“Herr Mengele is on his way,” the secretary said. Matthews nodded and watched as dispassionately as he could as the short man left the naked woman to bleed, heading through a series of doors. He waited for five minutes, just long enough for the secretary to get really nervous, and then Mengele stepped into the room.
“You may leave,” Mengele said, indicating the secretary. The young man didn’t argue; he was glad to be out of Matthews’s presence. “Now, what can I do for the Reichsführer?”
Matthews glared at him. “You will address him as the Fuhrer,” he said. “He is the heir to Adolf Hitler, the sainted man who made us powerful again.”
Mengele cringed. “Yes, Herr Gruppenfuehrer,” he said. “Why are you here?”
Matthews peered down at him, projecting his annoyance with the rudeness of the question. He didn’t understand why Himmler had accepted Mengele; there had to be other doctors, rather than the squalid little man. Mengele was disgusting; he could still smell blood and smells he would have preferred to have never smelled emanating from him.
“I have been ordered to obtain a report on your progress,” Matthews snapped. “What progress have you made with the subject?”
Mengele cheered up, perhaps realising that he wasn’t about to get into trouble with a senior officer of the SS. “We have taken around twenty pints of blood in total from her,” he said. “Cultivation of the supply” – he pranced in delight – “indicates a clear vulnerability to smallpox, although the Fuhrer has forbidden us to infect her or any of the other prisoners to test the theory. Development of stocks of smallpox proceeds apace; we will soon have enough for the special project.”
Matthews concealed his shock with an effort. He needn’t have bothered; Mengele was too obsessed with his own progress to care. “In addition, there are a number of curious items in her body, from a perfect contraceptive to some vaccines – we can only imagine what diseases they are intended to prevent. The contraceptive itself is remarkable; it seems to grow and multiply like a virus. We have kept some of it alive in a blood mixture, it might even be possible to literally infect people with it, particularly the subhumans of China.”
Matthews focused his mind on the here and now. There was information that was vital here. “Are you manufacturing the smallpox here?” He asked. “Is that safe for Germany?”
“Oh, of course,” Mengele said, dismissing his concerns. “It’s a strain that we have all been vaccinated against, I assure you. The Fuhrer raised similar concerns.”
“And he ordered me to check again,” Matthews said. “How long until it will be ready for deployment?”
“Maybe a week,” Mengele said. Matthews felt his heart flip over; Smallpox would wreck havoc on the British population. “The Fuhrer refused to allow us to establish duplicate factories, so we are of course limited in what we can produce.”
Matthews nearly broke character and sighed in relief. He held it in, fixing Mengele with a glare. “I have seen enough,” he said. “I trust that you have written reports?” Mengele nodded. “The head of security here will show me around, so I can inspect your security,” he said. “Then you will give me copies of your reports, and a covering letter for the Fuhrer. Include everything he needs to know.”
Mengele opened his mouth to object. Matthews glared him into silence. “The future of the Reich is at stake,” he said. “Do not defy the will of the Fuhrer.”
Matthews, confident that he’d left an impression of himself as a total bastard behind, drove away from the manor. As soon as he was half a mile away, in a nearby town, he stopped for lunch, while using his tiny transmitter to relay his findings. He read his way through Mengele’s report while eating lunch in a small café, and then he drove away into the countryside.
“Sir, I assume that you want to move in at once,” he said, after detailing the contents of Mengele’s report. “It won’t be long before they catch on to my fake credentials.”
“We’re going to have to move in,” Hanover said grimly. “I relayed your findings to PJHQ; we’re going to have to really stomp the place into the ground and you know what that means.”
Matthews looked around the countryside and shuddered. “A nuke,” he said. He knew why; only the searing heat of a nuclear warhead could guarantee the destruction of the smallpox bug.
Hanover’s voice was grim. It was a measure of the seriousness of the situation that he was handling it personally. Matthews smiled; Hanover probably missed his days when he was doing something himself, instead of just giving orders.
“Yes,” he said grimly. “There remains a second problem; could an SAS team rescue her and capture Mengele first?”
Matthews nodded silently. “Raiding the building would not be difficult,” he assured him. “It’s designed to keep out casual observers, not a full SAS assault. They could have dug an entire division in around the building, but they didn’t.”
“We would have noticed and wondered why,” Hanover said. The Prime Minister sounded tired. “PJHQ is putting the mission together now,” he said. “It will be launched in dusk, five hours away. You will meet the team on the ground and leave with them.”
“It would be a shame to leave this car,” Matthews said wryly. “Understood; will they want me to take part in the assault?”
“That’s up to the team leader,” Hanover said. “You’ll brief him on it now, and then you can plan the assault.”
“Yes, sir,” Matthews said. “I’ll wait nearby for extraction.”
Hanover snorted. “Don’t miss your flight out,” he said. “If you stay on the ground, you’ll die like Doctor Tucker.”
The Luftwaffe had abandoned any attempt to challenge the RAF or the USAAF in the night time, withdrawing from the offensive as dusk fell. The flights of bombing attacks over France and Germany continued, allowing three Eurofighters and a Tornado to slip through the German defences unobserved, completely invisible to even the naked eye, so high in the sky.
Squadron Leader Shelia Dunbar took a breath. The mission was going to be chancy enough, even for her; they would have to make certain that they managed to rendezvous with the tanker, or they would have to swim home. She knew the pilot of the tanker – she’d even spent a pleasant weekend with him in a hotel room – but his orders were specific. The tankers – and the AWACS – were not to cross over the mainland, whatever the situation.
“Let’s hope they don’t challenge us,” she muttered. The Eurofighter was handling badly, carrying two Paveway bombs on each wing rather than the missiles it would normally carry. She shuddered; she knew what the Tornado was carrying. The tactical atomic weapon would burn two square miles of the German countryside.
“You deserve it, you bastards,” she snarled. She’d seen the damage left by the V2 missiles. If there was any truth at all to the rumour about smallpox – and she’d seen that the entire RAF was being vaccinated – she wanted to use the weapon herself. She had other targets; the Germans had a handful of bases nearby, and they had to be destroyed before they could react to the commando raid.