Jackdaws

Ken Follett, author of seven
international best sellers, lives in Chelsea, London, in a two-hundred-year-old
house overlooking the river Thames with his wife, Barbara, and a varying
assortment of their children by previous marriages. His main interest apart
from literature is music, and he occasionally plays bass guitar in a blues band.

More about Ken Follett under:

www.ken-follett.com

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Also by Ken Follett

Eye of the Needle (1978)

Triple (1979)

The Key to Rebecca (1980)

The Man from St. Petersburg (1982)

On Wings of Eagles (1983)

Lie Down with Lions (1986)

The Pillars of the Earth (1989)

Night Over Water (1991)

A Dangerous Fortune (1993)

A Place Called Freedom (1995)

The Third Twin (1996)

The Hammer of Eden (1998)

Code to Zero (2000)

Jackdaws (2001)

Hornet Flight (2002)

Whiteout (2004)

World Without End (2007)

Fall of Giants (2010)

Winter of the Worlds (coming 2012)

Exactly fifty women were sent into France as secret agents
by the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War.
Of those, thirty-six survived the war. The other fourteen gave their lives.

This book is dedicated to all of them.

CHAPTER

ONE

ONE MINUTE BEFORE the explosion, the
square at Sainte-Cécile was at peace. The evening was warm, and a layer of
still air covered the town like a blanket. The church bell tolled a lazy beat,
calling worshipers to the service with little enthusiasm. To Felicity Clairet
it sounded like a countdown.

The square was dominated by the
seventeenth-century château. A small version of Versailles, it had a grand
projecting front entrance, and wings on both sides that turned right angles and
tailed off rearwards. There was a basement and two main floors topped by a tall
roof with arched dormer windows.

Felicity, who was always called
Flick, loved France. She enjoyed its graceful buildings, its mild weather, its
leisurely lunches, its cultured people. She liked French paintings, French
literature, and stylish French clothes. Visitors often found the French people
unfriendly, but Flick had been speaking the language since she was six years
old, and no one could tell she was a foreigner.

It angered her that the France she
loved no longer existed. There was not enough food for leisurely lunches, the
paintings had all been stolen by the Nazis, and only the whores had pretty clothes.
Like most women, Flick was wearing a shapeless dress whose colors had long ago
been washed to dullness. Her heart's desire was that the real France would come
back. It might return soon, if she and people like her did what they were
supposed to.

She might not live to see it—indeed,
she might not survive the next few minutes. She was no fatalist; she wanted to
live. There were a hundred things she planned to do after the war: finish her
doctorate, have a baby, see New York, own a sports car, drink champagne on the
beach at Cannes. But if she was about to die, she was glad to be spending her
last few moments in a sunlit square, looking at a beautiful old house, with the
lilting sounds of the French language soft in her ears.

The château had been built as a home
for the local aristocracy, but the last Comte de Sainte-Cécile had lost his
head on the guillotine in 1793. The ornamental gardens had long ago been turned
into vineyards, for this was wine country, the heart of the Champagne district.
The building now housed an important telephone exchange, sited here because the
government minister responsible had been born in Sainte-Cécile.

When the Germans came they enlarged
the exchange to provide connections between the French system and the new cable
route to Germany. They also sited a Gestapo regional headquarters in the
building, with offices on the upper floors and cells in the basement.

Four weeks ago the château had been
bombed by the Allies. Such precision bombing was new. The heavy four-engined
Lancasters and Flying Fortresses that roared high over Europe every night were
inaccurate—they sometimes missed an entire city—but the latest generation of
fighter-bombers, the Lightnings and Thunderbolts, could sneak in by day and hit
a small target, a bridge or a railway station. Much of the west wing of the
château was now a heap of irregular seventeenth-century red bricks and square
white stones.

But the air raid had failed. Repairs
were made quickly, and the phone service had been disrupted only as long as it
took the Germans to install replacement switchboards. All the automatic
telephone equipment and the vital amplifiers for the long-distance lines were
in the basement which had escaped serious damage.

That was why Flick was here.

The château was on the north side of
the square, surrounded by a high wall of stone pillars and iron railings,
guarded by uniformed sentries. To the east was a small medieval church, its
ancient wooden doors wide open to the summer air and the arriving congregation.
Opposite the church, on the west side of the square, was the town hall, run by
an ultraconservative mayor who had few disagreements with the occupying Nazi
rulers. The south side was a row of shops and a bar called Café des Sports.
Flick sat outside the bar, waiting for the church bell to stop. On the table in
front of her was a glass of the local white wine, thin and light. She had not
drunk any.

She was a British officer with the
rank of major. Officially, she belonged to the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, the
all-female service that was inevitably called the FANYs. But that was a cover
story. In fact, she worked for a secret organization, the Special Operations
Executive, responsible for sabotage behind enemy lines. At twenty-eight, she was
one of the most senior agents. 'This was not the first time she had felt
herself close to death. She had learned to live with the threat, and manage her
fear, but all the same she felt the touch of a cold hand on her heart when she
looked at the steel helmets and powerful rifles of the château guards.

