by Alan Evans
The sub came to the bridge to report, “The gunner’s been killed.”
Brent snapped at him impatiently, “Put another man on it!”
“The guns are wrecked, sir.”
“Then get off the bridge and into cover if you can.” No sense in all of them standing up here to be shot at.
The sub went away and Brent did not see him alive again. But at last the boat ran out of the light, the darkness hid her and she sped away. The guns lost her. Brent peered ahead into the darkness. He could not see the ship outside the estuary but closer, much closer, was the grey moustache that was the bow-wave of another boat headed towards him. The E-boats had seen him as he passed through the circle of light, were coming in after him. He held to his course, took a tight grip on the bridge coaming and saw Grundy stretch out one hand from the wheel to do the same.
The gap between the boats closed in seconds and Brent saw the other looming in front of his bow, then she swung aside. The gratings leapt under his feet as his boat rode over the bow-wave and wake of the other, bucking, pitching and rolling wildly. That was a heart-stopping progress for several mad seconds as they flashed past each of the three E-boats, then it eased as they ran into less turbulent water.
The E-boats were lost in the night astern. Brent circled past the torpedoed trawler outside, now listing and down by the head, her stern high out of the water and soon to slide under and sink. Then his boat was free on the open sea.
So they came home. Grundy was relieved at the wheel for a time and he gulped hot soup from a thermos. The bouncing of the boat at high speed spilled a lot of it but the rest went down, warming him. He wanted something in his stomach now because he knew he would not be able to eat later. He was back on the bridge at the helm to take the boat into port in the dawn light.
When she lay alongside the quay the young army officer came to stand below the bridge. He looked up at Brent and introduced himself, “Chris Tallon.” He was a stocky young man with a direct look. He had swayed as he ran out on the jetty but he stood straight now.
“David Brent.”
Tallon said thickly, “It went like a clock right up to blowing the power station. But as we got back to the village we came under fire. I think there was a company of infantry. Don’t know. A lot, though. Managed to hold on just long enough. It was good of you to bring us out. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
There was no more to be said. They had been kicked out of France and were just glad to be alive. Chris looked up at Brent leaning casually on the bridge roaming, old cap pushed back from his brow, but eyes bleak, searching, seeing everything aboard the boat.
Brent returned Chris Tallon’s salute and watched him march off along the quay at the head of his men. Then he turned to look the boat over from stem to stern. She was filthy, stained by smoke and sea-water, torn by gun-fire. The turret behind the bridge was holed and dented as if by a huge hammer. He told Grundy, “She’s a dockyard job, of course, but you’ll clean her up for now.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Grundy thought that as soon as he could he would send a man off to the requisitioned houses where the ratings were quartered. He could light a fire so there would be some comfort for the rest of them after the work was done.
David Brent knew this, and the hardship of the men’s lives. He had to make his report now, but then he would go to the hotel where the officers were billeted, for a hot bath and breakfast. Grundy and the men would clear away the bloody debris. He said, “Well done, cox’n.”
“Thank you, sir.” Grundy watched him walk away. Brent had a duty and Grundy had his. He led the hands in hauling the torn body of the gunner out of the mangled turret and laying him gently on the quay with the others, then hosing down the deck. At the end of it he felt more dead than alive. He had lost friends, almost his life. But his boat was tolerably clean now and he had found a captain.
Chapter Two - December 1941
In the early afternoon of Friday the twelfth of December, a slender, long-legged girl walked on tapping high heels through the rain-wet streets of the new town of St. Jean on the coast of Normandy. The new town was so-called because it had grown up in the last hundred years and to distinguish it from the old port of St. Jean which had existed before the days of William the Conqueror.
