by Mal Peet
So that was where the group had stashed the stolen staff car. They’d backed it into a row of wrecks, between a burnt-out three-tonne truck and an ancient high-sided van. They’d chocked up the front axle and taken the wheels off, hiding them and the battery in the smaller of the workshops. They’d draped a muddy tarpaulin over the car and, just as Eddy had said it would, it had become invisible. Later, when they had “liberated” the Waffen-SS uniforms, they’d taken those to the scrapyard too, concealing them in the workshop’s roof space. The British Sten guns were kept in the empty house itself, wrapped in oilcloth under a heap of old bedding and rugs that rats had nested in and pissed on. Koop had figured that no intruder would fancy poking about in that lot, and so far he’d been correct.
Tonight’s mission was the fifth time the group had used the car and the uniforms, and they had a pretty smooth routine going. Willy and Koop brought the guns and the bag of ammunition magazines out to the car, then went to watch the road. Eddy and Wim fitted the wheels and the battery while Oskar fed the tank with petrol from one of the jerrycans locked in the boot. They worked efficiently in the dark, needing only the briefest moments of torchlight. When it was done, all five men went into the workshop and transformed themselves into SS troopers. For night operations like this, it was really only necessary to wear the soft field service caps, the greatcoats, and the jackboots; but Koop always insisted on the whole getup, and no one was inclined to argue. Oskar wore the staff sergeant’s uniform because his German was fluent; if talking couldn’t be avoided, he would do it. He got into the front passenger seat.
Eddy pressed the starter, and the engine fired on only the second attempt. “God,” he said, “don’t you love these German cars?”
Tamar stalled the motorbike twice on the overgrown concrete road to the canal, but by the time he was on the towpath he had mastered it. The night was less dark now, which meant he could see but also be seen. And the bike’s engine was terribly — terrifyingly — loud.
Pregnant, he thought. My God!
To the right, below him, the broken moon raced through the water.
Fifteen minutes later he cut the engine and freewheeled down the embankment onto a narrow lane that ran alongside the canal. He peered in both directions, listening. He kicked the bike back to life and rode north until he came to a track leading up to the heath. He threaded his way between clumps of gorse and stretches of bracken; in several places the thin nubbly fingers of birch trees reached out to whip him. In the open areas of pale grass and isolated pines, he felt horribly exposed. When he guessed he was less than four hundred metres from the Arnhem–Apeldoorn road, he stopped and turned off the engine. He could hear nothing at all other than the normal sounds of darkness. The light wind was in his face, so if there had been heavy German transport he would surely have heard it. Or maybe not; his hearing might have been impaired by the noise of the engine and his extreme tiredness.
He locked a magazine into the Sten and restarted the bike. The track met another, running north, parallel to the road. Tamar swung the bike onto it. He was intensely anxious now. It occurred to him that if the Germans were moving up tonight, they might well have sent scouting patrols ahead. If so, he was very likely to run into one on this track, and he would have little chance of seeing them before they shot him out of the saddle. And he had very pressing reasons for wanting to stay alive.
Hanns Rauter turned to the man in the backseat and said, “I hope you are not too cold, Exner. I know you do not share my enthusiasm for fresh air.”
The lieutenant sat even more upright. “I am perfectly comfortable, Herr General, thank you.”
This was not true. The suitcase perched on the back of the BMW stuck out over the rear seat. If Exner leaned back, the edge of the case tipped his cap over his eyes in a ridiculous fashion. And he didn’t dare slump. The lieutenant was therefore forced to adopt an unnaturally upright position, like a man struggling to control his bowels. Also, he had been dying for a cigarette for some time. But the general was a notorious nonsmoker, and Exner had not dared to ask permission.
“Good,” Rauter said. After a second or two, he turned his head once again. “If you want to smoke, Lieutenant, please do so. It will not bother me. Another advantage of an open car.”
“Thank you, sir,” Exner said. He felt in his breast pocket for his cigarette case.
