by Thomas Wood
“You aren’t considering still using these things for Sperrle are you?” Suzanne asked, her thin frame towering over the two crouching Brits. In unison, we stood up to meet her, just as I realised that my legs were a mix of burning fire and dilapidated old trunks.
“Of course,” Mike answered, indignantly. We had trained for months for this sort of thing, and he seemed mightily offended that someone else, with no training, was about to offer an alternative to our way of thinking.
“Well,” I conceded, “That depends on what you make of the situation.”
She yanked the old rifle onto her shoulder, pulling out a packet of cigarettes. She offered neither of us one, as I watched Mike’s eyes trace her every move, before sucking in some of the smoke that she had ejected.
“Men like Sperrle don’t drive around in one car. They always have at least an outrider. Maybe even a second car. If they see the motorcycles ahead of them go down. They’ll know something is up immediately. All they will have to do is back up, and your man will be in the wind.”
I hated to admit it, especially as I could not be quite sure on whose side she was on, but the logic was sound enough.
“What we need to do, is bring the whole convoy to a halt, regardless of how many vehicles there are. That way, we will be able to identify which one is Sperrle and deal with him accordingly. It gives you more of a chance of stopping all of them, without them becoming too suspicious. It also increases your chances of actually getting anywhere near Sperrle.”
I looked at Mike, who seemed far more concerned with the state of his face than with what Suzanne was suggesting. He seemed completely disinterested.
“It sounds good to me,” I said, looking over to Mike, whose interest had suddenly piqued.
“What? You can’t be serious? Why wouldn’t we go with what we’ve been trained to do?”
“Because,” I snapped back, “Suzanne has been here before. What she has said makes sense.”
“Ten minutes ago, she was telling the Germans who we were and where we were staying, and now you’re trusting her like this?”
“As a matter of fact, yes I am. And if you don’t like it, you can jolly well shoot me.”
He stared me down for a moment, as I felt my face, flushed more than ever before, burn out of embarrassment, but also disappointment.
I couldn’t quite believe that Mike and I had fallen out in the way that we had. I had not seen it coming, nor had he. But his temperament, blowing hot and cold; tense and fearful one moment, lacklustre and disinterested the next, had frustrated me a little too far.
He chewed on the inside of his damaged cheek, as if removing the final few specks of blood that had leaked into it, still holding onto my gaze. For a moment I truly thought that he was going to swing the submachine gun up and put a round or two into me.
“What’s the plan then?” he asked, finally. Turning his head over to Suzanne, who seemed mightily pleased that she had seemed to have won us round.
“Well, I’ve been giving it some thought. What do you reckon to this?”
As she took in another breath, I noticed that she was taking a long hard look at the German helmet and dust goggles that I was still clutching a hold to.
26
Mike chuckled and spluttered as he heard Suzanne’s plan for me. He seemed to take great pleasure from watching my face morph into one of total fear and desperation.
“Sticking to our original plan doesn’t seem so bad now, does it, old fruit?”
I gave him a sharp look, one that told him that he needed to be quiet immediately, or he could find himself with another gash on his face.
He looked down at his feet, smirking. It was fair enough; I would have been doing the exact same thing if it was him who was being touted as the bait in the trap.
Part of me did, in fact, wish that we had continued with the original plan. The caltrops were all still in place and would be a mighty effort of manpower to dig them out. We would then need to refill the holes, covering them up enough so that, to the naked eye, they didn’t look as if they had recently been dug over.
It also meant that everyone had been briefed on the same plan, not the one that we were going to have to come up with on the spot. I made a mental note to make sure that every man knew of the change in circumstances, otherwise, there was a very real threat that I could end up dead as the result of another man’s inability to pass a message along. It wouldn’t have been the first time that it had happened in war.
“How good is your German?” she asked me, tentatively.
“It’s up to scratch.”
“Are you certain about that? Because if it’s not, you’ll be killing us all.”
I let her question linger, until she knew that I wasn’t going to answer. I knew full well that one step in the wrong direction could end up in a total massacre. But we didn’t have much choice.
“Sorry, old fruit. I would take your place if I could.”
“You could, Mike. Here,” I said, handing the motorcycle helmet and dust goggles.
“Can’t. I’m afraid,” he turned his cheek towards me. “Got this, you see. If they see it they’ll know that something is up.”
In fairness to him, the wound looked deep, where his skin had seemed to part when the German’s head had connected with his skin. Even so, I was convinced that it could have passed off as a wound suffered in a motorcycle accident.
“Anyway, leather isn’t really my thing. You’ll look far better in it than I would.”
“You rotter,” I muttered back at him, with a smile on my face. Our falling out had been momentary. Now that we had a new agenda, Mike was back to his old self. I, on the other hand, was still feeling rather fragile.
Mike began convening his men together, instructing them this way and that. A group of men quickly began to dig around the five caltrops that we had buried, while another went to source some dirt from the ditch, ready to fill the craters in the road.
“I want two men further up the road,” I said, looking southwards. “When the cars are heard, I want a warning.”
