by Mal Peet
Officially, Ashgrove House was known as ST73. Agents, and the officers who sent them there, knew it as “the finishing school.” It was the last place of safety. From here, on a moonlit night, SOE agents would be taken to an airfield in East Anglia, put into the belly of an RAF bomber, and flown across the North Sea to parachute into Nazi-occupied Europe. With any luck, the reception committees that awaited them would not be German.
During the months before their stay at Ashgrove, Tamar, Dart, and the other members of the Rivers group had been put through a training programme that was like a tour of the stately homes of England organized by dangerous psychopaths. At a succession of very grand houses — great echoing places commandeered for the war effort — they had practised concealment, stealth, and sabotage. In splendid drawing rooms, they had been taught to lie and to believe absolutely the lies they told. In deer parks and landscaped gardens, they had practised killing: silently, with knife and wire garrotte; and noisily, with both British and German firearms.
They’d gone to Manchester for parachute training, dropping — if all went well — into the elegant grounds of Tatton Park. Dart found them exhilarating, those steppings-out into the empty air, and was interested to discover that Tamar was afraid, even though he was already an experienced parachutist. He’d never detected a trace of fear in the man until then.
Back in London, in an anonymous office building just off Baker Street, the group spent arduous days practising codes and cryptography. Their instructor was a cocky, brilliant, and very young man who usually had an enormous cigar sticking out of his face. He introduced himself as DCY/M. They never discovered his name. He instructed them in the use of one-time pads. These were squares of silk, about three times the size of a handkerchief, printed with preset codes. He pulled them out of his briefcase and displayed them to the class like a salesman showing off a new line in underwear. He spoke of the strength of these silks and the ease with which they could be concealed. As a last resort they could be folded until they were no bigger than a square of chocolate and swallowed. Tamar put his hand up and asked, straight-faced, whether they might emerge intact “at the other end.” Equally straight-faced, DCY/M assured the class that the inks were designed to dissolve in digestive juices.
During a lunch break Tamar had said, “You know, the best thing about these one-time pads is something our boy with the cigar hasn’t mentioned.”
Dart looked up from his minced beef and mash. “Which is?”
“They make torture less likely. For you wireless operators, anyway.”
Dart placed his knife and fork on the table, keeping his hands steady. Torture was a word that threw a shadow across his brain, one that he did not like to look at.
“Do they?”
“Sure,” Tamar said. “Because you use a different line of code for each transmission, right, then you cut that line off the silk and burn it, or eat it, or whatever. You don’t memorize anything. So there’s no point in the Gestapo torturing you.”
“Unless they just happen to enjoy it,” Dart said.
“Yes, there’s always that.” Tamar looked at his watch. “Come on. Just time for a smoke before the boy wonder starts messing up our brains again.”
Later the group divided. The WOs, the wireless operators, were sent to yet another stately home for an intensive ten-week course. Tamar and Dart didn’t see each other again until the group reunited at Ashgrove House, six days before the sky filled with aircraft heading for Holland.
The agents became aware that something was wrong a couple of days before they found out what it was. There was a shift in the atmosphere at Ashgrove, like a change in the weather. Officers who were usually good at smiling seemed to have forgotten how to do it. The busy female clerks flirted less.
At the breakfast table, Torridge said, “You know what I think? I think something extremely bad has happened at home and they don’t want us to know. There’s been a major cock-up, and they are embarrassed to tell us.”
“They’ll have to tell us,” Tamar said, “but they’ll wait until they’ve worked out how. You know what the British are like: ‘It’s not what you say; it’s the way that you say it.’ But you’re right. Something has happened, definitely.”
He pushed his crossword aside and tossed the pencil on top of it. “Shit.”
Tamar and Dart were summoned to the library three days later. There were two men waiting for them: Colonel Nicholson, who had been driven up from London just before dawn; and a middle-aged civilian called Hendriks. Tamar and Dart were told to sit in two of the large armchairs.
