Early One Morning (21 page)

Most of the materiel was hidden around Auffargis, some, including nearly all of the cash, at the Lethias’ villa on the outskirts of Pontoise. Until it was needed. Thérèse started calling herself Banque du Liberation. And still the coded messages came from London: you need a radio operator. And still Williams replied: no. Then one day, when winter had finally given up the ghost, the plucky Beatrice came cycling down the drive with a single word as her message. Caravan. Williams heart gave an enormous judder, a surge of excitement cut with thin veins of fear. It was time to get off their arses and do something.

‘Is there a reply?’ asked Beatrice, anxious to be gone. She smiled as Robert walked from the house and raised a hand.

‘No,’ said Williams, but as soon as she remounted her bicycle he suddenly changed his mind. ‘Actually, yes. Gelignite.’

‘Gelignite?’

‘Gelignite and
plastique.
And more pencils.’

She couldn’t keep the curiosity off her face this time. Was he going to write the Germans to death?

Williams smiled. ‘They’ll know what it means.’

Keppler growled as Maurice won another hand of casino. He, Neumann, Lock—now wearing a SD uniform—and Maurice had been sitting around for an hour now, with a slow steady flow of money towards Maurice. The Sphinx was only half full this evening. Many officers and their units had been withdrawn from Paris and were heading east for the big summer offensive. Their replacements were not always the kind of gentlemen The Sphinx preferred. On stage two naked redheads performed a rather desultory version of the sand dance, accompanied by an elderly clarinet and piano duo. Keppler wondered if perhaps he should find a new venue. It wasn’t as if he ever used any of the girls.

Maurice suddenly launched into one of his endless stream of jokes and Lock leant forward, his French still being a little shaky. ‘So it’s this guy’s fiftieth birthday and he’s feeling pretty good, certain he doesn’t look his age. He goes to his wine merchant and says, I’ll have a bottle of the twenty-seven Margaux. In fact, it’s my birthday. If you can guess how old I am, I’ll pay you double. Forty-five, says the merchant. Ha, no, I’m fifty, the man says. He goes to the butcher’s and asks for a nice steak to go with the wine. He does the same thing to the butcher. If you can guess how old I am, I’ll give you this fine claret and you can eat the steak. Forty-five, says the butcher. Ha, no, I’m fifty. And off he goes. On the Metro on the way home he says to the little old lady next to him: It’s my birthday. If you can guess how old I am you can have this wonderful claret and this excellent steak. The old woman furrows her brow, unbuttons his trousers and has a good rummage around. She takes her hand out and says: You’re fifty. Good Lord, says the man, how did you do that? Easy, says the woman, I was standing behind you in the butcher’s.’

Neumann banged the table and Lock smiled weakly, possibly because he hadn’t quite caught the ending when Maurice’s words tumbled together into a single stream. Keppler nodded and lit a cigarette.

‘By the way, Maurice, did you have any luck with that little task we talked about?’

Maurice passed the cards to Neumann to deal. Neumann raised an eyebrow in question, but Keppler waved it away.

‘Not exactly, Sturmbannführer.’

‘Not exactly,’ he said coldly, letting his displeasure show in his voice, enjoying watching the ferrety Maurice shrink back into his scarab-shaped chair. ‘Not exactly. Well, I haven’t exactly got any more
Ausweissen
for you to run your little racketeering organisation.’

‘Sturmbannführer,’ he protested, ‘I have nothing to do with the black market.’

‘Your very blood runs black, Maurice. And if I choose to shut you down … you know the penalty for trafficking. Shall we say my office? Next Wednesday? Ten o’clock. I have the census lists, perhaps that will help.’

‘Of course, Sturmbannführer,’ said Maurice, as brightly as he could muster. But, from that moment on, he lost all his winnings, and more.

JUNE 1942

F
ELDWEBEL TECHNICIAN OTTO
Bruninghaus moved the dials in front of him, straining his ears to make out the ethereal voices that crackled and spat and drifted in and out of aural focus, as if he was eavesdropping on the spirit world. Finally he got a clear signal and flicked on the loudspeaker so the half dozen men in the room—four guards taking a break and two other technicians—could hear.

