Ken Follett - Jackdaws

by Jackdaws [lit]

  He noticed four guards at the chƒteau gate, instead of the usual two. Although he was in a Gestapo car, the sergeant carefully examined his pass and his driver's before opening the wrought-iron gates and waving the car in. Dieter was pleased: Weber had taken seriously the need for extra security.

  A cool breeze blew as he walked from the car to the steps of the grand entrance. Passing into the hall and seeing the rows of women at their switchboards, he thought about the female secret agent Weber had arrested. The Jackdaws were an all-woman team. It occurred to him that they might try to enter the chƒteau disguised as telephonists. Was it possible? As he passed through the east wing he spoke to the German woman supervisor. "Have any of these women joined in the last few days?"

  "No, Major," she said. "One new girl was taken on three weeks ago, and she was the last."

  That put paid to his theory. He nodded and walked on. At the end of the east wing he took the staircase down. The door to the basement stood open, as usual, but there were two soldiers instead of the usual one standing inside. Weber had doubled the guard. The corporal saluted and the sergeant asked for his pass.

  Dieter noticed that the corporal stood behind the sergeant while the sergeant checked the pass. He said, "The way you are now, it's too easy for someone to overpower you both. Corporal, you should stand to the side, and two meters away, so that you have a clear shot if the sergeant is attacked."

  "Yes, sir."

  Dieter entered the basement corridor. He could hear the rumble of the diesel-fueled generator that supplied electricity to the phone system. He passed the doors of the equipment rooms and entered the interview room. He hoped to find the new prisoner here, but the room was empty.

  Puzzled, he stepped inside and closed the door. Then his question was answered. From the inner chamber came a long scream of utter agony.

  Dieter threw open the door.

  Becker stood at the electric shock machine. Weber sat on a chair nearby. A young woman lay on the operating table with her wrists and ankles strapped and her head clamped in the head restraint. She wore a blue dress, and wires from the electric shock machine ran between her feet and up her dress.

  Weber said, "Hello, Franck. Join us, please. Becker here has come up with an innovation. Show him, Sergeant."

  Becker reached beneath the woman's dress and drew out an ebonite cylinder about fifteen centimeters long and two or three in diameter. The cylinder was ringed by two metal bands a couple of centimeters apart. Two wires from the electric shock machine were attached to the bands.

  Dieter was accustomed to torture, but this hellish caricature of the sexual act filled him with loathing, and he shuddered with disgust.

  "She hasn't said anything yet, but we've only just started," Weber said. "Give her another shock, Sergeant."

  Becker pushed up the woman's dress and inserted the cylinder in her vagina. He picked up a roll of electrician's tape, tore off a strip, and secured the cylinder so that it would not fall out.

  Weber said "Turn the voltage up this time."

  Becker returned to the machine.

  Then the lights went out.

  THERE WAS A blue flash and a bang from behind the oven. The lights went out, and the kitchen was filled with the smell of scorched insulation. The motor of the refrigerator ran down with a groan as the power was cut off. The young cook said in German, "What's going on?"

  Flick ran out of the door and through the canteen with Jelly and Greta hard on her heels. They followed a short corridor past the cleaning cupboard. At the top of the stairs Flick paused. She drew her submachine gun and held it concealed under the flap of her coat.

  "The basement will be in total darkness?" she said.

  "I cut all the cables, including the wires to the emergency lighting system," Greta assured her.

  "Let's go."

  They ran down the stairs. The daylight coming from the ground-floor windows faded rapidly as they descended, and the entrance to the basement was half- dark.

  There were two soldiers standing just inside the door. One of them, a young corporal with a rifle, smiled and said, "Don't worry, ladies, it's only a power cut."

  Flick shot him in the chest, then swung her weapon and shot the sergeant.

  The three Jackdaws stepped through the doorway. Flick held her gun in her right hand and the flashlight in her left. She could hear a low rumble of machinery and several voices shouting questions in German from distant rooms.

  She turned on an electric torch for a second. She was in a broad corridor with a low ceiling. Farther along, doors were opening. She switched off the flashlight. A moment later she saw the flicker of a match at the far end. About thirty seconds had passed since Greta cut off the power. It would not be long before the Germans recovered from the shock and found flashlights. She had only a minute, maybe less, to get out of sight.

  She tried the nearest door. It was open. She shone her flashlight inside. This was a photo lab, with prints hanging to dry and a man in a white coat fumbling his way across the room.

  She slammed the door, crossed the corridor in two strides, and tried a door on the opposite side. It was locked. She guessed, from the position of the room at the front of the chƒteau under a corner of the parking lot, that the room beyond contained the fuel tanks.

  She moved along the corridor and opened the next door. The rumble of machinery became louder. She shone her flashlight once more, just for a split second, long enough to see an electricity generator-the independent power supply to the phone system, she assumed- then she hissed, "Drag the bodies in here!"

