The Winter Agent

by Gareth Rubin

  In that case, the British planes would sweep in and bomb it all to pieces.

  Reece was pushed naked through the door, to find that there was no one in the interrogation room. He guessed the beating he was about to receive was to soften him up for more detailed questioning about the invasion – when, how many men, what armour would support them. He felt empty of hope as his wrists were bound in leather cuffs and hoisted to a hook in the ceiling. He hated himself for being weak and revealing the secret that he had known was the one truth he had to guard with his life, no matter what they did. As the rope was pulled tighter and his wrists lifted higher, the ligaments in his shoulders began to strain and tear, but he tried not to cry out, knowing that it would do nothing but encourage them. He bit his tongue and wished not that he had a gun or a knife but only that he had the L-pill, the little glass capsule of potassium cyanide, within his reach. The rope tightened and he felt the bones in his shoulders dislocate.

  ‘Are you enjoying yourself?’ one of the guards asked. ‘We are.’

  Reece groaned in pain.

  ‘We have you for your whole life,’ the other man called over. ‘We end it when we want. Your life belongs to us.’

  The door opened. Reece attempted to turn his head to see who had entered, but it doubled the burning in his shoulders. And he had no need.

  ‘You two out,’ Klaussmann’s voice ordered. ‘Captain Reece. My superiors in Germany are very interested in what you have been saying. You have told us the most important thing so there is no reason not to give us some more trivial details. We let you sleep last night and we will let you sleep again tonight, so long as we speak just a little today.’

  ‘I can’t tell you more. I can’t.’

  ‘You will, Captain Reece. You must believe me on that.’

  As 140 Wing reached the English Channel, the murky water below swirled as if countless creatures were fighting below its surface. In Mosquito HX922/EG-F, Pickard’s navigator, Bill Broadley, pointed through the Perspex window to their port side, where their fighter escort of Typhoons shimmered and moved into their bodyguard positions on the bombers’ wingtips. The escort would fly at their side when crossing the sea and approaching the target, on the lookout for German fighter patrols. They would then hover above the Mossies as the bombers hit the target. ‘We’re bloody lucky they found us,’ Pickard said through the intercom. The wing dropped down, speeding at fifteen metres above the surface of the water to avoid detection by the German radar. The target was an hour away. They accelerated to 400km/h. ‘Damn blizzard,’ Pickard said through the intercom as they reached the halfway point across the Channel. He counted his aircraft. Four of the Mosquitoes were already missing, and he guessed – hoped – they had turned back after being separated from the others by the thick snow. ‘Right. Radio silence from now on.’

  He pushed on until, at 11.57 a.m., 140 Wing reached the town of Doullens, and turned south-east, above a brilliantly white landscape that reflected what light the sun could force through the clouds. Two more minutes and they were over the town of Albert, following the straight old Roman road south-west. Pickard’s heartbeat rose with the sound of his plane’s engines. And then he saw their target: Amiens prison in the snow.

  ‘Captain Reece?’ Klaussmann said. He drank some water and held the glass in front of Reece’s dry lips. ‘How many men will the American government be committing to the invasion?’

  He had betrayed them all. He had betrayed himself, his circuit and all those men who would be wading ashore under a hailstorm of German bullets. He had lain awake all night clawing at his scalp, as if he could tear away his weakness and guilt. He knew what he had done: he had condemned hundreds of thousands of men to death. He had condemned France to endless night under the German sky. He wished he had died in the drop into France, or on the road to Amiens, instead of Richard. He wished himself dead now.

  ‘No, I can’t.’ His voice was thin.

  ‘We already know, but my superiors want to confirm it. Superiors – we all have to deal with their whims. How many men?’ And as Klaussmann said it, he heard a distant buzzing in the air and looked towards the sky.

  At 12.02 p.m., two minutes behind schedule, the first three of the six New Zealand aircraft dropped to just four metres above the ground, bursting past sparse hedgerows at 300km/h. The lead pilot gripped his control column so hard that the frozen skin on his knuckles cracked. Then he pressed the button to release two 200-kilogram bombs.

