The Winter Agent

by Gareth Rubin

  A man came into his line of vision and peered down.

  Klaussmann. Klaussmann had found him.

  Reece tried to focus on the here and now, to prove to himself that he was conscious and awake and in charge of his own body. He could resist.

  Above was a concrete ceiling. He had to remind himself of what was going on. Yes, the Gestapo’s favourite interrogation method: they would forcibly submerge him in a bath of ice water until he passed out or told his captors everything they wanted to know. To know it was to have some semblance of control over it.

  ‘Your name is Maxime. Well, that’s what your circuit call you.’

  Reece’s mind raced forward. How did Klaussmann know that? Had it been Charlotte? Had she tricked him again?

  Klaussmann waited a while before speaking again. ‘What’s your full name?’ Reece did his best to look dazed, to play for time before he came up with a strategy for evasion. ‘I’ve been here before, Maxime. More times than I care to remember,’ Klaussmann sighed wearily. ‘Would you like me to turn the lights off? I can do that.’ Reece stared at the wall, playing dumb, half dead, secretly bringing his mind up to speed. Klaussmann waited. ‘You’ve only been through the play-acting at Beaulieu, haven’t you?’ A pause. ‘When were you there? Forty-two? Forty-three? Ah, the rose garden must have been charming in the summer.’

  Klaussmann was right – at the Finishing School they had gone through mock interrogations, dragged from their sleep and subjected to hours of questions and mild physical pressure, informed that it was nothing compared to the violence of a real Gestapo interrogation. Reece realized that Sebastien and the others would be in another of these rooms or waiting in a cell.

  He focused. He had to predict how this would play out. Klaussmann would begin with innocuous questions such as when Reece had trained at Beaulieu and the questions would slowly become more dangerous and the methods more brutal. Agents were trained to hold out against the pain for at least forty-eight hours, to give SOE a chance to limit any damage – change codes, send any surviving contacts underground. He planned to defy it for longer. But the beaches, the meeting with Churchill. That information could change the course of the war. It had to be hidden as deep within himself as it was possible to plunge such a truth.

  He looked at Klaussmann from top to toe, fully awake now. The last time their eyes had met the German had been scrabbling for his gun and Reece for the blade underneath his lapel.

  ‘Would you like me to turn the lights off?’ Klaussmann repeated.

  The lights hurt and Reece wanted respite from their glare. But what he needed more was to understand what Klaussmann wanted.

  ‘Where am I?’ he managed to splutter.

  ‘Oh, somewhere.’ Klaussmann waited. ‘Would you like to know? Well, I will make a deal with you. I will tell you where we are if you tell me something utterly without importance about yourself. You can choose what it is.’ Yes, that was how the interrogations would begin, Reece told himself: seemingly unimportant information at first. Nothing operational. Then more and more demanding, closer to the bone. Coming more to himself, he tested the leather cuffs around his wrists. Klaussmann watched him. ‘You can tell me about Clémence Dubois.’ Despite himself, Reece looked up. Her name sounded strange coming from the German’s mouth. Perhaps it shouldn’t have done. Abwehr officers would have been pronouncing her name for a time. ‘I have her photograph.’ He beckoned to a subordinate, who handed him a white folder. Klaussmann pulled out the sepia-toned picture Reece had seen in her bedroom – the one perhaps taken on holiday. Her dark eyes, shaded from the sun, were the same, looking sadly through you to a point in the distance. On paper, as in life, they never saw you.

  But Reece realized something: Klaussmann didn’t know who Charlotte was. He didn’t know she was with the Abwehr. If he had known, he wouldn’t be asking Reece about her. Not so directly, anyway. The animosity between the intelligence services had kept her unknown to him.

  And Klaussmann’s question also suggested that none of the other people who had been in Charlotte’s house had been picked up. Luckily for them, they had run when Reece’s presence had been detected and had all gone before the Gestapo arrived.

