One Shot Kill

by Robert Muchamore

  ‘Thorwald is a moron,’ Huber said, as he shot to his feet. ‘She’s a little girl and I don’t appreciate you questioning my orders.’

  ‘As you wish, sir,’ the guard said stiffly, before clicking boot heels and leaving the room.

  Huber moved around the desk. Edith was horribly bruised and winced as Huber rested a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘I can make things more comfortable for you, Edith,’ Huber said. ‘I just need something to work with.’

  Edith glanced at Huber, then awkwardly at the notebook resting on the table.

  ‘Everything in the book is written in a simple code that Eugene taught me,’ Edith explained, as she reached out for the notebook. ‘Can I show you?’

  Huber was delighted. Younger investigators like Thorwald thought he was past it, but while they failed he’d cracked Edith in no time at all. Mentioning the burned horses had been pure genius.

  Edith opened the notebook. ‘This column is names. There are addresses, dates. The places where we met, and details of how much money I paid them.’

  Huber nodded. ‘Are all of the agents paid?’

  ‘Yes,’ Edith said. ‘Eugene said it’s important to put everyone in the circuit on a professional footing. Agents receive money, plus chocolate, coffee, and other treats when they get dropped by parachute. It’s never a lot of money, but he says it shows them that the British and Americans appreciate the risks they’re taking.’

  This information wasn’t news, but Huber felt it was too early to push hard and risk losing Edith’s confidence.

  ‘I’ll need a pen to show you how the decoding grid works,’ Edith said meekly. ‘Once you have that, you’ll be able to understand all the entries in my book.’

  Huber slid a fountain pen from inside his jacket and unscrewed the cap. Edith’s hand trembled, as she wrote three tiny rows of four letters.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s so messy. Thorwald bent back my fingers,’ Edith explained.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Huber said, as he leaned closer to the page and squinted at the minuscule letters

  V I V E

  L A F R

  A N C E

  Vive la France – meaning long live France – was a popular resistance slogan. As Huber realised Edith had been stringing him along, she thrust violently upwards, spearing the Gestapo officer’s neck with the pen nib.

  Edith had never received formal espionage training, but Eugene gave everyone who worked for his resistance group as much knowledge as he could, and one lesson that stuck in Edith’s head was the one about going for the jugular vein if you ever get a good shot at someone’s neck.

  As Edith tore out the pen, a fountain of blood spurted half a metre from Huber’s neck. He tried to scream, but the hot liquid was already flooding the German’s lungs and he gurgled as he staggered backwards and collapsed over the typist’s desk.

  The Gestapo compound was well guarded, but it seemed a shame not to at least try escaping. Her bare foot skidded in Huber’s blood as she headed for the door. She grabbed the door handle, but the guard was on the other side, about to enter with a coffee and a bowl of water.

  Edith gave the metal bowl a shove, knocking the guard back and showering him with hot water. She made a couple of steps but the guard was too fast and too strong.

  ‘Security,’ he shouted.

  Edith tried stabbing the guard, but he easily twisted the bloody fountain pen out of her hand, bent her fingers back painfully then smashed her head first into the hallway wall.

  As Edith slumped to the floor unconscious, two uniformed men rounded the top of the staircase, while the guard stepped into the interrogation room and was staggered by the sight of Huber splayed over the typewriter and drenched in his own blood.

  ‘Is he dead?’ someone asked from behind.

  ‘Look at him, you idiot,’ the guard shouted. ‘What do you think?’

  CHAPTER THREE

  One of the Germans shouted at Rosie in heavily-accented French. ‘Stay down,’ he ordered. ‘Raise your hands slowly into the air.’

  But in darkness, with fifteen metres and a fence between herself and the enemy, Rosie had no plans for a meek surrender. She unbuckled the equipment pack strapped to her thigh before ripping a small pistol from her boot and taking two wild shots into the torch beams.

  ‘Eugene?’ Rosie shouted, her boots churning soft earth as she started to run.

