Death Ray (4 page)

Following our landing and debriefing in Scotland, X turned up and made us an offer. Would we like the opportunity to hit back at the enemy? Would we mind going back to school? No ordinary school, but a rather special one where we’d be trained as secret agents. X was a shadowy figure, sharp-featured, with cold, hungry, steel-grey eyes. Perfect for his clandestine job. He received his orders directly from the British prime
minister
, Mr Winston Churchill, and I think that meant no one dared question his authority.

‘First, I guess you’re all wondering where you are.’ X turned and inspected a large map pinned to the wall. ‘This map shows southern England.’ He tapped a finger against it. ‘London’s here.’

‘What’s left of it,’ Loki muttered.

X frowned. Nils explained, ‘We were delayed by an air raid.’

‘Ah!’ X grimaced. ‘Glad you’re all in one piece. Now you are right down here,’ he continued, sliding his finger down towards the middle of the map, close to the coast. We all leaned forward in our chairs for a better look. ‘It’s called the New Forest. The whole area around Mulberry House is a mix of woodland, open heath, and small farmsteads. Importantly, it is a
restricted area
. The army is using much of it for training purposes, and the navy has a number of sites located on the coast and rivers. I should also tell you that Mulberry is only one part of our school. There are other houses in the forest in which groups are undergoing training just like you.’ Turning away from the map, he began pacing back and forth. ‘We discourage contact with the locals. That’s not to say you can’t visit the nearby villages, but you should either be accompanied by someone in uniform or take extreme care not to reveal who you are or what you’re doing here.’

‘Sounds more like a prison camp,’ Freya whispered under her breath.

X glared at her for a moment before proceeding.
‘There
are three other students here at Mulberry House. You will get the chance to say hello first thing tomorrow morning. Sergeant Walker shall arrange for various instructors to visit you here. They are from all walks of life, so don’t be surprised if some strike you as rather odd or shady characters. After all, who better to teach you about blowing open a safe than a top safecracker, or about breaking and entering than a proficient cat burglar?

‘Can I ask a question?’ I interrupted.

‘Yes, Finn, of course.’

‘How long will we be here?’

‘As long as necessary.’ He resumed pacing the room. ‘For now, my orders to you are simple. Listen and learn. Soak up everything. Practise hard. Ask questions. Use your time here productively. Waste not one minute. All too soon, frighteningly so in fact, you will find yourselves in enemy territory with minimal equipment. You will have to rely on your wits and your training. You will have to survive undetected amid the enemy for maybe months on end. One slip and you’ll be caught. And if you’re caught no one will come running to rescue you. You’ll be alone.’

I gulped.

X leaned against the back of a chair. ‘Unfortunately, there are influential men in high places who think this whole exercise is foolhardy, that training civilians to work behind enemy lines will prove disastrous, and that training boys and girls of your tender age to do the work of soldiers is simply madness.’

‘The official Secret Intelligence Services, the SIS, and in particular MI6 are the loudest objectors to our very existence,’ the brigadier interrupted sharply. ‘But the buggers are wrong. They fail to appreciate the advantages.’

‘Advantages?’ Freya asked.

‘Well, Miss Haukelid, not least the fact that children raise fewer suspicions than adults. And in some occupied countries, particularly France, many of the men have been forced to go and work in Germany. That means there are fewer about on the streets. Those who are often attract attention and get stopped and questioned. It’s a big problem. Hopefully you can all slip under the net.’

‘Quite so,’ X continued. ‘Suffice it to say, however, that there’s more than a little healthy competition between us and the SIS. I fought tooth and nail to get the Special Operations group up and running, scrounging what I could, begging, borrowing and stealing the rest. Thankfully, Mr Churchill is a firm supporter of my grand plan. Without his backing, the SIS would have us shut down inside a week. Of course, even Mr Churchill’s support will not last for ever if we don’t deliver. So, we have to be successful. We have to hit the enemy hard.’ X glared at each of us in turn to drive the point home. ‘Much rests on your shoulders but I’m sure you won’t let me down.’

‘We will teach you many things here,’ Sergeant Walker added. ‘Your weapons practice will be stepped up, and you’ll learn how to set explosives and detonators,
use
timing devices to disrupt the enemy’s machinery of war. Naturally, while here you shall also continue the fitness training you began up in Scotland, and further hone your Morse code and cipher skills.’

