My Enemy Came Nigh

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  She raised her beautiful, dark eyes and smiled tremulously, her brain working like an automatic calculator. "I was frightened. I was going to tell you, if we could be alone."

  "Tell me the truth now."

  "My name is Zdenka. I am physics graduate from Belgrade University. I work with Jugoslav Resistance. Germans have put radar on Mojat. They let me go with them as technical assistant. I want to go, because I want to tell our people what happens: then they pass messages to British."

  "How?"

  "Our fishermen meet British in small boats: sometimes the British come in submarine. We send messages to British all the time."

  "What are you doing here, on Sprot?"

  "Leutnant Scheusal pretends he is looking for good places for radar and radio. But is not true, he wants little holiday from Mojat. Coming here is excuse for picnic. He only pretends to work." She grinned provocatively at him.

  "How many Germans came with you?"

  "There is one more: a fat sergeant; very lazy man. Very nice man; for German. What will you do?"

  "What will you tell what's his name..."

  "Leutnant Scheusal," Sgt. Golightly prompted.

  "Yes. What will you tell him about this conversation?"

  "I cannot tell him you believe he is Jugoslav. Those two other men are too stupid to pretend: when your soldiers bring them, they will speak German. So I will tell him you will let us go back to Mojat."

  "I can't do that."

  "It is best. I am needed there, to get information. For you. For the British. I tell you, I am clever scientific doctor: I do val-valuable work for British. Not only on Mojat, but also where we have main... main... place. On Taf..."

  "Taf! We've been attacking it..."

  "Yes," she said eagerly, "I know. I was there." She gave him brief details about the raids and how she and her friends had passed reports on them to British Intelligence. "So, you understand, it is more good for me to go back than you take us as prisoners."

  "You speak English very well," Foster remarked inconsequentially.

  She smiled, and he felt a pleasant sensation in his loins. "Thank you. Is getting better with practice: I have not spoken for many years."

  Foster plucked thoughtfully at his lower lip. "I understand your logic, but it's my duty to take you all back with me..."

  "Begging your pardon, sir."

  "Yes, Sergeant?"

  Sergeant Golightly spoke earnestly for several minutes.

  *

  The shot that Sgt. Golightly fired over Leutnant Scheusal's head panicked the two German soldiers into swimming fast to get out of the lake and into their clothes. When Jarvis and Evans went down to arrest them they were already running back the way they had come.

  Sgt. Zotig, at the crack of the Sten gun, leaped to his feet and broke into a lumbering trot in its direction. None of the German party was armed. They had brought weapons with them as a matter of form, but left them with the beer, food and boat where they had come ashore.

  Zdenka had been wrong in her assumption that the two privates would instantly give themselves away. One of them, an engaging youth of twenty-one, who looked at least three years younger, called Klebrig, spoke English well. Stopped in his tracks as he ran away, by a shout from the two pursuing airmen, he muttered to his companion "It's no use, let me do the talking." They turned and waited.

  "Good morning," said Klebrig pleasantly. "Turned out nice again, what?"

  "Coo," said Jarvis.

  "None of your cheek," Evans said. "Come along with us, and no funny business, mind." He motioned with his Sten and the two Germans led the way up the slope

  Klebrig said, over his shoulder, "Nice to see you chaps. We've only seen the Germans around here, so far."

  ''You're Jugs... Jugoslavs, are you?'' asked Jarvis.

  "What do you think?" countered Klebrig; mindful that, as he was not strictly in uniform, he could be shot as a spy in civilian clothes. The trousers he wore were regulation Wehrmacht issue, but ambiguous enough to provide an excuse for an evil-minded captor to order his execution. He did not feel as cool as his manner suggested. He was not going to court a death sentence by claiming to be a Jugoslav.

  "We're not paid to think," Evans said. "That's our officer's job."

  "What's he like, your officer?"

  "Bit of a joke, really."

  "My dear chap, aren't they all?" Klebrig smiled over his shoulder.

  "What do you know about it?" Jarvis asked.

  "I've seen enough of them, German and Jugoslav; both equally pathetic."

  "Where d'you learn to speak English?"

