The Winter Agent

by Gareth Rubin

  ‘It’s the ready signal,’ Reece said. Thomas could only nod.

  ‘For an op?’ Charlotte asked.

  Reece’s eyes met hers. ‘For D-Day. We have twenty-four hours.’

  CHAPTER 29

  Security is essential for the existence of a clandestine organization, and all responsible members of the organization should constantly be on the lookout for breaches.

  After eating some bread and a little porridge the three of them walked to the Métro. Once on the network, they changed direction and lines four times. A search patrol made up of collaborating French police and undercover Gestapo men checked their documents, but they were probably looking for low-level insurgents, such as couriers of the underground newspapers – Guerrilla, L’Humanité – or young men avoiding Obligatory Work Service in Germany.

  They found the café bar Thomas had named. It was a large place in a busy street: workers on their way to the office or couples to friends’ houses. A pair of French policemen sauntered past.

  Reece, Thomas and Charlotte entered and took a table near the front. An ageing man with a shock of very blond hair was reading a newspaper behind the bar while four students laughed together in a tight, leather-padded booth in the rear corner. Reece noted a doorway at the back, presumably leading to the toilet, and one behind the counter that must have been to the kitchen. Chipped marble-topped tables and a black-and-white chequered floor said the bar had once been upmarket but had fallen on hard times.

  A radio in the corner was playing jazz, violins jumping all around a double bass, a mad snare drum in the background.

  Thomas greeted the barman. ‘Hello, Jean. How are you?’

  ‘My knees have gone, since you ask. No point going to war against age, though, is there?’

  ‘True enough. You know, I was thinking about Astride the other day. Haven’t seen her for ages. Want to see if she’s around?’

  ‘Could do. Hang on, I’ve got something under the grill. Back in a tick.’ He went back to the kitchen.

  They started chatting about food shortages until the barman returned and nodded that it had been done. ‘Thanks,’ Thomas said. ‘A few glasses of your best red, then.’

  ‘It’s my only red,’ the man replied, pouring three large glasses of real – if watered-down – wine from a bottle under the counter. Reece was happy to clink them together. He took a long draught of the wine. It really wasn’t bad. In fact, if he closed his eyes, he could almost have been back before the war, enjoying a bottle of Merlot with friends and a girl he liked, listening to music before heading out to one of the clubs.

  ‘Let’s eat. Who knows if we’ll get the chance again?’ Thomas said. Reece was hungry; the black bread and porridge earlier had hardly filled his stomach. They checked the menu chalked on a board. It took no time to read: vegetable soup or rabbit stew.

  ‘Rabbit stew?’ Thomas asked the barman.

  ‘It’s good. My son raised the rabbits himself.’

  ‘All right, I’ll have it.’ The other two asked for the same, and a glass of beer each. The man took their coupons and went out the back to prepare the food, clanging pots and pans. Charlotte seemed distracted, staring out the window. ‘So we’re back on active duty?’ Thomas asked under his breath.

  ‘We are.’

  Charlotte walked over to the front of the café, still staring through the glass.

  ‘Will more be joining us?’

  ‘I can’t say right now.’

  ‘Maxime,’ Charlotte said. There was a note of caution in her voice.

  ‘Do you think –’ Thomas began.

  ‘Maxime!’ She was pointing out on to the street. He stood and walked over to her.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘There’s no one out there.’

  Thomas stood and stretched his legs. ‘I’m going to the toilet,’ he said.

  The street was, indeed, completely dead. Where just a few minutes earlier there had been couples, a bus and cyclists going past, now it was silent as the grave. And Reece realized that there was no sound from the kitchen. The barman seemed to have left.

  Charlotte pointed to her handbag, hanging on the back of her chair. ‘In my bag!’ she said urgently.

  He tore it open and drew the Mauser she must have stolen from Thomas’s kitchen. Reece covered the pistol with a newspaper from the bar so that the students in the booth wouldn’t see.

  ‘Thomas,’ he called over as his friend was about to leave the room. ‘Please don’t.’ He levelled the barrel.

  He and Reece stared at each other for seconds that felt like hours, before Thomas’s feet began to move, taking him towards the doorway to the kitchen. He must have known he could never make it. And yet he ran.

