Mirage

by James Follett

  ‘In that case,’ said the attache stiffly, ‘I have to relieve you of command.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake—’

  ‘And you will have to face a court martial.’

  There was a silence. ‘You’re not kidding, are you?’ said Lenny incredulously.

  ‘No,’ the attache replied evenly. ‘I’m not kidding. So what is it to be?’

  51

  CENTRAL FRANCE

  Lucky was driving; maintaining a dangerously high average speed, considering the conditions, of fifty miles per hour. At least there was no snow. His lantern jaw was now black with stubble. Robbie was asleep - snoring - his bulk lolling in his seat harness as Lucky threw the car into bends. Several times during the past hundred miles he had closed up behind Citroen Amis but each time the registration number had been wrong. Deep down he began to accept that he had little chance of catching up with his quarry. He had no idea where they were heading. It could be any of half a dozen major ports, perhaps an airfield even. What drove him on through the miles of black countryside was his iron will and a blind, irrational hatred, now focused with a terrible malevolence on the unknown couple.

  Wherever they were ....

  52

  CENTRAL FRANCE Christmas Day, 1969

  Daniel was a better driver than Raquel. He used the gears more - he had to with the Ami’s sluggish performance - and was more willing to keep the engine peaking at optimum revolutions. His average speed was higher but it was paid for in more frequent refuelling stops. By midnight he had picked up the N5 trunk route and was heading north-west towards Fontainebleau. The fuel gauge was showing quarter full.

  ‘Rac ...’ He shook her gently.

  She woke and stretched before sitting up and raising her backrest. ‘How we doing?’ she asked, looking at the dashboard clock.

  ‘We’ve just gone through Nemours - south of Fontainebleau.’

  She groped for the torch and studied the roadmap. ‘Five hundred and twenty kilometres to go,’ she announced. ‘Or three hundred miles if you prefer.’

  Daniel’s spirits flagged. Nearly all the roadsigns were indicating Paris. For some foolish reason he thought of Cherbourg as being near Paris. But five hundred kilometres ...

  ‘It means we’ve got to average fifty miles an hour,’ said Raquel dejectedly, speaking his thoughts aloud.

  ‘Take a look in the Michelin, Rac. We need a twenty-four-hour filling station. This is a main route to Paris so there’re bound to be plenty.’

  ‘Didn’t you fill up in Nemours?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  His temper snapped. ‘Because they were all fucking fermé!' he exploded. ‘That’s why not! Even the ones that were supposed to be open!’

  Raquel said nothing. She found the Michelin Guide and spent a few minutes leafing through it. She looked at the clock again and at the fuel gauge. ‘Daniel.’ Her voice was strangely subdued as if something of awesome portent had occurred to her.

  ‘I’m sorry, Rac.’

  ‘Daniel - you’ve got to slow down. It’s Christmas Day. Even the twenty-four-hour filling stations will be shut...’

  Lucky lived up to his nickname. He got lost in Nemours and in so doing found an Algerian-owned filling station whose Moslem proprietor did not attach much spiritual importance to the celebration of Christmas. He left the town with a full tank and his foot hard on the floor.

  53

  EVREUX, WESTERN FRANCE

  Christmas Day was three hours old when Daniel and Raquel received a present in the shape of a guiding light that turned out to be an illuminated Elf petrol sign. The Ami’s fuel gauge had been showing empty for the past fifty miles when they turned on to the filling station’s forecourt. They were within ten yards of the pump island when the tank surrendered its last drop of fuel. Daniel jumped out and pushed the car up to the pumps while Raquel darted off to the toilets. The attendant filled the tank and the Ami’s spare five- litre can. Daniel sniffed the air. His breath made clouds. It was freezing but the night was dry. Ice was a receding danger.

  Raquel emerged from the toilets. She had freshened up and applied a little make-up but it failed to disguise the rings of exhaustion under her eyes. Daniel tried calculating the hours they had been without proper sleep and gave up. He wedged the spare fuel can beside the parcels and closed the Ami’s tailgate. The attendant wished them ‘Bon No 'eV and they were on their way again. It was 3.10am.

