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1. Characters

1.1. PCs

Vincent Alexander, an unnaturally charismatic actor. (Image of Jude Law as Errol Flynn; played by David Devereux.)

Pete Argas, a veteran of the Great War with a talent for not being seen. (Played by John Dallman.)

Robert John Carnegie, an American dabbler in the occult. (Played by Ingvar Mattsson.) Missing, presumed damned.

Major Brian Kingsthorpe, an engineering officer, veteran of the Great War, and subtle ritual magician. (Image of Rowan Atkinson as Major Blackadder; played by Phil Masters.)

Reginald Arthur Matthews, retired from the Indian Civil Service and knowledgeable in the ways of the Mysterious East. (Image of J J Thompson FRS; played by David Cantrell.)

Ola Nordmann, a Norwegian/Sami fisherman and shaman. (Played by Ingvar Mattsson.)

Barbara Vane, teacher, housekeeper and spirit medium. (Image of Merle Oberon; played by Karen Gilham.)

1.2. NPCs

Captain Maxwell Knight, in charge of MI5's B5(b) (which nominally monitors political subversion, but has other less official rôles (such as running magically-talented troubleshooters).

Sarge, Miss Vane's spirit guide.

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2. Events

2.1. Introduction and Training

[13 October 2007]

Early in September, the team is gathered for the first time. Captain Knight performs summary introductions, and explains that the powers that be aren't quite sure how to use the team yet; for the moment, they should concentrate on training.

2.2. Operation Scaffold

["Haunted Battleship"]

Friday 13 October 1939

Captain Knight confirms that some instructions have come in "on the square"; the second-in-command of HMS Royal Oak, which got back yesterday from the North Atlantic, is concerned that his ship is haunted; she's had more than the usual rate of boiler tube failures, and a variety of other problems. Commander Nichols, the 2ic, is aware of the team's nature; for other eyes, their cover is that of a civilian engineering investigation team. The ship is currently at Scapa Flow; the team's assigned transport is at Croydon Airport, a DH.89a Dragon Rapide.

The weather is clear after the previous night's storms, and the flight to RNAS Hatston takes about three and a half hours. Nichols is waiting with a boat to take them to Royal Oak, moored offshore. Alongside her is a fleet tender; a few hundred yards away is the old seaplane carrier Pegasus. He warns them that Captain Benn is a very suitable captain for this ship (Royal Oak fought at Jutland and is generally considered close to obsolete).

The team starts with a tour of the ship, though when they get to one of the boilers that's under repair they cut this short; Mr Alexander talks with Sublieutenant Fisher, who's overseeing the work, and persuades him to clear the room for twenty minutes or so. Mr Matthews and Miss Vane ask Commander Nichols to show them the ship's records; several men have been taken up recently for fighting, not in itself especially surprising, but more significantly several men seem to have reported fires that turned out not to exist. The current supposition is mental weakness, but they're good men in other respects.

In the boiler-room, Alexander keeps watch while Mr Carnegie and Major Kingsthorpe perform their respective workings to diagnose weak points in the boiler. Apart from the burst tube that was being replaced, there don't seem to be any particularly frail areas. That tube seems to have burst, which is the normal failure mode, though it's unusual for it to happen this thoroughly in a tube which has passed inspection. Carnegie talks about demon-summoning in a familiar way which Kingsthorpe finds somewhat disconcerting.

When Commander Nichols returns, Carnegie and Kingsthorpe ask him to introduce them to a more senior engineering officer; he brings them Lieutenant Martin, with whom they talk about the boiler failures. Martin can't account for them; the failures would be consistent with a boiler running far too hot, but the gauges (which have been checked and replaced) don't show any problems of that sort.

Miss Vane has been casting around for spirits of the dead, but has not found any. She speaks with her spirit guide, Sarge, who's sure there's something here, but thinks it's very large ("all through the hull") and not something he recognises. He attempts to speak with it, but gets no answer and doesn't want to push things.

Mr Argas considers random fires, and thinks about the effect they might have on the magazines. Alexander is noticeably nervous about this. Nichols is rather more sanguine; fires in magazines are something that battleship crews know how to deal with.

The team members retire to their accommodations (two junior officers' cabins, one for Miss Vane). She and Kingsthorpe conduct a seance; she invites Sarge to speak through her, and Kingsthorpe asks him to try harder to talk to the spirit. He does, and rapidly finds himself in a fight. Kingsthorpe attempts to lend him energy, but can't act quickly enough to be of help; he tells Sarge to flee, since the local spirit doesn't seem to be prepared to leave the ship.

Almost at once, a tannoy call goes out: "Check magazine temperatures". Argas follows invisibly to see what's going on; there's a wax sensor designed to sound an alarm if things get too hot, and it has melted, but there's no other sign of heat or fire. The sailors who were investigating replace the sensor and leave.

Matthews goes out on deck and uses his empathy with plants (the weed on the ship's hull) to try to find out about other hot spots; there are lots of them, all through the hull, and usually only lasting for a very short time. There's no real sense of how long this has been going on, though. He goes below again and checks the maintenance records (the last two years' are on board); reading between the lines a bit, this sort of failure and oddity has been going on at a low level for all that time, and possibly longer.

Alexander escorts Miss Vane round the deck so that she can try again to look for spirits of the dead; she doesn't detect any. Anyone who may have died aboard Royal Oak is presumably at rest.

Kingsthorpe speaks with the chaplain, who confirms that Royal Oak has never been a "happy" ship; in response to Kingsthorpe's hints of higher (or lower) powers, he gives mundane explanations (ship's traditions and such, that could only be cured with a total change of personnel). Kingsthorpe asks that a telegram be sent to the Admiralty requesting the full maintenance records.

The hints of something "throughout the hull" leads the team to get changed into boiler-suits and crawl about the innards of the ship. While there's nothing immediately obvious, it becomes apparent as they collate their reports that there's been some very large-scale symbol drawing going on, not based on the plans but seemingly connected with the specific small-scale details of the way the ship's been constructed. Kingsthorpe recognises it as a German pattern, though not a recent one; it's some sort of enchantment of binding.

It's getting quite late, and the team is invited to the officers' mess; Alexander tries to charm Captain Benn, who takes an instant dislike to him (though somehow this is defused into at least polite conversation). Kingsthorpe's vegetarianism is a matter of some comment, but the cooks manage somehow.

Before everyone turns in, Kingsthorpe conducts a protection ritual round the cabins; he stays up for an hour or so researching various powerful spirits.

Saturday 14 October 1939

They are woken shortly after 1am by a crash solid enough to be felt through the ship, followed by a loud rattle. Carnegie looks magically for the nearest source of refined fuel, and gets a trace off to the south. Kingsthorpe goes to investigate the rattle, and finds that the starboard anchor chain has broken loose ("that'll be a job for the divers"). He's very concerned, especially when the call goes out again to check magazine temperatures; Argas overhears that the first guess was a fire in the inflammables store, which could indeed cause such an explosion, but there's no sign of damage there. He goes out on deck; there's no moon, but the weather is clear, and in the light of the aurora he thinks he sees unusual ripples to the south. By the time he can get another crewman to look, they've gone.

About a quarter of an hour after the initial shock, three more shocks go off in quick succession, and the ship takes on a pronounced list. The team decides to leave her (so as not to get in the way of the professionals, of course). As they're climbing companionways to get to the deck, a rope whips round Carnegie; Alexander cuts one end of it, and Kingsthorpe works on the other. Carnegie tries a flame-based attack to burn it off, but it comes out rather more powerfully than expected; Kingsthorpe jumps back in time, but Alexander is singed. They decide not to fiddle further, but to carry Carnegie with them to the tender (now being cut loose as the Royal Oak continues to list). This is slow going, though, and the oily water catches up with them as they get out on deck. Nobody knows how to swim; Argas manages to stay afloat on his own, and the others cling to wreckage. Carnegie notices that it's smouldering where he touches it; he manages to dispel the effect, but finds himself being dragged down by his feet. He calls out something unclear about "old enemies". Kingsthorpe attempts a ritual of dispelling, but doesn't manage it in time.

After about half an hour, the team is fished out of the oily water and taken back to Hatston to dry off. Later in the day, Kingsthorpe tries divination to find out where Carnegie is; he starts with maps, going to increasingly smaller scales and larger areas, then attempts a vision of Carnegie's surroundings and reels somewhat. There definitely seems to be an infernal connection...

Sunday 15 October 1939

Research in London indicates that the symbolism found aboard Royal Oak is consistent with very early Thule Gesellschaft. HMS Warspite was built around the same time, also at Devonport; a team will be sent to check her over, as well as the ships converted and built there shortly after the Great War.

2.3. Operation Belay

[17 November 2007 - "Talvisota"]

The next two months or so pass in waiting, paperwork and training. On Christmas Day, Captain Knight starts to talk about winter clothing, and the team is sent on an intensive training coures in arctic survival. Those who've been listening to the news start to brush up on their Finnish.

A new member joins the team: Ola Nordmann apparently paddled a boat across the North Sea and up the Thames to knock on just the right door...

Monday 1 January 1940

Captain Knight gives some background to the mission. Slightly over a month ago, the Soviet Union invaded Finland; much to everyone's surprise, they haven't managed to conquer the country, and indeed they've bogged down a bit. Britain is interested in providing some assistance to Finland, but not too soon - Finland is still on good diplomatic terms with Germany and could be a potent ally. The British and French plan involves a landing in Norway and an overland march across Norway and Sweden, coincidentally persuading Sweden to abandon her neutrality and giving the chance to leave Allied garrisons on the iron-ore reserves. Actually providing military aid to Finland is somewhat lower on the priority list. In any case, none of that is going to happen for a couple of months, until it's warmed up a bit.

However, remote viewing resources - and Knight is not prepared to discuss any details of those with people who might potentially be captured - have picked up a suggestion that the Soviets are attempting some sort of large-scale working in order to break the stalemate. The mission is to stop it and to find out more about it, possibly not in that order. Magic isn't something that the official Soviet world-view can accept, so Allied intelligence has no information about their capabilities. The best guess as to the location is somewhere near the northern shores of Lake Ladoga, some miles on the Soviet side of the front line.

Since His Majesty's Government is not in a position to provide any sort of formal assistance to Finland, the group will be travelling as civilian volunteers (indeed, several other Britons have gone to Finland to lend their aid). Refuelling has been arranged at Kristiansand and Stockholm, and the aircraft should probably be left in the care of the British Embassy at Helsinki, since if it's taken further forward it will probably be requisitioned for military use.

The team stocks up on cold-weather gear, alcohol and cigarettes, as well as survival rations, good-quality portable food, camouflage netting, rifles and ammunition, and even a Lewis gun (though without its bulky and heavy cooling jacket). They fly to Helsinki, stopping overnight in Stockholm.

Tuesday, 2 January 1940

At Helsinki, they are met by a junior staff member of the British Embassy, who secures their plane and takes them to meet the Military Attaché, Mr Walker. He suggests that they bypass headquarters at Mikkeli and proceed directly to the front at Kollaa, closest to their target location; Major Rissanen is particularly sympathetic to the British cause and will probably be prepared to help further. The team buys more alcohol in Helsinki (since it will probably be more to the taste of the people they'll be dealing with), loads up a pair of borrowed trucks, and makes immediately for Mikkeli, as it's on the road to the front. They arrive, find a house where they can bed down, and turn in fairly immediately; there's some suggestion of trying to pick up some rumours, but since only one of them speaks the language and the Finns are a notoriously closemouthed lot they decide to get some rest instead.

Wednesday 3 January 1940

They take advantage of the few hours of daylight to drive to Kollaa, and make contact with the rear areas of the Finnish forces there. After a certain amount of discussion (involving the sentries muttering things like "no, they can't be spies, spies would at least try to blend in") they are introduced to Major Rissanen, who is somewhat busy with plans for the next day's fighting. He speaks good English ("I speak many civilised languages, as well as Russian"), but seems somewhat puzzled by the team's reasons for being present. Major Kingsthorpe explains that this group is specialised in unconventional operations and has its own reasons for being here, and simply throwing them into the line as volunteers is possibly not the best thing; after a bit, Rissanen exclaims "ah, I see! You're witches. Why didn't you say so?" Things seem to go more easily after that, at least from his point of view; it's the team's turn to be nonplussed.

Major Kingsthorpe asks for a guide, and Rissanen says he has just the man. "It'll make a change for him from dodging artillery." They have dinner together, the team making significant inroads into their food and alcohol supplies, though Rissanen is unusually sober by the standards of his fellow-officers.

Thursday 4 January 1940

The guide, Corporal Häyhä, is ready for them with skis and rifle in the morning. He seems to have some trouble with the idea that they're not competent on skis, but grudgingly admits that snowshoes will probably do. They advance slightly south of the main fighting, and head down to the bank of the Kollaa, a narrow river which has nonetheless served as a front in the fighting. It's frozen, of course, and they encounter little difficulty in crossing, though Häyhä has a disturbing habit of vanishing even when he is trying to be seen.

They continue through the forest, with no clear idea of where they're going other than they're heading for the northern shore of Lake Ladoga. They meet a Russian BT-5 tank crew trying to fix their vehicle (mostly by blowtorching the engine to get it warm enough to restart); Häyhä asks permission, then snipes the three men from a distance that seems too great to be possible with the M28 rifle (a near variant on the Mosin-Nagant) he's carrying.

Some miles further on, they see a larger group of Russians, apparently a motor pool; there are two tanks, some self-propelled guns, and several trucks. The idea of taking one of the trucks is discussed briefly, but abandoned; they seem quite well-guarded, and the alarm could be raised quickly. Their unit insignia are slightly odd: 47th Special Morale Detachment, with a black and white oblique checked patch.

There's a log-and-ice road running from here to the south-east, and the team decides to parallel it. Late in the evening they reach an encampment, with several log buildings apparently thrown up in some haste from local timber. Häyhä points out that the Russians guarding this place are unusually smart: they're actually using cover and concealment effectively.

Miss Vane summons Sarge, who reports that the dead seem to be mustering here - dead soldiers from both sides, which he finds quite surprising. The team lays up for the night.

Friday 5 January 1940

Argas turns himself invisible (deliberately in front of Häyhä, who doesn't visibly react except to comment that Argas doesn't have green eyes) and sneaks up to the edge of the encampment. There's a sound of continuous plainsong-like chanting coming from the biggest building, which is windowless; there seem to be three or four voices involved. The other buildings are a barracks, an office of some sort, and a cooking and storage area (currently unheated); there are two trucks on the far side of the encampment, with the same Special Morale Detachment insignia. It looks as though there might be about twenty people present in total.

Argas ducks under the gate and takes a closer look. One Russian comes out of the barracks and enters the large building; after a bit, another comes out and heads for the barracks. There's smoke rising from the large building as well as from the barracks and offices; Argas thinks he can detect incense of some sort. He can mak out a few repeated words in the chanting; one of them is "Chyornovog". He heads back to the team; Kingsthorpe recognises that name as Bad News, and they plan an assault.

They split up and cover the encampment from different angles. Alexander aims up the Lewis gun on the barracks door. Argas sneaks in again, picks the lock on the armoury door, and enters when the guards are looking the other way. He finds rifles, pistols, ammunition and grenades; he takes several of the latter. As he's leaving again, one of the guards spots the door and shouts something; a soldier tries to leave the barracks, and is shot by Alexander, which slows down the others long enough for Argas to toss in a grenade. It starts to get substantially colder. The rest of the team (excepting Miss Vane) shoots at the guards, and at anyone else who shows his head, killing them mostly without difficulty, though one of them gets in a lucky shot which wounds Major Kingsthorpe severely (he stays conscious but rather wishes he hadn't). Argas, meanwhile, uses grenades to blow in the door of the big building; he sees several Russians inside, as well as a very large arcane diagram, taking up most of the floor area. A whirlwind starts to form in the sky over the middle of the camp. Argas throws a grenade squarely onto the diagram, and things start to go severely wrong for the Russians, starting with the building itself catching fire. The whirlwind disperses.

The team (and Häyhä) shoot the other Russians who appear, though one of them (perhaps more ruthless than the rest in using his dead and wounded comrades for cover) manages to get away into the woods. Sarge reports that the spirits are dispersing. Nordmann drums for a few minutes and apparently heals Kingsthorpe's wound. The team members grab up all the paperwork they can find from the office hut, and then set fire to the whole place and take one of the trucks to get away. They drive back past the other Special Morale Group camp, where one of the guards waves at the truck. Matthews is driving at first, but the ice road is a bit of a challenge; Alexander takes over after they've had to lever the truck back onto the road.

They cross back across the Kollaa River, and Häyhä waves at several snipers whom they haven't seen. They leave most of the spare food, booze and tobacco behind with Major Rissanen. From there, the trip back to Helsinki and thence to London is relatively painless.

Sunday 7 January 1940

The papers are frustratingly fragmentary, but MI5 finds them distinctly interesting nonetheless. It appears that the objective of the Russian ritual was to deepen the winter to the west of the front, making the off-road going easier, and that the power source was the spirits of the dead of both sides. It's not clear just where the 47th Special Morale Detachment fits into the Soviet order; it seems to be a GRU unit, but there's some indication that its existence is being kept secret from Soviet high command.

2.4. Operation Brisket

[2 February 2008]

The British effort to send troops to fight in Finland founders somewhat when the Finns make peace with the Russians, ceding a fair amount of territory. Germany invades Denmark and Norway, and everyone keeps glaring across the Maginot Line and other fixed defences.

In March and April, Argas, Alexander and Miss Vane each spend a week or two at a castle in the Highlands, learning extremely pragmatic forms of unarmed combat from a former member of the Shanghai Municipal Police.

Monday 6 May 1940

Captain Knight calls the team together to discuss a report from British agents in Luxembourg; it's believed that German spies have been seen in the area, investigating a local archaeological site. Since fighter escorts are limited, flying isn't recommended, but a ferry and train to Luxembourg can certainly be arranged. Argas talks a Bren gun and a supply of ammunition out of the armoury, just in case; fortunately this is an era that still has railway porters.

Tuesday 7 May 1940

The group arrives in Luxembourg in the afternoon, and talks with M. Daubigny, the agent who sent in the report. The agents have been seen in the town of Neufchateau, about fifty miles away in south-eastern Belgium. Major Kingsthorpe and Miss Vane do some digging in local libraries; apparently the archaeological site is a pre-Christian Celtic one, and was first dug up around twenty-five years ago; it's not of particularly great interest, and most of the items found are in a museum in the basement of Neufchateau's town hall. The site itself is a mile or so outside town, in the corner of a field.

The team proceeds immediately by local train to Neufchateau, arriving shortly after dark. They book in at the local hotel, which is somewhat overwhelmed by the custom particularly in the present political climate; Major Kingsthorpe establishes that they're the only guests at the moment. Argas proceeds to the site, becoming invisible when he gets close, and is followed at a distance by the others. He spies three Germans, digging and talking to each other; they aren't showing any light, and he can only make them out because of his very good night-vision. While he doesn't understand German, he reckons they don't sound happy. There's no sign of a vehicle, at least on the road where he's walking, which is the closest approach to the site.

Miss Vane advances quietly, and translates: the Germans are apparently looking for a specific item, rather than "more arm-rings".

Miss Vane, Argas and Alexander go to wake the nearest farmer, and borrow paraffin lanterns and rope. Argas, Alexander and Matthews advance along the hedge-line towards the Germans, while Nordmann and Miss Vane take a flanking position. Alexander steps out into the open, and calls "Guten abend".

The Germans look surprised, but don't immediately react. Alexander calls for them to surrender, and a flare bursts in the sky behind him. The Germans start to draw weapons; Matthews entangles the two who were pulling out pistols, while Argas shoots the other with his Lee-Enfield - and is rather disconcerted to find himself apparently hit by his own bullet. He remains conscious, and calls a warning to the others.

Alexander tries a full-blown magical intimidation attempt on the Germans, and is disconcerted to feel it bounce from a hard arcane defence. Miss Vane calls on Sarge to take a look; he reports that the Germans' defences are very solid, and he'd have severe trouble getting through.

Major Kingsthorpe heeds Argas' warning, and takes aim on the flare. Nordmann has heard the warning too; rather than shoot the German who's apparently picking up a rifle from a pile of equipment, he shoots the equipment pile itself. The ensuing explosion of stored dynamite leaves the two entangled Germans plainly dead, and the third nowhere to be seen. The flare goes out.

Nordmann partly heals Argas, and Kingsthorpe looks around the site for anything useful that might have survived. There are quite a few unburned fragments of notebook paper, which he gathers. Once the local police arrive (both of them), the team leaves the site. Alexander fetches the local doctor, who is persuaded to keep quiet about Argas' apparent several-days-old bullet wound; he's brought back to the town on a farm cart. The others return to the hotel; Alexander borrows a horse and sets off for Luxembourg to send a telegram from the Consulate there.

Kingsthorpe, Matthews and Miss Vane work on reconstructing the notes; there's something about a bronze dirk, but it's all frustratingly fragmentary. There's some suggestion that it might once have been in the town hall museum, and a sketch. The only useful name that comes up is that the local curé, Père Chauvet, has taken some interest in the site and its artifacts.

Wednesday 8 May 1940

Alexander sends a cable to London, confirming the presence of Germans and asking for a proper archaeological team to go over the site in more detail. They'll take a few days to arrive, however. He stays in Luxembourg long enough to get the reply (and amuse himself while waiting), then heads back to Neufchateau on a fresh horse.

The rest of the team visits Chauvet, who's packing to go and assist with the defence of Belgium. He's in his forties, and while he's happy to talk with Major Kingthorpe and the others they get the feeling he's holding a lot back. He was a young man when the site was found, shortly before the Great War; apparently the German military governor, Graf Hans von Blumenthal, took some interest in it between bouts of his more usual preoccupation of hunting. He's rather more evasive about the dirk, suggesting that it might do much damage if it were found, particularly with the Nazis' quest for some sort of historical or mythological justification for their actions. He doesn't seem too worried that it will be found, however, even when Kingsthorpe suggests that it might be wise to protect those who know the item's location.