Suzanne Leclerc wore a trenchcoat belted at the waist and a kerchief knotted over her blonde hair against the misty drizzle that drifted in from the sea. Her heart had been broken over a year before, in the spring of 1940, but she had gone on with the business of living. Her strength of character had served her well and she needed it now. She was British but had spent half her childhood with her French grandmother and most of her adult life in France. She was an agent of the Secret Intelligence Service, playing the part of a Frenchwoman in this German-held country.
The main streets of the new town were wide, tree-shaded and the rain dripped from the trees to fall cold on her face. She passed the barracks looming sombre on the other side of the street. A German soldier stood sentry at the gate in his grey-green tunic, iron grey trousers stuffed into the tops of jackboots, a rifle slung over his shoulder. Suzanne cast a quick glance over the parade ground and the barrack blocks beyond but saw only a few soldiers at work and no unusual activity nor sign of a strengthening of the garrison.
She walked on along the street that ran arrow-straight to a distant square and the bridge leading to the old port. Her thoughts were of the man she was to meet that night, whom she knew as “Michel”. She had not known him before the war but he had known of her. When the Germans overran France and marched into Paris, Michel searched her out and recruited her. She lived and worked in Paris but he sent her to Normandy because she knew the region and had contacts there. Paul, the wireless operator, joined her later, landing from a motor torpedo boat on a winter night.
She had rarely seen Michel, but had received messages from him. Then two days ago, on Wednesday, he had come to her in the room she rented. It was above a shop and chosen because she could take calls on the telephone downstairs. He was in his early thirties, of average height and slight build, shabby and nondescript so he would be lost in any crowd. His face was haggard with strain as he sat on the bed in her room and told her, “I brought a man out of Germany. He has papers in the name of Max Neumann. On Sunday I left him in a safe house in Le Havre, went to my wireless operator’s apartment and coded the message for London, that I had Max Neumann. Then I went back to him but I found the safe house being raided by the S.S. and saw my man being taken away with the others. I ran all the way to my wireless operator to cancel that message to London but the S.S. were at his apartment as well. There were two vans with aerials on their roofs: detector vans. They’d picked up his transmission and tracked him down.”
Suzanne felt sick, swallowed. Michel rubbed at his face with his hands then blinked at her, “S.S. is short for Schutz Staffel and means guard detachment because the first ones were a bodyguard for Hitler. Did you know that?” And when she shook her head he said grimly, “But the branch working around here are called Gestapo. I’ve no doubt you know that.” He went on, “You’d better warn your operator about the vans. Remind him to keep on the move.” She nodded, and he carried on: “I spent that night in a rented room. Next day I got a new set of papers out of hiding and destroyed my old ones. Then I looked up my connection in the S.S.” He saw the flicker of surprise on Suzanne’s face and his lips twisted wryly, “I helped him get a Jewish relative out of Germany before the war. That Jewish relationship would have got him thrown out of the S.S. He still wasn’t pleased when I saw him in Le Havre a few months back and got in touch with him. But he produces the goods.”
Suzanne asked, “Can you trust him?”
“As much as anybody. He knows if I’m caught and talk, he’ll be for the high jump.” Michel dug a crumpled pack of cheap cigarettes out of a pocket and lit one with a match. “He told me my operator had taken poison and was dead.” He sucked on the caporal quickly, nervously and talked t
hrough the blue smoke, “He said the safe house was raided because they’d had a tip-off that Jews were using it as a hide-out. That turned out to be true. I hadn’t known, but the family there had hidden a Jew because he was an old friend.”
“Is this Max Neumann a Jew?”
Michel shook his head impatiently. “No. But he was there and they’d know he was German as soon as he opened his mouth. They’d want to know what he was doing there and why he wasn’t registered.” He pointed the cigarette at Suzanne. “Now the point is this: Max Neumann is being deported to Germany with a batch of prisoners. My contact didn’t know when, but it will be soon. There’ll be some extra wagons coupled onto a regular night freight and because it’s regular I’ve got the timings along the route. I’ll give them to you. I want your help to find a place where that train can be stopped by a party landing from the sea. I’ve looked at the map and picked out one possible place, but you know the country around here.”
