Other Paths to Glory (31 page)

Mitchell pushed aside the stiff folds of the ancient German greatcoat to get at the thing behind it, forcing his fingers to move slowly. Even if Sorel found Audley’s delicacy surprising he could hardly expect his prisoner to pee sitting-down, for God’s sake.

It was a carrying waistcoat, as he thought it would be; a carrying waistcoat of the sort British raiding parties and assault troops used, with ten pockets. Nine were empty - but the canvas webbing was stiff with age and his fingers were clumsy. He could feel the drops of sweat racing down his face like insects running for safety.

It wouldn’t move, it wouldn’t move !

‘
Asseyez-vous!
’
snarled Sorel.

No more time for delicacy. Push with the left hand - pull with the right.

Suddenly it was heavy in his hand. He straightened, hugging it under his left armpit, his eyes tightly closed.

Five seconds.

He counted them with heartbeats.

‘Sit down, David,’ he croaked. ‘You’ll get us all shot.’

Audley subsided back on to the ledge, grumbling under his breath.

‘Give it to me,’ he mumbled out of the side of his mouth, making it sound like a final complaint at not being allowed to finish what he had started in decent comfort.

Mitchell opened his eyes. He could hear Nikki breathing faster next to him. She must have heard what he had said, but either she was a young woman of iron nerve or she didn’t fully understand the extent of the risk. For her peace of mind he hoped it was the latter.

He shook his head slowly from side to side without turning towards Audley. For better or worse the thing was his. He’d found it - and they’d want him out of the passage first. It was a simple matter of common sense.

He stared at the chalk wall in from of him. The last man to sit on this ledge had been a German soldier, maybe one of the ill-fated 450th Reserve Regiment who had defended the wood with such courage. He would have sat here and wondered if this was the day when his bullet was being loaded, or his shell was being carried from its dump.

‘Captain Lefevre.’ Ollivier’s voice sounded far away. ‘We go on now.’

As Mitchell stood up, crouching under the low roof of the passage, the direct beam of Sorel’s light vanished, leaving him in almost total darkness again. Only the main tunnel was illuminated now: obviously Ollivier and Sorel had drawn back from the passage entrance, one on each side, waiting to take up their positions again at the front and rear of their prisoners.

The bastards weren’t taking any chances. But then they’d never taken any chances, not with Charles Emerson, not with Paul Mitchell walking home from work, and not with poor old George Davis walking home from his evening pint at the pub.

‘Paul!’ said Audley urgently.

Etienne Jarras, too - the Samaritan who’d never leave a stranded motorist. He would have been easy too.

Pin out.

‘Come on, Captain.’

‘Get down on the floor, Nikki,’ said Mitchell. ‘We’re coming.’

He stepped carefully towards the opening. Two sorts of dangers there were: the sort you couldn’t do anything about made you frightened, but this was another sort -

He poked his head out of the passage, looking left towards Ollivier then right towards Sorel. The twin beams blinded him, but not before he could see that they were quite close.

Sorel was closer, he decided in the last split-second as he released the striker arm behind his back.

Five seconds -

Four

He tossed the grenade at Ollivier’s feet and threw himself backwards down the passage, scrabbling with fingers and toes for extra inches of safety. His head struck a hard ridge of chalk with an explosion of pain which was lost in a tremendous eardrum-shattering concussion of sound inside his head.

Grandfather -

OPERATION MITCHELL

‘WHY, THERE’S COLONEL BUTLER!’
Corporal Hayhoe pointed a gnarled finger over the cemetery wall. ‘I thought you said he was going back home today, sir.’

There was nothing gnarled about Hayhoe’s eyesight: it was Butler striding across the field towards them.

‘Maybe he’s fixed for us to see the wood after all,’ said Hayhoe hopefully.

Mitchell watched a French army lorry skirt the edge of the wire on its way to the entrance of the wood. It was the third he’d seen since he’d led the party slowly up the hill, and there were both soldiers and uniformed police patrolling the perimeter fence ostentatiously.

‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ he replied carefully. ‘But you wait here, Mr Hayhoe, and I’ll go and find out.’

For the life of him he couldn’t bring himself to salute Butler this time, not if there were a thousand Frenchmen watching. But mercifully Butler took no exception to the omission: he stopped five yards short of Mitchell, hands on his hips, and shook his head in wonderment.