  ‘A hundred and fifty miles,’ said Raquel, looking up from the roadmap.

  Daniel pressed his foot to the floor. The countryside was flatter now, the roads more typical of France: straight and tree-lined, and - more important - deserted. The Ami’s speedometer crept up to a hundred and twenty kilometres per hour.

  ‘It’s pretty straight all the way to Caen.’ She gave a sudden nervous laugh.

  Daniel took his eyes off the road for a second to look at her. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Promise not to get mad?’

  ‘I promise.’

  Uneasy at his likely reaction, she said: ‘I was just thinking that it was around here that I came off the road when I was following you.’

  ‘You mean you’ve always been a lousy driver?’

  Much relieved, she gave him a playful poke.

  The Ami’s speed edged up. The miles slipped by under the little car’s bonnet. They were ten miles from Caen - on a particularly straight stretch of the N13 when Daniel spoke.

  ‘Hell,’ he muttered. ‘He’s shifting.’

  Raquel twisted round. Blazing headlights on main beam were coming up fast; the distance between the lights widening with a rapidity that made her think for a crazy moment that the following car was intent on ramming them.

  54

  CHERBOURG

  At 3.00am the Israeli sailors began converging on CMN in ones, twos and threes. They were shadows in the night, moving with silence and purpose. Some with hikers’ rucksacks on their backs; some with kitbags; some with smart leather suitcases. Some made jokes because they were nervous, others laughed quietly for the same reason. Some donned their yarmulkes for comfort. They crossed the railway line; some instinctively checking that the line was clear. There was no need, for they were the only moving things on this cold, bleak night apart from the sluggish stir of the oil-black water and the twinkle of distant harbour lights glittering in the frost-bitten air.

  Joe Tyssen was standing by the unlocked gate that led to the quay where the five waiting boats were moored. He greeted each man in turn, ticking their names off on his clipboard.

  By 3.30am all the men had checked in and were aboard their allotted boats. He closed the gates and went to report to Lenny.

  Cherbourg slept on. Still and silent.

  55

  CAEN, WESTERN FRANCE

  ‘They’re ours!’ Lucky screamed, and he rammed the Ami, smashing its rear lights. The little car slewed drunkenly but held its course. ‘What are you waiting for!’ he yelled at Robbie. ‘Kill the bastards!’

  Robbie pulled out his gun and wound down the window. He leaned out and tried to aim but the freezing night air hacked at his face like a thousand breadknives. He pumped off a round blindly and thought he heard it zing off the road.

  ‘Stupid fucking bastard! Shoot straight!’

  ‘I can’t see a fucking thing!’ Robbie screamed back. ‘You’ll have to slow down!’

  ‘Like fuck I will!’ With that Lucky powered the Rover into the back of the Ami a second time. The Citroen swerved and nearly left the road.

  The second impact threw Raquel painfully backwards. She jerked the lever to recline the backrest and crawled into the rear of the car.

  ‘Rac - what are you doing?’

  ‘Just keep driving!’ she yelled. Half blinded by the Rover’s blazing lights, she scrabbled around frantically until her fingers found the petrol can. Swinging it in the confined space was difficult. On her third attemp
t the rear window’s toughened glass crazed and finally shattered. Freezing wind was sucked into the car.

  Robbie leaned out of the Rover and tried to open his eyes. Flying hornet-sting fragments of glass lashed at his face and made him drop his gun on to the road. In fury, Lucky pulled out his .38, wound down his window and squeezed off two blind shots, but it was impossible for him to aim and steer at the same time. The Rover was a much more deadly projectile. He rammed the Ami for a third time and tried to get past it on the nearside. Daniel anticipated the move and hauled on the wheel, throwing Raquel to one side as she ripped wrapping paper from one of the parcels. Petrol slopped on to her hands when she unscrewed the can’s cap. She shut out everything - the noise, the lights, the clawing wind - and concentrated on stuffing the thick wrapping paper into the petrol can’s neck. Matches! Matches! She groped for her handbag, found it and the matches. The first match was snuffed out immediately. She struck the second one, holding the petrol-sodden wrapped paper against the matchbox. The howling slipstream turned the matchhead into a flameless ball of spluttering light but it was enough to ignite the petrol. A thousand suns burst in her face. She blindly launched the petrol can in the direction of the screaming wind.

