Into the Fire

by Into the Fire (retail) (epub)

  In his plot, Ben set the echo-sounder running. He knew they were in about five fathoms here but also that there was a smallish shallow patch of just less than two which would be under her in a few minutes’ time. At any rate he hoped it would be, so he’d have an absolutely accurate point of departure, on which all subsequent reckonings would be based. The sounder was his primary navigational aid, at this stage. It wouldn’t have been safe to use radar, with the risk of detection by enemy direction-finding stations, and the QH – R.A.F. equipment originally used in conjunction with specially gridded charts – was more use out in the open sea than in this clutter of rocks and islands where you had to work to a degree of accuracy of a few yards, rather than say half a mile.

  Extraordinary to think that Rosie had been here – here – only hours ago! In his mind’s eye, seeing her: all that soft brown hair, and the wide-apart hazel eyes; and the feature that really got to you – her mouth, that sort of hungry look—

  Supposed to be keeping this tub off the rocks, for God’s sake…

  He’d logged the time of weighing as 0345 G.M.T. And the echo-sounder told him – conveniently, just as he glanced at it again – that they were passing over the shallow spot. One and a half fathoms – perfectly safe, since the gunboat drew only about four and a half feet: and the time now 0354. So now – four hours short of high water at Dover, tide therefore from the northeast – the best course to steer would be… North twelve west. He passed that up to the bridge, and heard the C.O. tell Ambrose, ‘North twelve west, Cox’n.’

  Only 1100 yards, now, from this point to the La Petite Fourche buoy – which the Germans had left in place for the convenience of French fishermen, despite the fact that no fishing was allowed at night and that in daylight surely they’d know their own home waters. Not that one would have complained: it was a very useful mark. But – four and a half minutes to it, say. Three and a half or four before they’d spot it from the bridge. He checked the sounder: fourteen fathoms. The Brisante shoal would be close to starboard.

  ‘Pilot – broken water starboard, cable’s length—’

  ‘The Brisante. Fine, sir.’

  Particularly in confined waters like these he always began to worry if he didn’t know precisely where he was at any given moment. Good on Messrs Kelvin Hughes, he thought, for their echo-sounders. Shallowing here now – twelve fathoms. As he’d have expected – or rather, hoped… It was as well not to be too confident, never to pass up a chance to check, confirm. Belt and braces… They’d see the buoy in about one minute.

  He wondered whether Rosie was in her safe house by now. Getting big eats and a soft bed in some farmhouse, perhaps. Penalty for harbouring her, for Christ’s sake, being death. Truly fantastic people, those Bretons.

  She was, too. As well as being so easy on the eye. Recalling his initial sight of her in Dartmouth yesterday: her curvy little figure making that blonde Wren who’d been with her look like something you’d hang a sail on.

  ‘Pilot – Petite Fourche coming up fine to starboard.’

  ‘When it’s abeam, come round to north ten east.’

  Course for Lizard Head. (Course to be made good actually north eight east, but for another half-hour you had to take into account the coastal tide.) Hughes had decided that since it was odds-on that M.G.B. 600 would be used for a follow-up trip in two or three nights’ time, necessitating a quick turn-round, it would be best to make for the flotilla’s advanced base at Falmouth, a distance of only a hundred and ten miles. If for some reason they were required to return to Dartmouth, they’d be told so in plenty of time to adjust the course halfway across: not before that, because wireless silence couldn’t be broken until you were far enough offshore not to risk compromising the L’Abervrac’h pinpoint.

  Voicepipe: he answered it, and the skipper told him, ‘La Fourche is abeam, altering now.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’ He logged it, the time and the change of course. The boat was corkscrewing, with wind and sea slightly abaft her beam. The motion was having its effect on him, too, and he glanced round to check he had his bucket handy: chiding himself for not admitting to Rosie, when she’d confessed to being a rotten sailor, that he wasn’t entirely immune himself. Hardly anyone was, in fact. Time – 0357. Hughes would keep to this slow speed and silent running at least until they’d passed over the Libenter bank – which the echo-sounder would pick up, in a few minutes. Ben leant over the chart, his eye following the coastline of the Presqu’ile Sainte Marguerite to the point where Rosie would have got ashore. The nearest marked village would be Broennou: but they probably wouldn’t be stopping that close to the coastline. Landeda possibly – a larger centre, about four miles inland – or one of a number of other villages, those further inland not marked on charts of course, where the locals were actively pro-Resistance.

