Caitlin looked up at the window of the room she knew so well and wondered where Jack was at this moment. On his way to the boat, she hoped, because Dublin was certainly death for him now.
Trapdoor into Belgium
“You don’t seem very popular in Dublin,” was all Cumming had to say about McColl’s lucky escape from the Royal Hotel. They were sitting in the Service chief’s Whitehall office, where the glow of the gas fire lent an air of coziness to the proceedings. Outside the window a curtain of mist veiled the river beyond.
“I don’t suppose the man survived?”
“He did, actually. But I’m told he won’t ever walk again.”
“Oh.” McColl wouldn’t wish that on anyone. “I still don’t understand how he fell.”
“He just slipped and went over, according to the other man.”
“They’re both in custody, I presume.”
Cumming grimaced. “Not any longer. There was nothing to hold them on. They admitted they were chasing you, but only because they wanted a friendly chat.”
“About what?”
“Your immoral behavior with you-know-who,” Cumming said. His tone suggested he might even share the censure, but McColl doubted that was so. The Service chief’s reluctance to name Caitlin or discuss the role she’d played in recent events was more likely down to prudishness. Fast machines might not scare Cumming, but fast women probably did.
Which was fine by McColl. There might come a time when he had to report the rekindling of the relationship, but for the moment he thought it wiser to keep quiet. In one moment of love-induced naïveté, he had offered Caitlin the use of his London flat, only for her to sweetly ask him how, after what had just happened, he expected either his superiors or her republican friends to view such an arrangement.
Cumming picked up his pipe, stared at it for several seconds, then put it back down again. “Let’s move on,” he said with typical brusqueness. “I’m sending you to Belgium—the occupied bit. I know you speak fluent French, and I’m told that the Belgian version is very similar, with just a few distinctive differences that you’ll have to be aware of. I’ve arranged a meeting for you tomorrow with an expert in the field—a man named Thistlethwaite.”
“What’s the job?” McColl asked. The thought of operating behind enemy lines both intrigued and worried him. There was no doubt about it—his life seemed a lot more precious than it had a fortnight before.
“There are two. What do you know about our train-watching networks?
“Only that we have them.”
“We do. Or in some cases did. And when I say ‘we,’ I should be more precise. The French Deuxième Bureau have people in occupied Belgium, and so, believe it or not, do the Russians. Both of them have managed to retain a single command structure. We had three until a few months ago, and we still have two—an army outfit run from France and our own, which our man Richard Tinsley runs from Holland. Too many cooks, as you can imagine. Anyway, there was a meeting a couple of weeks ago, and some lines were drawn on the ground.” He pulled an atlas onto his desk and found the appropriate page. “The one in Belgium runs south from Antwerp to Brussels,” he said, tracing it with his finger. “And then on down to Namur. Everything east of that line is ours.”
“You implied that there have been some setbacks.”
“A series of catastrophes, more like it. But you have to understand how the system works. We have literally hundreds of watchers writing down details of trains, and they’re expected to deliver their reports incognito to addresses that act as ‘letter boxes.’ The people running these pass the reports on to couriers, who either smuggle them across the border themselves or pass them to others who do. Once in Holland the reports are sifted and evaluated and all the crucial stuff brought over to London.
“It was all working pretty well until early September, when the Germans managed to identify a couple of couriers. They were clever enough not to grab them straightaway but to keep them under observation and find out who their contacts were, both up and down the line. Several people running letter boxes fell into the net, and that’s left a lot of watcher groups with nowhere to deliver their reports. Basically, the networks have to be reconstructed, and with more emphasis on keeping everything in tight compartments, so that one person’s mistake doesn’t put a whole slew of others at risk. There are people working on this, but they need help, and you seemed ideal. You’ll make contact in Huy. Here,” he added, fingering the town on the open atlas.
“How do I get there?”
“Ah.” Cumming’s eyes lit up. “Normally we’d send you across to Holland on the ferry and have one of Tinsley’s men escort you across the border, but using that route takes time, and it’s got a lot tougher in recent months—the Germans have put up an electric fence and taken to leaving corpses fused to the wire. Pour décourager les autres, I suppose. So we’re going to fly you in. You’ve been up before, haven’t you?”
“Twice,” McColl told him. In the summer of 1913, before leaving on his global tour with the Maia automobile, he had paid for a couple of flying lessons, more out of curiosity than because he actually wanted to learn.
“Enjoy it?” Cumming asked.
“It was something,” McColl conceded. “Enjoy” was not the word he’d have chosen. And that had been on a bright sunny day, with no one trying to shoot him down.
“How about parachuting?”
“No.”
“Well, as far as I can tell, it’s just a matter of bending the knees when you hit the ground. But I don’t think the Flying Corps boys have much use for it—they prefer a quick landing and takeoff.”
McColl hoped so. The thought of a blind drop into enemy-occupied territory was far from appealing. “When do I leave?” he asked.