  56

  CHERBOURG

  It was 4.15am.

  Lenny held a quayside final conference with the commanders of the other four boats. It was a formality to make certain that nothing had been forgotten and to brief them on the latest weather forecast. Each man knew exactly what he had to do and what was expected of him and their respective crews. At 4.25am the five men synchronized their Naval-issue Rolex Oysters. They exchanged a few jokes, shook hands with each other and returned to their boats to start ploughing through their exhaustive checklists.

  57

  CAEN

  Lucky’s scream died in his throat as Raquel’s petrol bomb hit the road in front of the Rover. He jammed on the brakes. Had the can stayed in the road, the chances were that Lucky could have driven right through the fireball, but the spinning can, hurling liquid fire like a Catherine wheel, bounced off the road and hit the windscreen in front of Robbie and burst right through the glass with a shattering report. Lucky opened the door and threw himself half out of the car while still clinging to the wheel. It was an instinctive reaction but one that saved his life. The sudden inrush of air hurled engulfing tongues of hellfire at Robbie that wrapped themselves around his head and shoulders like the embrace of a fiendish lover. A scream of terror and agony burst from his lungs. The Rover ploughed across the grass verge, losing speed. Lucky launched himself clear, not knowing where or how he would land. He hit soft ground and rolled over several times. He heard a crash. The burning Rover cannoned into a tree like an express train hitting the buffers. Flames leapt up into the branches. Robbie’s hideous screaming seemed to go on and on. Lucky staggered to his feet, badly winded. Realizing that the fuel tank was about to go up, he started running. The expected explosion came a second later with a tremendous WHOOOSH! that tossed him flat on his face. He lay still for a few moments, marshalling his senses into some sort of coherency. Robbie’s screaming was no more. He rose to his knees and stared at the pyre with a curious, almost detached expression.

  Gradually the full implication of what had happened sank in. He heard a dog barking from a nearby farmhouse. It was only a matter of minutes before the police arrived on the scene. He started running across the field away from the road. When the burning car was a distant glow, he sank down and rested his back against a tree. He took stock when his heartbeat had returned to normal. He still had his wallet containing £500 in French francs, and, amazingly, he still had his gun although he could not remember putting it back in his jacket pocket.

  More important, he still had his hate.

  58

  CHERBOURG

  Joe and his second engineer turned over Honey’s engines by hand to prime the fuel injectors. Men would be doing the same on the other four boats. Lenny wanted all twenty diesels to come to life simultaneously with a minimum of noisy, futile cranking from compressed-air starters.

  He picked up the interphone and buzzed the wheelhouse. ‘Engine room - bridge. All engines primed, sir.’

  The first name familiarity was over. The boats were now part of the Israeli Navy, crewed by sailors of the Israeli Navy ... three thousand miles from home.

  ‘Thank you, chief,’ Lenny’s voice answered. ‘Final fuel checks please.’

  Joe looked at his watch.

  It was 5.00am exactly.

  One hour to go.

  59

  CHERBOURG PENINSULA

  Raquel sat very still in the speeding Ami and tried not to think about the pain in her hands. Daniel had wanted to stop immediately after she had thrown the petrol bomb but she had yelled at him to keep driving. After two miles Daniel had insisted on stopping to look at her hands. In the light of the torch the skin was red and angry- looking but thankfully not burnt. Her hands would be painful for some hours but there would be no permanent damage. She pulled her coat over her shoulders. The heater was on boost to counter the icy air blasting into the car through the windowless tailgate.

  They passed through the little town of Carentan. The headlights picked out a roadsign. Cherbourg 50. Thirty miles! Raquel looked at the clock. 5.30am. They had to average sixty miles per hour. That meant driving all the way at about eighty miles per hour. The speedometer needle was right across the clock, hovering over the 140 mark. She tried converting the figure to miles and gave up. Exhaustion had taken her beyond the point of thinking, never mind thinking straight. It was the same for Daniel. He was making mistakes. Twice he nearly misjudged bends. The brakes squealed .... Three times, she corrected. She felt guilty that she hadn’t done her share of the driving.

