The Winter Agent

by Gareth Rubin

  The transport was two hundred metres away now and the ground vibrated with its approach. Reece looked up the line to the others. All were pressing down as low as they could.

  A hundred metres from Richard’s position. The first bike and the van were within range. Reece’s breath became shallower and his fingers twitched, feeling the copper wire hot and sharp between them.

  He could just make out two shifting figures behind the windscreen of the van, its wipers going as the rain came down harder, like a sheer wall. Those men would be the first to fall when Thomas, who was a fine shot, fired from his position.

  The front motorcycle passed Richard. Reece moved the wire to within a hair’s breadth of the contact. He tensed as he prepared to bring them together to make a circuit. Then he froze. Something had entered into the rain-soaked hinterland of his vision: more movement in the distance, far behind the second motorcycle. A straggler from the transport, perhaps. If it were a civilian vehicle, they would be caught up in the battle. He snatched his fingers back, leaving a gap of air and rain between the wet wires.

  It was coming at great speed: a third German motorcycle, no sidecar. Reece caught his breath as he saw the rider lift his arm and a pair of sharp reports rang out. The rider was firing a pistol into the air. He was signalling to those in front of him. The motorcyclist at the front of the convoy looked over his shoulder. Reece’s carefully mapped-out plan was about to burn.

  The lead motorcyclist steered to the side of the road and slammed on the brakes, skidding to a halt. The van did the same, but its weight meant it couldn’t stop on a whim and it sped past its escort. The second motorcycle was right after it. Behind its rear wheels, the caltrops glinted as Richard hauled them across the road. Reece couldn’t tell what the new rider was doing there, why he was attempting to signal to the others, but he knew that the plan was in danger and he had only seconds to execute it.

  With a silent prayer, he pressed the electric wire to its contact. He saw them unite with a blue spark that instantly disappeared, washed away, and his heart skipped. The calculations on how much plastic explosive would disable but not destroy – had he got it right? He doubted himself. He doubted the figures and the manufacturing process that could have made the mixture too rich. He himself might be the author of Luc’s death, he knew.

  Then there was the sound: the noise of fireworks – a sharp explosion that rent the air. And in the same moment the ground beneath the van’s front axle turned into liquid bursting upwards, lifting the front of the vehicle into the air and tossing it like a ship on high waves.

  ‘Go!’ Reece screamed through the rain.

  The first reply was the hidden Bren. Reece felt the air shiver as its rounds sliced through, aiming at the closer of the two stationary motorcycles behind the van. Its rider and passenger, already alert to danger, jumped from the vehicle and used the sidecar as shielding, firing back as best they could towards the sound of the gun.

  The rider and passenger from the second bike were low in the opposite ditch, less ready for a firefight than their colleagues. Richard sprang up, his Sten ready, and dashed across to flank them.

  At the same time Thomas fired a volley into the front of the van, smashing holes in the windscreen. The driver and his mate ducked down, threw open the doors and leaped out, the driver flattening himself to the soaking ground, a pistol in his hand, while the other, armed with a Schmeisser, dropped into the ditch on the fields side of the road.

  The third motorcyclist arrived at speed, but he hadn’t seen the caltrops and they tore his tyres apart, sending him crashing into a tree, where he lay, unmoving.

  Reece aimed his gun, set to automatic, and fired at the van driver. The bullets sprayed out, the empty cartridges spitting from the side of the stock, but the man’s prone position made it a difficult shot. They went too high, thudding into the van’s wheel. The driver, sensing rather than seeing where the fire was coming from, shot back. Six, seven bullets went over Reece’s head, before the seventh grazed his ear.

  The scene was confusion and chaos now. Although Beggar had the upper hand, trapping and outgunning the Germans, within seconds the initial impact of the assault had worn off and the six surviving soldiers had gained good defensive positions. The shock of fear flowed through Reece. Defeat and death seemed to hover above them.