“As soon as you’re ready. You’ve Thistlethwaite to see, and you need to talk to our man Staunton—he knows the situation in Belgium best. And there’s some stuff here for you to read,” he said, handing over a thin folder of papers. “Dorothy will find you somewhere to sit. There are codes to memorize, your cover story, identity cards . . . oh, and the railway map—I almost forgot your second task. You’ll see on the map that certain stretches of line have been marked. We’d like you to take a proper look and find out where they’re most vulnerable. The bridges farthest from German garrisons, the ones with no guards or only a few.”
McColl examined the map. “With destruction in mind?” he asked.
“Not always. There are some bridges we wouldn’t dream of destroying, because we have good watchers on that line and would be shooting ourselves in the foot if we forced the Germans to divert their trains. But in the event of a major push, a few downed bridges would certainly slow the flow of German reinforcements to the sector in question.”
McColl stared at the web of lines, wondering how on earth he was going to memorize it.
Judging by the conversations Caitlin overheard in the twenty-four hours that followed McColl’s disappearance, the story of his escape was all over Dublin. Opinions differed as to whether young Dermot Breslin had fallen or been pushed, but all agreed that the G-man from London had gotten clean away. And that seemed to be that. The police were pretending that no crime had been committed, and the republicans looked eager to forget what appeared to be an embarrassing failure.
But the latter was not the case, as Mulryan told Caitlin the following day, falling into step beside her as she walked down Henry Street. “We were thinking an apology was in order,” he told her.
“I expected better,” she agreed, diluting the bitterness with more than a hint of resignation.
“And so you should have,” he said with a suitably shame-faced expression. “I don’t suppose the man will dare show himself in Dublin again, but if he does . . .” He left the promise hanging in the air.
“Well, you got what you wanted,” she told him. “They won’t be expecting an insurrec
tion anytime soon.”
“We hope not.”
She stopped and turned to face him. “Come on, you can tell me. When will it happen?”
He looked almost alarmed. “Oh, that hasn’t been decided. Not yet.”
They walked on in silence, parting company at the junction with Sackville Street. Caitlin had moved back in with Maeve, who was obviously burning with curiosity as to where, and with whom, her houseguest had spent so many nights, but she had so far shown a welcome disinclination to pry. Of course she might already know, but as far as Caitlin could tell, the republicans kept their cards pretty close to their collective chest.
She turned in through the doors of the GPO and walked across to the telegraph counter. On the previous day, she had cabled her editor saying she had a big story and asking permission to spend a few more days in Dublin. The reply was waiting—he was willing to trust her judgment. The postscript—“Please remember war declared in Europe”—was just a warning shot.
And it really was a big story, albeit one she couldn’t yet tell. If she did discover the date of a projected rising, there was no way she was going to give the British authorities advance notice in her newspaper, but she was determined to be here in Dublin, ready and waiting, when the first shots were fired. She needed the date and was pretty sure she wouldn’t get it from Mulryan.
An insurrection required troops, and there were two obvious sources of these—the small, well-trained, and highly committed Citizen Army and the far more numerous, but much less reliable, Volunteers. None of the leaders of either organization was going to tell her anything deliberately, but if she loitered in the right places, someone in the know might let something slip. Maeve and other contacts gave her access to Liberty Hall, and that weekend there was a Volunteer exercise involving most of the Dublin groups. She would spend the next few days asking people questions they wanted to answer and hope to hear something more in the spaces in between. Eavesdropping might be a vice for others, a New York editor had once told her; for reporters it was surely a virtue.
Walking on toward Liberty Hall, where she was picking up Maeve for lunch, Caitlin realized it was almost an hour since she’d last thought of Jack. It had occurred to her that morning that she was now one of those women who spent part of each day wondering whether their man would survive. The thought had infuriated her, mostly because it was true. But why not? she thought now. He was in more physical danger than she was, and it was only natural that she should worry.
The week they’d just shared—the nights, to be precise—had been . . . well, “wonderful” was a word that seemed to fit. She had felt no ambivalence, but that was hardly surprising. They’d been living in a bubble—one room, one bed, a finite number of nights. She didn’t doubt their love for each other, but could they carry it over into their normal lives? Lives that both of them liked, work that both of them valued. Had anything really changed?
The Channel crossing was a somber affair, partly on account of the cold gray skies but mostly because the converted ferry was crowded with soldiers confronting the prospect of winter in the trenches. If McColl had received a penny for each pair of eyes staring wistfully back at the white cliffs of Dover, he’d have been a very rich man.
He couldn’t say he was looking forward to the next few weeks himself. After two days of cramming, he was well equipped to pass himself off as a Belgian, but first there was the minor matter of surviving the journey. He knew that the one-legged Cumming would happily have swapped places with him, but his chief was a trifle deranged where newfangled modes of transport were concerned. Cumming probably would have let the Royal Artillery fire him into Belgium if there was even the slightest chance of survival.
Boulogne looked thoroughly woebegone, and McColl was pleased to leave it behind, traveling south across the Pas de Calais with a group of returning young officers. The guns had been audible since the ship cleared Dover Harbour and were now rumbling and cracking above the sound of their mud-spattered Cottin & Desgouttes saloon. As darkness began to fall, McColl noticed an ominous red glow slowly deepening above the eastern horizon.