The team heads to the museum, and Kingsthorpe is disgusted by the very poor state of the records of the site; he thinks some pages may have been removed entirely, but there's no way to be sure. There's certainly no bronze dirk matching the description or the sketch.

Nordmann visits Argas and finishes the job of healing him while Miss Vane distracts the doctor; then they and Matthews take turns watching the curé's house in case he should go out to retrieve the dirk, or simply leave suddenly.

Alexander returns, and he and Kingsthorpe visit Chauvet again. As Alexander gathers his will to control Chauvet's mind, the latter recognises him, crying "Talons of the Sphinx! You are monsieur Alexander, non?" This makes the control even firmer than expected, and the two have a very friendly conversation. Chauvet readily admits that he buried the dirk by a tombstone in the cemetery, and leads them to the place; he digs, but is rather disconcerted to find that the earth has been disturbed quite recently (in the last few days) and the dirk is missing. Miss Vane calls on Sarge, who contacts the spirits of the graveyard; the digging was done on the night of Saturday the 4th, by one person, but they can't make out any details as the impression is jangled or jammed in some way.

Kingsthorpe gathers some earth from the spot with the intent of casting a location ritual; Alexander and Argas talk to the sexton, who's in the pub, so they end up buying drinks for the idlers who are there in the afternoon. Alexander questions the sexton carefully, since the latter seems to be hiding something, but it turns out that it's just his general dereliction of duty.

The afternoon becomes generally boisterous, as Alexander and Argas buy more drinks and ask about strangers - the only ones who've been seen lately are the three Germans, who didn't even stay in town. While the pub is mostly empty at the moment, "everyone will be in later"... except for old Mère Sorel. "Why?" "She doesn't have any money!"

[22 March 2008]

Kingsthorpe gathers various magical components (including some fennel scavenged by Miss Vane), and sets up in the museum; the ritual takes some hours, and shows an interesting result. The pendulum would normally swing directly over the item of interest, but in this case it circles, as though it's being kept away by some means: the circling is however precise enough that Kingsthorpe can trace the centre of the effect to a house on the outskirts of the town. Kingsthorpe joins Argas and Alexander in the pub, where they determine that Mère Sorel has been away on a scrouging trip since Monday.

As things wind down, the team heads over to what they suspect is Sorel's house. There are no lights, but when Miss Vane gets Sarge to scout he reports that there's one spirit in the cellar (a live person). Argas walks invisibly to the back door, with Kingsthorpe following; there are a few chickens in the yard, but no animals likely to give an alarm. The back door is in poor shape; Argas oils it, then picks the lock and enters. He finds the cellar stairs and descends, in the near-darkness; when he gets to the bottom, he puts down his torch, turns it on and steps quickly away from it.

The light reveals piles of junk, some of it perhaps of some small value, and the figure of a old woman sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth. She doesn't seem to pay any attention to the light, or to Argas or Kingsthorpe. As they get closer, they see that she's holding the knife in her lap, mumbling to it, in a language that neither of the team members recognises - they later work out that it might be some sort of Celtic.

Argas picks her up and carries her upstairs to the parlour, then fetches the others from where they've been lying up in the hedgerow. Alexander takes the knife, and the woman stops mumbling; she seems catatonic. He and Kingsthorpe take her to the curé in the hope that she can be looked after and will recover.

The whole team heads back to the inn to get some sleep, and the knife is hidden in Kingsthorpe's ritual toolbox.

Thursday 9 May 1940

The team catches the first train back to Luxembourg, shortly after noon. It's a long journey, with frequent halts for troop trains; they don't arrive until the evening. They talk to the British embassy staff, and find that there have been ugly scenes at the station, with people scrambling to get on board any westbound train, though there's no particular news that should have caused people to panic.

The team decides that all these people _might_ have a reason, even so, and that they should get the knife away from German forces as quickly as possible. Miss Vane manages to get hold of a horse and cart for only several times its peacetime value, and the team learns the hard way how to handle it. They drive overnight, sticking to main roads and mostly avoiding getting bogged down.

Friday 10 May 1940

At dawn, the sound of aeroplanes is very noticeable behind them. They make for Sedan, the nearest RAF base, on the basis that they ought to be able to get hold of an aeroplane there (at least for one person to get away with the knife). There's increasing air activity as they push through the woods of the Ardennes, and in the afternoon what sounds worryingly like mechanised units catching up.

They make good time, though, and come out of the forest in the late afternoon, as the French forces are advancing from Sedan to meet the oncoming German probe. They have no flag, but do their best to look harmless to the French, who are in any case distracted by attacking Stukas; when one seems to be coming a bit close, Alexander takes the Bren gun and knocks out its engine after it's committed to its dive.

The base at Sedan is mostly deserted, though Alexander finds a maintenance crew chief working on a downed Hurricane. He's got nothing ready to fly, since everything that can is already involved in the battle, but does point out Wing Commander Millett's staff car. "Wouldn't have told you about it if I weren't prepared for you to take it, sir."

It's a touring car with a foldable soft top, with seating for four, but with a quick bit of spanner-work the boot can be made to accommodate the other two team members.

Kingsthorpe sanctifies the back seat of the car, with Miss Vane's help, and they conduct rituals to increase the speed and fuel-efficiency of the car. Alexander drives, with Argas beside him navigating as they head north-west. There are a few hairy moments, but there isn't a great deal of traffic, and after several more hours they arrive at Calais.

Kingsthorpe hires a fishing boat that's about to head out, and the team gets back to Dover, having mostly slept across the Channel (though Alexander and Argas are seasick).

Saturday 11 May 1940

The team returns to London and hands over the dirk to Captain Knight. After a few hours of analysis and research, it appears that its importance is primarily symbolic rather than as a direct power item, but centuries of local belief in it as a symbol of resistance to foreign invaders may well have given it a level of power of its own...

2.5. Operation Earwig

[12 April 2008]

The team spends an uneasy few days listening to the news: Rotterdam is carpet-bombed, the Netherlands surrender, and at home the Local Defence Volunteers are set up. British and French forces are pushed further and further back towards the French coast.

Tuesday 21 May 1940

Captain Knight calls the group together. Extensive research has revealed a ritual associated with the dirk that was recovered in the last foray into Europe; it's specifically tied to slowing and stopping invaders, and with the rate of German advance it seems well worth a try. The team will be going over to B&ecaute;thune, fifteen miles behind the front lines, to perform the ritual at an appropriate spot and leave the dirk buried there.

Their transport is a Bristol Bombay, flying supplies over to the troops. Alexander and Argas take the turrets, and the others dispose themselves among the bales and crates. The flight goes well at first, but over France they and their escort are jumped by a flight of Me109s. They're too many for the escort, and Alexander and Argas do their bit to help defend the plane. Argas has some success, scoring two hits - he thinks on the same aircraft, though the situation is very confused - with the second causing it to retreat, smoking heavily. Alas, this isn't enough to prevent the starboard engine being shot, and with other damage and the heavy load the pilot has to make an emergency landing.

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Note: the GM is well aware of the proper nomenclature of these aircraft, but "Me109s" they were to the men at the sharp end and "Me109s" they shall be herein.

---

The landing is rough, but the structure of the aircraft takes the brunt of it, and only Major Kingsthorpe is particularly shaken up. They've arrived in a ploughed field; Argas climbs a tree and spots a road nearby, but no buildings that might contain transport.

The group, and the two flight crew, head for the road, and flag down the first vehicle to come past: it's a lorry full of cabbages, as is traditional. After a slow and bumpy ride, they get to B&ecaute;thune, and the crew head off to the local airfield to report in; after some checking around, and finding that apart from a small RAF contingent all the troops nearby are French, the team follows, to try to get some information about the area.

Squadron Leader Grimbald gives them maps of the area, and Major Kingsthorpe looks over it to find the area that seems most propitious. There's a graveyard on the edge of the town which seems eminently suitable, and the team goes to check it in more detail. Matthews stays close by, ready to mobilise the extensive plant life in defence of the team, while Major Kingsthorpe and Miss Vane plan to do the actual ritual and the others will form a perimeter.

Miss Vane summons Sarge to try to check the disposition of any spirits that might still be present; he's somewhat distracted by something, then seems to be blown away on a wind that's only perceptible to him. Miss Vane asks where he's being carried, but the link is lost.

Major Kingsthorpe performs a small experimental ritual, and feels the power being sucked out of it; he can get a vague idea of the direction, to the south-east, towards the nearest point of the German lines... and towards the middle of town. The group moves a few miles and repeats the experiment; it definitely seems to be an effect centred on the town, rather than on the Germans. They also find a medallion, suggesting that they're not the first to use this particular spot as a ritual location; it bears the symbolism of the Grand Orient de France, the Masonic group most active in the country. As they continue to test, the directionality gets vaguer. The centre is somewhere in the central, oldest, part of town, but that's all they can be sure of.

It's now full dark, and they spend some time looking around the blacked-out town for architecture that seems consistent with Masonic principles. There are three likely candidates, but the most promising seems to be the 14th-century bell tower, particularly when they realise that the chain on the door is loose enough to have been fastened from the inside. Argas picks the lock and sneaks in invisibly; he sees an obvious ritual setup, with elaborate chalked diagrams, candles and incense burners, and what appears to be most of a roughly-butchered cow on a table in the centre of it all.

There's also a man, who goes over to the door and notices that it's been opened; he spots Alexander outside, runs back in and bars the door, then heads upstairs (where he sets off a signal flare). Argas unbars the door again, and Alexander charges in after the man, who pulls a pistol on him but is clearly intimidated.

Major Kingsthorpe speaks with the prisoner - one Boniface Guerin - and tries to find out just what's going on with the ritual. Guerin doesn't seem to know much detail, but talks of "raising the land in its own defence". Meanwhile Miss Vane tries again to contact Sarge, from within the tower; she can get through to him, but he can't describe where he is other than to say "it's dark down here, crowded, and smells funny". He can't get out; the other spirits trapped with him seem essentially to be spirits of the land, of the streams and fields and trees.

Argas spots some men gathering in a side street; borrowing Major Kingsthorpe's field glasses, he identifies them as gendarmes. He (inivisibly) and Alexander go out to deal with them, while Major Kingsthorpe and Miss Vane talk with Guerin and Matthews and Nordmann try to make sense of the ritual setup.

Sarge reports to Miss Vane that the spirits seem to be being shouted at: something about rising up and destroying the foreigners. When Guerin boasts that this is a very old ritual, Major Kingsthorpe has a moment of inspiration: would these "foreigners" include, say, those of Frankish blood? Sarge thinks so.

Outside, Alexander raises an eyebrow at the gendarmes, using all his persuasive talents. They halt the charge they'd half-begun, and start muttering among themselves; one of them is sent away, and comes back with a man who's clearly a local dignitary of some sort. Alexander sends him inside to talk with Major Kingsthorpe.

---

Quote: (Major Kingsthorpe) I'm going to have a good word with all the people responsible for this, because it's deeply...
(Alexander) Stupid?
(Major Kingsthorpe) Misguided. Deeply misguided.

---

Alexander passes out cigarettes to the (rather confused) gendarmes, who retire to a nearby bar, leaving their most junior member to "keep an eye on things". Alexander and Nordmann follow them, in the hope of getting some food for the group.

The dignitary, M. Angrand, is clearly a ritualist of sorts himself; Major Kingsthorpe tries to explain to him just what the problem is with the magic that's in progress, but comes up against a self-importance raised almost to the level of an art-form. Angrand is willing, just, to concede that the setup might not be entirely perfect, but he's certainly not willing to disassemble it or otherwise let the trapped spirits out. While Major Kingsthorpe keeps talking with him, Miss Vane works out just what needs to be done to break the circle: smudge that line there, spill some ash from that burner, and knock over this chalice. She and Argas do this, and there's a very loud bang, which mostly prevents them from hearing the pained howling that follows. The door of the tower is blasted to pieces, and the people inside it are covered with a fine layer of exploded cow.

They clean up in a horse-trough as hearing slowly returns. The food-foraging party returns, Alexander telling the gendarmes to go and get help; in the ensuing confusion, which is assisted by a sudden air-raid, the party gets out of town, though Alexander stays behind to influence the medics to keep Guerin and Angrand unconscious for longer than might be strictly necessary.

The group apart from Alexander cleans up properly in a stream, and spends the night in a shed full of tractor parts. Alexander passes it more pleasantly.

Wednesday 22 May 1940

Dawn brings with it the sound of tanks: the Germans have arrived, rather sooner than anyone expected. Major Kingsthorpe and Miss Vane decide that time is of the essence, and elect to perform the dirk-ritual in the shed, leaving the dagger buried under the earth floor. Matthews causes moss to grow over the spot where it's buried, Argas camouflages it, and Major Kingsthorpe attempts without success to cast an obscuring ritual. Argas then heads into town to see what help he can give to Alexander.

Alexander is woken by a tank blowing up the house next door to the one where he's spent the night. He thinks fast and dresses in civilian clothing, then strolls nonchalantly out into the town square and persuades a series of Nazi officers, of steadily increasing rank, that he is an Abwehr agent with vitally important information for the commanding general. To General Hoth, he explains that he has been tracking a British special unit, and needs transport ahead of the lines before they can escape; Hoth is impressed, but will await confirmation of his credentials from Berlin. Meanwhile, the agent will be found some suitable accommodation. Hoth passes him to Captain Ehmsperger and his soldiers.

Argas arrives just as Alexander is led out from the town hall, now clearly the local Nazi headquarters. Alexander uses his persuasive powers on Ehmsperger, explaining that he needs to get ahead of the front line with the greatest speed; Ehmsperger has his car fetched, a rather battered Kübelwagen, and he, Alexander, and two of his troopers get into it. Argas climbs onto the back, staying invisible, and holds on very firmly. They drive north; Alexander would feel confident about taking on Ehmsperger alone, but doesn't fancy his chances against the two privates, and isn't aware of Argas' presence. Just short of St Omer, Alexander explains to Ehmsperger that he has to go back under cover and can't be seen arriving in the company of German officers; Ehmsperger stops, then turns the car round and heads back, looking somewhat confused. Alexander and Argas wait in town to see what they can learn of the others.

Meanwhile Major Kingsthorpe casts rituals of good fortune and concealment, and the remainder of the team sets off cross-country. There's rather less traffic today, and it's several hours before they see a vehicle: it's a Kübelwagen, heading south. Matthews causes the vegetation by the road to grow across and bind the vehicle, stopping it suddenly; while Ehmsperger and his men are still recovering (since the Kübelwagen is entirely without such effete luxuries as seat-belts), Major Kingsthorpe and Nordmann shoot at them, with Matthews joining in shortly thereafter. Ehmsperger and his first private go down quickly; the second is a bit more combat-experienced, and dodges around before Matthews ties him down with more plant life. Ehmsperger's bleeding heavily, and Miss Vane performs first aid on him before they leave in the Kübelwagen.

They meet the others, and abandon the car, in St Omer, then try to scrounge up some more civilian transport; the best they manage is an ancient tractor and cart. Major Kingsthorpe has to perform some fairly thorough rituals just to work out how to get it started, but it successfully gets them further north; after sunset, Argas directs the driving, as it has no lights. They cross the British lines around Dunkirk around 9pm.

Thursday 23-Tuesday 28 May 1940

Over the next few days, they learn that the Panzer advance has halted, though nobody's quite sure why. If the dirk ritual has had some effect, unfortunately it doesn't seem to have stopped the Luftwaffe, who continue to attack the town and the beaches. Alexander spends much of his time marshalling the various groups of soldiers as they straggle in; Major Kingsthorpe and Nordmann help with treatment of the wounded, with a bit of distraction necessary before they can use their really effective treatments; Miss Vane assists with general organisation, and Matthews finds a unit of Indian troops to reassure. Argas is kept busy keeping the group supplied with food and other essentials; he even manages to find a new leather flying-jacket for Alexander, who had to abandon his old one with the rest of his uniform. Major Kingsthorpe and Nordmann also work to keep the weather closed in, not so much as to prevent navigation but enough to make aerial operations tricky.

On Saturday the news comes that Boulogne-sur-Mer has surrendered; Calais falls the next day. While the destroyers are taking off troops a few at a time, they can't get in close enough to do this efficiently; on Monday, the call goes out in England for small boats to come to the assistance of the trapped BEF. On Tuesday, as the news of Belgium's surrender comes in, the really large-scale evacuation begins, and as a group containing civilians the team is on one of the earlier boats.

They are rather surprised when they see their transport: in spite of the biggest Red Ensign her captain can find, and rather gaudy red, white and blue paint over the torpedo mounts, the vessel picking them up is very clearly a German E-boat. They are suspicious even though she's in convoy with the other British boats under Royal Naval escort; Alexander asks the captain how he came by such a vessel. "Found it." Suitably reassured, they crowd on board.

The group makes it back to Margate, and thence to London.

2.6. Operation Barracuda

[6 September 2008]

Mr Alexander, or more specifically Flying Officer Alexander, has a spot of difficulty reconciling his duties with 74Sqn at Hornchurch with those to MI5, especially since as he's one of the more experienced pilots he's being rotated through flights to try to give the other fliers the benefit of his experience. Or to put it another way:

"How many hours on Spits?"

"A hundred and twenty-five, sir. Plus a hundred and two on Hurricanes, time on the Blenheim, Defiant, Wellington, Lysander, Dominie... I'll just leave my log book on your desk."

"Where the bloody hell did you come from?"

"Whitehall, sir."

"You're not bloody going back."

Tuesday, 9 July 1940

The team is called together for a new mission. Captain Knight explains:

"After your trip to Scotland last year, we took a long hard look at Devonport and the ships that had been built there. Didn't find a great deal - a chalk scrawl here and there - but during the investigation we did see that production at Devonport is rather less than it should be. Too many 'accidents', and that sounds worryingly familiar. We'd like you to look into it."

They take the train to Plymouth, and thence Devonport. There are plenty of troops being moved around the country, blackout precautions are being discussed, and the harbour defences are clearly being built up. Rationing is starting to bite, too, with some commonplace items being hard to find.

Lt Bartlett, their liaison at the yard, has been described to them as on the square but not particularly aware of occult matters; Major Kingsthorpe decides that the team will present itself as time-and-motion experts. Bartlett is young, enthusiastic, and has his head full of hypothetical communist saboteurs; there's certainly been a certain amount of labour trouble, and while Russia is nominally neutral the Communists have certainly been preaching that British workers should not assist the war effort.

Miss Vane gets Sarge to cast about; he can't detect any odd spirits. A general look around reveals a certain degree of sloppiness and low morale, but nothing that can be tied specitically to sabotage.

As they are inspecting the working areas, there's a loud crash from the northern caissons, where three destroyers are under construction. They hurry over, to find a man pinned under a steel plate that's fallen off its hoist. He's not badly injured, but work in the area has stopped.

Nordmann, Major Kingsthorpe and Miss Vane overhear one of the workers muttering sditiously to the others: "Look how much they care about us. The union rep's here before the ambulance." They get Argas to follow him invisibly, which he does with some success.

Nordmann accompanies the worker to the base infirmary; he hears him muttering something to the effect of "it just got away from me". He attempts to heal the man, but without success in this highly unnatural setting.

Meanwhile Kingsthorpe inspects the accident site; he and Matthews look through the yard's records. There are indeed rather more accidents than one might expect, and a disproportionate number of them involve errors made by a single person (rather than general failures of equipment).

Argas continues to follow his man ("Jim"), out of the yard gates at the end of the shift and into the Lamb and Packet. He buys beer for himself and his friends, perhaps buying rather too often for someone on his wages, and at closing time heads home. He waits around 20 minutes, then goes out again, carrying a small lantern to find his way. He steps up to a gate leading to the back yard of another pub, exchanges a few words with the man guarding it, and steps in - still followed closely by Argas.

There are two other men in the yard, and Jim reports to them that everything went well today: "lots of disruption, nobody seriously injured". The second man, who looks a bit more prosperous, asks whether they've been given any more targets; the third man, "Joe", says no. "She hasn't said anything yet."

Jim heads home, and Argas goes back to the base; he reports, eats, and goes to bed.

Wednesday, 10 July 1940

Eyeballing the workers as they come in lets Argas spot that his second man is Brian Andrews, a foreman - Matthews spots in his records that he gave up his job in a drafting office to come here.

Miss Vane talks to the typing pool to sound them out. They seem, if anything, keener on their work than the men outside. One of them mentions in passing "good thing Ronnie wasn't there - he'd have tried to lift the plate off on his own". Another says that maybe he could have done it... he may be a bit slow, but he's strong, and his heart's in the right place. Argas spots Joe, who's a welder.

At lunch-time, the news on the wireless is that the British Union of Fascists has been banned: "about time too" is the general sentiment, and indeed Mosley has been locked up for some months.

Matthews and Kingsthorpe take another look at the accident site, but to no avail.

Argas follows Joe as he followed Jim yesterday, but in the crush at the end of the shift he's knocked down and trampled; he managed to get out of the way before too many people get suspicious. He takes a few hours to track down Joe, who's in the Goat and Compasses; at closing time, Joe goes home, and doesn't come out again.

Thursday, 11 July 1940

Sarge watches for active spirits, and doesn't see anything. He also scans the workers' lockers for active magical items, again without result. Matthews continues to examine the records; while the overall level of accidents is the same on day and night shifts, the number of people working at night is rather lower, and so the rate per person on nights is much higher. Kingsthorpe informs Lt Bartlett that they think they have their sights on some subversive types, but are working on gathering evidence.

Argas visits Brian Andrews' house while the latter is at work, He slips over the back wall into the yard, picks the back door lock, and starts to look around. It's a fairly standard two-up two-down row house: the back downstairs room is a kitchen, while the front is a living-room (the wireless set is tuned to the Home Service). Upstairs, the back room is being used as an office, with various paperwork and household bills scattered about; the front room is a bedroom.

Argas checks the loft hatch, and sees that there are a couple of hairs across the opening. He carefully removes these, then lifts the hatch. In the loft are several large boxes, all of the same general type, labelled "fruit"; there's also a light switch. Argas slowly and carefully opens boxes: he finds a complex piece of electrical equipment (something like a radio), more electronics but this time wrapped round a sort of skeletal metal helmet, and in the third box electronics with an antenna socket. He closes the boxes, puts the hairs back across the loft hatch, re-locks the back door and leaves.