  The first was an armour-piercing munition designed to break through the wall; the second was packed with high explosives, designed to blow everything to pieces.

  The bombs struck the base of the eastern wall of Amiens prison and thudded to the ground without exploding. The pilot jerked his column back, climbing as quickly as he could, straight up, to clear the wall that rose above him and threatened to smash his crate to firewood. The bricks were so close he could have reached out and touched them. Another second’s delay would have seen him the first casualty of the op, dead before it had even begun. But, praying for speed and time, he just made it, tipping over the height of the wall and passing so close to a German guard in a watchtower he could see the tip of the man’s cigarette burning red. The soldier was too shocked to fire the machine gun he was manning and the aircraft’s slipstream made his cigarette glow brighter before it fell to the floor of the watch post.

  The second plane followed and dropped its bombs. Then the third, each one fighting to ascend vertically before reaching the double-layer brick wall that had stood for the best part of a century. The German guard now grabbed his gun and pointed it at the fin-like tailplane of the fourth Mossie. The aircraft was in his sights but he never got the chance to pull the trigger because, below him, the eleven-second fuse on the first bombs activated, blowing a hole in the base of the wall about ten metres from the front gate. Then the second bombs. Then the third. And then the fourth. And at last there was a gap in the wall five metres wide.

  The shockwaves from the blasts carried through the main building, making the floor shiver.

  Klaussmann blinked and looked to the ceiling, as if he would be able to penetrate it with his stare. The roar of planes overhead was so fast and close that he instinctively ducked. ‘What …’

  ‘An air strike,’ Reece rasped in English. ‘Jericho. It’s Jericho.’ He began to laugh and silently prayed that it would kill them both. ‘And the walls came tumbling down.’ The explosions felt like a balancing of the scales. He had betrayed himself and all those men in the landing craft. Jericho felt like the wrath of God coming down on him and Klaussmann to scour away the stain. Vengeance in fire and shaking earth.

  They heard more engines coming in – three New Zealand planes breaching the northern wall as their mates had punched a hole in the eastern – and the floors trembled again, harder and louder.

  ‘I …’ Klaussmann began, trailing off without completing his thought. He pulled himself together and strode to the door. ‘Go and find out what’s going on,’ he ordered the two guards who had been waiting outside, stunned into inaction.

  What was going on, Reece could hear, was a torrent of noise from the cells, as if the Tower of Babel were coming down. The prisoners were shouting to each other, saying that the outer wall had been knocked to the ground. ‘Do you hear me, Klaussmann?’ Reece cried with what strength he had left. ‘The walls came tumbling down!’

  Above them, the lead Australian aircraft swept in above the main building. Its target was the mess hall, where the German guards were assembled for their midday meal. It dropped two more bombs straight through the roof, crushing the wooden tables underneath and sending the German guards scrambling away, and soared off as the munitions blew the windows and walls outwards in a cloud of splinters, leaving the guards torn and dead in the dust.

  Four more bombs fell from the other Australian aircraft, slamming into the tip of the opposite spur of the building, each one placed and chosen to free the prisoners from their cells. And so shockwave a
fter shockwave from the high-explosive munitions wracked through the prison structure, each time blasting more cell doors from their hinges.

  Reece twisted around to see Klaussmann screaming at the two Gestapo men. ‘They’re hitting the –’ And then Reece felt himself flying through the air.

  For a time, there was nothing but darkness. Darkness and a sound like a distant whistle. Gradually, the whistle became howls, screams and cries.

  When his eyes opened, he was enveloped in a brown mist. It settled on him, stinging, gritty and dirty. He rubbed it away and it turned into a foul paste squeezing out of the corners of his eyes. Many voices were shouting, desperate pleas for help, French and German mixed into each other. Reece’s whole body felt numb until, in a rush like a tidal wave, the pain hit.

