'No, Sir Henry will supply you with a shotgun.'
'That's nice of him. What about transport?'
'I've done the best I can. I've managed to persuade Sir Henry to allocate you one of the estate motor-bikes. As an agricultural worker it's legitimate enough. Buses have almost ceased to exist, so most people are allowed a small monthly ration to help them get into town occasionally for essential purposes.'
A horn sounded outside. She went into the sitting-room and was back in an instant. 'It's Sir Henry. Leave the talking to me. Just act properly servile and speak only when you're spoken to. He'll like that. I'll bring him in here.'
She went out and Devlin waited. He heard the front door open and her feigned surprise. Sir Henry said, 'Just on my way to another command meeting in Holt, Joanna. Wondered if there was anything I could get you?'
She replied much more quietly so that Devlin couldn't hear what she said. Sir Henry dropped his voice in return, there was a further murmur of conversation and then they came into the kitchen.
Sir Henry was in uniform as a lieutenant-colonel in the Home Guard, medal ribbons for the First World War and India making a splash of colour above his left breast pocket. He glanced piercingly at Devlin, one hand behind his back, the other brushing the wide sweep of his moustache.
'So you're Devlin?'
Devlin lurched to his feet and stood there twisting and untwisting his tweed cap in his two hands. 'I'd like to thank you, sir,' he said, thickening the Irish accent noticeably. 'Mrs. Grey's told me how much you've done for me. It's more than kind.'
'Nonsense, man,' Sir Henry said brusquely although it was observable that he stretched to his full height and placed his feet a little further apart. 'You did your best for the old country, didn't you? Caught a packet in France, I understand?'
Devlin nodded eagerly and Sir Henry leaned forward and examined the furrow on the left side of the forehead made by an Irish Special Branch detective's bullet. 'By heavens,' he said softly. 'You're damn lucky to be here if you ask me.'
'I thought I'd settle him in for you,' Joanna Grey said. 'If that's all right. Henry? Only you're so busy, I know.'
'I say, would you, old girl?' He glanced at his watch. 'I'm due in Holt in half an hour.'
'No more to be said. I'll take him along to the cottage, show him around the marsh generally and so on.'
'Come to think of it you probably know more about what goes on at Hobs End than I do.' He forgot himself for a moment and slipped an arm about her waist, then withdrew it hastily and said to Devlin, 'Don't forget to present yourself to the police in Fakenham without delay. You know all about that?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Anything you want to ask me?'
'The gun, sir,' Devlin said. 'I understand you want me to do a little shooting.'
'Ah, yes. No trouble there. Call at the Grange tomorrow afternoon and I'll see you fixed up. You can pick the bike up tomorrow afternoon, too. Mrs. Grey's told you about that, has she? Only three gallons of petrol a month, mind you, but you'll have to make out the best way you can. We've all got to make sacrifices,' He brushed his moustache again. 'A single Lancaster, Devlin, uses two thousand gallons of petrol to reach the Ruhr. Did you know that?'
'No, sir.'
'There you are, then. We've all got to be prepared to do our best.'
Joanna Grey took his arm. 'Henry, you're going to be late.'
'Yes, of course, my dear.' He nodded to the Irishman. "All right, Devlin. I'll see you tomorrow afternoon.'
Devlin actually touched his forelock and waited until they'd gone out of the front door before moving into the sitting-room. He watched Sir Henry drive away and was lighting a cigarette when Joanna Grey returned.
'Tell me something,' he said. 'Are he and Churchill supposed to befriends?'
'As I understand it, they've never met. Studley Grange is famous for its Elizabethan gardens. The Prime Minister fancied the idea of a quiet weekend and a little painting before returning to London.'
'With Sir Henry falling over himself to oblige? Oh, yes, I can see that.'
She shook her head. 'I thought you were going to say begorrah any minute. You're a wicked man, Mr Devlin.'
'Liam,' he said. 'Call me Liam. It'll sound better, especially if I still call you Mrs. Grey. He fancies you, then, and at his age?'
'Autumn romance is not completely unheard of.'
'More like winter, I should have thought. On the other hand it must be damn useful.'
'More than that - essential,' she said. 'Anyway, bring your bag and I'll get the car and take you along to Hobs End.'
.
The rain pushed in on the wind from the sea was cold and the marsh was shrouded in mist. When Joanna Grey braked to a halt in the yard of the old marsh warden's cottage, Devlin got out and looked about him thoughtfully. It was a strange, mysterious sort of place, the kind that made the hair lift on the back of his head. Sea creeks and mudflats, the great, pale reeds merging with the mist and somewhere out there, the occasional cry of a bird, the invisible beat of wings.
'I see what you mean about being isolated.'
She took a key from under a flat stone by the front door and opened it, leading the way into a flagged passageway. There was rising damp and the whitewash was flaking from the wall. On the left a door opened into a large kitchen-cum-living room. Again, the floor was stone flags, but there was a huge open-hearth fireplace and rush mats. At the other end of the room was an iron cooking stove and a chipped, white pot sink with a single tap. A large pine table flanked by two benches and an old wing-backed chair by the fire were the only furniture.
