The Winter Agent

by Gareth Rubin

  A second. Three, five seconds. No shots. Reece twisted around to see. The two fighters were still there, but suddenly they split apart, turning in opposite directions, curving away to speed back in the direction of France.

  ‘What are they doing?’ he shouted.

  ‘I don’t –’ the pilot began. But then something in the air ahead of him, something coming from the English coast, made him stop and swear in surprise.

  Charlotte, spotting the same sight, cried out too.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ the pilot said.

  For a moment there was nothing but the roar of the engine and the sight of scores upon scores of black shadows blotting out the stars.

  ‘Maxime,’ Charlotte said. She was pointing to the sea below. Hulking dark forms silently flowed across the surface, a hundred ships and fast boats sprinting alongside them, the waves breaking on their side. And he knew it was something the like of which no one had ever seen before.

  ‘It’s the armada!’ Reece shouted into the intercom. ‘It’s the invasion!’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes! That many crates in the air – and look, those at the back are tugs and gliders. They’re troop transport. It’s the invasion force.’

  ‘Christ, yes, it is!’ The pilot laughed into the intercom.

  The emotions shook in them like boats in a storm: the joy of the moment that they had prayed for having finally come; hope of liberty for France and Europe; naked fury at the enemy; fear that they were too late to save the men in the waves below them. Each thought lasted a single heartbeat before another took its place. Reece saw Charlotte’s arm lift across her eyes, and she shook. He placed his hand on her back.

  But even as the moonlight fell on the mass of aircraft, boats and men on their way to drive a stake into the heart of the Reich, there was something strange, something he couldn’t understand. ‘Which direction are they heading?’ he asked, watching their black journey.

  The pilot checked his compass. ‘Normandy. They’re going to Normandy! Good hunting, boys.’

  Reece felt his breath freeze in his throat. It couldn’t be true.

  ‘No,’ he whispered. Then he shouted through the intercom in anger and fear. ‘No, it can’t be. It’s not right!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘It’s wrong!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Calais! They’re supposed to be going to Calais. It’s where –’ and in a moment, as the silhouettes swarmed past the moon and through the waves, Marc Reece finally understood what he had been caught in: Thomas’s betrayal. Klaussmann’s face in front of his as Reece told of his recce mission to the Calais harbour. MI5. The gliders full of men reciting their instructions. And, most of all, that meeting with Churchill and Delaney and the generals, where a map of the Pas de Calais had been fastened to the wall and he had circled landing points. The men in that room had sat and smoked cigars and silently watched him do it, knowing that the troopships would never land there. Now he saw it in its true, mirror-image form. After that, Parade, the Reich’s prize source, had devoted so much effort to having Reece captured. And now he grasped the reason why. The writing was spread across the night and picked out in iron and steel.

  And so at 2.23 a.m. on 6 June 1944, he and Charlotte looked ahead at the sight of hundreds of planes breaking through the night to blot out the moon, destined for drop zones on occupied French soil. Bombers, fighters and gliders carrying airborne troops flitted in the darkness. Below them powered an armada of warships, landing craft, minesweepers and motor gunboats carrying a hundred thousand men, the largest assault force ever assembled.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Charlotte asked, staring into his face.

  ‘I understand now,’ he said, looking out into the stars pricking the black sheet enveloping them. ‘What they’ve done.’ The aircraft around them could have dissolved in the rain and fallen to the waves below and he wouldn’t have cared. For two years he had presented the world with one face while hiding another below it. As the world had caught fire he had clung to the few certainties he could reach – friendship, comradeship, duty – and a single compass bearing had shown them all to be built on shifting sands. ‘Take us there faster,’ he said.

  ‘Are you hit?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you see any damage to the crate?’

  ‘Some shell holes. The canopy is smashed.’ The rain was pouring in, running into his mouth. He cared no more about the canopy than he did about the fate of the waves below.

  ‘We can handle that. Have any of the rounds hit anything vital?’