‘I have a contact. Big contact. Ten thousand feet. Closing.’

And another voice. ‘Something on your tail. One-ten. Break right. Break right.’

Bruninghaus said loudly, mimicking perfectly the rising panic in the voice: ‘Something on your tail. A one-ten.’

Radio silence. He could picture the strange black combat, the shapes of planes barely glimpsed in the starless sky, the navigators hunched over primitive radar sets, the Me-110s swooping to protect the Dorniers and Heinkels, playing tag with the Bristols and Boulton Pauls lunging blindly into the night, the sudden glare of tracer fire and the sickening judder as cannon shells tore through metal and fabric and maybe flesh.

Bruninghaus’s job was simple. To confuse the British night fighters, to disorientate them even more, so they would no longer trust their eyes, their ears or their screens. He was sitting in what he thought of as a giant, angular albino insect, a metal capsule attached to a trailer, its legs formed by the struts that splayed from each corner to give stability, its head by the giant radio mast that was raised into the air, enabling signals to pass unimpeded from the bottom of the chalk quarry where it sat.

Everything was white—the scarred walls and soil of the pit, the structure itself, the tents where they slept, their overalls, a world devoid of colour, at least on the outside. Every two or three days they packed up the rig and moved to another of the big pock-marks in the earth that dotted this part of France, to the far north west of Paris, just outside the Forbidden Zone, the huge swathe of northern France out of bounds to all but essential workers. Every few days the spotter planes would come over, searching for them, to be chased away by the protecting Messerschmitts.

‘Have contact.’ The radio buzzed again. ‘Dorniers I’d say. I’ll go under. Have a go.’ There was the sound of gunfire, crackling, unreal.

‘Damn. I’ll turn again. Watch out for one-tens.’

This was probably a Boulton Paul, a single-engined fighter with a rather ungainly gun turret placed behind the pilot whose hapless occupant managed to miss the Dorniers. Bruninghaus flicked the transmit switch.

‘Am getting low on fuel here. Returning to base. Over.’

‘Who’s that? Say again?’

His audience began to titter and Bruninghaus turned to face them and said in a sing-song voice, ‘Time for tea. Tea time. Everything stops for tea.’

The others began to guffaw.

Then, more urgently, he said: ‘Dornier 17s. Dozens of them. Dive, dive.’

The radio waves became full of confused jabbering, and after a few more baffling interventions Bruninghaus stood up and stretched and gloated, ‘That should make sure our boys get an easier ride through to London. I need a piss.’

He went outside into the night and unzipped his overalls to relieve himself against one of the trailer tyres, careful not to splash the electrical wires snaking across the earth to the clanking generator. In fact, the machine seemed excessively noisy tonight, its low hum joined by a tappety burbling. Then he realised that the sound was coming from behind him. He turned, felt his jaw drop at what he could just make out in the gloom, and ran for the doorway to warn his companions.

Williams eased the truck into low gear and winced as he passed the guardhouse. Two amorphous shapes could be seen in the light of the few stars that were out, the apparently black splashes on the dirty white track their lifeblood draining away. All those days and nights of practising eye gouging and throat slitting and neck snapping, and there it was before him, the first evidence of cold-blooded murder, performed by Wimille’s little coterie of mercenaries.

This was it, this was real, he thought and reminded himself that the explosives packed behind him, surrounded by enough black-market petrol to keep Paris running for a month, that was real too, as were the pot holes and ridges in the crude road he drove towards the quarry.

He looked in the wing mirror as he turned on to the hairpins of the cliffside road that would take him to the bottom of the giant gash in the earth. He could just make out the low shape of the Atlantic in the glass. He was glad it was there. Eve had thought them mad. She’d suggested the Renault van or the Citroën as the follow car, but both he and Robert felt speed would be their best ally. ‘You’ll be spotted in the Atlantic,’ said Eve, adding with impassioned crudity, ‘it’s like driving round with your dick hanging out.’

‘Spotting us is one thing,’ Robert had said.

‘Catching us is another,’ finished Williams.

He guided the truck round the first of the hairpins, peering through the slot cut into a piece of steel welded across the windshield, hoping that the load in the back was secure and stable. He glanced at the primitive system of levers they’d welded on to the dashboard, praying they would work as well as they had in the dry runs.

