by James Philip
‘If I let you clean yourself up you won’t do anything dumb? Right?’
Clara had got wise by then.
The cabin only had a couple of rooms, a bedroom with just a mattress on the boards, and a kitchen that only an old-time dirt farmer would have thought worthy of the name. There was an outside John. In the summer you would have to worry about rattlers every time you took a dump; at this time of year, it was just cold and everything was damp, the whole Goddamned country. He had watched the woman strip off to her underwear, wash herself from a bowl of cold water.
There was an old pot-bellied stove in one corner, a little kindling and it was the work of only a few minutes to smash up the cabin owner’s favourite rocking chair.
Clara had volunteered to heat up the soup.
Twice, that afternoon and night he took her out to the John, watched her do her business. You never, ever let a prisoner out of your sight, or trusted them, or believed a word they said to you.
‘Do you plan to use me again?’ She had asked as night fell.
‘Yeah, do I have to tie you up again?’
‘No,’ she said but she had sobbed when he was done with her that first night at the cabin, like she had the previous night. She went quiet on him after he took her again, and again; then he trussed her like before, except not so tight that the ropes pinched her any harder than they needed to.
She had got all tearful on him that morning even though he had been gentler with her last night. And then she had tried to run away…
He had caught her fast.
Slapped her about, open hand stuff, nothing likely to break anything or leave permanent scars; it was not as if he was any kind of hoodlum.
“Please, just get it over with,’ Clara Schouten begged the moment he removed her gag. She stumbled as he lifted her to her feet and propped her against the side of the Dodge. ‘Just kill me!’
Why am I just standing here?
Looking at her like I don’t know how this has to end?
What was it that Rachel said?
‘It shouldn’t make any difference if they cry but lately, it does…’
Kurt stared at the woman he had kidnapped, beaten, humiliated, repeatedly violated as if she was a piece of meat and as the tears rolled down her cheeks, her left eye swollen, mottle blue and almost closed and her bottom lip fat and bloody, it was almost as if he had forgotten who and what he was…
What the fuck am I doing here…
He stared, and he stared.
He was paralysed by indecision and for the first time in his life, a numbing canker of…crippling doubt.
In a trance the switchblade was in his hand again.
Clara Schouten screamed and tried to shrink away.
It was impossible, she was hard up against the Dodge.
There was no room to move.
No place to run, or hide.
The blade flashed dully in the winter sun.
She shut her eyes and waited to die.
Chapter 28
Sunday 5th February 1967
Battleship Jean Bart, Capraia Isola, Ligurian Sea
First Captain Dmitry Kolokoltsev awakened to the feel of the new motion of the ship. Overnight – he was beginning to regain a sense of the passing of time, a thing Aurélie assured him was proof of his continuing recovery – the battleship seemed to be riding easier, working with rather than against the seas.
The former KGB man had only been dimly aware of the arrival of the British, of the sick bay and the dressing rooms being re-organised around him and several of the other seriously injured men and women being removed. He had been unconscious, drugged before, during and for many hours after the bombing of the fleet.
He had missed all the excitement…
Almost, because his dreams were vivid, lurid, haunting nightmares.
Around him was the infernal chaos, sounds of suffering, the moaning of the terribly wounded, the desperate response of crew members unable to cope with the casualties queued up on stretchers in the adjoining passageways. The absence of modern medicines had turned the sick bay compartment into a Hellish place. He remembered, or at least he thought he remembered – the last few days were a blur – things which he now suspected were just more bad dreams. Waking bad dreams as he slipped in and out of consciousness. He had no idea if had imagined the blood pooled on the deck, the discarded dressings, cut away clothing, the screams of those being operated on without anaesthetic other than, if they could keep it down, a few mouthfuls of the rotgut hooch distilled aboard…
Now, as he blinked at his surroundings, around him all was tranquility, antiseptic cleanliness and attendants, nurses for all he knew, instantly moved to the side of their cot-bound patients if they raised a hand or tried to speak.