  Jelly and Greta pulled the dead guards across the floor. Flick returned to the basement entrance and slammed the steel door shut. Now the corridor was in total darkness. As an afterthought, she shot the three heavy bolts on the inside. That might give her precious extra seconds.

  She returned to the generator room, closed the door, and turned on her flashlight.

  Jelly and Greta had pushed the bodies behind the door and stood panting with the effort. "All done," Greta murmured.

  There was a mass of pipes and cables in the room, but they were all color-coded with German efficiency, and Flick knew which was which: fresh-air pipes were yellow, fuel lines were brown, water pipes were green, and power lines were striped red-and-black. She directed her torch at the brown fuel line to the generator. "Later, if we have time, I want you to blow a hole in that."

  "Easy," said Jelly.

  "Now, put your hand on my shoulder and follow me. Greta, you follow Jelly the same way. Okay?"

  "Okay."

  Flick turned off her flashlight and opened the door. Now they had to explore the basement blind. She put her hand to the wall as a guide and began to walk, heading farther inside. A confused babble of raised voices revealed that several men were blundering about the corridor.

  An authoritative voice said in German, "Who closed the main door?"

  She heard Greta reply, but in a man's voice, "It seems to be stuck."

  The German cursed. A moment later there was the scrape of a bolt.

  Flick reached another door. She opened it and shone her flashlight again. It contained two huge wooden coffers the size and shape of mortuary slabs. Greta whispered, "Battery room. Go to the next door."

  The German man's voice said, "Was that a flashlight? Bring it over here!"

  "Just coming," said Greta in her Gerhard voice, but the three Jackdaws walked in the opposite direction.

  Flick came to the next room, led the other two inside, and closed the door before shining her flashlight. It was a long, narrow chamber with racks of equipment along both walls. At the near end of the room was a cabinet that probably held large sheets of drawings. At the far end, the beam of her flashlight revealed a small table. Three men sat at it holding playing cards. They appeared to have remained sitting during the minute or so since the lights went out. Now they moved.

  As they rose to their feet, Flick leveled her gun. Jelly was just as quick. Flick shot one. Jelly's
pistol cracked and the man beside him fell. The third man dived for cover, but Flick's flashlight followed him. Both Flick and Jelly fired again, and he fell still.

  Flick refused to let herself think about the dead men as people. There was no time for feelings. She shone her flashlight around. What she saw gladdened her heart. This was almost certainly the room she was looking for.

  Standing a meter from one long wall was a pair of floor-to-ceiling racks bristling with thousands of terminals in tidy rows. From the outside world the telephone cables came through the wall in neat bundles to the backs of the terminals on the nearer rack. At the farther end, similar cables led from the backs of the terminals up through the ceiling to the switchboards above. At the front of the frame, a nightmare tangle of loose jumper wires connected the terminals of the near rack to those of the far one. Flick looked at Greta. "Well?"

  Greta was examining the equipment by the light of her own flashlight, a fascinated expression on her face. "This is the MDF-the main distribution frame," she said. "But it's a bit different from ours in Britain."

  Flick stared at Greta in surprise. Minutes ago she had said she was too frightened to go on. Now she was unmoved by the killing of three men.

  Along the far wall more racks of equipment glowed with the light of vacuum tubes. "And on the other side?" Flick asked.

  Greta swung her torch. "Those are the amplifiers and carrier circuit equipment for the long-distance lines."

  "Good," Flick said briskly. "Show Jelly where to place the charges."

  The three of them went to work. Greta unwrapped the wax-paper packets of yellow plastic explosive while Flick cut the fuse cord into lengths. It burned at one centimeter per second. "I'll make all the fuses three meters long," Flick said. "That will give us exactly five minutes to get out." Jelly assembled the fire train: fuse, detonator, and firing cap.

  Flick held a flashlight while Greta molded the charges to the frames at the vulnerable places and Jelly stuck the firing cap into the soft explosive.

  They worked fast. In five minutes all the equipment was covered with charges like a rash. The fuse cords led to a common source, where they were loosely twisted together, so that one light would serve to ignite them all.

  Jelly took out a thermite bomb, a black can about the size and shape of a tin of soup, containing finely powdered aluminum oxide and iron oxide. It would burn with intense heat and fierce flames. She took off the lid to reveal two fuses, then placed it on the ground behind the MDF.

  Greta said, "Somewhere in here are thousands of cards showing how the circuits are connected. We should burn them. Then it will take the repair crew two weeks, rather than two days, to reconnect the cables."

  Flick opened the cupboard and found four custom- made card holders containing large diagrams, neatly sorted by labeled file dividers. "Is this what we're looking for?"

  Greta studied a card by the light of her flashlight. "Yes."

  Jelly said, "Scatter them around the thermite bomb. They'll go up in seconds."

  Flick threw the cards on the floor in loose piles.