In the evening, Argas follows Joe, who spends it again at the Goat and Compasses chatting with his mates - and with Ronnie, which strikes Argas as somewhat unusual (while "naturals" are an accepted part of life, they don't tend to get invited down to the pub). Joe heads home and then out again shortly thereafter, meeting at the same place (which appears to be the back yard of the Goat and Compasses). This time when Brian asks him about targets he has one: Number 7 crane's driver, on tomorrow (Friday) night shift around 9pm. Brian says he'll take care of it; Joe says that he knows a lad who can be on the spot to offer sympathy.

Brian asks whether "he" still doesn't suspect anything. Jim answers: "Him? Of course not."

Argas is fortified with fish and chips when he gets back to base.

Friday 12, July 1940

Kingsthorpe and Nordmann inspect number 7 crane. They can't see anything wrong with it: no sign of sabotage, not even any weak components. Matthews and Miss Vane attempt to locate Ronnie in the yard records: Ronnie Thorpe is a general labourer, not particularly skilled but usefully strong, who lives in town with his aunt.

In the evening, Argas breaks into Brian Andrews' house again and waits invisibly to see what will happen; Nordmann waits outside to back him up. The others are waiting by the crane.

Shortly before 9pm, Brian climbs to his loft and turns on the light. There's a protracted noise of assembly, then of valves warming up, and Argas risks poking his head through to see what's going on. Brian is wearing the helmet, and apparently deep in thought, while surrounded by his array of odd machinery.

At about ten past nine, number 7 crane drops its load on some boiler tubes (fragile and expensive). Nobody is hurt. The operator is aware that he made a mistake of some sort, but is at a loss to account for how it could have happened. Kingsthorpe and Matthews spot the "friendly face" egging the crowd on to greater dissatisfaction.

At about twenty past nine, Brian takes off the helmet, then turns off and disassembles the machinery. Argas leaves.

Saturday, 13 July 1940

The team is still trying to work out who the mysterious "she" might be. They decide to look into Joe's landlady. She was widowed in the Great War, and turned to renting rooms to make ends meet. Argas locates Joe's room (top floor at the back) and breaks in; the main finding of interest is a cache of (British) money in the wardrobe, rather more than Joe could plausibly have saved.

Sunday, 14 July 1940

Miss Vane goes to church and strikes up a conversation with the landlady, Mrs Bithell. The latter seems sound: she's stern in her condemnation of the Germans, and feels that the Treaty of Versailles self-evidently didn't go far enough.

Monday, 15 July 1940

Kingsthorpe arranges for Special Branch to raid the houses of Brian, Jim and Joe (and their colleague on the night shift). When Brian is picked up in the dockyard, the others try to run, unsuccessfully.

A Navy radio engineer is brought in to look at Brian's hardware; his first reaction is that this clearly isn't a radio, but he's not sure what it is. Checking some of the part numbers suggests that it's of Russian manufacture, though most of the valves and other fragile components are British.

Kingsthorpe operates a ritual to determine how the device is properly operated, and gains a brief but detailed knowledge; the main consideration is that it should not be used more often than once per day by the same person, "not even for the glory of the Motherland". It seems that it is a psychic amplifier of some sort, and interrogation of Brian reveals that he was using it both to inflict unluckiness on people and to report in to Moscow. He's prepared to collaborate with MI5 and share his limited knowledge of the device in return for not being hanged for treason (for all that the prosecution might face something of a challenge, this is wartime).

Joe and Jim stay quiet: where they were getting their targets from remains a mystery. While they have clearly been seditious and can be locked up for the duration, getting a treason charge to stick would be a hard business. Superiors at MI5 consider whether it's worth the effort of trying to run them as double agents.

2.7. Operation Everest

[11 October 2008]

Monday, 12 August 1940

While flying patrol from Hornchurch with his wingmates Francis and Matuschanskavasky ("Ski" for obvious reasons), F/O Alexander is vectored towards an incoming bomber raid near Clacton; count is uncertain because of bad weather in the area. The weather is both very bad and very localised; as he approaches the target he finds very heavy cloud with occasional lightning, and substantial air turbulence. He heads for the centre of the cloud; Francis and Ski aren't able to handle the state of the air, and break off. The lightning is interfering with radio communications enough that Alexander can't contact base.

In a surprisingly spherical clear area in the middle of the cloud, Alexander spots a formation of five Heinkel 111s. One of them is heavily painted with odd, rune-like markings. He attacks this one, putting a couple of good bursts into the tail, but to no visible effect; apparently in return, his aircraft is struck by lightning from within the cloud, and set afire. Since it is no longer airworthy, he calls in his situation as he falls out of the cloud, and makes an emergency landing on a country road. He's brought back to base, with the Spitfire slated to follow when a truck can be scrounged up. His CO orders him to take his sighting report to Whitehall first thing in the morning.

Tuesday, 13 August 1940

The rest of the team is called together to hear Alexander's report. After some discussion, Major Kingsthorpe decides that a useful first step will be relocation to an active fighter base; since the flight of Heinkels was tracked heading roughly southwards after it had dropped its bombs on Rochford, he picks Tangmere, and arranges for a house just by the base to be made available.

On arrival, he starts to set up one of the rooms as a ritual space; this will take some days. Meanwhile, he performs an immediate ritual to create a protective amulet against lightning, since it seems likely that Alexander will have to intercept this attacker again. (Argas obtains the necessary owl and crow feathers from a local.) Alexander meanwhile attempts to arrange the loan of a Hurricane; as long as the base isn't fully scrambling, this should be possible.

Wednesday, 14 August 1940

Kingsthorpe casts a location ritual, based on the full description of the aircraft (and its unique identifying number) brought back by Alexander. He tracks it down to a hangar in Abbeville, on the French coast - this is known to be a fighter base (Bf110s), and it's not clear what a bomber is doing there, as they're mostly based rather further from the front.

Alexander spends much of the day on the phone to various procurement personnel, and eventually manages to divert the new Spitfire that was to be ferried to his home base at Hornchurch down to Tangmere.

As the evening approaches, Kingsthorpe, Nordmann and Miss Vane head to an Observer site on the coast, and set up in a tent. Argas and Matthews stay in the fighter control room at Tangmere, where they can listen to both the controllers and the telephone link to the others. Alexander waits in his Spitfire.

Kingsthorpe (with confirmation from Sarge) detects a magical presence at high altitude just as the weather round the site worsens substantially. They alert Tangmere, and Alexander takes off to intercept the attackers. As before, the air around them is very rough, but he penetrates the bubble, which seems to be moving firmly with the central plane; he shoots at the rune-painted Heinkel, but again seems to have no effect. A lightning strike jumps at his plane, but misses at the last moment (and he feels his new amulet crack). Since his fire doesn't seem to be having any effect, Alexander reduces speed, lowers landing gear, and slams the port gear into the topside turret of the Heinkel. This certainly kills the crewman there, and at this point the Spitfire isn't going to make a clean landing anyway, so he repeats the effect by putting the starboard gear into the left side of the cockpit, killing the pilot and damaging the controls. The Heinkel starts to spiral down and out to sea; the bubble of clear air disperses, and the storm starts to blow itself out. Alexander notices that his shiny new Spitfire is displaying a worrying amount of rust, particularly since it's mostly made of aluminium.

He stays in the fight, though, and shoots down a second Heinkel (this one in conventional livery) before the creaking and groaning of the airframe gets too much to ignore. The Spitfire clearly isn't going any further, other than straight down, and he bails out.

Kingsthorpe calls the nearest Naval presence to send out a launch to the Heinkel's ditching site. He then sends in a preliminary report to MI5. The Navy crew reports that the aircraft had been abandoned, with no sign of the crew except for two dead bodies, and all sensitive material removed.

Thursday, 15 August 1940

It appears that the team will have to travel to France, and MI5 has an asset in place that can drop them off that evening. They spend most of Thursday getting their kit together (including a variety of German uniforms), then head down the Thames Estuary to meet Captain Furneaux. the man who got them off Dunkirk. His S-boat is no longer flying the red ensign. He can't put them ashore directly, but does drop them off in a rowing boat fairly close in to the Somme estuary, from which Abbeville is only about six miles overland; he tells them to signal green-white-green at local midnight when they want a pick-up. They conceal the boat on shore and make camp for the night.

Friday, 16 August 1940

At dawn, Alexander and Miss Vane (with Argas following invisibly) walk into Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme, sit in the local cafe speaking German, and order wine. After a few hours, an army Leutnant turns up in a truck, with six men; he orders Alexander to accompany him, and takes him to the air base, turning him over to the commandant with "I believe this is one of yours". The Leutnant seems keen to get on with the invasion of England, encouraging the Luftwaffe airmen (including Alexander) to "hurry up and finish off the Royal Air Force".

Alexander claims to be part of an airfield survey party from the Reichsluftministerium, and shows his Kondor Legion badge to squash any argument. He gets the commandant to lend him a truck and driver to pick up the other members of his group. On the way back, he tries to get the driver to stop in the bombed-out ruins of Abbeville itself and let off Matthews and Nordmann; the driver is firm in his determination to obey orders, and Alexander has to use his mind-control powers to make him stop.

When the others (Alexander, Kingsthorpe, Argas and Miss Vane) arrive at the Abbeville air base, they are rapidly surrounded by armed men. A Hauptmann (with strange shoulder-board insignia, that somehow make the eye look away from them) slightly outside the ring explains to the commandant that these are the spies he was talking about - "and I never forget a face". He looks at Alexander, who is as confused as the rest, and explains "we met briefly on Wednesday night, but were not introduced. Indeed, I had to walk home from the party". Alexander, who at that point was wearing goggles and an oxygen mask, is nonplussed.

The group is searched, though Argas manages to hide his lockpicks, and confined to a cell. There's one guard in the building with them, and presumably others outside. Meanwhile, Matthews and Nordmann observe the base from a safe distance, working out the routines of the sentries.

Miss Vane asks to be taken to the privy, and while she's away Alexander controls the mind of the guard. When Miss Vane returns, on a signal from Alexander she hits her guard; Argas, who's picked the relatively simple cell lock, and Kingsthorpe join in, but it's Miss Vane's kick that really causes him to lose interest in the fight. Alexander slits the throats of the two guards before the others can object.

Argas locates a truck, returns to the others to tell them where it is, and then heads towards the one hangar that's been kept closed while they were on the base. The others sneak to the motor pool, start the truck and follow. Miss Vane crashes the truck into a side wall of the hangar, and the three pile out into what seems to be an office of some sort; they all grab up handsful of the paperwork that's floating around loose as a result.

Argas comes in through a door in the opposite wall, as they confront someone who is clearly magically empowered. Alexander gives him pause with some well-chosen words ("So, Helmut, we meet again"), but this has more effect on the other occupants of the hangar (maintenance crew, it seems) than on their target. He's finishing a magical ritual of some sort, and as they watch a Heinkel 111 is assembling itself out of nothingness in the middle of the hangar.

He leaps towards them, striking at Alexander, but Alexander dodges his blows and shoots him, as do Kingsthorpe and Argas. They reduce him to unconsciousness, and as soon as there's enough of the aircraft to enter bring him in and start the engines. Miss Vane opens the hangar door, then jumps in. The plane's weapons have been stripped, presumably to save weight; Kingsthorpe realises that the entire cabin area is a formalised ritual space, though not of a tradition that he knows.

Matthews and Nordmann knock out a sentry and go through the fence when the excitement starts; they're in time to see the Heinkel taxiing out (still missing the tip of its tail, though this forms itself as they watch) with Alexander gesturing at them from the cockpit. They run that way and are hauled on board during the taxi run.

Alexander takes off, though he can see a number of Bf110s being scrambled in pursuit. With a certain amount of fumbling, the team gets a radio call through to Tangmere, asking for an emergency interception. Matthews and Nordmann blaze away at their pursuers with small arms, surprisingly enough getting a few hits (though without any effect other than on morale), but it's only the arrival of a wing of Hurricanes that gets the Germans to break off pursuit.

Alexander brings the plane in at Tangmere, heavily escorted; he manages to crumple the main gear on landing, and everyone's rather shaken up. The plane is hauled off the runway by tractor, while the team and their prisoner are taken to debriefing. ("Kingsthorpe, Royal Engineers. May I use your telephone?") The snatched-up paperwork proves to give some clues to the strange rune-based magic being worked by the Armanenorden.

Saturday, 17 August 1940

Immediate interrogation of the prisoner reveals that his name is Hauptmann Gervas von Ettingshausen, the project was Sturmkrähe, and that it was being kept on the coast (and linking up with passing bombers in the manner of fighter escorts) to avoid observation from the ground.

He starts getting very ill on Saturday evening, and cheerfully points out that the drugs that will alleviate this are only available in the Reich. (He refuses to say what or where.) While he is technically a prisoner of war (and was wearing uniform when captured), consensus is that attempting to obtain a supply of drugs from Germany - or indeed to return him there - would simply be too dangerous for too little potential reward.

von Ettingshausen dies of multiple organ failure on Saturday evening, with a smile on his lips in spite of what must be severe pain. Over the next few minutes, his body dries out and turns to dust.

(Sarge can detect that his spirit goes roughly east, rather than dispersing as the spirits of dead people normally do. But not, he thinks, far enough north of east to be heading for Berlin.)

2.8. Operation Nosegay

[15 November 2008 - "Went the Day Were"]

Monday, 19 August 1940

Captain Knight looks slightly embarrassed and apologetic.

"A gentleman formerly of our service, and with some pull in high places, has requested a team to look into what he's described as 'a werewolf'. Sir Andrew Davies-Wright was one of the precognitives working on artillery in the Last Lot, and - between us - it rather took its toll of him. But he still knows enough people to put pressure on us here..."

Werewolf lore isn't as firmly established as it will be in coming years, but just in case, the team loads up on flare pistols and silver steak-knives.

A truck is supplied, and the team heads to St Mary in the Marsh, a village near New Romney in Kent. It's a small place - a few houses, a church and a pub - and they first contact Sir Andrew. He explains that there have been a few chicken-killing incidents over the last week - not notable in itself, and would normally be written off as just a fox, but two people have seen something rather larger than a fox running off when they confronted it. One of them, Eric Harper, took a shot at it without any effect. The police aren't bothered with something so minor, but Davies-Wright has a feeling it's more important than it seems.

Eric Harper and his wife Audrey are in their sixties, and glad (if somewhat surprised) that their reports are attracting so much official attention. He shows the team the hen-house, and points out just where he was standing and where he saw the whatever-it-was (man-sized or a bit larger, he's at pains to point out, though going on all fours).

He was disturbed on Wednesday night by the sound of chickens in panic, and went out with his shotgun; he fired both barrels at the creature, and it ran off apparently unwounded. He found most of the pellets on the ground, and collected them; he hands over the jar. The pellets are noticeably flattened, as though they'd stuck something very solid. (There are one or two still stuck in the wood of the hen-house, which argues for the bulk of his shot having gone where he said it did.)

The wire of the chicken-run has been repaired, but it's possible to see that a triangular hole was made in it - and it certainly looks as though it was torn, rather than cut.

The team next visits Mrs Catchpole, the other person who saw something (on Tuesday night). She is chatty, but doesn't have much to add; the creature ran off when she confronted it with a broom. She mentions that "those parapsychological research people" have been asking questions, too; apparently they're four friends of the doctor's who have come to visit. (She is unimpressed with their various claimed ailments, and clearly thinks they're cowards who don't have the guts to join up or even to be conscientious objectors.) As with the Harpers', the hedge isn't dense enough to need to be broken through. Miss Vane thinks there's something odd about Mrs Catchpole's accent, but can't place it.

The team returns to Sir Andrew, who is slightly aware of the people from the Society for Parapsychological Research but is inclined to dismiss them.

The next stop is the pub, The Star, where Alexander immediately starts to... obtain information from... the young barmaid, Martha (who is fascinated by his flying stories). The landlord, Jim Wilson, has only two rooms left, but is happy to let the team have them (and gets the young "Ned" to make them up, with collapsible beds for the gentlemen). (In passing, he reckons the war will be over soon - the Germans are all very well on the attack, but they have no staying power.)

Martha tells Alexander that the Mellinghams, Peter and Anne, have the other room - they're two of the people from the Society for Parapsychological Research. The other two are staying with Doctor Taylor at his house.

The team pauses for lunch (basic but good); Alexander calls for a dispatch rider. Miss Vane sends Sarge to check on the village, particularly the spots where incidents have happened; he doesn't spot anything.

The team goes out to take a further look around; the place seems prosperous enough, but it's clearly missing a lot of people. Miss Vane spots the other two parapsychologists, Christopher Brown and Stephen Jones, talking earnestly about "psychical vibrations"; she encourages Sarge to shout at them, and they don't react at all. She chats with them briefly, explaining (without going into detail) that she and the team have been sent down from Whitehall to look into the incidents; they're glad that there's an official investigation happening, but somewhat rueful about not having had an opportunity to serve (as parapsychological investigators) themselves. They are eager to help; an official report of strange goings-on will _force_ Whitehall to pay attention.

Argas reckons he's going to be up for much of the night, so gets some sleep in the afternoon. Kingsthorpe visits Sir Andrew again, and reads the local histories in Sir Andrew's library - there are indeed legends of a "Black Dog of the Marsh", but they're very much the same as the ones to be found in most villages. Alexander's dispatch rider arrives; he sends the names of the parapsychologists, and Dr Wilson, to Whitehall for a background check.

As Miss Vane is walking back to the Star, Ned catches her arm. He explains that he saw Stephen Jones looking left-right-left when he crossed a road a few days ago - "and that's in the book! I think he's a spy! But Uncle won't listen..."

Around 9pm, Argas heads out and sets up in the fields behind the houses to one side of the village. There's a howling in the distance, but nothing else noticeable for a few hours. Around 11pm, there's a noise of panicking chickens; he heads towards it, in the garden of a house the team hasn't yet visited. He sees a large creature with its head and shoulders into the hen-house, and stays back to observe. After a few minutes, a woman comes out of the house, shouting; the creature pulls its head out of the hen-house (it does indeed appear to be a large dark wolf) and confronts her. They stare at each other for a few seconds, and then it pounces at her. Argas, who's been carefully aiming, takes a shot; it's a good hit, and knocks the creature aside; it doesn't seem wounded, though, and runs away through a neighbouring garden. He follows, but can't keep up with its pace.

The rest of the team is woken by the shot, and Alexander calms Mrs Coates. Alexander then calls for a second rider, whom he sends off with an urgent request for reinforcements (and silver bullets). Kingsthorpe goes to wake up Sir Andrew, who's happy to get his hounds out - but they turn away and refuse to follow the scent trail.

Tuesday, 20 August 1940

Argas searches for scraps of fur, but doesn't locate any. The parapsychologists are poking about enthusiastically; Argas follows them invisibly as they wave pendulums around.

The other team members are also poking about; Alexander recognises "Anne Mellingham" as someone he knew as Adelinde Fröbe in Berlin (someone who didn't choose to get out when he and others did). He immediately retreats to the Star before she gets a chance to recognise him, and calls for immediate backup by telephone. Kingsthorpe returns and asks him for more information; Alexander is evasive, and Kingsthorpe is unconvinced that the situation is as grave as Alexander represents.

Argas, who is still following the parapsychologists, starts to think that there might be some sort of code in their enthusiastic occult babblings. Kingsthorpe suggests that, as they're all away from their lodgings, he check the doctor's house.

He does so; the doctor's car is away (he spends most of his time in New Romney), and he gains entrance without difficulty. In one of the bedrooms, he spots a loose floorboard, under which are a great many oilskin-wrapped packages; he abstracts one that's unlikely to be missed, and recognises the shape of sticks of dynamite. He hears the parapsychologists returning, apparently alert to some sort of intrusion, but manages to hide in the kitchen until they have all gone upstairs.

He returns to the pub; the dynamite is in German wrappings. Kingsthorpe is keen to arrest these spies before they can escape; Alexander is more cautious, but strongly suggests that if Anne shows any sign of resistance they shoot her promptly.

The team goes to the doctor's house, with Argas invisible behind them and carrying the Bren gun. When confronted, three of the four pull out MP38s and start shooting; the fourth, Christopher Brown, drops his pack and starts to grow (both in stature and in hirsuteness).

The team hits the ground and returns fire with pistols; Anne goes down quickly, but the other two manage to take cover behind shrubbery and it's some time before Argas is able to shoot them; Kingsthorpe takes a nasty hit, and is out of the fight (and will take some time to recover). Meanwhile, Alexander takes his silver knife and confronts the werewolf; he holds his own briefly, but soon the creature's superior strength and sharp claws start to tell. Miss Vane takes Kingsthorpe's knife and starts to move up to help, but Alexander takes a nasty swipe to the lower abdomen and goes down, bleeding very heavily. Argas moves in with his own silver knife and manages to get in a good stab to the werewolf's stomach, killing it.

The volunteer ambulance service arrives, and with heroic efforts their doctor (not Dr Taylor, who gets grabbed later) manage to get Alexander's heart started again. He's taken some very severe damage, though, and will be walking with a cane for a fair while.

When the team returns to search Dr Taylor's house, among the dynamite and other sabotage materials are a wireless set and several cases of occult paraphernalia. These are all brought back to Whitehall for study. (Around the end of the week, it appears that one of these is some sort of magical navigation beacon. And that night, bombs fall on London...)

2.9. Operation Goblin

[17 January 2009]

Alexander buys a cane, and manages to get his flight status confirmed in spite of having only limited use of his legs. The demand for experienced pilots certainly has something to do with this. (Nordmann reckons he can fix the injury, but it will take time.)

Wednesday, 28 August 1940

As Kingsthorpe is leaving the British Museum one evening, the porter hands him a letter left "by an American gentleman". It's addressed by description rather than by name; Kingsthorpe asks the porter to describe the American, who was slightly overweight, with thinning light hair.

