A Bitter Field Read Free Page A

made doubly so by the nature of who those weapons were for andthe fact that there was a French embargo on weapons to Spain as well. What was irritating him now was the resemblance to Hamburg; it was just too pat and the similarities were too great.
    Yet he could not just dismiss what was on offer until he knew the threat it posed to that which he was already engaged in. The men fighting against Franco’s forces in the Cantabrian Mountains needed those weapons, and job number one was to get them loaded aboard ship and on their way.
    ‘How’s that coffee coming along?’ Peter called.
    ‘Nearly there.’
    ‘Fetch out the old confiture, Cal, there’s a good chap, the old stomach is rumbling somewhat.’

CHAPTER TWO
    ‘ M ust have been a bit hairy in Czechoslovakia, Cal, buying and shipping out your cargo with the nation mobilised for a possible war with the Hun.’
    Peter had emptied the coffee pot and chewed steadily on his bread and jam to the point of swallowing half the loaf, a time during which Cal Jardine had kept off the subject and stuck to conversational generalities to allow himself time to think; now he was being dragged back to the present and what might become a dilemma. For a moment he wondered whether to answer, but given what Peter already knew it seemed harmless to oblige.
    ‘The order I made was placed and the paperwork sorted before the crisis blew up, but the Czechs honoured the deal, which was pretty straight of them considering they had Adolf breathing fire. Not that they were surprised; they knew Hitler was bound to come after them once he’d swallowed up Austria. How did you knowabout the false End User Certificate, by the way?’
    ‘Our military attaché in Prague got wind of it and sent a standard report to London. That was where the Irish connection first raised questions, given how sensitive we are in Blighty about possible shipments to the IRA.’
    Cal was thinking that such an explanation did not clarify why Peter was here.
    ‘We had to be sure, Cal, they were going to where the certificate said. I also have to admit it was a damn clever ploy, given our chaps are busy licensing the same weaponry for use by the British army and, of course, the Irish would follow suit, piggybacking on our research and approval. I hope it was worth whatever you forked out to get the Czechs to fall for it.’
    If it was clever, the real reason that he had been successful in his purchase was more to do with the Czech factory having no desire to question him too closely about his bona fides: his papers were in order as far as they could see and the people he claimed to represent appeared sound.
    In reality they were not looking too closely; they badly wanted his money, or to be more precise, the Spanish republican gold with which he was prepared to pay, as did a government under threat from a powerful neighbour, keen to amass foreign exchange, so extracting a false certificate from the relevant Czech ministry had been something of a formality in which no one had even demanded an illegal payment.
    It was a good deal; the weapons he had bought were perfect for guerrilla warfare, a new pattern of easily portable light machine guns deadly in that kind of close combat. It was a ground and vehicle weapon, and added to that, so low was the recoil, they could be firedfrom the hip while on the move, all of which Peter listened to with polite interest; if he knew Cal was stalling, which he was, he gave no indication of it.
    ‘You can tell the staff wallahs from me they’ve bought a good infantry weapon.’
    ‘Sorry to disappoint you, Cal, but I doubt your estimation would carry much weight with the military brass and even less if I passed it on from MI6, given the army think we are all overeducated dolts. Anyway, to cut to the chase, we’re not interested in guns; what the firm is after is your opinion of the Czechs as a nation.’
    ‘Do you mean the Czech Czechs, the Slovaks, the Ruthenians, the Poles, the