C’s square hard face flushed hard and the monocle popped out of his left eye. ‘All right, Common Smith, just you look at ’em,’ he snapped in that gruff, no-nonsense manner of his, as if he were still back on the quarterdeck of the dreadnought he had once commanded before the war.
Common Smith, VC took the first photograph in his hand and looked at it. Next moment he wished he hadn’t. It showed a naked woman – at least the bottom half of her was naked – lying in a field of what appeared to be corn, with a bottle thrust deep into the dark patch between her legs.
C, the head of the British Secret Service, watched Smith’s face for his reaction as he sat there behind the desk which had once belonged to Nelson. To his right in that rooftop London office which could only be entered by secret staircases and disguised lifts, there was a smaller table. It was littered with maps, models of aeroplanes and a row of bottles and test-tubes, which suggested chemical experiments. The evidence of scientific investigation always seemed to the young officer, studying those horrifying photographs, to heighten the overpowering atmosphere of strangeness and mystery that he always associated with C’s headquarters.
Reluctantly Smith looked at the second photograph. It showed a grinning Turkish soldier with what appeared to be a naked baby speared at the end of his bayonet – and the baby was still wriggling. Hastily he dropped the photograph and felt he was going to be sick.
C nodded. ‘Yes, I know,’ he said, ‘the abominable Turk – at his worst, what?’
‘But, but,’ the young officer stuttered miserably. ‘What’s going on? Why…’
‘Why have I asked you to come here again after eighteen months since I last saw you in this place, eh?’ C’s voice was hard and incisive.
‘You mean, sir, you have a show for us?’ Despite his wretched feeling, Common Smith’s voice was suddenly full of hope. He had been on the beach now ever since 1920 and the business with the Poles. He was bored, as was the rest of the crew of his beloved Swordfish. ‘The chaps would find that absolutely ripping, sir. I can assure you of that.’
C smiled coldly at the young officer’s use of the word ‘ripping’. He told himself that despite his Victoria Cross and a chestful of other decorations for gallantry, Common Smith was really only a boy. The war had forced him to become a man – quickly!
‘Ripping isn’t quite the word for it, Smith,’ C said thoughtfully, and tapped the bowl of his pipe on his wooden leg which was his habit when he had something difficult to explain. ‘Now Johnny Turk isn’t all that bad. He’s a damned good soldier as we learned to our cost back in fifteen at Gallipoli, eh.’
The handsome young soldier with the clear blue eyes nodded his agreement but said nothing.
‘At the moment Johnny Turk’s main concern is to get the rest of the Greek Army out of his country. Those photographs are just propaganda, aimed I suppose at stirring up the world against the Turks. Who takes ’em and who sends them to newspapers all over the West, I don’t know. No matter.’ He tapped the pipe against his wooden leg again. It was said that he had amputated the leg himself with a penknife after a bad car crash behind German lines in the recent war. Smith thought it was possible. He could imagine the Empire’s greatest spy-master being capable of anything – and everything. ‘Soon the Turk will have run the Greek Army – it’s a mere rabble now – out of his country. Then, and there can be no doubt of that, Johnny Turk’ll clear all remaining Greek civilians out of Turkey. In his eyes they are infidels, Christian dogs, as I believe the Turks call them in their own language.’
C rose to his feet and walked across to the big wall map that decorated the back of the office. ‘Come over here and look at this.’
Obediently Smith followed and looked at the map.
C poked the stem at the section depicting Turkey. ‘There’s Istanbul. Over there is Smyrna. Now Smyrna has the main concentration of Turkish Greeks in the whole of the country. They’re mainly engaged in the tobacco and dried fruits trades. Some of them have been there for generations, perhaps hundreds of years, ever since Turkey conquered Greece. Mostly they’re pretty rich and control the country’s main exports. As a result they are very envied by the local populace and detested by the country’s dictator, Ataturk, although he was born in Greece himself.’
Smith nodded. He had heard of Kemal Ataturk, who had helped depose the Turkish Sultan and was now in process of introducing all sorts of weird and wonderful reforms in that backward country. He had already forced the local women to remove the veil, and the men to shave off their beards and wear cloth caps instead of the fez so that they could not touch their foreheads to the ground when worshipping Allah. It was said he was going to abolish religion altogether soon. All the same he wondered what kind of mission C could have for him and his crew in that remote country.
‘Now,’ C continued, ‘it’s pretty common knowledge that once Ataturk has kicked out the rest of the Greek Army, he’ll start on the Greek civvies at Smyrna. They have the money he needs to replenish his empty coffers and the business his chaps want to control. So what will he do?’
‘Terrorise them into fleeing the country and return to Greece, sir?’ Smith ventured.
C shook his head, smiling slightly. ‘I’m afraid you don’t know Johnny Turk, Smith. There’s nothing Johnny Turk loves more than a good massacre. Don’t you know what they did to the Armenians a couple of years back?’
Smith looked blank.