  The two Germans from the van cab had mistakenly identified the abandoned car as a firing position and their error gave Thomas time to hit the driver’s mate. At the same time, the two men from the first motorcycle spread out and began shooting back at whoever they could see. But Beggar’s fortunes took a boost the next moment as the Bren took down the second motorcycle passenger. That made the numbers even: four soldiers, four agents. In an instant Richard was on top of the second rider. The two men struggled hand to hand, their weapons discarded, water spraying from their limbs and the fetid pools on the road.

  Reece knew they had to press home their advantage before the Germans could retreat to better positions where they might have a chance to defend themselves.

  He emptied his Sten magazine in the direction of the first motorcyclists, hitting one, he thought, then dropped the gun and drew his Colt. He broke cover, jumped out of the ditch and went for the van driver lying on the ground. The soldier saw him coming and shot in Reece’s direction, but his laid-out defensive position now worked against him, making it hard to hit a target moving at speed. Reece saw his angular face and pulled the trigger. His arm tensed for the recoil, but there was only a dull click: his round had jammed in the barrel. In a flicker, the face of the German changed from terror to the amazement of a man spared. He twisted on to his side and scrambled for Reece’s legs, heaving and tipping him to the ground.

  The back of Reece’s head slammed through the flood on the road, into the crumbling, potholed tarmac. Grit and wet stones broke through the skin, into his flesh, scraping on the bone. The impact knocked all thought from him except the instinct to take hold of the body that was now crawling like an insect over his torso, pinning his arms so that he couldn’t reach his gun.

  It was then that muscle memory took over. The toughest part of his SOE training had been a two-week stint on a Highland estate, Arisaig, where two former British officers from the Shanghai Municipal Police had instructed recruits in the dirty fighting they had seen win battles on the docks. By instinct, Reece’s hands grabbed and found a close-cropped head. He brought his knee up sharply, feeling it connect with a curving jaw.

  The man grunted and rolled to the side, spraying brown water across them both. Above, bullets were cracking the air in every direction and the van’s horn was blasting a continuous note over the cries. Reece skewed on to his side, twisting and sliding away in an attempt to get to his feet, but the other man had a firm grip on his jacket and dragged him back. Reece looked now at his adversary – a sergeant in the Feldgendarmerie, the army police who kept the civilian population subservient to the occupying force. He looked to be in his early twenties, but those years of training had given him the muscular physique of an older man. Wet filth covered half his face and had soaked into his fair hair.

  Now that the shock of the assault was over, the German seemed to relish the fight. Perhaps he had looked on at his infantry comrades with jealousy – the Feldgendarmerie would assist the SS rounding up and killing civilians but mostly their duties were to control the population through bullying and intimidation. Now, finally, he was in a real battle. Reece kicked hard, his heel thudding into the man’s armpit to break the grip, allowing him to pull himself away.

  The German dived for his pistol, sending a flurry of sopping dirt across the ground. In the same moment Reece grabbed his Colt, but the magazine had come away when he was knocked down. He turned to see the German, his face running with mud and oily water, drop an empty magazine from his gun and rapidly pull a full one from his belt. Reece raced him, recovering his own magazine and slotting it back into the body of his Colt, his limbs weighed down by the saturated cloth around them. Th
e German levelled the gun. Seeing the barrel pointing straight towards him, Reece made a blink-of-an-eye calculation that its bullet would hit him on his right side, and collapsed his left knee, dropping to that side. One, two bullets went past him. But the Colt was still jammed and Reece had no time to eject the round and re-cock it. He only had time to throw the weapon straight at the sergeant’s face, forcing him to lift his hands up in protection.

  It gave Reece a second’s grace. He drew the stiletto knife from the sheath strapped to his arm and sprang forward. The German loosed two more shots. One went wide, but the other, Reece knew from the feeling of being punched, had found its mark in his left shoulder. It spun him so that his right hand, which grasped the knife, pitched forward towards the German’s chest. But the sergeant, whose reflexes were fast, caught Reece’s wrist before it found its mark and raised it up above both their heads. There was a struggle of strength, and the bullet wound in his shoulder meant Reece’s was ebbing away. There was nothing else for it. He opened up his hand and let the blade fall. At the same second he lifted his left hand, trusting only to instinct, and snatched into the air. His fingers closed on the steel hilt. And his momentum carried it slick into the stomach of the German, slipping under the ribs.

