Death Ray (27 page)

URGENT … ODETTE ARRESTED … WILL TRY RESCUE … SUSPECT JACQUES IS ENEMY SPY … DEATH RAY COMPROMISED … ADVISE NEXT STEPS

That was the easy bit. Before it could be sent it needed to be coded. I took a deep breath and got to work. I had to be meticulous: one tiny mistake could render the whole message gibberish. We’d been taught a method of coding called the Playfair Code. Every agent had to memorize a key phrase. Mine was
On a dark and
stormy
night
. Step one was to write out the key in rows of five letters, remembering to ignore any repetitions and then to add the remainder of the alphabet to complete a grid. Having created this, I took pairs of letters from our message, beginning with ‘UR’, and located them in the grid. Thinking of their positions as being the corners of a square or rectangle, I then made a note of the opposite corners. These were the letters I’d transmit. The code was virtually unbreakable unless you knew the agent’s key phrase. When I’d finished, I double checked it and added my ‘identifier’ – a string of Fs – so London would be alerted to the fact it was me on the other end and not Freya. She used a string of Os.

‘What shall we do with Pierre? He doesn’t look too good,’ said Loki, having inspected him at close quarters. ‘We can’t take him with us.’

‘When it gets dark I’ll try and get him to a doctor. I know one I can trust, but he’s on the other side of town,’ said Alain.

‘You’ll never manage to move him alone,’ said Max, sizing up the task. ‘I’ll give you a hand.’

As the sun set and darkness fell, we gathered up the holdalls containing our supplies and swung them over our shoulders. Max and Alain dragged a weak and unsteady Pierre up the steps and to the back door of the safe house. ‘All being well, we’ll join you in the woods later, once Pierre’s in safe hands. Good luck,’ said Max. They disappeared into the night.

We gave them five minutes before heading off in the
opposite
direction. Amélie led the way. She was still in a state of turmoil, stomping rather than walking, kicking out at invisible stones, incessantly muttering to herself and not bothering to look back to see whether Loki and I were managing to follow her all right. Having taken us through a gate to the rear of the property, she then guided us across a large area of wasteland, annoyingly overgrown and littered with rubble and refuse. Then we had to crawl through a smelly culvert close to the railway line for several hundred yards before finally taking a gravel track that brought us to the edge of the woods. Amélie headed deep into the trees. She moved quickly. I couldn’t work out how she managed it. It was as if she could see in the dark. In the end I supposed it was simply that she knew the way off by heart. Loki and I struggled to keep up. It was too dangerous to risk using torch light, so progress was slow and hazardous, spiky branches and brambles prodding, slapping and scratching our faces without warning. We had to bat them back as best we could with our flailing arms. Eventually Amélie veered off through a narrow, almost imperceptible gap in the bushes. ‘This way,’ she whispered. Thorns clawed at my clothes as we scrambled through a tangle of briars and dense bushes. Crouching on all fours, Amélie suddenly announced, ‘We are near. Stay here. I’m going to check everything is all right.’

It was a relief to finally crawl out of the undergrowth into a small clearing. Taking a pen torch from her pocket, Amélie hunted for a log partially hidden beneath
a
bush. Dragging it out, she then gave it a hefty kick. The end dropped out. ‘
Voilà!
’

The log was hollow. Inside was our spare transmitter, or rather the pieces of it. I helped her remove the various bits and began assembling it. ‘Are you sure this is going to work?’ I asked sceptically. ‘It doesn’t look very powerful. That battery is rather small.’

‘It worked last time, Finn … Loki, can you give me a hand to drape the aerial up in those branches?’

Twenty minutes later, everything was set. I had my headphones on and a finger poised over the key pad that I’d balanced on top of the log. In my other hand I held the coded message. Amélie shone the pen torch over my shoulder. Loki knelt beside me, ready to hand me a pencil so I could scribble down London’s reply. I took a deep breath and flicked a switch. My headphones hissed and crackled. Morse was a whole different language, comprising just dots and dashes. We’d practised it so many times that it should have become second nature, our tapping fluent and precise. But my confidence seemed to drain from me. I began tapping but quickly made a mistake, then another. I stopped, cursed, rubbed my hands together, flexed my fingers and began again.

‘There. It’s done.’ I flipped another switch. ‘Let’s hope they’re listening.’