Suzanne asked, “Can London do a thing like that?”
Michel said flatly, “If they want Neumann, they’ll have to. It’s our last chance to save him.”
“Why do they want him?”
“I don’t know. I was ordered not to try to find out. Can we do it?”
And after thinking and poring over the map with him, Suzanne took him to the bridge fourteen kilometres south of St. Jean. There the railway ran through near-empty countryside and a bare kilometre from the sea. From there they went to the landing place on the coast. Finally they selected a rendezvous, between the two and at the corner of a wood, for when they met again.
Paul set up his wireless that night and sent the message Michel had drafted, though he was already on his way back to Le Havre. The message told of Max Neumann’s capture, the timings of the train that was to carry him, then the suggested places for a landing and for stopping the train.
On the Thursday London replied: a landing would be made and they only waited to be told which night, but requested a guide. Paul sent an affirmative. Then on this Friday morning Michel telephoned Suzanne in the shop under her room and she told him, “Everything’s fine.”
He answered, “It needs to be. They’re sending him tonight.”
Suzanne said, “I’ll tell Uncle and see you this evening.”
“Uncle” meant London; they used a code because they believed the S.S. might be tapping the telephones at the exchange.
This night the soldiers would land and she would lead them to the bridge.
Now she walked down the last steep slope of the street and came out on a cobbled square. She turned right and passed the fronts of several houses and shops until she saw a young man standing in a doorway. Suzanne grabbed at the kerchief over her hair, as if it was about to blow away, and stepped aside into the shelter of the doorway. She took off the kerchief and shook out its folds, saying softly, “Tell them it’s tonight. Send straight away. I’m going to meet Michel. You know where.”
Paul, her wireless operator, was slight and pallid. He wore a felt hat and his sodden raincoat, too big, hung baggy on his frame. He asked, “Will you wait for confirmation?”
“No. I have to see Albert, then go to meet Michel. I can’t wait; there isn’t time.”
“Suppose I don’t get through?” Reception was always bad and sometimes Paul failed to make contact at all.
“Then we will have wasted our time.” Suzanne was silent a moment, thinking of this man, Max Neumann, being taken back to Germany — to what? She went on, “When you’ve finished transmitting, get out. You’ve sent too often from there. Remember Michel’s operator was traced by detector vans.”
Paul grimaced, “And we know what happened to him. Don’t worry, I’ve found another room and I’ll move. But it’s a hell of a job moving so often with two damn great suitcases.”
Suzanne said, “Just the same, do it.” Ahead of her and across the cobbled square was the harbour of the old port, crowded with the drifters of the fishing fleet. On the far side the three E-boats were tied up in a line, one against the quay and the others outside of it. The Germans called them S-boats, Schnellboote, and they were the equivalent of the British motor torpedo boat. The quay stretched back for thirty or forty yards to a long terrace of buildings, houses, offices, stores and chandlers that ran in a line parallel to the harbour and out to the sea-wall. Though the terrace was continuous, each building joined to its neighbour, they had been built and rebuilt over the course of eight hundred years.
The furthest house, that standing on the sea-wall, was the residence of Oberst Erwin König, the colonel commanding the Wehrmacht battalion in St. Jean. It stood at a right-angle to the others, like the foot of a long L. The second house from the other end was the headquarters of the S.S. Once, a century or more ago, it had belonged to a butcher and the name stuck. It was still “the butcher’s house”. Its windows looked like glazed, blank eyes staring out at Suzanne across the harbour. She knew the layout of the house very well, from the redecorated sleeping quarters of the S.S. men on the upper floor to the cellars newly converted to cells in the basement; she had listened to the talk of some of the local painters and masons employed to do the work. She had also walked, and learned the layout of, the maze of narrow alleys and streets behind and around the house.
