by Thomas Wood
“Right, where are we going?” I screamed at him, desperately wanting to be heard over the din of the airfield as it erupted into action.
Tracer had now begun appearing on the far side of the airfield, and it appeared that another group had managed to acquire a second machine gun and were now using it to devastating effects behind the group of soldiers that were attacking the first gun.
We desperately needed to get moving because, if these boys carried on, there wouldn’t be any men left to fight and my cover would be blown immediately. We would have the first Allied airfield in the whole of France for well over a year.
I made a mental note to take to Jimmy when I got back to Britain that it was entirely possible to requisition an entire airfield with just a handful of men, if the need arose for whatever reason in the future. I liked to think that one day the Allies would make a return to this part of the world and I hoped that I would be able to play a small part in that by making a suggestion such as this.
A round suddenly whizzed past my skull and had I been two paces behind, like I had been a second before, the bullet would have taken me down with a lethal accuracy. My natural instinct was to make for cover, or at least drop to one knee as I scanned the area for where the round had originated from, but I had to override any sense of humanness, I would just have to keep moving.
I pondered whether it had been a German-aimed round at me that had just missed me by inches, or a British one, both of them with valid reasons for having a pop at me.
“Over there!” the Standartenführer hollered, “I have a car! We can probably get out that way!”
I tried to acknowledge him, but another round kicked into the ground just by my right foot and fortunately spun off in a direction other than into my flesh.
The shooter was ducking down behind a pile of sandbags, which I assumed must have been some sort of open air raid shelter, for those caught short out on the airstrip when our planes screamed in.
I pulled the gun into my shoulder and began squeezing off a few rounds and I watched, quite surprised, as sand began flying up in all directions causing a mini explosion of its own. The Standartenführer led the way, leading us straight towards the man in the dugout.
As we neared, I pulled a grenade from my pocket and went through the motions of priming the thing, keeping it in my hand for two seconds before tossing it over the bags and into the trench below.
I couldn’t tell if I’d got the poor man, but a fine cloud of dust and muddied earth sprayed up as it exploded, making my ears go pop as the detonation reached my eardrums. I heard nothing of the man after that, but then again, I didn’t hear much of anything at all, the grenade had made a horrifying tinny noise begin to squeal in my ear, the sounds of the world diluted by the agonising scream of my eardrums.
I turned to shout at my German companion, but he was too busy brutally firing on his own men, who were using a car as cover to lay down some rounds on their attackers. I found myself thinking that it must have been our intended ride as he hared towards it, throwing himself against the body of the car with such a clatter that even I was able to hear it.
“Get in! Get in!” He bellowed at me, opening the door to the driver’s side. I dove in, dragging myself to the far side to allow him to drive.
His suitcase clattered me in the side of the skull as he tossed it in as nonchalantly as a grenade, before it fell onto my lap almost perfectly. My cheek began to ache as the force threatened to rip at the stitches that held my cheek together, reigniting the burning feeling that had so often frequented my face now.
I clutched the suitcase tightly as he began to start the motor up. The suitcase that held so many secrets. The one that held so many potential answers for me, was now in my possession.
21
As the engine roared into life, the comforting rumbles of its pistons began to soothe me almost, as the amount of tracer rounds and crackles that zipped through the night sky seemed to intensify, to the point where it seemed that all the oxygen would simply be replaced by bullets.
I wanted desperately to open the suitcase and begin rummaging around in it, reading everything I could and trying to piece together what was going on. But I knew that now was not the right time to be doing that, I would need to focus for a few minutes more and hopefully, we would have the airfield far behind us before too long.
He caught me looking at the suitcase wistfully, “Do not open that! Don’t! We need to get out of here first!”
His English was impeccable, in fact it was better than how some native Englishmen spoke the language, which didn’t calm me in any way, in fact it served only as the spark to set off an eruption of emotions and paranoia-fuelled thoughts in my weary mind.
I began to question how he had known my name and whether or not he was known to the British military in some capacity. Maybe he had worked for them and had become a double agent, working for the Germans whilst pretending to work for the British. It would tally with why the Brits wanted him dead.
My flittering mind even reasoned that it was possible that he knew Jimmy personally, that he knew Joseph intimately and that they had all studied at the same university in England before the war, and that now they found their countries locked in bitter fighting they wanted to help the moral force to win.
But then again, maybe they were all helping one another, maybe it wasn’t a case of good against evil but friend against friend. I began searching myself for evidence in my recollections of Jimmy and whether it was at all possible that he had been feeding information to the Germans for the sake of his friendship with this man? But then again, if he had been talking to him with intelligence, if they had been friends, then surely, he wouldn’t have wanted the man dead? And if they had been friends then surely this man would have tried to save his bacon with something a bit more substantial than resting all his hopes on whatever was in the suitcase. Besides, all I had seen in the suitcase was a couple of spare pairs of underpants, some socks and his cherished photo of his family. There had been no sign of any paperwork or photographs that could lead to some sort of incrimination of anyone.
