NOW 8

Chapter Eight

“Jesus Christ, Wachmann!” the Commissioner yelled. Wachmann decided to bear the dressing down for two reasons, one it hadn't been the best idea to shoot around, this wasn't the pre-war Balkans after all, but also because the Commissioner had long since turned from a police Officer into a politician. A rather diplomatic one, given that at least six different nations were always involved in the city at any given time, but still a politician.

“I did what I felt was best, Sir.” Wachmann said and wished that he could go back upstairs to where Kelso was overseeing the search of the flat.

“Fiddlesticks!” the Commissioner yelled. “You are lucky that we managed to apprehend König and that his flat was full with evidence supporting your accusations.”

But then, for a second at least, the old copper who had walked the beat in his time shone through. “But surely he is to old to be our stabber.”

“That he is, Sir.” Wachmann agreed. “But he was the last known owner of the Hitler Youth dagger used in at least one of the murders and he fired at us when we knocked on the door an identified ourselves.”

The Commissioner grunted in agreement. He disliked Wachmann's insubordinate attitude immensly and would have loved to cut him to size for involving an Allied Officer, but the fact that Wachmann usually produced results had prevented this in the past and would do so again today, especially considering that Brigadier Larking, commander of the Commonwealth Berlin Brigade had made the impromptu co-operation between Wachmann and Kelso official and congratulated them all. It galled the Commissioner that Berlin was taking it's directions from the Allied Control Council instead of the German Government, but he had sworn to uphold the law in the difficult days after the Allies had captured Berlin.

“Still, pull something like that again and you are out of the Force.” the Commissioner said and turned around before he lost his temper again.

The warning went into one ear and out the other. Wachmann was hearing the exact same speech whenever he stepped onto the Commissioner's toes, and that happened once a month at least.

The flat was indeed packed to the brim with evidence, and most pieces were illegal enough on their own to bring the owner at least a month or two of prison time. But what they did not find was the dagger. So nothing. They had absolutely nothing at all to go on now.

Kelso came up to Wachmann and they watched as a group of police officers packed up the things in the flat.

“Well, what now?” Kelso asked, deferring to Wachmann who knew the city and the people in it better.#

“Let's check out his other properties. It's all we can do.”

“You know, I wish we could have talked to him before he decided to become a Bond Villain.”

Wachmann nodded. “Agreed. But at least we know we are on the right track, in fact if I had to bet I'd say we'd find something in his warehouse in Steglitz.”

Kelso looked at Wachmann. He was slightly puzzled as to why Wachmann was so certain.

“How come, Wachmann?”

“Well, primarily because he inherited it from his bugnuts Kreisleiter of a father who, as he claims, held the first and the last NSDAP party meeting there before you and your Asiatic Mercenary Armies brought down the glorious Third Reich.”

Wachmann sighed.

“Sarcasm aside, it's one of his lesser-known properties.”

“This damn thing turns into a bloody treasure hunt.” Kelso replied.

“True that, but this time we will damn well take some reinforcements. Now at least we have probable cause.” Wachmann said with a wolfish and almost predatory grin on his face.

~*~---~*~

“Attention, Attention. This is the Bomber Controller for Bomb List Baker. SCRAMBLE. Authentication EASY NINE ZEBRA. E-Hour One Zero Zero Zero Zebra. Positive Release Authorised.”

The brand new Vulcan painted in Anti-Flash White raced down the runway in response to this one, very dreaded wireless message, it's Rolls-Royce Olympus engines producing the customary howl. RAF Chabua was one of the many dispersal bases that Bomber Command maintained in India, and right now almost a hundred British and British-Indian Victors and Vulcans would be doing what he did, ready to cross the mountains to the north and deliver a mixture of Blue Sun free fall Bombs from the Victors and brand new Blue Steel missiles from the Vulcans and...

Instead of the flash of a PRC or American Cruise Missile that he had expected he was looking at the face of the ADC.

“Signal from London for you, Squadron Leader.”

Flight Lieutenant John Dashwood rose from the chair he had nodded off in and walked into the communications room.

It was as expected. The small detachment of Tankers on RNAS Malta was given operational orders, to stand by to tank a group of German aircraft somewhere north of Sicily. As a Bomber pilot he he was not accustomed to be stationed on this smallest of all Mediterranean Naval Air Stations, but breaking his leg in a motorcycle accident two months earlier had earned him medical leave, but it wouldn't be much longer.

Exactly eight minutes later Dashwood slowly made his way across the space between the doors and the Land Rover with his driver, a private of the RAF Regiment. The RAF detachment was big command for a Flight Lieutenant on the ground, but the CO was the Squadron Leader flying the lead tanker, so Dashwood was forced to do most of the work on the ground today, as the planes had been out in an exercise with the Italian Royal Air Force last night, and thus the pilots and crews were still asleep. Dashwood was one of the first post-war generation of RAF Officers, he had been trained on Avro Lincoln Bombers and served on the North Pole deterrent patrols with the Valiants, but almost immediately transferred to the Vulcan when it had entered service.

Much to the feigned displeasure of his father. The son of the Commander of 633 Squadron, the RAF's most famous Fighter Squadron not flying the Lightning? Unthinkable! The comment his father had used was 'at least it's not Coastal Command.', using the outdated term for Strike Command's Maritime patrol force. Harold Dashwood had personally delivered his son to the Squadron that was still his nominal home the day after his latest promotion.

