by John Gardner
There was silence for half a minute, then the SIS officer, who had not yet asked anything, coughed and opened his mouth, but the pompous legal man – the one with the striped suit and a gold watch-chain dangling in a double loop – got in first. ‘Wasn’t that all rather insecure? Two radio operators meeting on a bridge?’ the lawyer asked.
‘It was see and be seen.’ Drake did not look at him. ‘He would have a girl with him. I was to make certain he was there. He had to be sure I was there. Both our first signals would confirm the other was in place.’
‘And you saw Descartes?’ – the SOE man.
‘Yes.’
‘What then?’ Once more the pushy lawyer.
‘I was to walk across the bridge – east to west. A girl would come towards me.’
‘You’d recognise her?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘Body signals. I would smile and embrace her.’
‘And all this happened? You made contact?’
‘Like a bus hitting a pedestrian.’
Finally the SIS man spoke. ‘In your own words will you tell us what occurred after contact? Give us everything: who you were supposed to be working for, what took place.’ He spoke as though, already knowing the evidence they were to hear, he wanted to get to some salient point.
Drake spoke quietly, using economical language. The girl had taken him to a safe house in the Rue Bannier. ‘I was supposed to be working for Felix. His réseau was known as Tarot. The girl said I could transmit my arrival message on ‘sked,’ but they probably wouldn’t need me in the area. She said they already had a ‘pianist,’ and the place was getting crowded. I was furious – and a little frightened. It didn’t smell right.’
He asked to see Felix and she said she did not think that would be possible, so he insisted. ‘I said I would alert London and say I thought Tarot had been blown. I had my hand in my pocket, clutching the Welrod. I’d have shot her if she’d tried anything.’ The Welrod was a cheap, makeshift, near-silent pistol made for around $1.50 by the Americans especially for the OSS and SOE.
The girl said she would see what could be done, and Drake watched her leave. ‘I was distinctly anxious. To be honest I thought it might be a trap, so I waited for an hour watching from the window. There was a café across the street. It appeared to be used only by locals so in the end I left the wireless in the safe house and went to the café. I drank a glass of red – very slowly, sitting near the window so I could see the door of the safe house.’
After another hour the girl came back with a man who Drake thought looked all right. ‘I was ready to kill if it was a trap, but Felix knew all the proper words. He said there had been a terrible cock-up – which wasn’t unusual – and London had already been told one operator was enough. They had somebody working out of several houses in Orléans and the villages round about. Felix looked like a worried man. We were all worried. The SD and Gestapo had direction finders on the go all the time. A multitude of ‘pianists’ in one area doubled, trebled, quadrupled the chances of your getting snatched.’
In the end they agreed to work Drake, on his normal ‘skeds’ one week in three. ‘I wasn’t happy about it and told London so at the end of the first week. Then, in my second week, Felix came to the house alone. He told me that he thought Tarot might have been infiltrated but he couldn’t prove it. I asked after Descartes and he looked at me as though I was mad – asked me if the girl hadn’t told me. I said no, so he told me. They had bagged Descartes on the first day.’
‘Did you report all this to London?’ the SOE man asked.
‘Of course. That night. I told them Tarot did not need me, that Descartes was in the bag, and that I was suspicious. I thought Tarot might have been infiltrated.’
‘They replied?’
‘Moved me on. Sent me to Paris where I had a high old time for two months, rushing about the place, sending signals, and being pushed from pillar to post.’
‘And you heard no more about Tarot?’
‘Not a peep. The Paris people seemed to think they were okay.’
‘Mr Drake.’ The SOE man stood up. He held two photographs in his hand. ‘Do you recognise either of these girls?’ He put the prints on the table in front of him. Drake looked closely and nodded, pointing. ‘That was the girl who looked after me. The other one was with Descartes.’
The SOE officer handed each of the prints to Caspar. In the transcript it said, The girl identified as Drake’s contact was Jo-Jo Grenot, known as Dédé. The other was Caroline Railton Farthing, known as Maxine. Both girls worked for réseau Tarot.
