The Occupation Secret

by The Occupation Secret (retail) (epub)

  He shook his head in a vain effort to clear it. He knew that he was missing something, some crucial aspect of the situation, but he couldn’t for the life of him pin it down.

  The SS motorcycle and sidecar team roared past him for the second time in under an hour, followed, less than a minute later, by the scout car, its engine labouring under the weight of the six armed men squeezed into its van. An MG42 machine gun had been rigged up on the driver’s side of the vehicle, straddling the front windscreen. In his semi-inebriated state, Hervé imagined its questing eye drifting over the half-collapsed stone wall behind which he was crouching like an elephant nosing for peanuts.

  The scout car pulled up ten metres beyond Hervé’s hiding place. Five camouflage smocked soldiers clattered out from the back of the vehicle and began systematically checking the bases of the roadside trees for dynamite charges. The remaining soldier covered them with the MG42.

  The blood drained from Hervé’s face. He was instantly sober again. He could hear the men’s voices from where he was lying. They were laughing. Cracking jokes with each other. Preparing for the kill.

  Hervé chanced a second peek over the wall. He was deep in the shit. Where the hell was Jean-Baptiste when you needed him? In a few moments, when the soldiers approached the wall behind which he was hiding, they would have him cold. And if Jean-Baptiste and the boys turned up while the Schleuhs were still in situ, the MG42 would cut them to pieces. Hervé knew he had to act before that happened.

  Forcing down a rising tide of panic, Hervé dissected the split-second snapshot he had taken during his last fleeting glance over the wall. All the soldiers he had marked off in his mind’s eye had been carrying Schmeissers – effective range maybe 75 or 80 metres. The MG42 machine gun, on the other hand, could cut a man in half from a kilometre away, given an unobstructed field of fire. Best to pepper its operator first. In the uproar that followed he might just be able to make it to the edge of the pinewoods without getting slotted.

  Hervé rubbed at the numbness in his chin. If only he had a citron or two to chuck at the Stols – at this distance he could have lobbed one into the well of the scout car and another towards the soldiers, and then, with luck, the spare petrol canisters would have blown, frying anything within a five metre radius. Even a petrolette would have been better than nothing; he could have sprayed the soldiers with half a clip, then hightailed it in the confusion.

  He stared glumly at the twin hammers of his father’s 1871 Martinier-Collin shotgun. God help me, he thought to himself, the bloody thing probably hasn’t been fired since before the Great War.

  He was just about to lurch up from his place of concealment when he caught sight of Eberle. He ducked swiftly down again, cursing. The blood flushed through his cheeks as if his flesh, independently of himself, had memorized the visage of its tormentor and laid it down in stem cells. His face was slick with sweat. The palms of his hands, where they rested against the weather-beaten stock of his father’s shotgun, felt as if he had washed them with lard, that morning, instead of soap.

  Hervé remembered the frozen expression on Eberle’s face as he and his companion had grimaced and grunted above him in the cell, their mouths contorting with each separate blow of their boots. He remembered, too, the words Eberle had abused him with in the car, two days before, on the way to his fake execution. Freak. Cripple. Scarface.

  The wine he had quaffed that morning leached back through his bloodstream in the wake of his gradually diminishing adrenalin, turning him instantly drunk again. No man, he decided, should be forced to travel to his death with such a foul and profane companion.

  Hervé reared up from his hiding-place and brought the point of the shotgun jubilantly to bear on Eberle’s back. The MG42 operator spotted him and began to manhandle the heavy machine gun in his direction.

  Instinctively and with no hint of hesitation, Hervé bypassed Eberle, swept the shotgun over the line of approaching soldiers, and fired the first of his two barrels at the scout car. From the corner of his eye – for he was already in the act of swinging the shotgun back towards Eberle – he saw the operator start to fall. A heady rush of satisfaction surged through him at this first successful strike against the enemy.

  Eberle was nowhere to be seen. Salted by years on the Eastern Front, he and his companions had dived to the ground at the first sight of an armed man. Hervé now found himself in full view of the enemy and with no targets left to shoot at.

  He loosed off the second barrel at where he estimated the soldiers were hiding, then turned and sprinted for the tree line. As he ran the skin on his back puckered in anticipation of the lethal strafing that awaited him. But nothing happened. For five precious seconds, nothing happened.