  Cherbourg 35. Another town. She couldn’t be bothered to see what it was called. Daniel slowed when he saw a parked police car. It was unoccupied. She dozed and heard music. Daniel was scouring the wavelengths on the radio. She heard him say something about a timecheck. Strange that she hadn’t noticed that the Ami had a radio. She wondered who had owned the little car before and whether anyone had ever made love in it. The French loved making love in their cars, which was why they had such bouncy springs. The cars - not the French. She giggled. The car pitched across potholes, jerking her awake.

  Cherbourg said the sign but it gave no distance. They were hurtling down a steep hill. Bright street lights. Neat little houses and shops. Cherbourg? Cherbourg! They were in Cherbourg!

  ‘Four kilometres to the harbour,’ she heard Daniel say.

  She looked at the clock. The hands were perfectly in line. 6.00am.

  They had failed.

  Somehow it didn’t seem to matter any more.

  At 5.55am the crews of all five boats cast off and fended the hulls away from the quay with boathooks. The boats drifted silently, turning aimlessly in the wind. Lenny trained his binoculars on the port captain’s building. It was in darkness. Not even Cherbourg’s diminishing fleet of fishing boats were planning on leaving harbour today. Beyond the port captain’s office was the yacht club quay. If anyone was there, he was under orders to pick them up. He prayed that the quay would be deserted.

  5.57am.

  ‘Bridge - engine room,’ he said curtly. ‘Stand by.’

  ‘Standing by, sir.’

  His hand went to the master throttle lever. The other four commanders would be doing exactly the same thing at that moment.

  5.58am.

  ‘Heaters.’

  ‘Ignition heaters on, sir.’

  5.59am.

  A church clock started chiming. The last seconds of Cherbourg’s Christmas Day peace were ticking away. The second hand on his Rolex clicked busily through the seconds - climbing to its zenith.

  ‘Fifteen seconds.’ He was surprised at how matter of fact his voice sounded.

  Ten ... the sound of a distant air-cooled car engine buzzed across the water like a trapped bee.

  Five ... four ... t
hree ... two ...

  ‘Start engines!’

  What happened next was something that the citizens of Cherbourg would talk about for many years to come. Some, those in houses near the waterfront, thought it was the end of the world and with good reason. Dead on the stroke of 6.00am, twenty marine diesel engines, with a combined total of 70,000 horsepower, roared into life. The shattering uproar that switched on a thousand bedroom lights was nothing compared with what was to follow. For ten seconds the engines fast-idled to prime their cooling pumps. And then they began to gradually open up. 1000 revolutions per minute ... 1500 ... 2000. They held 2000 rpm for a further thirty seconds while twenty temperature gauges were watched anxiously by five commanders. As one, the note of the engines died away to permit forward gear on twenty gearboxes to be engaged.

  And then they opened up to full power. Churning screws turning the black water to milk in a magical alchemy wrought by a solid wall of sound and twenty unleashed engines pouring the energy of an ocean liner into the water. Tiffany was first on to the plane. Bucking wildly at first and then lifting her bow like a 707 reaching vee one on take-off, she turned in a semi-circle, making a great question mark on the water. The other four boats followed her - arrowing towards the harbour entrance. Pussy was crabbing but there would be plenty of time to balance her engine revs later.

  For weeks Lenny had been dreaming of this moment. Hands on the helm, bringing the boat round to the harbour entrance and the open sea beyond. Wind and spray whipping past the wheelhouse windows; rotary wipers spinning furiously; four tachometers, four temperature gauges, four instruments for every function: all climbing to peak efficiency. He tucked Honey into the flattened swathe of Tania’s broad wake. All around the harbour lights were coming on. Shutters were thrown up. Small boys were leaning out and waving excitedly. The memory of the incredible spectacle was a mind-numbing Christmas present that would remain with them long after the last plastic toy was broken and discarded.