With such a high-profile war hero as a father Dashwood could have had the pick of units to serve with, but when he had joined the RAF he had made it clear to his father that he wouldn't want patronage. Still, the jokes he'd had to suffer....

Anyway, he got out of the car and rued the day he had ever decided to buy that blasted motorcycle. He slowly walked past the large Valiant Tankers painted not in Bomber Command's Anti-Flash white but rather the new RAF camouflage pattern and glanced up a the retraccted refuelling probes that were mounted at three points under the wings and the fuselage. The quarters of the detachment were beyond the hangars of the Tankers and that was where Dashwood was headed. The CO would have to be wakened and told of the message that had confirmed the orders that had come through yesterday via the Admiralty. It admittedly felt odd to work with the Germans instead of against them, but Dashwood felt indifferent towards the Germans that now served in the Luftwaffe. Two Wings of Swifts and one more of Canberras hardly represented a threat to No.11 group, especially since they couldn't use French Airspace, never mind that the Crannies weren't considered operational yet.

Squadron Leader Pickwick cursed as Dashwood banged on the door. Dashwood wordlessly handed the CO the message. There was no love lost between the two. The CO hated Dashwood for his status as a bomber pilot and his impending transfer to RAF Space Command, filed on nearly a whim two weeks ago when he had been given the date for his meeting before the medical commission of 22 Group.[1]

Dashwood couldn't stand the CO because he saw him as a greedy little man with entitlement issues who was mad at the world for being washed out of the Glowing Course, the in-service nickname for the course that turned normal RAF pilots into those that flew the deterrent patrols in the Great White North. In spite of this both men were competent pilots and big enough to recognize this in the other.

“When did this come in, Dashwood?”

“About ten minutes ago, Sir.”

“Hell's teeth.” the CO said. “Took them long enough. So, we do have to share our precious fuel with those damned Gerries.”

Dashwood declined to answer to that and kept his feelings to himself.

“Anyway, they could have bloody well waited until after Christmas to do this transfer.”

Again Dashwood didn't answer. Dashwood believed that it was as much politics as it was a desire to get up to scratch with the rest of the contemporary Air Forces. Most likely the German MoD feared that if they did not manage to get things done this year the political winds might be such that they could not go at all... But as a mere Flight Lieutenant it was not his place to comment on strategic policy, so he said nothing.

~**~~~**~

The Head of Station SA (Saudi Arabia) of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service Foreign Service, also known as MI6 was happy that he was about to be relieved. If the whispers running around the capital were even only slightly accurate then the country was turning into a powder keg. It was hardly surprising, considering that the Petrol Pounds that rolled into the country consistently failed to make it past the middle level of the chronically corrupt bureaucracy. There were any numbers of rumoured plots against the Monarchy, but the Foreign Office in London believed that it was unlikely these would succeed. In spite of the League Arms embargo that was in place the Government was by far the best armed faction.

The biggest problem the SIS and HM Government had in the region was that Saudi-Arabia was sitting atop the biggest oil deposits in the region, and while so far the needs of the Western World were covered from sources in Iraq, Persia and to a lesser degree Russia and Indonesia[2] sooner or later one would either be forced to deal with the autocratic regime or accept the insecurities of some sort of Republican regime.

Saudi-Arabia was the odd duckling out in the Region. Neither Iraq nor Persia were model Democracies as a defined by the Manchester Guardian, but they were far better than this particular patch of desert.[3] It was a sticky situation and not going to get any easier. The Foreign Office had badly neglected the Middle East during the 1950s. Hardly surprising when most of the decade had been spent rebuilding Europe and trying to stabilize the Southern Chinese territories into the Republic of China.

Now this was coming back to haunt them. Palestine and Israel were surprisingly friendly with each other and the Head of Station suspected that the Jerusalem Regiment of the British Army had something to do with that, but the rest of the region was a powder keg. The IGS had even reinforced Aden with The Gordon Highlanders, temporarily detached from the 51^st Highland Division that was stationed with XXX Corps in Canada at the moment.

There were considerable parts of the Army stationed in the region commonly grouped together as British Africa, but most of that was in Namibia and Rhodesia lest the South Africans decided to try something naughty. The current big fear by the Dominions and the Imperial Authorities in London alike was that the South Africans would try to escalate Angola, or that they would try and make a play for 'regaining' what they called 'Southwest' and what the Empire and the locals called Namibia.

But the Head of Station wasn't privy to more than the basics of the situation in Africa, what he did know was that his best contact within the Saudi Interior Ministry was three days late making contact. Having discreetly checked the man's home it was clear that he wasn't sick, and the men doing relay watches on him had reported that he hadn't been arrested either and was going to work regularly.

As he paced across the square in front of the Ministry concerned towards the Minor 100 he was using when having to go 'off the book' and decided that it was time to be a bit more active in the matter. There was a dead drop on the man's daily walk to work that would be hard to miss, and if the man declined to pick it up tomorrow then something would be wrong. Very, very wrong.

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Comments, questions, rotten Tomatoes?

[1] Operations in the Med.

[2] Iraq is likely to remain a monarchy, given that there's still a significant number of British troops nearby, stationed in Kuweit and Persia and India.

[3] ITTL the British saw the Persian reformers as the lesser of two evils and merely watched very closely. The Nationalization of the Oil Industry has not yet happened, as the reformers know that they are sitting between two British Bases, India and Kuweit/Iraq and decide to play it safe.