  He was only twenty metres from the protection of the trees when the shouting finally began.

  ‘Scheiß, du! Es ist nur ein Mann!’

  The Schmeisser slugs tore and lashed at the trees surrounding him, but Hervé, benefiting from a fresh surge of adrenalin, was already zigzagging like a cornered rat. In a moment or two, he told himself fervidly, one of them will take over the MG42 and then I’ll be for it. Damn Eberle and his survival instincts! The bastard must have thought he was being attacked by a whole gang of Maquisards.

  Hervé threw himself over the brow of the hill just as the heavy machine gun opened up.

  ‘Putain de bordel de merde!’ he screamed.

  Fragments of tree branch, nuts, foliage, pine cones, abandoned nests and other pieces of assorted greenery fluttered around him as he corkscrewed down the incline, the shotgun pressed to his chest like a lover.

  For one crazy, testosterone-fuelled moment, Hervé fantasised making a final heroic stand at the bottom of the gully, and taking the first two soldiers who breasted the rise above him with a magnificent left and right – but wisdom, and the dulled remnants of his hunter’s instinct, dissuaded him from such a folly. Now that they knew he was acting alone, his pursuers would be circling around him, silently, like wolves preparing for the kill.

  He paused, one knee on the ground, his head twisted like a cornered stag listening for the death song of the beaters. He flared his nostrils. His every sense was attuned to the noise of the chase. But nothing happened. No sound of pursuit. Nothing.

  Hervé shook his head incredulously. Not another miracle, surely? He felt the euphoria of his narrow escape coursing through his veins. What did the Boche think? That an army was waiting down here in the dell to entrap them?

  Hervé straightened up. He would make his way downhill, then, and away from the forest. In exactly the opposite direction to the one they would expect. There was no conceivable chance now of Jean-Baptiste and the boys walking into a trap. All that shooting had been enough to waken the dead.

  Sobbing with relief, Hervé fell into a slow jog, one hand feeling in his pockets for fresh cartridges, the other balancing the shotgun whose shape had become an integral part of his body, as a spear or a bow would have been to that of his ancestors.

  Eberle

  11:15 am: Wednesday 7th June 1944

  Eberle lay exactly where he had fallen, his legs stretched out in front of him, his back against a rotting tree trunk. All the blood had drained from his face, making the sallowness of his complexion even more explicit than usual.

  His companion, SS-Oberschütze Wolfgang Seeman, threw himself down onto the ground, cursing. ‘Scheiß, du! Es ist nur ein Mann!’ He began to fire in short, concentrated bursts.

  Still Eberle refused to move. He lay behind the protection of the tree trunk, shaking his head in wonder. When the order to cease firing was given, he rolled over onto his stomach and tapped Seeman’s boot, a broad grin on his face.

  ‘What are you grinning for, Ebie? We’ve just been ambushed. And why weren’t you firing? Did you get a cramp in your muschi finger last night?’

  ‘You know who that was, Wolfi? That’s the fucker Meyer is supposed to have shot two days ago. I remember his wrecked face. Dieter and me gave him most of it when w
e beat him to hell and back in his cell. He won’t be going anywhere fast, I can promise you.’

  ‘Well, let’s get after him then, and finish off the bastard.’ The two men looked across at their officer for confirmation.

  Lieutenant Halder, who had only caught the last few words of their conversation, raised his hand warily. ‘Wait. It may be a trap. They may be trying to lure us into the forest, away from the road. There may be a whole bunch of them in there. Stay where you are.’

  ‘But there’s only one of the bastards.’

  ‘Our orders are to keep the road clear. Not to engage in a hot and fruitless pursuit of the enemy in his own country. Get back to the scout car, all of you. Eberle, see to Nordeck. That son of a bitch peppered him with a charge of buckshot.’ He buttoned his pistol back inside its holster. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll have our moment later.’

  ‘Jawohl, Herr Obersturmführer.’

  The lieutenant hesitated, unable to leave the subject alone. He stood staring out across the woods, a frown on his face. ‘My estimate of the situation is that the man was a forward scout checking on possible ambush positions. We simply happened to surprise him before he could retreat into the security of the woods. Two of you go around that rise and find out if any of our shots managed to hit him. The rest of you, get back inside the vehicle.’

