauling that dog up over the side—had lost the war. If the Commander and Jonathan were alive, then anything was possible.

Or maybe it was just his relief at not being a murderer. Or the brandy.

“These last four months we’ve been helping map the beaches in Normandy,” the Commander said casually.

Mapping the beaches. Jesus, an incredibly dangerous job. And, if they were caught, one that could undo everything Fortitude South had worked so hard to accomplish the last few months.

“Your turn,” the Commander was saying. “What have you been doing? How long were you in hospital?”

“Nearly four months,” he said. “I tried to get in touch with you. That’s why I thought you were dead. After I wrote you, Daphne—”

“Our Daphne, from the Crown and Anchor?”

“Yes. She came to tell me you hadn’t made it back from Dunkirk. Have you sent them word you’re alive?”

Jonathan shook his head.

“Not even your mother?”

“No. After we brought Colonel Tensing back, they sent us straight out again to lay mines against the invasion, and by the time we got back, they already thought we were dead.”

“Which we might have been at any time,” the Commander said. “And then when we started doing missions for Intelligence, everything had to be hush-hush. And we were as good as dead anyway, with the sort of thing they wanted us to do. It was only a matter of our having been killed a bit later than they thought. And if Jonathan’s mother had known he was alive, she’d never have let him do it.”

Jonathan nodded. “So it seemed better all around to let them go on believing we were dead. I suppose that seems hard to you.”

“No,” Ernest said, thinking of what he’d done to Polly and Eileen. “I know sometimes things like that are necessary.”

The Commander nodded. “If it means the difference between winning or losing this war”—

Or getting Polly and Eileen out or not.