Caspar’s face gave nothing away. He got to his feet and asked if he could cross-question Drake. The chairman nodded. When Naldo and Arnie read the notes in the transcript they both realised that it appeared as though Maxine and Dédé were, to use Arnie’s words, ‘working both sides of the street.’
‘You sent a signal to London, which said Tarot had no need of you; that Descartes had been arrested, and that you were concerned the réseau was infiltrated?’
‘I did.’
‘On your dating, that would be the signal sent at nine P.M. on the night of November 22.’
‘I can’t tell you the exact date but it would be a day or so around then.’
‘That is the only date, around that time, that we have a record of a signal from you. Can you recall the transmission – what did it say?’
‘As I remember it, the code for Tarot was Bruno. Descartes was PH – for “Philosopher” I suppose. “Arrested” was rendered as “invisible”. “Suspect infiltration” was “possibly has a fever.” It would read something like PH INVISIBLE STOP BRUNO HAS NO WORK FOR ME AND IF POSSIBLE FEVERISH STOP REQUEST MEDICAL AID. “Medical Aid” was the sign that it would be prudent to get out quickly. I’d be asking for a new assignment.’
Caspar picked up one of the papers spread across the table at which he sat. ‘I’ve read all your signals for that period,’ he said calmly. ‘I’ve also spoken to your case officer and seen his file. The message you sent reads as follows: PH INVISIBLE STOP BRUNO UNWELL STOP REQUEST MEDICAL AID. It starts with your normal log-on sign and finishes with your security check.’
Drake just looked at him.
‘Do you agree that is the signal?’
‘It could well be. It means the same.’
‘No.’ Caspar was firm. ‘That signal does not mean you are concerned about Tarot. It is on record from your briefing that UNWELL means UNSAFE TO TRANSMIT. So what you were saying was, in fact, DESCARTES ARRESTED STOP WORKING FOR TAROT IS UNSAFE STOP PLEASE MOVE ME ON. That is exactly how it was decrypted. You made a slight technical error, I fear. You did not say what you meant, and we had no hint of a warning from you that you suspected Tarot. Merely that it was unsafe for you to continue sending for them.’
It was recorded that Drake shook his head and frowned. ‘If that’s what I sent, then I did make an error. The signal was meant as a warning.’
‘It wasn’t received as one,’ Caspar said. ‘It was acknowledged immediately and you were told to await instructions on the following night. The message sent to you, and presumably received, merely told you to move to Paris and gave you a contact time, place, and fallback. Correct?’
Drake nodded. Caspar sat down.
The SIS man shifted. ‘Had you any inkling as to who the regular “pianist” for Tarot was?’
‘I was given no hint, though I gathered it was one of them – by that I mean not a regular SOE “pianist” sent in specially.’
‘Thank you, Mr Drake.’
The Board decided to break for lunch.
In Northolt it was the end of the transcripts delivered that morning. Naldo and Arnie continued reading some of the other files and discussing all the permutations so far. At five o’clock Naldo prepared to leave. He was in the hall when the doorbell rang in its clear sequence.
C had come with the transcripts from the previous afternoon’s hearings. ‘I would like you to go through thes
e tonight,’ he said crisply. ‘You’ll need them before you get today’s work – Felix’s evidence. It’s been hard going but you’re required to read this first.’
Naldo had permission to use the telephone, and he alerted Barbara that their date for the evening was off.
C stayed as they opened the transcript. It was the evidence of Tertius Newton, the OSS man who had survived operation Romarin – the plan to snatch Klaubert, the Devil of Orléans, with the help of Tarot.
They had flown Newton into London from the United States, especially for a detailed interrogation, and his appearance before the Board. His story took them all back to France four weeks after the Normany landings, but it started in England.