“Good call,” said Mike, as he pulled two rifle-wielding Frenchmen from the pack, sending them off on their way.
“And make sure you stay up on the bank!” I called out after them as they began their jog to meet the Generalfeldmarschall.
“Right, come on then Herr Pelletier, let’s get you all ready then,” Mike chuckled heartily as he began to walk away from me, and back towards the treeline that we had been hiding in recently.
The German motorcyclist was further into the woods than where we had been hiding, now tied to a tree in nothing but his underwear; a thin white top with long Johns to match. He looked quite cold, but that did not really matter too much to us now.
He was fastened to the tree by a rope, that cut into his wrists and ankles, but only on account of how much he was insisting on wriggling. The tree was a good fifty yards or so away from the top of the bank, which meant that, by the time that he realised what was going on behind him, it would be too late for him to shout a word of warning to his comrades.
But I was sure that the rifle that was pointed at him would have more than sufficed.
He looked over at me, disappointed that I hadn’t proved as weak as I must have looked. His face turned to one of utter disgust, as he realised that he had been stripped for one purpose; to clothe me.
I pulled his uniform on over me, his eyes falling longingly on the clothes that I left in a pile on the floor. Underneath his uniform, I kept a thin shirt on, so that I would, when the impending confusion commenced, be able to take off the German uniform, and avoid being shot at by people on my own side.
It was a risky manoeuvre, but it was one that had to be done. It was a risk that I considered worth taking, although I wished that someone else could have taken up the baton.
I pulled his boots on with a grimace, as I realised that the German was quite enjoying the fact that I was a good two or three boot sizes larger than he was. My
toes, curled up against the extremes of the leather, screamed at me to get them off, to give them some sort of breathing space, but I ignored them.
It had taken me long enough to get them on, to take them off again would simply be a waste of precious time.
Finally, the big, heavy leather overcoat was pulled on over the top of everything else, its double-breasted tunic buttoning all the way up to my neck and stopping just short of my shins. It covered almost every inch of me, and I could imagine how well it felt to the motorcycle owner, particularly when it was bitterly cold outside.
But I was not going to get the chance to test its abilities on the saddle of a bike. In fact, the bike that I was using wasn’t going to be going anywhere at all.
“Very fetching,” Mike quipped, as he passed an MP40 and the helmet to me. “It suits you. Have you ever considered becoming a Nazi?”
“No, I hear the pay is lousy and the food is bad.”
“Is that right?” Mike joked, turning to the German for some sort of an answer. Unsurprisingly, there was not even a flicker of approval behind the hatred that was in his eyes.
Mike came in close to me and began brushing dirt off my collar with the back of his hand. “Yes, quite dashing,” he remarked again, before licking his thumb and rubbing on my cheek. “Come here, Jean. What’s this all over you?” he said, mockingly.
I pushed him away, chuckling.
“Give over, would you?” I snickered. “Who do you think you are? My mother?”
“I might as well be, the amount of times I end up looking after you.”
“Put the helmet on,” Suzanne intervened, unimpressed with the level of joviality this close to a contact with the enemy.
I did as I was told, the steely glare reminding me quickly of how most men that we had met had some sort of innate fear of her.
“You forgot this,” she said, pulling in close to me and wrapping her arms around my waist.
I looked up at Mike, who was already pulling a mocking face, one of surprise and embarrassment.
Her head came up no higher than my neck and, as she stood there, I caught a faint hint of roses as a gentle breeze rolled in off the top of her head. But, just as quickly as the breeze had rolled in, she had taken a step back, and I was now the proud owner of a black rubber belt, with a dulled metal buckle at the front.
“They would have noticed that you were missing that straight away. It is a good job that I am here, wouldn’t you agree, Michel?”
She looked at Mike, as if she knew full well the kind of face that he had been pulling behind her back. Mike didn’t answer, but instead flashed a bright shade of red instead.
I shook my head at him and laughed, whispering in his ear as I passed.
“I may not trust her. But she’s growing on me all the time!”
He sulked around for a few moments, as if he really didn’t like being humiliated by someone like Suzanne. Or maybe it was because she had made it blatantly obvious that he wasn’t exactly her type. That sort of thing always had the knack of winding him up.
“Now what?” he said, as he came to join me in the ditch at the side of the road.
“Well,” I said, looking up and down the track, at the heads that bobbed around in the ditches on either side. “Now, we wait.”
“What’s the time?” he asked, his fingers drumming repeatedly on his thigh.
“Quarter to eleven, Mike. Calm down, will you.”
“What?”
“You’re so tense I can see it.”
“Sorry.”
He spent the next ten minutes biting down on his lip, hard, his eyes closed as he tried to meditate his way to relaxation. But none of it seemed to be working.
For the life of me I couldn’t quite work out what he had to be so uptight about, I was the one doing all the heavy lifting. His remit had barely changed from the original plan. Step out in front of the Generalfeldmarschall and pull the trigger a few hundred times.
That was the easy bit.