Kingsthorpe takes the letter home to his flat in Bloomsbury, scans it for obvious magical emanations (without result), and leaves it in a ward overnight.

Thursday, 29 August 1940

He opens the envelope, which contains a handwritten sheet and another envelope. The sheet reads "At seventeen minutes past nine on Thursday morning, do not cross the road. After that, read the other letter."

He proceeds on his way, keeping an eye on the time. Shortly before the time noted, he decides to wait before crossing the road; a building on the other side sloughs off its frontage into the street, presumably weakened by last night's air raid. Nobody is caught under it as far as Kingsthorpe can see, but he might well have been had he continued as usual.

On arrival at Whitehall, he opens the second letter. It states that on the evening of 4 September, a German magician will be out in a small boat, calming the waters for the invasion of England. The writer isn't quite clear how Kingsthorpe is involved with stopping this, but he's quite sure that he is.

He and Argas look at both letters, and establish that they're on paper watermarked from the Dorchester. They walk there across the parks, and Kingsthorpe readily gains access to the records. The receptionist recognises Kingsthorpe's description as Adrian Fiske, an American who's been staying for a few months. His home address is in Chicago. "It's after eleven, so you'll probably find him in the bar..."

He does seem to be there, so while Argas keeps watch in the corridor Kingsthorpe searches his room on the third floor. There's very little in the way of occult paraphernalia - a lump of cloudy quartz that might be used for scrying or might just be a paperweight, but no odd books or anything of that sort.

Kingsthorpe and Argas repair to Scotland Yard, where they ask to see the file on Fiske. He's been in England since just before the outbreak of war; he is an insurance agent for an American company, and has kept postponing his return to the USA, perhaps in consideration of the vulnerability of shipping in the Atlantic. He makes a bit of money on the horses, and doesn't seem to have any particularly dubious contacts.

Kingsthorpe and Argas return to Whitehall, pick up Nordmann and Matthews, and head to Hornchurch to talk with Alexander, who's very much tied up with anti-bomber missions. Kingsthorpe proposes getting Alexander to strafe the boat once it's located, but Alexander reckons that someone more used to patrolling in that sector would be a better bet; he refers them to Squadron Leader Henshaw at Coastal Command.

They go to Southampton, arriving just as the desk officers are leaving for the day. They do get a chance to talk with some of the pilots who are preparing for night patrols. They spend the night nearby.

Friday, 30 August 1940

Henshaw is available in the morning, and reckons that if this hypothetical boat is off the English coast, there should be no problem; if it's off the German coast, that will be rather more difficult, as Coastal Command's aircraft aren't exactly the newest or most agile. Perhaps a torpedo boat might be a more appropriate?

The group returns to London, where Kingsthorpe consults Captain Knight. Knight has been trying to get the Bureau's remote viewers to see where preparations are being made, but there's a very large-scale magical blackout on the French coast.

Kingsthorpe decides to talk to Fiske to see if he can get any further information out of him; Argas goes along for backup. Fiske is quite happy to talk, in between working his way through the Dorchester's whisky reserves. He doesn't have control over what he "sees", and he doesn't understand it well, but he's quite sure that Kingsthorpe would have been under the building when it came down. He's seen other magicians, when he was living in the USA; the German felt rather more powerful than them. All he can add is a rough description, and that this German seemed very pale.

Kingsthorpe spends the rest of the day making up a Luck charm for Alexander, and gets it sent up to Hornchurch by the next courier.

Saturday, 31 August 1940

The team digs through the Bureau's scanty records on German occultists from before the war started, and going by Fiske's description it seems likely that their target is one Gerlach Essig, who was generally reclusive but shows up occasionally on occult society membership lists.

Alexander gets the feeling that there's something odd about recent weather patterns in the Channel, and this is confirmed with the Met. Office: the last few days have been alternating better and worse weather than usual for the time of year. It's not conclusive, but it's certainly indicative; Nordmann feels that it's definitely not from natural causes.

Kingsthorpe attempts to locate Essig (armed with name and description), but is unable to penetrate the veil over the Continent.

The team develops a plan to put Kingsthorpe and Nordmann on a Sunderland, to plot the location of the mage, while Argas and Matthews are on an MTB and Alexander provides top cover.

Sunday, 1 September 1940

On Sunday, the weather is much worse, continuing the pattern. Kingsthorpe borrows a Fairmile B and crew from the Navy at Dover, and brings along Nordmann, Argas and Matthews. They head out into the channel, and Nordmann attempts to use his ability to detect oddities in weather patterns to locate the centre of the effect, pinning it down to somewhere between Calais and Boulogne.

As they head towards the French coast, they find that there's a substantial growth of water-weed, which forces them to reduce speed. Fortunately there's a very low cloud base, and they're not spotted from the air, though there are occasional sounds of aerial combat overhead. The cloud-base gets lower as they progress east, and it's soon foggy at the water's surface.

The Fairmile crew spots a German destroyer lying about a mile off the coast, a mile or two to the north of the centre of Nordmann's detection. The consensus seems to be to head back to base and call for the MTBs, but after the call is sent Kingsthorpe gives the order to turn south and see what can be seen. The Fairmile comes in very slowly, until it's possible to see the small boat and its single occupant, a hooded figure who's chanting and making odd gestures. Matthews causes the water-weed to reach up and haul down one side of the boat, and it capsizes readily; the figure goes into the water and doesn't surface, until he causes the weed to push him up again.

He's caught with a boat-hook and hauled aboard the Fairmile, which then makes for England while Argas works on reviving the half-drowned German. (Nordmann tries to heal him more thoroughly, but his magical efforts are strongly resisted.) He's unwilling to talk, but at least appears to be in slightly better shape than von Ettingshausen was (apart from the cocaine withdrawal).

Over the next couple of days the weather starts to settle back to normal (and the German engineers working on trying to make Rhine barges survivable for a Channel crossing in any sea state worse than "millpond" continue to worry).

2.10. Operation Stickleback

[21 March 2009 - "Danger UXM"]

Sunday, 8 September 1940

Last night, in the first really large-scale bombing raid on London, St Katherine Docks were hit. The Engineers found something odd and passed it up the chain, so the team is called in...

As they get through the perimeter, passing the damaged buildings and rubble (on some of which someone has pinned a sign saying "business as usual during alterations"), they see three shored-up pits, each holding one unexploded bomb. Lt Robert Andrews, a painfully young Engineer, points to the odd one: it looks like a standard small German bomb casing, but it has a substantial dent in one side, and it's covered with runic symbols (Kingsthorpe identifies them as the Armanic Thor rune, associated with ruin and destruction). There's some magical presence, but it seems quiescent.

Given these limited assurances, Lt Andrews defuses the bomb, and some of the team take it out to Essex. With magical protection provided by Kingsthorpe, Nordmann disassembles the bomb; it contains a mixture of explosives and cloth bags containing dust of some sort. Matthews believes it to be some sort of disease pathogen, but can't identify it in more detail. The team takes it to the Microbiological Research Establishment at Porton Down, where after some hours it is confirmed to be psittacosis. It certainly can infect humans, but it seems an odd choice for a biological attack.

Back in London, Andrews passes on a report from a fire warden who was on duty when the bombs were falling. He claimed that this particular bomb was falling towards the nearby Tower of London, but then "bounced off the air" and came down in the docks instead. Miss Vane gets Sarge to take a look at the Tower; there's something going on there, but it's very subtle. (The team's superiors claim to know nothing about magical protection on the Tower.)

Monday, 9 September 1940

With all the team back in London, they decide it's time to visit the Tower. Gerlach Essig, the magician captured the previous week off the coast of France, has apparently been asking for them - quite apart from the cocaine withdrawal he's been going through, it seems he's suffering from nightmares of being attacked by ravens. He's in a bad way even though he's in one of the Tower's "quiet cells", ones in which no magic can work. (A little research suggests that these date from the 1500s or so.)

Argas reckons that the combination of psittacosis and the Tower may mean that someone's trying to nobble the ravens. Kingsthorpe speaks with them, but doesn't get much - the food has been a bit off in the last few months, there haven't been any interesting humans about for ages, and the quiet cells "smell funny". (And their current inhabitant is keeping the ravens awake by raving all night.)

Kingsthorpe speaks to the Ravenmaster, Yeoman Warder William Barnett, who's in his sixties; he can't account for anything odd about the food, as it's still coming from the usual sources (Smithfield and other meat markets).

Argas decides to take a look at things overnight, and goes home to sleep for the afternoon. Kingsthorpe visits the British Museum to check up on legends of ravens and the Tower - it was first written down by the Victorians, but there's some suggestion that the idea of the birds' being essential to the Tower's survival is an older one in oral tradition.

That evening, Argas sneaks in invisibly and keeps an eye on the ravens' feeding; he can't spot anything odd. He remains inside the Tower overnight.

Tuesday, 10 September 1940

Matthews runs background checks on the Yeoman Warders and their families. Alexander and Miss Vane speak with Barnett, who is visibly hiding something; under Alexander's influence, eventually backed up with full-on mind control, he admits that he is being blackmailed. His granddaughter, who's a clerk in the Ministry of Food, had some unfortunate friends a few years ago, of the student communist variety... and some of them have been leaning on him to try to poison or drive off the ravens. He gives descriptions of the three men he's seen, and hands over a hip-flask which he says contains the poison. Kingsthorpe analyses it, and confirms that it's a suspension of mercury.

---

Quote: (Alexander) So we stop giving it to them, and hope they don't... croak.

---

The team visits Scotland Yard, but can't identify their targets from descriptions. However, there's a Constable Jones over in Whitechapel who deals with that sort of thing; they head back. Jones (who looks profoundly disreputable) gives them a few places to look, and Argas finds them in The Mariner's Rest - not talking to each other, but all in the same place.

Miss Vane calls the Yard to get them picked up. One leaves, and Argas and Alexander follow him home (to a third-floor flat). The light goes off after a short while, and Argas decides to risk breaking in; the target is wearing headphones and operating a wireless transmitter, and doesn't choose to fight when he's captured.

Barnett identifies him and the other two, and they are taken to be tried as spies (and probably to have their radio fists imitated)...

2.11. Operation Diadem

[25 April 2009]

Wednesday, 11 September 1940

An early morning call goes out: meet at the docks on HMS Maori, bring tropical-weight clothes, briefing to follow.

Italian aircraft have crossed the border into Egypt, and a full-blown invasion cannot be far off. Last night, a radio message was received from Sidney Ericson, an agent in place in Alexandria: it wasn't entirely clear, but did include code groups for "send special assistance" and "likely to affect the course of the war". So special assistance is being sent...

Maori steams to Gibraltar, and refuels there, giving the team some time to pick up spare clothing, then proceeds to Alexandria (where they get the news that the Italians have crossed the border in force, but are so far being held back by the British).

Saturday, 14 September 1940

The local contact is a "trade attache" at the embassy, Thomas Williamson, who formally works for MI6 rather than MI5. His principal job is keeping tabs on the local Axis agents, mostly Germans; he has had only a loose supervisory relationship with Ericson, but does give the address of the antiquities job that he has been keeping as a cover job. As far as he's aware, Ericson's main job has been to listen in on the local anti-government movements, which vary from constitutional reformers to outright anti-British rebels. He arranges rooms in a local hotel.

Alexander has not been in Alexandria for some years, and takes out Miss Vane to paint the town red (and get some decent-quality clothes made up by local tailors). He gets distracted by a local lady at one of the casinos, and having made sure Miss Vane gets safely back to the hotel spends the rest of the night otherwise engaged.

Nordmann, Kingsthorpe and Argas proceed to the shop, which is clearly shuttered and untenanted; Argas heads in to scout it while the other two wait in a nearby cafe. The place has been locked up reasonably well, but he gets in through a barred back door and searches. In the upstairs bed-sitting room is a mummified corpse, sitting in the armchair; some magic is present, but it's not animated. In an ashtray is ash from coding sheets; concealed about the room are a radio and various high-value antiquities, presumably those too good for the general stock downstairs. He removes a gold ibis-head as an exemplar, and returns to the others.

Later in the evening, all three (and Miss Vane) return to the shop to take a more detailed look. Kingsthorpe analyses the magic on the mummified corpse; after some consideration, he thinks it is the residue from a failed attempt to animate a servitor. They recover the other artefacts from the upper room.

Sunday, 15 September 1940

The team returns to the embassy, and Williamson confirms from their photographs of the corpse that it is indeed that of Sidney Ericson. He points them to Fadil abd-al-Muttalib, a local collector of antiqiuties who was one of Ericson's sources in the revolutionary political world.

Kingsthorpe, Alexander and Miss Vane visit Fadil, an overweight and clearly rich man, who is happy to help friends of Mr Ericson's; he tells them about various diggers and dealers with whom he had business, though says that he'd been doing some digging himself recently. On Monday he was very excited about something, but by Tuesday he seemed very low, saying "my career is over" and "they'll never believe me again".

They look around for the diggers at Pompey's pillar, one of the main surviving antiquities and a popular relic-hunting area. They locate Daud, one of Ericson's preferred diggers - he hasn't seen him for several days, but assumed that this was of the new source of items he'd found, which certainly wasn't in this area.

Alexander visits the local museum, and impresses on Dr Jones the need for utter secrecy; he then shows him some of the artifacts. Jones is impressed by their condition; he dates them to the early Dynastic period, and believes that they may have been underwater recently.

The team rejoins, and with Alexander's information takes a boat tour of the Eastern Harbour - much of which covers the older parts of Alexandria, and which has in the past been a good hunting-ground, though it's mostly picked clean now. They speak with Sarwat, who skin-dives for items here, but he certainly hasn't heard of any new or especially interesting finds.

As they take tea in a cafe and consider what to do next, Miss Vane is approached by an elderly Englishwoman wearing a mixture of English and native dress; she seems agitated, and clearly believes she has found a fellow Spiritualist. Miss Vane allows the misunderstanding, and they converse; the lady, Miss Poole, has been suffering from terrible dreams, of Pharaohs rising from the water and killing the townspeople. She wasn't sure quite where this was happening, since it didn't make sense - the old Roman amphitheatre isn't underwater, after all!

Alexander visits the Navy base to investigage possible submarine traffic, and Kingsthorpe talks to the embassy to try to arrange for police support (though it seems that this isn't likely to be easy). The others go to the amphitheatre, and search using magical detections; they're soon joined by Kingsthorpe and Alexander. There's a trace of magic in a cleft under a wall, which seems large enough to get down.

Argas goes down first, winding his way through a fairly tight passage, and comes out into what's clearly a ritual space, thickly decorated with gold statuary; there's a definite jackal motif about it. The others follow him down, though Alexander (who's still unable to move well following his brush with death some time ago, in spite of Nordmann's efforts) stays on guard at the surface. There are several exits, which seem to lead further onward and downward; they explore down the largest of these, passing some high-powered pumps and following canvas pipes into the depths of the earth and eventually down to a pool of water that blocks the passage.

It is Alexander, therefore, who hears the barking of jackals; three of them run towards him, biting (with strangely-glowing fangs) and clawing. He shoots one of them; then two humans turn up, dressed in local robes and holding Thompson guns. They get ready to shoot Alexander (who's still dealing with the jackals), but the larger appears to recognise him - they have a hurried conversation on Arabic, including the words "Talons of the Sphinx", and he draws a large sword. Alexander draws his own swordstick, and they fight, recreating the scene from the film that Alexander made here a few years ago. Alas for him, it doesn't end the same way, as the big man gets a solid blow in to Alexander, who's already weakened from the jackal-bites and loses consciousness.

The team inside has heard the gunshots, and Sarge confirms two jackals coming in. Nordmann kills the first one, getting badly bitten in the process and falling down; Kingsthorpe shoots the second.

With a certain amount of wriggling and rearrangement, Argas sneaks invisibly up the passage, and finds the two Egyptians with Thompson guns laying an ambush in the ritual chamber. He kills one of them and badly wounds the other, then heads outside, to find Fadil and a woman in the process of picking up Alexander's body. He has the drop on them, but Fadil still tries to out-draw him - unsuccessfully. The woman is gesturing strangely, so (bearing in mind the rules that apply to magical engagements) he shoots her too; a crackle of electricity plays around her fingers as she falls.

She's carrying a bulky gold amulet that's clearly magical, as well as a number of other items that are not. The amulet seems to be hollow, and contains an oddly-shaped lobed cavity, as well as what seems to be a magnet in the middle.

Kingthorpe gives Nordmann some basic healing to get him back on his feet (and deal with the poison from the jackal's bites); Nordmann heals Alexander.

Monday, 16 September 1940

The temple is to be recorded in detail, then stripped to be shipped back to England when conditions permit. The surviving cultists are interrogated; the woman turns out to be Alexander's companion from the first night. They are engaged in an attempt to overthrow the constitutional government by magical means, intending to replace it with an absolute rule (and one rather less friendly to Britain). They have been using a combination of magic and technical means to plunder the early-dynastic cache they detected under the harbour.

When the Navy divers are called in to deal with the cache, one of them recognises the design of the "amulet" and passes word up the chain of command - "tell Sir Henry to forget everything he knows about Number Twelve".

2.12. Operation Scrimshaw

[16 May 2009]

Wednesday, 18 September 1940

Williamson has received a report from a Long Range Patrol unit: in one of the villages near the Italian front lines at Sidi Barrani, there seems to be construction going on, specifically a Roman-style temple. The LRP unit had more militarily important targets for their explosives, so they left it alone. On the basis that Williamson doesn't understand what it might be for, and the team deals with things he doesn't understand, he'd like them to take a look at it.

Argas borrows a Lewis gun from the Navy, just in case, and Alexander hastily obtains a set of native-style robes. The flight to Mersa Matruh, aboard a Bombay carrying supplies, is uneventful, and the team is introduced to Lieutenant Parmenter of the Long Range Patrol. He takes them in a 30cwt Chevrolet truck through the Italian lines after dark, and parks up behind a sand dune about half a mile from the site. Even from here, Matthews can identify the smell of camels.

There is a small force of native cavalry, and a platoon or so of Italian infantry, camped out by the village, as well as one armoured car and one staff-type car without insignia. The temple is very obvious, and clearly quite close to completion. Argas sneaks round to the side of the encampment and investigates more closely. There are two one-person tents in the middle of the Italian encampment which seem to be guarded to prevent people from getting out, though there are no lights showing or sounds of conversation from them. The temple seems to be entirely new construction, slabs of marble cladding on a steel framework.

Argas approaches the prisoners' tents more closely, and detects a smell of very strong and cheap tobacco.

It is decided that, whatever the Italians are up to, it's probably worth stopping. Parmenter can bring his patrol back on the following night, half of it going to set fire to the ammunition dump at the next strongpoint, with the other half available for support here. He takes all the team apart from Argas and Major Kingsthorpe back to Mersa Matruh.

Thursday, 19 September 1940

Alexander arranges to borrow a Blenheim and bombardier for the coming evening's festivities. He'll also get a Gladiator for escort (there's only one Hurricane in the whole of Egypt, and it's needed elsewhere), flown by the local top ace, one "Pat" Pattle. (He and Alexander engage in some kill-measuring, though the fact that all Pat's have been scored in Gladiators counts very much in his favour.)

Matthews heads out in an LRP car with several small bags of gold, in an attempt to find locals who will be prepared to help with the attack. Nordmann arranges for some desert camouflage clothing, and manages to scavenge a Holland & Holland rifle the previous owner of which has no further need for it.

During the day, Major Kingsthorpe and Argas keep an eye on the site. There are definitely two prisoners, one man (probably local) and one woman (possibly European, but very tanned from long exposure to desert sun); they're being guarded, but also apparently being consulted on the construction. A junior officer visits during the morning; it seems to be substantially his project, judging by the amount of shouting he's doing.

Shortly after the lunch break, two trucks arrive with goats on board; they're unloaded into the animal pens near the outdoor altar-block.

Around two hours after sunset, once Nordmann and Miss Vane have returned, a much more senior Italian officer arrives, accompanied by the junior officer from earlier in the day. The latter begins what is clearly a long and complex ritual.

Nordmann takes careful aim with his rifle and shoots the senior officer, wounding him in the shoulder. Argas, having been sneaking up to the site, shoots the magician (whom he reckons is definitely doing something necromantic) twice in the back. Both of them go down.

About this time, with a rumble of hooves, Matthews appears, leading his scratch local force (who are especially enthusiastic once they realise that the natives working for the Italians are Libyan Bedu).

The senior officer is hustled by his aide into his staff car, which departs at speed. Argas encourages the prisoners, who have their hands tied but not their feet, to run for the dunes, then grabs the papers that the adept was working from (he's rapidly bleeding out).

Kingsthorpe and Miss Vane, meanwhile, have been taking tea and getting ready to receive the escaped prisoners. He asks Lieutenant Parmenter to head out to capture the Italian senior officer. Around this time, Alexander comes in with his Blenheim, scoring a direct hit on the temple with bombs and strafing the Italian troops. Nordmann gets closer and keeps firing.

A smaller bomb catches the staff car, but it keeps going, albeit on fire. Alexander is forced to break off pursuit when he realises he's overstressing his aircraft - and the Italian CR.42s (and light tanks) are starting to come up from Sidi Barrani.

The team, with the two escaped prisoners, heads back to Mersa Matruh. The two turn out to be archaeologists, Dr Paola Vercesi and Jibril abd-el-Rahim, who had been out of touch in the desert until they were captured by the Italians. Apparently they were the closest thing available to experts on Roman antiquity. They ask whether anything has been heard of their leader, Professor Domingues, a Brazilian who was captured at the same time; Kingsthorpe makes sure a note will be sent to the Brazilian Embassy.

The magician's notes, in classical Latin, suggest that while he had told his superiors he was going to strengthen and protect the Italian troops, he was in fact attempting to summon the shade of Italo Balbo (shot down a few months ago by his own side's anti-aircraft gunners) to take possession of Marshal Graziani, the senior officer who got away. Balbo was noted for rather more flair and less caution than Graziani has been displaying in the attack so far.

Rumours will be spread that the attack was aimed at Graziani, his schedule having been leaked by a spy in his headquarters.