Nicholson paced as he talked. “I am going to speak to all teams separately; I can spend only thirty minutes with each. If at any time you wish to ask me a question, make sure it’s a good one.”
He went to the big bay window and stared out at the morning mist lifting from the lawn.
“The airborne forces that you watched pass overhead twelve days ago were part of a major offensive code-named Operation Market Garden. The objective was to seize certain key bridges over the Rhine, which would allow Allied troops to cross from the south of Holland into the occupied north, and from there advance into Germany. I regret to tell you that this operation has failed. You will be briefed on the details later. A decision has been taken that the attempt will not be repeated. Not in the foreseeable future, anyway.”
He turned round, expecting a question, and got one.
“Are you saying, sir, that there will be no effort to liberate the rest of Holland?” Tamar’s voice was hard-edged.
Nicholson’s reaction was fierce. If he were a cat, Dart thought, his fur would be standing on end.
“Damn it, Tamar. The casualty figures aren’t in yet, but I can assure you that a serious bloody effort was made last week. A lot of people died making what you call an effort!”
Silence. Hendriks shifted uneasily in his chair.
Dart cleared his throat. “Colonel, I think my colleague was trying to ask what our roles will be now. We have been trained to assist an Allied advance into our country. You seem to be saying that this will not happen. Is that correct?”
Nicholson put his hands in his trouser pockets and leaned against the wall. “I understand your concerns,” he said. “We all do. Your fellow countrymen have endured appalling suffering under the occupation. We are deeply concerned for the Dutch people, believe me. But what we are now thinking about is the liberation of Europe. Europe. Not individual countries. We will defeat Germany. There’s no doubt about that. And there’s a race on. The Americans want to get to Berlin and drag Hitler kicking and screaming out of his bunker before the Russians do. Which means that pockets of the German army will get left behind to be mopped up later. In Denmark, for example.”
“And Holland,” Tamar said quietly.
“And northern Holland, yes.”
“So what will we be doing? Sitting here on our highly trained arses doing crosswords?”
Nicholson almost smiled. “Oh no,” he said. “You’re not that lucky. You’ll both be in Holland in less than a week. You, Dart, will be doing what you expected to be doing as Tamar’s WO. Your cover story remains unchanged. You’re still Dr. Ernst Lodders.”
“Lubbers, sir,” Dart said.
“Sorry, Lubbers. So your medical training will still be useful. However, you’ll be operating from three transmission stations, not two. It means you’ll have to move about a bit more, but on the bright side it’ll make it harder for German radio detectors to pin you down. You’ll be given your new schedules and ID codes this afternoon.”
Tamar said, “I get the feeling that I’m the one with the problems. Do you want to tell me what they are, Colonel?”
“You’ll get an intensive briefing beginning this afternoon at 1500 hours,” Nicholson said.
“Am I still to organize strategic acts of sabotage?”
“No.”
“Am I still Douwe Schoeten, the railway maintenance engineer and Nazi sympathizer?”
“No.�
�
“Christ,” Tamar said. “I’ve been him for three months. Who the hell am I now?”
By three o’clock the room was full of sunlight. Nicholson sat looking out of the bay window, apparently watching a game of tennis that Tamar could hear faintly but not see. The man called Hendriks sat at the table. He was rather overweight and unhealthy in complexion; the flesh of his face looked as if it had been moulded out of dough by a baker with dirty hands. He took an ID booklet from his briefcase and slid it across the table to Tamar.
“Christiaan Boogart,” he announced. “Taken into Germany as forced labour in 1941. Contracted tuberculosis winter ’43. Failed to make a full recovery, therefore of no further use to the Third Reich. Repatriated. Now an itinerant farmworker.”
Tamar didn’t look at the ID. He didn’t need to. “Again? I’m Boogart again?”
Nicholson said, with his back to the room, “We thought you might be pleased. A bit less homework for you to do.”
“But, sir. Boogart? He’s an agricultural labourer. What would he be doing in Rotterdam?”
“You’re not going to Rotterdam,” Hendriks said calmly.