  She might lie up for a day, he guessed. Or perhaps not, since the longer an agent stayed in any one house the greater the risk to his or her hosts. Stories filtered back: during his year in that Naval Intelligence section he’d heard enough of them to be constantly bewildered by the courage of people who in other respects could be described as ‘ordinary’. And Rosie being one of them now was – staggering. It wasn’t easy to keep thoughts and images of her out of mind. Even now – watching the echo-sounder for the edge of the Libenter shoal…

  ‘Stop both outers!’

  Urgent tone: and a second later, abrupt cessation of engine noise. Plenty of sea-noise, though, the thuds and creaks of her pitching, banging around, rolling becoming wilder as the way came off her. It was virtually a reflex action to check the position on the chart, and a relief in seeing there were no rocks within half a mile. The tidal stream being from the northeast, she’d be drifting no closer to that nearer group either. He’d logged the stop-engines order and the time; keeping an ear meanwhile to the voicepipe.

  ‘Two of the buggers… Number One, warn the guns – pay ’em a visit, would you – tell ’em to hold their fire.’

  They normally would – would wait for the ‘fire’ buzzer – but if some enemy suddenly loomed out of the darkness at close quarters and a gunner had reason to guess the bridge couldn’t have seen it, he’d be wrong not to let rip.

  ‘Losing steerage-way, sir.’

  ‘All right, Cox’n.’ Into the voicepipe then: ‘Pilot.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Two armed trawlers will shortly be crossing our bows from east to west. I’m going to lie doggo if they’ll let us. Come up if you like.’

  He could get a compass bearing on the loom of the Ile Vierge searchlight, he thought: and a position-line later from the QH. In any case there’d be nothing useful to do down here.

  Cold night wind with spray in it. Pitch dark. Looking for Ile Vierge – about three miles to starboard; they had a searchlight on it with its beam sweeping constantly at sea level… There – like a lighthouse flash only slower in its traverse, a dome of reflection for a moment or two in the sky above it. Hughes told him, ‘Saw the first one in silhouette against it.’ Ben had his own glasses on them, then: small, stubby ships plugging westward into wind and sea. The M.G.B. rolling like a cow and swinging her forepart downwind, no way left on her now. Hughes called over, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to give ’em a big surprise!’

  Taken unawares, the trawlers wouldn’t have stood a chance. At speed, coming up from astern on a parallel course and passing at close range, opening up with everything you had, blasting one as you swept past it and then the other, and perhaps dropping a shallow-set depth charge as you whipped across the leader’s bows: short and sharp and deafening, two dead trawlers burning as they sank.

  If only…

  But you couldn’t afford to compromise the L’Abervrac’h pinpoint. No Royal Navy gunboat would be this close to the Brittany coast for any purpose other than a clandestine landing or pickup. You’d have destroyed two armed trawlers but you’d have lost the use of the pinpoint, compromised the réseau ashore and left a dozen airmen stranded.

  Sheph
erd arrived back in the bridge, having to claw his way to its forefront, the way she was throwing herself about. ‘They all have the message, sir.’

  ‘Cursing, no doubt.’

  The enemy ships were passing probably less than three cables’ lengths to the north. Range of five hundred yards, he thought: if one had been setting a range at all. They’d be steering to round the Pointe de Landunvez and as likely as not carry on down to Brest. Beside him the signalman, Crow, was being sick: it reminded him that he wasn’t feeling all that marvellous himself. Hughes admitted ‘Wouldn’t’ve seen ’em if it hadn’t been for that light behind ’em at the time. Might have, but…’

  He’d dried his glasses and put them up again. Hughes was telling Shepherd, ‘– so close they’d have seen us too…’

  And still might. The gunners fore and aft, crouching at their weapons with itchy fingers, would doubtless be hoping they would. They were intelligent men, knew the priorities of the job and that its value was a lot greater than the sinking of a couple of armed trawlers – but this was still a gunboat; by rights she ought to use her guns occasionally.