  "I've got relations, on my mother's side, in Leicester: it's my second home."

  "Ever seen Leicester Tigers play rugby?" asked Evans.

  "Often. Of course, being Welsh, you must be a great rugger enthusiast."

  And this brought them over the lip of the bowl, where they waited until Foster and Sgt. Golightly finished their talk with Zdenka.

  Sergeant Zotig, with half a mile to cover, and the gait of a ruptured tortoise, had no hope of arriving at the pond before his quarry had disappeared; he headed for it because he knew his men and was sure, when he sent them off, that they would make straight there and have a quick dip before making any serious attempt to find the leutnant. Klebrig was a minor swimming champion and drawn to water as irresistibly as a lemming; his companion was no champion at anything, just slothful: and he'd rather float in cool water than tramp about.

  The gunshot could, Sgt. Zotig supposed, have been fired by a Jugoslav fisherman come ashore to shoot birds; except that it had been the sharp crack of a military firearm, not the dull smack of a shotgun. He knew there could be no other German party on the island. The obvious conclusion was that the British had landed. But Sprot was too far, too unimportant, to attract them. Well, it wasn't, of course: if there was one thing that fifteen years in the Army had taught Sgt. Zotig it was that logic did not necessarily play any part in the decisions of Service powers-that-be. So he could neither rule out the arrival of a second German group, which had not been notified, nor an invasion by the enemy. In either event he had better proceed with caution: if there were another bunch of their own chaps around, and they didn't know about Leutnant Scheusal's lot, they'd open fire if they spotted him. So would the enemy, of course.

  He peeped into the basin where the pond lay, then walked around above it. He found two cigarette ends, a toffee paper and flattened grass which Foster, with his patrol and their prisoners, had left.

  On Zdenka's plea, so as not to put her under suspicion of betraying the Germans, Foster had not sent anyone to bring Sgt. Zotig in: she had assured him that he would eventually return to the landing beach and they could take him then.

  The capture did not befall quite as planned. Foster had posted Sgt. Golightly and LAC Evans as sentries on opposite sides of the small ravine which led to the beach. Sgt. Zotig, with much stertorous breathing, having reached the top of the small, wooded knoll which looked down on the ravine, climbed a tree.

  Sgt. Golightly, a great consumer of tea, had to empty his bladder. Sgt. Zotig, being obese, cracked the branch along which he had, distastefully, exerted himself to wriggle. The branch broke; with a loud cry, he plummeted to the ground and, on a slippery bed of pine needles, glissaded down the slope to land on the urinating Sgt. Golightly; who, surprised and distracted, jerked round and met the German with a copious jet. There was a brief howl of rage from Sgt. Zotig, accompanied by one of alarm from Sgt. Golightly, and then a thud as Golightly fell, flattened by fifteen stone and the impetus it had gathered as it dropped from the tree and hurtled down the slope.

  Sgt. Golightly was knocked out and Sgt. Zotig, his indignation at his ignominious drenching at once forgotten in solicitude for a fellow creature, bent over him making clucking noises.

  His hat had remained jammed firmly on his large head and he looked, as Private Klebrig remarked to Jones, like a debauched pixie.

  Until now, Klebrig had maintained the
fiction that he and his companions were all Jugoslavs, who had stolen the rubber dinghy from the German invaders of "our homeland".

  Sgt. Zotig destroyed any hope of the claim succeeding, by calling urgently for the first aid kit; in German, naturally enough.

  "That's let the cat out of the bag," Klebrig murmured.

  "Yes, and you'll be in the bloody bag for the rest of the war, mate," Evans told him unpleasantly. Things had been deteriorating between them since that first gratifying

  moment of not only meeting a fellow rugger enthusiast but also being recognised as a Welshman; for Klebrig had displayed an irritating insistence on the superiority of Leicester over any Welsh club.

  "Ah, well," Klebrig retorted, "it was bound to happen as soon as Sgt. Zotig showed up. He looks so unmistakably Krauty, doesn't he? I mean, even more than the rest of us Krauts."

