Ken Follett - Jackdaws Page 2

  He could have raped her. She had certainly expected that. No one would have raised a protest, let alone punished him. But instead, he had fed her, given her new clothes, installed her in the spare bedroom in his apartment, and treated her with gentle affection until one evening, after a dinner of foie de veau and a bottle of La Tache, he had seduced her deliciously on the couch in front of a blazing coal fire.

  Today, though, she was part of his camouflage. He was working with Rommel again. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the "Desert Fox," was now Commander of Army Group B, defending northern France. German intelligence expected an Allied invasion this summer. Rommel did not have enough men to guard the hundreds of miles of vulnerable coastline, so he had adopted a daring strategy of flexible response: his battalions were miles inland, ready to be swiftly deployed wherever needed.

  The British knew this-they had intelligence, too. Their counterplan was to slow Rommel's response by disrupting his communications. Night and day, British and American bombers pounded roads and railways, bridges and tunnels, stations and marshaling yards. And the Resistance blew up power stations and factories, derailed trains, cut telephone lines, and sent teenage girls to pour grit into the oil reservoirs of trucks and tanks.

  Dieter's brief was to identify key communications targets and assess the ability of the Resistance to attack them. In the last few months, from his base in Paris, he had ranged all over northern France, barking at sleepy sentries and putting the fear of God into lazy captains, tightening up security at railway signal boxes, train sheds, vehicle parks, and airfield control towers. Today he was paying a surprise visit to a telephone exchange of enormous strategic importance. Through this building passed all telephone traffic from the High Command in Berlin to German forces in northern France. That included teleprinter messages, the means by which most orders were sent nowadays. If the exchange was destroyed, German communications would be crippled.

  The Allies obviously knew that and had tried to bomb the place, with limited success. It was the perfect candidate for a Resistance attack. Yet security was infuriatingly lax, by Dieter's standards. That was probably due to the influence of the Gestapo, who had a post in the same building. The Geheime Staatspolizei was the state security service, and men were often promoted by reason of loyalty to Hitler and enthusiasm for Fascism rather than because of their brains or ability. Dieter had been here for half an hour, taking photographs, his anger mounting as the men responsible for guarding the place continued to ignore him.

  However, as the church bell stopped ringing, a Gestapo officer in major's uniform came strutting through the tall iron gates of the chƒteau and headed straight for Dieter. In bad French he shouted, "Give me that camera!"

  Dieter turned away, pretending not to hear.

  "It is forbidden to take photographs of the chƒteau, imbecile!" the man yelled. "Can't you see this is a military installation?"

  Dieter turned to him and replied quietly in German, "You took a damn long time to notice me."

  The man was taken aback. People in civilian clothing were usually frightened of the Gestapo. "What are you talking about?" he said less aggressively.

  Dieter checked his watch. "I've been here for thirty-two minutes. I could have taken a dozen photographs and driven away long ago. Are you in charge of security?"

  "Who are you?"

  "Major Dieter Franck, from Field Marshal Rommel's personal staff."

  "Franck!" said the man. "I remember you."

  Dieter looked harder at him. "My God," he said as recognition dawned. "Willi Weber."

  "Sturmbannfuhrer Weber, at your service." Like most senior Gestapo men, Weber held an SS rank, which he felt was more prestigious than his ordinary police rank.

  "Well, I'm damned," Dieter said. No wonder security was slack.

  Weber and Dieter had been young policemen together in Cologne in the twenties. Dieter had been a high flyer, Weber a failure. Weber resented Dieter's success and attributed it to his privileged background. (Dieter's background was not extraordinarily privileged, but it seemed so to Weber, the son of a stevedore.)

  In the end, Weber had been fired. The details began to come back to Dieter: there had been a road accident, a crowd had gathered, Weber had panicked and fired his weapon, and a rubbernecking bystander had been killed.

  Dieter had not seen the man for fifteen years, but he could guess the course of Weber's career: he had joined the Nazi party, become a volunteer organizer, applied for a job with the Gestapo citing his police training, and risen swiftly in that community of embittered second- raters.

  Weber said, "What are you doing here?"

  "Checking your security, on behalf of the Field Marshal."

  Weber bristled. "Our security is good."

  "Good enough for a sausage factory. Look around you." Dieter waved a hand, indicating the town square. "What if these people belonged to the Resistance? They could pick off your guards in a few seconds." He pointed to a tall girl wearing a light summer coat over her dress. "What if she had a gun under her coat? What if..

  He stopped.

  This was not just a fantasy he was weaving to illustrate a point, he realized. His unconscious mind had seen the people in the square deploying in battle formation. The tiny blonde and her husband had taken cover in the bar. The two men in the church doorway had moved behind pillars. The tall girl in the summer coat, who had been staring into a shop window until a moment ago, was now standing in the shadow of Dieter's car. As Dieter looked, her coat flapped open, and to his astonishment he saw that his imagination had been prophetic: under the coat she had a submachine gun with a skeleton-frame butt, exactly the type favored by the Resistance. "My God!" he said.

