World War II Thriller Collection (76 page)

“It's not possible.”

“He was carrying one when we arrested all of you. He tried to destroy it, just now, but we managed to save a few scraps.” Dieter took from his pocket the sheet he had torn and handed it to her. “Isn't that his handwriting?”

“Yes.”

“And is it a love letter . . . or what?”

Gilberte read it slowly, moving her lips:

 

I think of you constantly. The memory of you drives me to despair. Ah! Forgive me! I will leave you! Farewell! I will go far away, so far that you will never hear of me again; and yet—today—I know not what force impelled me toward you. For one doesn't struggle against heaven; one cannot resist the smile of angels; one is carried away by that which is beautiful, charming, adorable.

 

She threw down the paper with a sob.

“I'm sorry to be the one to tell you,” Dieter said gently. He took the white linen handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit and handed it to her. She buried her face in it.

It was time to turn the conversation imperceptibly toward interrogation. “I suppose Michel has been living with you since Flick left.”

“Longer than that,” she said indignantly. “For six months, every night except when
she
was in town.”

“In your house?”

“I have an apartment. Very small. But it was enough for two . . . two people who loved each other.” She continued to cry.

Dieter strove to maintain a light conversational tone as he obliquely approached the topic he was really interested in. “Wasn't it difficult to have Helicopter living with you as well, in a small place?”

“He's not living there. He only came today.”

“But you must have wondered where he was going to stay.”

“No. Michel found him a place, an empty room over the old bookshop in the rue Molière.”

Walter Goedel suddenly shifted in his chair: he had realized where this was heading. Dieter carefully ignored him, and casually asked Gilberte, “Didn't he leave his stuff at your place when you went to Chatelle to meet the plane?”

“No, he took it to the room.”

Dieter asked the key question. “Including his little suitcase?”

“Yes.”

“Ah.” Dieter had what he wanted. Helicopter's radio set was in a room over the bookshop in the rue Molière. “I've finished with this stupid cow,” he said to Hans in German. “Turn her over to Becker.”

Dieter's own car, the blue Hispano-Suiza, was parked in front of the château. With Walter Goedel beside him and Hans Hesse in the backseat, he drove fast through the villages to Reims and quickly found the bookshop in the rue Molière.

They broke down the door and climbed a bare wooden staircase to the room over the shop. It was unfurnished but for a palliasse covered with a rough blanket. On the floor beside the rough bed stood a bottle of whisky, a bag containing toiletries, and the small suitcase.

Dieter opened it to show Goedel the radio. “With this,” Dieter said triumphantly, “I can become Helicopter.”

On the way back to Sainte-Cécile, they discussed what message to send. “First, Helicopter would want to know why the parachutists did not drop,” Dieter said. “So he will ask, ‘What happened?' Do you agree?”

“And he would be angry,” Goedel said.

“So he will say, ‘What the blazes happened?' perhaps.”

Goedel shook his head. “I studied in England before the war. That phrase, ‘What the blazes,' is too polite. It's a coy euphemism for ‘What the hell.' A young man in the military would never use it.”

“Maybe he should say, ‘What the fuck?' instead.”

“Too coarse,” Goedel objected. “He knows the message may be decoded by a female.”

“Your English is better than mine, you choose.”

“I think he would say, ‘What the devil happened?' It expresses his anger, and it's a masculine curse that would not offend most women.”

“Okay. Then he wants to know what he should do next, so he will ask for further orders. What would he say?”

“Probably, ‘Send instructions.' English people dislike the word ‘order,' they think it's not refined.”

“All right. And we'll ask for a quick response, because Helicopter would be impatient, and so are we.”

They reached the château and went to the wireless listening room in the basement. A middle-aged operator called Joachim plugged the set in and tuned it to Helicopter's emergency frequency while Dieter scribbled the agreed message:

 

WHAT THE DEVIL HAPPENED? SEND INSTRUCTIONS. REPLY IMMEDIATELY.

 

Dieter forced himself to control his impatience and carefully show Joachim how to encode the message, including the security tags.

Goedel said, “Won't they know it's not Helicopter at the machine? Can't they recognize the individual ‘fist' of the sender, like handwriting?”

“Yes,” Joachim said. “But I've listened to this chap sending a couple of times, and I can imitate him. It's a bit like mimicking someone's accent, talking like a Frankfurt man, say.”

Goedel was skeptical. “You can do a perfect impersonation after hearing him twice?”

“Not perfect, no. But agents are often under pressure when they broadcast, in some hiding place and worried about us catching up with them, so small variations will be put down to strain.” He began to tap out the letters.

Dieter reckoned they had a wait of at least an hour. At the British listening station, the message had to be decrypted, then passed to Helicopter's controller, who was surely in bed. The controller might get the message by phone and compose a reply on the spot, but even then the reply had to be encrypted and transmitted, then decrypted by Joachim.

Dieter and Goedel went to the kitchen on the ground floor, where they found a mess corporal starting work on breakfast, and got him to give them sausages and coffee. Goedel was impatient to get back to Rommel's headquarters, but he wanted to stay and see how this turned out.

It was daylight when a young woman in SS uniform came to tell them that the reply had come in and Joachim had almost finished typing it.

They hurried downstairs. Weber was already there, with his usual knack of showing up where the action was. Joachim handed the typed message to him and carbon copies to Dieter and Goedel.

Dieter read:

 

JACKDAWS ABORTED DROP BUT HAVE LANDED ELSEWHERE AWAIT CONTACT FROM LEOPARDESS

 

Weber said grumpily, “This does not tell us much.”