  The jolt of it lifted his shoulders, creasing him in the middle. And it was then that he realized he was no longer hanging from the ceiling. More than that: as his eyes focused, they saw that the whole ceiling was gone; the solid masonry and rough plaster that had stood for a century now lay on the floor. The hook from which his wrists had hung was embedded in the cracked wall.

  He struggled up, his hands still bound by the leather straps.

  ‘Halt.’ He felt it as much as heard it. ‘Halt.’ It was feebly whined out in German, robbed of its power. Prostrate in the doorway, Siegfried Klaussmann was staring at him, face-up, from the floor. The Gestapo officer stretched a hand towards him, but it was no longer a hand; all the fingers had been shorn off. His other palm pushed weakly at a heavy wooden beam across his chest. Through the blurring dust, Reece’s eyes met his. And Klaussmann seemed to understand how things had changed. He tried impotently to scrabble away through the dirt, the debris of the war that had come closer to him than he could ever have imagined. ‘Please help me,’ he said faintly. Reece hauled himself to his feet unsteadily, one of his knees feeling swollen or even fractured. He felt as hollowed out as the building that had buried them both. ‘Please help me.’

  Raw with the pain, Reece stumbled over, resting for a moment against what was left of the door frame, now nothing more than a testament to Reece’s captivity. Outside was havoc without end. The brown cloud hung everywhere like thick smog, so that he could see no further than he could reach. The railing along the edge of the landing had been blown away, leaving a sheer drop into the ocean of spiralling dust. Bodies brushed past him – prisoners or guards, it was hard to tell and impossible to care, when they had all been plunged into the same chaos. Reece gazed at the man at his feet. Then he dropped to his knees and placed his palms under the wooden beam. It was heavy but gave way a little. Klaussmann, too, put his good hand under it, pushing as hard as he could, and between them they managed to shift it little by little off his chest. Reece slumped against the wall, his ankle burning. As more bodies seethed past him, shouting that the walls were down, he stooped to drag Klaussmann further out on to the landing.

  ‘Thank you,’ the German wheezed.

  ‘Who gave me up?’

  ‘I …’

  ‘Who informed?’

  ‘I … The messages came from Berlin,’ Klaussmann replied, grimacing in pain. ‘They wouldn’t tell me. A secret source.’

  From Berlin. A source secret even from the Gestapo’s own officers. It had to be their man in London.

  ‘Have you heard the name Parade?’ Reece muttered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The man who put me here.’ The one who had torn the flesh from Reece’s wrists and back, sent blood coursing down his beaten skin. The one Reece would do all these things to, whose eyes Reece would look into at the payment of account. ‘What do you know about a spy in London?’

  ‘Nothing. I swear to you that I don’t know. Please help me.’

  With his hands still bound, Reece pulled Klaussmann further on to the walkway. And further. And then Klaussmann understood. Reece stamped on his face and rolled his body to the edge of the landing, then over once more, through the gap in the guard rail and down through the smog. Their eyes met once, a flicker, and then Klaussmann’s turned downwards, looking to the ground. Reece watched him fall through the smothering dust and crumple into the floor below.

  In the war, every payment was short, and this was all Marc Reece could extract. But he enjoyed seeing Klaussmann fall.

  He stood breathing, his sleeve held over his mouth and nose to filter out the harsh brick dust. His body ached, but his muscles were becoming stronger. A German guard charged past him, ignoring him entirely, and Reece tried to understand where he was. Somehow, providence from above had turned his fate on its head. That meant the prison walls had been bust down and the prisoners must be streaming out. He had to seize the moment; for the moment, now, was with him.

  If he found Luc, he might salvage the mission to expose Parade. Something Luc had seen in the photographs of the document could lead them to the spy.

  He grabbed a prisoner who was making for the stairway. ‘Do you know Luc Carte?’ The man stared at him without comprehension. Reece shook him. ‘Do you know Luc Carte?’ he repeated.

  ‘No. Here,’ the other man said, taking Reece to the side, where a door’s broken and twisted hinge was protruding from the brickwork. ‘You need to be free.’ Reece used the torn metal as a saw to cut the leather cuffs on his wrists.