  He reached inside his suit jacket and remembered he was not carrying a gun.

  Where was Stephanie? He looked around, momentarily shocked into a state close to panic, but she was standing behind him, waiting patiently for him to finish his conversation with Weber. "Get down!" he yelled.

  Then there was a bang.

  CHAPTER 3

  FLICK WAS IN the doorway of the Caf‚ des Sports, behind Michel, standing on tiptoe to look over his shoulder. She was alert, her heart pounding, her muscles tensed for action, but in her brain the blood flowed like ice water, and she watched and calculated with cool detachment.

  There were eight guards in sight: two at the gate checking passes, two just inside the gate, two patrolling the grounds behind the iron railings, and two at the top of the short flight of steps leading to the chƒteau's grand doorway. But Michel's main force would bypass the gate.

  The long north side of the church building formed part of the wall surrounding the chƒteau's grounds. The north transept jutted a few feet into the parking lot that had once been part of the ornamental garden. In the days of the ancien r‚gime, the comte had had his own personal entrance to the church, a little door in the transept wall. The doorway had been boarded up and plastered over more than a hundred years ago, and had remained that way until today.

  An hour ago, a retired quarryman called Gaston had entered the empty church and carefully placed four half-pound sticks of yellow plastic explosive at the foot of the blocked doorway. He had inserted detonators, connected them together so that they would all go off at the same instant, and added a five-second fuse ignited by a thumb plunger. Then he had smeared everything with ash from his kitchen fire to make it inconspicuous and moved an old wooden bench in front of the doorway for additional concealment. Satisfied with his handiwork, he had knelt down to pray.

  When the church bell had stopped ringing a few seconds ago, Gaston had got up from his pew, walked a few paces from the nave into the transept, depressed the plunger, and ducked quickly back around the corner. The blast must have shaken centuries of dust from the Gothic arches. But the transept was not occupied during services, so no one would have been injured.

  After the boom of the explosion, there was a long moment of silence in the square. Everyone froze: the guards at the chƒteau gat
e, the sentries patrolling the fence, the Gestapo major, and the well-dressed German with the glamorous mistress. Flick, taut with apprehension, looked across the square and through the iron railings into the grounds. In the parking lot was a relic of the seventeenth-century garden, a stone fountain with three mossy cherubs sporting where jets of water had once flowed. Around the dry marble bowl were parked a truck, an armored car, a Mercedes sedan painted the gray-green of the German army, and two black Citro‰ns of the Traction Avant type favored by the Gestapo in France. A soldier was filling the tank of one of the Citro‰ns, using a gas pump that stood incongruously in front of a tall chƒteau window. For a few seconds, nothing moved. Flick waited, holding her breath.

  Among the congregation in the church were ten armed men. The priest, who was not a sympathizer and therefore had no warning, must have been pleased that so many people had shown up for the evening service, which was not normally very popular. He might have wondered why some of them wore topcoats, despite the warm weather, but after four years of austerity lots of people wore odd clothes, and a man might wear a raincoat to church because he had no jacket. By now, Flick hoped, the priest understood it all. At this moment, the ten would be leaping from their seats, pulling out their guns, and rushing through the brand-new hole in the wall.

  At last they came into view around the end of the church. Flick's heart leaped with pride and fear when she saw them, a motley army in old caps and worn-out shoes, running across the parking lot toward the grand entrance of the chƒteau, feet pounding the dusty soil, clutching their assorted weapons-pistols, revolvers, rifles, and one submachine gun. They had not yet begun firing them, for they were trying to get as close as possible to the building before the shooting started.

  Michel saw them at the same time. He made a noise between a grunt and a sigh, and Flick knew he felt the same mixture of pride at their bravery and fear for their lives. Now was the moment to distract the guards. Michel raised his rifle, a Lee-Enfield No.4 Mark I, the kind the Resistance called a Canadian Rifle, because many of them were made in Canada. He drew a bead, took up the slack of the two-stage trigger, then fired. He worked the bolt action with a practiced movement so that the weapon was immediately ready to be fired again.

  The crash of the rifle ended the moment of shocked silence in the square. At the gate, one of the guards cried out and fell, and Flick felt a savage moment of satisfaction: there was one less man to shoot at her comrades. Michel's shot was the signal for everyone else to open fire. On the church porch, young Bertrand squeezed off two shots that sounded like firecrackers. He was too far from the guards for accuracy with a pistol, and he did not hit anyone. Beside him, Albert pulled the ring of a grenade and hurled it high over the railing, to land inside the grounds, where it exploded in the vineyard, uselessly scattering vegetation in the air. Flick wanted to yell angrily at them, "Don't fire for the sake of the noise, you'll just reveal your position!" But only the best and most highly trained troops could exercise restraint once the shooting started. From behind the parked sports car, Genevieve opened up, and the deafening rattie of her Sten gun filled Flick's ears. Her shooting was more effective, and another guard fell.