  Reece looked at the hole in the metal fuselage. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. I can’t see.’

  ‘Right. Well, cross your fingers.’ It was even colder in the rear seat without the canopy; the wind tore at their wet skin and the rain ran down their faces.

  The pilot increased the throttle. ‘Won’t be long now.’ As he said it the horizon seemed to lift up from the sea and gain a solid grey form. They passed over strident sea defences and within minutes saw the lights of RAF Tangmere a few kilometres from the south coast, one of the two homes for the RAF’s Special Duties squadrons. But as they approached the airfield Reece noticed a change in the engine: it wasn’t just slowing, it was spluttering, on the verge of stalling.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he said.

  ‘They must have hit the header tank.’

  ‘Will we make it?’

  ‘We might. But the landing will be hard. Very hard. Be ready.’ And as he said the words the whine of the motor suddenly became silence, leaving only the rush of the rain. The sky above the airfield was heavy with aircraft, large and small, taking off or waiting to land. Through them all, the Lizzie began to glide, moving only with the momentum it had built up. ‘Hold on!’ the pilot said, then he turned off the intercom. Reece knew that he was radioing a mayday to Tangmere, requesting a clear path down, a runway that they might be able to career along. The glide became a rush towards the ground.

  A hundred, fifty, thirty metres from the earth. Reece began to pick out buildings, vehicles, and then men and women scurrying back and forth. He felt his stomach lift as they dropped faster, the pilot fighting to keep the craft trim, to touch the ground with the wheels, not the propellers. ‘Just let us get there,’ Reece whispered. And then they were falling towards the landing lights. Another aircraft, a hulking Hudson, was taxiing along the strip, in the direct path of the Lysander’s descent. ‘Move!’ Reece screamed. But its widespread wings seemed to trundle along, inviting a collision. And then the Hudson’s pilot must have seen or been alerted to the plane speeding to the earth, because he accelerated and turned away, bouncing off the landing strip into the rough ground along its side.

  Reece saw the grass of the landing strip rise up to them. They were coming in far too fast, he knew. The Lysander seemed to shake as it reached ten metres above the ground, but it was level, he could feel it level. And then, at the last moment, a few metres from the ground, perhaps there was a blast of wind, or he had never realized how unstable they were, but the plane tipped on to its starboard side. They turned over, and the last thing Reece knew was the sight of the shredded wing gouging a deep rut in the ground and the metal cage around him tearing apart. Charlotte twisted and, just as he saw her face lit by flares around them, the world turned black.

  Klaussmann writhed in pain. His back was the lower limit of feeling in his body; below it his legs had neither movement nor sensation, but his back necessitated morphine every few hours and it had been too long since the last dose. Now his spine burned as if he had been strapped to a table and cut apart.

  ‘Go faster! What’s wrong with you?’ he demanded of his driver.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The hedgerows of night-time France flashed past him. He turned on the overhead light and stared again at the photograph of Marc Reece, taken in Amiens before they started work on him. The man who had killed Schmidt, who had left him unable to stand by himself, unable to wa
sh himself.

  Klaussmann had been so close to him in Paris, but Reece had disappeared. Since then, however, there had been a piece of luck. Earlier in the day, a fisherman had walked into the police station in Caen and said he had been on a boat that had picked up a couple of British spies the previous morning and delivered them to the Brittany coast. The man was now awaiting the Gestapo’s arrival and asking for his brother to be released from a prison camp in return. Klaussmann switched the light off and looked out the window. ‘How long before –’ He broke off. ‘My God!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘What, are you blind? Look!’ And the driver looked into the night sky to see scores of white silk parachutes fluttering to the earth.

  ‘What is it?’ he said, pressing the brake pedal hard.

  ‘Paratroopers,’ Klaussmann replied. And for a moment he was as dumbfounded by his words as his driver. ‘Get us to a telephone. We have to call it in. Warn them.’

  The driver accelerated again, speeding to the closest village. From his wheelchair, Klaussmann watched the man break the windows in the local café to wake up the owners and demand use of their telephone.