'I've news for you,' Devlin said. 'I was raised in a cottage exactly like this in County Down in the North of Ireland. All it needs is a bloody good fire to dry the place out.'
'And it has one great advantage - seclusion,' she said. 'You probably won't see a soul the whole time you're here.'
Devlin opened the Gladstone bag and took out some personal belongings, clothing and three or four books. Then he ran a finger through the lining to find a hidden catch, and removed a false bottom. In the cavity he revealed was a Walther P38, a Sten gun, the silenced version, in three parts, and a land agent's S-phone receiver and transmitter which was no more than pocket size. There was a thousand pounds in pound notes and another thousand in fivers. There was also something in a white cloth which he didn't bother to unwrap.
'Operating money,' he said.
'To obtain the vehicles?'
'That's right. I've been given the address of the right sort of people.'
'Where from?'
'The kind of thing they have on file at Abwehr Headquarters.'
'Where is it?'
'Birmingham. I thought I'd take a run over there this weekend. What do I need to know?'
She sat on the edge of the table and watched as he screwed the barrel unit of the Sten into the main body and slotted the shoulder stock in place. 'It's a fair way.' she said. 'Say three hundred miles the round trip.'
'Obviously my three gallons of petrol isn't going to get me very far. What can I do about that?'
There's plenty of black market petrol available, at three times the normal price, if you know the right garages. The commercial variety is dyed red to make it easy for the police to detect wrongful use, but you can get rid of the dye by straining the petrol through an ordinary civilian gas mask filter.'
Devlin rammed a magazine into the Sten, checked it, then took the whole thing to pieces again and replaced it in the bottom of the bag.
'A wonderful thing, technology,' he observed. 'That thing can be fired at close quarters and the only sound you can hear is the bolt clicking. It's English, by the way. Another of the items SOE fondly imagine it's been dropping in to the Dutch underground.' He took out a cigarette and put it in his mouth. 'What else should I know when I make this trip? What are the risks?'
'Very few,' she said. 'The lights on the machine will have the regulation blackout fittings so there's no problem there
. The roads, particularly in country areas, are virtually traffic free. And white lines have been painted down the centre of most of them. That helps.'
'What about the police or the security forces?'
She gazed at him blankly. 'Oh, there's nothing to worry about there. The military would only stop you if you tried to enter a restricted area. Technically this still is a Defence Area, but nobody bothers with the regulations these days. As for the police, they're entitled to stop you and ask for your identity card or they might stop a vehicle on the main road as part of a spot check in the campaign against misuse of petrol.'
She almost sounded indignant and, remembering what he had left, Devlin had to fight an irresistible compulsion to open her eyes a little. Instead he said, 'Is that all?'
'I think so. There's a twenty-mile-an-hour speed limit in built-up areas and of course you won't find signposts anywhere, but they started putting place names up again in many places earlier this summer.'
'So, the odds are that I shouldn't have any trouble?
'No one's stopped me. Nobody bothers now.' She shrugged. 'There's no problem. At the local WVS aid centre we have all sorts of official forms from the old Defence Area days. There was one that allowed you to visit relatives in hospital. I'll make one out referring to some brother in hospital in Birmingham. That and those medical discharge papers from the Army should be enough to satisfy anyone. Everybody has a soft spot for a hero these days.'
Devlin grinned. 'You know something, Mrs. Grey? I think we're going to get on famously.' He went and rummaged in the cupboard under the sink and returned with a rusty hammer and a nail. 'The very thing.'
'For what?' she demanded.
He stepped inside the hearth and drove the nail partially home at the back of the smoke-blackened beam which supported the chimney breast. Then he hung the Walther up there by its trigger guard. 'What I call my ace-in-the-hole. I like to have one around, just in case. Now, show me round the rest of the place.'
There was an assortment of outbuildings, mostly in decay, and a barn in quite reasonable condition. There was another standing behind it on the very edge of the marsh, a decrepit building of considerable age, the stonework green with mildew. Devlin got one half of the large door open with difficulty. Inside it was cold and damp and obviously hadn't been used for anything for years.
'This will do just fine,' he said. 'Even if old Sir Willoughby comes poking his nose in I shouldn't think he'd go this far.'
'He's a busy man,' she said. 'County affairs, magistrate, running the local Home Guard. He still takes that very seriously. Doesn't really have much time for anything else.'
'But you,' he said. 'The randy old bastard still has enough time left for you.'
She smiled. 'Yes, I'm afraid that's only too true.' She took his arm. 'Now, I'll show you the dropping zone.'
They walked up through the marsh along the dyke road. It was raining quite hard now and the wind carried with it the damp, wet smell of rotting vegetation. Some Brent geese flew in out of the mist in formation like a bombing squadron going in for the kill and vanished into the grey curtain.
They reached the pine trees, the pill boxes, the sand-filled tank trap, the warning Beware of Mines so familiar to Devlin from the photographs he had seen. Joanna Grey tossed a stone out over the sands and Patch bounded through the wire to retreive it.