An acknowledgement arrived almost immediately. The signal was poor, sounding distant. But I understood it without needing to write it down. It was one of many short, standard replies. Tearing off the headphones,
I
said, ‘We have to wait. They’ll send their instructions in two hours.’

Amélie looked at her watch and then flicked the power switch on the transmitter. ‘We must save the battery. It is the only one we’ve got.’ She crawled to a tree and sat with her back against the trunk. Drawing up her legs tightly, she rested her chin on her knees and shivered in the cold night air. Loki and I settled down on either side of her. ‘You’re wrong about Jacques,’ she said. ‘Trust me. I know him.’

Nobody spoke for ages, and then Loki piped up. ‘A truck. We need a German truck.’

‘What for?’ I asked.

‘We’ll drive right up to the château, fight our way inside, rescue Freya and then leg it. Smithy gave us enough gear to make quite a stand.’

I chewed it over for a few minutes. Loki’s plans were often pretty simple and direct. Blaze in, knock a few heads together, do the business and then get the hell out of there. It might work, of course, but I wondered if a few modifications might make it a little less risky. ‘I’d prefer to try and get in and out as Germans. I know! Maybe we could forge some papers – orders from their High Command. Pretend that Berlin wants Freya taken to Nazi HQ for interrogation and that we’ve come to transport her.’

‘Idiots!’ Amélie muttered under her breath. ‘It sounds a stupid plan.’

‘She’s right, Finn. There’s not enough time to forge anything. I reckon we’ve got twenty-four hours.
Forty-eight
at the most. After that, everything is lost.’

In training at Mulberry House we’d learned a lot about the Gestapo’s methods of interrogation. In all likelihood Freya’s would begin slowly, gently, the Gestapo simply pointing out that spilling everything would be in her best interests. When that didn’t work, they’d apply stress, depriving her of sleep, food and water, and repeatedly take her from her cell for bouts of questioning. If, after about a day, that didn’t do the trick, they’d resort to other methods, the kind Monsieur Truffaut experienced. Even the most courageous couldn’t be expected to resist for long. At Mulberry House we’d been taught to stall as best we could, try to hold out for forty-eight hours, enough time for others to make their escape. But the Gestapo weren’t stupid. They knew that was precisely what agents were trained to do. I wondered how Freya would fare. At what point would she regret not accepting her L-pill from the brigadier? She was tough for a girl, not just physically, but in spirit too. She’d inherited that from her father, Heimar, a man who spent his life hunting in the great expanses of Norway’s wilderness. Maybe seeing she was just a young woman, the Gestapo might be misled, I thought. They’d not be used to someone like her.
Or would they?

‘It’s almost time, Finn,’ Loki announced, peering at his watch. ‘Let’s hope X has some bright ideas.’

London’s reply was long. They repeated it to make sure I got all of it down. Then I set about decoding the long string of letters. With Loki and Amélie
peering
over my shoulders, I slowly revealed our instructions.

‘Jesus, Finn, that can’t be right,’ said a shocked Loki. ‘You must’ve made a mistake.’

Unfortunately I’d not made any mistakes at all. I stared at our orders in utter disbelief.

MESSAGE UNDERSTOOD … OPERATION HAS BEEN BROUGHT FORWARD … DEATH RAY MUST PROCEED WITHOUT DELAY … WILL BEGIN TOMORROW NIGHT … AIR DROP AT 2300 HOURS … PICK UP ON BEACH AT 0030 HOURS … GET THERE IF YOU CAN … WARNING … CARPET LAYING BEGINS 0100 … IF CAN’T BE REMOVED FREYA MUST BE DESTROYED … GOOD LUCK

Loki was shaking his head adamantly. ‘No! No way. Can’t be.’

I read and re-read the message and then sent a quick reply requesting clarification. All I got in return was the message re-sent, without any alterations. In the end, fearing I’d already been transmitting for way too long, I signed off and removed my headphones.

‘This is impossible,’ said Amelie.

It was
all
impossible, I thought. Why did they want Freya destroyed? Did she know too much about Special Ops? Was that it? Did we have to either save her or make sure she was silenced for ever? For once in his life, Loki was dumbstruck.

Of course, I could understand why London, fearing
Freya
would eventually buckle under interrogation, were bringing Operation Death Ray forward. They knew the train timetable. They knew that only one supply train came per week. And to wait another week was simply out of the question. But they also knew we were heavily compromised. How could we be expected to undertake such a major diversion? And what was all that about carpet laying?