2.13. Operation Sexton

[22 August 2009]

Saturday, 21 September 1940

After a day of rest, a cipher message arrives from London for Major Kingsthorpe. It seems that "an Allied operative inside the Italian Navy" has passed on information regarding the Italian bombing campaign against Palestine, specifically the oil refinery and port at Haifa - reports are being sent from within the town (and relayed by Italian ships) regarding the movement of assets, deception operations, and so on. Local agents have been trying to track them down, with no luck: they are unable to intercept radio messages or find any trace at all. The administrative section these spies seem to be dealing with is the same as that of the flamen who was working out of Sidi Barrani, so a destroyer will take the team to Palestine... The cover for the benefit of local agents is that this is thought to be a particular faction within SIM (Italian military intelligence) with which the team has dealt before (this is even technically true).

Sunday, 22 September 1940

The team is met by Major Baldwin, who advises them to try not to look British - there are plenty of locals, both Jews and Arabs, who don't like them. He has arranged hotel rooms and a secured room at the Consulate for their use; he's clearly not happy to have had to call in outside help, but his own resources are limited. The team studies the layout of the town and catches up on details; Baldwin has had direction finders out, but they haven't caught any illicit radio transmitters.

Miss Vane calls Sarge to search for signs of active magic or spirits; he can't spot anything out of the ordinary.

Alexander talks to the police to find out who's in charge of the underworld of Haifa; the answer seems to be a man called Siraj, who's essentially apolitical. Alexander visits his coffee shop and observes.

Kingsthorpe tries to track down local occultists, starting by with the antiquarian booksellers (working out likely prospects and then having long and philosophical conversations with them). He gets the impression that if there are serious magicians in Haifa they're staying well hidden.

At around dusk, most of the team (except Matthews) suffer sudden blinding headaches; Alexander is particularly badly affected, having to leave the cafe rather than making contact with Siraj. It is clearly some sort of magical effect; it lasts for around thirty seconds, then stops just as suddenly. To Alexander it feels like trying to listen to an aircraft radio during a thunderstorm. Sarge tries to pin down the location; it's somewhere near the Technion university, he thinks.

Alexander goes out that night looking for trouble (and finding it, though nothing he can't handle). Kingsthorpe, Matthews and Miss Vane visit a variety of cafes near the university, looking for anything unusual; they spot it, in the form of a young and painfully thin man being fed a large quantity of honeyed pastries and other foods by his friends. Asking about a little reveals that he's "one of those students" and comes in nearly every night.

Matthews listens to conversations nearby - there's a fair bit of political talk, which could be considered borderline subversive, but their target doesn't seem to be involved in it (he's discussing engineering and women with his friends, with similar lack of knowledge of both). Sarge establishes that his name is Tamir, and follows him back to his shared flat.

At the Consulate, Baldwin doesn't have a file on Tamir, but is certianly prepared to open one. He mentions that the RAF have been out looking for the Italian ships that must be lurking off the coast to relay signals, but with no luck. "They've never been as good as they were in the early days, like the time they wiped out the Turks at Megiddo." A little conversation with Kingsthorpe reveals that they have differing memories: Baldwin claims to have seen the RAF destroy by bombing the Turkish Seventh Army in Wadi Fara (in 1918), while Kingsthorpe regards that as a cover story because the Turks were actually destroyed by an earthquake caused by Allenby's staff adepts (something of an open secret in the British occult community). Allenby was offered the title of "Viscount Armageddon", but felt that it would play too much into the hands of the millennialists; he took Viscount Megiddo instead.

Monday, 23 September 1940

A little before dawn, Alexander goes out to have a word with Tamir. The blinding headache strikes him (and the rest of the team) again; once it's passed, he knocks on the flat door and asks for Tamir. Whoever's inside speaks very little English; Alexander takes control of his mind and gets him to open the door. There's a crunching sound from the back of the flat, and Tamir emerges at the other end of the hall, clearly in a panic. Alexander trips him with his cane, but he pays little attention, just trying to scramble up and keep going. Smashing through the doorway behind him comes a massive grey human figure, wielding a pair of sub-machineguns. Alexander, familiar with Hollywood folklore, recognises it as a golem (though it has no writing on its forehead).

Alexander allows Tamir to pull him out of the building and takes control of his mind, telling him to go to the Consulate. They try to get away together - but Alexander still moves slowly thanks to his leg injuries, and he takes a couple of bullets and goes down.

Kingsthorpe meanwhile has been reading up on the Battle of Megiddo; the histories here describe the RAF's attack, but that's more or less what he'd expect from the cover story. He's informed of a madman banging on the Consulate gates, and gets the team together. After hearing Tamir's somewhat incoherent story, he goes with Nordmann to the site (also calling for an ambulance), while Matthews and Miss Vane talk to Tamir to try to get his story into some sort of order.

Alexander is unconscious, and without his wallet. Kingsthorpe fixes him up while waiting for the ambulance; once he's been stabilised (and before he's taken away), Nordmann drums for a while and repairs the worst of the damage. Alexander persuades the ambulance crew to take him back to the Consulate rather than to hospital.

Kingsthorpe and Matthews search the flat; there are no signs of occult paraphernalia, apart from a very basic book on spiritualism which has clearly been read once and then discarded in a corner.

Tamir is still in shock, and quite prepared to talk. A few months ago he was riding back from visiting his family, and something happened; he's not sure what, but the next thing he knew he was lying on the sand and being woken by his donkey. Over the next few days, he found that he could talk to people at a distance in his head; he made contact with someone called "Julius", who seemed similarly anti-British (in Tamir's case, because the British aren't restricting Jewish immigration or stopping them from taking over Arab land), and has been passing on information since then.

Alexander talks to the RAF attaché to find out where he'd most like the Italian bombers to come in; he then arranges with Tamir to feed this false target information to them. Kingsthorpe sends a coded cable to JFC Fuller at Sandhurst, asking him for a summary of the battle of Megiddo to see which version he remembers.

The place where something happened to Tamir is very close to the crossroads at Megiddo, only about thirty miles away, and the team takes a car out there. They all spot a very strong magical shimmer off the side of the road, and as they get closer they can see that the foot- and hoof-prints tend to avoid it. Throwing a stone through the shimmer doesn't seem to make any difference, but when Alexander pokes it with his sword-cane it collapses, revealing a scorched but basically mundane document folder lying on a circle of blackened sand. It's labelled in Latin written in Enochian script, which Kingsthorpe can read: "Read this at once. Only you can prevent the poisoning of the world."

The paper inside is very fragile and prone to crumble; its contents are typed in English. It's about forty double-sided and closely-spaced pages, giving a concise history of the world (written in the future tense) from about 1910 (and it's accurate as far as they can tell) to 1960, with some particular emphases: there's very little mention of magic, but some excursion on (the carefully-explained ideas of) atomic power and atomic weapons. Both of these, it seems, are intrinsically inimical to magic and magicians; the startup of the Chicago pile in December 1942, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, will kill magicians all over the world. The other major emphasis is on the decline of Britain and the rise of two atomic-armed powers, the USA and the USSR, and the damage they both do to Europe.

The document goes into some detail as to how Britain can avoid being damaged by the Great War, implying that perhaps this is not the time at which it was intended to be read.

There's enough detail for an immediate prediction: according to the document, Vichy French forces will bomb Gibraltar for the first time tomorrow night.

The team drives back to their hotel; Alexander sends a cable to Gibraltar (citing "intelligence sources") warning the air defence crews to be on particular alert tomorrow night.

Around dusk, Tamir is planning to send the deceptive information; in case the golem returns, the team sets up an ambush in the military prison (Nordmann with his H&H rifle, Alexander with his Bren, Matthews with grenades). A few minutes after Tamir sends his message (with accompanying headaches again for all the team except Matthews), there's shouting from the front gate; it seems that the golem was pushed out of a car and is smashing its way towards Tamir. (He is got out of the way; the golem keeps heading for the same place.) As the golem comes down a corridor, the ambush is sprung; Nordmann and Alexander damage it, but not enough to slow it down, and it returns fire with its sub-machineguns, injuring Nordmann. The grenades finish it off, though, with fired clay fragments scattering throughout the corridor.

Alexander finds the nearest rabbi, Mordecai, and describes in roundabout terms what's been going on; he asks to see the head of the most conservative faction.

A cable comes back from Fuller; his analysis includes the earthquake.

Kingsthorpe and Miss Vane work to transcribe the document before it crumbles completely; they photograph as many pages as they can, particularly the signatures on the last page (Maxwell Knight, JFC Fuller, Julius Evola, Karl Spiesberger, TC Lethbridge, Hellmut Wolff). Kingsthorpe knows the first two signatures, and they look too unlike the ones he's met to be competent forgeries.

Tuesday, 24 September 1940

Alexander goes to see Elihu ben Yaron, and with a lot of coded talk about "noise being made" and "young hotheads" he believes they have reached an accommodation.

While the team has not yet decided just who should be shown this document, getting it back to London seems to be a priority, so Kingsthorpe throws his rank around a little to get space on a destroyer heading home.

2.14. Interlude in Gibraltar

[26 September 2009]

Some discussion of what to do with the document ensues; the consensus seems to be that it should at the very least be shown to Captain Knight. Preventing the development of atomic power and weapons seems likely to be a significant challenge, and may not even be worth doing, if the number of magicians killed is less than the number of lives saved by its availability in the war with Japan...

Argas and Miss Vane make themselves useful aboard - the former with manual labour, the latter in the galley.

Thursday, 26 September 1940

The destroyer arrives in Gibraltar to refuel, and the team is given quarters in the evacuated town overnight. Kingsthorpe borrows the Intelligence people's photographic equipment to make some more copies of the document, while Argas and Miss Vane go about getting hold of some better-quality food supplies.

(The players of Alexander and Nordmann were unable to make this session; they were clearly off at the RAF station on the island.)

Kingsthorpe runs into an old colleague from Sandhurst, (now) Colonel Banfield - he's a bit of a plodder, but seems to have done all right fr himself. Over brandy, Banfield explains that he's here as an advance party for the Engineers who are arriving next month to dig a host of new tunnels in the Rock; after a few more drinks, he asks the Major whether he's ever heard of mice getting at explosive detonators. It's happened to him in his last few postings...

Kingsthorpe returns to the others. Miss Vane summons Sarge, who says that there are definitely spirits in Banfield's vicinity, possibly held there by magic. The team inspects the explosive store - there's no sign of mouse-droppings, and the metal boxes in which the detonators are stored are still intact. It's only the items themselves that have been gnawed.

More discussion with Banfield reveals that he went on a trip to the Maginot forts in June of 1939 - semi-officially, his commission was being reactivated but wasn't yet in force - and the problem seems to have been dogging him since then.

Matthews and Miss Vane set up to spend the night in the explosives store: Sarge will tell Miss Vane about the spirits if and when they arrive, and Matthews will attempt to control them with his yogic powers. Meanwhile, Kingsthorpe arranges to sleep on Banfield's sofa, and pleads an early start; once Banfield has retired, he sets up a cleansing ritual, directly below Banfield's bed.

The spirits appear - they seem to be spirit-mice. Matthews commands them to go north and a little east, towards the Spanish mainland; they set off that way, but are thrown back by some other force. When Kingsthorpe's ritual takes effect, they are able to go on their way.

Friday, 27 September 1940

The team returns to their ship, but it seems that the oil taken on overnight was contaminated - the burners will have to be disassembled, cleaned and checked, and this will take a few days. This must have happened in the twenty-four hours leading up to the ship's arrival last night; Kingsthorpe and Sarge look for signs of magical influence on the oil, but it seems that it's just had a lot of a heavier fraction added. There's some muttering from the base personnel that perhaps the accident to a shell hoist on Thursday morning wasn't really an accident either - a rail broke and some shells were damaged, but nobody was hurt.

Kingsthorpe sends a ciphered message to London, hinting at problems following Banfield around and suggesting that investigation of other people who've visited the Maginot Line might be worth trying.

The team decides to look at the caves in the Rock, and so is fairly close by when someone in the hospital (in the upper part of St Michael's cave) finds that someone's broken into the drugs store and the supply of sulpha drugs has been severely damaged. MPs are sent to secure the place; Argas sees that the store has been crowbarred open, but reckons that someone acting quietly could have done it if he'd been able to avoid being seen or heard by the personnel on tidy.

Kingsthorpe speaks to the Provost Marshal and arranges that his team should have appropriate passes in case they're challenged while investigating. There don't seem to be any more relevant incidents in the recent past.

Argas checks Banfield and finds no trace of magic on him. That evening, the team splits up to keep an eye on likely targets - Argas and Kingsthorpe looking at the harbour, Matthews and Miss Vane roaming. They don't spot anything.

Saturday, 28 September 1940

In the morning, it turns out that the crew of one of the anti-aircraft posts was murdered during the night - each of them stabbed. Argas looks at the scene and spots some tracks of bare human feet outside the gun-nest. Sarge talks to the recently-dead spirits, and finds that each of the gunners was killed by a single stab in the lower back; none of them saw anyone, though one of them fired his pistol blindly.

Argas widens his search, and finds some disturbed vegetation; he and Matthews establish that it had something sodden with salt-water put down on it around the time of the murders. Miss Vane finds some scrapes on the sea-wall at the south end of the harbour which might indicate someone's having climbed out of the sea there. Kingsthorpe scans out across the bay to Algeciras, but doesn't spot anything unexpected.

That night, the whole team sets up in a sentry box with a good view of that end of the harbour, except for Argas, who's invisible closer to the point Miss Vane spotted. Around 1am, he and Matthews see a disturbance in the water; it's hard to make out the form itself, but Argas closes in, planning to capture it. Matthews has a good shot and takes it, and the figure goes down. It seems to be human, though his skin is coloured to match the quayside he's been crossing. He's dressed in a basic breechclout, and is carrying a long narrow blade that matches the wounds on the gunners. He's carried to the temporary quarters, and the local Intelligence officers are asked to recommend whichever medic they regard as most close-mouthed; the intruder is patched up. Kingsthorpe dispels his camouflage, and he's handcuffed to the bed.

Sunday, 29 September 1940

In the morning, he wakes; he tries to stick (in Italian) to name (Isidoro Paluzzi), rank and serial number but this doesn't last very long in the face of the evidence of what he's been up to. It's decided to take him back to England; en route, after it's become clear that he needs to be immersed in sea water at least once a day, he reveals that he was the one of several hundred people put through a big magical ritual who survived; he gained his chamaeleon skin and the ability to breathe water, but sadly not an appreciation of espionage or sabotage tactics. He's been sleeping underwater in the harbour.

2.15. Operation Forethought

["Hellish Eleanor"]

[10 October 2009]

Monday, 30 September 1940

The destroyer reaches London late on Monday night, and the characters disperse to their various homes and lodgings.

Tuesday, 1 October 1940

They foregather at headquarters, and present their reports to Captain Knight. He is, to say the least, concerned. It's clear to him that the existence of the document can't go any further up the chain of command (i.e. to non-magicians and non-believers in magic), though perhaps some of its contents can. (There's also a concern that as the information in it is used, the remainder may become less accurate, as events no longer have their causes to follow.) Knight agrees that the signature looks somewhat like his, though if it's a forgery it's a lousy job; the same goes for Fuller's.

There's some discussion of the possibility of assassinating Enrico Fermi, who's currently working in Chicago. The possibility of suppressing the magical-radioactive effects, or shielding magicians against them, is also considered; it's concluded that the team needs to talk with a physicist who's sufficiently open-minded to be cleared for magic. Perhaps someone working with Frisch and Peierls in Birmingham, or with the Paris Group at Cambridge, could be brought in?

Meanwhile, thinking of things that shouldn't be known in advance: Mrs Jane Draper, of Croydon, was widowed on the night of 31 August; her husband was aboard HMS Ivanhoe. The information concerning casualties aboard Ivanhoe wasn't released even to relatives until 10 September, but on 3 September one of her co-workers at the shell factory where she's employed heard her talking about it. (The co-worker's report has been working its way through police channels since.)

During the day, Alexander, Nordmann and Argas visit Holland & Holland, first to obtain more ammunition for the salvaged rifle but also to get some of their other weapons upgraded; this will take a while.

Miss Vane, in ATS uniform, visits Mrs Draper at home that evening. Clearly there isn't a lot of money available, but the house seems reasonably well-kept-up. Mrs Draper is wearing blacks, but talks with Miss Vane; "it'll seem silly, but I went to a seance on the Monday night, and the spirit said that there'd been an accident to Ivanhoe, and I just knew my husband was dead".

Mrs Draper is not of great intelligence, and "didn't tell anyone important" about the news she'd had; she clearly doesn't make the connection between such news and the war effort. Miss Vane does extract from her the location of the seance she attended; it's in Bayswater.

Wednesday, 2 October 1940

Miss Vane does a bit of digging; these seances have become quite popular, and it's since she left London early in September. She arranges to attend the one that's happening that evening.

There seem to be three women running the thing - Mrs Parnell, who's clearly in charge, Mrs Andrews, a countrywoman who spends most of her time cooking and making tea, and Mrs Siudek, a Polish exile. They take a "charitable donation" and provide a meal (mostly vegetables, excessively boiled, but quite a lot of them) before the seance itself.

Miss Vane, who's had some exposure to Spiritualists before, has a pretty good idea of how a seance should go, and this one follows the pattern; Sarge reports no sign of magical activity or other spirits in the area, and the effects are most probably a combination of sleight-of-hand (table-tapping and rocking) and cold-reading of the other guests. Mrs Parnell expresses regret that the spirits could not be persuaded to use the talking-board; apparently this is quite a usual thing.

Thursday, 3 October 1940

Argas checks the area; he doesn't find any sign of magical activity. The team looks up Mrs Siudek; she claims to have fled from Poland in 1939 with her husband, and showed up at Dover. It's not really possible to check her story. Her husband, Andrzej, works as an aircraft-fitter at one of the bases in Kent; Alexander drives over to talk with him, and finds that far from having Nazi or Communist sympathies he has a fanatical hatred of both Germans and Russians.

Friday, 4 October 1940

Miss Vane returns to the next seance; this time the talking-board comes out, and (when asked "is there any news of the war") it spells out R-A-I-N-B-O-W - it transpires that "the spirits" think this is the name of a ship that's been sunk. Miss Vane calls on Sarge to disrupt matters, throwing the table about, to distract the guests. Afterwards she calls for checks on all three of the people running seances. (HMS Rainbow, an R-class submarine, has indeed been sunk, overrun - perhaps accidentally - by an Italian merchant ship.)

Mrs Parnell was widowed in the Great War and has been keeping the boarding-house for several years. Mrs Andrews is from Devon; her husband, in the merchant navy, was killed last year.

Monday, 7 October 1940

Argas goes to the seance, asking about news of his son; it seems to him like more cold-reading. What is genuine news is the German invasion of (or assistance to) Romania, which comes over the radio a few minutes later. The air raid siren goes during the seance, and they all spend some time in the house's Anderson shelter (noting the well-stocked garden); Argas talks with Mrs Parnell about spiritualism, and finds her well-read.

Tuesday, 8 October 1940

During Tuesday night's air raid, Argas and Matthews break into the house while the inhabitants are in the shelter. Argas searches the rooms: in Mrs Parnell's, he finds a great many books on spiritualism, including some (slightly hidden) which hint at using one's abilities for personal gain - though they're still claiming that the whole thing is genuine. In Mrs Siudek's room, he spots some scrape marks and lifts a floorboard to find a leather bag containing Polish gold coins, which at the very least should have been declared on entry. Mrs Andrews' room contains cookery books, largely unused. The final room belongs to the fourth occupant of the house, Miss Sibbett, who's concealing a supply of eggs (there are no chickens in the garden, so possibly they were obtained on the black market); Argas also finds some old medals, possibly Indian. There's an attic space, with cobwebs in the hatch-corners which haven't recently been disturbed and no ladder immediately to hand. Argas detects no magic anywhere in the house.

Matthews meanwhile checks the garden; it's well-tended, but he can't find any sign of unusual influence or of anything buried there.

Wednesday, 9 October 1940

Argas talks with Miss Vane about the spiritualist books; some of the authors he spotted have been comprehensively discredited since. Alexander arranges for Special Branch to help raid the place on Friday evening.

That evening, Nordmann and Matthews visit the seance; Nordmann uses his silencing powers to muffle all sounds, and Mrs Parnell plays up to this. They find out afterwards that they missed the air-raid siren.

Friday, 11 October 1940

Alexander visits the seance; there's much fluttering from the ladies present, though Mrs Siudek seems to take a dislike to him on the spot. The "news from the war" is that the Germans are making preparations to invade England almost at once. Alexander blows his police whistle, and everyone present is hauled off to the station.

The three ladies are interrogated separately. Miss Sibbett has no idea what's going on, and admits to having bought the eggs illegally. Mrs Andrews cheerfully admits to having faked the lot, since it's all a lot of nonsense but a good racket.

---

Quote: (Major Kingsthorpe) We'd beat you with a rubber hose but judging by your vegetables you'd probably enjoy it.

---

Mrs Siudek, confronted with the gold, breaks down, but she's a true believer in Mrs Parnell's talent.

Mrs Parnell herself seems to believe in her own talent too; Miss Vane says that, as a medium herself, she detected no spirits, and Mrs Parnell says that they must have been on a different "etheric frequency".

Argas strips the sitting-room where the seances have taken place; he finds a mark under one of the table-legs where a stone has been inserted to make it easier to rock, and locates the stone itself kicked under a dresser. Kingsthorpe scans the room and detects no sign of magic at all; Argas checks the house's fuse-box, and finds a crude clockwork device that could make the lights flicker.

Both the stone and the clockwork are presented to Mrs Parnell, who breaks down - she'd been trying to contact spirits for a long time, and had so much success once Mrs Andrews moved in.

Andrews claims that she simply made up the messages she faked; the team starts to think she may have some latent remote-viewing ability. Alexander and Miss Vane get her to write down a random thing that she's made up (HMS Hood being sunk by an air raid), which has not happened.

Saturday, 12 October 1940

On the basis that something about the seance setup might set off Mrs Andrews' latent talent, the stripped room is recreated at MI5 headquarters. The team would like Mrs Parnell to lead it, but while she's willing they don't think she'll be able to carry it off now that she knows that it was (at least mostly) faked.