'You're sure?' Devlin said.
'Absolutely.'
He grinned crookedly. 'I'm a Catholic, remember that if it goes wrong.'
They all are here. I'll see you're put down properly.'
He stepped over the coils of wire, paused on the edge of the sand, and walked forward. He paused again, then started to run, leaving wet footprints for the tide had no long ebbed. He turned, ran back and once again negotiated the wire.
He was immensely cheerful and put an arm around her shoulders. 'You were right - from the beginning. It's going to work, this thing. You'll see.' He looked out to sea across the creeks and the sandbanks, through the mist towards the Point. 'Beautiful. The thought of leaving all this must break your heart.'
'Leave?' She looked up at him blankly. 'What do you mean?'
'But you can't stay,' he said. 'Not afterwards. Surely you must see that?'
She looked out to the Point as if for the last time. Strange, but it had never occurred to her that she would have to leave. She shivered as the wind drove rain in hard off the sea.
.
It was raining at Landsvoort, too, as Steiner and Ritter Neumann made their first tour of inspection of the general area surrounding the airstrip. They had arrived an hour previously by truck after a flight in a Ju 52 transport from Cherbourg to Amsterdam, and Steiner had left the immediate problem of settling the men in the capable hands of Sergeant-Major Brandt.
He and Ritter followed a track which led from the farmhouse to the shore perhaps a quarter of a mile away. It was an incredibly desolate landscape, flat and barren. There was little shelter anywhere.
Neumann said, 'What a dump. It's going to be a long three weeks.'
'It needn't be if you and Brandt organize it properly,' Steiner said. 'A good hard schedule and lots of ground-jump training practice. Most of them could do with that. We haven't jumped for some time, remember. Then there are the British weapons to come to terms with. Target briefing and so on. I think the three weeks should be filled rather well.'
'When are you going to tell them; about the target, I mean? Will you leave it till the last possible moment?'
'I don't think so. About a week before we go would be a good time. That would sharpen them up for the last few days. You know how men get when they're kept under strict security for an operation like this.'
'You don't need to rub it in,' Neumann said. 'Remember what things were like at Hildesheim airbase at the beginning of the war when we were preparing for the Eben Emael assault and the Albert Canal bridges? How long did they keep us in quarantine for that one? Six months?'
'But it paid off, remember. It worked to perfection, right down to the last detail.' Steiner sighed. 'A long time ago, Ritter. Like something out of an old story. A different war.'
The track snaked between dunes of pure white sand, tufts of grass sticking through here and there, a barrier between the land and the sea. There was an inlet on the other side, deep water and a broken concrete pier.
'What was it used for?' Neumann asked.
'Barges came up the coast from the Hague and Rotterdam to fill up. with sand,' Steiner told him. 'It should suit young Koenig admirably.'
'When does he arrive?'
'Radl wasn't sure when he spoke to me on the telephone. Certainly within the next week. The thing is, Koenig may find it better to come up with one of the coastal convoys than on his own.'
Their footsteps boomed hollowly on the boardwalk along the centre of the pier. There was the heavy salt smell of the sea, the murmur of the waves as they swirled between the concrete piles below. Steiner stood at the very end and looked out into the curtain of grey mist and rain. 'There it is, Ritter, waiting for us. A hundred and sixty miles due west, that's all.'
'And will this work to perfection, too, Herr Oberst?' Ritter Neumann said. 'Like Eben Emael, right down to the last detail?'
'It worked for Skorzeny at Gran Sasso.'
That isn't what I asked.'
'All right, let's see if I can do any better.' Steiner took his time over lighting-a cigarette and flicked the match out into space. 'Men generally die in war when they cannot help it and are defeated by a disadvantageous situation.'
'And what in the hell is that supposed to mean?'
'That you need luck, Ritter, always that, because no matter how well you plan there remains the unexpected. The one thing you hadn't looked for. The stupid, silly, unimportant items that can destroy you.' He smiled. 'Having made that point, it is a fact that with any kind of luck this whole thing could go beautifully. We could be in and out so fast that they won't know we've been till we've gone.'
'And i
f it doesn't go like that?'
Then all your problems will be over and you won't have a thing to worry about.' Steiner smiled slightly. 'And now, I think we'd better get back.' He turned and walked away along the pier.
.
At twenty to eight that evening Max Radl, in his office at the Tirpitz Ufer, decided he'd had enough for the day. He'd not felt well since his return from Brittany and the doctor he'd gone to see had been horrified at his condition.
'If you carry on like this, Herr Oberst, you will kill yourself,' he had declared firmly. 'I think I can promise you that.'
Radl had paid his fee and taken the pills - three different kinds - which with any kind of luck might keep him going. As long as he could stay out of the hands of the Army medics he had a chance, but one more physical check-up with that lot and he was finished. They'd have him into a civilian suit before he knew where he was.
Jack Higgins - Eagle Has Landed Page 17
