Staying politically innocent after Rudolf Hess almost literally fell into his lap wasn’t easy, though. You couldn’t keep a thing like that secret. The Army and the government did their best, and failed. Too many people saw and recognized the German big shot when Walsh brought him back into Dundee. And Hess’ Bf-110 crashed into a barn farther inland, killing several cows and a horse and just missing the farmer himself, who’d tended the animals in there a few minutes earlier.
They took Hess down to London, presumably to tell the government about what he’d already told Walsh. They brought Walsh along, presumably because they didn’t know what else to do with him. After all, he already had the vision of Landsers and Tommies and poilus marching into Russia shoulder to shoulder implanted in his brain. If they didn’t get him out of sight, he might start telling people about it before they decided what the people ought to think.
He knew what he thought, not that anyone asked a staff sergeant’s opinion. Walsh would have been shocked had the tight-lipped young officers from the Ministry of War and their even tighter-lipped colleagues from the Foreign Ministry done any such thing. The way they kept eyeing him made him wonder if he would suffer an unfortunate accident before he made it to the capital.
He didn’t. But he worried when they put him up in a posh hotel instead of with his mates. “You may do as you please, so long as you don’t leave your room,” one of the tight-lipped captains said.
“Meals?” Walsh asked.
“They’ll be sent in. Order what you please from room service,” the officer replied, an extravagance Walsh had never enjoyed before. But he didn’t really enjoy it now, either. It came at too high a price: four armed guards outside the room made sure he wouldn’t amble down the corridor. It was six floors up; he couldn’t very well leave by the window, either.
“Gets a bit dull here, all by my lonesome,” Walsh hinted. The captain only shrugged, as if to say that wasn’t his worry. Walsh decided to be more direct: “If you’re spending all that filthy lucre on room service, can you lay out a bit more and get me a girl? I’ll have better things to talk about with her than Rudolf bloody Hess, by God-I promise you that.”
The officer’s lips got tighter, and paler, than ever. “I shall have to take that under advisement,” he said, and got out of there as fast as he could.
No girl knocked on the door. Walsh hadn’t really expected one would, but asking didn’t hurt. The food was pretty good, and room service would send up beer and whiskey when he asked for them. Things could have been worse. He kept reminding himself of that. They could have stuck him in a cell somewhere and lost the key.
But he couldn’t talk to anybody. That was why they kept him here. They didn’t want reporters asking him questions. They didn’t want other soldiers asking him anything, either. They knew how news flashed through the military. Soldiers and sailors were worse than women when it came to gossip.
He could step out into the hall. The guards would only shake their heads if he spoke to them, though. And, while he could go into the hall, those guards wouldn’t let him take more than a couple of strides along it. They had old-fashioned bayonets-the long ones-fixed to their rifles. By all appearances, they were ready to use them if he looked like getting out of line. He didn’t; he owned a well-honed sense of survival.
Like any prisoner, he suspected changes in routine. What were they going to do to him now? Find that cell and drop him into it? Or bump him off as if he’d never existed to begin with? They could do that, if they decided to. They could do anything they damn well pleased. Who’d stop them?
What would happen if the Nazis sent bombers over London? Would the guards escort him to the cellars, perhaps with a gag on his mouth so he couldn’t blab to anyone? Or would they leave him up here, staying themselves to share his fate? He didn’t want to find out, and was glad the Luftwaffe seemed to be staying away.
Even if the alarms outside didn’t go off, the ones inside his head did when somebody knocked on the door one night at half past eleven. His heart pounded as he walked over to it. Was this the moment? Had they decided to imitate the Fascists and the Reds and dispose of him at midnight?
If they had, he could do damn all about it. Defiantly, he threw the door wide. There in the hall stood a short, portly man in his mid-sixties, with a round red face-a wrinkled, irascible baby face, it was, although he smoked a large and decidedly unbabyish cigar.
Walsh recognized him right away. Few Britons wouldn’t have, of course. “Winston!” he blurted.
“At your service,” Winston Churchill replied, his voice familiar from the wireless but more resonant now that he was here in the flesh. “May I come in?”
“How can I say no?” Walsh stepped back to let the politician enter, then closed the door behind him. He pointed to a whiskey bottle on the sideboard. “I could use a drink, sir. Would you care for one?”
“How can I say no?” Churchill repeated, blue eyes twinkling. Moving as if in a dream, Walsh poured for them both. He gestured toward the siphon-equipped soda bottle beside the whiskey: a silent question. Churchill shook his head. Walsh was just as well pleased. He wanted something potent himself.
Churchill raised his glass. “The King!” he said. Walsh echoed the toast. They both drank. Churchill smacked his lips. “Not bad. They are treating you satisfactorily?” The six-syllable word sounded natural in his mouth, though more often than not he was the most plainspoken of politicos.
“Yes, sir.” Walsh finished his whiskey at a gulp-he needed it. “Did you come here to ask me that?”
“I did not,” Churchill rasped. “I came to ask you this: how would you and your comrades in arms like to march with the Germans and against Russia?”
That was as plainspoken as a man could get. Walsh poured himself a refill. Churchill held out his glass, and Walsh filled it as well. “I don’t care to speak for anyone but myself, sir…”
“Then by all means do that. Your reluctance does you credit.”
Shrugging, Walsh said, “I don’t know anything about that. What I know is, I’m damned if I want some Nazi general giving me orders. And that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? We’d be helping Hitler do what he already wants to-hell, what he’s already started doing. He couldn’t lick us, so now he wants us to join him. I’ve fought against Fritz twice now. I don’t want to be on his side. He makes a fine enemy, but I doubt he’d prove such a good friend. If he’s after the Russians now, there’s more to Stalin than I looked for.”
The words poured out of him, fueled more by nerves than by whiskey. Once he ran dry, he wondered whether he’d just doomed himself. If the government had already decided to throw in with Adolf…
But the wrinkles smoothed out of Churchill’s face as he smiled. “God bless you, son. I thought you’d say that-I hoped you would-but I was far from sure. Even if you’re too modest to say so, I feel sure you spoke for most British fighting men. And, most eloquently, you spoke for me as well.”
“Good Lord!” Walsh did not expect ever to win the VC. Aside from that, he couldn’t imagine a finer honor. He dared a question of his own: “Is it decided? What we’ll do, I mean?”
“Decided?” Churchill snorted and shook his head. “Not likely! Neville Chamberlain couldn’t decide to change his drawers if he shat in them.” That made Walsh blink. Then he remembered Churchill had fought in the Boer War and commanded a battalion on the Western Front in the last big go-round. Some of it must have stuck-he knew how soldiers talked, all right. He went on, “No, Sergeant, it’s not decided. But I daresay you’ve helped put a spike in Herr Hess’ wheel. That you have.” This time, he poured the whiskey. He raised his glass. “Down with Hitler!”