Just as I was beginning to feel comfortable in the leather ensemble of the German motorcyclist, I heard a scurry of feet behind me. I turned to see a Frenchman scrabbling down the bank, his eyes bulging and mouth wide.
By the time he got to me and Mike, he barely had enough oxygen left in his lungs to speak.
“They’re here. They are coming.”
“Excellent. How many vehicles?”
“Two cars. Three motorcycles.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad,” Mike chimed. “Maybe things are going to go our way this time.”
“One of the motorcycles has a sidecar,” the Frenchman added, after sucking in an inhuman amount of air. “With a machinegun.”
“Why do you have to open your big mouth?” I said with a grin.
“I did warn you didn’t I? I’m cursed. I’m telling you,” Mike replied, his voice sticking to the thick air around us.
“Oh, do give it a rest,” I muttered, as I pulled myself up from the ditch, every limb aching as if I had just run a marathon. “You’re not the one who has found himself wearing this.”
Without looking back, I heaved myself into the road, defying all logic and reason, to go and stand directly in front of the oncoming convoy of vehicles and heavy weaponry.
I stood next to the BMW, running my hand over the seat and handlebars, as if I was trying to draw some kind of comfort out of it. It had been kicked up onto its stand, which took just enough weight off the two tyres to enable it to balance where it was.
The front tyre was drooped and deflated, hanging on for dear life.
But then, my attention was drawn elsewhere, away from the bike completely, no matter how much I enjoyed looking at it.
Ahead, I could hear the rumble of engines, this time not just the higher-pitched engine of a motorcycle, but a deeper, more guttural noise, that could only come from a car.
My heart beats quickened. My breathing shallowed. This was it; this was what I had trained for.
All those months of learning about French customs, French clothes and vehicles. All that time spent learning about different explosives and methods of hiding in plain sight. And there I was, standing head on to a convoy of German vehicles, dressed as one of them.
I could make out the two headlights of motorcycles at the front of the group, mercifully not streaks ahead of the cars like I had imagined. I could only pray that the two motorcycles leading the pack were the unarmed ones, and that my chances of receiving a machinegun round to the chest were slimmer than they would be.
From behind the two motorcycle engines, I could make out the headlights of a car, slightly brighter than the motorbikes, and not quite as restricted by the tape.
Perks of being a high-ranking officer, I supposed.
The engines grew louder until they no longer presented themselves as individual growls, but as one cacophony of noise, like a stampede of horses’ hooves in the Grand National.
Everything in my body seemed to slow, apart from my heart, as they drew closer. My palms began to sweat, seeping into the leather gloves that I now wore. My brow furrowed, as I questioned whether I really needed to do this.
But, by the time I had the thought, it was already too late.
I breathed out sharply. Then I leant over to the motorbike.
I flicked the headlights on and off. Then again. And a third time for good measure.
The convoy began to slow to a halt.
27
I caught a flash of hair just over to my left, resisting the temptation to look over in Suzanne’s direction. If they suspected that someone else was with me, then I would get a bullet in me quicker than I had hoped.
“Was ist los?” called out a voice, their faces silhouetted by the headlight beams behind them. As he spoke, brakes squealed to a halt a few yards to the rear. It was all perfect, we had them exactly where we wanted them.
I needed to buy a few more seconds of time, in the hope that they all bunched together just a little bit more, which would make our job much
easier.
“Mein Reifen ist geplatzt. Muss einen Stein getroffen haben.”
I put on my best German accent, trying to pronounce every single syllable as they would have done, without overdoing it too much. There had been stories of spies wandering into shops up and down the country, only given away by their upper-class British accent, that did not seem to match their appearance nor their surroundings.
I could only hope that I had pulled it off.
There was a moment of silence, where the bike riders turned to one another, discussing what the best plan of action would be.
Then, a call from behind, from one of the cars, most likely asking what the holdup was, the Generalfeldmarschall was tired, and wanted to get to bed.
The voice that had called out to me replied, telling them that some fool had managed to burst his front tyre, and needed help getting it back to the Château.
All the while, I kept my hand on the seat of the motorcycle, the pistol grip of the MP40 resting easily under my palm. It was out of sight to them, ready to swing into action at a moment’s notice.
I had not hidden it because they weren’t expecting me to have a weapon, they more than likely were, but I wanted it somewhere close by, somewhere considerably easier to bring to bear if I was suddenly caught out.
I had my escape route planned already; pull the MP40 up into the aim and squeeze off a few rounds, manoeuvring behind the bike for a bit of additional cover. It would not be a long-term solution, as the petrol tank would be incredibly close to my face, but I hoped that it would be enough for the others to begin replying to help me out.
A voice growled into the darkness ahead of him, his face far darker than all the others it seemed as if the blackness of the night was attracted to him somehow.
“Bah,” he bellowed, as if frustratingly clearing his throat. “Sag ihm, er soll in mein Auto steigen.”
Sag ihm, er soll in mein Auto steigen.
I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing, and for a moment I wondered if I had heard correctly.
