The Prisoner (30 page)

‘If they’re not away on a mission, they’re out training,’ Henderson explained. ‘I’ll need to give you a full debrief on what you’ve been up to, but from what I’ve heard so far you’ve put on a top show. The RAF is chuffed with their radar set. I hear the boffins have already got it working.’

McAfferty spoke firmly. ‘Marc’s still groggy from the concussion, Captain. He’s been away for a year, I’m sure your debrief can wait for a day or two. Right now he needs rest.’

‘Absolutely, take your time!’ Henderson said cheerfully. ‘Head upstairs. Come down for a chat when you feel ready for it.’

As Marc headed upstairs, the familiar smells of floor polish and steam from the showers became a warm reminder of his friends and his training. His room was a former classroom, at the end of a first-floor corridor which he shared with five other agents.

Paul Clarke was the only person in the room. He lay on his bed, sketching on a small pad. He’d grown ten centimetres while Marc had been away, and had one ankle heavily strapped.

‘Still finding excuses to get out of training then?’ Marc said brightly.

Paul smiled, then put down his pad and stood up to clear a load of clothes and junk that had built up on Marc’s bed while he’d been away.

‘We weren’t expecting you until this evening,’ Paul explained. ‘Sounds like you had a good little holiday.’

Marc laughed. ‘Nice weather, nice people. It seemed rude to hurry back.’

‘We thought you were dead,’ Paul said.

‘A lot of people did. What are you drawing?’

Paul had a major artistic gift, and Marc was impressed as Paul turned his pad over, revealing a surreal image of two topless girls being chased by a giant serpent which had swastikas instead of scales.

‘Very attractive,’ Marc said, smirking. ‘I take it from the large breasts that you’ve grown out of the
girls are yucky
phase.’

‘Must have,’ Paul agreed.

‘Much else going on while I was away?’ Marc asked.

‘We nicked some sugar and yeast from the yanks. PT’s been brewing beer and selling it to the locals. Groups B and C are fully trained, but they’ve decided to cap our unit at twenty agents. A few people have been on missions. Henderson says we’re riding our luck: no casualties or anything.’

‘Nice,’ Marc said, as he sat on the edge of his bed.

He’d abandoned almost everything in France in order to fit into the plane, and apart from the boots his black commando gear and weapons had all been returned to British Army stores. There were just three items in the laundry pouch that McAfferty had brought to the hospital to collect his belongings in.

Marc placed his throwing knife and the dead German soldier’s pocket watch on his bedside table, then took out the knotted strands of Jae’s hair and gave them an experimental sniff. His heart surged as he caught the smell of the farm, mixed with the barest hint of Jae herself.

Marc turned his head so that Paul didn’t see his glazed eye. He was finally home, but it didn’t feel like a triumph. There was a huge hole where Jae belonged and Marc knew he wouldn’t fill it until he walked back through the gates of Morel’s farm and pulled his girl up close for a kiss.

Fat Patty was a four-engined B-17 bomber, crewed by Americans, but assigned to a Royal Air Force special operations squadron. She’d been in the air for four hours, heading for France’s Atlantic coast. There were three men in the cockpit. Seven more manned electronic equipment and gun turrets, plus two trained spies ready to parachute into one of the most secure areas of occupied France.

Fat Patty’s crew were old hands. They’d dodged night fighters and anti-aircraft guns to insert agents deep in German territory and even made top-secret runs, dropping supplies to partisan groups in eastern Europe and refuelling in Russia before returning the following night.

Tonight’s run was as easy as this work got. After takeoff they’d flown down over Cornwall, then in a gentle southwards arc over the Atlantic, where no German fighter dared probe. The agents were to be dropped in countryside, a few kilometres from the port town of Lorient and its heavily fortified U-Boat
¹
base.

Dale was the radio operator, but the crew called him Old Boy because at thirty-five he was ten years older than his pilot, and the rest were even younger. He rubbed gloved hands, pulled his headphone cup away from one ear and gave the girl squatting on her parachute a few metres away a big show of pearly white teeth.

‘Gets damned cold up here,’ Dale said, shouting above four propellers and a whoosh of air. ‘Got a flask of coffee if you feel the need.’

The view down the metal-ribbed fuselage was gloomy. The only light came off illuminated dials and chinks of moonlight through the gun turret up front.

‘If I drink too much I’ll have to pee,’ Rosie Clarke replied.

The closest thing to a toilet on board was a relief tube built into the fuselage, but even when it wasn’t frozen up there was no dignified way a girl could use it.

‘Better give it a miss then,’ Dale said, smiling. ‘How old are you? Seventeen? Eighteen?’

At sixteen, Rosie was young enough to be flattered when someone said she looked older. But while Dale seemed nice, she wondered if his question was a trick that would cause trouble when she got back to campus.

‘I’d better not answer,’ Rosie said. ‘You know, security and everything.’

Dale nodded. He’d dropped enough agents to stop wondering what happened to them, but Rosie might stick in his head because she reminded him of his daughter. Rosie was nervous and kept the conversation going to help her mind settle.

‘Where are you from?’ she asked.