Three years ago, her greatest
ambition had been to become a professor of French literature in a British
university, teaching students to enjoy the vigor of Hugo, the wit of Flaubert,
the passion of Zola. She had been working in the War Office, translating French
documents, when she had been summoned to a mysterious interview in a hotel room
and asked if she was willing to do something dangerous.

She had said yes without thinking
much. There was a war on, and all the boys she had been at Oxford with were
risking their lives every day, so why shouldn't she do the same? Two days after
Christmas 1941 she had started her SOE training.

Six months later she was a courier,
carrying messages from SOE headquarters, at 64 Baker Street in London, to
Resistance groups in occupied France, in the days when wireless sets were
scarce and trained operators even fewer. She would parachute in, move around
with her false identity papers, contact the Resistance, give them their orders,
and note their replies, complaints, and requests for guns and ammunition. For
the return journey she would rendezvous with a pickup plane, usually a
three-seater Westland Lysander, small enough to land on six hundred yards of
grass.

From courier work she had graduated
to organizing sabotage. Most SOE agents were officers, the theory being that
their "men" were the local Resistance. In practice, the Resistance
were not under military discipline, and an agent had to win their cooperation by
being tough, knowledgeable, and authoritative.

The work was dangerous. Six men and
three women had finished the training course with Flick, and she was the only
one still operating two years later. Two were known to be dead: one shot by the
Milice, the hated French security police, and the second killed when his
parachute failed to open. The other six had been captured, interrogated, and
tortured, and had then disappeared into prison camps in Germany. Flick had
survived because she was ruthless, she had quick reactions, and she was careful
about security to the point of paranoia.

Beside her sat her husband, Michel,
leader of the Resistance circuit codenamed Bollinger, which was based in the
cathedral city of Reims, ten miles from here. Although about to risk his life,
Michel was sitting back in his chair, his right ankle resting on his left knee,
holding a tall glass of pale, watery wartime beer. His careless grin had won
her heart when she was a student at the Sorbonne, writing a thesis on Moliere's
ethics that she had abandoned at the outbreak of war. He had been a disheveled
young philosophy lecturer with a legion of adoring students.

He was still the sexiest man she had
ever met. He was tall, and he dressed with careless elegance in rumpled suits
and faded blue shirts. His hair was always a little too long. He had a
come-to-bed voice and an intense blue-eyed gaze that made a girl feel she was
the only woman in the world.

This mission had given Flick a
welcome chance to spend a few days with her husband, but it had not been a
happy time. They had not quarreled, exactly, but Michel's affection had seemed
halfhearted, as if he were going through the motions. She had felt hurt. Her
instinct told her he was interested in someone else. He was only thirty-five,
and his unkempt charm still worked on young women. It did not help that since
their wedding they had been apart more than together, because of the war. And
there were plenty of willing French girls, she thought sourly, in the
Resistance and out of it.

She still loved him. Not in the same
way: she no longer worshiped him as she had on their honeymoon, no longer
yearned to devote her life to making him happy. The morning mists of romantic
love had lifted, and in the clear daylight of married life she could see that
he was vain, self-absorbed, and unreliable. But when he chose to focus his
attention on her, he could still make her feel unique and beautiful and
cherished.

His charm worked on men, too, and he
was a great leader, courageous and charismatic. He and Flick had figured out
the battle plan together. They would attack the château in two places, dividing
the defenders, then regroup inside to form a single force that would penetrate
the basement, find the main equipment room, and blow it up.

They had a floor plan of the
building supplied by Antoinette Dupert, supervisor of the group of local women
who cleaned the château every evening. She was also Michel's aunt. The cleaners
started work at seven o'clock, the same time as vespers, and Flick could see
some of them now, presenting their special passes to the guard at the
wrought-iron gate. Antoinette's sketch showed the entrance to the basement but
no further details, for it was a restricted area, open to Germans only, and
cleaned by soldiers.

Michel's attack plan was based on
reports from MI6, the British intelligence service, which said the château was
guarded by a Waffen SS detachment working in three shifts, each of twelve men.
The Gestapo personnel in the building were not fighting troops, and most would
not even be armed. The Bollinger circuit had been able to muster fifteen
fighters for the attack, and they were now deployed, either among the
worshipers in the church, or posing as Sunday idlers around the square, concealing
their weapons under their clothing or in satchels and duffel bags. If MI6 was
right, the Resistance would outnumber the guards.

But a worry nagged at Flick's brain
and made her heart heavy with apprehension. When she had told Antoinette of
MI6's estimate, Antoinette had frowned and said, "It seems to me there are
more." Antoinette was no fool—she had been secretary to Joseph Laperrière,
the head of a champagne house, until the occupation reduced his profits and his
wife became his secretary and she might be right.