“What?”
Nicholson glanced round, his face inscrutable against the light.
“You’re not going to Rotterdam,” Hendriks repeated.
As Tamar gazed at him blankly, Hendriks leaned forward on his elbows, his plump hands clasped. “In your opinion,” he asked, “would it be fair to describe the Dutch resistance as fragmented? Disorganized?”
“What? Er . . . no. It would be fair to describe it as a bloody shambles.”
“That’s perhaps a little harsh. But, yes, the different resistance organizations have been mounting operations without any central planning. A bomb here, an ambush there, a train derailed, a telephone exchange blown up. Fine things in themselves, but not adding up to anything really useful. And the Germans are taking terrible reprisals for such actions. Their jails are packed with what they call Todeskandidaten. You know what the word means?”
“It translates as ‘death candidates,’” Tamar said.
“That’s right. It’s a system they were beginning to operate when you were last there, a year ago. Every time there’s a so-called ‘terrorist outrage’ the Gestapo drag a dozen or so poor bastards out of prison and shoot them in the street. Making sure the locals are watching, of course. We don’t think it’s worth it. Do you?”
Tamar didn’t answer immediately; then he said, “It’s a complicated question.”
Nicholson interrupted again. “Not to me, it isn’t,” he said. “Several of our people — your colleagues — are death candidates right now. Austin is. So are Holvoet and Dubois. Thijssen too.”
Tamar looked at the colonel. “Thijssen? Jan Thijssen?”
“Correct,” Nicholson said. “Your old boss. He’s banged up in Apeldoorn.”
“I thought he was dead.”
“No. They kept him alive, poor sod. I don’t much fancy his chances if we don’t get a grip on things.”
Hendriks cleared his throat officiously. “The point is that these hostages will be sacrificed if we do not establish discipline. For this and other reasons it is now an absolute priority to get all resistance groups to bury their differences and work together. You would agree that this is desirable?”
Tamar made an unnecessary sign of agreement.
“Therefore,” Hendriks said, sounding proud of himself, “what we’ve done is divide Holland into sixteen zones. Each of these zones will have a commandant who will persuade — at gunpoint if necessary — the various resistance groups to unite under his control. Once that is achieved, the resistance will only conduct operations authorized by Delta Centrum in Amsterdam. You, Tamar, are to be the commandant of zone six. Now, I want to show you this.”
The file he plopped onto the table had a brown cardboard cover with a thick red band running diagonally across it.
“This contains everything we know about your area as it is at present. It is as detailed as we can make it. We cannot guarantee that the information regarding the positions of German troops is entirely accurate. It was accurate last week, but . . .”
Tamar put up a hand, palm out, the way you might shield light from your eyes. “Please,” he said, “tell me something simple. Where are you sending me? What is zone six?”
Nicholson turned away from the sunlight and the tennis and said, “Your old turf. Where you were last time.”
Tamar’s heart stumbled like a happy drunk.
“You got out clean,” Nicholson continued. “You know the geography. And we need someone good near the front line. That’s why we’re resurrecting Mr. Boogart. It’s a largely rural area. Who else but an itinerant farmworker would be roving about?”
Hardly daring to, Tamar asked, “And where will I be? What are the safe houses?”
Hendriks tapped the file impatiently. “The information you need is all in here. At the moment, we believe that the Maartens farm is the best option. You do remember the place?”
Tamar lifted his face to the window, dazzling his eyes with the sun that now burned directly through the smeared glass. Praise God. “Yes,” he managed to say. “I remember it.”
An unfamiliar feeling grew huge inside him. Then he recognized it: joy.
Something in the dazzle moved: Nicholson lifting his arm to look at his watch.
“Now then, Tamar. Here’s the drill. You’ve got this room for the next twenty-four hours. Learn everything in that file, and then lose it in some remote part of your brain. As if you’ve completely forgotten it. Do you understand? Right. You’ll be here again at 1500 hours tomorrow, when Mr. Hendriks will test you on your prep and answer any further questions you might have.”
