The Kingdom of the Air

by C. T. Wells

  The girl was sitting between them, wearing a summer dress with shoestring straps and beads around her neck. Slender limbs were draped around the two men. She had the same half smile as the first man, and large, almond–shaped eyes. She held Lucas’ attention.

  Sir Frank cut in. ‘This group is the Hyperion Cell. The leader is Martin Alegre. His sister, Giselle, and a friend Edouard Tierney. They have proven their capabilities.’

  ‘Students?’

  ‘Yes, at The Sorbonne. Martin was studying politics, Giselle took music and classics, and Edouard studies art and architecture. Most French students are now reassigned to the labour force. This lot now have documents to establish themselves as farm–workers. They have been placed with a farmer who is sympathetic to their duties. I will leave you with the radio frequencies and codes to contact them. Your callsign is Cardinal. Martin is Archangel. Giselle is Seraphim. Edouard is Cherub.’

  Lucas smiled as he looked at the photo. Three new marionettes for the puppet master. Then he started to wonder what strings he could pull to operate them. He recalled that Sun Tzu had called the task of a spymaster ‘the divine manipulation of threads’. He tapped the photo. ‘What influence do I have with these people?’

  ‘They are activists. They want France liberated and a new regime under De Gaulle. I have promised them more deliveries of armaments when they complete our objectives. We fund them, supply them. But they want more. They want a formal declaration of support from England. Currently we can turn off the tap of supply at any moment. They want a broadcast across France committing our government to work not only with their government in exile, but promising supply for the resistance cells. They think it will galvanise the French underground. It is fractured now, as you know. Small, isolated groups. Students. Runaway soldiers. Jews. No central network. No coordination. They think that, if England broadcasts support across the clandestine radio network, it will unite the separate resistance cells. They are pressuring us to pledge this support by making a declaration on air. They want us to broadcast the codeword “covenant”. Use that prospect to string them along.’

  Lucas sucked on his lip, considering. The students were good assets, but what did he really have to work with? The transient political ideals of youth would usually melt away when he asked people to do difficult and dangerous things. He preferred a more Freudian approach to his art. He liked to get a grip on people’s deep fears and insecurities; their greed or vanity. Even blackmail was a much better currency than trading on idealism. Blackmail was how you got them by the throat. If that didn’t present itself as an option, he liked to get them by the heart, as he had done with Josef. The pilot would do almost anything to save his sister. The third main option was to get them by the balls. Maybe he could work with that. He looked at the photograph. A brother and sister, and a friend. What were the dynamics? Who was loved by whom? What leverage did he have? ‘Do you have background material on these three?’

  Sir Frank handed him a slim dossier. ‘I’m sure you will get a result one way or another.’

  Lucas nodded. ‘It’s what I do.’

  ‘Just make sure that Hugo Sperrle’s photo–recon intelligence is destroyed. And do it quickly, Lucas. England’s defences are dying a little more every day.’

  ***

  Josef stirred as Lucas barged into the upstairs bedroom. Judging by the light it was well into the afternoon. The Lysander had left hours ago and Josef had been left alone to stare at the ceiling and eventually doze off.

  ‘It’s showtime, Josef! Time to put your costume on.’ Lucas was holding a bundle of Josef’s equipment and he tossed the uniform, boots and flying jacket onto the end of the bed. The SOE officer hesitated to hand over the holstered Walther automatic and instead he placed it atop a chest of drawers near where he stood. ‘Get on with it then.’

  Josef stood and started to remove the civilian clothes. Lucas watched him unashamedly. Josef tried to ignore the eyes that fixed on him as he dropped the ill–fitting clothes and donned the familiar flying uniform, still filthy from his time on the run.

  ‘We have to get you down to the coast to meet an associate of mine who operates a small boat in the channel.’

  ‘What’s his name? Captain Hook?’

  ‘Very good, Josef. Captain Hook. Let’s go with that, shall we? I’m impressed. Germans are not known for their sense of humour. And South Africans even less! But you are a true wit.’

