Citadel

Citadel

Stephen Hunter

For

R. Sidney Bowen,

author of

Dave Dawson with the R.A.F.

and

Red Randall at Pearl Harbor

and so many others, for teaching me

the glory of the story sixty-odd years ago

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along and the words—or, rather, the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life.

—Jorge Luis Borges

First Day

The Lysander took off in the pitch-dark of 0400
British Standard War Time, Pilot Officer Murphy
using the prevailing south-southwest wind to gain
atmospheric traction, even though the craft had a
reputation for short takeoffs. He nudged it airborne,
felt it surpass its amazingly low stall speed,
held the stick gently back until he reached 150 meters,
then commenced a wide left-hand bank to
aim himself and his passenger toward Occupied
France.

Murphy was a pro and had done many missions
for his outfit, No. 138 (Special Duties
Squadron), inserting and removing agents in coordination
with the Resistance. But that didn't
mean he was blasé, or without fear. No matter how
many times you flew into Nazi territory, it was a
first time. There was no predicting what might
happen, and he could just as easily end up in a
POW camp or against the executioner's wall as
back in his quarters at RAF Newmarket.

The high-winged, single-engine plane hummed
along just over the 150-meter notch on the altimeter
to stay under both British and, twenty minutes
on, German radar. It was a moonless night, as preferred,
a bit chilly and damp, with ground temperature
at about four degrees centigrade. It was early
April 1943; the destination, still two hours ahead,
was a meadow outside Sur-la-Gane, a village fortyeight
kilometers east of Paris. There, God and the
Luftwaffe willing, he would deviate from the track
of a railroad, find four lights on the ground, and
lay the plane down between them, knowing that
they signified enough flatness and tree clearance
for the airplane. He'd drop his passenger, the peasants
of whichever Maquis group was receiving that
night (he never knew) would turn the plane
around, and in another forty seconds he'd be airborne,
now headed west toward tea and jam. That
was the ideal, at any rate.

He checked the compass at the apex of the
Lysander's primitive instrument panel and double-checked his heading (148° ENE), his fuel (full),
and his airspeed (175 mph), and saw through the
Perspex windscreen, as expected, nothing. Nothing
was good. He knew it was a rare off-night in the
war and that no fleets of Lancasters filled the air
and radio waves to and from targets deep in Germany,
which meant that the Luftwaffe's night
fighters, Me110s, wouldn't be up and about. No
110 had ever shot down a Lysander because they
operated at such different altitudes and speeds, but
there had to be a first time for everything.

Hunched behind him was an agent named Basil
St. Florian, a captain in the army by official designation,
commissioned in 1932 into the Horse
Guards—not that he'd been on horseback in over
a decade. Actually Basil, a ruddy-faced, ginger-haired
brute who'd once sported a giant moustache,
didn't know or care much about horses. Or
the fabulous traditions of the Horse Guards, the
cavalry, even the army. He'd only ended up there
after a youth notorious for spectacular crack-ups,
usually involving trysts with American actresses
and fights with Argentine polo players. His father
arranged the commission, as he had arranged so
much else for Basil, who tended to leave debris
wherever he went, but once in khaki Basil veered
again toward glamorous self-extinction until a
dour little chap from Intelligence invited him for
a drink at Boodle's. When Basil learned he could
do unusual things and get both paid and praised
for it, he signed up. That was 1934, and Basil had
never looked back.

As it turned out, he had a gift for languages and
spoke French, German, and Spanish without a
trace of accent. He could pass for any European
nationality except Irish, though the latter was more
on principle, because he despised the Irish in general
terms. They were so loud.

He liked danger and wasn't particularly nonplussed
by fear. He never panicked. He took pride
in his considerable wit, and his bons mots were famous
in his organization. He didn't mind fighting,
with fist or knife, but much preferred shooting, because he was a superb pistol and rifle shot. He'd
been on safari at fifteen, again at twenty-two, and
a third time at twenty-seven; he was quite used to
seeing large mammals die by gunshot, so it didn't
particularly perturb him. He knew enough about
trophy hunting to hope that he'd never end up on
another man's wall.

He'd been in the agent trade a long time and
had the nightmares to show for it, plus a drawerful
of ribbons that someone must organize
sooner or later, plus three bullet holes, a raggedy
zigzag of scar tissue from a knife (don't ask,
please, don't
ever
ask), as well as piebald burn
smears on back and hips from a long session with
a torturer. He finally talked, and the lies he told
the man were among his finest memories. His
other favorite memory: watching his torturer's
eyes go eightball as Basil strangled him three days
later. Jolly fun!

Basil was cold, shivering under an RAF sheepskin
over an RAF aircrew jumpsuit over a black
wool suit of shabby prewar French manufacture.
He sat uncomfortably squashed on a parachute,
which he hadn't bothered to put on. The wind beat
against him, because on some adventure or another
the Lysander's left window had been shot out
and nobody had got around to replacing it. He felt
vibrations as the unspectacular Bristol Mercury
XII engine beat away against the cold air, its energy
shuddering through all the spars, struts, and tightened
canvas of the aircraft.

