Jackdaws (8 page)

Flick went inside and made her way
to SOE's flat. Her spirits lifted when she saw Percy Thwaite. A balding man of
fifty with a toothbrush mustache, he was paternally fond of Flick. He wore
civilian clothing, and neither of them saluted, for SOE was impatient of
military formalities.

"I can tell by your face that
it went badly," Percy said.

His sympathetic tone of voice was
too much for Flick to bear. The tragedy of what had happened overwhelmed her
suddenly, and she burst into tears. Percy put his arms around her and patted
her back. She buried her face in his old tweed jacket. "All right,"
he said. "I know you did your best."

"Oh, God, I'm sorry to be such
a girl."

"I wish all my men were such
girls," Percy said with a catch in his voice.

She detached herself from his
embrace and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. "Take no notice."

He turned away and blew his nose
into a big handkerchief "Tea or whisky?" he said.

"Tea, I think." She looked
around. The room was full of shabby furniture, hastily installed in 1940 and
never replaced: a cheap desk, a worn rug, mismatched chairs. She sank into a
sagging armchair. "I'll fall asleep if I have booze."

She watched Percy as he made tea. He
could be tough as well as compassionate. Much decorated in the First World War,
he had become a rabble-rousing labor organizer in the twenties, and was a
veteran of the 1936 Battle of Cable Street, when Cockneys attacked Fascists who
were trying to march through a Jewish neighborhood in London's East End. He
would ask searching questions about her plan, but he would be open minded.

He handed her a mug of tea with milk
and sugar.

"There's a meeting later this
morning," he said. "I have to get a briefing note to the boss by nine
o'clock. Hence the hurry."

She sipped the sweet tea and felt a
pleasant jolt of energy. She told him what had happened in the square at
Sainte-Cécile. He sat at the desk and made notes with a sharp pencil. "I
should have called it off," she finished. "Based on Antoinette's misgivings
about the intelligence, I should have postponed the raid and sent you a radio
message saying we were outnumbered."

Percy shook his head sadly.
"This is no time for postponements. The invasion can't be more than a few
days away. If you had consulted us, I doubt it would have made any difference.
What could we do? We couldn't send you more men. I think we would have ordered
you to go ahead regardless. It had to be tried. The telephone exchange is too
important."

"Well, that's some consolation."
Flick was glad she did not have to believe Albert had died because she had made
a tactical error. But that would not bring him back.

"And Michel is all right?"
Percy said.

"Mortified, but
recovering." When SOE had recruited Flick, she had not told them her
husband was in the Resistance. If they had known, they might have steered her
toward different work. But she had not really known it herself, though she had
guessed. In May 1940 she had been in England, visiting her mother, and Michel
had been in the army, like most able-bodied young Frenchmen, so the fall of
France had left them stranded in different countries. By the time she returned
as a secret agent, and learned for certain what role her husband was playing,
too much training had been invested in her, and she was already too useful to
SOE, for her to be fired on account of hypothetical emotional distractions.

"Everyone hates a bullet in the
backside," Percy mused. "People think you must have been running
away." He stood up. "Well, you'd better go home and get some
sleep."

"Not yet," Flick said.
"First I want to know what we're going to do next."

"I'm going to write this report—" "No I mean about the telephone exchange. If it's so important, we
have to knock it out."

He sat down again and looked at her
shrewdly. "What have you got in mind?"

She took Antoinette's pass out of
her bag and threw it on his desk. "Here's a better way to get inside.
That's used by the cleaners who go in every night at seven o'clock."

Percy picked up the pass and
scrutinized it. "Clever girl," he said with something like admiration
in his voice. "Go on."

"I want to go back."

A look of pain passed briefly over
Percy's face, and Flick knew he was dreading her risking her life again. But he
said nothing.

"This time I'll take a full
team with me," she went on. "Each of them will have a pass like that.
We'll substitute for the cleaners in order to get into the château."

"I take it the cleaners are
women?"

