After forty-five silent and nerve-wracking minutes, the job was complete.
Attaching a line to the silent aircraft, NS-D pulled her out into deeper water, where the rear gunner completed the work done by the IRA the night before, venting the hull with heavy calibre bullets.
NS-X sank quickly and silently. Her remaining depth bombs had been made safe to avoid announcing their presence to half of Ireland.
NS-D turned into the wind and drove herself airborne, heading back to their base with an awful cargo.
Hostile eyes watched their departure, as they had done from the moment the Sunderland had touched down.
As NS-D disappeared slowly from sight, Seamus Brown rose from his hiding place, gathered up his two colleagues and jogged off towards his base, hoping his report would calm the fears of the Russian officer.
The phone rang at his desk, causing the Colonel to jump, so engrossed was he in his work.
“Bryan.”
The Colonel stretched as he listened to the brief information.
“Good. Ask him to come in please.”
Replacing the receiver, Bryan walked to the side table and poured two cups of tea, one of which he held out to the newly arrived Richard Hayes.
Manoeuvring his visitor to a seat, Bryan resumed his former position.
“So then, what brings you to my office at this ungodly hour, Richard?”
“You know very well why I am here.”
The two men enjoyed the fencing as a rule, but today there were other fish to fry.
“All Anger.”
“All Anger indeed, Dan.”
“Mr Hayes informs me it was an old codename, used back in the days before the Germans.”
“So the codes wouldn’t cover it at all. It’s a double encryption?”
“Well, yes and no, Stephen. Fortunately, the IRA are not THAT bright. What we have is a simple code name that was encoded using old German message code. The name ‘All Anger’ means something to someone in its own right. It’s not an encryption as such.”
“Yes, I do understand that, you know!”
Bryan held his hands up in apology.
“Not teaching you to suck eggs, Stephen.”
“When did this codename first come into being?”
Swiftly consulting his notes from the late evening session with the ex-IRA man, the Colonel spoke with authority.
“He says quiet adamantly it was 1933. He remembered because of Hitler.”
“Didn’t we discover something about that?”
The Colonel grinned.
“Yes… we did. They had a habit of using anagrams as simple codenames.”
Such a statement posed a challenge the Academic could not resist.
Picking up a pencil, he begged a piece of paper and started to work.
All Anger…
Angerall.
Enallgar.
Largelan.
Ellanrag.
Within a minute, he sat back triumphantly.
“Glenlara.”
“Impressive, Stephen, it took me a little longer.”
That brought the slightest of scowls from Hayes.
“Forgive me. Now cast your mind back.”
Hayes, his mind again tasked, slipped quickly from his annoyance into recall mode.
“Yes, I thought it was familiar… Glenlara, Cork. You had that trouble with the Garda ambush, the lads from Castleisland, just before the world went mad again, did you not?”
“Anything else?”
He racked his brain.
“The woods near there.”
“Indeed, Stephen.”
There had been two reports of strange lights in the woods between Glennamucklagh and Glenlara. The second report had resulted in the dispatch of a team and four Garda constables subsequently being shot to death in an ambush. One inexplicable issue of that ambush was the fact that their car and bodies were found at Barleyhill, the other side of the woods from the dead men’s base at Castleisland.
Licking his lips free from sweet tea, Bryan asked the important question.
“Are there any messages that would tie in with that ambush and this codeword? My men can’t find any at first look.”
“I will check my own folders and see what I can find.”
The G2 Commander nodded and then relaxed back into his chair.
“None the less, a number of my men and Special Branch officers, plus a company of the Army, are presently on their way to see what delights the woods contain.”
On the stroke of 11am, the artillery of Chuikov’s and Yeremenko’s forces commenced a barrage, hundreds of artillery pieces delivering thousands of shells in a storm that lasted thirty minutes precisely.
As the artillery ceased its activity, defending Allied units came up from their bunkers, moved up from secondary positions and prepared to face whatever it was that was coming at them through the heavy snow.
At 1140 hrs, Soviet artillery and previously silent rocket batteries fired as one, catching the deployed defenders by surprise and inflicting heavy casualties.
The plan required that the barrage would advance, commencing at 1210hrs and the plan was followed to the letter, shell shocked and battered Allied soldiers suddenly finding themselves overrun as Soviet infantry formations closed up and into their positions, hard on the edge of the advancing barrages.
Chuikov’s 1st Alpine Front committed itself in Eastern Austria, striking hard down upon the defenders of Northeast Italy, keeping his southern flank against the relative safety of the Yugoslav border, his right flank in touch with Yeremenko’s 1st Southern European Front, the border between them agreed on as a small German village only recently made notorious; Berchtesgaden.
Konev’s suggestion had been simple and well reasoned.
The logistics gleaned from the Yugoslavs were close at hand for the 1st Alpine and 1st Southern European. The units were fresh, whereas the enemy opposite them had been thinned out to reinforce the German front.
The Spanish had arrived and been inserted into frontline positions. Not quality troops by all accounts, certainly not up to the standard of the old Blau Division.
Other inferior units had been detected in Italy and Southern France, soldiers of limited worth, according to Soviet intelligence and Soviet prejudices. Negroes, Brazilians, French, Mexicans, Portuguese, and even small detachments from Cuba and Paraguay.
So, Konev had argued, with his plans for limited advances on the main front, combined with a rejuvenation programme and resupply schedule for the savaged Red Banner formations, now was the time to instigate the phase that brought Chuikov and Yeremenko into action.
The GKO had agreed and the dying started all over again.
Squadron Leader Benjamin Viljoen read the report in silence, detaching himself from the fact that he was reading about the death of his brother.
All secret map work, all radio code books, and all sensitive equipment had either been recovered or had been verified as destroyed within the aircraft. That ticked a lot of boxes on the RAF loss report he was filing.
All the bodies had been placed in the station morgue, awaiting proper ceremony at the Sacred Heart cemetery in Irvinestown.
Ten good men, not the least of which was his brother.
Larry Cox had been a good mate too.
The musing triggered something in his mind; an unease, a discomfort, a seed of something ‘not right’.