There were only a few bends in the road, and Oskar’s opinion was that they should set up shop close to one of them. It would give any German driver less time to assess the situation. Koop’s view was that a genuine roadblock would be set up on a straight stretch of road where anything coming could be seen from a long way off.
“And,” Koop had said, “we are, for tonight, Germans. So we do things the way the Germans do, okay? And another thing, if we make a truck stop suddenly, the guys in it will get all twitchy and reach for their guns. But if we do it on a nice safe stretch of road, all they’ll do is moan, like it’s a boring routine keeping them from their food and their beds. Which means we’ll just stroll up, very friendly like, and do them before they suspect a thing.”
“Koop’s right,” Wim had said. “Let’s do what they’d expect and surprise the life out of them.”
Which was what they did.
Tamar left the motorbike in a small copse of tilted pines and crawled up the low slope to the road. At the top of the rise, a line of ghost-white birches and rusty bracken gave him some cover. The road here ran dead straight, a grey band dissolving into the darkness.
He had imagined that by this time, twenty minutes before midnight, he would hear the sound and even see the hooded lights of the German convoy. He had hoped, although desperately, that he would find Koop’s roadblock on this particularly deserted stretch. Yet the road, as far as he could tell, was empty. He had no idea what was going on. He had no idea what to do.
Something sagged inside him. It was hopeless. Marijke had been right; he had risked everything for nothing. He was exhausted. Marijke was pregnant with his child, and maybe he didn’t have the energy or the luck to get back to her. His back and his arse ached. His brain ached. He was almost overwhelmed by the desire for warmth and safety and sleep. He slithered back to the pines and sat against the front wheel of the bike, savouring the warmth from the engine, the Sten across his lap. He would rest for a few minutes and then begin the dangerous journey back.
His head fell forward, jerked upright, fell again. His hands slid from the gun onto the harsh carpet of pine needles. He smiled in his sleep when he heard a woodpecker drumming its beak against a distant tree.
He woke up, gasping. There was drool on his chin. Woodpecker? He stood, staggering slightly, fumbling with the Sten. It came again, on a scrap of wind: a faint rapid hammering.
Gunfire. Machine guns.
They’d set themselves up on an open stretch just south of a boarded-up inn called De Woeste Hoeve. Eddy had angled the car so that the black-and-white cross on its side would be clearly visible to oncoming traffic. Willy, restless and anxious, had wandered a hundred metres or so down the road, so he was the first to hear the motor. He sprinted back and called to Koop.
“I don’t think it’s a truck. You want to get off the road?”
Koop said, “No. There’s no time. Get ready.”
A pair of hooded headlights came into view.
Exner had had some trouble lighting his cigarette. He’d had to bend down behind the front seats to shelter his lighter. Still hunched over, taking his first drag, he heard Rauter yell.
Eddy knew from the sound of it that it was a BMW. Lovely engine. Sweet as a baby’s heartbeat. He cocked his Sten and looked across at Oskar, who was smiling as he stepped forward and raised his hand. Koop and Wim switched on the lamps, illuminating the crude HALT sign. Eddy clambered over the ditch that ran alongside the road and moved up so that he would be behind the vehicle when it stopped. He knew that on the other side of the road Willy was doing the same thing.
Rauter knew immediately it was a
trap for the simple reason that only fourteen days earlier he had issued an order cancelling all roadblocks in country areas. Without looking at the driver, he roared, “Don’t stop! Drive through them!”
The young Austrian corporal was confused. Unfortunately he had not been told of the general’s order regarding roadblocks. When Rauter yelled at him, he had been thinking (again) about his beautiful fiancée and whether or not she would want to marry a man with half an ear. He stamped on the pedals and caught the brakes and the accelerator at the same time. The car slewed, and he fought to straighten it and bring it safely to a stop. Beside him, Rauter was struggling upright, clutching his Schmeisser in one hand and hanging on to the top of the windscreen with the other, cursing viciously.
“Shit,” Oskar said. The BMW had stopped too soon, too quickly. It was maybe eighty metres away, and you couldn’t guarantee hitting anything with a Sten at that range. He wasn’t sure where Eddy and Willy were: beyond the car, level with it? Still ahead of it? It looked like someone was trying to get out. Someone was yelling in German.