We heard a noise. Someone was coming. We reached for our guns.

MAX AND ALAIN
emerged from the bushes. Thankfully Pierre had made it into safe hands. According to the friendly doctor, he’d live. Loki showed them London’s instructions. Max couldn’t believe the bit about Freya either. About the rest he was philosophical, saying that we’d simply have to try our best in difficult circumstances.

‘Does anyone know what they mean by “carpet laying”?’ I asked.

Max nodded. ‘I keep forgetting, you and Loki weren’t at all of the briefing sessions back at Mulberry House, were you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘
Enlighten us!
’

‘Walker told us that they wanted to cause Fritz as much inconvenience as possible. Knowing a lot of research goes on at the laboratories, they reckon that destroying them will set Fritz back months, maybe years in his radar research. So, whether Operation Death Ray succeeds or fails, after the boats have left the beach the RAF is going to fly in and bomb the whole area. There’ll be nothing left of the château or its laboratories.’

Loki raised his hands to his face and let out a groan of anguish. ‘We’ve got to save her, Finn. We’ve got to.’

‘Yes. But how?’

Max suddenly snatched up a Sten. ‘Sssh! Someone else is coming,’ he whispered.

In silence we listened to the cracks and snaps of twigs breaking underfoot and the rustling of bushes. When a shape finally emerged from the undergrowth on all fours, Amélie pressed the switch on her pen torch. We all gasped.
Jacques!

‘What the hell’s been happening?’ he said, shielding his face from the brightness of the torch light.

No one lowered their weapons. ‘Are you alone?’ Max asked.

‘Of course. Can somebody tell me what’s going on? Why did you abandon the safe house?’

‘Where have you been?’ I asked sternly.

Jacques tried to explain that he’d got delayed by German patrols a few miles outside of town and couldn’t make the rendezvous with Freya, but I don’t think anyone believed his story for one minute. Fearing Jacques had led the enemy to our hide-out, Max and Alain moved to the edge of the small clearing and listened out for a possible ambush. Amélie’s torch remained fixed on her brother but I noticed the beam flicker strangely – her hand was shaking. As Jacques tried to scramble to his feet, Loki moved rapidly, knocking him back down onto his knees. ‘Hands behind the back of your head, Jacques. Do it! Now.’ Loki pressed the barrel of his revolver against Jacques’ left temple.

‘What are you doing?’ he protested. ‘Get off me, you idiot. And put that gun down.’

The accusations flew. ‘You’re a traitor. You’ve betrayed everyone.’

‘What? Don’t be stupid,’ he replied.

‘You’re working for the enemy. Did Renard recruit you? What rewards did the Nazis offer you?’

‘This is nonsense.’

‘It’s the truth, Jacques. We’ve worked it out,’ I said. ‘All along you’ve been trying to prevent Operation Death Ray from going ahead. That’s why so many partisans have been arrested, why the Germans arrived so quickly after we landed, why Freya got caught.’

Jacques was suddenly fearful. ‘
Non!
Tell them, Amélie. I’d never betray anyone.’

We all looked at her but she said nothing. She did not defend her brother. Alain turned and marched across to where Jacques knelt. ‘This is for my father,’ he hissed. Turning his Sten gun round, he swung it viciously, the butt smacking the side of Jacques’ head. His glasses flew off into the bushes and he rocked for a moment before falling forward like a felled tree. Had he not been wearing spectacles, had the thick arm not cushioned the blow, I think Alain’s strike would have killed him there and then. But Alain wasn’t done. He launched his right foot, the heavy boot sinking into Jacques’ ribs. ‘That is for Philippe.’ He kicked him again. ‘That is for Claude.’ And he kicked him a third time. ‘That is for Pierre, and all the others you’ve betrayed.’

‘Finn, hand me one of those welrods. One with a silencer,’ said Loki.

Amelie cried, ‘
Non!
’

‘It has to be done,’ Alain snarled.

Clutching his sore ribs, Jacques tried to lift himself up, and desperately began crawling towards the bushes where his glasses had landed. ‘You don’t understand,’ he groaned. He was like a frightened, wounded animal, making a last desperate bid to escape. Alain’s boot came down on him hard. Jacques wasn’t going anywhere – except hell.

‘
La vérité, Jacques
,’ Amélie cried. ‘The truth.’