Goedel agreed. “What a disappointment.”

“You're both wrong!” Dieter said jubilantly. “Leopardess is in France—and I have a picture of her!” He pulled the photos of Flick Clairet from his pocket with a flourish and handed one to Weber. “Get a printer out of bed and have a thousand copies made. I want to see
that picture all over Reims within the next twelve hours. Hans, get my car filled up with petrol.”

“Where are you going?” said Goedel.

“To Paris, with the other photograph, to do the same thing there. I've got her now!”

THE PARACHUTE DROP
went smoothly. The containers were pushed out first so that there was no possibility of one landing on the head of a parachutist; then the Jackdaws took turns sitting on the top of the slide and, when tapped on the shoulder by the dispatcher, slithering down the chute and out into space.

Flick went last. As she fell, the Hudson turned north and disappeared into the night. She wished the crew luck. It was almost dawn: because of the night's delays, they would have to fly the last part of their journey in dangerous daylight.

Flick landed perfectly, with her knees bent and her arms tucked into her sides as she fell to the ground. She lay still for a moment. French soil, she thought with a shiver of fear; enemy territory. Now she was a criminal, a terrorist, a spy. If she was caught, she would be executed.

She put the thought out of her mind and stood up. A few yards away, a donkey stared at her in the moonlight, then bent its head to graze. She could see three containers nearby. Farther away, scattered across the field, were half a dozen Resistance people, working in pairs, picking up the bulky containers and carrying them away.

She struggled out of her parachute harness, helmet, and flying suit. While she was doing so, a young man ran up to her and said in breathless French, “We weren't expecting any personnel, just supplies!”

“A change of plan,” she said. “Don't worry about it. Is Anton with you?” Anton was the code name of the leader of the Vestryman circuit.

“Yes.”

“Tell him Leopardess is here.”

“Ah—you are Leopardess?” He was impressed.

“Yes.”

“I'm Chevalier. I'm so pleased to meet you.”

She glanced up at the sky. It was turning from black to gray. “Find Anton as quickly as you can, please, Chevalier. Tell him we have six people who need transport. There's no time to spare.”

“Very good.” He hurried away.

She folded her parachute into a neat bundle, then set out to find the other Jackdaws. Greta had landed in a tree, and had bruised herself crashing through the upper branches, but had come to rest without serious injury, and had been able to slip out of her harness and climb down to the ground. The others had all come down safely on the grass. “I'm very proud of myself,” said Jelly, “but I wouldn't do it again for a million pounds.”

Flick noted that the Resistance people were carrying the containers to the southern end of the field, and she took the Jackdaws in that direction. There she found a builder's van, a horse and cart, and an old Lincoln limousine with the hood removed and some kind of steam motor powering it. She was not surprised: gas was available only for essential business, and French people tried all kinds of ingenious ways to run their cars.

The Resistance men had loaded the cart with containers and were now hiding them under empty vegetable boxes. More containers were going into the back of the builder's van. Directing the operation was Anton, a thin man of forty in a greasy cap and a short blue workman's jacket, with a yellow French cigarette stuck to his lip. He stared in astonishment. “Six women?” he said. “Is this a sewing circle?”

Jokes about women were best ignored, Flick had found. She spoke solemnly to him. “This is the most important operation I've ever run, and I need your help.”

“Of course.”

“We have to catch a train to Paris.”

“I can get you to Chartres.” He glanced at the sky, calculating the time until daylight, then pointed across the field to a farmhouse, dimly visible. “You can hide in a barn for now. When we have disposed of these containers, we'll come back for you.”

“Not good enough,” Flick said firmly. “We have to get going.”

“The first train to Paris leaves at ten. I can get you there by then.”

“Nonsense. No one knows when the trains will run.” It was true. The combination of Allied bombing, Resistance sabotage, and deliberate mistakes by anti-Nazi railway workers had wrecked all schedules, and the only thing to do was go to the station and wait until a train came. But it was best to get there early. “Put the containers in the barn and take us now.”

“Impossible,” he said. “I have to stash the supplies before daylight.”

The men stopped work to listen to the argument.

Flick sighed. The guns and ammunition in the containers were the most important thing in the world to Anton. They were the source of his power and prestige. She said, “This is more important, believe me.”

“I'm sorry—”

“Anton, listen to me. If you don't do this for me, I promise you, you will never again receive a single container from England. You know I can do this, don't you?”

There was a pause. Anton did not want to back down in front of his men. However, if the supply of arms dried up, the men would go elsewhere. This was the only leverage British officers had over the French Resistance.

But it worked. He glared at her. Slowly, he removed the stub of the cigarette from his mouth, pinched out the end, and threw it away. “Very well,” he said. “Get in the van.”

The women helped unload the containers, then clambered in. The floor was filthy with cement dust, mud, and oil, but they found some scraps of sacking and used
them to keep the worst of the dirt off their clothes as they sat on the floor. Anton closed the door on them.

Chevalier got into the driving seat. “So, ladies,” he said in English. “Off we go!”

Flick replied coldly in French. “No jokes, please, and no English.”

He drove off.

Having flown five hundred miles on the metal floor of a bomber, the Jackdaws now drove twenty miles in the back of a builder's van. Surprisingly it was Jelly—the oldest, the fattest, and the least fit of the six—who was most stoical, joking about the discomfort and laughing at herself when the van took a sharp bend and she rolled over helplessly.