Chapter Eleven
To use his own words, Tert Newton was ‘Fed up and far from home.’ Newton was in uniform, as he had been for the past month – battle dress, rubber-soled parachute boots, a camouflage jump-jacket. He was also armed to the teeth: an M-1 Winchester carbine, grenades, a large amount of ammunition, and a Colt .45 automatic, which hung from his webbing belt, the holster slung low, almost to his thigh, like a cowboy gunslinger. It was a new role for the OSS officer who had spent his war, until the last few months, skulking around in civilian clothes and helping to run a pair of SI agents in Greece and Portugal, where he had, inevitably, fallen over – or at least stepped on – the toes of the British Secret Intelligence Service. It appeared to be an occupational hazard of the OSS.
The reason behind his current depression lay in the fact that the bulk of his friends in the Office of Strategic Services were already out there, in France and other occupied countries – many going via Algiers – assisting the various resistance movements and fighting the Germans from secret vantage points.
Newton and his team had all been told that they would be dropped, after D-Day, to back up the French Resistance fighters – viz., the one Frenchman who had also joined them: Antoine, known as Tony. Nobody bothered with the Frenchman’s surname. But here he was, Tert Newton – trained, fit, and raring to go – with a fifteen-man OSS unit, stuck out in the wilds of Bedfordshire, England, at a place called Gibraltar Farm, on D-plus 28. Waiting.
It was hard to bear the fact that the team had a new commander – an English major by the name of Laurence Cartwright. They also had a new name – Romarin. What kind of name was that for a bunch of hard-bitten OSS thugs? French for the herb rosemary. Jesus, Tert Newton had known a girl back in San Jose, California, called Rosemary who had legs like Betty Grable and tits bigger than Jane Russell’s incredible knockers.
‘We sat around that place for a whole month,’ Newton told the interrogators. ‘Nobody seemed in the least bit interested in us.’
Of course he was quite wrong. On the morning of July 4, 1944, while the bitter fighting still continued in Normandy, Major Laurence Cartwright was called to the Intelligence Rooms in one of the rusty-looking old Nissen huts. The IO smiled at him and said, ‘Charlie says Romarin is “go” tonight.’ Charlie was the OSS Signals Intelligence station at Poundon, Oxfordshire.
Cartwright, a short, breezy SAS officer, gave a sigh of relief. He was all too aware that the OSS team under his command was getting twitchy. Cartwright was more than a little twitchy himself. For the past four weeks he had been forced to keep the operational secret of Romarin inside his head. Now he could share it with the others an hour or so before they were due to leave.
Even the aircrew who would carry them in the big four-engined Liberator would not know about the mission. They would be briefed on the DZ and the ground signals that would mark it – probably grumbling because the French reception committee did not have the radio identity device, Eureka, from which they could pinpoint a truly accurate drop. Apart from that, they would not know any details.
When it came to the briefing, in a bare hut guarded by armed RAF Regiment men, Cartwright broke the news. They would not be going in anywhere near the fighting around Normandy, but far inland – and they would not be staying long.
The DZ was fifteen kilometers from the city of Orléans – there were details of how to make contact and form up once they had landed, together with maps and photographs of the entire area. A local Resistance circuit, Tarot, would be there to meet them with a truck and a stolen German staff car. Cartwright and an American called Dollhiem would be wearing German uniforms – Dollhiem and the Englishman both spoke good German.
The team was to be deployed in the truck. Cartwright and Dollhiem would drive in the staff car, and the Resistance people from Tarot were all set to cover them.
Plans of Orléans were produced, with a large-scale drawing of the area around Gestapo headquarters on the Rue de Bourgogne. They were also provided with a detailed drawing of the layout inside the headquarters.
‘It was like something out of a movie,’ Newton was to say later. ‘They had this crazy plan to snatch the SS Chief – Klaubert – from his headquarters. We were to do it, if possible, without any fighting. The Englishman had a hypo full of some drug that would quieten him down, and he carried papers which requested him to go with them. Real cloak-and-dagger stuff with disguises and forged documents. It was unreal and scary.’
Once this kidnap had taken place, Cartwright and Dollhiem would drive Klaubert back to the same field that had been their DZ. A Hudson aircraft from 161 Squadron would be waiting, and Klaubert was to be flown back to England.