My mind was all over the place as a grenade kicked off over to our left as the Standartenführer engaged reverse gear and we began to whine our way across the field. I tried to start thinking about what was ahead of us, whether I would simply have to execute him at the side of the road or demand the intelligence that he claimed to have had. As the rounds intensified, and one or two began striking the car, I wondered whether I had a future to ponder at all.
The car crunched into first gear, and my head shot backwards as the spinning wheels finally gained the traction they needed, and we started to barrel towards the main gate. I had hoped that the fact that we were driving in a German staff car would mean that we would be relatively safe from all the cross firing, but I was very much mistaken. In fact, the moving vehicle became a target for both sides; the British judging that some sort of VIP was in there and needed taking out, the Germans believing that some of the attacking forces were making a break for it.
There was no point in winding the window down and trying to get some rounds down, the car was juddering all over the place and I simply wouldn’t have had a stable enough firing platform to really direct any rounds anywhere. The chances were that they would just be sent off into the night sky, causing no harm to anyone and serving only as an even bigger chance of me letting my chest become home to a thousand bullets.
I slid down in my seat, clutching the suitcase as if it was some sort of chainmail, a body armour that would prevent a fatal round from striking me down. The rounds increased even more as we crunched into a higher gear, the dang dang dang of bullets striking metal growing louder and louder the closer to the gate that we got.
I could see nothing from where I was cowering other than the tracer rounds that zipped across the bonnet of the car, aiming just ahead of us in the hope that we would drive straight into their rounds.
“Hold on!” He roared, holding onto the las
t syllable as I felt his foot push down so hard into the accelerator that I thought it would shoot through the floor.
We lunged forwards, both now screaming at the top of our lungs and an almighty crash threatened to burst my ear drums as we crunched our way through the security barrier. The barrier came clean off its hinges, but not before it had shattered the windscreen of the car beyond reasonable use. The Standartenführer’s head began bobbing around as he negotiated the spider’s web of smashed glass, trying to find a slither that was still intact that he could see through.
The rounds behind us suddenly seemed to die down, as if they had all given up on us and resorted to trying to kill each other once more. I felt a few rounds trying to hit us from behind and I risked sitting up again and taking a quick glance backwards, still clutching the suitcase as if my life depended on it.
The horizon was alive with orange glows of fire and the red-hot tracers that still zipped through the darkness. I could see no figures now, just the occasional flash of light and I said a quick prayer for the remaining Brits that were inside, and for Ray’s soul that was now in flight. Just as I did so, the whole airfield seemed to light up, the deep booming growl of the anti-aircraft gun beginning to purr through the night and throb through my chest. I breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t being used to fire upon us in the speeding car, but hoped desperately that it was the Brits who had managed to swing the gun into action first. Whoever was using it, would be the victors within a matter of seconds.
A flash of light filled my vision, sending me squirming back down to the pits of my chair, just as the rear windscreen disintegrated into a million tiny shards of glass, spraying themselves finely all over the back seat of the car.
“Phew!” I exhaled involuntarily, and I tried to calm myself down desperately, by trying to breathe in the considerably cleaner air than that of burning fuel and smouldering fighter planes.
It was then that I finally began to take stock of my situation, trying to plan ahead for what we would have to do to get out of the whole escapade alive.
I pulled my pistol up and immediately pressed it into the temple at the side of his head, which seemed to bulge as he realised what was going on. The car swerved momentarily, as if it had a mind of its own, before it was corrected and carried on, on its journey down the country road.
“I’m the one in charge here. Do not forget that. I will kill you if I have to.”
“I know, I know. I saw you kill one of your own men for this information, remember.” I suddenly felt sick to the pit of my stomach. I had killed one of my own. I had murdered him in my own selfish desire to find out why I had been compromised during my escape attempt and, more importantly, to find out what had happened to Cécile.
There was a family, somewhere in Britain, that would now get a telegram delivered to them, similar to the one that my own parents had received, informing them that their son, their brother, their best friend was dead. There would be no explanation as to how he had died, but just that he had, and it had all been at the hand of my weapon, at the hand of my murderous trigger finger.
I blinked profusely as I fought back the tears, the sudden realisation that I was no longer a solider, I was no longer even an assassin, fighting on the side of the moral, but I was a cold-blooded murderer, and I hadn’t even given any of it a second thought.
Even then, as I gave it more and more consideration, there was one thing that was niggling away at me, eating away at my very soul. I had no regrets over the incident. I would do it all again if the situation arose.