  At last the Germans began to act. The guards took cover behind the stone pillars, or lay flat, and brought their rifles to bear. The Gestapo major fumbled his pistol out of its holster. The redhead turned and ran, but her sexy shoes slipped on the cobblestones, and she fell. Her man lay on top of her, protecting her with his body, and Flick decided she had been right to suppose he was a soldier, for a civilian would not know that it was safer to lie down than to run.

  The sentries opened fire. Almost immediately, Albert was hit. Flick saw him stagger and clutch his throat. A hand grenade he had been about to throw dropped from his grasp. Then a second round hit him, this time in the forehead. He fell like a stone, and Flick thought with sudden grief of the baby girl born this morning who now had no father. Beside Albert, Bertrand saw the turtleshell grenade roll across the age-worn stone step of the church porch. He hurled himself through the doorway as the grenade exploded. Flick waited for him to reappear, but he did not, and she thought with anguished uncertainty that he could be dead, wounded, or just stunned.

  In the parking lot, the team from the church stopped running, turned on the remaining six sentries, and opened up. The four guards near the gate were caught in a crossfire, between those inside the grounds and those outside in the square, and they were wiped out in seconds, leaving only the two on the chƒteau steps. Michel's plan was working, Flick thought with a surge of hope.

  But the enemy troops inside the building had now had time to seize their weapons and rush to the doors and windows, and they began to shoot, changing the odds again. Everything depended on how many of them there were.

  For a few moments the bullets poured like rain, and Flick stopped counting. Then she realized with dismay that there were many more guns in the chƒteau than she had expected. Fire seemed to be coming from at least twelve doors and windows. The men from the church, who should by now be inside the building, retreated to take cover behind the vehicles in the parking lot. Antoinette had been right, and MI6 wrong, about the number of troops stationed here. Twelve was the MI6 estimate, yet the Resistance had downed six for certain and there were at least fourteen still firing.

  Flick cursed passionately. In a fight like this, the Resistance could win only by sudden, overwhelming violence. If they did not crush the enemy right away, they were in trouble. As the seconds ticked by, army training and discipline began to tell. In the end, regular troops would always prevail in a drawn-out conflict.

  On the upper floor of the chƒteau, a tall seventeenth- century window was smashed open, and a machine gun began to fire. Because of its high position, it caused horrible carnage among the Resistance in the parking lot. Flick was sickened as, one after another, the men there fell and lay bleeding beside the dry fountain, until there were only two or three still shooting.

  It was all over, Flick realized in despair. They were outnumbered and they had failed. The sour taste of defeat rose in her throat.

  Michel had been shooting at the machine-gun position. "We can't take out that machine gunner from the ground!" he said. He looked around the square, his gaze flying to the tops of the buildings, the bell tower of the church, and the upper floor of the town hall. "If I could get into the mayor's office, I'd have a clear shot."

  "Wait." Flick's mouth was dry. She could not stop him risking his life, much as she wanted to. But she could improve the odds. She yelled at the top of her voice, "Genevieve!"

  Genevieve turned to look at her.

  "Cover Michel!"

  Genevieve nodded vigorously, then dashed out from behind the sports car, spraying bullets at the chƒteau windows.

  "Thanks," Michel said to Flick. Then he broke cover and sprinted across the square, heading for the town hall.

  Genevieve ran on, heading for the church porch. Her fire distracted the men in the chƒteau, giving Michel a chance of crossing the square unscathed. But then there was a flash on Flick's left. She glanced that way and saw the Gestapo major, flattened against the wall of the town hail, aiming his pistol at Michel.

  It was hard to hit a moving target with a handgun at anything but close range-but the major might be lucky, Flick thought fearfully. She was under orders to observe and report back, and not to join the fighting under any circumstances, but now she thought: To hell with that. In her shoulder bag she carried her personal weapon, a Browning nine-millimeter automatic, which she preferred to the SOE standard Colt because it had thirteen rounds in the clip instead of seven, and because she could load it with the same nine-millimeter Parabellum rounds used in the Sten submachine gun. She snatched it out of the bag. She released the safety catch, cocked the hammer, extended her arm, and fired two hasty shots at the major.

  She missed him, but her bullets chipped fragments of stone from the wall near his face, and he ducked.

  Michel ran on.

&n
bsp; The major recovered quickly and raised his weapon again.

  As Michel approached his destination, he also came closer to the major, shortening the range. Michel fired his rifle in the major's direction, but the shot went wild, and the major kept his head and fired back. This time, Michel went down, and Flick let out a yell of fear.

  Michel hit the ground, tried to get up, and collapsed. Flick calmed herself and thought fast. Michel was still alive. Genevieve had reached the church porch, and her submachine gun fire continued to draw the attention of the enemy inside the chƒteau. Flick had a chance of rescuing Michel. lt was against her orders, but no orders could make her leave her husband bleeding on the ground. Besides, if she left him there, he would be captured and interrogated. As leader of the Bollinger circuit, Michel knew every name, every address, every code word. His capture would be a catastrophe.