They Used Dark Forces Read Free

Australians in the jungles of New Guinea had rivalled their Allies’ bravery. In the naval battles between August and January over forty warships had been sunk and hundreds of aircraft shot down, but by the spring of 1943 the Japanese had been driven out of New Guinea, Guadalcanal was firmly in American hands and now, in May, the enemy was everywhere on the defensive.
    To outward seeming, therefore, it appeared to be only a question of time before both Germany and Japan were finally defeated. But those who were responsible for the High Direction of the war were far from being as sanguine as the public about the outcome. They had learned that a new development in warfare was maturing which might not only cancel out the superiority in men and material they now enjoyed, but reduce Britain’s cities to ruins, render her ports unusable and make it impossible ever to invade and conquer Hitler’s ‘Fortress Europa’.
    As early as the autumn of 1939 British Intelligence had reported rumours that German scientists were experimenting with some form of long-range weapon. From then on, at lengthy intervals, corroborative reports had come in; but it wasbelieved that this new, secret weapon was still in its infancy and not likely to emerge from its experimental stage for several years, by which time it was anticipated that the war would have been won. Until December 1941 it had not even been known if the German scientists were working on a revolutionary type of cannon, a rocket or a pilotless aircraft; but chance had led to Gregory finding out at least that much.
    In June 1941 Herr Gruppenführer Grauber, the Chief of the Gestapo Foreign Department UA-1, had become so infuriated by Gregory’s series of successes as a secret agent that he had decided to lure him into a trap and put him out of the way for good. For this purpose he had used Erika’s husband, who was a distinguished scientist. A letter from Count von Osterberg had reached Erika, informing her that, revolted by the inhuman method of warfare that would result from a project on which the Nazis had forced him to work, he had fled from Germany and was living in hiding in a villa on the Swiss shore of Lake Constance. The letter went on to say that since they meant nothing to one another Erika would probably welcome a divorce, and that if she came to live in Switzerland for three months they could secure one.
    As Erika’s dearest wish was to marry Gregory, she had asked Sir Pellinore to help her to get to Switzerland. He had agreed, at the same time urging on her the importance of endeavouring to find out about the project upon which her husband had been working. On reaching Switzerland she had been led to believe that it was a new and terrible form of poison gas, the formula for which von Osterberg had left in his castle on the other side of the lake. She had accompanied him back into Germany to get it, so had fallen into Grauber’s trap; providing, as he had planned, the perfect bait to ensnare Gregory.
    Meanwhile, Gregory had been on a mission in Russia. On learning what had happened he had immediately gone to Switzerland, taking with him his friend Stefan Kuporovitch, the ex-Bolshevik General who had aided him on an earlier mission and then married a French wife and settled in London. At the lake-side villa they had killed the Gestapo thug who was acting as von Osterberg’s jailer, and Kuporovitch had taken hisplace while Gregory went into Germany. There he had succeeded in blackmailing Grauber into giving up Erika. On their return, for a brief while, they believed that Grauber had shot the spineless Count, only to realise, when they recovered from their exhaustion, that the shot had come from a Swiss patrol boat. So Erika’s husband was still alive.
    While he had had the Count on his own Kuporovitch had forced him to talk. The secret weapon upon which he had been working was not a new poison gas, but a giant rocket weighing seventy