  Eberle straightened up from checking on the stricken MG42 operator. ‘Nordeck is dead, Herr Obersturmführer. Some of the buckshot took him in the eye.’

  Lieutenant Halder turned and stared at where the retreating man had entered the forest. ‘Du Scheißhund, du!’

  For a moment it seemed to his men as if Halder might even be about to shake his fist at the ghostly, elusive figure.

  ‘So you’re going after us with shotguns now, eh? You’ll see! You’ll see what happens to you!’

  Eberle grimaced at Seeman. ‘Listen to him, Wolfi. The bastard’s already half insane. He’s shouting at a man who isn’t there.’ He shrugged his shoulders, the fraternal NCO instinct still strong in him when it came to volunteering information about his own class to an officer. ‘Shall I tell him about Scarface? It sticks in my craw to do it. He’ll have Meyer slaughtered if he thinks he cocked up the execution. Just for the fucking thrill of it.’

  ‘Wasn’t it Meyer who persuaded the major to take away your stripes? Don’t you owe him for that?’

  Eberle grunted. His eyes flared greedily. ‘Tcha. You’re right. See? You’ve convinced me. I’d rather like to watch Halder taking the Spiess apart. Even his old crony the major won’t be able to protect him from this one.’ Smiling wolfishly, Eberle draped his Schmeisser over his shoulder, walked up to Halder, and gave the man a punctilious Hitler salute. ‘Lieutenant Halder. I have something of the utmost importance to report.’

  ‘And what might that be, Eberle?’

  ‘I know the identity of the terrorist who just killed Nordeck.’

  Tulle

  10 am: Friday 9th June 1944

  ‘How do you account for it?’

  ‘Account for what, Herr Sturmbannführer?’ Meyer shifted gear. He used the impetus of the movement to mask the action of leaning forward and easing his back, which suffered now on long journeys, in unholy triangulation with his kidney scar. The very last thing he wanted was for Max to start fussing again and make unpalatable suggestions about sending him home, just when they were finally building up to re-engage the enemy.

  ‘The Maquis. Allowing us to leave St Gervais with scarcely a shot fired. They missed a magnificent opportunity to slow us down. I simply can’t fathom it. I’ve been wrong twice now. Perhaps I’m losing my touch? Perhaps there really were no Maquis up on the Causse? Apart from that solitary maniac with the shotgun, of course. That would be a good joke.’

  ‘So what else have you been wrong about?’

  ‘I was wrong about the church tower.’

  ‘The what?’ Meyer glanced up from the driving wheel, a vacant expression on his face. He had expected Max to mention the girl. To apologise once again for involving him in Najac’s fake execution.

  ‘You asked me what the second thing was I was wrong about. Well, I was wrong about the church tower. I shouldn’t have allowed my religious convictions to influence my military judgement. So now I’ve told you.’ Max threw away his cigarette and put on his crusher cap. ‘What do you think Lammerding wants with us, anyway? Why drag us away from the column and all the way out here for a bloody Divisional Conference? And why did his office order you to accompany me?’ He buttoned up his jacket, then bent down and began to buff his boots with a duster from the toolbox. ‘Perhaps he simply wants to issue another of his crazy proclamations urging us to pursue and purge his elusive gangs of terrorists, instead of cracking on to Normandy where we really belong? Didn’t I tell you it would take us two weeks to get there if they forced us to rely on road rather than on rail transport? Von Rundstedt will be shitting cannon balls by now. It’s taken us three days so far, and we’ve managed a grand total of one hundred and twenty kilometres. Sixty percent of our tanks are unserviceable, together with thirty percent of the half-tracks and towing vehicles. Just wait until I flop that fish onto Lammerding’s plate.’

  ‘Herr Sturmbannführer. Look!’ Meyer raised a gloved hand from the steering wheel and pointed ahead of them, his mouth falling open to reveal the array of decaying teeth he had inherited from his service on the Russian front. ‘I must be imagining things. That looks like a dead man, hanging from the lamppost.’

  Max shaded his eyes and squinted up the road. ‘Christ Jesus!’

  ‘There are more of them. See.’ Meyer’s face was tense with shock. ‘What in the name of God has happened here?’