  ‘This is Sturmbannführer Siegfried Klaussmann,’ he barked into the handset. ‘My men and I have seen paratroopers landing ten kilometres north-east of Caen in Normandy. It’s the invasion.’

  ‘It’s a feint,’ a Wehrmacht captain replied. ‘What you saw were dummies being dropped. It’s a puerile trick. They’ll really come in Calais. We know that.’

  ‘Send a brigade right now!’

  ‘I’ll do no such thing,’ the captain snapped back. ‘The only men we have available are reserves and they’re exhausted from building defences. I’m not going to send them out because you’ve been taken in.’

  ‘I know what I saw!’ Klaussmann shouted at him.

  ‘And I know better!’ The receiver was slammed down.

  CHAPTER 31

  Where does the organizer fit into all these schemes? The organizer is the key man in all of them, and it is on his work and organization that the smooth carrying out of all the plans depends. You will have seen enough from what I have told you to realize that any one organizer has only a very small part – although an important one – in a vast organization, and that any work he carries out is only a minute part of a big general plan. You will therefore appreciate the absolute necessity of team work. Too much individualism on the part of any one organizer might go far to wreck the plan.

  Never relax your precautions, and never fool yourself by thinking that the enemy are asleep. They may be watching you all the time, so watch your step.

  Reece woke to the vision of stars in the sky. A sharp intake of breath, his lungs filling, cold rain running between his lips.

  ‘Can you hear me? Son, can you hear me?’ It was a woman’s face. Charlotte? No, a fleshy face, older than hers. Someone wearing a green-brown uniform. A cap holding her hair down. ‘Son, you’re all right. You’ll be all right, do you hear me?’

  ‘I …’ he mumbled. ‘I’ve got to …’

  ‘You’re all right. You’re going to the hospital as soon as we can get a car. You crashed.’

  He looked around. There was salty blood on his tongue. ‘Charlotte.’

  ‘Is that who was in the plane with you? She’s all right. Nothing broken,’ she said.

  Reece moved his neck. It hurt like fire, but he found he could sit up. He was on a stretcher but it was on the ground. He felt a surge of heat, then it all began to chill. His head filtered away a mist. ‘You’re going to the hospital.’

  He looked around. ‘What …’ The aircraft lay beside them, its wheels and one wing smashed off. ‘The pilot?’

  ‘Unconscious. He’ll live. We hope.’ And then another face was in front of his. Charlotte had a gash on her cheek and was holding a white pad to it. He struggled to his feet. ‘I said, you’re going to –’

  ‘No,’ he said, his eyes on Charlotte’s. ‘I have to go somewhere else.’ He looked at the woman in the WAAF uniform. ‘I need a telephone. Urgently.’

  She looked him up and down but recognized the seriousness. It was a day of need. ‘Officers’ mess over there.’ She pointed.

  He stumbled, stopped and retched, then he walked, followed by Charlotte. Miraculously, the telephone in the corner of the room wasn’t in use and he got a line through to London.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s Maxime. I need to speak to Delaney. Now.’

  There was a pause as Delaney’s assistant apparently wrestled with the decision whether to break protocol. ‘I’m sorry, Maxime, he’s not here. I can’t say where he is.’

  ‘Yes, you bloody can. I don’t cry wolf, I need to know where he is.’

  There was more silence. ‘Portsmouth. Southwick House.’

  ‘Tell him I’m coming. You got that? I’m coming.’

  He hung up.

  ‘Where?’ asked Charlotte.

  ‘Portsmouth. A few miles from here.’

  Half an hour later the rain was still falling, running across the saturated earth in waves.

  He no longer felt the urgency of a mission. He felt cold fury. Because somewhere between France and England the information that he bore had turned to dust in his hands.