  Eleven

  Wg. Cdr. Beale was obsessed with his theory that there was a sinister facet to the frequent movement of the two German hospital ships up and down the Adriatic. To justify this, one of them had been stopped on its way north and boarded by a British destroyer the previous year, and was found to have a whole infantry battalion aboard. Fit and well. These were obviously reinforcements for the German armies in northern Italy. The destroyer escorted the hospital ship to a southern Italian port, where they were disembarked and made prisoner. The same ship and its sister had since been stopped and searched a few times, but the subterfuge had not been repeated and the practice was dropped.

  Now, somewhere behind Cracker Beale's simian forehead, the germ of suspicion was at work. He went to the Operations Room before breakfast to look at the plotting table for the Nürnberg's latest reported position.

  No further reports had been received, but a signal had come in cancelling the movement and announcing that the ship was returning to Piraeus.

  "Don't believe it,' Beale told the duty controller. "The Hun's up to something."

  At breakfast he repeated his suspicion to the group captain; who had an assignation that night with Matron and did not listen with much attention: his mind was preoccupied with the delights to come.

  Grimes, when the wing commander spoke to him about it, automatically felt dubious. He had taken the point that the two ships had recently been making unusually frequent voyages, but accepted the cancellation at face value. His lack of respect for Cracker's intelligence prompted him to discount any too subtle theory of his. From Beale one was accustomed to simple, straightforward, gutsy thinking and action: this attempt to ratiocinate and try to behave like some kind of airborne Klausewitz invited disbelief.

  However, it would be as well not to be blunt about it. "They're pretty old ships and they've been belting up and down rather a lot, as you pointed out, sir: Nürnberg’s probably had to return to port with engine trouble."

  "Got a feeling in my water, Grubby. Hun's up to something." He brooded all day, and some particularly inflammatory opinions expressed by the Rev. Parry-Jones in the bar at lunchtime added fuel to the embers of his doubt. For Ianto had been more than usually red-eyed and was insisting that, with the invasion of France going well, the Allied forces in Italy should resort to every possible strategem to drive the Germans out of the country by the end of the autumn; which would, he preached, mean the end of the war. "And they bloody know it, boyos," he concluded.

  Beale unreservedly agreed with him. And if the enemy was badly in need of reinforcements in Italy, his suspicion that they were being supplied from Greece seemed justified.

  He telephoned the War Room at R.A.F. Headquarters to ask if anything were known of the Nürnberg’s or Heidelberg's whereabouts. Heidelberg was still in Venice after her last trip north and Nürnberg supposedly back in Piraeus by now, he was told.

  Beale continued to brood.

  *

  Von Trampel read the signal with pleasure: U987 was due at Taf at 0600 hrs. the next day. She was having trouble with her generator and her starboard engine was overheating. Taf was the nearest harbour and the safest.

  His wishes were being granted. He sent for Wüstling and Holzkopf. The signal had been brought to him at breakfast and when they arrived he told Eva to send in a fresh pot of coffee. She told Maria-Pia, in the kitchen, and hurried up to her bedroom to sit by the wireless set. The voices came with the usual faintness and crackling, as von Trampel gave his orders for the reception of the U-boat and alerting all gun posts. He wrote a signal to be sent to Scheusal, warning him to have his radar fully manned from 0400 hrs. until further notice.

  Eva passed a fretful morning, impatient to give her brother the news. At lunch, von Trampel was in good humour but did not linger; as soon as he had drunk his coffee he returned to his office, swinging his false leg with the vigour of a man rejuvenated by a new purpose and sense of achievement; destiny, even. She arrived home in time for a long talk with Petar.

  The news excited him. "We must send this information at once. I think it is the most important thing that has happened here for more than a year. This U-boat will be the first of many, and so will the flak battery that came from the mainland last night. I am sure the Germans are going to use Taf as a main base for a final attempt to do something desperate in Italy. I must leave the British in no doubt of the importance of what is happening here." He drummed his fingers nervously on the table and there were feverish red patches on his cheeks. "Tell Maria-Pia to send Guido to meet me at the end of the jetty near her house, tonight at eight. I will be fishing. Now that Zdenka has gone away for a while, I do not trust anyone else to try to send a radio message."