  Not on this occasion, though. The range was still opening, chances of action lessening with every passing second… Ben shared the signalman’s bucket briefly but effectively, then lurched over to the binnacle to take a bearing on that light.

  5

  The change of rhythm as the train slowed woke her to the fact that this was Rennes coming up. Getting on for halfway. Or a third of the way, at least. The small man at the far end of the seat facing hers was on his feet, stretching and yawning; he muttered, either to himself or to his neighbours, ‘This’ll be a boring affair. If my guess is right, we’re in for another search.’

  Small, balding, with a small black moustache. Guillaume: a pal of Vidor’s. He and Rosie had arrived at Landerneau together early this morning but they’d embarked separately and since then ignored each other. His journey had nothing to do with hers, but he’d told Vidor he’d keep an eye on her. In other words, if she was arrested in the course of one of the railway checks London would hear of it, she wouldn’t just have disappeared. She’d commented, over breakfast in the doctor’s house at Lannilis, ‘Fat lot of comfort that provides’, and Vidor had mumbled with his mouth full, ‘Don’t get arrested, that’s the answer.’

  The engine was blasting off steam as the train clattered over points: a marshalling yard, a couple of acres of crisscrossing lines with a backdrop of blackened and roofless warehouses or engine sheds. Courtesy of the R.A.F. or U.S.A.F., no doubt. The line curved away from it, to the left, and suddenly this was the end of a platform sliding past.

  Guillaume was probably right that they’d be examined again here. She’d already seen one group of soldiers stolidly watching the train’s windows as it huffed past them. Earlier checks had been made at Landerneau where she’d embarked, and then at St Brieuc. More Germans: and milice, brown-shirted French Fascist paramilitaries. Guillaume grumbled – on his feet to stare out past her at the platform – ‘They’ll be making a meal of it here, that’s for sure.’

  When Vidor had told Nick Ball on the island that there was a security clampdown around Brest, she’d wondered whether they’d be moving her further east – to Morlaix for instance – to join the train well outside the net. But she’d realized then, talking to Vidor about it during the crossing of the sandbar, that she hadn’t been thinking straight. With a cover story that started her off from a farm near St Saveur, how would she have explained embarking at Morlaix – when Landerneau was just up the road? By French country standards, just up the road. Actually she’d told them at the Landerneau check that she’d cadged a lift up on the milk wagon: the milk wagon, from the farm, as if they were the only ones in France and as well known to her questioners as they were to her.

  At St Brieuc, police had checked passengers’ identities but only glanced inside one piece of luggage in every six or eight. They’d have been looking for black-market goods – not only the real racketeers, but ordinary people who’d been visiting friends in the country bringing stuff back to Paris for their own consumption or their families’. Through half-closed eyes now she saw the group approaching this carriage and climbing in, a little further along. The German in plain clothes was the one who counted. S.D., or Gestapo – equally unpleasant, overlapping in their activities so that they were often in competition, but both answerable to Heinrich Himmler. This one had three gendarmes with him – in kepis and dark blue tunics – and in case anyone made a run for it there was the backup of soldiers in groups all along the platform. Steam hissing, shouts mostly in German. She put her head back and shut her eyes. To get to Landerneau and catch this so-called express she’d have needed to be on the road before daylight: in any case the train’s dusty warmth was soporific. With so much noise around her she’d hardly be sound asleep, but she wouldn’t be bright-eyed and alert either.

  In fact she wasn’t. Alert – she had to be – but not bright-eyed. After crossing the sand there’d been several miles more of foot-slogging before they’d arrived at a farmhouse where the doctor from Lannilis was ostensibly visiting a sick child. They’d been given coffee and bread in the kitchen, then Rosie and Vidor had been taken on into Lannilis in the doctor’s charcoal-powered car, Rosie slumped in the back with a rug over her, and Vidor in front. If they’d been stopped the doctor would have said she was a patient – Vidor’s young sister – whom he was taking to the infirmary. Léon had stayed behind with the two French passengers, who must have had some other form of transport coming for them. Saying goodbye to her, the little one had kissed her hand.

  ‘Tickets and papers!’