  Reece threw aside the newspaper and pulled the trigger. He tensed his arm for the recoil.

  It never came. No bullet cut through the air to tear into flesh. Nothing but a dull metallic click. Reece looked at the weapon. A small sliver of metal was poking from the ejection port – Thomas must have inserted it when he had had the gun earlier, to jam it in case it was taken from him. One of the students, a girl aged twenty wearing a blue jumper, screamed.

  Reece dropped the weapon and threw himself at the other man, managing to grab hold of Thomas’s jacket and pivot to swing him around. The students held each other and cowered into the booth, yelling pleas not to shoot them. Reece and Thomas slammed into the bar and fell to the ground, struggling, each attempting to free a hand to strike the other.

  But then Thomas froze. Out of the corner of his eye, Reece saw Charlotte holding the gun, recocked and ready. He remembered the last time he had been on the ground and she had been pointing a gun.

  ‘Don’t, Thomas,’ she said. ‘I will do it if you make me.’ Reece knew that she would.

  But Thomas didn’t know her so well. With a single motion he somehow twisted out of Reece’s grip and jumped upright, springing for the gun. Reece saw its muzzle flash. Then he heard the explosion. And then Thomas was folding up in the middle. A hole had opened in his shirt, a tear of blackened flesh mixing with the fibres.

  For a moment, he stayed like that, struggling to remain upright, before his knees gave way and he sank straight down like a dropped marionette.

  Reece scrambled over, lifting Thomas’s face, searching for signs of life. There was a patch of sticky blood soaking through his shirt. His breathing was laboured. The four youngsters were still shouting pleas not to hurt them.

  Charlotte went to the door, the gun still in her hand, checking outside to see if anyone was coming. ‘Troops!’ she warned. He leaped to where she was. At both ends of the street big black cars now blocked the road and men with sub-machine guns were sprinting towards the café through sheets of rain. She fired twice in their direction and the men dropped into deep rivers of rainwater flowing across the ground.

  Beside one of the cars Reece saw a man in a wheelchair wearing grey SS uniform. For a brief second his eyes met those of Siegfried Klaussmann.

  ‘Take him!’ Reece heard Klaussmann shout. ‘Take him!’

  ‘Out the back,’ Reece said. They charged towards the kitchen. Charlotte scrambled over the bar but, as Reece was about to follow her, he felt something grab hold of his leg. He saw Thomas’s eyes open and staring up to him.

  ‘Maxime,’ he rasped. ‘Wait.’ His hand fell and Reece saw his lips trembling, as if attempting more words. But any sound was muffled as bullets thudded into the wood beside them. By reflex, Reece fell to his side and he caught sight of a German soldier in front of the window firing a sub-machine gun. He felt another round slam into the wood, centimetres from his cheek. ‘I …’ Thomas groaned, his air fading. Then there was another sound: a pistol much closer than the sub-machine gun outside. The German dropped to the ground. Charlotte was behind the bar, her hot gun trained on the shattered void where the window had once been. The storm was now blowing through that space.

  ‘Maxime.’ Thomas was struggling to speak again, lifting his voice to fight the stor
m. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t want to …’ His head rolled to the side, but his chest rose and fell in short, panting breaths. Reece saw the German outside crawling away to a safer position.

  ‘Come on!’ Charlotte screamed.

  Reece shouted down to Thomas. He grabbed Thomas’s face and turned it up. ‘I don’t want your apology. Who were you informing? Who is Parade?’ He felt the weight of his friend’s betrayal.

  ‘I …’ His chest began to shake. Reece tried to hold it still.

  ‘Maxime!’ Charlotte cried again. She shot once more through the window.

  ‘Who is he?’ The other man’s eyes fluttered in pain.

  ‘Evans.’

  ‘Evans.’ The name echoed on Reece’s lips as a whisper. He had been so close to Evans, had rightly suspected him and then had let him go. If only he had held on for longer, had challenged him … But there was no time for self-recrimination. Not now. The infection had to be cauterized. For that, they needed to know how deep it went. ‘Does he know the army Order of Battle?’ The only answer was hard, laboured breathing. He twisted his finger around, screwing the flesh. ‘Has he given it to them?’ He shook Thomas brutally, as if to shake the ebbing life back into him.