Miss Vane presides at a seance as thoroughly observed as can be managed: nobody spots any sign of spirit or magical activity. Mrs Andrews says that Southampton has been sunk (not true).

Mrs Andrews will be prosecuted for fraud; the others will be let go, and Mrs Siudek found a new place to lodge, though the local police will be asked to keep eyes on them. It's still not clear whether her information was genuinely fortuitous or the subject of some mechanism still unclear...

2.16. Operation Headache

[7 November 2009]

Monday, 14 October 1940

After a rare day off, the team is called into Captain Knight's office for a new job. It seems that in the last couple of weeks German bombing has got a lot more accurate, and it's thought that their navigation has improved; Farnborough has been looking at captured aircraft, and the team should head down there and see what they can work out.

Flight Lieutenant Stainer, a navigator who's clearly unhappy to have been taken off bomber duty, is the local liaison; he's not cleared for the details of what the team does, but he's used to being tight-lipped. He explains that the Germans have been using a couple of radio-based systems for navigation, one fairly simple and one rather more complex; the guidance beams for those can be detected, and measures are being taken to stop them working. Whatever this new system is, it's not using detectable radio beams. They're still using pathfinders, so presumably not all their aircraft have been fitted with the system.

The team looks at the wreckage of one of the KGr100 pathfinder He111s that was forced to land a few days ago after a raid on Manchester - its fuel tanks were shot up, and the pilot put it down in a field in Warwickshire. (The crew were picked up about half an hour later by a Home Guard unit; they'd burned their maps, but made no effort to resist capture.) There's no sign of anything magical on board, even after thorough examination; Alexander takes Stainer to the mess while unconventional means are being used.

The team heads for the crash site to see whether the recovery teams missed anything. A few hundred yards back from the landing site, Kingsthorpe turns up a small silver swastika pendant that seems faintly magical to him (in fact he only finds it because of this). Argas reckons that one of the sheep that's wandering around is also magical, though Kingsthorpe doesn't agree; nonetheless, it is brought back to Farnborough.

Kingsthorpe secretes himself in the base library to perform a ritual that will allow him to learn more about the pendant; it was made a few months ago, it sometimes gets warm and vibrates, and the user was probably a pilot.

After a while, the sheep (which has been christened "Mutton Chops") passes a second magical pendant, which is cleaned off. Kingsthorpe repeats the ritual, and with a little more difficulty determines that this one was probably used by the navigator (and it doesn't get warm or vibrate for as long as the other). The team theorises that there are two magical beams, set to cross over the target; the pilot flies along one and the navigator releases his flares when the aircraft crosses the other.

Argas goes looking for Stainer, and finds him crouched and trembling round the side of the hangar. It looks to him very much like shell-shock, but it seems awfully sudden, and the medics confirm that he hasn't had any problems before (but that this thing has hit a few other people over the last several months - they think it's some sort of general stress of war work). Kingsthorpe confirms that he's under a curse of some sort, and performs a cleansing ritual. Stainer starts to recover straight away. Argas searches his office and finds a faint magical resonance on a hip-flask, which Stainer says he picked up a few years ago during a trip to Berlin (one of the meetings of aviation enthusiasts that have been common for a while).

Alexander has reported on possibilities, and is asked for more information. He borrows a recently-repaired Wellington and its crew to test the pendants. The pilot's does react, getting warm when it's roughly in the right beam and vibrating when it's on target, but it's still very hard to follow the beam. He is able to spot a formation of He111s coming in, around the same time Chain Home picks them up; he gets a rough bearing on the east-west beam, and a better one on the north-south.

Tuesday, 15 October 1940

The team talks with some of the other "shell-shock" victims; they have indeed all been to Germany on various aviation-related occasions, and have souvenirs. A carefully-worded circular is sent to the RAF medics, suggesting that anyone else who's been on one of these trips should send their souvenirs to MI5; there's a suggestion of long-term drugging.

Kingsthorpe returns to London to make a full report. The others, with Stainer, wait for nightfall and take up a captured and repaired He111 to follow one of the beams as far as can be arranged. Alexander flies, Stainer is navigating, Argas has the belly gun (and both pendants) and Nordmann is on top. It's still tricky to use the pendants, but Argas seems to have more of a knack for it; they join up with a returning group of bombers that's heading in roughly the right direction. The bombers soon turn away from the beam, though, and Alexander continues on. They approach the northern Netherlands, heading towards Grongigen; somewhere aroung Leeuwarden, the beam suddenly cuts out. Alexander turns north to head home.

The radio comes to life, and Alexander spins a yarn of a damaged and lost aircraft. A Bf110 is sent up to escort them to the nearest airfield; they're clearly suspicious. Alexander shuts down one engine to allow a more convincing imitation of a damaged aircraft; when the Bf110 is close enough, showing lights and leading them down, he drifts slowly upwards, restarts the engine, and puts the He111 into a fast dive to give Argas a good shot with the belly guns. Argas rakes the Bf110's cockpit with machine-gun fire, and it crashes into the sea. The team returns to Farnborough.

Wednesday, 16 October 1940

Alexander calls up Hendon and asks for photo reconnaissance of the Leeuwarden area. There's some information already available; as the team pores over the photographs, Kingsthorpe spots a confluence of ley lines with a group of tents placed directly on top of it.

Assuming the second beam is also being sent from close to the coast, Cherbourg is the closest likely point, so photographs from there are checked; there's a similar group of tents in a magically-significant location.

The team puts together a report recommending immediate bombing of these two spots, and gives it to Knight to pass up the chain of command.

2.17. Operation Alchemist

[5 December 2009]

Monday, 21 October 1940

Given some of the contents of the Knight-Fuller-Lethbridge document, the team has decided that talking to some of the British atomic scientists would probably be a good idea. Knight can supply them with rail warrants to Cambridge, since the closest group is working at the Cavendish Laboratory, but after that it'll be up to them.

The chief of security, George Whiskeard, is an MI5 man, but not one of Knight's lot. However, he's clearly exhausted by trying to get scientists to follow basic security procedures, and is glad to see people who (probably) have a better idea of how these things work; he gets one of the scientists, Nicholas Kemmer, to show them around. (Kemmer asks distractedly if they've seen his wallet; Argas checks, and it isn't in his jacket...) They start in Kemmer's half-office, since his room-sharer isn't there just at the moment, and talk in rather more technical detail than Kemmer is expecting about the possibilities of the atomic programme - putting it to him as primarily something they're worried about the Germans developing.

Kemmer explains roughly what the teams have been up to: uranium as a power source obviously has great potential, but the idea of a "super-bomb" some three or more orders of magnitude more powerful than conventional explosives - something which might end the war overnight if detonated in the right place - is getting rather more attention (at least in the UK - the Americans don't seem to accept that it's possible). The Germans started the war with pretty much the same information as the British, and have plenty of good scientists of their own (he names the ones he can remember - Walther Bothe, Kurt Diebner, Otto Hahn and Paul Harteck), so it seems likely that they've got about as far along as the British - further, if Hitler's taken a fancy to the project (much of the equipment here is scavenged up or built by the researchers, since resources haven't had much of a priority).

The team asks about uranium, since that's the primary raw material being looked at; in Europe, the main stockpiles (waste from radium extraction) are in Czechoslovakia and Belgium. It doesn't have any industrial uses beyond the extremely small scale, so if movements of it can be traced they may well be relevant to a power or super-bomb programme. There was also some talk about using heavy water in a power reactor, though the British research programme now regards that as something of a blind alley.

The short- and medium-term health risks of working with radioactive substances are reasonably well-understood by now, but there are some obvoius ways things can go wrong if short-cuts are being taken; Kemmer suggests some illnesses to look for (and key words that would be used in German communications, in case those should be intercepted). All of this information will be passed into the main section of MI5, so that it can be considered in assessing intelligence from other sources.

Kingsthorpe has been doing most of the talking; Argas scans for active magical effects, and finds only one, a fairly small item at some small distance. Kemmer takes the group to see an experiment in the production of one of the recently-discovered elements ("well, what would you call the two elements that come after uranium?"; he's slightly surprised when Miss Vane fills in "neptunium and plutonium"); as they're approaching it, Argas falls in a dead faint, Kingsthorpe feels very ill (as if he had a bad dose of 'flu), and Nordmann and Miss Vane are briefly dizzy. As they take Argas out to fresh air ("he was in the Last Lot, you know"), Miss Vane hears someone inside the lab say "that's very odd..."

Argas and the Major recover quite quickly once they're out in the open. Argas walks round the outside of the Laboratory to pin down the magical signal he detected; the others head back in, to speak to Norman Feather, the physicist who was conducting the experiment. He's friendly enough but rather distracted, clearly trying to come up with a workable theory to explain the very odd observation he's just seen: for about ten seconds, the radiation output of the neutron source he was using dropped to zero, and the current theory says that this essentially cannot happen. (It was just about as the team was approaching the lab...)

There's a pen trace to confirm it, but only one, and an equipment failure is one possibility - but the detector tube itself had stopped clicking. While Nordmann and Miss Vane talk to him, Kingsthorpe tries a basic ritual in the experimental chamber - finding it substantially harder than usual. Miss Vane calls Sarge, and he's very reluctant to enter the chamber - he says it "smells funny", but he can't explain just how. These effects seem to be in something like a ten to fifteen foot radius of the radioactive materials, even though they're in heavily shielded containers and by conventional standards entirely safe to approach.

The team looks around a bit more; Kingsthorpe, guided by Argas' observations, finds the magical item - it's a pocket-watch lying on a desk. As he takes a look at it, someone he hasn't seen before enters and says "oh good, you've found it" - this is Francis Perrin, one of the French scientists who came over from Paris after the fall of France. (He explains that he bought it last year, on a previous visit to Cambridge - it's a reasonable-quality but unremarkable timepiece.)

The team leaves; Argas checks the shop where the watch was bought, and can't detect anything remarkable about it. Kingsthorpe and Miss Vane ask about Perrin; he has lived for most of his life in Paris and hasn't been to Germany at all, certainly not since the war started.

Argas goes back into the lab and picks up Perrin's watch from a bench where he's left it. They all head to a boarding-house, and Kingsthorpe conducts a history ritual - there's nothing odd about the watch's history until a few days ago, when it was in a dark place for a while, then exposed to a strange electrical machine that sparked intensely, then in a dark place again. (There's no sign of damage to the watch case, though it's clearly seen some fairly hard use.) Argas takes a closer look and reckons that the watch is recording everything it "sees" and "hears".

Tuesday, 22 October 1940

When the watch-seller opens, Argas buys another watch of the same model, then goes to a specialised repair place and picks up a set of very small screwdrivers. He starts to transfer the mechanism from Perrin's watch into the new case, but when he removes it the magic dissipates, and does not return when he reassembles it.

The team talks to Whiskeard, on the basis that Perrin may well be recording his research to be passed on to other people. Argas drops off the watch where Perrin can find it. Kemmer sees the team and says gladly that he's found his wallet - though it now has a familiar-looking magical aura on it. Argas tails Kemmer for a few hours, staying away from experimentation; when Kemmer comes out of the first experiment, the wallet is no longer magical. As the team asks around, it seems that quite a few small items have been going missing and then turning up a day or two later; it's being blamed jokingly on "elves".

Wednesday, 23 October 1940

The items that went missing yesterday are back, though during the day their new magic fails when they are brought near radioactive substances. Argas, who's moving most through the labs, finds that he's getting a sense for radioactives - he definitely feels queasy when they're nearby, even if they're shielded. He borrows Kingsthorpe's watch, and arranges to leave it lying around in the hope that it will be taken. It is.

At about 8pm, Kingsthorpe scries for his watch; it's in a dark place, and there's a sound of two people arguing, but the voices aren't clear. At 9.30, he tries again: it's in an electrical machine, which when he describes it sounds very similar to the Russian machine captured at Devonport earlier in the year. At 11pm, it's being pointed around a room by an unfamiliar man, while another unfamiliar man looks on; the man who's holding it appears to be trying to convince the other that the spying effect is working correctly.

Thursday, 24 October 1940

Argas heads in to the Laboratory earlier than usual, and spots one of the cleaners looking around her and then dropping off the watch where it was left yesterday. He follows her away once her work is done; she shops, then goes home and spends the day cooking and cleaning. Kingsthorpe dispels the magical effect on his watch. Nordmann lurks near the cleaner's house, while Argas keeps an eye on her when she turns up for the evening's work at the Laboratory. When she leaves, she makes a telephone call, then bicycles (slowly, and it's quite a short distance) to Trinity College, where someone (the first figure from Kingsthorpe's vision of the previous night) steps out of the porter's lodge, collects an envelope from her, and heads back inside. The cleaner heads home; Argas follows the other figure, invisibly, as he heads back to his rooms. This is Alexander Black, apparently a Fellow; Argas doesn't attempt to follow him into his rooms but lurks nearby for a bit, and after a little while hears some electrical noise as the lights flicker briefly.

Friday, 25 October 1940

Argas goes out early again to trace the collection (an envelope has been left for the cleaner at the porter's lodge of Trinity). Looking up Black in the yearbook shows that he's a senior lecturer in law. At the Laboratory, a man from the Ministry of Supply has turned up - one Simon Dowsett, here to inquire into resource usage (and, he claims, try to get higher priority for the lab if it's important war work). He's the second figure from Kingsthorpe's vision.

Kingsthorpe phones London to see what's known about both Black and Dowsett. Black has been at Trinity for pretty much his whole career; Dowsett was a factory foreman who got pulled into the Ministry when the war broke out; he's pretty clearly anti-fascist, and even went to Spain with the International Brigades in 1937.

Argas follows Dowsett throughout the day; Dowsett has some sort of magical effect active on him, though the details aren't clear. In the afternoon, he's close to an experiment when it's fired up; he falls over, bleeding from the nose, and his suit starts to smoulder. Argas gets him out of the lab and after a quick check decides that he really does need a hospital. The doctors at Addenbrooke's reckon it looks as though he's had a sudden stroke; Nordmann is unable to help him, and it's arranged for him to be transferred to London.

Argas and Kingsthorpe confront Black, naming enough names that he can't get away with the blanket denials that are his first tactic. He caves; he's been an ideological communist for some years, as many people are, but he was contacted by someone who asked if he'd help to do more to further the peaceful socialist cause. He agreed, and was given the machine and some basic training in its use; he's had it for a year or so, and has gradually been getting more proficient at it, but is baffled as to why it's suddenly failing. He's also hauled off.

Kingsthorpe casts a Chaperone ritual onto a lead charm; it successfully jerks him out of the way when an experiment is about to start, but this doesn't seem to bode well for a situation in which radioactivity is rather more pervasive...

2.18. Operation Topsoil

[16 January 2010]

Monday, 28 October 1940

After a weekend off, the team is called in around lunchtime on Monday; it seems that Nicholas Kemmer has been trying to get in contact with them. After some discussion, they agree to meet him; he has been talking with Feather and the others, and he reckons that there's something about this group that affected radioactive substances. Knight expedites some new clearances (many of Kemmer's colleagues, after all, are as foreigners regarded as too unreliable to work on important things like radar so have been shuffled off to the atom project instead).

Meanwhile, Italy has invaded Greece. It's not entirely clear what their strategic goals may be, but their initial progress is very impressive.

Tuesday, 29 October 1940

Once the clearances are done, the group meets Kemmer again; Kingsthorpe talks about old and ill-understood forms of science (carefully avoiding using the word "magic") Argas demonstrates his ability to be unseen.

Kemmer (who seems surprisingly accepting - "I grew up in St Petersburg, I had a grandmother") asks several relevant questions: is the effect on radioactives something they were doing deliberately? Apparently not, and it made them feel unwell too. He wonders what would happen if they got close to a criticality; so do they. Since they obviously can't spare a team member for testing, they consider the Russian machines they've recovered (and the prisoners who at least know how to operate them, even if they don't understand how they're supposed to work); those should be able to produce "magical items" that can then be tested near radioactives. A section of the MI5 cellars is partitioned off to be Kemmer's part-time lab, since this is something he won't be able to talk about even with the other radiation physicists.

Wednesday, 30 October 1940

Meanwhile, there's work to be done: a body's turned up in Bristol, at the City Museum and Art Gallery, apparently burned to death but with no sign of fire damage on anything nearby. The local police punted it upstairs, and the Ministry has passed it on to the funnies.

The team takes a train to Bristol, and on arrival at the museum sees what is clearly an ongoing and acrimonious discussion between the police and a Mrs Campbell, apparently in charge, who wants all this cleared up so that she can open the museum normally. She found the body when she opened the museum this morning; there was no sign of a break-in.

The body is in the Greek Room, and doesn't appear to have been moved; there's enough char that there probably would be signs of this. (There are some traces of footprints from yesterday's visitors, so the place hasn't been cleaned up afterwards either.) Argas detects no magic on it, or in the room. Kingsthorpe photographs the site, while Nordmann goes to check all the potential entrances and exits. Matthews looks at the wooden ceilings and floors, not finding anything concealed behind them, but does spot that the items in one of the display cases have been rearranged to conceal the fact that something's missing. The label for the item is still there: it's a small terracotta head of an (unidentified) veiled goddess, in a style typical of the Eastern Hellenistic Kingdom, probably somewhere near the Hindu Kush. The catalogue is not entirely helpful; the head came as part of a bequest, and its provenance before that it somewhat uncertain.

Kingsthorpe looks at the body; the damage seems consistent with a powerful lightning bolt, though while he's theoretically aware of how this might be done it's more usually something that happens out of doors. One electric light fitting is somewhat melted, though the fuses haven't been blown. There are on the body:

• some melted coins and keys
• the remains of an electric torch
• a long narrow knife strapped by the ankle
• a cheap watch, probably picked up in Egypt or Palestine
• a leather-wrapped shard of pottery with some fragments of Greek writing on it (it's not one of the usual dialects, but seems to say something about Athene striking down the enemies of the Greeks)

Some of his teeth have been filled, not very well.

Nordmann locates a window that has been expertly forced; there's a crowbar tucked under the sill. Some tracking suggests that two people went in, separately, and the second person came out again. Kingsthorpe attempts rituals on various objects on the site, but something about the air of the place isn't right. The crowbar is handed over to the police to check for prints. The items found suggest that the victim might have been a sailor.

Back at the team's hotel, Kingsthorpe examines the history of the label, confirming that it was moved recently. The pot-shard has been in its wrappings for the last twenty-four hours. The police are asked to check the local Greek and Italian communities to see if anyone's gone missing recently, though they don't expect quick results.

Thursday, 31 October 1940

Nobody's shown up as missing straight away. The team returns to the Greek Room, though they allow Mrs Campbell to open the rest of the museum. Matthews checks the will that gave the head (and various other items) to the museum; Jacob Buckler died some ten years ago, and didn't have any living relatives. He asked for certain specific items to be delivered to particular people across the Levant, but gave the remainder of his collection to the museum. Matthews heads over to the University to find out who catalogued it.

Using the descriptive label, Kingsthorpe attempts to locate the missing head; it's in the central areas of the University. Argas gets a map of the University buildings and Kingsthorpe pins it down to the Classics department.

Matthews, talking to the departmental secretary, manages to borrow a photograph of the head. There's nothing in the accession records about the pottery shard, though, and it doesn't look as though it was broken off the head.

The others meet Matthews as he's leaveing the department; they go back to talk to the secretary and find out just who of the academic staff is left; Argas takes an invisible look round the corridors, but doesn't see much activity. Dr Nicholson is the only one here at the moment. They go to see him; Argas reckons that there's certainly something magical in his filing cabinet. They talk about the incident at the museum, though Nicholson professes not to know much; the missing head is certainly not easily saleable, though other items in the museum would be. Nicholson is very clearly uneasy about something; when the group leaves (and Argas lurks behind), he listens to make sure they've gone away, then checks his filing cabinet and makes sure the head is still there.

Nicholson locks the cabinet and leaves at lunchtime; Argas opens it and removes the head. As far as he can tell, it's not something that could be used directly, but rather part of a larger magical effect.

Nicholson gets back from lunch and leaves again a few minutes later. Nordmann follows him, being deliberately obvious, to make him more nervous. Nicholson gets his bicycle; Argas slashes the back tyre as he gets aboard. Nicholson walks the bicycle down into the middle of town, near the city docks; in the crowd, looking around nervously, he patches the tyre, which gives Argas time to steal a bicycle for himself. They ride out of the centre to a suburban house which seems to be Nicholson's home. Argas stays outside; there's no immediate or obvious sound from inside.

After a while, Argas knocks; there's no answer. He knocks again; there's a slight sound from inside, perhaps muttering or chanting. He opens the door and calls out "Dr Nicholson, I've come to arrest you". Nicholson comes out into the hall and throws a small object at Argas; it sticks to his coat. Argas shoots and misses; Nicholson shouts something, but there's no effect; Argas shoots again, hitting this time, and Nicholson goes down. Argas levers the sticky thing off his coat - it's a piece of pottery with various writing on it, coated in glue - and bandages Nicholson, then calls for the rest of the team, who arrive just before the police.

Combining interrogation of Nicholson and examination of his (very extensive, but well-catalogued) handwritten notes, it seems that he was working on a location ritual of his own; he's very keen to recover the head and get it to Greece, since if the right actions are performed with it in a duly-consecrated temple of Athene it should substantially aid the Greek defence. (As a traditional classicist he's in favour of the Greeks in theory, if not always in practice.) He's spent some years constructing a magical system based on hints in obscure texts, and seems to have got it working most of the time. His career has rather suffered for lack of attention, though...

He was approached by the Italian - who called himself "Isaac Benton" and presented himself as a merchant seaman, but talked like someone who'd grown up on a farm near Rome - on Tuesday, supposedly to translate the pot-shard and see whether it might be valuable. Nicholson realised that this was the clue to an item he'd been looking for for a while - indeed, something he'd had in his own hands, but not realised its significance. He followed "Benton" (he hasn't forgotten all his skills from his trench-raiding days), and when the latter broke into the museum and lifted the head he felt he had to kill him quickly. Since then he's been out to Avonmouth looking for a ship that might be heading towards the Mediterranean, but without luck so far.