Suzanne shivered and turned her gaze away. A hundred yards to her right was the bridge carrying the road over the river that ran into the harbour. There were two German sentries, as always, standing in their open-fronted wooden shelter at this end of the bridge. Further right still was a bend in the river. It ran down from the north then turned at that point to pass under the bridge and into the harbour. She heard a train’s piping whistle and saw its puffing smoke above the houses, marking where the railway ran through the new town. She glimpsed the engine and its coaches for a few seconds as they ran parallel to the river flowing down from the north, then they were hidden by the houses of the old port on the opposite bank. The railway track ran close to the river for almost a kilometre to the north before turning inland.
She adjusted the kerchief to her satisfaction, saying, “I’ll see you tomorrow or the next day, same time, opposite the baker’s in the rue de Rochelle.”
“Right.” And Paul, in love with her and afraid for her, added, “Good luck tonight.”
But the girl was already tapping away through the rain. She walked back up the street but after fifty metres turned left to climb steep stone steps to another street on a higher level. It was narrow and she turned right for another fifty metres then entered a café. It was a long room running back from the street, with a bar on one side and a succession of booths down the other. The lamps were lit on that dark winter day, shedding pools of light and making shadowed caves of the booths.
As she walked the length of the room some of the dozen or so men scattered along the bar lifted a hand and called a greeting. One of them was a gendarme while another worked on the quay in the old port and smelt strongly of fish. Suzanne knew them all and they knew she would exchange banter but a man would be put in his place if he went too far. They also knew she had come to St. Jean in July of 1940 after the German occupation of Paris and that she was a teacher of shorthand, typing and other secretarial skills. She taught them privately, as a self-employed tutor, which meant she kept irregular hours and travelled about the countryside.
Suzanne slipped into the booth farthest from the door. Albert was already slouched on the curved wooden bench-seat; they met in this place twice a week. He grunted, “B’jour”. He was aged around sixty, a skinny, leathery peasant, erstwhile smuggler and poacher who ran a café-cum-general store ten kilometres to the north of St. Jean. He was a simple, gentle man, honest by his own elastic standards, and shaved on Sundays. Suzanne had known him since before the war and he had hated and distrusted the Nazis then. She had sought him out in the July of 1940.
Now she said, “I’ve had a message from London. There is to be a landing tonight.”
Albert glanced at her sharply, “At our place?
”
Suzanne shook her head. “Our place” was a secluded inlet close to Albert’s café and they had marked it as a good site for a landing. “No. South of St. Jean. I have to meet a man at a rendezvous tonight, then we go to the boat.”
Albert shifted worriedly in his seat. “This landing place, is it safe? Are there no sentries?”
“There should not be, but a friend will let me know.” A doctor who lived close to that stretch of coast, which was patrolled infrequently. That was one reason why it had been selected for the landing; the other was because it was little more than a kilometre from the bridge. Suzanne said, “Don’t worry.”
Albert muttered under his breath so she could not hear the obscenity. Aloud, but his voice still low, he said, “We are in a dangerous business. This of tonight could be very dangerous. And the man is important. Yes?”
Suzanne hesitated a moment, her grey eyes meeting his scowl, then with a half-smile she agreed. “It could be.”
“Then you, and this man you are meeting, need some protection. Take me.” And when she declined with a shake of the head, he persisted, “Then — better — take Louis. If there is danger, a sentry, he can handle it. He is a good man with a gun.”
Suzanne thought: Or with a knife or a boot. Louis was Albert’s nephew and a thug. Suzanne knew his type, did not like it but used it if she had to. Certainly he could deal with an unsuspecting sentry. She had seen Louis as she entered the café and he had winked at her then turned back to the girl serving behind the bar, leaning across it to whisper to her. He was a tall, muscular young man who carried himself with a swagger. When he first arrived from Paris he affected a thin moustache, and his hair was artificially waved and grew down to his collar. Now he was clean-shaven and his hair was cropped short.