  Reece heaved with his weight and then the full blade was buried in the man and arterial blood was pulsing down the narrow hilt to cover Reece’s hand. The German looked down in amazement and sagged at the knees. For a second, both men stopped still.

  Reece knew what he had to do. He twisted the weapon, opening up the wound. The German screamed out in pain and Reece turned it back to its previous position before lifting it with all his strength to find a lung. He withdrew the knife and the sergeant gasped. It was as if he believed it was over. Reece whirled around behind him, grabbed his chin and stabbed the tip of the knife through the man’s windpipe.

  On his bloody hands, Reece felt the air escaping from the hole in the soldier’s throat. It lasted for two breaths before the muscles fell lifeless and he slumped to the ground. Reece let him drop. It was the first time he had killed anyone he could see and touch. Rain washed the blood from his fingertips in thin streams.

  Coming to himself, his body and clothes soaking with dirty water, he knew that the bullets were still flying. Two more slammed into the side of the truck beside him and he felt a burning in his shoulder. Looking down, he saw it was a shaking mass of red and tattered cloth that looked as if it had exploded outwards and the arm below it was becoming numb, falling to his side.

  He checked around. The momentum of battle was back with the circuit. One of the soldiers from the first bike was shooting at Thomas in the ditch, but Hélène was keeping him pinned down and the other soldier, the one Reece had hit, was lying on the ground, half his head missing. Richard and the other surviving German, who had ridden the second bike, had broken apart and were exchanging fire. As Reece watched, Thomas drew the pin from a Mills and lobbed it towards the soldier opposite him. It went wide and dropped on to the road. The German fired another volley and ducked down. Then the grenade exploded and the whole world became a silent film.

  No noise, no sound, no desperation. Everything seemed to blur. Through the smoke, Reece saw Richard crawling up the road, one leg trailing uselessly behind him. And something terrible, something inhuman, had happened to his face. His lower jaw had been shot away, and it now hung, held only by muscles and ligaments. He held his hands upwards in supplication, begging for aid, unable to ask for it.

  Instinctively, Reece started for him. He didn’t even know if his plan was to cover him or to pull him to safety but, first, he had to get there.

  Almost immediately, Richard stopped and pointed at something further up the road that Reece couldn’t make out. He began to crawl faster, as fast as he could, but he stopped and his body shook seven times, each one for a round fired from a German sub-machine gun behind him. And his body fell in the road. Reece knew then, with a hollow pain, that he had failed him.

  Yet there was no time to mourn. Reece flattened himself to the side of the van and watched the two remaining Germans holding out in covered positions. He had to force them into the open. He scanned the ground and grabbed his Colt, ejecting the jammed round and chambering another before spinning around the corner of the van to see one of the Germans stare at him with an expression of surprise. But Reece froze before he pulled the trigger as another sight stopped him in his tracks.

  Further up the road, coming around the bend, was a bulbous vehicle topped with two heavy weapons: a machine gun and an autocannon that spat explosive armour-piercing shells. ‘Panzerspähwagen!’ Reece screamed at Hélène, rainwater spraying from his skin. It would be upon them in twenty seconds. If it got among them, the battle was lost. The remaining soldiers would regroup behind it and use it as a mobile fortress. She looked where he was pointing and turned the Bren in that direction, although its armour and distance meant there was little point wasting ammunition on its body. ‘Grenades. Go for its wheels.’

  They had to change tactics: now they had to attempt to free the prisoners before they had wiped out the German soldiers, and run.

  Reece fired at the soldier on the ground, who was trying to crawl into a safer position. The bullets went into his back, causing him to shake violently before falling motionless. Reece ran to the rear of the van and tried the handle, praying that the explosion had somehow broken the lock. But he had no such luck.