There's some feeling that Nicholson could be recruited, or at least helped with his mission. Nicholson himself hasn't met any other magicians before, and is rather overwhelmed by the whole business.

2.19. Operation Confine

[20 February 2010]

Friday, 1 November 1940

Kemmer has been conducting a variety of experiments. There's a hard edge to the interference effect, and the distance seems to be correlated with the square root of the radioactivity level (and of the magical power of the magical item - the Russian machine is being used to create a variety of glowing stones). It changes a bit with different radioactivity types (alpha emitters interfere at 3-4x the distance of betas for the same decay rate, with neutrons and gammas somewhere in the middle). Once the interference kicks in, the decay stops dead; once the magical item has stopped being magical, decay resumes at its previous level. And interposing lead bricks makes absolutely no difference to the distance at which the effect kicks in.

While the team has no memory of self-luminous radium instrument faces causing them problems, they do seem to do so (and to stop glowing) when very close. The decay rate is so low that the distance is very small, though.

Kemmer has built a crude and short-ranged "magic detector": an alpha source and a Geiger-Müller tube connected to a capacitor, with a light to come on when the capacitor stops charging.

Kingsthorpe tries a variety of protective rituals, but radioactivity doesn't seem to be treated as a hostile spell or curse. Nordmann's weather-working doesn't trigger the detector, though controlling a small whirlwind does. Matthews sets up a long-term experiment with tomato plants (some of which he's encouraged to grow, others not) next to radioactive sources.

Sunday, 3 November 1940

Dr Nicholson has been hastily sworn in, and has agreed to work within the bounds of MI5 from now on. Since there's a diplomatic mission being sent to Greece, the team (plus Nicholson, and the votive head of Athene) is hurried onto a Wellington that'll be flying there overnight carrying the "real" mission, refuelling in Gibraltar.

Monday, 4 November 1940

Arriving somewhat groggy, the team goes to the diplomatic mission (carefully not being called an embassy or consulate - until the Italian invasion, Greece was a fascist country with some ties to the Axis). There's a fairly steady stream of politicians and senior officers coming to see the diplomats, and they are able to offer some advice from their military experience. Two Greek officers are assigned as liaison: Iatrides and Trikoupis, both with the rank of Lochagos (captain). Miss Vane starts learning Greek fast, and chats with them both; Trikoupis is optimistic about Greece's chances in the war, while Iatrides thinks a glorious death is more likely ("and what good will your diplomacy do when an Italian flag is flying from the Parthenon?").

Argas looks around the mission, and spots a couple of watchers front and back as well as the official guards. He heads out invisibly, while Miss Vane persuades Trikoupis to take the party to see the Acropolis. Dr Nicholson had hoped to use the temple of Athene Nike for his ritual, but the carvings - while undoubtedly good copies - aren't the originals. Those are in the Acropolis Museum, on the east side of the rock. Shifting them would be a pretty major job... so Nicholson arranges to be "overcome by the heat" while visiting the museum, and while resting pokes around on a magical level. The carvings have been here long enough that he ought to be able to do his ritual here, though it'll take an hour or so, longer than he'd hoped.

Argas takes a less-supervised look around; there are quite a few loafers about, though whether they're intelligence agents of some sort is anyone's guess.

That evening, the group (minus Argas) arranges to go out for food and drink with Iatrides; they do a poor job of holding their liquor (only partly faked) and generally give an impression of themselves as harmless. Argas meanwhile takes a look at the Acropolis Museum at night: there's a single night-watchman inside, and the doors are kept locked. The watchman walks around inside every once in a while, but snoozes for much of the time. There's a basic contact alarm system that'll go off if the windows are opened. Argas also scouts good routes for getting from the city across the Acropolis to the museum without being thoroughly exposed.

Tuesday, 5 November 1940

Once everyone has recovered from the previous evening's exertions, Kingsthorpe obtains some knockout drops from the "cultural attaché". That evening, around 10.30, Argas heads for the Acropolis Museum; when he gets there, he sees a truck outside, the door open, and the night-watchman slumped behind his desk. Looking more closely, he spies four people inside, loading up trolleys with antiquities and bringing them out to the truck. A significant fraction of the carvings Nicholson wants has already been loaded. Argas lets down all the tyres on the truck.

Wednesday, 6 November 1940

When the robbers finish, around midnight, they don't check the tyres, and start to drive off. Argas (still invisible) slashes the tyre closest to him, and that's enough to get them to stop. The robbers get out and start to argue; Argas slips into the cab and cuts the ignition lead (and all the other wires he can find, not being mechanically-inclined).

Meanwhile the rest of the group has been out with Trikoupis, and Kingsthorpe has managed to slip him the knockout drops. They head for the Acropolis, Argas spots them arriving, and they arrange to come at the robbers from two sides at once. The robbers scatter, and the team decides not to pursue them.

It takes about half an hour to shift the carvings back inside the museum. Dr Nicholson starts his ritual, with Kingsthorpe and Nordmann assisting; Argas, Matthews and Miss Vane stay outside to keep an eye on things. Around a quarter past one, Miss Vane spots a head briefly looking over the cliff below the museum. Argas takes a closer look: it's a black-clad man carrying a couple of knives and a pistol, and he has two comrades further down. There are three more coming over the ridge from the top of the Acropolis.

Argas stabs the first climber, who shouts something in Italian. The other two hurry up and over the edge, and start waving their knives about randomly. Argas hamstrings the second.

Matthews tells the scrubby plants on the rock to entangle the three coming from above, and brings them down; they start to break free, but he reinforces the binding and starts to strangle them.

The two Italians who are still mobile move back-to-back, and slowly approach the museum, waving knives randomly. When they spot Miss Vane, one of them throws a knife at her, but misses. Argas stabs one in the guts, and he goes down, then catches the last one as he sprints for the museum door. Matthews finishes off his three.

The ritual draws towards its end; Kingsthorpe and Nordmann both see on each other and on Nicholson a ghostly impression of a Greek helmet, which expands and fades into nothingness. Nicholson thinks the ritual worked, though the practical effects remain to be seen. He writes a label for the votive head and conceals it among the museum's other items.

Kingsthorpe inserts himself into the dreams of the night-watchman, suggesting that various groups of robbers fought among themselves and the watchman was able to knock out the last couple. The two surviving Italians are left knocked out and tied up. Argas waits on the site until the police arrive; the others head back to their taverna of the evening, but Trikoupis is gone, so they return to the mission (and get the "attaché" to raise the alarm with Greek military intelligence).

In the morning there's no sign of Trikoupis, so Kingsthorpe casts a location ritual: it points to the Piraeus. They get Iatrides to take them down there, and a crowd is gathering to look at the body that's just been fished out: Trikoupis, with his throat cut. Miss Vane gets Sarge to try to talk to Trikoupis' spirit: he can't get much, though, just a sense of betrayal by his (Italian) friends. Apart from dropping hints to Greek intelligence, there's not much more the team members feel they can do, so they board the Wellington that evening and head back to England.

2.20. Operation Gymnast

[27 March 2010]

Tuesday, 12 November 1940

After a few days of rest, the team is called back in on the following Tuesday morning, where the news of the previous night's attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto is unofficially shared.

Of more immediate importance, however, is a worrying collection of crime reports from round the country: seven in all, they all refer to petty vandalism (broken windows and such like), but they all seem to have occurred at more or less the same time on Sunday evening, nobody was caught, and in each case there was an odd symbol found nearby - a three-lobed knot, with various twiddles. The combination of symbols (not belonging to any known group) and seven events has meant that Knight has picked it up.

The events happened in Bath, Cirencester, Dover, St Alban's, Fenny Stratford, Lincoln and Wroxeter. The team plots these on a map, and they seem to line up at least a little bit; after some contemplation, Matthews draws in what he remembers from his schooldays of the Roman road network, and all the sites seem to lie on either Watling Street (now mostly the A2 and A5) or the Fosse Way (various minor roads, and in some places lost completely).

The team heads to the nearest site, in St Alban's, having called ahead to the local police. PC Braddock saw most, and explains: about 11.45 pm he was in the station, having just come in from patrol, when he heard breaking glass outside. He went out, saw a broken window in a nearby house and someone running away, and gave chase; he was unable to keep up and broke off pursuit. On returning, he spotted the symbol on the wall of the house with the broken window.

That symbol has been preserved; it's been chalked in place, and consists of the three-lobed pattern with a couple of extra small curlicues. Argas feels a magical residue about it, but can't get any deetails.

Since they're already half-way there, the team heads next to Fenny Stratford. Nobody observed the vandalism there (knocking over and stamping about on some road-works signs), but a man heading back late from his friend's house spotted the damage (and symbol) and called the police; there's no sign of magic on him. Mattsson recovers a size-8 boot print; the symbol here looks slightly different in the curlicues, but is basically similar.

The team calls from the police station to ask Knight to pull telephone records from the smaller villages where incidents happen; this will take some time. For the moment, they head back to London and hit the books.

Miss Vane looks into possible significance of the threefold knot: two things come up, both quite vague. It shows up in some Celtic designs but doesn't appear to have any particular significance, and some books by Margaret Murray (particularly God of the Witches) hint at some sort of three-fold symbol that might have been used in the religion she hypothesises. There also seems the possibility of a connection between the Roman roads and Alfred Watkins' idea of "ley lines" - while Watkins himself ascribes no occult significance to the alignments he discovered, occultists have gladly adopted the idea, and (as found during Operation Headache back in October) it seems to have some validity.

Nordmann looks at the symbols in a mathematical way; the ones found closer to the coast seem a little more complex, but the significance of the details is not at all clear.

Matthews calls around the police in other towns built on major Roman settlements to see if any reports have slipped through the gaps. He finds one from Exeter which seems to be a match, but nothing in York or other places that weren't on one of the two Roman routes in question.

Wednesday, 13 November 1940

The logical next step seems to be a trip to High Cross, near Hinckley, where the Fosse Way (or what's left of it) crosses Watling Street. Finding the spot is tricky in itself, as there's no settlement on the spot; the Fosse Way is just a cart track on one side of the main road and a field entrance on the other. Argas detects some magic in the area. A search reveals a crude hut in one corner of the field, in bad repair but somewhat weather-resistant; inside, there's a three-fold symbol (without curlicues) scraped out on the earth floor, which Argas reckons is definitely (if passively) magical. There are quite a few footprints inside and outside, and footprints and bicycle tracks outside - obviously more or less contemporary with each other, given how they overlay, but even Nordmann can't be sure of their age. Sarge can't spot any spirits in the area, but he confirms Argas' feeling of magic.

Matthews stays on site to keep watch (persuading the hedge at the side of the field to curl away and make a sheltered and concealing nook for him) while the others take the car five miles into Hinckley to obtain overnight lodging. They also report in, using code phrases, and buy a bicycle.

While he waits, Matthews gets a feel for the local plants. In the field on the other side of the road, there's a patch where they aren't growing quite as well; he investigates further, and finds that it's a rectangular outline with some other lines inside, perhaps the site of a Roman fort or something similar. He decides that this is probably not significant for the moment, and returns to his position.

At around 8pm, Argas bicycles back to relieve Matthews, though finding him causes brief difficulty. The first visitors arrive at 11pm, and they straggle in for the next twenty minutes or so, thirteen of them altogether, walking their bicycles across the field and leaning them against the hedge by the hut. All of them carry small bundles. Once three of them have gone inside the hut, Argas sneaks closer to overhear them (and look through some of the many knotholes and gaps in the hut's structure). They have changed into the robes they were carrying and lit lanterns; they are talking in English, in local accents, and are mostly catching up on news and gossip.

Argas gets the feeling there's a hierarchy involved, though he's not sure of the details: a man in his seventies (with a magical feeling about him) seems to be in charge, and a woman in her sixties is probably the number two. There's lengthy occult talk, of which Argas can't make much sense, and actual magic-working starts at 11.30. The ritual is conducted in English, albeit archaic, and seems to be orientated towards summoning some form of protection.

Thursday, 14 November 1940

The meeting breaks up once the ritual is over, a few minutes after midnight. Only one person leaves on foot, the elderly woman; Argas follows her a mile or so back to the nearest village, Claybrooke Magna, and carefully notes the house into which she goes. He returns to the hut, noting that the symbol on the floor has been re-inscribed.

Nordmann arrives at 4am to relieve Argas, but nothing happens for the rest of the night. Argas reports when the others wake up, and the details are passed on to Knight. He can check the address Argas found: it belongs to a Miss C. Winstanley, with no criminal record or file as a subversive; her family has lived in Claybrooke Magna for many generations, though the younger members have moved away and she's the last one left.

Matthews and Argas take the car to pick up Nordmann and then head for Claybrooke's one pub, the Pig in Muck. Miss Vane goes to the village on foot, and spots Miss Winstanley working in her garden (turned over to vegetable production); she strikes up a conversation, and gradually (via talk about gardening and the desire to do a bit more concrete to help one's country) works the conversation round to practical occultism. Miss Winstanley suddenly realises she's said rather too much to a total stranger and clams up; Miss Vane waves her Military Intelligence identification, and explains that she works for people who are taking just such concrete measures. Miss Winstanley is relieved: "I thought we were the only ones." Apparently it was all the Colonel's idea, to rebuild the Old Religion based on what Murray has reconstructed of it; the results can't be denied, and while some of it seemed faintly blasphemous the Colonel has explained that it's all entirely compatible with Christianity. On Sunday night they were able to send some of their coven along the old roads, and now that they can draw power from that network they're working on a large summoning, something to put a shield over the country and save London from the air raids.

Miss Vane offers a warning, but Miss Winstanley is sure the Colonel knows what he's doing, though he seems to be under some strain (poor man). She's happy to give his name (Burchard) and address (in Coventry, about ten miles away).

The others have been hinting that they're spying out the land for a possible military exercise. Most of the inhabitants either work on the farms nearby or take the bus into Coventry for war-work there. Argas books both of the guest rooms at the pub, in case they need to stay overnight. Matthews spots something odd about Miss Winstanley's garden; it looks over-heated, odd for November, but very reminiscent of attempts he saw in India to grow an "English garden" in the climate there.

It's late afternoon when the team goes to visit Burchard. There's a lot of flashing of identity cards, and Burchard, clearly an old India hand, is happy to talk. His house is packed full to bursting with Indian artefacts, of wildly variable quality; Argas spots that some of them are faintly magical, though probably from having been an object of veneration for centuries rather than from direct enchantment.

Burchard has a tedious and self-important conversational style, and he's glad of an audience. He explains how he's used Murray's work to reconstruct the Old Religion, and how he worked out that if ley lines may be significant then actual roads that people have travelled along for hundreds of years must be more so. The symbol is used as a thing to "push" against to start travelling.

While Burchard is talking, Argas confirms that there's something magical about him - his body, rather than something he's wearing. Miss Vane gets Sarge to look too; he doesn't like the "smell" of Burchard at all, though he can't pin down exactly what's wrong.

Matthews proposes that Burchard accompany the team to London for a detailed debriefing; Burchard is happy to go along with this, but explains that he needs to lead the current ritual for two more nights (i.e. until the full moon).

Once the team leaves and has a chance to talk, there's a feeling that it might be a good idea not to let the ritual be finished. Argas is dropped off (with bicycle) to keep an eye on Burchard's house; the others head to the Army offices in Coventry, on the basis that this is the best place to get a phone line that isn't going entirely through civilian exchanges. They call Knight, who starts things moving to get plenty of policemen available on Friday night to take the whole coven into custody if it seems like a good idea. He also confirms that Burchard has no criminal record and isn't a known occultist; he'll work on getting Burchard's service record, but this may take a bit of time.

Burchard leaves his house (by bicycle) around 10.30 that evening; Argas follows him, but Burchard is suspicious, stopping every so often to look around. The rest of the team returns to High Cross: Nordmann in the hole in the hedge, Miss Vane by the field entrance, and Matthews with the car keeping an eye on Miss Winstanley's garden in the village to try to find out more from the plants when they become overheated.

The coven members arrive as before (one of them, an adenoidal young lady, declaiming something about "along the same road by which it descended the soul must retrace its steps back to the supreme Good" before being told to shut up) and the ritual starts. Sarge confirms to Miss Vane that there's power flowing along the roads, being drawn in to the crossroads. Everyone outside is a little startled when a flight of aircraft passes (single-engine planes at medium altitude, but it's very quiet out here apart from the chanting).

Very soon afterwards, the hut goes up in flames: it's clearly not a natural fire, as it seems to get hold almost at once. Argas kicks the door and calls "this way"; the interior is ablaze, even where there's seemingly nothing to burn. A few of the people closer to the door stagger out, on fire; Miss Vane knocks them over into the muddy field, as the best way to get them extinguished. Argas can't spot Burchard; he counts bodies, and there's one missing.

Nordmann and Matthews, at about this point, notice a fire-glow from the south-west, in the direction of Coventry - where an unexpected German air raid is hitting. Matthews can also see the closer fire, and gets the car started. Nordmann shoots the hut with his rifle; he gets a key structural beam, and the whole thing collapses just as Argas gets outside. What's left is a twenty-foot pillar of flame, one that's gaining in definition.

Argas backs away and shoots silver bullets; they don't seem to have much effect. The pillar throws a blob of fire at Miss Vane, who's closest, tending to the surviving wounded; she manages to get out of its way. Argas and Nordmann keep shooting, while Miss Vane drags away Miss Winstanley, the nearest casualty.

Matthews arrives in the car, just as Argas is diving into the ditch by the field-gate to wet down his clothes. Argas scoops up muddy water in his helmet, then takes it back to the fire and throws the water at it; this seems to have some effect, and he has to dodge the fire that's thrown back at him. Nordmann, having run out of ready rounds in his rifle, damps down his coat and throws it into the fire; this helps a bit. He asks for and receives Matthews' coat; meanwhile Matthews gets the car away from the area of the fire, pausing briefly when one wheel bogs down in soft ground; the fire-pillar is definitely heading towards this potential fuel source.

Nordmann throws Matthews' coat, but misses; the return blob of fire burns him severely. Argas has grabbed a jerrican from the car and is using that to throw on more water; the fire-pillar gradually sinks. As it sputters, Nordmann's weather-working kicks in, and a rainstorm starts, finishing off the last sparks. Once that's done, Nordmann directs the rain towards Coventry, now well ablaze, then loses consciousness.

There are six survivors from the coven; Matthews drives them to Claybrooke Magna and knocks up the village, getting the wounded into the church hall for emergency treatment out of the rain.

Friday, 15 November 1940

In the morning, Argas goes with the sexton to get the charred bones of the other six coven members from the ruins of the hut. The team debriefs the survivors; the flames hit suddenly, while the Colonel was in mid-sentence. They're cautioned to keep quiet, write it off to a stray German incendiary, and not to muck about with anything even vaguely magical.

2.21. Operation Gazebo

[17 April 2010]

Monday, 18 November 1940

Captain Knight has a new job for the team: a German spy was caught on Saturday night. Well, he walked into a police station and said "I am a spy for the Germans and I wish to surrender". He's been put in the Tower for now, but things seemed to keep going wrong round him - his guards suddenly got a bout of the trots, and someone apparently forgot to lock his cell door. He's been sitting about not trying to escape; but when he was put in the quiet cell, all these oddities stopped, so going and having some words with him seems like a good idea.

The team arranges to be locked in with the spy, whose name is Erich Neumann; he's from a village in Denmark near the German border. He explains that he was drafted immediately after the invasion of Denmark, and more recently told that he was going to be a spy; he has no particular enthusiasm for the Nazis, and after he was parachuted in made straight for the nearest village and found the police station. His instructions were to find casual work in Hatfield, a town notable mostly for the de Havilland plant, and then contact Blitzen, another German agent already in England. (Blitzen was caught some months ago, and his name is being used to send deception messages.)

Neumann didn't get much training: he was put in a room (in what he thought had probably been a school) for six weeks or so, and told to read books about infiltration into British society, radio operation, and so on. There was another spy being "trained" at the same time, "Wolf"; he seemed rather more enthusiastic about the whole business.

Neumann is moved out of the quiet cell, and Argas detects clear signs of magic; it's low-powered and not easily identified. However, when the team goes to put Neumann back in the quiet cell, all their shoelaces have come undone.

Alexander calls the Air Ministry to try to find out about unusual accidents; there's nothing immediately available. Nordmann gets in touch with his contact in the Norwegian Resistance; the details Neumann gave seem plausible, though they don't know of any Resistance people who might be able to confirm that he is who he claims to be.

Alexander makes the point that de Havilland, who are mostly repairing Hurricanes, have a fairly direct impact on aircraft availability - and this in turn has been a factor in staving off German invasion plans. The team calls Knight, and gets all aircraft works put on the lookout for someone matching Wolf's description.

Kingsthorpe places a magical protective ritual on himself, and he and Alexander talk with Neumann outside the quiet cell; they both do a poor job of carrying on a conversation while waiting for something odd to happen. Argas observes; there's a flare in Neumann's magic at the same time as Kingsthorpe's ritual goes down, indicating an attack of some sort. With a bit more observation by Argas, invisibly, it seems that the flare goes off every 10-20 minutes or so.

Alexander borrows a Tiger Moth and fitter from the Central Flying School, where he's been corrupting innocent young proto-pilots; he brings it in on the docks near the Tower. The fitter is sent off to a pub nearby for a bit, while Neumann is brought out to look at the plane. A few minutes later, there's a cracking sound and the propellor swings loose. The second time Neumann's magic flares, nothing apparently happens. A bit of questioning reveals that Neumann was asked to sit in a particular seat on the plane that brought him over.

The fitter fixes the Tiger Moth - there doesn't seem to be anything else wrong with it - and Alexander takes them back to Hendon.

Kingsthorpe attempts a magical ritual to locate the particular flavour of magic that Neumann is carrying; this is tricky, but it does indeed find Neumann, so when the latter is back in his cell it may be able to find Wolf.

Alexander spends the rest of the day with an Air Ministry functionary, looking for patterns in accident reports, though without any particular joy.