X gripped the back of the chair tightly with both hands. ‘You are all embarking on a most unusual journey – towards a career not far removed from that of the common criminal. But let us all face a stark truth – this war is vile, dirty, nasty and downright underhand. There are no rules. Think of it as nothing less than a battle of good versus evil. And right now the outcome lies precariously in the balance. Put simply, our backs are against the wall.’

Loki raised a hand.

‘Yes, Mr Larson. What is it?’

‘You mean we’re losing?’

‘Yes, Mr Larson, things are going badly for us. After the fall of France and the Low Countries, not to mention your own homeland, the Nazis effectively control most of Europe, all the way east to the Baltic and Black Sea. However, all is not lost. Britain remains an island of defiance. We are a painful boil on Hitler’s backside and we don’t intend to let him forget it. When we think of war, we often imagine great battles involving thousands of men and machinery such as tanks and artillery, fighter aircraft engaged in frantic dogfights in the skies above us. But there are other aspects to warfare – aspects hidden from the public gaze, rarely reported in newspapers, never spoken of in radio broadcasts and denied by men in authority. I believe it will be these that
will
decide the outcome of this war. Maybe it will be the breaking of a secret code, or perhaps the destruction of a factory or other vital installation. We just have to make sure it is us who deal that defining blow.’ X straightened up stiffly. ‘So, lady and gentlemen, having said all that, it just leaves me with the task of wishing you good luck, happy hunting and, as Mr Churchill said to me, “Go forth and set Europe ablaze”!’

Silence filled the room. I don’t know about the others, but all I could picture was the horrors we’d witnessed in London – is that what he wanted? For Europe to become one massive bonfire? I shuddered at the idea.

‘Any further questions?’ asked X.

The silence was broken by the brigadier. ‘Sergeant Walker will show you to your rooms now. Try and get a good night’s sleep as you’ll be up at the crack of dawn.’

X began putting on his coat. ‘One thing I forgot to say,’ he said. ‘If at any time you change your minds, if you can’t go through with what we ask of you, then you must tell us. There’ll be no shame in it. We can make alternative arrangements. It would be better all round if you dropped out before we sent you behind enemy lines. Safer for everyone.’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ I said. ‘You know what we went through to get here.’

‘Yes.’ He smiled at me. ‘I thought you’d say that, Finn Gunnersen. Oh, and another thing. You need to fill these forms in. I’ll leave them with you. No rush.
The
brigadier or Sergeant Walker will help you if necessary. Sorry, but we can never seem to get away from paperwork completely.’

Loki picked them up and examined them. ‘What are they?’

‘One you have to sign to say that you’ll never tell a living soul about Special Ops – we call it the Official Secrets Act. The other is your last will and testament … Just in case.’

UPSTAIRS, I WAS
relieved to discover we each had our own room. In Scotland, Loki and I shared and he’d snored like an elk suffering from a bad case of flu. I barely got a wink of sleep all the time we were there. My room here was small and sparsely furnished. It smelled dusty and slightly odd, kind of rotten, as if a dead mouse lay hidden beneath the floorboards. The bed was metal-framed with squeaky springs and a thin mattress, and there was a rickety bedside table and cupboard. Our luggage had been sent on ahead – one military issue khaki-coloured canvas kitbag each, containing the standard set of clothes issued to students at Arisaig. I opened it and tipped the contents onto the bed: socks, cotton shirts, ill-fitting trousers, itchy sweaters made from coarse wool and spare grey underpants with weak elastic in the waistband – the sum total of my worldly possessions. Our own clothes, the ones we were wearing when we’d arrived from Norway, had been confiscated along with everything else. My precious leather flying jacket, a gift from Father, and his medals and photographs had all been taken by the authorities for
safekeeping
.

Wearily I undressed and slipped beneath the cold, clammy quilt. It took ages to warm up. Just as I finally
got
comfortable and was close to drifting off to sleep, I heard the distant drone of aircraft engines. It sounded like there were loads of them. I leaped up and ran to the small bedroom window. Unfastening the latch, I threw it wide open and stuck my head out. Peering up into the night, I saw a scatter of dark specks moving slowly south.