His was their first stop, outside the gates of the sprawling Royal Flying Corps’s Saint-Omer HQ. The field was unlit, but as a corporal walked McColl to his sleeping quarters, he could make out a line of parked airplanes stretching into the distance. “Does it ever stop?” he asked his escort.
“What? Oh, the noise. After a while that’s the only time you notice it—when it stops.”
McColl’s bed was a lower bunk in the mainly empty barracks. Most of the pilots were in the canteen, playing cards and drinking tea. They seemed appallingly young to McColl, but no more so than Jed. He was still hoping to see his brother but doubted there’d be time.
After breakfast next morning, he reported to the squadron leader, a man named Plumley with an accent to match and a mustache so extravagant that McColl thought he must have nightmares about catching it in a propeller. He also had a very soft voice and struggled to make himself heard above the constant roar of distance guns that poured through the open window. McColl asked how far away the front was.
“About thirty miles,” Plumley told him. “Look, we can take you where you want to go, but we’ll have to get a move on. The moon’s on the turn already, and once it’s passed its quarter, long flights get a little too risky. We could always take you out when there’s decent cloud cover, but that would mean a drop in total darkness, and they’re always a bit of a lottery.”
“A drop?” McColl asked, already feeling it in his stomach.
“Ah, yes. We won’t be landing you, I’m afraid. We don’t know enough about the area for one thing, but even if we did . . . The Boche have a new kite, a Fokker monoplane, and they’ve put us at a bit of a disadvantage. They have machine guns,” he added sadly, as if the enemy weren’t quite playing the game. “And we’ve had so many losses in the last couple of weeks that landings behind enemy lines have been ruled out.”
“I thought a landing only took a few minutes.”
“It does. But taking off is a noisy business, and once the Germans know there’s a kite headed home, they send half a dozen up to intercept it. But don’t worry—we’ll get you on the ground. Have you heard of the Guardian Angel?”
“No.”
“It’s a new parachute, works like a charm. We’ve only had one failure.”
Wonderful, McColl thought. He hoped the man who’d been unlucky appreciated his comrades’ good fortune. The thought of clambering out of a cockpit a mile from the ground, encumbered by heaven knew how many square yards of fabric, was enough to send a whole army of shivers marching down his spine.
But as the other man explained, there’d be no need to clamber.
“There’s a seat like a sidecar slung under the fuselage,” Plumley told him. “With a sort of trapdoor. At the appropriate moment, the pilot pulls a lever and you just drop through the hole, count to three—two if you’re nervous—and then pull the cord.”
“And nothing more to worry about until I hit the ground,” McColl murmured.
“Exactly so,” Plumley agreed with a grin.
“I don’t suppose there’s much point in a practice run?”
“Can’t spare the fuel, old man. And anyway, why go through it twice?”
Why indeed? McColl thought wryly. There was nothing to be gained from waiting around at Saint-Omer and much to lose with the moon shining brighter each passing night. He might as well get it over with. “So the sooner the better,” he said. “How’s the forecast for tonight?”
“Not good. But tomorrow’s looking better.”
McColl spent the day either reading in the canteen or walking around the airfield. The weather was clear and cold, and the blazing sunshine seemed freshly inappropriate each time a heavily loaded ambulance trundled past on the road from the front. On several occasions McColl felt like dashing out in front of one of these
vehicles, holding up a hand, and asking to see if his brother was lying inside.
He was introduced to his pilot a couple of hours before the scheduled takeoff, and the two of them pored over maps together, the large-scale one of the upper Meuse Valley that McColl had brought with him and two others that the squadron used for planning its flights over Belgium. His first point of contact with the Belgian underground was a bookshop in Huy, and his briefer in London had suggested a landing halfway between there and Andenne, a smaller town seven miles farther west. With most of the night still ahead of him, McColl should have no trouble reaching the outskirts of Huy before dawn.
The pilot, a young man in his early twenties named Rob Lansley, had already flown similar missions and clearly lived to tell the tale. His passengers had not been so lucky. Both had been intercepted by German patrols on the night of their arrival, one arrested, the other shot dead when he made a run for it. “It’s those first few hours,” Lansley explained. “The Germans hear an airplane and they don’t hear any bombs exploding, so they know that someone’s been landed or dropped.” The pilot smiled. “So we’ve started carrying a couple of twenty-pounders. Once I’ve pulled the plug on you, I’ll fly on to Huy and throw the bombs at the local castle. That’s where the Boche are billeted,” he added in explanation. “I don’t want any Belgians on my conscience.”
As the pale November sun sank below the hedges lining the airfield, the two of them ate an early dinner in the canteen. Lansley was from Bristol and had two brothers in the army, one up near Ypres, the other out in Mesopotamia. “And Mum’s just had another boy. Insurance, I reckon.”
There was one slight delay while the pilot went off in search of a thicker coat for McColl—“It’s bloody cold up there!”—and another when Plumley arrived to wish them luck. Eventually McColl and his suitcase were squeezed into the underslung sidecar, Lansley and his bombs into the B.E.12’s single seat, the propeller set in motion. The biplane drove steadily across the field, suddenly accelerated, and seemed to almost leap into the sky. As it climbed and turned, McColl could see the distant rows of lights that marked the two front lines.
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