Connie Willis - All Clear

He went to find Chasuble, but he wasn’t in his office, and Prism didn’t know where he was.

“Gwendolyn might,” Prism said, and Ernest went out to the garage to find him.

Gwen was underneath the staff car. Ernest leaned under and asked, “Do you know where Chasuble is?”

“He went to Station X to drop off the radio messages,” Gwen said.

Damn. “Do you know—” he began, then stopped and looked up, listening. There was a faint putt-putting off to the east. It sounded like a motorbike approaching.

“That’s odd,” Gwen said, sliding out from under the car. “I didn’t hear the siren.”

“Perhaps they’ve stopped bothering with them.”

Gwen nodded. “Or worn them out.”

It’s possible, Ernest thought, listening to the putt-putt grow louder. In the two weeks since the V-1s had started, the sirens had sounded at least five hundred times.

“What did you ask me before?” Gwen asked.

“I asked you,” Ernest said, raising his voice over the chugging of the V-1, “if you knew when we were invading France.”

Gwen waited till the rocket had passed safely overhead and headed loudly off to the northeast and then shouted, “Invading France? I thought we already had!”

“Very amusing!” Ernest yelled back. “Not the real one. I’m talking about the one we’ve been working on for the last five months!” He was suddenly shouting into silence as the V-1’s motor cut out.

Gwen held up his hand, signaling him to wait. There was a brief silence and then a muffled boom off to the northwest.

“That’s the eighth flying bomb today,” Gwen said. “You’d think Hitler would be growing bored with his new toy by now.” He slid back under the car.

“You still haven’t told me when we’re invading Calais.”

“I think they decided on July fifteenth, but I’m not certain. Cess will know.”

But Cess would follow him back to the office and stand there watching him type.

“Whenever it is, I hope it’s soon,” Gwen said from under the car. “I can’t wait to get out of this bloody place.”

They’d all be out of this bloody place as soon as the Germans caught on to the deception.

And then what? Ernest thought. Where would he be assigned? He had to see to it he wasn’t sent to France. He hadn’t realized deception units had operated over there after D-Day till last week, when an officer from Dover had arrived and requisitioned all their dummy tanks. They apparently planned to set up dummy-tank battalions in France to confuse the Germans, and the officer’d said the units manning them would be drawn from Fortitude South. “We need people who’ve had experience with these bloody unwieldy inflatables,” he’d said, which meant everyone in the unit was vulnerable.

Hopefully, Ernest’s bad foot would keep him from being sent, but he couldn’t count on it—the officer had asked him how much experience he’d had with tanks, and Cess had told him the entire story of the bull.

Ernest wished he knew what other deception missions they’d done after D-Day so he’d know what to avoid and what to ask for. He needed an assignment that would keep him in England, and one that involved sending messages that an historian might have an interest in. It was his only hope, now that D-Day was over and Denys Atherton had gone back to Oxford.

It also had to be an assignment where he wouldn’t have to undergo a background check, and where he wouldn’t be likely to get caught.

He’d had a close call last week. He’d been typing one of his messages when Cess came in, and before he could get the paper out of the typewriter, Cess had begun reading over his shoulder. “I say, haven’t you already used the name Polly?” he’d asked. “It’s a common enough name, but you don’t want to do anything to make the Germans suspicious.”

Or you, he thought. Or Tensing. And he had dutifully Xed out the name and typed “Alice” above it.

Maybe the safest thing to do would be to try to get invalided out and land a job on a newspaper. Whatever he did, he had to do it soon, before they were shut down and he was assigned elsewhere. Once he’d been assigned, it would be almost impossible to get it changed.

And in the meantime he needed to finish his news story and get it put away before Cess caught him using “Polly” again and got suspicious. He went back to the office and changed the sentence to “When I spoke to Captain Davies, he said it was scheduled to last another full month. I realize Sellindge is located on the direct route to Dover, but is it necessary for the entire First Army to parade past my door? At my wits’ end, Miss Euphemia Hill, Rose Gate Cottage—”

“You may as well stop typing,” Cess said from the doorway. “The Jig’s up.”

“You may as well stop typing,” Cess said from the doorway. “The Jig’s up.”

Ernest looked up at him, startled. Cess was leaning lazily against the doorjamb, his arms folded. “What?”

“I said, the jig’s up. It’s American slang. It means we’ve been found out. Hitler’s finally tumbled to the fact that there’s no First Army. And no second invasion.”

Ernest waited a moment to give his heart time to stop thudding and then said, “Hitler’s caught on to the deception?”

“Yes, and about time. I’d begun to think he’d only realize he’d been tricked when he saw Monty rolling into Berlin.”

The Russians, Ernest thought. And Hitler won’t be there. He’ll already have killed himself in his bunker. “Who told you he’s caught on?”

“No one,” he said. “I’m in Intelligence, remember? I’ve deduced it from the clues.”

“What clues?”

“One, Algernon’s here. And two, Lady Bracknell’s called a general meeting in the mess.”

Cess was right. It looked like the jig was up. In more ways than one. I should have talked to him earlier about being reassigned, he thought. Or perhaps there was still time. “When’s this meeting scheduled for?”

“Now,” Cess said, showing no sign of leaving.

And Ernest couldn’t leave either, not with a story with the name Polly in it still in the typewriter. “Coming,” he said, putting a cover over the machine and standing up. “You need to go tell Gwen. He’s in the garage underneath the staff car.”

“Oh, right,” Cess said, and left. Ernest yanked the cover off and the letter out of the typewriter, hid it in the file cabinet, and was at the door when Cess returned.

“Gwen wasn’t there,” he reported. “He must already be in the meeting.”

He was, and so was everyone else except Chasuble. Lady Bracknell, in full-dress uniform—another bad sign—was saying, “Colonel Algernon has something to say to you.”

“Thank you,” Tensing said, standing up. “First of all, I want to thank all of you for your hard work during these past months and to tell you how handsomely it’s paid off. Our efforts to deceive the Germans as to the time and place of the invasion have been successful beyond our greatest hopes. Even after receiving news of the Normandy invasion, the German High Command continued to believe that that was a diversion and that the main invasion was still to come at the Pas de Calais.”

He was talking in the past tense. Cess was right. The jig was up.

“As a result of this belief,” Tensing went on, “they held significant numbers of troops and tanks in readiness for that invasion, numbers which, if sent to Normandy, would have significantly altered the outcome. Fortitude South’s work was decisive in the outcome of the invasion, and you’re to be congratulated.”

The men began to clap and cheer. “We did it!” Cess shouted. “We beat them.”

“Right,” Prism said wryly. “Single-handedly. I’m certain all those destroyers and planes and paratroopers and landing forces had nothing to do with it.”