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More dry ice was added to the case. Then the Motor T
ransport Corps men secured the lid. A set of ten nuts and bolts was evenly distributed around the lip of the lid and then tightened using the two socket wrenches tethered to the lid by lengths of stainless steel cable.
Charity followed Jamison, Ustinov, and the Motor Transport Corps men as they carried the case containing Major Martin out to the ambulance. Jamison and Ustinov had begun talking about the logistics of the drive to the submarine and Charity looked at the ground.
Leave it to men to move right to the discussion of automobiles, she thought.
“So,” Jamison was saying, “you’re supposed to arrive at the dock at Greenock on April eighteenth?”
“That’s right,” Ustinov said.
“And that’s up past Glasgow, right?”
Ustinov nodded.
“That’s some trip.”
“Indeed. Eight hundred–plus kilometers. I figure we can cover about three hundred kilometers on one tank of petrol. But we’re being very conservative, allowing for any number of problems that might arise, and hoping to average at most two hundred a day. That gives us a five-, six-day margin of error.”
“Better to be early than late?”
“Your Dr. Ben Franklin said, ‘Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.’ That doctorate was given to him by our Oxford University, by the way.”
“I didn’t know that.”
Try as I may, I cannot help but overhear this, Charity thought.
She looked ahead and saw that the rear doors to the ambulance were closed.
Charity quickly worked her way around the men to get to the ambulance. She swung open its doors, and, with some effort, they slid the steel case into the ambulance.
“We get ferried by the HMS Forth the final five kilometers from Greenock to Holy Loch, where the Seraph is berthed, preparing to shove off. It had been in for repairs.”
“Get there soon, maybe the sub can set sail earlier,” Jamison said. “Who knows?”
“Just so long as we don’t run the bloody hell into those Motor Transport bastards in Great Glen again,” the brawny man in the Motor Transport Corps uniform said.
What? Charity thought.
“I thought you were those,” she said to him. “MTC types, I mean.”
The other MTC man laughed, looked at Ustinov, and said, “Don’t want to lose the ambulance en route, do we?”
Charity said, “What did you just say?”
“Oh, nothing, miss. Just joshing. Pay no mind to us.”
“No, I mean it. Did you just say Great Glen?”
“Yes, miss.”
“What about it?”
The two MTC men looked at each other, then at Ustinov.
“It’s rather complicated,” Ustinov explained. “It took some doing—quite a bit, actually, as London had just been hit with a particularly nasty Luftwaffe attack—but we borrowed the ambulance. It’s usually in service with the London Civil Defence. The Motor Transport Corps uses it to ferry the injured from hospital to a hospice and they said they desperately needed it. But they were not aware of our desperation….”
Charity Hoche intercepted Lieutenant Colonel Edmund T. Stevens at the foot of the main stairway near the grand front door of Whitbey House. As she caught her breath, he looked at the clip of Ann Chambers’s story.
