Destroyer: A Black Magic Story: Standalone Novels

For Holly

Chapter 1

May 1941. A cold, dark, night. The pilot is determined that the plane will reach its target, bearing a cargo that could determine the course of the war, and the fate of the entire planet. Maybe even more than that. Nothing is more important than this. Not even the pilot’s own life. His life, after all, is only that of one man, and he has already decided to put it in service of the greatest possible cause. If he loses it, so be it. There are worse things than death. And he, who has been so willing to send others to their deaths, can’t balk at the idea of his own.

May is supposed to be a warm month. A month when the days are finally growing noticeably longer after a long, dark, winter, when the sun is finally up long enough to heat the ground below. A month when you can feel the flowers bursting from the ground, and everything coming to life. May is meant to be spring.

But flying across the North Sea, at night, in a one-man plane, is cold no matter what the time of year, and the pilot can see his own breath in the air. He shivers, and smells the aeroplane fuel, a scent that fills him full of wonder, even as the fumes make him slightly dizzy. The aeroplane is a marvel of modernity, of Aryanism. It is the greatest marvel of a century of wonders. The plane allows a man to fly above the world and, if necessary, to rain death down upon it. The aeroplane is everything that National Socialism is working towards – soon the whole world will be controlled by those who create such machines. The future that is coming is one where such technological marvels will be commonplace. But that future depends on his actions tonight.

The Reich and Britain should not be enemies. The Aryan race should not be divided. The pilot knows this, deep in his heart. The two great empires should be allies against the Communist threat. All other concerns should be secondary to that. And his great work would bring the day of peace closer. All he has to do – all that the golden future requires of him – is to get his plane to Scotland. After that, he can rest. His job will be done.

That would be a simple task in most circumstances, but right now there is a war raging in Europe – a war that the pilot hopes to end, but which may take his life before he has the chance. Not only will the enemy attack him if they can, but his own side may not realise the nature of the mission with which he has been entrusted. They, too, may attempt to kill him. They may even succeed.

No matter. He is only one man. Millions have died already. And millions more will die before this is all over. His only task is to ensure that those millions will be the enemies of the Reich, and that they are a sacrifice for the best of causes.

It is the darkest of nights, in the darkest of times, but the pilot is bringing the light. Soon this conflict will be over, and soon the glory of the German people will be obvious to all. This fallen world will rise up again, and become worthy of the Führer’s genius. It will come through the fire and be purged of its impurities, the pure metal fit to be forged into the shape the Führer has anticipated.

The twentieth century is the German century, and the pilot knows it. He is the bearer of a cargo as important to the future of the world as the Holy Grail itself. He is Parsifal, carrying the spear that will heal the wounds in the Aryan people and unite them against their common foe. His plane, like that spear, is a weapon that does not serve the purpose of weapons. It will unify rather than tear apart.

The cargo is only a handful of documents, but what documents they are! They are the culmination of his life’s work. The pilot had never been the most ardent of mystics – his devotion to the cause is a personal one, not an ideological one – but nonetheless, he understands the import of this moment. It may well be the most important moment in the history of the world. He feels genuinely humble, even while acknowledging his own role in history. He is not the important one. He is just a vessel.

The documents he is carrying will change everything. Given to the Reich’s allies, they will allow the civilised world to unite against the lesser men, the dwarves who are determined to destroy everything good about civilisation. His allies are noble men. They will know what to do with them.

The storm rages around him. He’s dizzy now. His heart is racing with excitement, and the blood is rushing in his ears so loudly it almost drowns out the sound of the plane’s engines. He bites his lip, and feels the salt, metallic taste of his blood in his mouth mingle with the smell of the plane fuel. He closes his eyes, just for a second, and allows himself to become one with the plane, to feel what it feels, to experience the air rushing around him and the ground pulling him towards it. To know the freedom of the air, and realise that it is only with a superhuman effort that such freedom can be maintained.

The pilot knows this mission, the most important of his life, must succeed. He has been entrusted with this mission by the Führer, and no-one else can possibly know its true purpose. Even Rudolf Hess, himself, the pilot, doesn’t know all the details, although he is the one who oversaw it all personally. He desperately needs to see the Duke of Hamilton, the only man he can trust. He needs to get the documents to him, and to relieve himself of this immense burden.

The plane starts to head towards the ground. Hess knows that the plane will not survive the landing, but he is sure that he will remain unharmed. The hand of destiny is on his shoulder.

Chapter 2

Bored, bored, bored, bored, bored

Bletchley Park was a beautiful house, with exquisite grounds, but the hundreds of people labouring away in the huts in those grounds scarcely had time to stop and look at them for a second. There was work to be done – work that could easily make the difference in the war effort, and save countless lives. Because Bletchley Park was where some of the most secret work of the war was taking place – the decryption of German military messages.