Tuesday, 19 November 1940

Kingsthorpe attempts to locate the other spy, and gets a result of somewhere around 10-30 miles north. The group decamps to Hendon and he repeats the ritual; the result is rather fuzzier, but seems to be about ten miles north. The group spends the night at Hendon.

Wednesday, 20 November 1940

Kingsthorpe tries again after a night's sleep, and gets a convincing read on Hatfield. The group heads up there and arranges lodging, then visits the de Havilland works. Once their credentials have been established, Alexander breaks off to talk with the test pilots (who haven't been seeing any unusual problems); the others talk with the chief of security and the works manager. They haven't taken on anyone new recently - some applications for unskilled labour, but they have plenty of that - and haven't seen unexpected accidents or anything of that sort.

The team heads off with the names and addresses of the unsuccessful applicants, and spends the afternoon visiting them; none of them is magical or matches Wolf's description.

In the evening, Kingsthorpe repeats his ritual with a detailed map of Hatfield; he pins the trace down to one of two houses or a pub. Argas keeps an eye on the houses while Alexander looks into the pub; its customers are mostly aircraft workers from the plant, with a few locals, and he doesn't spot anyone drinking alone while he's chatting with the barmaid.

Kingsthorpe and Matthews knock at the two houses and establishes that neither of them is letting rooms. They head into the pub with Nordmann and order beer (there's a slight delay as the barrel is changed, as the old one had gone cloudy). Argas enters the pub and spots the right sort of magic on a young man who's sweeping up. He drops a note to warn Kingsthorpe, then goes over and says "Guten tag, Herr Wolf, you are arrested". Wolf makes a bolt for it; Alexander throws an ashtray but misses, Matthews tries to knock him down but also misses, and Kingsthorpe hits with a straight right to unfortunately little effect. Alexander calls out "block that door" as Kingsthorpe struggles with Wolf with some help from Nordmann and Matthews. Wolf gets free from Kingsthorpe with a low blow, but by this time Argas has got up behind him and slashes with his knife; Wolf goes down and Argas secures him and patches him up.

Wolf had been taken on as a general skivvy; there's nothing incriminating in his room. The group takes him to the police station; Kingsthorpe questions him in German, but he looks blank. Alexander gets the others to leave him alone with Wolf, and starts to hone his straight razor meaningfully while talking in Munich-accented German; Wolf seems to think that he's an Abwehr agent, and admits that he's completed his main mission and is now waiting to get in touch with Blitzen. Alexander lulls Wolf's suspicions by explaining that the car taking them to the Tower will stop suddenly when they're nearly there, and at that point he should try to escape to Blitzen. Wolf reports that he has successfully placed the two pieces of paper in the prototype aircraft at de Havilland's.

Wolf is drugged into unconsciousness, and the team heads over to the factory. With the help of the security chief, they head to the small hangar which just barely contains the first model of a new light bomber. There are indeed two pieces of heavy, expensive-looking paper crumpled into the undercarriage housing, though they're blank; Argas detects some sort of magic in the whole aircraft, while Alexander simply falls in lust with it. Geoffrey de Havilland and his son Geoffrey (the chief test pilot) are both summoned; talking with them, it does seem as though if the first flights don't go well further funding for the project is likely to be cancelled, since this is a fairly unconventional aircraft in many respects.

Argas analyses the magic in the airframe; he thinks it's probably to attack the crew, though there's a lot more complexity than he's used to seeing. Kingsthorpe borrows the nearest guard hut for its occult resonances and conducts a very extended cleansing ritual; as this takes effect, the spell on the aircraft tries to destroy the plane, but it's swept away by Kingsthorpe's ritual.

[1 May 2010]

Thursday, 21 November 1940

Back in London the next day, with Wolf safely in the quiet cell in the Tower, the team talks some more with Erich. He is adamant that he received no training in the use of the odd effect that he seems to be generating; he wasn't even aware of it. The people in charge of the spy operation did ask him some odd questions which Argas believes may have been intended to find out whether he had developed the power they were expecting.

Kingsthorpe reads Wolf's memories to find out how he went about using his power; he had to think a key phrase, and look at his target. Nordmann and Matthews try to work out what the phrase might signify, but it seems to be just random syllables.

Argas asks more about the room in which Erich was put to read his training manuals. It was entirely surrounded by the rest of the building, and Erich noticed some wire frameworks - like sprung bed-frames or something of that sort - leaning against the walls in the corridor outside. There was also an occasional electrical burning smell. None of this sounds like the Armanic rune-magic with which Kingsthorpe is familiar - if anything, it seems a bit more like the Russian machinery they've captured.

Both Erich and Wolf are given thorough medical exams, and they seem to have some similar medical oddities - missing bottom ribs, slight anomalies in organ placement, and so on. None of it has any clinical significance, but since the same oddities occur in each of them it seems plausible to think that there may be some magical connection. (Matthews looks up the anomalies to see if they have any occult significance; there's very little in the literature, though there are some vague hints in some Tibetan material, and some more in some rather dubious Norse material of recent invention.) Kingsthorpe starts to make plans to try to remove the magical effect from Wolf.

2.22. Operation Watchstrap

Friday, 22 November 1940

However, this is cut off by a problem on Friday morning: Kemmer hasn't appeared at the section of MI5's underground passages that are being used as a laboratory. His lodgings in Baker Street have been phoned, and apparently he left as usual. Kingsthorpe immediately attempts to locate him magically, and gets a sense that he's to the north or north-west, but it's fairly fuzzy; he thinks there's something working against his magic.

Kingsthorpe heads up to Hendon and repeats the ritual; he gets a similar direction, but not much more resolution. Nordmann takes a look at Kemmer's rooms; there's no sign of disturbance, and he seems to have been following the rules on secret documents.

The team talks to ticket-takers at Baker Street station, several of whom remember Kemmer, though they haven't seen him today. They work their way back via paper-shops and tobacconists, and work out that Kemmer must have been picked up pretty close to his rooms. Some workmen repairing bomb damage to a building across the road remember seeing "two toffs" escorting him into a Daimler saloon - a pretty decent car, and not many of them are running at the moment.

Checking in with Scotland Yard reveals that no Daimlers have been reported stolen recently. The team works northwards, the way the car went, but most of the people who might have seen it aren't still on the street now, several hours later.

The team returns to headquarters, and Kingsthorpe scries to get a vision of Kemmer's whereabouts. He sees a coffin... which is lying in a room with two others, presumably in an undertaker's. It's not immediately identifiable, but looking up undertakers in North London who use Daimler saloons cuts down the list to a manageable ten or so.

The fourth side visited is Wilkinson and Baldwin, a firm in Edgware. Miss Vane's guide Sarge looks in first, and verifies that there's a room of about the right shape, though the central trestle is empty. In the yard at the back of the building are one hearse and two saloons, all Daimlers; the engines of the hearse and one saloon are warm. Argas sneaks in invisibly and detects a trace of magic by the central trestle; it's a tiled floor, and there's no trace of chalk or other signs of ritual magic in the grout.

Kingsthorpe, Miss Vane, Nordmann and Matthews go in to speak to Mr Wilkinson, in his sixties. Argas listens in to the conversations between the staff as they work out what's going on. Wilkinson explains that several of his men are out on a job at the moment: Mr Gabriel, who's been there a couple of years, and the men he's brought in more recently (who are not quite of the sort of class he might have hoped for, but they seem able to work well, which among men unfit for military service is quite unusual.) In fact, he's surprise they're not back by now; they were only going over to the North Middlesex Hospital to pick up a body.

Kingsthorpe gets the number of the missing hearse and calls it in; Scotland Yard will be told to be on the lookout. He confirms that the four men haven't been seen at the North Middlesex. It seems possible that one of the saloons could have been taken out this morning off the books; Wilkinson doesn't get in first thing.

With the addresses of the four missing men, the team heads out to look at their homes. Three of them are fairly standard working men's flats, with rather too much money hidden in mattresses and under floorboards. The fourth, Mr Gabriel's, is a bit more interesting, with definite magic surrounding it. There's also a hair across the doorframe, which Argas puts to one side as he unlocks the door. Sarge looks inside and confirms that there's nobody in there, though there is quite a bit of magic; Argas enters and searches.

Argas locates several magical items, mostly wands and medallions, cunningly hidden - built into hollowed-out table-legs and such like. Once he's got the hang of the hiding places, he can spot that there are several more empty compartments. Kingsthorpe checks the bookshelves; there are several books in Russian, which he doesn't read. Argas also locates a radio and codebooks, also in Russian; there are some ashes in the wastebasket.

The team calls in again, getting a couple of policemen to come and sit in the flat in case Gabriel comes back; they also ask that the hearse be stopped if it's seen. Back at headquarters, Kingsthorpe attempts to locate Mr Gabriel, using his codebooks and magical paraphernalia, but with no success; he tries again for Kemmer, who's to the north-east and moving.

The hearse is spotted near Chelmsford by a policeman on foot; by the time the team gets there, there's a report from Colchester, where a police car gave chase but hit a deep pothole almost at once. At Colchester, there's no further news, but Kingsthorpe borrows the library to repeat his location effect; it looks as though Mr Gabriel is now in Frinton-on-Sea.

By the time they arrive, it's full dark, but there hasn't been any disturbance. Argas scans out to sea: there's a waning half-moon, so it won't rise until around midnight. Kingsthorpe turns out the Home Guard, who carry out their defence-against-invasion drill; meanwhile he uses the library to do a final location, tracking down Gabriel to a seafront house at the southern edge of the town. Argas and Sarge scout around the outside; the sound of voices (in English) comes from inside.

The house has a garage, which Argas inspects; there's a hearse inside, with a coffin in it. He oils the side door and sneaks in, unlocking the car and shifting the coffin enough to confirm that there's something heavy in it. He pockets thhe car's distributor cap and leaves, bringing back Nordmann to help him shift the coffin; they wrestle it far enough out of the hearse to be able to get it open, revealing Kemmer, apparently asleep. They carry him back to the rest of the team, then fill sandbags to about the right weight, put them into the coffin, and close up the coffin, the car and the garage.

Kingsthorpe puts through a call to the police, and another to the Navy: it seems likely that there's a submarine rendezvous planned. He and Miss Vane take Kemmer to the local cottage hospital to keep an eye on him, while Nordmann, Argas and Matthews spell each other watching the house.

Around ten minutes to midnight, there's a sound of movement, and four men leave the house to enter the garage. There's a sound of car doors, then of shouting, and one man runs out of the garage's side door to run back to the house. (Nordmann and Matthews have aimed rifles, but hold their fire.) A moment later, a second man makes a run for it, then a third; thirty seconds after that, the last man goes across, and Argas moves in close behind him. This last man is shouting at the others to "get everything in here"; Argas shoots him with a short burst of submachinegun fire, and he falls, sinking very rapidly into the floor and disappearing. The others are fairly thrown by this, and when Argas (still invisible) shoots a second man they open up on each other with pistols.

Argas spots a magical trace underground, and follows it, calling in Nordmann and Matthews to deal with the other three. He gets to the back of the house, where a metal barrel propped against the wall has just caught fire; he calls for help while continuing to follow the trace. Nordmann knocks the barrel away from the house, preventing the whole place from going up. Argas' trace heads down the beach and out to sea; he can't spot anything on the surface.

Matthews checks the house for papers: nothing comes to light at first, but eventually he finds a hand-written schedule with dates and times, of which midnight is one. The Home Guard medics are called to patch up the three prisoners, two of whom are still alive, and the local ARP get the fire put out.

The team inspects the floor where the fourth man vanished; it's floorboards, an air gap, and then bare earth, which doesn't appear to have been disturbed or tunnelled through. Argas calls headquarters, asking them to get Coastal Command to look for submarines in the Channel, though they turn out to have no luck.

Saturday, 23 November 1940

In the garage there's a hastily-written note, reading "please deliver to O. Nordmann, of the spies". Nordmann reads it: "Nikolayev says hello." Nordmann is unwilling to go into details, but admits that he has met Nikolayev, a Russian of unpleasant habits.

At the hospital, Kingsthorpe tries to clean the spell off Kemmer, but without success; he tries again in London with better equipment, and Kemmer wakes up with no knowledge of what happened after he was put into a car at gunpoint. The two surviving enemy agents turn out to be London low-lifes, recruited by Gabriel.

At last, Kingsthorpe has a chance to try his dispelling ritual on Wolf: he successfully removes the magical trace, and it seems that Wolf is no longer able to make things go wrong for those around him.

[26 June 2010]

2.23. Operation Ewer

Monday, 25 November 1940

Miss Vane has been using her linguistic talents to pick up some basic Russian, and looks through Mr Gabriel's books. One in particular appears to describe a magical system that's alien to her; consulting with Kingsthorpe, who also hasn't come across it before, it seems fairly broad (rather than the specific rituals and powers that they're used to), and essentially elemental in nature. It's an aide-memoire rather than a teaching system - something akin to a "spell-book". The side text talks about Russian tradition, but there's less about the Glorious Destiny of the Proletariat than they would expect (and nothing at all about the Soviet system or Marxism-Leninism). It's moderately similar in style to the documents recovered from Finland back in January.

The book was published in 1926 and this edition printed in 1935 - but when they go to Cambridge to consult a Russian linguistic expert, he says that the typography is from before the 1918 spelling reform. The book looks somewhat cheaply printed, possibly by hand in a small run, and bound by hand too.

The hand-written notes interleaved in that book are another matter: nothing to do with magic, they describe a number of people whom the writer appears to suspect of being NKVD agents. Some of them have a "K." notation next to their names: this isn't explained, but it's applied to the group in Devonport, Professor Black, and to four other people, whose names and addresses (all in the East End) are given. Also listed, but without the "K.", are Irene Andrews, the fake medium imprisoned in October, and an unfamiliar name beside which is written "podtvyerzhdyeno" ("confirmed"). That turns out to be the name of someone who disappeared in London several months ago and hasn't been seen since.

There's nothing on Gabriel's own epionage operations, but it certainly looks as though he was trying to find out what the NKVD was up to in the UK - and possibly stop it.

Argas walks around in the East End that evening, taking a look at the homes of the four men. He detects magic in three out of the four of them, though he can only analyse one of the spells: it's something to do with the mind.

Tuesday, 26 November 1940

Argas follows that man (Malcolm McEwan, an engine driver on the Great Western) during the day; he doesn't do anything surprising, though he seems to have a bit of a cold. He gets sight of the other two he detected as magical that evening: William Hands, a warder at Pentonville, and Arthur Mason, a typesetter for the News Chronicle. (He's in his forties; the other three are in their twenties.) Mason spends the evening in the pub, and judging by the company he keeps is something fairly senior.

Wednesday, 27 November 1940

Argas follows the fourth man, Ron Ibbot, through his working day on the docks. As Ibbot goes home, Argas spots him making a chalk cross on the wall of a building. Once he's got home, he spends a couple of hours with the light on before going to bed.

Thursday, 28 November 1940

Argas returns via the site of the cross, around 1.30am, and sees that it's now been circled.

During these few days, Kingsthorpe and Miss Vane have been trying to find out more about this Russian elemental tradition: while it seems to have some similarities to things described in folk-tales, they eventually determine that there's literally nothing known for certain about Russian lore before the advent of Christianity in the tenth century. Anything as detailed as the system they've uncovered must be in large part invented.

Argas visits Ron Ibbot's house while he's at work. There's nothing incriminating there, but he does seem to be taking five or six correspondence courses in various mechanical and electrical trades, from a variety of institutions.

He then goes to Mason's house - all the men live alone, mildly unusual in itself, and none is married, though Mason is a widower. Again, he finds nothing subversive or illegal, though there's a very detailed set of notes on a highly complex process; he thinks it's something to do with increasing the efficiency of the organisation of movable type.

The others look into Mr Gabriel's records: his trail stops sharply before 1937, since while the relevant documents are present they can easily be spotted as forgeries.

None of the current four suspects is known to the police.

Friday, 29 November 1940

Argas, having checked that the other two men are on day shifts, visits their houses. McEwan has written several hundred manuscript pages of a gritty novel about life on the railways (it's pretty grim, but competently done); Hands has a large stack of Penguin editions of Great Literature, and appears to be working his way through them.

The news breaks of a naval battle at Cape Spartivento.

Saturday, 30 November 1940

Argas picks up Ron Ibbot and follows him all weekend. Ibbot now has active magic on him, which he didn't when last observed on Wednesday night. He doesn't do anything unexpected; he goes to a fairly normal church on Sunday.

Sunday, 1 December 1940

In the evening, Argas checks the other three; their magic is noticeably weaker, with McEwan the weakest. Argas theorises that this isn't mind control, as the team had previously guessed, but mind enhancement: a way to pay agents, which won't attract attention as they spend unusual amounts of money, and which must surely be addictive once it wears off.

Monday, 2 December 1940

Kingsthorpe decides that he will invade Ibbot's dreams. He gets MI5 to borrow a recently-busted opium den, and spends the day with Miss Vane preparing it with spirals of poppy-seeds and downward-pointing blue arrows on the walls. Argas waits outside Ibbot's house in case of complications.

Ibbot's dreams are fairly random, as one might expect, but Kingsthorpe directs him to remember the important events of the past few days. Ibbot apparently went to a "meeting" on Friday night, and Kingsthorpe directs him to dream of that. It was apparently a pretty boring lecture, and Ibbot wasn't paying much attention, but he recalls mention of a "fourth way" - which sounds to Kingsthorpe like some of the ideas of Gurdjieff (now in Paris). When pushed, Ibbot reveals that the lecture was at the Institute for Harmonious Self-Improvement, given by a Miss Clements, and he's been thinking more clearly since he started to go to them. Kingsthorpe tries for more information about the chalk cross, but Ibbot becomes angry, and Kingsthorpe withdraws.

Tuesday, 3 December 1940

The Institute for Harmonious Self-Improvement is near Wapping. Argas passes by: it's apparently a former church hall (the church is next door, looking poor), and a sign mentions "classes every evening" starting at 7pm. It's a one-floor building with the main door opening into a large hall; more rooms are at the back. Argas determines that he'll go to that evening's class, just to observe.

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Quote: (Argas) I do not want to be attacked by a mob of rampant East End self-improvers. Some of them will have studied Boots.

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Tea and biscuits are served, then Miss Clements (in her forties, probably) explains the system: the evening lectures cover the basics, taking about ten sessions, and there are advanced sessions available for those who progress beyond that stage. There's around ninety minutes of lecture, though people are prohibited from taking notes: it sounds vaguely familiar to Argas, who knows the basics of Gurdjieff's ideas, enough to ask some basic questions in the half-hour session after the lecture. There's a collection at the end; most of the twenty-odd people give a shilling or two, which can't be making anyone rich.

Wednesday, 4 December 1940

Argas plans to go back, so spends some time reading up on Gurdjieff. Some of the specifics he finds aren't the same as in the previous night's lecture; this clearly isn't being taught straight from the books.

At that evening's meeting, McEwan shows up. Sarge keeps an eye on the hall, and once the lecture has started spots a "glowing machine", like the Russian ones that he has seen before, in a back room; he goes back to headquarters to report to Miss Vane and Kingsthorpe. Meanwhile, after about half an hour of lecture, McEwan starts frothing at the mouth and falls over; Miss Clements cuts things short and does her best to help him, as does Argas. His symptoms are a bit like those of an epileptic fit, but the muscular movements are small twitches rather than big spasms. An ambulance is called, and he's taken away; Miss Clements looks as though she'd like to continue the lecture, but reads the mood of the room correctly and sends everyone home.

Thursday, 5 December 1940

The next evening, Miss Vane disguises herself as a lady fallen on hard times and goes along to keep an eye on things from the inside. Argas waits outside, starting at five o'clock, to see who arrives. Kingsthorpe is in a police station nearby. Around 6pm, two women arrive on foot, one of them Miss Clements; they enter the hall and go to the back rooms. The woman who isn't Miss Clements - conversation reveals that she's Miss Edith Pole - says that she has to prepare material for future lectures, and stays in the office, while Miss Clements starts to give tonight's talk. Nearly as soon as she's left, there's a brief flicker of the lights and a low hum as valves start to warm up...

After the lecture, Argas follows the two women home (via bus) to Seven Sisters - not a particularly pleasant area, but they live (separately) in a reasonably decent part of it. He tracks Miss Pole to her first-floor flat, making a note of the address.

Friday, 6 December 1940

Early in the day, Argas heads back to the Institute, getting in through the back door and into the office; there's a hair by the door-handle, which he puts to one side. There are two big wooden desks in the room, making it somewhat crowded; one of them has another hair by one of the drawers, and it turns out that the drawer bodies themselves have been removed to accommodate a familiar-looking Russian machine. There are no codes or other incriminating material around, just letters asking for support for the Institute's work. Argas restores the hairs and gets out.

At 7pm, he heads for Miss Pole's flat, entering the house invisibly and using his power of silence to get up the creaky stairs. There's something magical about the door-handle to the flat; he extends his perception further inside, and spots something magical very briefly before it stops being magical. Deciding that this is probably an alarm that has warned Miss Pole, he heads out, returns to visibility, and rings some of the bells; when a lady answers, he asks to speak with Miss Pole, and when told that she's not available looks concerned and asks to use the phone. His uniform does the trick, and he calls Kingsthorpe and Miss Vane, who set out at speed.

Meanwhile Argas asks the landlady whether he might see Miss Pole's room to make sure nothing is amiss; again, she is dubious, but allows him to look in from the doorway. The place is in good order, with no sign of anything wrong.

Miss Vane and Kingsthorpe arrive, and Argas asks the landlady to ask Miss Pole to call them. While he distracts her, Kingsthorpe and Miss Vane slip inside, to wait on the first-floor landing; Argas takes up position invisibly outside. A few minutes later, he spots a powerful ball of magic with Miss Pole inside it; it seems largely sensory in nature, though she has not apparently noticed him. Miss Pole walks along the road, glancing up at her flat, and continues round the corner. Argas follows her; she's waiting at a bus stop. He shoots her in the leg, then becomes visible while she is distracted and arrests her for espionage. She does her best to look blank.