  "Do you think Guido...? I know he is brave... and reliable... but he's so stupid. Isn't there someone else?"

  "He's only a messenger. You know how we work: the British will home onto the radio signal from whichever boat is safest."

  "There's the risk of a mistake."

  "There always has been, but nothing has gone wrong before."

  "There's always a first time, Petar. Do be extra careful."

  "I would go myself, if I could, but you know I would be missed if they made a surprise check: I am not supposed to leave the island. I am not a fisherman."

  "I wish I could go myself."

  "You know that's nonsense. What are you trying to do? Make me feel ashamed? Force me into taking the risk of going secretly with the fishing boats tonight? If the. Germans found out, I wouldn't be the only one they'd shoot. They'd arrest mother and father at once. Torture first, then shoot. You know what they'd do: they'd call in the Gestapo and at least one man off every boat would be taken away. It's what they always do. Reprisals, they call it. Bloody murder, it is. Barbarism. Torture, and if that doesn't kill you, the rope or the firing squad. D'you want to see more of that barbaric brutality on this island? I'd willingly go out tonight, but I haven't the right to endanger the others."

  Petar was panting with emotional stress, like a runner at the end of a gruelling cross-country race, and his sister knew he spoke the truth. Despite von Trampel's urbane manner and correct behaviour the Germans had committed many outrages against her people even during the time that he had been in command here. Her brother's face was wet with the sweat of his emotion, as he remembered events that she had witnessed also and which, she knew, justified his fear and disgust. There were many jolly Germans on Taf, Leutnant Scheusal and Sgt. Zotig among them; but they were all part of the vicious machinery of subjugation and terror. Even if they did not take part themselves in the torture and the killing, they wore the same uniform as those who did and by their tacit acceptance of these crimes they were as much to be feared as the Gestapo and the S.S.

  *

  It was a busy day on Sprot, on Taf and at Afrona, but at Bardoc only the ground crews making the Beaufighters operationally ready were working under pressure. For the rest it was like a holiday.

  The pilots and navigators shared the pilots' traditional task of washing their aircraft. Fit. Lt. Dunn and his crew sat in the sun outside the Operations tent, on duty but at ease. Fit. Lt.
Hargreaves wrote the detachment's diary and Fit. Lt. Grummit hopefully roved the island praying for female company. He covered miles, looking for some sign of habitation: surely at least one girl had been left behind by the people who had once sparsely populated the little place? Or perhaps there was a castaway wench somewhere, who had drifted here after a wreck? He would have settled for a mermaid; half was better than nothing at all.

  In the afternoon, while F/Sgt. Tucker's crew still worked on the aircraft and there was nothing anyone could do to help them, the rest kicked a football, swam, played volleyball and were bored.

  Joe Anstey said "I wonder when Fearless Foster's coming back? Perhaps I should start worrying about him? How about leading a search party to Sprot, George?"

  Middleton didn't think much of that idea. "He's probably having a wonderful time. Don't worry about him. Something tells me young Fearless can look after himself."

  Middleton was indifferent to P.O. Foster's welfare. He was engrossed in fond, and jealous, thoughts of Fay.

  Tommy Tindall backed him up. "Don't start fussing like an old Hen, Joe. Yon Foster's all right: he's only gone on a picnic, after all: it's common sense there's nowt but maybe a few goats on Sprot." He looked wickedly at Grummit, who was disconsolately lying on the sand and looking at the illustrations in an old copy of Men Only. "You should have taken your little first aid box and gone with them, Doc.: you might have found a nice nannygoat." The doctor's constant preoccupation with the female sex was the subject of much ribald comment in the mess; a place he frequented only for meals, all the rest of his spare time being spent m his caravan, on his motorbike, or in some local bedroom.

  Charlie Teoh seemed to take Foster's absence rather badly. "Those R.A.F Regiment types ought to be here," he declared, "defending us; not playing at D-Day landings on an uninhabited pimple that calls itself an island. You shouldn't have let him go, Joe: it makes me nervous to have almost half our defence force missing."

  "The laugh will be on him in the end," Anstey promised.