The Romarin team was to be kept hidden for one day by the Tarot people. Joe – ‘Big Joe’ – Farthing would assume command, and in the early hours of the following morning they were to split into groups of five, making their way across country to three different pickup points, where the Royal Air Force, which had a lot of experience in these matters, would collect them.
‘I remember thinking,’ said Tert to a docile inquisitor, ‘if it all goes like clockwork, which was impossible, where would we be at the end of the day? Back at Gibraltar Friggin’ Farm.’ The inquisitor allowed himself a smile.
They took off shortly after nine-thirty. It was still daylight and the lucky men who were near one of the few windows in the Liberator could see people working in the lazy English fields below them. Then cloud and darkness closed in.
Nobody could smoke, so Newton spent much of the time dismantling and reassembling his Colt, in the dark – ‘ Just for practice.’
It was almost one in the morning when the pilot signaled DZ coming up. They turned in a lazy circle with the engines throttled back for a glide across the DZ. Pilot, copilot, and navigator were all up front, craning into the blackness at around four hundred feet, trying to spot the diamond of flashlights that would indicate the dropping zone. It was bumpy and the machine pitched and yawed in the darkness. Behind them their passengers felt uncomfortable, rocking hard against each other. One man was sick. It was like a frightening fairground ride. The navigator saw the lights first, and the copilot yelled out the compass heading so that they could climb away and complete a circuit, to come in again across the DZ at seven hundred feet. The navigator had the stopwatch going as they performed the 90 degree turns. The markers came up right on the button. The height was good, and the pilot flicked the jump switch. At the debriefing the RAF dispatcher said the whole stick of seventeen men – the fifteen OSS, one British officer, and the French liaison man – were out in twenty-five seconds. He was suddenly alone in the aircraft’s long belly with only the shrieking wind funneled in through the open hatch and the whipping canvas parachute static lines – hooked to the cable which ran the length of the fuselage – flapping and banging against the outside like shrapnel.
In training, Newton had never felt fear during a parachute drop; for him it had always been exhilarating – like leaping from some great high diving board into invisible water. That night, as he dropped into the darkness, feeling the familiar rush of air followed quickly by the crack of the parachute opening and the sudden wrench on the harness as he slowed down, Newton suddenly knew fear. It was as though he had waited for it all his life – or it had waited f
or him. The instinct, then the vivid picture of death in his mind.
He pulled sharply on the right-hand guideline to correct a slight oscillation, then, stabilised, peered into the blackness, knees up and body relaxed. There would only be a couple of seconds from seeing the ground to landing on it. Newton was concentrating so hard on the landing that he genuinely failed to understand what was happening around him. Just before hitting the ground everything fused, making contact between his mind and the events. He could hear the ripsaw noise of the Schmeisser machine pistols – below, right, left, and behind him. There were cracks of noise all around, and, seconds before he hit the ground, bullets came cutting into his canopy, tearing it to shreds. He rolled and pulled at the harness release, knowing that what was left of the canopy had fallen behind him. He was free, his carbine tucked into his shoulder, and his body trying to dig itself into the ground as burst after burst of fire came down around him.
Somebody to his right let out a ghastly scream, and there was an explosion behind him, as though a grenade had gone off. Something told him not to return fire – to use his carbine would reveal his position. Lie still.
The automatic fire went on for a long time, and his eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness. He seemed to be in a ditch, or gully, on what he figured was the western side of the field that formed the DZ. He pictured the map in his mind, and knew that there was a small wood at the north end of the field, too far away to be of comfort. The map’s details had shown this ditch also. It was a deep dividing line between fields, and there was a track of sorts winding along the far side: also a sprinkling of deciduous trees. He felt around him. The ditch was full of bracken, fern, and undergrowth.
After a while the shooting died down. Newton did not have to put his thoughts into any cohesive form. The whole thing was there, a lump of fearsome knowledge within him – Romarin had been sold out. Instead of réseau Tarot, the reception committee had been the local heavies – Wehrmacht, SS, or Abwehr. It did not particularly matter which.
