Dave Dawson on the Russian Front Part 3

The Air Vice-Marshal blinked just a little at that string of descriptive adjectives, but decided to let them ride without further explanation.

"Yes, Jones was very much in a bit of a spot," he said with a nod. "He had the two halves of paper, but of course he'd had had no time to examine them yet. Fact is, he had no way of knowing whether what he'd heard was true or not. Perhaps those torn halves of paper in his pocket with all the minute writing didn't mean a thing to anybody. In short, it might be best to wad them into a ball and toss them unseen over the side of the police van, and forget the whole thing. Whether they contained things of importance or not would certainly make no difference to the n.a.z.is should those blighters find them on him. The n.a.z.i beggars are thorough, if nothing else. As you say in America, they don't overlook a single bet. They do things automatically, and take care of the questioning part of it later."

"And lots of times they don't even bother with the questioning part!"

Dawson spoke up, with a knowing nod. "They may be butchers and murderers, but they aren't anybody's fools."

"Far from it," the Air Vice-Marshal agreed instantly. "So it was very touch and go with Jones. Should he get rid of the stuff and pay attention to saving his own skin? Or should he risk everything until he had a chance to make what he could from the writing on his two torn halves of paper? Well--well, permit me to say that he was a British Intelligence officer, so the decision he made is obvious. He took the chance on keeping the two halves. And for once luck was with him. Unseen by the guard on the van, he managed to wad the two halves of paper--they were very thin sheets--into a ball and hide them in his left armpit under a patch of gummed skin tissue that all agents carry--as you two chaps well know."

The senior officer stopped talking as though waiting for the two air aces to nod. And then he continued on.

"Well, Jones, and those with him, were taken to the town of Opelln inside Germany, and thrown into jail. For thirty hours they had neither food nor water, and four unfortunates died. Or perhaps they were fortunate in being able to die, considering what the others suffered later. Anyway, Jones was unmolested for thirty hours. And you can be sure he made full use of them. He borrowed a pair of thick lens gla.s.ses from one of the other prisoners, and using a lens as a magnifying gla.s.s, he read what his two halves of paper contained. And I will say right here that it was the most exciting bit of reading that Jones or any other man ever perused. Before his eyes was revealed a good part of what Hitler intended to do. _And_, mind you, exactly what he _has_ done since the start of the war! Of course, with only half of it there, Jones was unable to learn definite details. He could only read what he could read, and guess at what the other half contained. But had Jones been able to turn his newly gained knowledge over to us, the--well, I can tell you that the history of this war thus far would have been completely different from what it has been."

"You mean he didn't turn it over to you, sir?" Freddy Farmer blurted out on impulse.

"He didn't have the chance, worse luck!" the other replied, and rubbed one clenched fist into the palm of his other hand. "But he did do the only thing he could do. During those thirty hours he was left unmolested he not only read every one of the unfinished sentences, but he memorized every single word before destroying and disposing of the two torn halves of paper. However, Fate, you might say, was still giving him a black look. At the end of the thirty hours the prisoners were herded into the prison head's office and questioned. Questioned, and knocked about from here to there when they didn't, or couldn't give answers that satisfied their captors. Jones was no better off than any of the others. In fact, it developed that he was worse off. An answer he gave to one question didn't please the n.a.z.i overlord, who lost his temper and struck Jones in the face with his fist. Jones, to save himself from toppling over backwards, flung up both hands, and his right hand unfortunately whacked one of the lesser n.a.z.i officials in the face. And that tore it, of course. Jones wasn't questioned any more. He was promptly jumped on, half beaten to death, and then chained hand and foot, and sent off to a n.a.z.i internment camp."

The senior R.A.F. officer stopped short. His lips stiffened, his two hands bunched into rock hard fists, and there was the bright glint of cold steel in his eyes.

"I need not describe to you the things Jones went through, and suffered, after that!" he finally grated out through clenched teeth. "The so-called routine of a n.a.z.i internment camp is well known all over the world by now. But I come to the end of my part of this story. Six days ago, Agent Jones arrived back in England. He was the mere shadow of the man I sent into Europe over three years ago, but the British spirit, like the American spirit, knows no such thing as defeat. He never gave up. He tried to escape three times, and was caught. He himself says that he'll never know how he managed to go on living from one attempt at escape to the next. But the fourth time he made it. His escape is a hair-raising story in itself, but it's unimportant here, so I won't bother with it. But he did return to England six days ago, and he was able to put down on paper every one of those words he had memorized."

"Stout fellow!" Freddy Farmer cried enthusiastically. "He certainly deserves the Victoria Cross, if ever a chap did. So now all that invaluable information is ours!"

Air Vice-Marshal Leman smiled sadly and shook his head.

"No, Farmer, it isn't," he said slowly. "We only have half of it. And the half we have is practically useless without the other half. Like Jones when he first read it, we can only guess at what the other half reveals. We don't _know_. And guesses in war are quite often as useless as no information at all."