  ‘So you’re letting me go.’

  ‘Yes. My advice is to stick to the story when you get back to France. The best lies contain much truth. Your plane got shot down. You bailed out. Ran at night. Hid during the day. On the third night you made it to the coast and hijacked a boat. We’ll have you dropped off on Guernsey which is in German hands now as you know. It wasn’t enough for your lot to go goose–stepping down the Champs Élysées, you had to take some squalid little dairy farms on a muddy island just to make the point.’

  ‘Why Guernsey?’

  ‘Believe it or not, you can’t catch the ferry to France at present. And you have to arrive by sea to make the story plausible. Guernsey’s our best bet. Barely any defences. From there I expect you can hitch a ride back to your Aryan fly–boys at Jagdgeschwader 27 and tell them about your little adventure. I wouldn’t mention the dental work or this gilded cage, though.’ Lucas swept his hand around the well–appointed bedroom.

  ‘Why did you have my mouth fixed?’

  ‘Because we need you back in action within a couple of days. No languishing in a field hospital for you.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you are doing all this.’

  ‘We have gentleman’s agreement. You do me a favour. I save Melitta.’

  ‘You told me she has already begun receiving treatment.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but she’s a young woman on her own in a savage country. She’ll need saving every day of this wretched war. You’re lucky I can arrange to have her taken care of.’

  Josef snarled. ‘What is the favour?’

  Lucas sauntered to the dormer window, and, leaning on the sill, he stared out at the English countryside. ‘There’s an old stone windmill in a field a couple of miles from your airstrip. It has three sails. Do you know it?’

  ‘Yes. You can see it on final approach.’

  ‘You are observant. You will need to keep watching it. The sails on the windmill don’t turn any more, and the wind has stripped them almost bare. It has seized up in a Y–shape. But the day you notice one of the sails pointing straight up, that will be your signal.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘You go there. To the mill. Within twenty–four hours. Inside you will find an envelope with a question in it. You have another twenty–four hours to answer the question.’

  Josef turned his eyes to the Walther on the chest of drawers, quite within reach. He was tempted to grab it and jam it in the Englishman’s face until he got some real answers. Instead, he spoke quietly. ‘What question?’

  ‘Really, Josef. What do you expect from me? A memo?’

  ‘I want to know what this is about.’

  ‘For you, it is about saving Melitta …’ Lucas trailed off and studied the window sill on which he was leaning. ‘Josef, did you prise open this window?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You could have run away, couldn’t you? A fit, young fellow like you could easily have escaped through this window and over the eaves. But you didn’t. I find that encouraging, Josef. It means there was something holding you back. I think you have accepted our gentlemen’s agreement.’

  ‘You will ask me to provide intelligence. To betray my brothers.’

  ‘I’m giving you a chance to save your sister.’

  ‘Prove to me she is safe and getting the treatment she needs.’

  ‘Answer the question within twenty–four hours and I will give you proof.’

  ‘Has i
t occurred to you that I am a fighter pilot? We get transferred, put on standby. We get lost sometimes. Shot down. Killed. What if I can’t make it to this windmill? What will happen to Melitta?’

  Lucas gave a look approaching genuine sincerity. ‘Let me put your mind at ease, Josef. If the unthinkable happens to you … I will adopt Melitta myself. I think I would make a wonderful father. She’s very lovely, though. That could get awkward, couldn’t it?’

  Josef picked up the leather holster from the chest of drawers. He drew the Walther from the holster. He checked the magazine. It was still loaded. He snapped it back into the pistol and chambered a round. Lucas watched him coolly as the pilot weighed the pistol in his hand. Finally, Josef shoved the Walther back into the holster. Now his priority was to get Melitta to safety. Later, somehow, he would deal with Lucas. ‘Let’s go.’

  X

  Giselle rode in the sidecar of Martin’s motorcycle and they roared through the summer fields. Hardly anyone rode for pleasure these days because there was barely enough fuel for essential transport, but they had a sufficient amount to relocate to the farm near Cherbourg. The fields of Normandy rushed by; some ploughed brown, some green, some yellow with crops.