“Over Channel now, sir,” came the crackle of
a voice from the earphones he wore, since there
was entirely too much noise for pilot and passenger
to communicate without it. “Ten minutes to
France.”

“Got it, Murphy, thanks.”

Inclining toward the intact window to his starboard,
Basil could see the black surface of the
Channel at high chop, the water seething and shifting
under the powerful blast of cold early-spring
winds. It somehow caught enough illumination
from the stars to gleam a bit, though without romance
or beauty. It simply reminded him of unpleasant
things and his aversion to large bodies of
the stuff, which to him had but three effects: it
made you wet, it made you cold, or it made you
dead. All three were to be avoided.

In time a dark mass protruded upon the scene,
sliding in from beyond to meet the sea.

“I say, Murphy, is that France?”

“It is indeed, sir.”

“You know, I didn't have a chance to look at the
flight plan. What part of France?”

“Normandy, sir. Jerry's building forts there, to
stop an invasion.”

“If I recall, there's a peninsula to the west, and
the city of Cherbourg at the tip?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell me, if you veered toward the west, you'd
cross the peninsula, correct? With no deviation
then, you'd come across coastline?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And from that coastline, knowing you were to
the western lee of the Cherbourg peninsula, you
could easily return home on dead reckoning, that
is, without a compass, am I right?”

“Indeed, sir. But I have a compass. So why
would—”

Basil leaned forward, holding his Browning
.380 automatic pistol. He fired once, the pistol
jumping, the flash filling the cockpit with a flare of
illumination, the spent casing flying away, the
noise terrific.

“Good Christ!” yelped Murphy. “What the
bloody hell! Are you mad?”

“Quite the opposite, old man,” said Basil. “Now
do as I suggested—veer westerly, cross the peninsula,
and find me coastline.”

Murphy noted that the bullet had hit the compass
bang on, shattered its glass, and blown its dial
askew and its needle arm into the vapors.

A few days earlier

“Basil, how's the drinking?” the general asked.

“Excellent, sir,” Basil replied. “I'm up to seven,
sometimes eight whiskies a night.”

“Splendid, Basil,” said the general. “I knew you
wouldn't let us down.”

“See here,” said another general. “I know this
man has a reputation for wit, as it's called, but we
are engaged in serious business, and the levity, perhaps
appropriate to the officers' mess, is most assuredly inappropriate here. There should be no
laughing here, gentlemen. This is the War Room.”

Basil sat in a square, dull space far underground.
A few dim bulbs illuminated it but
showed little except a map of Europe pinned to the
wall. Otherwise it was featureless. The table was
large enough for at least a dozen generals, but there
were only three of them—well, one was an admiral—
and a civilian, all sitting across from Basil. It
was rather like orals at Magdalen, had he bothered
to attend them.

The room was buried beneath the Treasury in
Whitehall, the most secret of secret installations in
wartime Britain. Part of a warren of other
rooms—some offices for administrative or logistical
activities, a communications room, some
sleeping or eating quarters—it was the only construction
in England that might legitimately be
called a lair. It belonged under a volcano, not a
large office building. The prime minister would sit
in this very place with his staff and make the decisions
that would send thousands to their death in
order to save tens of thousands. That was the theory,
anyway. And that also is why it stank so
brazenly of stale cigar.

“My dear sir,” said the general with whom Basil
had been discussing his drinking habits to the general
who disapproved, “when one has been shot at
for the benefit of crown and country as many
times as Captain St. Florian, one has the right to
set the tone of the meeting that will most certainly
end up getting him shot at quite a bit more. Unless you survived the first day on the Somme, you cannot
compete with him in that regard.”

The other general muttered something, but
Basil hardly noticed. It really did not matter, and
since he believed himself doomed no matter what,
he now no longer listened to those who did not
matter.

The general who championed him turned to
him, his opposition defeated. His name was Sir
Colin Gubbins and he was head of the outfit to
which Basil belonged, called by the rather dreary
title Special Operations Executive. Its mandate was
to Set Europe Ablaze, as the prime minister had
said when he invented it and appointed General
Gubbins as its leader. It was the sort of organization
that would have welcomed Jack the Ripper to its
ranks, possibly even promoted, certainly decorated
him. It existed primarily to destroy—people, places,
things, anything that could be destroyed. Whether
all this was just mischief for the otherwise unemployable
or long-term strategic wisdom was as yet
undetermined. It was up for considerable debate
among the other intelligence agencies, one of which
was represented by the army general and the other
by the naval admiral.

As for the civilian, he looked like a question on
a quiz: Which one does not belong? He was a good
thirty years younger than the two generals and the
admiral, and hadn't, as they did, one of those
heavy-jowled authoritarian faces. He was rather
handsome in a weak sort of way, like the fellow
who always plays Freddy in any production of
Pygmalion
, and he didn't radiate, as did the men of
power. Yet here he was, a lad among the Neanderthals,
and the others seemed in small ways to
defer to him. Basil wondered who the devil he
could be. But he realized he would find out sooner
or later.