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STORM
    LONDON–BERLIN–WARSAW–LENINGRAD
1941-1945

18. LONDON 1944
    On rare shore-leave back home. Mother was still alive then; he was told Father had died a couple of years before. Didn’t go to the funeral. Henry Fogg no longer existed. Even the register of his birth was gone from the church. The Bureau was nothing if not thorough.
    He finds shelter in a dark cinema off Leicester Square. The uniforms keep away the roving bands of women handing out white feathers to civilians, a mark of shame, an echo of an earlier war. Why aren’t you serving.
    But he serves.
    Huddling deep in his seat, the air freezing, the coat too large over his frame. The cinema is almost empty. Every time he comes back to London the city has changed further, become darker and more menacing. The Blitz had ended by forty-one, but it changed the city permanently, a madman taking a blade to someone’s face. But savagery left Fogg numb, these days.
    Huddling in his coat, smoking a Lucky Strike – American. The smoke rising before the projector, a blue, magical fog with light passing through it. Everyone smokes, in the war. A couple of kids courting in the back row. A veteran with a face like a quarry sitting in the front, eyes like boreholes. Fogg trying to forget the goddamned war, if only for a minute.
    Instead, a newsreel.
    D-Day.
    American forces landing at Normandy. Grainy images in black and white. Warships crowding the sea. Landing craft beaching, soldiers pouring out like insects, aircraft flying overhead.
    Gunfire. The reel is coy at first about showing us the dead.
    Announcer: D-Day! Brave American soldiers are storming the beach at Normandy, coming under heavy enemy fire!
    The veteran in the front is lit up by the projector, unshaven cheeks, lips moving without sound.
    Announcer: The dastardly Hun fight desperately, but they are no match for American heroism!
    Fogg smokes, fidgets. Knows what’s coming next.
    Announcer: Here comes Tigerman!
    New landing craft has just beached. Painted garish colours, you can tell even in the black and white of the picture. Like something out of a storybook. The hatch opens. A man steps out onto the beach.
    He looks like a circus performer. He is dressed in leotards. He has a long mane of blond hair. He is bare-chested, despite the cold. Tigerman roars without sound at the camera, showing teeth.
    Wild eyes. Fucking hero , Fogg thinks. What makes a man. Tigerman roars again, shifts , half transforming – someone gasps in the back row of the cinema, the couple courting make their own sounds, oblivious. Fogg watches, Tigerman’s face shifting, jaws opening, teeth like weapons, a tiger’s canines. Roars. Hands extended to the camera, become claws. Stripes over his bare skin. What a fucking animal , Fogg thinks.
    A smaller shape materialises out of the open hull of the landing craft.
    Announcer: Here comes Whirlwind !
    A female figure, slight, ears almost elf-like, dark hair, an impish smile – doesn’t walk down but jumps , into the air, transforming into a localised storm, a cone of air, moving over the cold water of the English Channel. Bullets fired at it, the whirlwind takes them and fires them back, the camera jerks, a group of German soldiers die in a hail of bullets. Pans back, on Whirlwind: growing in ferocity, landing, at last, on the beach. Transforming, beside Tigerman, into a woman, barely more than a girl, Fogg thinks, that same half-smile on her face. She stands there.
    Fogg leans back. Fascinated despite himself. In the back row the moans reach a crescendo and suddenly stop. An embarrassed giggle. In the front row the veteran moves his blind face this way and that, the light from the projector surrounding his head like a halo.
    German soldiers dying on screen in a weird, speeded-up flickering. Announcer: The Electric Twins!
    Two young identical men in overalls and helmets. Look like electricians, or miners. Serious faces. Neither smiling. Walk carefully off the ramp onto the beach. Stand