‘
The enemy, Finn!
’ To my left, Loki was leaning out of his window too.

Dozens of planes in arrow-like formations were flying home after their night-time raids. ‘They remind me of birds migrating for the winter,’ I called out. ‘It’s hard to identify their silhouettes, but they’re probably Dornier Seventeens.’

‘Expect you’re right. They call them “flying pencils”, don’t they?’

‘Uh-huh.’

Dorniers were heavy-duty bombers, the pride of the Luftwaffe. They were nicknamed ‘flying pencils’ because of their unusually long noses and fuselage.

Without warning the night suddenly turned alternately white, then black and then white again, the heavens lit by blinding flashes. The noise was deafening too. It was as if great hammers were beating the sky, or somebody was bashing together two giant dustbin lids.

‘Anti-aircraft fire,’ Loki shouted across to me. ‘Doubt they’ll hit anything, though.’

He was probably right. I’d heard that a gunner’s task was rather tricky. Shells had to be preset to detonate at a particular altitude, hopefully matching that of the
enemy
planes. Get it wrong and the enemy would laugh all the way home. Get it right and they would be blown out of the sky. As far as I could tell, luck that night was with the Luftwaffe.

‘I’ve seen enough. Goodnight, Finn.’

‘Goodnight, Loki.’

Returning to bed, I lay staring at the chipped paint and cracked plaster ceiling that was intermittently lit by the flashes outside. What had we let ourselves in for? Nowhere was safe any more. Death and destruction hung over the world like a dense fog. It was impossible to see what the future held. Where would we be heading? Would we even live to tell others of our adventures? Would anyone bother to read my last will and testament? I turned over onto my stomach and buried my head in the pillow. I thought of home – to before the war, of my small village on the shores of the Trondheimfjord, and the protective embrace of tall snow-capped mountains within full view of the house I’d been born in. Although it seemed far away, almost another world, by concentrating really hard I could see it all vividly. I could hear familiar voices and laughter. On cold winter nights Father would sit by the fire and dream of making his fortune flying passengers and freight from one end of our rugged country to the other, of moving to a big house in the city. Mother would curse at him and vow never to leave our village, and my sister, Anna, would argue with them both before storming off to her room to sulk. So much had changed. I wanted my old life back. I wanted the impossible.

* * *

I was woken at six-thirty the next morning by Sergeant Walker thumping a fist on my door and yelling, ‘Be up and dressed in five minutes,
or else
!’

At breakfast, Mrs Saunders busied herself making pots of tea and toast. In possession of a fine pair of lungs, she sang along with tunes blaring out of a wireless, merely greeting us with a glance and a nod.

Our fellow students descended the stairs and joined us in the kitchen. We introduced ourselves. Brother and sister Jacques and Amélie Lefebvre were French. Jacques was seventeen and very studious looking, his thick glasses frequently needing to be pushed back up the bridge of his nose with a bony index finger. He struck me as pretty humourless too, his brow permanently creased with worry lines. At just fourteen, Amélie was the youngest among us. In truth I was quite shocked that someone of her age was a member of Special Ops, and wondered whether others, maybe even younger than her, were being trained in the other houses X had mentioned. How old did you have to be to qualify? I wondered. Ten? Twelve? Fourteen? Old enough to pick up a gun? Quite pretty, with a wide smile and warm chestnut eyes, Amélie was tiny for her age. She was the sort of person that once you’d met you were unlikely to forget. I wondered if that was a disadvantage in a secret agent – not easily being able to blend into a crowd.

The third of our new acquaintances was one hell of a surprise. Max Stein was a tall sixteen-year-old German! From Düsseldorf, apparently. On seeing
the
look of shock on our faces, he held up his hands and grinned, telling us, ‘Don’t worry, I’m on your side. Honestly!’

One of the rules of Special Operations was that English had to be spoken at all times during training unless we were specifically having lessons in another language. Now I understood why. We were quite a mix. I just hoped that we’d be able to understand each other properly as we were all speaking in a second language. From what I could gather, we were all pretty fluent, except Amélie. She seemed to struggle with anything beyond simple phrases.