  Klaussmann gazed at the image. ‘She’s very beautiful.’ He placed the photograph in the folder and handed it back. The other man brought him a wooden chair. ‘I will explain something.’ Reece sighed deeply, his lungs beginning to work again in their natural rhythm, his head clearing. ‘It doesn’t matter where we are. What matters is that we have as much time as we need.’

  ‘Tell me who informed on us.’

  Klaussmann seemed unperturbed. ‘If I gave you a name, would you even believe me?’

  ‘Try me.’ He knew that he wouldn’t be able to trust it, but he clutched at the straw.

  ‘Not yet, my friend. It is an exchange. First you tell me something, then I will tell you something.’

  ‘I’ll tell you nothing.’

  ‘Well, then,’ Klaussmann said, getting up from his chair. ‘I have been polite.’ He walked out of Reece’s sight. A fat man, stripped to the waist, strode in front of Reece and pulled a cosh from a loop on his belt. In reflex, Reece tried to lift his hands to ward off the blow, but they only strained against the leather straps. The cosh came down in his eye socket. Reece heard Klaussmann’s voice again. ‘I won’t warn you again, Maxime.’

  Three hours later, Reece’s body was a map of what the guards had done to him. Dark patches spread here and there, cut through by red lines and yellow pools of liquid under the surface.

  Two men, covered in sweat like Reece himself, were taking it in turns to beat his bones with their coshes.

  ‘Stop it now. Leave us,’ Klaussmann ordered. Reece lifted his bleeding face. Klaussmann settled himself into the chair. He was holding the Proust novel in which Reece had recorded the movements of German officers who visited his shop. ‘Our regiments. You have been busy,’ he said, lifting the book. ‘Now, let us start again.’

  Reece gazed at him. ‘Will you … tell me something?’ he rasped. His throat was dry through thirst. He wheezed air.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Klaussmann looked into Reece’s face, now a seething and torn mass of craters and bulges. Slowly, the British agent’s eyes lifted to meet Klaussmann’s. The lids closed in pain and suffering and the head lolled to the side. Reece’s lips came together and he attempted to speak, to drop a word or two, but the sound was caught in his mouth and his tongue refused to function properly. ‘What?’ Klaussmann asked, bringing his face closer.

  Reece lifted his forehead then crashed it down on to the bridge of the Gestapo officer’s nose, smashing the cartilage outwards. Klaussmann roared in pain and threw himself backwards, almost tipping over. Reece’s lips spread and he panted in shallow laughter. Then something metal cracked into the back of his head and it all turned dark.

  CHAPTER 19

  16 February 1944

  When news of Reece’s capture crossed the desk of Major Daniel Delaney the following morning, he sat back in his chair, passed his hands across his eyes and saw again the face of his one-time-girlfriend Elena, who had been beaten to death by the Gestapo. But he had been through such news too often to be disabled by it.

  He went directly to the Cabinet War Rooms, to find Churchill in conference with Huw Evans from 5, and showed them both the message he had been sent. The stamp at the top, ‘Most Secret Sources’, indicated that it had come from the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, who had been intercepting German intelligence and military traffic.

  It contained a message sent by a minor Gestapo officer, one Major Klaussmann, to Headquarters in Berlin.

  ‘Just tell me what he says,’ Churchill said gruffly. There was a half-eaten plate of spam and bread on the desk beside him. Churchill had his own bedroom in the bunker and sometimes barely saw daylight for forty-eight hours. ‘No time to trawl through German cables.’

  ‘It looks like Maxime has been caught. We can presume he’s being inter
rogated.’

  ‘How long do you think he’ll hold out?’ Churchill growled. ‘We don’t want all of this to be for nothing.’ Evans took the signal to read it through.

  ‘It’s hard to say. Bletchley is deciphering the cables as top priority.’

  ‘You think Maxime will survive the interrogation?’

  ‘Perhaps. At least Jericho will give him a chance.’

  ‘Evans?’ Churchill said.

  ‘I say Jericho’s the best chance we have, Prime Minister,’ he replied. ‘I’ll speak to 6 as well to see if they can find out anything in the meantime.’

  ‘Do it.’

