World War II Thriller Collection (55 page)

FLICK LANDED AT
RAF Tempsford, an airstrip fifty miles north of London, near the village of Sandy in Bedfordshire. She would have known, just from the cool, damp taste of the night air in her mouth, that she was back in England. She loved France, but this was home.

Walking across the airfield, she remembered coming back from holidays as a child. Her mother would always say the same thing as the house came into view: “It's nice to go away, but it's nice to come home.” The things her mother said came back to her at the oddest moments.

A young woman in the uniform of a FANY corporal was waiting with a powerful Jaguar to drive her to London. “This is luxurious,” Flick said as she settled into the leather seat.

“I'm to take you directly to Orchard Court,” the driver said. “They're waiting to debrief you.”

Flick rubbed her eyes. “Christ,” she said feelingly. “Do they think we don't need sleep?”

The driver did not respond to that. Instead she said, “I hope the mission went well, Major.”

“It was a snafu.”

“I beg pardon?”

“Snafu,” Flick repeated. “It's an acronym. It stands for Situation Normal All Fucked Up.”

The woman fell silent. Flick guessed she was embarrassed. It was nice, she thought ruefully, that there were still girls to whom the language of the barracks was shocking.

Dawn broke as the fast car sped through the Hertfordshire villages of Stevenage and Knebworth. Flick looked out at the modest houses with vegetables growing in the front gardens, the country post offices where grumpy postmistresses resentfully doled out penny stamps, and the assorted pubs with their warm beer and battered pianos, and she felt profoundly grateful that the Nazis had not got this far.

The feeling made her all the more determined to return to France. She wanted another chance to attack the château. She pictured the people she had left behind at Sainte-Cécile: Albert, young Bertrand, beautiful Geneviève, and the others dead or captured. She thought of their families, distraught with worry or stunned by grief. She resolved that their sacrifice should not have been fruitless.

She would have to start right away. It was a good thing she was to be debriefed immediately: she would have a chance to propose her new plan today. The men who ran SOE would be wary at first, for no one had ever sent an all-female team on such a mission. There were all sorts of snags. But there were always snags.

By the time they reached the north London suburbs it was full daylight, and the special people of the early morning were out and about: postmen and milkmen making their deliveries, train drivers and bus conductors walking to work. The signs of war were everywhere: a poster warning against waste, a notice in a butcher's window saying No Meat Today, a woman driving a rubbish cart, a whole row of small houses bombed into rubble. But no one here would stop Flick, and demand to see her papers, and put her in a cell, and torture her for information, then send her in a cattle truck to a camp where she would starve. She felt the high-voltage tension of living undercover drain slowly out of her, and she slumped in the car seat and closed her eyes.

She woke up when the car turned into Baker Street. It went past No. 64: agents were kept out of the headquarters building so that they could not reveal its
secrets under interrogation. Indeed, many agents did not know its address. The car turned into Portman Square and stopped outside Orchard Court, an apartment building. The driver sprang out to hold the door open.

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 ack emma. 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.”

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.”

“I'll explain in a second,” Graves said, and he sat down on a schoolboy bench, looking flustered, and opened his briefcase.

Paul was irritated. Monty hated surprises. But Paul could not throw Graves out of the room.

A moment later, Monty walked in. He was a small man with a pointed nose and receding hair. His face was deeply lined either side of his close-clipped mustache. He was fifty-six, but looked older. Paul liked him.
Monty was so meticulous that some people became impatient with him and called him an old woman. Paul believed that Monty's fussiness saved men's lives.

With Monty was an American Paul did not know. Monty introduced him as General Pickford. “Where's the chap from SOE?” Monty snapped, looking at Paul.

Graves answered, “I'm afraid he was summoned by the Prime Minister, and sends his profound apologies. I hope I'll be able to help . . .”

“I doubt it,” Monty said crisply.

Paul groaned inwardly. It was a snafu, and he would be blamed. But there was something else going on here. The Brits were playing some game he did not know about. He watched them carefully, looking for clues.

Simon Fortescue said smoothly, “I'm sure I can fill in the gaps.”

Monty looked angry. He had promised General Pickford a briefing, and the key person was absent. But he did not waste time on recriminations. “In the coming battle,” he said without further ado, “the most dangerous moments will be the first.” It was unusual for him to speak of dangerous moments, Paul thought. His way was to talk as if everything would go like clockwork. “We will be hanging by our fingertips from a cliff edge for a day.” Or two days, Paul said to himself, or a week, or more. “This will be the enemy's best opportunity. He has only to stamp on our fingers with the heel of his jackboot.”

So easy, Paul thought. Overlord was the largest military operation in human history: thousands of boats, hundreds of thousands of men, millions of dollars, tens of millions of bullets. The future of the world depended on the outcome. Yet this vast force could be repelled so easily, if things went wrong in the first few hours.

“Anything we can do to slow the enemy's response will be of crucial importance,” Monty finished, and he looked at Graves.

“Well, F Section of SOE has more than a hundred agents in France—in fact, virtually all our people are
over there,” Graves began. “And under them, of course, are thousands of French Resistance fighters. Over the last few weeks we have dropped them many hundreds of tons of guns, ammunition, and explosives.”