  A police sergeant. Other policemen further along the carriage were doing the same thing. This one had black hair and a moustache, brown eyes with bags under them. Guillaume had his documents ready in his hand, but the sergeant was currently examining those of an old man in blue serge, pot-bellied and with a neck like a turkey’s. He’d embarked at St Brieuc. The sergeant grunted, pushed the papers back into the old man’s hands, nodded to a French naval N.C.O. sitting opposite him, and ignored Guillaume again – this time in favour of two middle-aged sisters who’d spent the whole journey whispering to each other. There was another naval man on Rosie’s left.

  The plain-clothes German had been strolling this way down the central corridor, keeping an eye on the progress of the search. He’d paused in the gangway now, taking a look at each of them in turn. Rosie met his gaze for a moment – blue eyes in an annoyingly pleasant, boyish face – and glanced away quickly from the beginnings of a smile. He picked on Guillaume then: snapping his fingers under the small man’s nose, Guillaume tilting his head back with his eyebrows raised – but of course complying, surrendering his papers. He muttered to the man opposite him, ‘At least they’re getting on with it…’

  ‘Indeed we are.’ The German was looking at the luggage in the rack: ‘This yours?’

  A fat, heavy-looking briefcase: Gladstone bag, one might have called it in English.

  ‘Get it down, open it.’

  Guillaume sighed as he stood up. Rosie felt sick. She couldn’t look that way any more. The sergeant growled. ‘Ticket and papers.’

  She had them in a large, crumpled envelope in a pocket in her coat: had to half rise to pull the coat down. Trying the wrong pocket first. ‘Oh, Lord… Ah – here. Sorry – I was half asleep.’

  ‘Where’s the child this belongs to?’

  She stared at him for a moment; then comprehension dawned. ‘Oh, my God. I can’t have—’

  ‘Lefèvre, Jeanne-Marie… And – Lefèvre, Juliette, a J2 card?’

  ‘My daughter – I just took her to her grandmother, on the farm. God, they’ll need it, they’ll—’

  ‘What’s this?’

  The S.D. man – if that was what he was. The sergeant showed him. ‘Two ration cards. One’s a J2. Says it’s her daughter’s.’ Staring down at Rosie: she’d begun to cry… ‘What age is she?’

  ‘Thre
e and a half. Oh, I’m such a fool!’

  ‘Return ticket – to Paris.’ The S.D. man passed it back to her. ‘You say you’ve left your child on some farm?’

  ‘With her grandmother. I am a widow, I need to earn a living – and this person in Paris, a sort of cousin – well, he has a job for me, I hope—’

  ‘All right.’ He gestured – he’d heard enough – and the sergeant dropped the papers in her lap. But the German had turned back… ‘What’s this cousin’s business?’

  He was looking at her suitcase, on the rack roughly at his own eye level. Rosie protested, ‘Not exactly a cousin—’

  ‘What sort of job does he propose to offer you?’

  ‘He is a parfumeur. He hopes to be able to employ me as a sales woman.’

  He stared at her for a few more seconds: then turned back to Guillaume, who had the opened briefcase beside him. ‘What’s in this?’

  ‘Business documents – and my own overnight essentials. I’m a representative.’

  ‘Representative of what?’ Fingering the top edges of the papers, flicking through them… ‘What business?’

  ‘Veterinary products – for horses, cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry. Head office is in Paris. Your Ministry of Commerce people know me.’ A shrug … ‘Indirectly, they employ me.’

  ‘Well. Lucky them.’ He winked at the naval men as he said it, and they both laughed. A glance at the sergeant: ‘Finished?’ The search was moving on into the next section. Rosie muttered, dabbing at her eyes, ‘I’m such an idiot!’ Her hands were shaking as she fumbled the papers back into their envelope. One of the two sisters told her, ‘You’ve only to pop it in the post, when we get to Paris. I’m sure your mother won’t let the baby starve, meanwhile.’

  ‘Mother-in-law. And she already has it in for me.’

  ‘But my dear girl, that’s normal!’

  Chuckles and smiles all round. From Guillaume, a particularly warm smile. In the bottom of his briefcase were several packages of plastic explosive which he was to deliver to a réseau leader in Auteuil. It was not improbable that if it hadn’t been for the fuss over ration cards the S.D. officer might have searched the case more thoroughly and found it.