Oliver shook his head. “I do have to hold a day job,” he said. “Nothing attracts investigation than living with no visible means of support. One day, I will retire somewhere, but not for a while.”
Kasper nodded. “I do trust that you were not followed,” he said. “This may be your legitimate place of work, but you have been in the public eye recently.”
“Some RAF bastard needs a pair of cement leggings,” Oliver said angrily. “How dare he leak my name to the Press?” Kasper shrugged. “Even if I was followed to a place I should be going to anyway, the reporter could hardly have gotten inside, could he?”
“No,” Kasper agreed. “Shall we proceed?”
The other men nodded, waving Oliver to a seat. “We have a problem,” Kasper said. “We were expecting delivery of a consignment of Black Aleph from America, which will be seventy-five years late.” No one smiled; Kasper wasn’t known for joking. “The net result is that we are seriously overextended; we are holding many asserts and we might well have lost our income.”
Oliver smiled; they would be just ready for his pitch.
“Already, our creditors, some of the organisations in Scotland, are demanding their money or their supplies or designer drugs,” Kasper said. “We can give them neither.”
A long silence fell. “I believe that I have a solution to our cash flow problem,” Oliver said, and explained the deal he’d made with Roth. There was a long silence.
“You’re talking about treason,” Hanford Fox said finally. The man spoke in a strong Irish brogue, name notwithstanding. “In case you haven’t noticed, the bastards have been blowing hell out of the English. If we supply them with information, they’ll use it against us and we’ll…
“Carry on,” Kasper ordered. “Tell me your plan.”
“There are three… sections of information that the Germans want,” Oliver said, who’d been giving the matter some careful thought. “They want historical information, defence information and technical information. By now, they already have a good idea of what is to come; they know the outline of history.” He smiled; he’d spent a day in the library researching. “If we tell them who was involved in the July Bomb Plot, they would wipe out a fair percentage of their competent generals and commanders.”
Kasper made the closest noise he ever made to a laugh. “Therefore we would be helping the government to defeat the enemy,” he said. “Continue.”
Oliver bowed in his general direction. “We should not supply them with any form of defence information,” he said. “By now, they will know a great deal about our defences; I see no reason to expand what they have.” He smiled. “That would introduce the possibility that they might win.”
Fox nodded. “That would be treason,” he agreed.
“As for technical information, we could give them a lot that would be useless to them,” he said. “We could share information on their own later weapons, which are still outmatched by the RAF. We could give them the plans to the T-34; they never quite matched that tank until it was too late.”
“I do not believe that we have a choice,” Kasper said finally, as atonal as ever. “Mr Oliver, please prepare some… information for the Germans. I trust you do have a way of getting it to them?”
Oliver nodded. “I’ll get on it at once, Mr Kasper,” he said, and relaxed.
Chapter Fifteen: Ruler of the Waves
Combat Zone
Egypt
24th July 1940
There were two ways of looking at the world, Field Marshall Graziani knew; the Mussolini way and the real way. Despite his attempts to warn the Duce of the dangers, the Italian Army was advancing across the desert, stripped of most of its equipment. At the urging of Herr Obersturmbannfuehrer Strudel, the German officer who’d been assigned to help them, he’d stripped every unit of their trucks and tanks, merging them into a single fast force, leaving the other units to make their way forward as best as they could. Despite that, a single British air raid, using one of the old aircraft, no less, had crippled their supply lines; the Italian army was moving ponderously to refuel and rearm the mobile force, which had dug in near Mersa Matruh, a small town in Egypt.
I suppose the blasted German comes in handy, he thought dryly, as the sounds of German-accented Italian rose up from outside. Obersturmbannfuehrer Strudel – what sort of rank was an Obersturmbannfuehrer, he wondered – might or might not have served with Rommel as he claimed, but he certainly understood military matters. The Italian Artillery, the most well-trained service the Italians possessed, were learning new tricks from him. They’d already heard about how tough British Matilda-class tanks were; now they knew the German trick of massing their artillery and allowing the tanks advance to break under their fire.
He wished the same could be said for the rest of his army. Obersturmbannfuehrer Strudel had said a lot of sharp things about it – and he had to admit that most of his complaints were justified – but there wasn’t the money or the resources to equip the Italian Army with better tanks, or even to train like the war was coming tomorrow. He’d tried to warn Mussolini that the army would be unlikely to succeed in making it to Cairo against serious opposition, but the Duce had been adamant; Italy needed victories and it needed them now. They had to appear equals to the Germans, or else Hitler wouldn’t take them seriously.
Graziani snorted bitterly. After Obersturmbannfuehrer Strudel made his report, he suspected that Hitler wouldn’t take them seriously anyway. He was training as fast as he could with the waiting troops, but there was no way that they would be ready for modern war. Not for the first time, he cursed the adventure in Spain; it had cost the Italian Army strength for no reward at all. Franco had refused to become involved in the war; if he’d shut down Gibraltar the problem of Egypt would have… gone away.
We’ve never faced a British army, Graziani thought angrily. The Italians had faced colonial troops, stiffened by a handful of Englishmen, in Africa before, but General Sir Archibald Wavell commanded a real army. The Germans had defeated a British army, but the British had been allied with the French, whom Graziani hated. Without German support, Graziani suspected that the attack on Egypt was doomed, but at what price would that support come?
A polite knock, the form of politeness that suggests rudeness, started him out of his thoughts. Obersturmbannfuehrer Strudel had come to complain about something else, perhaps the supply lines, which were… not in the best of shape. If the Navy had kept its word, then they would have been able to land directly onto the shore, but instead they were dependent upon Tripoli. Just as he called for the German to enter, he remembered where he’d heard the rank Obersturmbannfuehrer before. It was an SS rank.
What is an SS officer doing in Libya? He wondered, as Obersturmbannfuehrer Strudel entered the office.
Unbeknownst to either Grazini or his German advisor, a small pilot-less drone hung high over their heads, watching them. Light, nearly transparent, radar-invisible, the only sign of the drone’s presence was the steady stream of information it was broadcasting back, with a flagrant disdain for security precautions that would have cost its operator his or her career back in 2015. In 1940, nothing the Axis had could even detect the UHF signal, let alone launch a missile that would home in on the signal and kill the drone.