‘Well, I’ll tell you. The Turks slaughtered them by the thousand and hundred thousand – women and children, too. They did the same with their Kurds as well.’ C’s face hardened, and Smith whistled softly. ‘Yes,’ C said, iron in his voice, ‘there’s a massacre in the making, if we don’t do something to stop it.’
‘But what can we do, sir?’ Smith objected. ‘We tried to get through the Dardanelles and capture Istanbul back in fifteen and the operation turned out to be a total failure. If I recollect correctly, we lost several battleships in the attempt.’
‘You do. We lost the Implacable and the French lost the battleship, Bouvet. At one point the Dardanelles are no more than three or four miles wide. The fleet was a sitting duck for the Turkish batteries on both sides, as they tried to get through. The battleships didn’t have a chance in hell.’ C suddenly looked very bitter and Smith thought he caught the glimpse of tears in his eyes when he said, ‘My oldest boy went down with the Implacable.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
C brushed his knuckles across his eyes and said gruffly, ‘No matter, Smith… no matter. It’s long done with.’ He sniffed and when he spoke again, his voice was normal once more. ‘So, there is going to be a bloodbath at Smyrna, if nothing is done in time. But his majesty’s government’s hands are tied. We’ve enough trouble on our hands at home, in Ireland, the Middle East and India.’ He sighed a little wearily. ‘It seems as if everywhere there are traitors and turncoats out to destroy the British Empire.’
Smith nodded. Crossing London to the headquarters of the Secret Service in this discreet house in Queen Anne’s Gate, he’d seen the alarmist headlines on the newspaper boys’ placards – ‘Further heavy fighting in Southern Ireland… India demands Home Rule… Egyptian mobs stones British Consul in Alexandria’. ‘Yes, I know, sir,’ he said stoutly. ‘But no one and nobody can ever bring down the British Empire.’
‘Well said, Smith!’ C responded heartily. ‘Thank God our public schools are still turning out stout fellahs like you who are prepared to go over there and lay down their lives for the Empire if necessary.’
Smith nodded his head in agreement, face set and determined. That was what it was all about, he told himself, the Empire. All that red on the map.
‘So officially we can do nothing to help those poor souls. Unofficially,’ he tapped the side of his big nose, a sudden cunning look in his eyes, ‘we can do a lot.’
He paused to let his words sink in and Smith had a quick feeling that this was going to be his ‘show’. He waited expectantly. Through the window the clip-clop of a horsedrawn cab penetrated, followed by the metallic clatter of a tramcar.
C broke his silence again. ‘The leaders of the Greek community are planning to evacuate all their people who are prepared to go. One of their leaders, a chap named Onassis – a cunning devil by all accounts, but immensely wealthy – has chartered a fleet of freighters and the like to take his people to Greece. He has also convinced the US President, who, as you know, is in his dotage, to promise his support for this evacuation—’
‘You mean the Yanks are going to give the evacuation naval and military protection?’ Smith asked in surprise.
‘Of course not!’ C snorted. ‘Ever since they pulled out of Siberia and Baku in 1920, they have washed their hands of Europe. It’s just a silly promise made by a silly man. America will send neither ships nor men to help the Greeks. They are on their own and the Turks will show them no mercy. Johnny Turk will slaughter the Greeks wholesale, unless we do something about it, and after all the Greeks were our allies in the last show.’
‘What, sir?’ Smith asked boldly, for he was longing to know what his role was to be.
But instead of answering his question, C said, ‘We’ve wondered how the Turks would carry out the Smyrna massacre, as it will undoubtedly be called if it takes place. Our guess here is that Turkey will take some notice of the American promise so they won’t massacre them on land for every newspaper correspondent to see – and there are scores of them there already, waiting for the massacre to happen. No, the Turks will do it safely away from prying eyes. They’ll do it out to sea. Out in the Aegean probably, well away from the coast.’
‘But the Turks don’t have a fleet, sir,’ Smith objected. ‘After they lost the war on the side of the Huns, we took their remaining ships off them, just like we did with the Hun High Sea Fleet in 1919, sir.’
C peered at Smith’s eager, handsome face through his ‘window-pane’, as his staff called C’s monocle behind his back, and said softly, ‘But they have a little fleet. Two battleships, in fact.’
Smith whistled softly. ‘But where did they get them, sir? Who sold them to the Turks?’
‘No one. They had them in storage, you might say.’
‘In storage?’ Smith echoed, completely bewildered now. He knew C of old. He dearly loved the oblique approach, always trying to startle, bewilder his operatives.
‘Yes,’ C said, ‘at the bottom of the Dardanelles.’
‘You mean the Implacable and the Bouvet?’ Smith cried.
C looked pleased with the effect he had had on the young officer. ‘Exactly. Last winter the Huns raised them for the Turks in secret, or so they thought. They are currently refitting them in Istanbul. You are going to sink them before that refit is completed, Smith.’ He paused and licked his lips, as if they were suddenly parched. There was no sound for a moment, save the grave one of the grandfather clock in the corner ticking away the seconds of their lives with solemn metallic inexorability.
Finally C spoke. ‘Smith, my dear boy, you are going to do – for me – another Kronstadt…’