  He dashed back to the man he had cut apart just moments ago. He was lying on his front, still leaking blood, and Reece turned him over to expose the ragged throat before hunting through his pockets. There it was: a metal ring of keys in the man’s hip pocket.

  The Panzerspähwagen, a four-wheel version built for speed and agility, was a hundred metres away now and bearing down fast. Thomas was shooting at it, although Reece knew he was wasting his time unless he hit the tyres multiple times, and those would be lucky shots. He ran to the lock and tried a key. It didn’t fit. Neither did another and, worse, when he tried to pull it out he found he had pushed it in too hard, his muscles working at their maximum preservation-of-life level, and it was jammed in. He had to patiently work it out, gently twisting and shuffling it until it came away. There was banging from inside, pleading cries to let them out. ‘Wait,’ he whispered under his breath. The third key went in. He paused to hope that it would turn. It did.

  Bullets hit the ground at his feet and Reece looked up to see the 222’s machine gun in its shielded turret strafing the ground between him and the ditch. The remaining agents dropped out of sight and Reece threw open the vehicle door to see a mass of faces, people chained to the floor. One of them he recognized from the previous day – the girl whom the Gestapo had captured outside his shop. He caught the expression of desperation on her face.

  Some of those shackled inside shouted to him, begging him to free them. But one voice stood out. ‘Maxime!’ it cried. Luc was chained with the others to the floor. ‘The photos. I saw the document!’

  Three bullets slammed into the van, tearing and buckling the metal. And then a fourth passed Reece’s hip. And this one found a mark.

  When Reece was a boy he used to go to the pictures. There were films about gangsters that showed men getting shot. The actors would put their hands to their chests, wince and fall to the ground, instantly dead. Very rarely, one would be shot in the forehead and a small black circle without blood would appear. When Reece went to war, he discovered that when a bullet drives into a man’s skull it smashes it to pieces, turning the flesh into a pit and sucking the tissue out through the exit wound. On that country road, he watched as a round from the German machine gun tore the face from an old man chained to the vehicle’s floor, turning the bones of the jaw and the eye socket into fragments. The man wore the clothes of someone who had once been well-to-do. Now they were stained with oil and dirt.

  Luc was still shouting, even more desperate now. ‘Maxime! I saw the images. The counter-attack plan. It comes from a German spy hi
gh up in England.’ He was trying to impart what he had seen. The bullets were going wide – the 222 must have changed direction a little, throwing off the gunner’s aim.

  ‘What?’ Reece demanded, struck by the information.

  ‘Parade, that’s his service name. The plan is called Parade One. It’s …’

  And then, as Reece watched, Luc’s body jerked backwards, thudding against the side of the van.

  Reece dropped to the ground and scuttled around the side to take shelter behind a wheel. More bullets cut into the ground in front of him as the gunner found Reece back in his sights. Reece could roll out and attempt to take out the gunner with his pistol, but the man was crouched behind steel shielding and the chance would be one in a hundred.

  ‘Maxime!’ It was Luc’s voice again, weakly piercing through the metal of the van. He was alive, although clearly hurt. Reece turned all his attention to the words he was shouting. ‘The photos are in my studio. Charlotte knows my hiding place. They’ll … sent, but I …’ The rounds were drowning out his voice.

  ‘Say again!’ Reece knew the risk they were both taking, shouting like this.

  ‘… says so … German radio frequency. I tried to …’ But his voice was muffled by a new metallic sound, centimetres from Reece, as the wheel in front of him began to erupt. He looked up to see that the Panzerspähwagen’s gunner had switched to the autocannon’s explosive shells and was targeting him. ‘Maxime! Get me out!’ and Reece wished that he could but knew it was hopeless; he needed the bolt-cutters to break the chains and even then he would be dead before he got inside.

  The wheel exploded in two. He dived for the ditch, tumbling into it and looking back at the armoured car. It was thirty metres away, no more. And in the distance there was another vehicle closing in – a troop carrier. It was hopeless now.