  ‘Oh God, Maxime,’ Thomas whispered. And his body seemed to fall into itself.

  Then there was a rush of noise like the ocean. It crashed over them, throwing them to the floor, sending chairs and tables tumbling. It was as if the very ground had erupted.

  When Reece opened his eyes again, and vision and sound returned, he saw Charlotte firing her gun and a German officer rushing towards the smashed window. And he saw the scorched hole in the floor where the grenade had fallen. Thomas lay with his neck torn open.

  ‘I’m empty!’ Charlotte screamed at him, casting her gun aside. He scrambled across the bar, barely feeling the shattered glass under his palms, and they ran out through the kitchen, across a rear courtyard and between dark buildings. They heard jackboots sprinting toward them, but a narrow alleyway strewn with rubble afforded an escape into the backstreets, and soon the only sound came from their own steps.

  CHAPTER 30

  6 June 1944

  The Lysander dropped into an L-shaped flare path in a field west of Paris, fighting the night’s storm. As its wheels thudded down Reece and Charlotte kicked sopping mud over the flares to douse them. The pilot taxied to the end of the pasture, turned around, ready to take off as soon as possible, and they scrambled into the rear seat. Charlotte had to sit on Reece’s knee. It was the closest they had been since they spent their last night together six months previously. They were soaked to the skin.

  The invasion was imminent. Thomas may well have told the Gestapo about Hélène, so they couldn’t go to her to transmit. But they had to get back before Evans handed over the army Order of Battle and Parade One turned the Allied firestorm on their own troops.

  ‘Hold on. It’s rough up there,’ the pilot called back as he revved the engine and started moving forward. The sound of the motor blotted out any more words as they pulled up into the swirling air.

  ‘Why did Thomas do it?’ Charlotte shouted above the rain rattling against the duralumin fuselage.

  ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’ He wanted to know why Thomas had done it. He could have been paid; he could have secretly favoured Hitler. Reece would probably never know. Evans could only have known about the two attempts to free Luc from a source in London, but it was Thomas who had, that morning, handed Reece over to the Gestapo – albeit on Evans’s orders. And then he remembered the moments in Thomas’s safe house months earlier when he had taken Reece in and given him the last of his food. Real friendship in the field was so difficult it was almost unknown. But Thomas was dead and that was an end to it. Yet Reece felt he had lost something. ‘You took his gun.’

  ‘I didn’t trust him. I know what it is to betray those around you. I saw something in him that I’ve felt.’

  The pilot kept them low to avoid the German radar and fighter patrols. They drifted over treetops and an isolated farm until the French coast appeared. The airman’s voice came through the intercom. ‘We’ll keep on –’ he began, but he was cut off by a sudden shaking of the plane, as if it had been kicked. Reece and Charlotte braced themselves against the sides and stared through the canopy. The rain blurred the night, and yet the light from the moon was enough to make out tiny black clouds exploding in the sky. Reece felt the radial engine whine and the fuselage vibrate as the pilot increased their speed. ‘It’s flak. They’ve seen us.’

  ‘How bad?’ Reece asked.

  ‘We’ll get there.’ The nose of the aircraft lifted and they left the puffing flak behind. The English Channel rippled below as they sped on. After a while the pilot’s voice came again. ‘We’re about an hour out.’ Reece checked his watch. It was 2.19 a.m. British time.

  But as he calculated how long it would take to get to London he caught sight of something new through the grimy canopy: two rapidly growing black spectres crossing the face of the moon. ‘On your seven. High,’ he barked through the intercom.

  The pilot’s head jerked to the left. ‘Christ,’ he muttered. ‘They’re 190s.’

  They were coming in fast. The pilot increased speed again and climbed quickly – the unarmed Lysander had no defence but to attempt to lose itself in the clouds. If there had been no light that night, there would have been a chance, but it was only two days past the full moon and the pale beams picked them out like a searchlight.

  The airman pushed the engine to its screaming limit, but the Germans were in full chase now – if there was ever a hope that the Lizzie hadn’t been seen, it was gone. The 190s were climbing too, ready to fire.