"Yes. I'd need an all-female
team."

He nodded. "Not many people
around here will object to that—you girls have proved yourselves. But where
would you find the women? Virtually all our trained people are over there
already."

"Get approval for my plan, and
I'll find the women. I'll take SOE rejects, people who failed the training
course, anybody. We must have a file of people who have dropped out for one
reason or another."

"Yes—because they were
physically unfit, or couldn't keep their mouths shut, or enjoyed violence too
much, or lost their nerve in parachute training and refused to jump out of the
plane."

"It doesn't matter if they're
second-raters," Flick argued earnestly. "I can deal with that."
At the back of her mind, a voice said
Can you, really?
But she ignored it.

"If the invasion fails, we've
lost Europe. We won't try again for years. This is the turning point, we have
to throw everything at the enemy."

"You couldn't use French women
who are already there, Resistance fighters?"

Flick had already considered and
rejected that idea. "If I had a few weeks, I might put together a team
from women in half a dozen different Resistance circuits, but it would take too
long to find them and get them to Reims."

"It might still be
possible."

"And then we have to have a
forged pass with a photo for each woman. That's hard to arrange over there.
Here, we can do it in a day or two."

"It's not that easy."
Percy held Antoinette's pass up to the light of a naked bulb hanging from the
ceiling. "But you're right, our people do work miracles in that
department." He put it down. "All right. It has to be SOE rejects,
then."

Flick felt a surge of triumph. He
was going for it. Percy went on, "But assuming you can find enough
French-speaking girls, will it work? What about the German guards? Don't they
know the cleaners?"

"It's probably not the same
women every night—they must have days off. And men never notice who cleans up
after them."

"I'm not sure. Soldiers are
generally sex-hungry youngsters who pay great attention to all the women with
whom they come into contact. I imagine the men in this château flirt with the
younger ones, at least."

"I watched these women entering
the château last night. and I didn't see any signs of flirting."

"Still, you can't be sure the
men won't notice the appearance of a completely strange crew."

"I can't be certain, but I'm
confident enough to take the chance."

"All right, what about the
French people inside? The telephone operators are local women, aren't they?"

"Some are local, but most are
brought in from Reims by bus."

"Not every French person likes
the Resistance, we both know that. There are some who approve of the Nazis'
ideas. God knows, there were plenty of fools in Britain who thought Hitler
offered the kind of strong modernizing government we all needed—although you
don't hear much from those people nowadays."

Flick shook her head. Percy had not
been to occupied France. "The French have had four years of Nazi rule,
remember. Everyone over there is hoping desperately for the invasion. The
switchboard girls will keep mum."

"Even though the RAF bombed
them?"

Flick shrugged. "There may be a
few hostile ones, but the majority will keep them under control."

"You hope."

"Once again, I think it's a
chance worth taking."

"You still don't know how
heavily guarded that basement entrance is."

"That didn't stop us trying
yesterday."

"Yesterday you had fifteen
Resistance fighters, some of them seasoned. Next time, you'll have a handful of
dropouts and rejects."

Flick played her trump card.
"Listen, all kinds of things could go wrong, but so what? The operation is
low-cost, and we're risking the lives of people who aren't contributing to the
war effort anyway. What have we got to lose?"

"I was coming to that. Look, I
like this plan. I'm going to put it up to the boss. But I think he will reject
it, for a reason we haven't yet discussed."

"What?"

"No one but you could lead this
team. But the trip you've just returned from should be your last. You know too
much. You've been going in and out for two years. You've had contact with most
of the Resistance circuits in northern France. We can't send you back. If you
were captured, you could give them all away."

"I know," Flick said
grimly. "That's why I carry a suicide pill."

CHAPTER

EIGHT

GENERAL SIR BERNARD MONTGOMERY commander of the 21st Army Group, which was about to invade France, had set up
improvised headquarters in west London, at a school whose pupils had been
evacuated to safer accommodation in the countryside. By coincidence, it was the
school Monty himself had attended as a boy. Meetings were held in the model
room, and everyone sat on the schoolboys' hard wooden benches—generals and
politicians and, on one famous occasion, the King himself.