Seeing that he was conscious a man stood over him, smiled comfortingly, took his pulse, felt his brow and made notes on a clipboard, returning the same to its unseen place somewhere at the foot of the cot.
“How do you feel this morning, Captain Kolokoltsev?” The man asked, talking slowly in English.
Learning English was a thing that every ambitious KGB officer knew to be essential to his future prospects but the one-time Red Navy Officer, having struggled for a couple of years to attain a basic proficiency in the language, had not actually spoken it for over five years.
“Not so bad,” he muttered, focusing on the man, whom he determined must be one of the men the English had left on board the Jean Bart.
Aurélie had reported that the Royal Navy, their ‘saviours’, had originally transferred over a hundred of their personnel to the battleship; and that those remaining were mainly engineering, communications and medical orderlies under the command of a British surgeon. She had also informed him, without beating about the bush, that if the ‘English had not emptied their medicine cabinets for our people’, he and a lot of others would be dead by now.
Kolokoltsev had been astonished to discover that the British had sent helicopters to carry the Jean Bart’s most seriously ill men and women, and a child also, to one of their ships which had ‘proper operating theatres’. Apparently, there had been some question about his being airlifted but in the end Surgeon Lieutenant Braithwaite, who had already assumed the status of a minor saint aboard the flagship, had decided that his injuries were ‘manageable’ where he was, and that therefore, the considerable risks of moving him were unjustified.
The Russian licked his dry lips.
“We unhooked you from your saline drip a while back. You must be thirsty?”
The man held his head while he drank, sucking cool, cold water through a straw as if he was a man lost in the desert who had stumbled across an unmapped oasis.
“Steady, steady,” he was counselled gently.
“Let me,” another, feminine whisper interjected.
“He’s better again this morning, Ma’am,” the man murmured as he departed.
“Good,” Aurélie Faure said simply. “That is good…”
“I still feel like a T-54 just rolled over me,” Dmitry Kolokoltsev complained wryly as he enjoyed the woman re-positioning his pillows. “How is l’admiral?”
‘L’amiral is having the time of his life!” Aurélie giggled. She was as tired as any of them, and actually, still a little seasick which she had not expected on such a big ship. But then she had not expected the Jean Bart to be tossed about like – an albeit – very large cork in the wilderness of white horses and roaring winds of the Ligurian Sea.
“I bet he is!” The Russian retorted, trying not to laugh because he knew it would hurt.
Aurélie grabbed the guard rail of the cot, waiting for the ship to roll back somewhere near to the horizontal. For much of the last twenty-four hours the surviving ships of the fugitive Villefranche Squadron had been sheltering in what Rene called ‘the lee’ of the northernmost island of the Tuscan Archipelago, Capraia, ‘so that our people on the other ships, especially the smaller ones, can have a little respite’.
Finally, it
seemed the storm was starting to ‘blow itself out’ and that ‘it should be fairly smooth sailing from now on’.
Her stomach would believe that when it happened!
Although Rene made light of his injuries, Surgeon Lieutenant Braithwaite was unconvinced that he was anywhere near as fit as he claimed, as evinced by his regular treks up to the bridge of the leviathan to check up on his reluctant patient.
The rest of the time Rene sat in his command chair on the compass platform, the lord of all he surveyed, blissfully at peace with the world for the first time Aurélie could remember.
Serge Benois periodically reported to the bridge and stood a long watch, otherwise, Rene and the English officer, Lieutenant Moss carried the burden.
The two men, the haggard saviour of the Villefranche Fleet and the youthful Englishmen had already become firm friends, chatting away the long hours on the bridge.
Keith Moss had been stiff, wary when he first came aboard.
Now, like Rene, Aurélie could tell that he was having the time of his life.
“Rene says the fleet will need to take on fuel at Naples. Captain O’Reilly has detached HMS Dundee to make the necessary arrangements with the Italian authorities. I think the plan is for a tanker to come up from Malta to meet us in the Bay in two days’ time, or maybe, three. The plan keeps changing because of the storm.”