  Reece lay on the concrete floor of his cell, his swollen and bruised eyelids drooping. During the night, every time he looked to have fallen asleep, the guards had either sprayed him with water from a hose or administered a beating, and each time he had felt his mind and his resolve weakening.

  In the course of their training, Reece and the other agents had been taught that, if captured, it was best to go along with instructions – but to do so slowly. Always make the Germans wait for a second before acceding to their demands, they were told. That way, for a moment, you are in control. Outright defiance simply gives them an excuse to kick you into submission. So when the guard told Reece to stand he sat for a couple of seconds, as if deciding whether this was what he wanted to do. Then he stood, only to find he was so exhausted he had to use the wall to brace himself. The guard pulled him around and cuffed his hands together.

  ‘Out,’ he was ordered.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  The guard’s only answer was to jab him in the back with his cosh. Reece hoped he could hold out again today. The longer it went without him breaking, the colder the trail for the Gestapo to the rest of the circuit would be.

  The resistants’ cells were in the horizontal bar of the cross-shaped prison, guarded by Germans. The ordinary criminal prisoners were guarded by French warders in the vertical bar. A central tower where the two beams intersected allowed the Germans and the French warders to keep an avid watch on all the prisoners.

  When Reece was shoved into the interrogation room he saw Klaussmann, as before, with the ghost of a smile on his thin lips. Reece was strapped into the chair, although this time his head was restrained too. He didn’t resist; there would be no point. He did notice some bruising around the bridge of Klaussmann’s nose.

  ‘We spoke yesterday of your trip to Saint-Cloud,’ Klaussmann said, wandering over to the corner of the room. ‘Do you know it well?’ Reece looked the Gestapo officer up and down. ‘Had you been before?’ So, Klaussmann’s plan was to get to him through Charlotte. Did they have her? Had she been with them all the time after all? The silence was filled by the click of the guard’s heels on the concrete floor and the swish of a cosh raised. Klaussmann lifted his palm to stop the man. Air wheezed through Reece’s throat, in and out. ‘If you will only tell me if you have been before, you can have some food and water. Would you like that?’ Klaussmann took a pack of Turkish cigarettes from his pocket. He lit one. ‘Would you like to smoke?’ Reece shook his head. ‘Very bad for the lungs. But your lungs sound bad already.’ He took a long draw. ‘So let’s start again. Do you know Saint-Cloud?’

  ‘Go to hell.’

  An unseen fist cracked into Reece’s jaw. He felt it dislocate then snap back into place with searing-hot pain. He wanted to put his hand to it, but they were held by the leather.

  ‘I said, do you know Saint-Cloud?’ This time the fist thudded into his temple.

  Hemsall Sands was a short and isolated stretch of the Dorset coastline in southern England. Part of a wide bay, it had a beach that began as sand at the shoreline but soon became pebbles further back. It was topped with large grass-covered dunes, and behind them a road led to a small village consisting of a handful of houses, a shop, a church and a tiny village school. The village had recently been evacuated, however, and the beach covered with lines of spiralling barbed wire and huge iron tank traps.

  Some way along the coastline, low cliffs hovered over the sea. On one of the cliffs, the German agent Parade stood with a telescope wrapped in sacking and propped up on a low brick wall. The targets he was watching were too far for binoculars to be effective. He looked one more time along the forlorn beach that had been turned from a place where families would take giddy children to one where men would have their clothes and flesh grabbed at by spiked wire while mortars fired over their heads. Then he scanned the horizon again. Nothing.

  He looked over to the village. There was the little Norman church, forlorn in its churchyard peppered with leaning gravestones. There the shop and there the single-room school. How many of its past pupils were now readying to embark for France? Hard to say. He spun back to the simmering sea, peering east. Empty as ever. He spat on the ground. They were …

  Wait. There. Yes, there was something: a grey mass suspended on the horizon, appearing around the headland. Finally.

  It was steaming from Portsmouth, Parade knew, as he refocused the telescope. Good, not much longer to wait. He drew his jacket tighter – it was a cold morning, but he was in light civilian wear so that if a patrol happened to come across him he could claim he was merely a lost holidaymaker.