‘Garfield County, Utah,’ Dale said, before making a little laugh. ‘I’ll bet you’ve never heard of that.’

As Rosie nodded her stomach plunged. The pilot had pulled the bomber into a sudden upwards lurch and she had to put her hand against the floor to stop herself tipping over. They’d been skimming at two hundred feet to avoid German radar, but now they had to gain height to get a visual on their drop zone.

The two agents were to be met by a reception committee from the local resistance, who were supposed to switch on a battery-powered light beacon when they heard Fat Patty approach. Rosie’s fellow agent Eugene came eagerly down the steps from the cockpit, crouching to save his head.

Eugene was a twenty-one-year-old communist who’d run the anti-Nazi resistance around Lorient for almost two years. He’d been picked for the job by Rosie’s commanding officer Charles Henderson and by most accounts he’d built a superb team of locals to gather intelligence and sabotage the town’s heavily fortified submarine bunkers.

While the combat gear they wore draped awkwardly from Rosie’s curves, Eugene’s thick frame had been made for it. He was moderately handsome, but sharply angled eyebrows and slicked-back hair gave him a vampirish quality.

‘How are we doing?’ Rosie asked, in French.

‘Just waiting for the beacon,’ Eugene replied. ‘I wanted to see the terrain from the cockpit myself. Last time I parachuted in, the navigator mistook the landing beacon for a German searchlight and I ended up walking twenty kilometres.’

Eugene had travelled to Britain to brief his superiors, learn the latest espionage techniques and most importantly to take a break from the mental pressure of working in Nazi-occupied territory.

For Rosie, this would be her first drop since completing parachute training two years earlier. After landing, her role was to serve as a back-up radio operator, and to train some of the younger members of Eugene’s circuit.

‘Take a step back, sweetheart,’ Dale said, as he removed his headset and stood up.

After squeezing past Rosie, Dale moved towards the rear of the plane and crouched over a hatch in the floor. Moments later a red bulb illuminated directly above his head.

‘Beacon in clear view, commence drop in sixty seconds,’ the pilot announced over an intercom.

The message sent everyone scrambling. Rosie and Eugene strapped on parachutes they’d been sitting on for most of their journey, then helped each other attach cumbersome equipment packs that buckled to their thighs. More supplies for the local resistance would follow on additional parachutes and the nose gunner had left his position to help Dale push them out.

‘Twenty seconds. Wind north-by-north-east at two feet per second,’ the intercom said.

Rosie glanced at Eugene, feeling like she was about to spew. ‘I can’t remember the winds. Is that blowing me left or right?’

‘Gently left,’ Eugene said. ‘You’re first. Remember your breathing. Get up by the hatch.’

As the red bulb died and the green next to it flicked on, Dale tugged on a rope handle and lifted a half-metre-square hatch out of the floor. Air currents ripped noisily towards the rear as buffeting made the fuselage shudder.

Eugene gave Rosie a friendly whack on the back as he attached the static line hanging off her chute to a bar over the hatch.

‘Drop positions,’ Dale shouted.

The bomber flew at two hundred metres, going as slow as it could without stalling. But that was still over a hundred and fifty kilometres per hour, which meant every second moved Rosie’s drop zone by forty metres.

She sat on the edge of the hatch, boots dangling over a black abyss and tense hands resting against the side. She looked up, catching angst on Dale’s face. Eugene said something, but she’d pushed off before she understood it. She fell for two seconds before the static line tethering her to the plane snapped off, opening her chute.

The crack was reassuring. It’s tough to judge the approaching ground in darkness, but if the pilot had got the height right, Rosie would be able to count to fourteen elephants before touching down. She saw the outline of a hill, but no sign of the landing beacon. As her chute opened she heard the crack of Eugene’s line, followed by three more chutes loaded with equipment. At the same time, Fat Patty began a lazy turn, dropping back beneath German radar as she turned back out towards the Atlantic.

Rosie counted under her breath, ‘Nine elephants, ten elephants, eleven elephants …’

The dark made it hard to see the ground, but a torch beam hit Rosie and after a second’s blindness she sighted trees coming up way too fast. On twelve elephants she yanked her left steering line, opening a vent in the top of the chute and tilting her sharply to the right.

A whiff of manure hit Rosie’s nostrils as she got clear sight of where she was about to land. She’d cleared the trees, but there was a tall fence closer than she’d have liked and her boot thumped into it before she pulled up her trailing leg and made a gentle touchdown on its far side.

Two torch beams lit her up, casting shadows across her body in the shape of fence posts. She unbuckled the chute and scrambled forwards, ready to gather up the billowing chute before the next gust of wind caught it. She could see the other chutes landing nearby and then she heard a shout – in German.

Heart in mouth, Rosie rolled on to her bum and got her first proper look at the men behind the torches. Her eyes had adjusted to the gloom and it was hard staring into the torch beams, but the curved outline of two German army helmets was unmistakeable.

Note

  
¹
 
U-Boat – German submarines were usually called U-Boats. The term is an abbreviation of the German word Unterseeboot, meaning submarine.

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