Dmitry Kolokoltsev knew he must be getting better because it was starting to worry him that he had only the vaguest idea what had happened in the last week.
“Forgive me, you must have told me all sorts of things but I have no idea how the British came to be here, on board…”
Aurélie pulled up a chair.
“You were very unwell. I talked to you just to talk to you,” she smiled, her weariness evaporating, “as I did to the others, because I hoped it would help. Most of the time I did not know what I was saying,’ she confessed, sheepishly.
She briefly recounted the fraught radio conversations with Captain O’Reilly, about HMS Campbeltown coming alongside, and Rene surrendering the fleet. Then the arrival of two more of the British destroyers, how Surgeon Lieutenant Braithwaite and his men had taken over the sick bay, and how in no time at all how supplies and specialists had transferred onto not just the Jean Bart but all the other big ships. She recounted the way the three British destroyers had blazed away at the bombers attacking the fleet, and desperately tried to rescue survivors of the sunken ships from the oily waters of the bay. Finally, she told him about the decision to sail for Malta, where everybody on board the French ships would be offered the chance to ‘join the fight’ or to ‘return to civilian life.’
Suddenly things started making sense, with context and chronology approximately aligned, and Dmitry Kolokoltsev was, for the first time in a week or so, more or less, cognisant of the state of the world around him.
“What happens to mongrels such as me?” He inquired wanly.
Aurélie had already thought about that.
“You are an honorary Frenchman now; an officer of the Villefranche Squadron,” she stated, and with a shrug, added: “You fought with us against the Front Internationale. The British know that. Rene thinks the British will want to ‘debrief’ you when we get to Malta. However, we are not prisoners. That is a thing Captain O’Reilly made very, very clear.” She reached for and held the man’s right hand. “I have spoken to Lieutenant Moss, the senior Royal Navy officer on board the ship. He says that the ‘normal drill’ for any Soviet citizen who surrenders or who voluntarily hands themselves over to the British authorities, is that they are given the choice of ‘joining the fight’, and of living under the laws of ‘the Commonwealth’, whatever that means, or of returning home. He says quite a lot of former prisoners of war and refugees are already living freely in England, some may even have signed up to fight with the British forces. He admitted that he did not know a lot about it but he said that he thinks most of the Russians captured on Malta in 1964 – apart from the ones who murdered civilians – were eventually sent to the British Isles where so far as he knows, practically all of them were assimilated into civilian society and handed British passports.”
The former KGB man frowned.
“Seriously?”
“Yes,” she nodded. “I think the British are so tired of fighting that anybody who is an enemy of their enemies, is their friend. You are no friend of the FI, or those unspeakable Krasnaya Zarya bastards. Therefore,” she concluded, “you are their friend.”
This was all quite a lot to absorb.
Aurélie released his hand, patted his arm.
“Now, you must rest. You are safe, mon amie.”
Aurélie remained in the sick bay and the nearby, much modified casualty clearing station where the less seriously injured were being given their mid-day meals, helping as best she could, and just…being there.
She was, after all, la femme de l'amiral.
The Admiral’s woman…
All pretence was gone now.
Oddly, there had been no moment when she had ceased to be the Admiral’s faithful secretary and become, proudly, his woman. Nothing had been said.
Nothing had needed to be said.
As the Jean Bart had shouldered into the first big seas beyond the shelter of the Bay of Villefranche-sur-Mer, she had felt Rene’s arm circling her shoulders, and leaned against him.
They were on the bridge, surrounded by their people and he had drawn her to him.
She had kissed his cheek.
And everything had changed.
Chapter 29
Monday 6th February 1967
Headquarters Free French 2nd Corps, Châlons-sur-Marne
“Ha!” Major General Francis St John Waters, VC, chortled happily as he digested the contents of the message flimsy a French staffer had just handed him.