Oskar glanced over his shoulder at Koop and Wim.
Koop said, “Walk, nice and easy. Don’t run. Stay in line.”
So the three of them strolled down the road.
Rauter’s bulk made it difficult for him to stand up between the front seat and the dashboard. He was awkwardly upright, off balance, when he swung his machine pistol towards the three approaching silhouettes and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed.
“Exner!” he screamed. “Exner!”
Exner had been thrown forward against the driver’s seat and onto the floor. Hauling himself up, bleeding from the nose, he was amazed to see the general staring white-eyed down at him, yelling, struggling with a gun. Exner got to his feet and picked up his own weapon from the floor.
“Shoot them, Exner! Shoot them!”
Exner looked ahead and saw a stop sign and three Waffen-SS men walking towards the car.
“General?”
“Goddamn it, Lieutenant, shoot those men!”
Baffled, Exner opened fire.
Wim, Koop, and Oskar were still fifty casual metres from the BMW when they saw the flashes and heard the bullets sing off the road into the darkness. Wim went onto one knee, Koop and Oskar stood, and all three of them let rip with the Stens. The sound hammered into the night, like typewriters writing the same brilliant white word over and over again.
Off to the right of the BMW, Willy had taken the precaution of lying facedown in the long damp grass on the far side of the ditch. He had no intention of being caught in the crossfire, especially with that mad sod Eddy on the opposite side of the road. By the conjunction of the moon and his good luck he was able to see clearly the silhouette of the man in the back of the car who was standing and firing at Koop and Wim and Oskar. He pushed the button of his Sten to burst and let off half the magazine, and the silhouette magically disappeared.
By the time Exner died, Rauter had cleared his own gun, but before he could use it, the windscreen exploded into a prickling frost. He turned his face away from it and noticed that his driver had thrown himself back against his seat and was twitching like someone having a fit. Then something tore into Rauter’s face and thumped into his chest, and he fell sideways.
Koop and Wim and Oskar shot at the car until their magazines were empty. Then, although there was no longer any returning fire, they reloaded and fired continuously as they walked towards it, because none of them wanted to be the first to stop. When they did stop, the silence rang in their heads like a vast bell. All five men slid fresh magazines into their Stens and, at a signal from Koop, Willy and Eddy ran crouching onto the road until they were alongside the BMW. When Willy said “Now!” both men stood and aimed their guns into the car.
It was immediately obvious that the three men in it were no longer a threat to anybody. All the same, Willy moved slowly and carefully when he reached in to pick up the two machine pistols and the cigarette that smouldered on the blood-spattered back seat. He called to Koop, who went to fetch the lanterns. Eddy noted approvingly that the motor was still running, despite the hot water spewing out of the holes in the radiator. One of its headlights was intact, spilling a cone of light onto the road.
Koop trained his lantern onto the big man who was slumped across the body of the driver. His face had been opened up on one side, and there were entry wounds on the front of his greatcoat. Koop studied the man’s insignia and whistled softly. He opened the dead man’s coat and saw the flashes on the lapels of the tunic: gold oak leaves on green panels. There was no need to look for the man’s identity papers.
“Jesus,” he said.
“Koop?” Eddy said. “Koop? Who is it?”
“We get out of here. Now. Now!”
Koop switched his lantern off and began to walk, almost run, back towards their car. The others followed. Eddy caught him by the arm. “What? What?”
“We’ve killed the big one,” Koop said.
There was no doubt that the gunfire had come from the south. Tamar’s need to get back to the farm was overwhelming. On the other hand, he had to find out what the hell was going on. It was his job to know. He stood knee-deep in the bracken, gazing down the almost invisible road.
The atmosphere in the stolen staff car was weird. It was as if, Eddy thought, they were drunk. As if they were kids again, coming home far too late from a party in his father’s borrowed van: that same heady mix of bravado and fear of punishment. Willy, Wim, and Oskar would all talk at once, then fall silent, and then start jabbering again. Crazy mood swings.