  Rosie’s shots hadn’t hit anything, but they’d had the intended effect of making the two Germans wary of climbing the fence and coming after her. The moonlight lit billowing silk from the other parachutes, and gave her a clue where to find Eugene.

  ‘Rosie, get down,’ Eugene shouted.

  It was good to hear Eugene’s voice, but Rosie couldn’t see where it was coming from as she scrambled up a slight hill.

  ‘Get down,’ Eugene repeated.

  As Rosie hit the dirt, Eugene lit up a nearby copse of trees with the muzzle blast from a small machine gun.

  ‘Get here, now,’ Eugene shouted.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Rosie gasped, as Eugene shoved her back against a thick tree trunk.

  ‘They must have known we were coming,’ Eugene said. ‘I know this area well and I think we’ve come down a few hundred metres off target. If we hadn’t, we’d have been surrounded.’

  Rosie felt queasy, realising that she’d have landed at the German’s feet but for her last-second tug on the steering rope.

  ‘Are you fit?’ Eugene asked.

  ‘Leg bashed a fence, but it’s not much,’ Rosie said.

  ‘The machine gun blast will make ’em wary, but we’ve got to move before they try and encircle us. They’ll have seen five parachutes, so hopefully they’ll think there’s more than two of us.’

  Eugene kept low as he led Rosie downhill. Besides the machine gun slung around his neck, he’d strapped on a large backpack that had been dropped on one of the equipment chutes. There were plenty of torch beams and Germans shouting orders behind them, but as Eugene predicted they showed no appetite for a head-on charge into a potential machine gun ambush.

  The pair kept up running pace for twenty-five minutes over five kilometres of countryside. They finally stopped behind a brick stable to catch breath and drink from a standpipe.

  ‘Can you carry on?’ Eugene asked.

  ‘Just sweaty,’ Rosie gasped, as she splashed her face and sucked water from the palm of her hand. For the first time in her life she was grateful for the fitness she’d earned on gruelling training runs.

  ‘I’ve not heard any sign of Germans, but if they had sniffer dogs at the landing site they might still track us,’ Eugene said.

  ‘What do you think happened?’ Rosie asked. ‘How could they have been waiting for us?’

  Eugene shrugged. ‘If we’re lucky, a local patrol stumbled into our drop zone and arrested a couple of members of our reception team. But for all we know the Gestapo have penetrated and destroyed my entire organisation while I’ve been away.’

  ‘Why didn’t the Germans spread out over a wider area?’ Rosie asked. ‘They didn’t seem well organised.’

  ‘Probably a lot of Germans in one place, because they overestimated the accuracy of our parachute landings. Or one of my people could have given a slightly inaccurate location under torture, giving us a fighting chance of getting away.’

  ‘But we’ve been getting regular radio transmissions from your people,’ Rosie pointed out.

  ‘They could have captured my wireless operators and turned them against us,’ Eugene explained. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time the Nazis have pulled that stunt.’

  ‘So where to now?’ Rosie asked, backing up as Eugene took his turn drinking from the tap.

  ‘We’ll get to a safe house with a radio before morning.’

  ‘Could it have been compromised?’

  Eugene shook his head. ‘This is my personal safe house. Nobody knows about it. We’ll wash, eat and rest. Then we’ll start investigating. You’ll have to t
ransmit a message home explaining what’s happened. Get them to re-check all transmissions coming out of Lorient in the last seven weeks and look for anything suspicious.’

  *

  Edith came to as a pair of strange guards dragged her down concrete stairs. She couldn’t have been out for long because the corridors of the Roman villa were in uproar. She couldn’t understand German, but angry sounds the same in any language.

  ‘Is shit-head dead?’ Edith asked, as her head rolled sideways.

  Neither guard answered, but one of them gripped her arm extra tight. It hurt, but it was good to know that she’d pissed the Germans off. She wanted to hum something patriotic to see if she could really set them off, but her head was thudding and her jaw felt like a block of wood.

  A cell door clanked. The space was bare concrete, except for a shit-crusted bucket. The guards threw Edith at a puddled floor.