This was no dry run. Sweat was beginning to stream down his face as he took the second bend, trying to use the throttle as little as possible, hoping not to lose the element of surprise. He’d been given this target before leaving England, assured that he would only be needed if the RAF failed to find and destroy the mobile masts. They clearly had.

Next bend, and suddenly the wheels were slipping on the edge of the road, sending flurries of grit and chalk into the air. He corrected, pulled the lorry back on to the centre, settling into the ruts made by hundreds of other trucks over the years. Better to endure the bouncing than risk plunging over the edge and detonating the load without achieving anything. Final turn, then a long ramp down to where he could just make out the spectral shape of the camouflaged transmission unit.

This was the part he had been dreading. The wait.

Williams lined the truck up at the top of the ramp and wiped his damp hands on his shirt. He pulled the six make-shift levers on the dash, watching the wires pull taut, praying that behind him half a dozen pencil timers had just broken. The problem was, all that had been sent were four-minute timers. Four minutes was three minutes too long as far as he was concerned.

He sat there, waiting for the seconds to crawl by, waiting for the searchlights to suddenly blind him, the bullets to start hitting the cab, the grenades to ignite the load behind him. Then he began to breathe long and slow. This was like a race. Life or death. Similar odds. You did that for ten years. You can manage this.

One minute.

Was he crazy? Should he have just come back and stayed with Eve, and sod those mad bastards in London who think that pinpricks like this one could affect the course of the war? A symbol, they always argued. No matter what you do it will be a symbol, a rallying call. Which presumably it would be even if he died. But he wasn’t going to die. He was going to slow time down. He closed his eyes, felt the tachycardia kick in as, against the constant urging of adrenaline, his heart rate fell.

Two minutes.

With measured calm and steady hands, Williams moved the throttle brace into position, the steel rod that would fix the accelerator in the fully depressed position, and slid the retaining bolt through the steering wheel, which would keep the truck on a direct course for the wireless station ahead.

Three minutes.

There was someone outside who had spotted him. A technician. Sprinting to raise the alarm. Chequered flag time. He pressed the throttle to the floor, felt the ancient engine twist and jerk in its mounting as if trying to break free, engaged the throttle brace and let in the clutch, and in one smooth, flowing movement was out the door and heading for a hard landing.

Fifty seconds left.

The air exploded from his body as he hit the ground with a puff of choking chalk dust.

Forty-one, forty, thirty-nine …

Then he was on his feet and running, counting down, sprinting up the slope towards the Atlantic, willing his legs to pump faster.

Twenty, nineteen …

He waited for the explosion to lick its warm breath over him. Keep running.

Ten, nine, eight …

He was level with the car when he heard the crumple of metal as the truck punched into the German unit, its engine screaming in its red-lined death throes, the building itself half torn from its housings with a teeth-clenching shriek, bracing wires pinging free from the ground and spinning through the air with a lethal whistle.

Three, two, one …

Williams ducked.

Nothing.

He stared in panic at Robert who mouthed, ‘Get in.’

Williams looked again at the twisted pile of truck and radio station. He could see a figure crawling from the wreckage. Something in his hand. Gun.

Williams opened the Atlantic door and reached into the back for the Thomson. ‘Will. Get in. It’s a dud. The pencils mustn’t have snapped.’

‘There’s still the gelly … and the petrol.’

‘Get in, you idiot.’

Another figure, and Williams felt the crackle of air as a bullet flew past him. He pulled back the bolt on the Thomson. He knew you couldn’t ignite petrol with a bullet. Not an ordinary bullet. But you might with tracers, and the thirty-round magazine had seven of those in there, big .45 slugs that burned bright and hot.

He set the gun to auto fire. A pain seared through his ear, and his shoulder. Then he heard, way off to his left, a gunshot and saw a muzzle flash from the corner of his eye. Sniper. Wimille or one of his lads. Good people. Value for money.

Williams squeezed the trigger and felt the submachine gun judder up to the left and noticed the two fiery angels flying towards the truck.

More cover fire from the clifftop, pinning down the Germans. But still he could hear the air snapping near him.

Second burst, three tracers out into the truck. Still nothing.