‘Couldn’t keep away then?’ Butler’s lip twisted in what might just be a smile. ‘You’re a glutton for punishment, Mitchell, I’ll say that for you.’

‘What do you mean?’

Butler gestured towards the scene behind him.

‘Your handiwork, man, your handiwork - Audley told me. But don’t worry - it’s all sorted out at this end. There wasn’t any need for you to come back.’

‘I haven’t come back.’

Butler’s eyebrows lifted.

‘No?’

‘I’m showing the Poachers the Prussian Redoubt.’

Mitchell ignored the look of disbelief. It clearly hadn’t occurred to Butler - or presumably Audley either - that life beyond Hameau Ridge had gone on as usual; that the unspeakable Whitton should rouse him at dawn with a wink and a nudge, less than two hours after he had collapsed into bed -

‘Eh, you look proper knackered, lad-looks as though she gave you a right going-over, an no mistake.’
-
and drag him off to carry out his official duties.

‘Indeed?’ Butler gave the cemetery a quick glance. ‘Well that does at least account for why Audley couldn’t get through to you this morning. We wondered where you’d got to.’

‘
Let
’
s
‘
ave you, then. Got a lot of walking today, lad.
’

‘Where’s Audley?’

‘In Paris by now, with the woman of theirs. I said we’ve got things sorted out here, but there’s the devil to pay there, I can tell you.’ Butler paused. ‘But I’ve got a message for you from him.’

‘A message?’ Mitchell tried, but failed, to keep the eagerness out of his voice.

Butler looked at him curiously. His heavy features and fierce colouring seemed to Mitchell ill-designed for conveying nuances of expression, but the eyes betrayed a suggestion of sympathy.

‘A message?’ Sympathy he could do without. ‘Go on.’

The eyes went opaque.

‘You killed two men last night.’

Mitchell was taken totally aback. For a moment he could think of nothing to say.

‘How certain were you that the grenade would go off?’

Mitchell stared at him, still nonplussed.

‘I didn’t know. It all depended how careful the battalion bombing officer had been - back in 1916.’

‘The battalion bombing officer?’

Mitchell nodded slowly.

‘It was in a British waistcoat carrier - the Germans must have captured it - killed the chap who was wearing it, when we raided their trenches most likely. And if it was from a raid then it was a good bet our chaps would have checked their grenades carefully first. They wouldn’t have used any with the wax seal round the top of the striker broken, for instance, because then the damp might have got in and the charge would’ve deteriorated. But if it was on the top line in 1916 - if the base plug had been treated with vaseline, and so on - it was absolutely dry in the tunnel, you see …’

‘You thought it would still work.’

‘There was a fair chance, yes.’

Butler nodded.

‘How do you feel about it - now?’

Mitchell felt a touch of irritation, but he could hardly admit that.

‘I don’t know what you mean - how do I feel? There wasn’t any choice.’

‘There’s always a choice,’ Butler shook his head. ‘Maybe not at the time, but afterwards sometimes you wonder.’

‘There wouldn’t have been any afterwards for us, for God’s sake,’ Mitchell could hear the anger in his own voice: Butler was the last person from whom he expected such idiotic questions.

‘If you mean do I regret it - ‘ Butler pounced.

‘Do you?’

‘Why the hell should I?’ This time he had the anger controlled.

‘No reason at all.’ Butler relaxed. ‘You did what came naturally to you … so I’ll tell you a litde story which may amuse you.’

‘You said you had a message.’

‘Oh. I have -‘ the lip twisted again in a Butlerian smile-substitute ‘ - but that comes at the end. First comes an apology, though.’

Mitchell frowned.

‘An apology?’

‘From Audley. He nearly got you killed because he made a mistake about Ollivier. He doesn’t usually make that sort of error, I can tell you. Ollivier wasn’t so clever, he was just lucky.’

‘Lucky?’

Mitchell searched Butler’s face for evidence that he was being mocked in some obscure and macabre way. It seemed to him that Ollivier’s only luck had been to catch the full blast of the grenade. Sorel hadn’t been so fortunate.

For an instant he was back in the tunnel, with the man’s gurgling cries of agony rising out of the echoes of the thunderclap. They had not continued very long, and his own senses had been reeling, but they were not something he wanted to remember.