I blamed the German for making me feel this way, so I pressed the pistol into the side of his head just that little bit more, to make him aware that I was still there, that I still meant business.
“Nothing funny. If you try and get me set up I will paint this car with a nice colour of brain matter.”
We drove on for a few more minutes before I began to recognise certain aspects of the terrain.
“Stop the car. Get out, from here, we walk.”
He did exactly as he was told, walking in close behind me as we stepped over branches and brambles as we went deeper into the forest. He took possession of his prized suitcase and acted almost shocked when I uncovered my bag from under the ferns.
His shock soon turned to an admiration for the way that we had planned, the way that it hadn’t merely been a burst in to the airfield and straight out again.
“You came prepared. You knew it would end up like this.”
“To be honest, I didn’t actually think I would see this bag again,” I said, lifting it up onto my shoulders, with a slight chuckle.
For the first time, he smiled, a tired one, but a smile that made him seem almost human to me for a while, something that for some reason I tried to expel from my mind.
“Right,” I said, turning the pistol back on him, “back that way, we’ve got some walking to do.”
We walked for an hour, maybe more, our footsteps crunching on the hard, frozen ground that bullied my joints into an aching mess of pain and tiredness. As we got to the edge of the forest, I stopped him.
“Stay there. I’m getting out of these.”
“A very wise idea, my friend.”
I pulled the khaki from my body, exposing it to the freezing chill that suddenly picked up as soon as I undressed, and began pulling on the civilian clothes that I had lived in for the few weeks prior. I figured that it would work far better if I was in civvies and he was the one in uniform and not the other way around, in the hope that his embellished and overextravagant uniform would give us a free pass to almost anywhere in the country.
I finished changing and buried my khaki superficially in amongst all the brambles and thorns of the frozen forest floor, hoping that it would take the Germans days to find any evidence that I had even existed.
I pulled the pistol from my trousers, pointing it at his skull for one last time. He did not flinch this time, but instead looked at me knowing that I wasn’t about to pull the trigger, growing tired with the man who kept threatening death but never going through with it.
“I want the information now, how do I know that you’re not just leading me into a trap. How do I know that what you have is genuine?”
He looked at me with a smirk, “Of course it is genuine. How else would I know your name? How else would I have known that you were with a woman in the Hotel La Romaine in Paris? I am sorry. You are not going to kill me. I will not give you the information that I have until we are on British soil. You will have to get me there.”
I weighed up my options for a moment or two. He still had the suitcase, but it was an unworthy risk to gamble what he had in that case with what he also had stored up in his mind. A man like that wouldn’t have kept top secret files on traitors and double agents in the bottom of a suitcase. I knew it would all be in his mind and if I was to blow his mind all over the trees, there would be no way of piecing it all back together in an attempt to read it.
I had no option but to trust him, like he had no other choice but to put all his faith in me and my ability to try and get back to Britain.
22
I decided that we were far enough away from all of the drama to be able to stop and rest for an hour or two. The airfield would be a battle zone for an hour and then the clean-up operation would begin; that airfield needed to be operational within a matter of days if possible. The men that had survived the shootout wouldn’t have had time to organise some sort of search party, to try and find the soldiers that had raided them, and I hoped that they wouldn’t have the presence of mind to send out a search party for the missing German officer either.
I began to worry about the men that I had left behind and wonder whether they had all got out or not, excluding Ray of course. If, for any reason they had gone in and seen Ray’s body, I wondered if they would suspect me at all, or if they would assume it had just been an unfortunate event that he had been done over by the German officer.
Despite the appearance to the Germ
an of how I valued my men, I was genuinely concerned for their welfare and had wanted them to get out. If the others had somehow managed to escape, I wondered what they would have done and where they would go from here.
I was meant to be the one who helped them get back to Britain, it was me who was supposed to put them in contact with men like Joseph and help them to safety. With me gone, they were left completely to their own devices, to start from scratch.
I debated with myself as to how long they would actually survive, or whether they had gone into the bag already. No matter what had happened to them, I told myself that I was still alive, I was unhurt and for now, that was all that really mattered to me.
They could have still been waiting for me in the woods, where we had originally buried all of our kit, hoping that their escape officer would appear from behind the trees at any moment, broad grin on his face as he began to work out a plan to get them home. But he was long gone, helping a German officer escape to Britain where he would apparently spill all of his secrets. I wondered if they knew that they had been double crossed, I wondered if they had known that my intentions and objectives were not the same as theirs.
Again, I found myself battling with my conscience; I had betrayed them, I had been promised to them, to help them as soon as the mission was over but instead, I had sacrificed them. My selfish motivations began to take a grip on my mind again as I thought about what lay ahead for me.
