The Executioner

by Thomas Wood

  I only hoped that the intensity of the snowfall stayed at what it was for now, I couldn’t risk it getting much heavier, especially as I had at least an hour’s trek back to my hidey hole in the forest to factor in. After that, it could do whatever it wanted, but for now, I pleaded with the sky for its full cooperation.

  Tip toe sprinting my way over to the railings, I hammered into them and I held onto them for dear life as they finished vibrating and clattering around, hoping that I would somehow be able to stop their clanging from reverberating around the village. Nothing moved, not a thing even stirred, so I desperately hoped that there was some sort of pesky cat that usually made these kinds of noises at night.

  As the vibrating iron in my hand began to die down, I realised that it had been replaced by another vibrating noise. As I strained to listen to it, I realised that it was rapidly getting much closer to my eardrums and before long, found myself hauling my stiff body over the iron railings and face down into the mixture of snow and earth on the other side.

  I positioned myself in between two small graves, hoping that the depression in the ground in between them would be more than enough for me to pass as just another grave in the dark, which might pass the test as long as they weren’t going to stop and have a good look round. If they did have a good look though, I wouldn’t last too long before being caught, especially if they had even the smallest of torches; I would eventually be spotted.

  As the motorbike roared into the north side of the village, I began praying that they would drive through without incident and that I could set about what I was meant to be doing here, rather than eating up a mouthful of dirty snow and succeeding in getting one of the biggest brain freezes known to mankind.

  The bike hared through the village, throwing up the snow in all manner of directions as the men guffawed and screamed at one another, as the motorcycle and sidecar began sliding all over the place as it lost traction.

  Deciding that they had had enough fun for one evening, the men withdrew back out of the village in the same direction that they had come, and the vibration soon began to lose its power in my chest, as they roared off into the night.

  They had done me a favour in some ways, tearing up the village meant that practically all of the snow had been disturbed in one way or another and, if I was to get a move on, meant that my exfiltration from the village would go almost unnoticed.

  Gripping the railing hard, in the approximate place that I had seen the girl standing at earlier, I began twisting and yanking as hard as I possibly could on the iron spikes that adorned the top of the railings. The freezing temperature didn’t help me in the slightest and it was only on my second go round that eventually, one of the spikes loosened slightly, before it came clean off in my hand.

  The inside of the railing itself was hollowed out and just big enough for me to get one of my fingers down to pull out what I was here for. Sliding my finger around the inside of the railing, I felt a series of rolled up papers that had been tightly bound up, but had now expanded to match the width of the tube. Pulling them out, I fumbled around in the dark trying to check that I had got everything that was enclosed in the railing, before counting how many sheets of paper I had.

  Three, I thought, probably about right, and began stowing them down the top of my shirt, so that they would flatten out slightly while I walked back to the comfort of my trees.

  Replacing the tip of the iron railing with a soft squeak, I began checking my surroundings one final time, just in case a French insomniac had decided to look out of his window to see what the figure at the church was doing.

  Everything was clear and so, taking the long way round so that I could stay in the disturbed snow tracks caused by the motorcycle, I beat a hasty retreat from the small village, quite sad that I would never see the place ever again. I could have murdered a coffee from that café right now.

  Making it back into the treeline, I walked further in than I normally would have done, before setting my bag down against one of the large tree trunks that rose up majestically from the frozen earth. Having a good feel around inside of it, I pulled out the small torch that I had acquired from Louis, a battered old thing that chucked out next to no light, which was perfect for me, I would only need it to read a few pages.

  Excitably pulling around at the paper enclosed in my shirt, I withdrew them and set them out before me on my lap. I shone the light briefly over all three pieces and realised that each one was double sided, which was far more information than I had been expecting on the matter. It was all handwritten and my heart fluttered slightly at the thought that it could have been the girl’s own handwriting, or even Cécile’s, but I knew to put that illusion from my head immediately.

  I had all of the usual stuff that I would expect to see from a communication such as this, times and frequencies of when to transmit a radio signal about the operation, and there was even a poem code and security identifier that I was to use each time I transmitted, complete with deliberate mistakes to try and throw the Germans off the scent.

  But I focused in on one piece of paper specifically, the one that I deemed to be the most important. There it was in black and white, we were to attack the very airfield that Joseph had told me about, on or around a specific date if possible, set for three days from now, before trying to secure the exfiltration of the commando team by Royal Navy submarine, if achievable.

  It was my real objective that I scanned the pages for earnestly, the one that Joseph didn’t know, the one that no one knew apart from Jimmy, the radio operators and me.

  Underneath it all, in the clearest handwriting possible so that I didn’t misinterpret a single letter, was a subheading of ‘Primary Objective.’

  I scanned my eyes over it quickly and read how intelligence had been gathered suggesting that an SS Standartenführer, Rudolf Schröder, would be visiting the airfield for a number of days, to inspect defences and oversee the necessary improvements. It would be my job, the file said, in no uncertain terms, to kill him. Whatever the status of the rest of the operation, I was to make sure that he was no longer able to breathe after we had left, and to confirm it to the rest of the team back in London at the earliest opportunity.