‘Lucky?’ He repeated the word to drive out the memory. ‘I thought we were the lucky ones.’

‘Aye, at the end you were. But if Audley’s job had been to help the French you wouldn’t have been there at all.’

‘Audley’s - job? What do you mean?’

‘We’ve enough problems of our own without sticking our noses in theirs.’

‘I don’t follow you. We were helping them - you were helping them when you first brought that map to me.’

‘A little thing like that we’d do for anyone, even the Russians. If it has nothing to do with our security it has nothing to do with us, Mitchell.’

‘But what about Charles Emerson - and George Davis? That had nothing to do with you either, are you saying?’

‘Not with us. With the police perhaps, but not with us.’

Mitchell stared at him. Not the French and not Emerson. But that left nothing at all. Except the one question.

‘So what was Audley’s job, Colonel?’

‘You were.’

You were.

Not the French. Not Emerson. But Mitchell.

He’d take it slowly.

‘What sort of job was I?’

Butler drew a deep breath.

‘Ollivier sent us a piece of map and Emerson’s name, but we couldn’t get through to Emerson. Then we were told a young man named Mitchell would probably know where Emerson was, and even if he couldn’t he’d at least identify the map for us. So we did a little routine checking on the young man. And then a little more. And then quite a lot.’

‘From my old tutor, you mean - Forbes?’

‘Among others. He gave us a pretty fair specification - it interested us quite a lot.’

‘It interests me too. But I wouldn’t have said Archie Forbes was one of my admirers exactly.’

‘He isn’t. But he said you had a superb memory, for one thing.’

‘That was big of him. And what else?’

‘Remarkable application to detail and objectivity in assessing it.’

‘He makes me sound like a computer.’

‘Only a computer lacks intuition, and you don’t.’ Butler’s eyes narrowed. ‘And a wide streak of bloody-minded ruthlessness, you don’t lack that either. He said you were potentially a very dangerous young man, in fact.’

‘Forbes told you that? I wouldn’t have thought it was apparent in my essays on the Cromwellian settlement.’

‘He said that given the right circumstances you’d show it.’ Butler paused. ‘So we thought we’d have a look at you. And after we’d seen you - and after Emerson had been killed - we thought you were worth a try-out.’

‘A try-out?’

Butler nodded.

‘Yes. You’ve got to face it, Mitchell: you may be a scholar, but you’re also a bom intelligence officer. You’d be wasted on anything else.’

‘You must be bloody short of manpower,’ Mitchell sneered.

‘We are - of your sort.’

‘My sort?’

‘Aye. In wartime it’s easy. We can pick and choose who we want from the professions. But in peacetime … You know, Mitchell, of the ten truly outstanding intelligence officers of the last war, nine were civilians - they were civilians in 1939 and they were civilians again by 1946. Your tutor Forbes was one of them, as it happens. We wanted him to stay on, but he wouldn’t.’

‘Isn’t the pay any good?’

Butler ignored the jibe.

‘We catch them too old and we can’t hold them - they’ve already got careers. So usually we have to make do with second best.’

‘Like colonels?’

‘Captains and majors usually,’ said Butler coolly.

‘And is Audley second best?’

‘Audley’s a rarity - like you. He enjoys it.’ Butler sniffed. ‘Like you.’

Touche!
Mitchell remembered Audley’s warning about Butler belatedly; the mighty memory had let him down for once.

‘You’re very sure of me, aren’t you.’

‘I’m sure you’re right for the job, with a little more discipline and a little less arrogance yes,’ said Butler.

As a result of the try-out, of course, thought Mitchell dispassionately. That had been Audley’s job, quite simply: to try him out in the field, the best test of all. And the fact that he was being tried out on someone else’s problem was the bloody masterstroke, because if he made a hash of it the British had nothing to lose. In just the same way the Germans had tested their Stukas in Spain and the Russians their Sam missiles in the Egyptian desert, Paul Mitchell had been tested on the unfortunate French.

‘Whether you want it is another matter, naturally,’ continued Butler. ‘Which brings me to the message … I gather Audley’s already made you an offer. He says you accepted, but after last night you may feel differently. So as of now you have three days in which to make up your mind. Then Audley will be getting in touch with you - that’s the message: three days.’