  Jelly placed an oxygen-generating pack on the floor at the blind end of the room. "This will make the fire hotter," she said. "Ordinarily, we could only burn the wooden frames and the insulation around the cables, but with this, the copper cables should melt."

  Everything was ready.

  Flick shone her flashlight around the room. The outer walls were ancient brick, but the inner walls between the rooms were light wooden partitions. The explosion would destroy the partition walls and the fire would spread rapidly to the rest of the basement.

  Five minutes had passed since the lights went out.

  Jelly took out a cigarette lighter.

  Flick said, "You two, make your way outside the building. Jelly, on your way, go into the generating room and blow a hole in the fuel line, where I showed you."

  "Got it."

  "We meet up at Antoinette's."

  Greta said anxiously, "Where are you going?"

  "To find Ruby."

  Jelly warned, "You have five minutes."

  Flick nodded.

  Jelly lit the fuse.

  W H E N D E T E R PASSED from the darkness of the basement into the half-light of the stairwell, he noticed that the guards had gone from the entrance. No doubt they were fetching help, but the ill discipline infuriated him. They should have remained at their post.

  Perhaps they had been forcibly removed. Had they been taken away at gunpoint? Was an attack on the chƒteau already under way?

  He ran up the stairs. On the ground floor, there were no signs of battle. The operators were still working: the phone system was on a separate circuit from the rest of the building's electricity, and there was still enough light coming through the windows for them to see their switchboards. He ran through the canteen, heading for the rear of the building, where the maintenance workshops were located, but on the way he looked into the kitchen and found three soldiers in overalls staring at a fuse box. "There's a power cut in the basement," Dieter said.

  "I know," said one of the men. He had a sergeant's stripes on his shirt. "All these wires have been cut."

  Dieter raised his voice. "Then get your tools out and reconnect them, you damn fool!" he said. "Don't stand here scratching your stupid head!"

  The sergeant was startled. "Yes, sir," he said.

  A worried-looking young cook said, "I think it's the electric oven, sir."

  "What happened?" Dieter barked.

  "Well, Major, they were cleaning behind the oven, and there was a bang-"

  "Who? Who was cleaning?"

  "I don't know, sir."

  "A soldier, someone you recognized?"

  "No, sir... just a cleaner."

  Dieter did not know what to think. Clearly the chƒteau was under attack. But where were the enemy? He left the kitchen, went to the stairwell, and ran up toward the offices on the upper floor.

  As he turned at the bend in the stairs, something caught his eye, and he looked back. A tall woman in a cleaner's overall was coming up the stairs from the basement, carrying a mop and a bucket.

  He froze, staring at her, his mind racing. She should not have been there. Only Germans were allowed into the basement. Of course, anything could have happened in the confusion of a power cut. But the cook had blamed a cleaner for the power cut. He recalled his brief conversation with the supervisor of the switchboard girls. None of them was new to the job-but he had not asked about the Frenchwomen cleaners.

  He came back down the stairs and met her at ground level. "Why were you in the basement?" he asked her in French.

  "I went there to clean, but the lights are out."

  Dieter frowned. She spoke French with an accent that he could not quite place. He said, "You're not supposed to go there."

  "Yes, the soldier told me that, they clean it themselves, I didn't know."

  Her accent was not English, Dieter thought. But what was it? "How long have you worked here?"

  "Only a week, and I've always done upstairs until today."

  Her story was plausible, but Dieter was not satisfied. "Come with me." He took her arm in a firm grip. She did not resist as he led her through to the kitchen.

  Dieter spoke to the cook. "Do you recognize this woman?"

  "Yes, sir. She's the one who was cleaning behind the oven."

  Dieter looked at her. "Is that true?"

  "Yes, sir, I'm very sorry if I damaged something."

  Dieter recognized her accent. "You're German," he said.

  "No, sir."

  "You filthy traitor." He looked at the cook. "Grab her and follow me. She's going to tell me everything."

  F L I C K O P E N E D T H E door marked Interview Room, stepped inside, closed the door behind her, and swept the room with her flashlight.

  She saw a cheap pine table with ashtrays, several chairs, and a steel desk. The room was empty of people.

  She was puzzled. She had located the prison cells on this corri
dor and had shone her flashlight through the judas in each door. The cells were empty: the prisoners the Gestapo had taken during the last eight days, including Gilberte, must have been moved somewhere else... or killed. But Ruby had to be here somewhere.

  Then she saw, on her left, a door leading, presumably, to an inner chamber.

  She switched off her flashlight, opened the door, stepped through, closed the door, and switched on her flashlight.

  She saw Ruby right away. She was lying on a table like a hospital operating table. Specially designed straps secured her wrists and ankles and made it impossible for her to move her head. A wire from an electrical machine led between her feet and up her skirt. Flick guessed immediately what had been done to Ruby and gasped with horror.