"But, my gos.h.!.+" Dawson cried. "You mean, sir, he went through all that for nothing? That he might just as well have tossed the whole thing overboard in the first place?"

"No, not quite, Dawson," the Air Vice-Marshal said. Then, looking over at Colonel Welsh, he added, "I guess you'd better tell the last half of our story, sir."

CHAPTER FOUR

_East of Darkness_

As one man, Dave Dawson and Freddy Farmer swiveled around in their chairs and stared expectantly at the chief of the American Intelligence services. He did not return their look for a moment or two, however. As Air Vice-Marshal Leman had done once or twice, he scowled silently off into s.p.a.ce as though thinking up the exact words he wanted to say.

Eventually, he seemed to decide on them, and leveled grave eyes at the two youthful airmen.

"Just as Air Vice-Marshal Leman has said," he began slowly, "what little we know of all this Tobolsk business is practically useless without the other half of it. It was the worse kind of luck for Agent Jones not to catch the name of the man he was supposed to contact in Tobolsk. True, Tobolsk is well behind the n.a.z.i lines at the moment. And also, it is quite possible that he may be dead. As a matter of fact, we have every reason to believe that this unnamed man is dead, or at any rate, that he no longer lives in Tobolsk."

"And what do you mean by that, sir?" Dave wanted to know when the other didn't continue at once.

"From certain developments that have recently come to light," the Colonel replied. "From--well, from the American angle of this crazy, mixed up mystery. Contrary to general belief, Yank Intelligence was more than a little active long before the j.a.ps pulled the knife on Pearl Harbor. We knew just as sure as the earth grew little apples that Uncle Sam would be in this war up to his ears before very long. So we did what we could, short of causing the State Department to come down on us with both feet. And--well, to use an expression that groans with age, it certainly is a small world. And there is nothing so baffling, or so helpful, as coincidence. It pops up in the darnedest places, if you get what I mean?"

"I can guess close enough, I think, sir," Dave said with a grin.

"Tobolsk again?"

"Take a bow, son," Colonel Welsh grinned back at him. "You just about hit that nail right on the head. Tobolsk again is correct. One of my agents was working with Russian Intelligence until a few days ago. He was actually on the lease-lend end of the business, on the look-out for sabotage along the supply routes leading up through Iraq and Iran from the Red Sea. Well, to get on with the actual story, he was on his way from Baku to Moscow by air when the plane he was in ran smack into a storm, came out of it n.o.body knew just where, and b.u.mped head on into a flock of German Messerschmitts. And the plane--it was a Russian craft--got shot down. My agent was the only one who came out of the crash alive. He must have been born under a lucky star, because he didn't so much as receive even a goose egg on his head, or a scratch any place.

"The aircraft crashed just before dark, and my agent didn't have the faintest idea where he was, save that he was in the middle of some woods. Anyway, he used his head and put as much distance as he could between himself and the crashed plane. But after a while it got so dark that he couldn't tell but what he might be just going around in circles.

At least he realized that he was still in the woods. So he sat down to wait out the night. And lucky for him he did. When daylight came again, he saw to his horror that he was less than a hundred yards from the end of the woods, and an equal distance from a German panzer division obviously camped and resting up from recent action at the front.

Naturally, he realized then that he was well behind the n.a.z.i lines. But he still didn't know at what part of the front."

Colonel Welsh paused and smiled grimly.

"There he was smack in the middle of the Germans, and wearing a suit of clothes he had bought in Moscow a month before," he continued presently.

"It so happened that he didn't have any money. Nor did he have a gun of any kind. All he had on his person were identification papers that would have slapped him up against a firing squad wall five seconds after the n.a.z.is got their hands on him. So his first job was to destroy all his identification papers. And his second job to make sure the n.a.z.is didn't lay hands on him. Well, we can skip the next few days. He spent all of them, nights included, dodging n.a.z.i patrols, and getting out from under the hand of Death reaching for him. And then came the night of coincidence, we'll call it.

"He was groping his way northward across a field, with the idea of somehow slipping through the n.a.z.i positions to the Russian side, when suddenly the ground seemed just to drop out from underneath him. One instant he was groping his way along, and the next he was out cold as an iced fish. When he opened his eyes again he found himself in the cellar of a bomb and sh.e.l.l blasted farm house. He was stretched out on a smelly mattress, and a couple of thread-bare blankets were over him. He took stock of what was what and realized instantly that he wasn't in n.a.z.i hands. n.a.z.is don't give blankets to prisoners they pick up at night.

Anyway, my agent decided to stay right where he was, and wait for whatever was to happen next. And a body full of aches and pains helped him a lot to decide to do just that."

The Chief of U.S. Intelligence let his words come to a halt, and it was all Dawson and Freddy Farmer could do to refrain from telling him to hurry up and get on with the rest. They held their tongues, however, and waited with pounding hearts and tingling nerves.