  The flotilla, stretching three or four kilometres in full, drifted across the open sea, its lines solidifying into a corvette leading nine LST tank landing ships, each carrying four hundred British and Canadian soldiers and sailors. Nipping along their sides was the motor torpedo boat escort. Parade checked his watch. It was 6.50 a.m. He had suggested the E-boats intercept the flotilla at 7 a.m. The E-boats must be close now, their powerful diesel motors thudding them through the waves – so long as they hadn’t run into a Royal Navy patrol in the Channel. That was entirely possible, of course. If so, it would spoil what the German high command no doubt considered an excellent round of practice for the Kriegsmarine, gearing up to repel D-Day just as the Allies were preparing to prosecute it. A show of strength and shark-like stealth by the Germans today would also put the fear of God into the Allied troops – and strength of morale would be as much a factor as the strength of arms that day.

  At 6.58 a.m. the convoy was about half a mile offshore. The LSTs – ‘Large Slow Targets’, to their sardonic occupants – took up their positions in a ragged line, waiting for the signal to approach the beach and rehearse rapid disembarkation. In order to acclimatize them to the chaotic noise of an amphibious landing, the corvette began to shell the beach. Parade watched the shells land and blast the pebbles into the air, sucking dark sand into high vortexes that spread over the beach.

  The corvette should have been monitoring the open sea, but Parade guessed its crew was focused on the beach, watching the explosions send up plumes of dust. Through his telescope he saw the E-boats speeding in at forty knots.

  As they approached through the freezing water he thought of the young man he had met in a café in Erith, the one who said he was about to receive beach training. But he thought of him only briefly. There were, simply put, a billion young men in the world. Not all of them would be grieved for.

  The first the LSTs knew of the E-boats was when the side of the middle craft erupted like the sand on the beach. Parade watched as the steel blew apart. Another second and the boat was listing in the water, then rolling over like a shot animal. Another explosion erupted in its rear, flames spreading across the deck. Shells continued to rain on the beach as the gunners on the corvette failed to spot the danger that was now upon the flotilla.

  Then another LST, and another, shook with explosions – torpedoes and surface guns buffeting them from side to side. Those few boats left undamaged were scattering, but they were heavy, slow-moving vehicles built for stability on the Channel crossing, not for speed. The first one hit was beginning to slip down into the water. Hundreds of men in battle dress, weighed down with equipment, were jumping from its side. Parade couldn’t hear, but he knew they were crying out for help. Then the E-boat cannons opened up on th
ose in the water.

  Suddenly the shelling from the corvette ceased as its commander became aware, and its guns swivelled towards the German boats. But it was too late – the German raiders had already turned and begun dashing for the open sea, leaving a churn of men and torn metal. Carnage was all around, as if the sea itself had torn the boats to pieces: two of the LSTs were engulfed in fire, three more were nearly submerged and, as they sank, they sucked scores of men down with them.

  Parade scanned the scene. He guessed that there were two hundred men in the freezing February water, most with large packs strapped to their backs. Some were struggling feebly towards already overladen lifeboats, although there would be little point. Most were simply sinking, their arms above their heads, reaching out for a rescue that would never come. Some of the lifeboats were limping towards the shore. A few sodden packs were floating on the surface, their pale owners now drifting downward, no longer able to cry out for help.

  It appeared to Parade that of those men here who had seen the sun rise, one in two would see it set again. It had all taken four minutes.

  Around a hundred and fifty thousand troops would land or wade ashore on D-Day. If the Kriegsmarine could repeat the sort of success he had just witnessed, that would mean an entire city of men at the bottom of the sea. They were men with names and wives and sons and homes, just like the men before him, screaming to the sky as their limbs became colder.

  And this is war, he thought to himself. I did not choose it and it is a necessity of man. This will not be the last time.

  He mentally noted the destruction, the number of deaths and how the boats had panicked, and retracted his telescope before placing it inside a green knapsack and walking away along the cliffs.