  For several minutes she forgot the war and their mission. It was fun to be out with Martin alone. It reminded her of a less complicated time. Before the war. Before Edouard.

  A year ago, her biggest problem was how to get hold of the latest American jazz recordings, or how to save for a new set of high heels on a student’s income. That was last summer, when they thought the Maginot line was impregnable and no–one had heard of blitzkrieg. Even during the invasion, no–one really considered that Paris would fall.

  She had first seen Edouard in a café on La Rive Gauche. There was a row of students arranged along a bench behind a row of wine bottles and glasses. It was a debate and Edouard was about to speak. He wore a waistcoat of scarlet velvet and black silk over a rumpled, collarless shirt, open at the neck and with sleeves rolled back. His dark hair was unruly and he had to keep flicking it out of his eyes. He was the sort who tried hard to look careless and bohemian.

  Giselle was due to go to class, but she lingered as he spoke. With a flick of his fringe, Edouard proclaimed that socialism was not the enemy of art. He spoke for two and half minutes. He stuttered at times, but his passion won him some applause. Giselle went to her lecture that day, but she came back later to the same café. Before long she was regularly missing class to talk with him.

  He could have been just another student radical with more philosophy than courage, but later, after the blitzkrieg, most of the self–styled radicals disappeared. They had liked the talk about underground movements. But the ranks had thinned when the British recruited agents for a résistance army. By then, everyone knew France would fall and opposition would be crushed as brutally as it had been in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Only a few were determined that the struggle would not end with occupation, and Edouard was amongst them.

  At the end of summer, they had been trained by English specialists, learning the trade of résistance fighters. Edouard had turned his hand to demolitions; Martin had proven to be a fine marksman and Giselle had discovered she was a natural radio operator, transmitting and receiving morse signals at more than a hundred letters per minute.

  There had been many hours apart, honing their skills. Then many hours together, forming the practices and disciplines of the Hyperion Cell. They had played cat and mouse games on the streets of Paris. Surveillance and counter–surveillance drills. And she had noticed Edouard watching her in the reflections of shop windows.

  She began to wonder whether his first commitment was to the cause, or to her. But he was elusive. He would not declare his feelings, either because of shyness or because there was more to him than she understood. As they spent time together, she saw that he was not comfortable in his own skin. He was always trying to impress them. Maybe he aspired to be both a man’s man and a lady’s man, but in his striving he had become neither. She could probably find it in her to forgive such things in an earnest young fellow like Edouard, but for now it was nice to just be with Martin. He should be a saint. Saint Martin the Uncomplicated. Not unsophisticated. Just straightforward in the way a man should be.

  Giselle looked up from the sidecar at her brother. His jacket billowed in the wind. Now he really looked larger than life. He rode with easy confidence and she felt safe with him. With Martin, everything was clear. He was her brother, and would always be so. With Edouard, it was hard to know. He was her comrade, certainly; a friend even, but would he one day be something more?

  By now, Edouard should have made his own way to Joubert’s Farm. It would be their home for the duration of the new mission. He had volunteered to bring the equipment supplied by the British. She had to admit that he was brave because being caught with such things was tantamount to death in occupied France. But Edouard had volunteered to smuggle the equipment, probably to impress her. And, in truth, she was impressed. It just tainted things that she had let him do it for such a reason. Now it felt like she owed him something.

  Martin pulled over on a gentle rise in the landscape and studied a road map while the motorcycle idled. As they sat there, Giselle heard a different noise above that of the motorcycle.

  She looked up and saw a flight of German fighter planes coming in low over the fields, their shadows swarming over the sunlit fields beneath them. They were a mottled grey and looked like a school of sharks, only less welcome.

  Martin raised one fist emphatically and slapped his bicep with the other hand. It was quite impossible that the obsecene gesture could be seen from the aircraft, but Giselle giggled at the cheekiness of it. He grinned at her like a mischievous schoolboy. He gave the bike some throttle and they roared north as the planes vanished into the distance.