“Sir.”
At the door, Nicholson paused. “This is Dart’s first time,” he said. “Did you know that?”
“I guessed.”
“That worry you at all? A bit of a moody bugger, is he?”
“I don’t think so. He’ll be fine.”
“Good. But I don’t want you nursemaiding him, hear me? That’s one reason we’re tucking him away in Albert Veening’s nuthouse. We don’t want him near you all the time. We can just about afford to lose him, but we can’t afford to lose you as well. If we do lose him, you might have to be your own WO for a while. For that reason, you’ll have your own set of silks. Now, get your nose into that file.”
“Sir? May I ask when Dart and I will be going in?”
“There’s a three-quarter moon in four days’ time. The weather forecast looks reasonable. That’s the timetable we’re looking at. Is that soon enough for you?”
Tamar and Dart sat in a dingy, blacked-out brick shed that contained a table, four chairs, a telephone, and a good deal of cigarette smoke. Tamar wore a scuffed leather jacket over a high-necked sweater and grubby denim dungarees. Dart looked rather more respectable in a dark tweed overcoat and corduroy trousers. Outside, at the edge of the bleak airstrip, a Stirling bomber was warming its engines, and every time they faltered, Tamar’s heart faltered with them. The surface of the table was covered by a map of Holland brightly lit by the big lamp suspended from the ceiling. The young SOE officer was called Lennon, and he had a heavy cold; the edges of his nostrils were raw. He would have preferred the two agents not to smoke but didn’t think it was reasonable to ask them to stop. He wiped his nose with a crusty handkerchief and tapped a pencil on the map.
“We last used this dropping zone seven weeks ago,” he said. “It is, as far as we know, quite secure. There are small German garrisons here and here.” He drew faint crosses with his pencil. “They might look uncomfortably close, but it seems they are lazy buggers who don’t like going out at night. It’s mostly marshy ground out there. Ponds and so forth. So you might get your feet wet. On the plus side, there aren’t many roads good enough for German armoured cars and whatnot to pootle about on.”
Pootle, Tamar thought. God, these British.
“The plane will make
two passes over the DZ. Five of the containers will be dropped first. If there are Germans there and all hell breaks loose when those go down, we’ll bring you back and try again at a later date. All right?”
“All right.”
“On the second pass, the sixth container, the one with your stuff in it, will go first, then you. There’ll be a big reception committee, so don’t get confused. They all know what to do. When everything’s been sorted out, you’ll be taken in two separate vehicles to the Maartens farm. You, Dart, after checking the radio there, will then be taken to your base, which is, um, here.” He poked his pencil at the map. “It’s a shade less than three kilometres outside Mendlo.”
Lennon gasped and threw his head back so violently that for an instant he appeared to have been shot. He sneezed explosively into his handkerchief three times, and then, as if nothing had happened, continued. “Good. Next thing. The weather people tell me there’s a fifty-knot headwind tonight. That means the flight will take approximately two hours and twenty minutes. You’re going to get bloody cold sitting in the belly of that Stirling. So I’ve brought you these.”
He reached into his coat pocket and took out two flat metal flasks. “Whisky. Not enough to get you squiffy, but it’ll help keep the heart rate up to scratch.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Not at all. Now then. These damn things.” Lennon took an ordinary brown envelope from his inside pocket, opened it, and tipped two signet rings onto the map. They were rather chunky, similar in design, and didn’t look new. One was engraved with the letters CB; the other, a touch more fancily, with the letters EL.
“You’ll know what these are. Here’s how you open them.” He picked up the EL ring. “Just slip your nail in here, see? And then a little twist . . .”
The engraved panel swivelled to reveal a tiny compartment. A capsule of cyanide nestled snugly inside. Dart leaned forward to examine his suicide pill more closely.
Lennon cleared his throat and said, “Apparently, the best thing to do is just lick it out with your tongue. It’s a bit fiddly to get at with your fingers. Don’t forget to crunch before you swallow, of course.”