  Puddle of what? Edith thought, as pain ignited in every welt and burn.

  ‘You’ll hang for killing him,’ one of the guards shouted, as the cell door banged, plunging Edith into complete blackness.

  Pain and anger gave Edith a shot of energy.

  ‘You’d have hung me anyway,’ she shouted back. ‘At least I took one of you bastards with me.’

  Edith tried to get comfortable as the guards’ footsteps faded out, but she was sore in a hundred places and the floor was hard. She put her back against the wall, tucked her knees up to her chin and stretched the oversized vest over her legs to try and stay warm.

  She didn’t want to give the Germans the satisfaction of hearing her sob, but from this dark spot, the only thing she could see was her own death.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  After invading in summer 1940, the Nazis forced hundreds of thousands of French peasants to abandon countryside in newly declared military zones running the length of the Atlantic coast. Three years on, buildings were disintegrating, swathes of farmland had returned to nature, and the Nazis had inadvertently created a perfect hiding place for their enemies.

  All well-run resistance groups arranged safe houses, where you could hide out, or pick up essentials before going on the run. Eugene had made his personal bolthole in a deserted two-room farmhand’s cottage. It sat on a hillock six kilometres from the centre of Lorient, with good visibility in all directions and two kilometres from the nearest major road.

  Besides the equipment they’d arrived with, Rosie and Eugene could draw on a radio transmitter, weapons and tinned food stashed in the surrounding fields.

  Eugene had impressed his superiors in the two years since he’d taken control of the Lorient resistance group, and he’d impressed Rosie in the two days since their disastrous parachute drop. A lot of young men would have panicked and raged, but Eugene handled troubles with the calm air of an elderly chap solving The Times crossword.

  For the first twenty-four hours, they’d laid low, staying in the dirt-floored cottage, except for a trip outside to dig up tinned food and retrieve a radio transmitter hidden in the roof of a nearby barn.

  Rosie had transmitted a short message in encrypted Morse code, explaining what had happened on arrival, and asking for a review of all messages received from the Lorient resistance circuit over the past few weeks.

  On the second morning – a Tuesday – Eugene set off before sunrise. The centre of town was too risky, but he’d made a mental list of people he knew in the suburbs and surrounding villages.

  Some were active members of his resistance unit, but most were relatives of members, or sympathisers: people who’d turned a blind eye, or given some small assistance during a past operation.

  Rosie stayed back at the house, waiting to pick up a radio transmission. She felt uncomfortable being alone, with no certainty about when – or even if – Eugene would return. After breakfasting on apples and pears picked from trees near the back door, she tried reading Eugene’s battered copy of The Communist Manifesto.

  There were two schools of thought on what would happen if the Allies won the war. Communists like Eugene believed a workers’ revolution would sweep Europe. Others like Captain Henderson said the communists were idiots, who should visit Russia as he’d done and see what living under communism was really like.

  Rosie was undecided, but The Communist Manifesto did little to help make up her mind. The text was dense and with so much on her mind her eyes skimmed words that failed to penetrate her brain.

  When it got to 11 a.m., Rosie began setting up the aerial for her radio set. Like all radio operators she had a personal sked, with fixed times to send encrypted messages, and others when she had to listen to a certain frequency and pick up orders and responses to questions.

  This system was secure, but meant that getting a reply to a question took two days, or even longer if storms or German jamming disrupted the signal.

  By the time Rosie had stretched the wire aeriel across the field behind the cottage and given the valves in the battery-powered set a few minutes to warm up, it was time to receive.

  Just as you can recognise a person’s handwriting, people transmitting in Morse code have their own distinctive signature, known as a fist. Rosie recognised the fist of Joyce Slater as she sat on the dirt floor by the back door, with the radio set alongside, pencil and paper in her lap and a cumbersome headset over her ears.