The people working on that exceptional task were not, to look at them, exceptional people, and in that respect at least Alan Turing was not unusual. He was of average height, though he looked shorter, due to a tendency to attempt to fade into the background. He was twenty-eight, but looked younger, and no matter how much he tried to control his hair, it would look ruffled within a couple of hours. He looked utterly typical of the mathematicians who were working in Bletchley, but for his eyes, which were a piercing blue which stood out dramatically against his otherwise dark colouring.

He wouldn’t have said as much to anyone else, of course – modesty would forbid it – but Turing knew that he was, if not the most intelligent man in the country, certainly the most intelligent man involved in the espionage community. He had already made some of the most important conceptual breakthroughs in mathematics in generations.

And on this day in May, the greatest mathematical mind in Europe was sitting in an office which, no matter what the weather outside, was always slightly too chilly for comfort, looking at yet another tedious piece of paperwork that needed to be filled in with the results of a meeting he had attended more or less against his will.

When I was brought in to this job, I was told I’d be a mathematician, not a bloody, buggering, administrator. I’m supposed to have important mathematical work to do, but instead all I do is have meetings about meetings about meetings!

Talking to himself had become a habit in recent months, as the need for intelligent conversation came into conflict with the necessity of secrecy. Secrecy was not something Turing was particularly suited for, either by training or temperament; he was a mathematician, and mathematics, like all the sciences and indeed every aspect of human culture and knowledge, grew by sharing ideas and building on what came before. More importantly even than that, he was a man who knew that a secret can never be entirely kept, and that the incorrect belief that one has successfully hidden something can be much more harmful than the public exposure of a secret ever could. His work showed that – the Nazis believed their encryption kept their secrets safe.

Turing knew that Newton’s comment about standing on the shoulders of giants was meant as an insult, aimed at a short rival, but he also knew that there was truth in it. Only by sharing knowledge could mathematics ever progress – Newton himself had provided the perfect counterexample, by keeping calculus to himself until Leibniz reinvented it independently, and thus got all the glory.

He saw the need for secrecy in his current work, of course – it would hardly do to tell the Germans Oh, by the way, we’re reading all your most secret communications, and know what you’re planning to do next – but like so many of the irritants in his life, that need was a contingent fact caused by the stupidity and irrationality of the human race, rather than a fundamental of the universe.

The basic job of breaking the Enigma code had been completed long ago. Now it had almost become routine – gather the transmissions every day, try to find a crib as quickly as possible, run them through the machines. There was little intellectual satisfaction in that kind of work.

Turing was still an important part of the work – possibly the most important, he liked to think – but it was no longer the mathematical and engineering puzzle that he’d been drawn to in the early months of the war. And while for the most part that was a good thing, there was a tiny, selfish part of him that missed that work.

And so Turing had, instead, become an administrator. It had happened piecemeal, but by now it had become unmistakable. He was doing important, necessary, vital work – but not his work. It wasn’t that he objected to the work itself, of course, no matter how tedious – he was very aware that there were men all over the world dying, while he was sat in an (admittedly chilly, admittedly dull) office, and he never forgot how comparatively lucky he was. But still. It was dull.

He gazed, half-reading, at the documents before him. The subjects were all personnel matters, organisational, bureaucratic – everything that required the maximum thought for the minimal intellectual pleasure. He chewed on his pencil while trying to bring himself to think properly, and then grimaced at the next sip of tea as he realised there were tiny flecks of wood in his mouth.

The phone rang, the piercing noise once again breaking his concentration while he was trying to drink his mug of tea. Not that the tea was actually any good – institutional tea has its own flavour, as if someone had put a pair of sweaty socks into the urn. Turing imagined at times that he could almost see the socks in his mind’s eye. They would be grey, woollen ones, and would have been worn for a full weekend’s walking through particularly muddy fields, in leaky boots. Possibly a few cowpats would also have been involved.

But still, a man needed his tea if he wanted to have any chance of getting his brain to work properly. Not that his brain was needed for these papers, of course.

He sighed, and reached for the phone.

Not a moment’s peace around here. Hello, who is it?

It’s Godfrey here. Not busy, are you? Only something rather important has come up. I’d like you to go and see Fleming.

Chapter 3

Turing had never been in this office before, but it wasn’t as if any of the offices in Bletchley were radically different from each other anyway. While the main hall was pretty enough, in an ostentatious sort of way, the surrounding buildings were functional rather than beautiful.

The same could be said for the rather angular-looking man with the beaky nose in front of him, looking at him through eyes which seemed permanently half-closed. Nobody would ever call him beautiful, but at