There was no time to waste!
A gleam of silver caught his eye.
A thin metallic tube was resting in a small compartment in the dashboard. He reached for it: it was a whistle.
A dog whistle.
He remembered seeing the chauffeur use it to call off the dogs several hours earlier. Putting it to his lips, he blew hard. It produced only the faint sound of air being forced out, the whistle sound emitted at a frequency audible only to dogs.
Suddenly the growls stopped. The dogs backed away a good distance from the car, then sat obediently.
Tentatively he opened the car door, the whistle grasped in one hand in case he needed it. He got out, walked over to the gates, and was relieved to see the large iron key still in the lock. Picking the lock would not have been complicated, but he had just saved five minutes.
And he needed every minute.
Guided by the Berlin map that Chip Nolan had provided him, he drove as fast as he dared, not wanting to attract the attention of the Orpo, the Ordnungspolizei.
As he drove he mentally rehearsed the arrangements he had made with Corky and Kundrov. The normally unflappable Corky was surprised to hear Metcalfe's voice on a direct trunk line from Berlin. "Good heavens, boy, where are you calling from, the Fuhrer private office?" he'd said. He greeted Metcalfe's request with a long silence. Metcalfe had expected Corcoran to raise any number of objections to the plan, but to his surprise, the older man did not. He didn't even complain about being awakened in the middle of the night. He had only one objection: "This is not like calling for a cab, Stephen. I have no idea what the flying conditions are, the visibility." The aging spymaster set down the phone for a few minutes, and when he returned, he said, "A
Lysander will be departing momentarily from the R.A.F fighter base at Tangmere, on the English Channel coast, arriving at three a.m. You have no idea how many chits I had to call in to pull this off." He specified the precise location that he had selected for the pickup and rattled off a series of instructions.
As soon as Metcalfe hung up, he called Kundrov at the pay-phone number the Russian had given him. They spoke for no more than a minute; both men knew what had to be done.
"I will call Moscow now," Kundrov said. "But once I make this call, it's irrevocable. There will be no going back."
Now, as Metcalfe approached the pickup site, he was astonished. Corky had prepared him, but it was staggering nonetheless.
It appeared to be a vast complex of buildings arrayed in horseshoe formation around a large, open grass field. In the center was an immense concrete hangarlike building with a corrugated steel roof; to either side were smaller brick buildings. Smoke plumed from their many chimneys. Scattered around the buildings were fuel tanks and waste barrels. It appeared to be an industrial facility of some kind, probably a giant munitions plant.
In fact, it was a stage set. Although the building at the center was real, the structures to either side of it were all fake, the barrels and tanks and trucks probably bogus, too.
This was the location of a defunct movie studio, a huge lot that had been expropriated by the Nazis and turned into a decoy fire site. Hitler's men had swiftly constructed dozens of such sites around Germany in the last few months fifteen in Berlin alone. They had been inspired, some said, by the British, who during the recent Battle of Britain had set up five hundred dummy cities airfields, shipyards, and bases, built in remote areas of plywood and corrugated metal, designed to lure the Nazis into bombing these fake installations rather than real cities. The strategic deception had been a great success, causing the Nazis to squander valuable time and materiel and thus reducing the damage inflicted upon population centers.
The ancient Chinese tactician Sun Tzu had proclaimed, "All warfare is based on deception," and the Nazis had taken this principle seriously. In Berlin, the Lietzensee, the lake between the Kurfurstendamm and Kaiserdamm, was a useful guide for incoming bombers targeting the city center, so the Luftwaffe had confounded enemy radar by covering the lake with enormous timbered floats that resembled, from above, residential buildings. They had dressed lampposts up as fir trees, strung camouflage netting along the Charlottenberger Chaussee from the Tiergarten to the Brandenburg Gate, decked out with green cloth