  They were standing in front of a huge Georgian manor with neoclassical columns fronted by a wide colonnade, but it was hours before sunrise and, despite the windows blazing with light and people hurrying in and out, the house looked somehow gloomy. They had been driven by a WAAF who had left them without a word before turning the car straight around and returning at speed to her station. There was a guard post at the edge of the driveway, wire and barriers preventing entry, and through dense trees Reece glimpsed long huts made of corrugated iron.

  ‘May I see your identification, sir?’ asked a Blue Cap military policeman.

  ‘I’m Captain Reece. Here to see Major Delaney. He knows I’m coming.’ Reece propped himself up against the white wood of the guard post. He could feel the very last of his energy and the Benzedrine seeping from his limbs, replaced by the pain of a bruise enveloping his chest, where he knew ribs had cracked. He saw Charlotte, exhausted by what they had come through, ready to fall into the ground.

  ‘I need to see some identification, sir.’ The Blue Cap peered at the pair in strange, torn civilian clothes, cuts on their faces.

  ‘It’s all right, Corporal,’ a voice called over. They both turned to see Major Daniel Delaney walking quickly from the front of the house wearing his regimental uniform. Reece tried to see what was in his face. Did it betray anything? Anything about what was happening? Anything of what he expected Reece to say? ‘Hello, Maxime, Charlotte,’ he said, taking them away from the guard post. ‘I was told you were coming. I didn’t realize it would be so soon.’ They walked a way down the path. ‘My car’s over there.’ The driver, a young ATS woman with curling red hair, saluted. ‘The garrison church, Richards,’ he told her. ‘Take us through the harbourside.’

  The car started with a whine and they wound their way through an endless stream of tanks, tankers, half-tracks and troop vehicles. Soon they approached a checkpoint thrown across the street, through which military vehicles were slowly filtering. A private came to the driver’s window and asked for their identification. Reece couldn’t help but think of the many checkpoints he had been through in France. The soldier carefully checked the cards offered by Delaney and his driver, before waving them through.

  ‘Cordon all around the town,’ Delaney explained as they drove past men and women in many types of uniform, all heading towards the docks. The driver had to use the horn and shout out the window numerous times in order to get through. They came to a stop near the waterfront. All the buildings and open areas were covered with camouflage netting and arc lights gave everything a strange sheen. Fighters were on constant patrol overhead.

  They parked outside a church set thirty metres from the seafront. It looked out on a sea teeming with troopships and gunboats. Hund
reds of soldiers were trudging down the road in a long, heavy queue towards the seafront and a pier, where small tenders were ready to take them to larger vessels.

  ‘The Royal Garrison church,’ Delaney said, nodding towards a building of grey mediaeval stone set on ground raised slightly from the level of the street. ‘Monty himself was its governor when he was a brigadier.’ But the building was incomplete. A large square chancel still stood intact, but the roof of the nave had been bombed down, leaving the disembodied walls standing like mute mourners at a wake. ‘Incendiaries,’41,’ Delaney said. ‘Charlotte, would you mind giving us a minute alone?’ She glanced at Reece and stepped through the stream of young men, to the side of the road. ‘We’ll go in. It’s a makeshift field post today and I have to see some people there soon.’

  Reece and Delaney walked up the short path, between lichen-covered gravestones and a memorial to a soldier who had fallen in the Peninsular War, to the door of the church, which was guarded by a young Blue Cap. And this, Reece told himself, was where the truth would finally be dragged into the light. Some of the truth. A side of the truth.

  Delaney showed his identification card and saluted as he passed through a porchway, with Reece slow in his wake.

  In the old chancel, tables had been set between the dark oak choir pews. Maps were pinned to cheap boards and a wooden screen had been built to shut the nave off from the chancel – but it wasn’t wide enough and there was a gap between it and one of the walls, wide enough for a man to walk through into the roofless nave.

  Standing by one of the map boards, a lean commander was speaking hurriedly to a Wren as she made notes on a pad. The officer looked up as Delaney and Reece entered. Reece wiped his face on his sleeve and saw the bright smear of blood. He wouldn’t be able to stand much longer. Delaney locked his eyes on the commander’s and waited.