It was about time they got some good news!
It seemed that the Senior Service had successfully spirited away what was left of the French Mediterranean Fleet, including a battleship and a modern aircraft carrier, from the clutches of those perfidious scoundrels in Clermont-Ferrand!
“My word,” he sighed in satisfaction, ‘the Lady will be even more chuffed with her Admirals when she hears about this!” He observed to his companions in the Officers Mess at the Hotel de Ville.
The snow had finally relented twenty-four hours ago, and with the wind gusting at a mere twenty or thirty miles-an-hour, the blizzard was reluctantly loosening its grip on Picardy and the Marne Valley. A new spirit of optimism filled the air and provisional movement orders had been sent out to the leading assault battalions; orders to be confirmed around midnight if the current forecast for cold but clear weather for the next two to three days still held.
“My, my, another one of the Navy’s Nelsonian cutting out operations, what!”
Truth be told, not all his French comrades were wholly of the same mind on the subject. The apparent Soviet bombing attack on the Villefranche Squadron – which might have cost as many as three or four hundred lives – and the subsequent ‘escorting’ of the undamaged French ships out to sea, presumably into internment somewhere in the Mediterranean, smacked to many Frenchmen of a re-run of the Mers El Kébir betrayal of 1940. True, the British had not fired on French ships in port but the whole affair still had a damnably unsettling ring about it.
Had the Villefranche Squadron not capitulated; would the Royal Navy have fired on it as it had on Admiral Marcel-Bruno Gensoul’s ships in July 1940. Almost certainly, was the general consensus.
Fortunately, General Alain de Boissieu, the Supreme Commander of all Allied Forces in France (SCAFF), was less preoccupied with the what ifs of French mid-twentieth century naval history, than he was with the reality of the Soviet intervention at Villefranche, when Frank Waters strolled into the Supreme Commander’s map room that morning.
Contrary to the ex-SAS man’s jaundiced expectations, the fact that Field Marshal Sir Michael Carver had been trapped in Châlons-sur-Marne for nearly three da
ys by the blizzard, had done a great deal to heal the lingering mistrust between the two men.
The Chief of the Defence Staff, notwithstanding he had proven himself to be the finest, most adroit and resourceful British battlefield tactician of his generation; was never going to be the most clubbable or personable man in Christendom. Superficially, he and Alain de Boissieu might have been made to rub each other up the wrong way. However, cloistered in the Hotel de Ville the two men had talked military history, strategy and tactics and unexpectedly, although they had differed over many things, clearly discovered, and developed an abiding respect for where the other man was coming from.
Frank Waters did not think it was anything to do with a meeting of minds, or any of that psychological mumbo jumbo. He had decided it was simpler than that.
It more to do with the fact that up until that point, Alain de Boissieu had never really believed that the great general who had Cannaed two Soviet Tank Armies, took him very seriously, let alone respected his own grasp of battlefield realities. In the Second War de Boissieu had led a cavalry charge against Nazi panzers; for a couple of days in the Western Desert in 1941 Michael Carver and a gang of relatively junior staff officers in XXX Corps had virtually been left to fight Afrika Corps on their own, because their own high command was all at sea. The one was an exemplar of reckless courage under fire, the other possibly the coolest, most calculating mind in the British Army. And yet they had buried the hatchet, agreed a modus vivendi, finally accepting that their fates were inexplicably locked together.
I never used to go in for any of this soul-searching guff…
It was the Lady’s influence, of course.
He wrote his wife letters, chatty mainly inconsequential nonsense – she got quite enough remorselessly grim, serious, cerebral reading matter from her official cables and reports – which he hoped might cheer her up, brighten her days.
Her letters tended to be brief, a little formal, stultified, in fact. That was her nature, the very private public woman. Not that she could not be sharp, distanced in private; it was just that now and then she let him into her real, inner world and a scintilla of affection and intimacy from the woman he loved was worth a deluge of it from anybody else he had ever known.