  They pulled off the road where an old milk pail had been made into a letter box. They rode up a long driveway to a collection of stone buildings. The farm buildings formed a U–shape; the largest was a house with a thatched roof. Moss was growing in some of the joints. On their right was a barn with walls of weathered timber beneath a steeply pitched roof. A lean–to against its outer wall housed a rusting plough and other attachments for a tractor. On their left was a cluster of smaller buildings; a dairy and a squat, round structure Giselle guessed was a smokehouse. Across the fields, up on higher ground, was a derelict windmill.

  The place could have been on a postcard for rustic, rural France. Or it might have been a place for Monet to paint haystacks fifty years ago. It was not without charm, but it did look like it was without certain services. There was evidently no telephone, judging by the lack of wires, and Giselle guessed there would be an outhouse rather than modern plumbing.

  They dismounted in front of the house and stretched their road–weary bodies. Martin started to unload the few possessions they had strapped to the motorcycle. A heavy–set man strode across the yard from the dairy. He wore galoshes, dirty blue coveralls and a leather jerkin that could have dated from the Middle Ages. He also sported the sort of drooping moustache that was unfashionable even amongst the older generation.

  The farmer wiped his hands on his paunch and opened his arms to the new arrivals. ‘Welcome! I am Anton. Come and meet Terese. Your friend Edouard is already here, though he has not yet worked out the difference between cows and bulls. But you, Martin, I think you will know how to handle a teat, no?’ Anton chuckled as he led them to the house.

  Martin and Giselle exchanged a smile. They followed Anton to the house where he removed his boots on the porch. The smell of manure reached her nostrils, but it was not offensive. The place was earthy and natural. She liked that farming folk like Anton and Terese supported the cause. It validated what they believed: freedom from oppression was a dream for real people, real workers, not just the rhetoric of students in cafés.

  They went through the low door of the farmhouse a
nd met a ruddy, solid woman dicing cabbages. Terese. She had none of her husband’s exuberance, but she greeted Martin and Giselle with a polite embrace. Edouard appeared a moment later and his eyes lit up when he saw Giselle. She kissed both his cheeks.

  Anton’s voice boomed through the farmhouse. ‘First, we will eat, then Edouard can show you your quarters in the barn. You should feel honoured. We have relocated the pig especially for you!’

  Terese produced a platter of cheese and bread, olives and smoked ham and they fell on it happily. It had already become hard to find enough food in the cities, and it had been some time since they had feasted like this. Anton supplemented the food with a bottle of red wine.

  ‘So tell me, boys, why have you joined the résistance?’ Anton looked to Edouard and Martin for an answer. It annoyed Giselle for a moment that only the men had been asked. But she decided not to let it bother her and she set about helping Terese clear the table.

  Edouard launched into a lengthy and passionate rationale for driving out the Nazi tyrants and building a stronger France on the basis of the equality of men—and women, he added, with a quick glance towards Giselle.

  ‘Will you attack the Germans?’ pressed Anton. ‘Or is it sabotage? They have an airfield yonder.’

  ‘Intelligence,’ explained Edouard obliquely. ‘We pass on information and the British will supply us with weapons.’

  Martin set down his wineglass. ‘And you, Anton? Terese? This is dangerous for you, harbouring us. Why do you do this?’

  ‘When I was a young man, I lived in Belgium with my family.’ Anton’s sigh was heavy. ‘The Germans burnt our farm. I came west into France and I fought them in 1917. They gassed us in the trenches. I was nearly killed. I spent years thinking I would cough my lungs out. For me it is not politics. I simply hate them, and I will help you to hurt them.’

  ‘Well, we appreciate your help.’ Martin said. Giselle could see he wanted Anton to believe in a cause greater than revenge, but he didn’t push the point. Anton was clearly not a man taken with abstract political notions. If he hated Germans, well, they had a simple alliance.