It was a bureaucrat's answer, Paul thought; it said everything and nothing. Graves would have gone on, but Monty interrupted with the key question: “How effective will they be?”

The civil servant hesitated, and Fortescue jumped in. “My expectations are modest,” he said. “The performance of SOE is nothing if not uneven.”

There was a subtext here, Paul knew. The old-time professional spies at MI6 hated the newcomers of SOE with their swashbuckling style. When the Resistance struck at German installations they stirred up Gestapo investigations which then sometimes caught MI6's people. Paul took SOE's side: striking at the enemy was the whole point of war.

Was that the game here? A bureaucratic spat between MI6 and SOE?

“Any
particular
reason for your pessimism?” Monty asked Fortescue.

“Take last night's fiasco,” Fortescue replied promptly. “A Resistance group under an SOE commander attacked a telephone exchange near Reims.”

General Pickford spoke for the first time. “I thought it was our policy not to attack telephone exchanges—we're going to need them ourselves if the invasion is successful.”

“You're quite right,” Monty said. “But Sainte-Cécile has been made an exception. It's an access node for the new cable route to Germany. Most of the telephone and telex traffic between the High Command in Berlin and German forces in France passes through that building. Knocking it out wouldn't do us much harm—we won't be calling Germany—but would wreak havoc with the enemy's communications.”

Pickford said, “They'll switch to wireless communication.”

“Exactly,” said Monty. “Then we'll be able to read their signals.”

Fortescue put in, “Thanks to our codebreakers at Bletchley.”

Paul knew, though not many other people did, that British intelligence had cracked the codes used by the Germans and therefore could read much of the enemy's radio traffic. MI6 was proud of this, although in truth they deserved little credit: the work had been done not by intelligence staff but by an irregular group of mathematicians and crossword-puzzle enthusiasts, many of whom would have been arrested if they had entered an MI6 office in normal times. Sir Stewart Menzies, the foxhunting head of MI6, hated intellectuals, communists, and homosexuals, but Alan Turing, the mathematical genius who led the codebreakers, was all three.

However, Pickford was right: if the Germans could not use the phone lines, they would have to use radio, and then the Allies would know what they were saying. Destroying the telephone exchange at Sainte-Cécile would give the Allies a crucial advantage.

But the mission had gone wrong. “Who was in charge?” Monty asked.

Graves said, “I haven't seen a full report—”

“I can tell you,” Fortescue interjected. “Major Clairet.” He paused. “A girl.”

Paul had heard of Felicity Clairet. She was something of a legend among the small group who knew the secret of the Allies' clandestine war. She had survived under cover in France longer than anyone. Her code name was Leopardess, and people said she moved around the streets of occupied France with the silent footsteps of a dangerous cat. They also said she was a pretty girl with a heart of stone. She had killed more than once.

“And what happened?” Monty said.

“Poor planning, an inexperienced commander, and a lack of discipline among the men all played their part,” Fortescue replied. “The building was not heavily
guarded, but the Germans there are trained troops, and they simply wiped out the Resistance force.”

Monty looked angry. Pickford said, “Looks like we shouldn't rely too heavily on the French Resistance to disrupt Rommel's supply lines.”

Fortescue nodded. “Bombing is the more reliable means to that end.”

“I'm not sure that's quite fair,” Graves protested feebly. “Bomber Command has its successes and failures, too. And SOE is a good deal cheaper.”

“We're not here to be fair to people, for God's sake,” Monty growled. “We just want to win the war.” He stood up. “I think we've heard enough,” he said to General Pickford.

Graves said, “But what shall we do about the telephone exchange? SOE has come up with a new plan—”

“Good God,” Fortescue interrupted. “We don't want another balls-up, do we?”

“Bomb it,” said Monty.

“We've tried that,” Graves said. “They hit the building, but the damage was not sufficient to put the telephone exchange out of action for longer than a few hours.”

“Then bomb it again,” said Monty, and he walked out.

Graves threw a look of petulant fury at the man from MI6. “Really, Fortescue,” he said. “I mean to say . . .
really.
”

Fortescue did not respond.

They all left the room. In the hallway outside, two people were waiting: a man of about fifty in a tweed jacket, and a short blonde woman wearing a worn blue cardigan over a faded cotton dress. Standing in front of a display of sporting trophies, they looked almost like a head teacher chatting to a schoolgirl, except that the girl wore a bright yellow scarf tied with a touch of style that looked, to Paul, distinctly French. Fortescue hurried past them, but Graves stopped. “They turned you down,” he said. “They're going to bomb it again.”

Paul guessed that the woman was the Leopardess, and he looked at her with interest. She was small and slim,
with curly blonde hair cut short, and—Paul noticed—rather lovely green eyes. He would not have called her pretty: her face was too grown-up for that. The initial schoolgirl impression was fleeting. There was an aggressive look to her straight nose and chisel-shaped chin. And there was something sexy about her, something that made Paul think about the slight body under the shabby dress.

She reacted with indignation to Graves's statement. “There's no point in bombing the place from the air, the basement is reinforced. For God's sake, why did they make that decision?”