The Brits thought this was cute.
Paul Chancellor from Boston, Massachusetts, thought it was bullshit. What would
it have cost them to bring in a few chairs? He liked the British, by and large,
but not when they were showing off how eccentric they were.

Paul was on Monty's personal staff.
A lot of people thought this was because his father was a general, but that was
an unfair assumption. Paul was comfortable with senior officers, partly because
of his father, partly because before the war the U.S. Army had been the biggest
customer for his business, which was making educational gramophone records,
language courses mainly. He liked the military virtues of obedience,
punctuality, and precision, but he could think for himself, too, and Monty had
come to rely on him more and more.

His area of responsibility was
intelligence. He was an organizer. He made sure the reports Monty needed were
on his desk when he wanted them, chased those that came late, set up meetings
with key people, and made supplementary inquiries on the boss's behalf.

He did have experience of
clandestine work. He had been with the Office of Strategic Services, the
American secret agency, and had served under cover in France and French-speaking
North Africa. (As a child he had lived in Paris, where Pa was military attaché
at the U.S. Embassy.) Paul had been wounded six months ago in a shoot-out with
the Gestapo in Marseilles. One bullet had taken off most of his left ear but
harmed nothing other than his looks. The other smashed his right kneecap, which
would never be the same again, and that was the real reason he had a desk job.

The work was easy, by comparison
with living on the run in occupied territory, but never dull. They were planning
Operation Overlord, the invasion that would end the war. Paul was one of a few
hundred people in the world who knew the date, although many more could guess.
In fact, there were three possible dates, based on the tides, the currents, the
moon, and the hours of daylight. The invasion needed a late-rising moon, so
that the army's initial movements would be shrouded in darkness, but there
would be moonlight later, when the first paratroopers jumped from their planes
and gliders. A low tide at dawn was necessary to expose the obstacles Rommel
had scattered on the beaches. And another low tide before nightfall was needed
for the landing of follow-up forces. These requirements left only a narrow
window: the fleet could sail next Monday, June 5, or on the following Tuesday
or Wednesday. The final decision would be made at the last minute, depending on
the weather, by the Allied Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower.

Three years ago, Paul would have
been desperately scheming for a place in the invasion force. He would have been
itching for action and embarrassed at being a stay-at-home. Now he was older
and wiser. For one thing, he had paid his dues: in high school he had captained
the side that won the Massachusetts championship, but he would never again kick
a ball with his right foot. More importantly, he knew that his organizational
talents could do more to win the war than his ability to shoot straight.

He was thrilled to be part of the
team that was planning the greatest invasion of all time. With the thrill came
anxiety, of course. Battles never went according to plan (although it was a
weakness of Monty's to pretend that his did). Paul knew that any error he
made—a slip of the pen, a detail overlooked, a piece of intelligence not
double-checked-could kill Allied troops. Despite the huge size of the invasion
force, the battle could still go either way, and the smallest of mistakes could
tip the balance.

Today at ten a.m. Paul had scheduled
fifteen minutes on the French Resistance. It was Monty's idea. He was nothing
if not a detail man. The way to win battles, he believed, was to refrain from
fighting until all preparations were in place.

At five to ten, Simon Fortescue came
into the model room. He was one of the senior men at MI6, the secret intelligence
department. A tall man in a pin-striped suit, he had a smoothly authoritative
manner, but Paul doubted if he knew much about clandestine work in the real
world. He was followed by John Graves, a nervous-looking civil servant from
the Ministry of Economic Warfare, the government department that oversaw SOE.
Graves wore the Whitehall uniform of black jacket and striped gray pants. Paul
frowned. He had not invited Graves. "Mr. Graves!" he said sharply.
"I didn't know you had been asked to join us."