  Feldengendarmes – known as Kettenhünde to the troops on account of the heavy chains of office they wore around their necks – prowled amongst the cadavers like robber-crones in the aftermath of a battle. Occasionally the crack of a pistol would echo down the deserted streets like the prelude to an avalanche.

  Max felt for his cross through the fabric of his tunic shirt. ‘What is this nightmare?’ His face was drained of colour, his voice curiously muted. ‘It’s like the end of the world.’

  One of the roving Kettenhünde raised a dilatory hand, indicating that the car should pull over. He strutted forwards, then bent down and peered through the window. His breath and skin reeked furiously of alcohol and his eyes were bloodshot, as though he had been participating in an all-night orgy and was only now, reluctantly, on his way back to bed. ‘Your destination?’

  ‘Divisional conference with SS-Brigadeführer Lammerding at Brigade HQ.’

  ‘Your papers, please.’

  Max felt inside his top pocket. He tried to keep his voice steady. For some reason he sensed great danger, as if a universal madness had gripped his brothers-in-arms, and that all judgement, all rationale, had temporarily vanished. ‘What’s happened here? Who are these men?’

  ‘They are terrorists. Ninety-nine of them. They attacked the town in force early on Wednesday morning. Yesterday afternoon they massacred part of our garrison. Forty men. All elderly reservists. Now we’ve taught the bastards a lesson they won’t forget in a hurry.’

  Max shook his head in numbed disbelief. ‘You’ve taught them a lesson? But surely, Sergeant. Dead men don’t have memories.’

  The Feldengendarme made a perplexed face. ‘I’m sorry, Herr Sturmbannführer. But I don’t understand what you are saying.’

  Max raised a gloved hand. ‘Are they simply going to be left here to rot?’

  The man rocked back on his heels, showing the full extent of his inebriation for the first time. ‘What the hell do you care, Major?’

  Max retrieved his papers. ‘You’re right. What do I care?’ He sat back in his seat, acknowledging the Feldengendarme’s salute with an automatic and deep-rooted weariness. ‘He’s right.’ He turned to Meyer, as the Kubelwagen began to gather speed again. ‘What do I care? I’m just a killer, along with the rest of them. I should be cavorting about in th
e streets, like these metal-tongued clowns, shooting dead men in the head in case they twitch illegally. I should be delighting in their hanging carcases, pleased that our men have been avenged. Didn’t I avenge you, and Brasick, and Krug, and Doerr, and Wahl, and Karkowski, in that clearing in Khodorov? Wasn’t that justified? So why shouldn’t this be? I confess that I am at a total loss to understand why I should take such an exception to this.’

  Meyer jerked the car over to the side of the road. He fumbled around in his jacket and withdrew a battered silver flask. ‘Looted, I’m afraid. If you call one of the Kettenhünde across, he can shoot me now and get it over and done with. Otherwise, have a drink. There’s good cognac inside.’ Meyer leaned his head wearily back against the seat. ‘And that was looted too. Illegally. From the de Joinville’s cellar. Forgive me, Herr Major, for involving you in my crimes.’ Meyer seemed entirely unaware of the unintended irony contained within his comments, or of the fact that he had unconsciously lapsed into Wehrmacht, and not SS nomenclature.

  Max took a long slug of the cognac, shivering spasmodically as the alcohol coursed through his system. ‘Poor devils. Look at that one. He can’t be more than fourteen years old. Hardly a terrorist, anyway.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Where is it all going to end, I wonder?’

  ‘You asked me exactly the same question in Khodorov. Don’t you remember?’ Meyer reached over and helped himself to the flask. ‘Well, I didn’t know the answer then, and I don’t know it now.’ He tipped his head back and allowed the alcohol to trickle over his tongue. He glanced across at Max, his eyes questioning, his pupils dilating with the effects of the cognac. ‘Do you really think that they mutilated the garrison like he says?’

  ‘Who knows? And who gives a damn? We hardly seem to need excuses to massacre people anymore. We are surrounded by so many lies and obfuscations that it is becoming impossible to know what is truth now and what isn’t.’ Max leaned forwards in his seat and put his head inside his hands. ‘Do you know something, Paul? I am fast beginning to lose my taste for this godforsaken and self-indulgent war.’