  Joyce was Espionage Research Unit B’s wheelchair-bound radio operator and something of an expert in code breaking and puzzle solving. The previous evening, Rosie had received a brief message, stating that there was nothing obviously wrong with the transmissions received from Lorient over the past seven weeks, but that a specialist was doing more detailed analysis. The fact that Joyce was the specialist cheered Rosie, because nobody would do a more thorough job.

  The transmission lasted four minutes. The signal deteriorated a couple of times, meaning Rosie missed a few characters, but you never got them all. After pulling in the aeriel, and switching the set off to conserve the battery, Rosie hurried towards a table and began using a printed silk square, known as a one-time-pad, to decode the message.

  The news was bad. Every radio operator in occupied territory slipped three-letter security check codes into their messages. According to Joyce’s analysis, Eugene’s chief radio operator had missed out her security checks on three occasions, beginning on 9 May. This should have been recognised as a sign that a radio operator might have fallen into enemy hands, but apparently it had been treated as a simple omission.

  From 12 May onwards, the messages from Lorient all contained the correct security check, but Joyce now believed that someone was trying to impersonate the fist of the original operator, because there was a sudden tendency to elongate the last dot or dash in each letter, which resulted in certain letters getting mixed up.

  Joyce’s conclusion was that the Lorient circuit’s chief radio operator had been arrested on or around 9 May. When forced to send false information by her German captors, she’d tried giving a warning by missing her security checks. From 12 May onwards, the original operator had been replaced by a German radio operator who was trying to imitate her style.

  *

  It was late afternoon when Eugene returned. Joyce’s report only confirmed what he’d learned on the street.

  ‘Everyone’s terrified,’ Eugene told Rosie, as he sat on a battered chair, with an intense scowl and a drumming foot. ‘The few people I found barely spoke to me. In the end I had to turn nasty to get any information at all.

  ‘Nobody knows how it went down, but the Gestapo must have had someone working inside my organisation for a long time, because they picked everyone up in a single swoop. Madame Mercier died under torture last Friday. They picked up the girls who worked in the laundry, my engineers in the U-boat yards, a few messengers, both wireless operators and people living at the last two houses they transmitted from. As far as I can tell, Alois Clement is the only person who escaped arrest.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Rosie said, as she approached Eugene. ‘Would you like some
wine? It’ll help you calm down.’

  Rosie passed over an enamel mug and Eugene downed it in three quick glugs.

  ‘They’ve executed more than a dozen. A couple were shot, but most were hung at the gallows outside Lorient station and left on show.’

  Tears welled in Eugene’s eyes as Rosie put an arm around his back.

  ‘I recruited most of them,’ Eugene said. ‘One woman spat in my face. Told me her daughter was tortured and raped before they hung her. She blamed me for leading her into it.’

  ‘You know you’re not to blame,’ Rosie said. ‘She’s upset.’

  Eugene wrung his hands and sobbed. ‘It’ll be worth it when the workers’ revolution comes,’ he said, though his retreat into communist propaganda sounded unconvincing.

  ‘Can we try and rebuild the group?’ Rosie asked.

  ‘Maybe someone can, but not me. They’ll have my description, maybe even a surveillance photograph. They’ve arrested so many people that it would be like starting from scratch. Probably harder, because everyone’s so scared.’

  ‘Have you got any idea who the informant was?’

  ‘Does it even matter?’ Eugene asked. ‘It’s not the first resistance group to collapse. I doubt it’ll be the last.’

  ‘We’ll have to leave then,’ Rosie said. ‘Sooner the better. We’ll go to Paris, make contact with the Ghost circuit and they’ll find us another task or a route home.’

  Eugene made a kind of hissing sound, and Rosie backed up thinking that he’d found her remark insensitive.

  ‘I still have one friend,’ Eugene said. ‘A German inside Gestapo Headquarters. Because of her position I never told anyone else about her.’

  Rosie looked curious. ‘How did you get to know her?’

  ‘I met her when I was working in one of Madame Mercier’s bars. She’s in her forties. Husband crashed his plane over Poland, two sons killed on the Eastern Front, so she’s no fan of the Nazis.’