  ‘I need to find Luc Carte.’

  ‘Try in there.’ The escaping prisoner pointed to the warders’ room. ‘They have the list. And the keys.’

  Reece didn’t need to be told twice. He limped towards the room, gaining a little strength with each step.

  The door, like most others, had been blown out. Inside, it was as dark as hell.

  ‘Who’s there?’ a voice called out in German.

  Reece spun around to its source. ‘It’s fine,’ he replied in the same language, crouching slightly. ‘Where’s the Sturmbannführer?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the voice said, before turning into a deep, retching cough. Through the gloom Reece saw a slim man crawling, spluttering uncontrollably. ‘Why –’

  Reece lifted a brick from the floor and brought it down on him.

  When he was finished and the guard’s body had stopped trembling he stripped the body and donned the uniform. It was too dark to find any list and the papers and files had been blown haphazardly across the floor. He would have to find Luc another way.

  Out on the landing the dust was settling, coating everything, like the sleet outside. The streams of prisoners running for the spurs of the cross, where the opposing exterior walls had been destroyed, had become a tide. And yet, as Reece stared around, he saw some inmates standing inside their empty doorways just watching hundreds of men and women run for their lives and their freedom. He thought of looking for Hélène and Thomas, but he knew securing the information from Luc and getting it back to London was the priority. He just hoped they had escaped with the others.

  Every second brought the arrival of German troops to the prison closer but, without knowledge of Luc’s location, he had no idea if he had escaped – and without keys, there would be little Reece could do about it if he were still locked in his cell. He had to think what he could do. As he tried to form a plan, he spotted a uniformed figure on the ground floor below, a German guard waving a sub-machine gun in the air and loosing off a few shots to keep back a group of prisoners. Reece shouted to him in German. ‘Hey, we need help!’

  ‘What?’ the guard shouted back.

  ‘Here. Come up.’

  ‘I can’t.’ The soldier turned his gun back towards the Frenchmen in front of him.

  ‘The Sturmbannführer’s orders.’ The soldier below hesitated, but decided he had his orders and dashed up the stairs to the first floor, where Reece was waiting. ‘We need to find a prisoner. Luc Carte. He knows who did this,’ Reece said, sweeping his arm around. ‘The Sturmbannführer wants him taken away before his friends do come.’

  ‘Before what?’ The German soldier looked confused by the strange wording.

  Reece re
alized his mistake. He had to cover it. ‘I’m sorry. I grew up in the Sudetenland. We speak differently. I can forget sometimes. Quickly – we need Carte now.’

  The guard seemed unsure but pulled a ring of keys from his belt and hurried along the walkway, with Reece following. They approached a cell where the door had been thrown off its hinges and now lay uselessly on the concrete walkway. ‘That one,’ the German said. Reece’s spirits rose at the sight of the empty doorway. He must be out.

  But as Reece approached the German shouted into the room in French, ‘Are you Carte?’ And Reece looked inside to see a man covered in dust. His eyes met Reece’s and widened in shock. ‘I said, are you Carte?’ The guard raised his gun.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Luc whimpered.

  ‘He’s all yours,’ the guard muttered to Reece. ‘Here.’ He handed Reece a cosh from his belt. ‘Use it if you need to.’ Then he rushed back down the stairs.

  Reece checked behind him and hurried into the room.

  ‘Maxime?’

  ‘Yes. Come on, we have to go.’ He pulled Luc towards the open doorway.

  ‘No.’ Luc tore away from him.

  ‘What? It’s open – the walls are down.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If I run for it, the Boche will arrest my whole family. My sister has two daughters.’ Reece realized he was right. The repercussions of this raid, of the freeing of hundreds of prisoners, would be felt by many more people than just the inmates themselves. And he understood why those other men had been standing at the opening to their cells, just watching while others burst through the walls, away from Germany and into France.

  He dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘When we hit the transport I only heard you say there’s a German spy, Parade, and the op is Parade One. What else did you see in the document?’