  ‘Go faster!’ Reece shouted.

  ‘We’ll break apart!’ the pilot shouted back at him. And then they had to brace themselves as the pilot banked sharply. Black explosive cannon shells were winding around them in the night. A distant bolt of lightning lit their two pursuers and the swarm of shells like a flashbulb.

  Now they dived, feeling weightless as the aircraft powered towards the sea faster than gravity would take it. Reece tracked the two black beasts behind them. They were staying high, positioning to shoot from above. The shots were masked by the roar of the Lizzie’s engine as it strained, until one of the little metal spears tore through the rear canopy and through the air between Charlotte’s neck and Reece’s eyes, before blasting out the side of the aircraft.

  We have to get there, Reece thought to himself. Just let us warn them.

  If he got there in time, he could alert them and they would be ready for Skorzeny’s commando assault and the disguised Parade One units. If they had new recognition codes, they could identify and neutralize the German infiltrators and the commanders could ignore any false signals. The momentum of surprise would be turned on the Germans. But every ticking second sounded like another death.

  ‘What if we don’t make it?’ Charlotte said to him.

  ‘A slaughter,’ he replied.

  As he said it a series of tears opened up in the starboard wing, along the edge towards the tip. Then the tip sheered away, grabbed by the wind and tossed into the dark sea surging ten metres below them. The aircraft began to shudder unsteadily as the moonlight picked out the debris sinking under the waves.

  Reece twisted around. The two fighters were directly behind and perhaps twenty metres above. The Lizzie could never outrun them and there was nowhere to hide. It seemed clear now that they would never make it back to the English coast. Another shell exploded in the fuselage.

  ‘Hold on!’ the pilot shouted through the intercom. ‘I’m going to try –’

  And then Reece felt his muscles drawn into his spine as the nose of the plane turned upwards. The sea fell away and was replaced by the stars in the veiled sky. And still they swept upwards, the force pushing him back into the seat. His arms wrapped around Charlotte to stop her falling through the shattered glass canopy and down to the sea. The plane’s undercarriage tou
ched the sky as the aircraft inverted perfectly, flying on its back, heading straight into the propeller blades of the two Luftwaffe fighters.

  The German pilots broke, left and right, banking sharply to evade collision. They came so close that the canopy of the lead fighter grazed the broken tip of the Lysander’s port wing.

  Evans watched as the Morse key tapped up and down, sending short electronic pulses into the night air: Invasion begins. Large force at sea ex Portsmouth and Southampton docks. Destination unknown. 109,000 troops first wave. Includes battleships USS Texas; Nevada; Arkansas. HMS Warspite; Rodney; Nelson one other. Twenty cruisers. Seven frigates. Eighteen destroyers. USS North Carolina delayed mechanical malfunction. Standby for full army Order of Battle.’

  ‘Is that it?’ the woman asked, placing her headset on the table.

  ‘For now. We’ll send more before dawn,’ he replied. He lit a gasper. ‘Have you ever stopped to think how much these little messages of ours are going to change it all? I mean …’ His mind strayed to the hundreds of men he had drowned within sight of Hemsall Sands on the Dorset coast. Men weighed down by their packs and slipping to the seabed as the Kriegsmarine E-boats sped away. And this is war, a necessity of man, he thought to himself. When it is over, then I can consider my penance. ‘We’re actually going to change the course of history. You and me.’

  She placed her headphones over her ears to listen for a reply.

  Bursting between the two 190s, the RAF pilot rolled the Lysander so it was upright again.

  ‘Now what?’ Reece shouted through the intercom as he watched the two German nightfighters regroup. They had seconds before the Luftwaffe planes were back in attack position. ‘Can we get back to France?’

  ‘Not a chance.’ He jerked the plane around again, turning towards the English coast. ‘We can try to shake them off.’

  We won’t, Reece thought to himself. The pilot climbed again, once more trying for the clouds, as if they would offer some kind of protection. But Reece knew that the two German fighters could outfly the Lizzie, and as they lifted through the streaming rain he saw the two stalking forms move into firing position behind them, ready to turn on the guns. He braced himself for the rounds.