Free The Black Baroness by Dennis Wheatley

to the basement so that it became a jam of angry men and hysterical women. In consequence, Gregory went up to the lounge again. The hotel was solidly built and by sitting on the floor behind the hall-porter’s desk he was quite safe from bomb-splinters or the flying glass of shattered windows, and if the place received a direct hit from a really heavy bomb the people in the basement would just as certainly be crushed to death as those on the ground floor. As a result of his move he heard the Norwegian Foreign Minister, Professor Koht, make the first Government broadcast, via a radio-set which had been left turned full on in the manager’s office nearby.
    He could not understand Norwegian but the head hall-porter, who had also remained upstairs, gave him the gist of the speech in English. Apparently the Minister, who only the day before had been protesting most violently about the British mine-laying as an infringement of Norway’s neutrality, was now calling upon all loyal Norwegians to resist the German invasion by every means in their power. He also stated that the Norwegian Government had asked for aid from the Allies, who had agreed to send the Norwegians armed support as soon as possible.
    With some alarm, Gregory questioned the head porter upon the last phrase, but the man was quite definite about it, which gave him furiously to think. The statement should have been to the effect that, in anticipation of German aggression, the Allies had had troopships waiting off the coast which were
now landing
forces in support of the Norwegian Army, but apparently all that the Allies had said was that they
would send
troops; which might mean this year, next year, some time or never. Even if they were leaving now—at this very moment—by the time they reached Norway they would find that the Germans had secured a solid foothold and were well dug-in there. Evidently somebody had slipped up pretty badly.
    It was now after nine o’clock and Gregory decided that the time had come for him to make a move. The bombing had ceased some twenty minutes before, and it seemed that comparatively little damage had been done except that the Nazis had put one down plumb on the American Legation. The Minister and his staff had escaped, but Gregory felt that by destroying their papers and belongings Hitler had done his good deed for the day; nothing could be better calculated toarouse the fury of the people in the United States than this wanton desruction of their property, and since we still had no propaganda there worth talking about it was just the sort of thing that we wanted.
    Out in the street he found people now hurrying about and many cars stacked high with baggage, so evidently the unfortunate folk of Oslo who had the means to do so were already in flight from the city, That would jam the roads and make his trip to Bergen longer and more difficult, but he was well-fed and well-clothed so he had no doubts at all about his ability to arrive there without suffering any great discomfort.
    Round at the garage, however, he received a nasty shock. The man who filled his hired car with petrol told him that the Germans were in Bergen. Gregory gaped at him, amazed, angry, helpless; he could only suppose that a convoy of German troopships had slipped past the British naval patrols in the night. Anyhow, the presence of the Germans in Bergen put any question of going there now right out of the picture, so he decided to head north, for Trondheim.
    As he drove slowly through the crowded streets he once more reviewed the situation. By allowing the Germans to get into both Oslo and Bergen the Allies had landed themselves in a pretty mess. With their usual amazingly efficient staff-work the Nazis would now be able to seize all the strong points in southern Norway and, the power of defence being so vastly superior to that of attack, they would sit there—perhaps for weeks—wiping out any Allied forces that were sent against them. With such a lead they