Eddy stared fixed on the unlit road ahead, driving faster than was really safe. He felt a sudden pain in his jaw and for a mad instant wondered if he’d been shot. Then he realized that his teeth were tightly clenched. Relax, he told himself. Relax and take care of the driving.
Then Koop said, “We can’t go home,” and they knew it was true.
Tamar kept the bike in a low gear, its engine stumbling slightly. He was certain he was heading towards something terrible, and the desire to find it and get it over with was almost stronger than the need to be cautious. He forced his hand to stay steady on the throttle, the Sten bumping against his chest. He passed the junction to Loenen, then saw, or thought he saw, a dim light ahead. He killed the engine instantly and wheeled the bike to the edge of the road. He propped the machine, then slithered down into the ditch and crept towards the light.
The ditch became shallower as he went forward. By the time he was able to see that the patch of brightness was a car’s headlight, he was forced to bend almost double. When he guessed he was close to the light, he leaned back against the side of the ditch, listening, holding his breath. Black rags of cloud drifted across the moon. There was nothing to hear, except, perhaps, a faint spilling of water. It was quite possible, he thought, that he had crept up on a Nazi patrol; that a German was taking a leak just a metre or two away. He turned onto his belly and lifted his head until his eyes were just above the level of the road.
It was a long, low-slung car without a roof. No markings, but German, obviously. There appeared to be no one in it. Tamar listened and could hear no voices, no movement, no sound at all other than that quiet trickle. He felt around until his hand found a pebble. He threw it and ducked back down, hearing it strike metal and then skitter across the road. Nothing happened. Dragging what might be his last breath into his lungs, he stood up.
It was a BMW staff car with three dead occupants. Tamar walked around it, his flesh twitching, moving the gun restlessly. The number of bullet holes was incredible. There were two dead men in the front and one in the back. Their blood was shiny black in the moonlight. The man in the front passenger seat was lying across the driver. Both he and the one in the back were officers, or had been. As far as Tamar could make out, working by broken moonlight, there were no weapons in the car. He put his Sten down on the bonnet and used both hands to explore the big man’s body. The face was pulpy and still warm, and Tamar’s ha
nds recoiled from it. He fumbled inside the man’s greatcoat and found the thin wallet where the ID was. He took it to the front of the car and kneeled so that he could read the document in the dull gleam of the surviving headlight.
“Oh, dearest Christ.”
He stood and grabbed the Sten and blundered into the darkness back towards the motorbike. His feet slithered, and he almost fell. He had slipped on spent cartridge cases; now, looking down, he could see that there were dozens, scores of them lying on the road.
“Koop,” he cried into the night. “Koop, in God’s name, what have you done?”
The hideout was a cluster of four wooden bungalows deep in the pine woods at the eastern fringe of the heath. Before the war, they had been the holiday homes of well-off Jewish families from Amsterdam, but these families no longer existed in any recognizable form. The houses themselves now sagged like grieving relatives. Once, the narrow lane that led to them from an obscure country road near Loenen had been tidily gravelled; now it was a couple of faint ruts either side of a meandering strip of tall grass. The labyrinth of footpaths that threaded the area had become ghostly traces. Koop and his men were among the very few people who knew them.
The group had done the buildings up in a way that made them look even more derelict than they already were. The windows had been crudely boarded up, but the gaps in the rough boards happened to provide views of all approaches, and they were wide enough for gun barrels. The holes in the shingled roofs were useful lookouts for a man armed with a machine gun. The place was fairly well stocked with food — most of it with German labels — and the group kept spare clothes there, as well as the heavy Bren gun the RAF had dropped to them eight months earlier. There were also three bicycles, all with good tyres.
It was Eddy and Wim who had first used the bungalows as a hideout. They’d slipped away there for a day or two whenever the Nazis were rounding up able-bodied men for export to Germany. Now, in the incredibly black early hours of 7th March, it was clear to all of them that they might have to stay for quite a while.