"An hour or so later," Colonel Welsh finally continued, "an old man came down into the cellar holding a chipped bowl of some steaming liquid. It proved to be a bitter kind of tree root broth, but just the same it tasted mighty good to my agent. He accepted it, and drank it down without a word. Then he took a good look at this man and saw that he wasn't so old after all. He was no older than my agent, but war had made him look three times his true age. My agent's first questions were concerning what had happened to him, and how he had come to be there. My agent, of course, spoke Russian, but it developed that this man with the root broth spoke English, too. The long and short of it was that in the dark my agent had simply stepped down an uncovered, abandoned well. Why he hadn't broken his neck is something that n.o.body will ever be able to explain. Anyway, this man, who said he was a Russian, and named Ivan Nikolsk, said that he had found my agent at the bottom of the well. And that he was about to shovel dirt in on top of him, thinking him to be a n.a.z.i, when he saw that my agent's clothes were Russian made. So he hoisted my agent up out of the well and took him down into the cellar.

And that was that. Nikolsk simply believed that he was saving the life of a brother Russian. And he'd hide him from the n.a.z.is, who were all about, at least until he'd found out more about the man whom he had pulled from the abandoned well."

The Colonel paused to shrug slightly, and make a little this-probably-sounds-nuts gesture with one hand.

"Well, the two of them started talking back and forth, of course," he resumed his story presently, "and my agent learned a few things about his lifesaver. One, that Nikolsk had been born in Moscow but had lived most of his life in Germany. And two, that Nikolsk had almost lost his life in a railroad train wreck just before the invasion of Poland. And three, that--"

"Good grief!" Freddy Farmer interrupted with a gasp. "The same chap that Agent Jones met!"

"One and the same," Colonel Welsh admitted with a nod. "He told my agent how he had been arrested by the n.a.z.is and thrown into prison, where he almost died as the result of his train wreck injuries. But he survived, somehow. He survived the questioning and beatings he received. And, like Jones, he refused to let a n.a.z.i internment camp finish him off for good.

He managed to escape almost three years later and make his way out of Germany, and across German-occupied Poland and German-occupied Russia to the little village of Tobolsk. There he hoped to meet a life-long friend. But he never met him. When Nikolsk finally arrived, his friend, and most of the village's inhabitants, had simply disappeared from the face of the earth. But--"

Colonel Welsh leaned forward slightly and tapped a forefinger on the desk top.

"Ivan Nikolsk had survived things that you could not even put into words, for there are no words in any language to describe them adequately," he said. "But though he came out of it all with his life, he came out of it with only part of his brain. It didn't take my agent long to see that Nikolsk went off the beam completely every now and then. He would be making sense, when suddenly his speech would start rambling all over the place. And even then, almost a year later, he had the certain belief that his friend would return to Tobolsk, and he would be able to see him."

"Did he tell your agent _why_ he wanted to see his friend?" Dawson asked eagerly.

"No," Colonel Welsh replied. "That's one of the questions he wouldn't answer, though my agent asked it more than once as he heard more and more of the strange story. It's funny, but though Nikolsk had saved my agent's life, and believed him definitely on Russia's side, he couldn't get it out of his head that my agent might rob him of his great secret.

Yes, you're guessing it. Nikolsk's secret knowledge of the n.a.z.i war plan that he had learned while in Germany. Oddly enough, he told my agent every detail of his meeting with Agent Jones. Of how he had torn the secret information in half, given half to Jones, and destroyed the half that he kept. He told my agent all that, but he wouldn't tell him _one word_ of what the information was about. And do you know _why_?"

"Didn't trust your agent, obviously," Freddy Farmer spoke up.

"Yes, that's my guess, too," Dawson added.

"No," Colonel Welsh said with a vigorous shake of his head. "True, he didn't tell my agent what his half of the information was because he was afraid of being betrayed. But he wouldn't reveal anything about the other half--_because he had forgotten it_!"

"Forgotten it, for cat's sake!" Dawson exploded. "But--?"

"Just what I am about to explain," Colonel Welsh cut in. "He swore blind that what he knew was of no use at all without the half that he had given to Jones. And to get it all together he had to see either Jones or his friend. He felt that Jones was dead, but--but he still held to the crazy belief that his friend would return to Tobolsk one day, and that together they would place in Joseph Stalin's hands something more valuable than a hundred armored divisions, or a thousand squadrons of aircraft!"

As the echo of the last died away, a tingling silence settled over the room. Dawson had the insane urge to pinch himself hard just to make sure he wasn't sleeping through a very c.o.c.keyed dream. He knew, and had seen for himself, many of the upside down things that come out of war. But this dizzy tale was a new high for everything. When he tried to mull it over, and gain some sense from it, it simply made his brain hurt.