  I didn’t know how to feel at the news. I had gone from evasion consultant to contract killer within a matter of hours, all at the decree of Jimmy. I didn’t know exactly how to feel, but one thing washed over me like a cancer almost immediately. I felt sick. And I felt furious with Jimmy.

  14

  It was a strange feeling, laying down on my front in amongst the towering sand dunes, in the middle of the winter. It was unusual for me to experience the seaside in this kind of weather, normally my trips were restricted to the summer months, when a train ticket down to Margate wouldn’t have been so wasted by dodging the wintery showers.

  The sand was hard and incredibly compact on account of the freezing weather, but it had also soaked up a lot of the snowfall over the last few days and so I felt as if I had been into the sea to take a dip, once I had been lying there for more than five minutes.

  From where I was laying, on top of the tallest sand dune that I could find, a mound of sand probably about nine feet high in total, I had a grand view of the twilight of this small stretch of French coastline. To my extreme left, probably a mile or so away, I could make out the lights of the nearby coastal town, no doubt teeming with Germans as they drank in the atmosphere in the town’s plethora of seaside restaurants and social venues. To my far right, probably a little farther away than the town on my left, were the vague lights of the nearby harbour, where a few German gunboat type vessels patrolled around the entrance, preventing anyone from entering or leaving via the harbour itself. I imagined that there were more than enough soldiers to match the presence of the boats, and hoped that the commandos that were meant to be coming ashore didn’t misjudge the tide and end up in the company of the droning boats.

  My team that I was to welcome in were meant to land somewhere in the middle of the
two landmarks, hopefully using both of them to silently guide themselves in, but the submarine from which they would launch, would not be able to see the two features while submerged, and so the navigational skills of the submariners would be what the commandos were relying on greatly.

  I was a little over to the left of the stretch of sand where they were meant to be coming ashore, purely because the sand dunes were higher there, and there was a little more vegetation, offering that little bit of additional cover that I so desperately craved, particularly when I was laying nonchalantly stretched out on an enemy occupied stretch of beach. From here though, I would be able to see both ends and hopefully, the landing party coming ashore to greet me.

  Spread out on the beach in some sort of deranged sunbathing position, I began to think of home, of the times that we all, as a family, would make the trip to the coast and spend hours enjoying one another’s company. Dad, Bill and I would partake in a spot of cricket or swimming, just anything it seemed, but as long as we had done it together. Mother on the other hand, much preferred to stay still, simply basking in the need to do absolutely nothing, on account of the fact that she seemed to stay on her feet almost all day every day anyway.

  I thought about those endless cricket games and the freezing waters of the English coastline and I discovered that I was almost pining for Bill, I wanted him right next to me. I knew that I had never seen him soldier, but I knew him, and that was all I had needed. I knew with a sincerity that he would have thrown himself head first into his training and he would have accepted nothing but being recognised as the best in every single category. I had never seen him soldier, but I knew my brother would have been the perfect man to be with me in those sand dunes.

  I wondered where he was in the world at that moment in time. Mother and father had suspected that he had been shipped out to Egypt, and I tried to recall any snippets of information that I could about how the war was going over there. From what I could remember, the latest information in the French newspapers was that Hitler was preparing to send his own troops there, to help bolster the Italians already fighting. I only hoped that Bill would somehow be withdrawn before that happened, as it would surely mean the British being eventually outnumbered. That was even if he was still alive at this point.

  I wondered if he ever thought of me, wherever he was in the world and if he still remembered me as Alf the dead little brother, or if he had heard word from mother and father that he was now Alf the little brother back from the dead.

  It wasn’t the first time that Bill had cropped into my head since hearing that he had joined up to be with everyone else in the thick of the action. When I had returned to London after learning of his recruitment into the British Army, I made some enquiries with some of Jimmy’s subalterns as to whether or not I could get him pulled out of the line, at best get him all the way back to London to work with me, or at worst just get him into the reserve lines where I figured he would be safer. But my enquiries came up with no way of helping my older brother survive the war.

  Even if Jimmy did curry some favour and was capable of trying to get a specific soldier out of the line, I doubted it would have truly worked anyway. If the fighting in Egypt was as fierce as it had been in France last year, then they would have been unwilling to let a single man go, they would want every soldier they could get.

  I closed off that train of thought and began to think about what I was really meant to be considering. I had buried my kit in the forest that was about a mile and a half from where I was laying, entering between two distinctive trees, one that had had a large branch ripped from its body and another that seemed to bend like a piece of rubber. From there it was a seventy-five pace walk in a straight line to the place where I had buried the rest of my kit.

  As soon as I had met the lads coming ashore, I would need to be able to locate it in a flash and we would move as one body as we went to pick it up. I had buried it there for two main reasons. The first was so that if a German was to sneak up on me while on a patrol, I would have an element of deniability as to why I was there, my story being that I must have fallen asleep earlier on in the day. It was almost completely unbelievable but had sufficient hint of possibility, that it might stop the firing squad in their tracks.

  The second reason was for the need to be light. I could lay here and watch as the kayaks slowly paddled ashore, only to be intercepted by the gunboats coming haring down from the harbour, in which case, there would plenty of accompanying soldiers on the shoreline that I would need to avoid. My only defence would be my speed.

  It is very difficult for the human body to stay in one solitary position in silence, for any period of time and not allow their mind from being distracted by certain things. It was no different for me laying in those dunes. I got frustrated with myself that my attention span on the operation seemed minimal, but the frantic imaginings of my mind wouldn’t allow me to stay on task.

  My thoughts were filled with the faces of Jacques and Julien, as I wondered how they must have felt when they realised that they wouldn’t be making it home this time. I felt utterly depressed at their demise, particularly as I had been handed a ticket out from there just hours before I was due to leave with them. It dawned on me that there was a slight possibility that the machine gun wielding sentry post had been for me; Jacques and Julien were just meant to be collateral.

  I was making a nuisance of myself, trying to piece together some sort of profile of Joseph and of Jimmy and, both being intelligence types, decided that I was a loose end, one that needed to be tied up very quickly for fear of exposing them both. Maybe Louis had gone to Joseph to tell him that I had been asking questions, or possibly someone else had overheard him telling me all those things.

  The more I thought about it, the angrier Joseph’s face became when he had told me that I was being reassigned. He had wanted me to die and for all I knew, he had arranged for me to die in the most convenient of circumstances for him.

  By the time I had been reassigned and left the escape, it would be too late for Jacques and Julien, Joseph probably far too angry at his failure to have me executed, that he let the murder continue regardless.

  My mind was beginning to play dangerous tricks on me, and I put it down to the long hours of laying in wait that had made my thoughts become more and more radicalised. I wasn’t sure if I believed any of them at all, they were just thoughts after all.

  I readjusted myself slowly, my chest aching in pain as it found that it was suddenly able to pump blood around it once again. I was frozen but, as with anything, once you are past the initial pain and discomfort of something, it becomes ever so slightly more bearable and gradually, any thoughts of uneasiness slowly drifted to the peripheries of my mind.

  The noise of the waves slowly lapping into the shore was therapeutic and began to distract me from where I was. I willed the sounds of splashing paddles to appear in amongst all the noise, but it refused to come. I knew that I wouldn’t hear them coming ashore anyway, they were far too skilled for that, my eyes would be my only identifier of their arrival.

  If this mission went awry, I was to sacrifice this team for the sake of the objective, which was something that simply didn’t come naturally to me. I had learnt a lot since I had joined the army, I’d learnt even more since I had been in MI9, but my natural instinct of helping every member of my team was something that refused to be reprogrammed in my mind.

  I had made sure that my tank crew were all okay at every possible opportunity, I had tried to help the wounded by pulling myself back into the firing line, and I had even taken a lone soldier under my wing because he had seemed particularly vulnerable. Sacrificing others was something that I could never be programmed to do.

  The men that would be coming ashore would be highly trained, it had taken them months to get where they were, and it would be a great travesty if they were to be killed in the name of making sure that one German was neutralised.

  I began to rub my face as I considered the possibi
lity that this was a one-way mission for the men that I would soon meet, the beard that I had grown over the last few weeks working wonders to keep the chill from biting at my face too much.

  When I looked up, I began to see four spots on the sea, bobbing up and down with the roll and pitch of the tide and I pulled my neck up and above the vegetation of the dune, to try and get a clearer view of the specks.

  At first, they looked as if they could have just been a group of gulls resting on the remedial waves but, as they grew larger, it was clear that they were my boys. The relief that filled my whole body when I saw them almost made me get up and wave, welcoming them ashore, but I kept my head down, right up until the moment that they were about to disembark.

  I watched as the seated silhouettes raised up slightly in their kayaks, resting their paddles across their bodies, each one of them lifting up a pistol to their heads, scanning the coastline for any sign of enemy movement.

  If I made my move now, I would be dead in seconds.

  15

  Pulling my pistol out of the waistband of my trousers around my back, I laid it on the ground, just ahead of me, where my chin had been resting a few minutes before. Slowly, intentionally, I manoeuvred my body into a push up position, a dull ache groaning through my chest as it got used to being able to pump blood again.

  I pushed myself up onto my knees gradually, as I watched the men slowly disembark from their kayaks one by one, the others all covering the coastline with their glaring pistols as he did so. They all knelt in the water for a few seconds, as if they were enjoying the refreshing chill that I imagined it gave them.

  Their pistols glided left to right in the darkness, double checking before they made their next move. As one, as if some sort of silent order had been given, the oars were tucked into the kayaks and each man took a grip of their vessel with one hand, pointing their pistol up and into the dunes with the other. As a united body, they began haring up the beach, moving as quickly as possible and hoping the lack of light would be able to conceal their swift movements.